My Year In Reading, 2021
I'm back, sort of.
Hello! As you may have noticed by fishing this out of some god forsaken gmail inbox next to the life insurance scam and fraudulent mailing list sign ups, this has not been the most updated newsletter for the last several months. That’s because I’ve been working at a new news website that will be launching in 2022. Both my time and my thoughts about economics and public policy, the bread and butter of my blogging, have been devoted to that and it has left little time, energy, or clear purpose to dedicate to longform writing somewhere else.
That being said, a reader reached out to me saying that they were looking forward to my year end reading list and I felt like I couldn’t refuse. So, like last year, I will include short writeups of some of my favorites, as well as a complete list of books I finished this year, with asterisks indicating the ones I especially liked.
There are some broad themes that emerge from the list — Maoism and its global incarnations, sexual hangups of midentury Britain, New York City in the 1980s, Los Angeles, The New Yorker — as well as several books that I don’t remember reading at all.
Happy New Year and thank you, as always, for reading.
The Loneliest Americans, Jay Caspian Kang
What are “Asian Americans”? While I think most people reading this have some idea of what that means, when you think about it, it’s not obvious. Even if we’re just talking about East and Southeast Asia, we’re talking about a region with a great deal of ethno-linguistic diversity as well as longrunning and unresolved conflicts both between and within its component states.
And then there’s the American part. Asian America began with Chinese migration to the West Coast during the Gold Rush and, thanks to immigration restriction, was largely frozen for decades with Chinese and Japanese communities on the West Coast and in Hawaii. Then came the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which lead to a great tide of migration from all over the world, but especially from Asia (including Kang and his parents, who were themselves displaced by the Korean war, who arrived in the US in 1979). And yet we call these millions of people of disparate backgrounds, with varying levels of rootedness in the country and, very importantly for Kang, class status, “Asian American.” How did this happen and what do we mean when we talk this way?
What Kang does in the course of the book is look at this question from the top-down — with chapters on the history of immigrant enclaves like Flushing and Koreatown, and a much more detailed version of the history above — and the bottom-up, with a great deal of memoiristic writing about his own life and family, as well as anti-feminist Asian men, Bruce Springsteen, and his mentor and intellectual father Noel Ignatiev. This is a book that only Kang could have written and I hope you’ll read it.
The Big Picture, Ben Fritz
Spider-Man: No Way Home made some $386 million at the box office the week it premiered, beating out Sing 2 by some $370 million. In two weeks, it has grossed over $1 billion globally. Meanwhile, Nightmare Alley, a film directed by Best Director and Best Picture winning Guillermo del Toro starring Bradley Cooper, has made just under $6 million at the box office.
Fritz’s 2018 book is largely the story of how this happened. Near the end of 2014, hackers, believed by many to be working at the behest of North Korea, dumped the contents of Sony executives' email inboxes on the world. Many journalists (including, full disclosure, myself), combed through them for whatever newsworthy bits we could find. The hack foiled the release of The Interview, a James Franco and Seth Rogen film about an ill-fated interview with North Korea’s president, and ended up claiming the job of Amy Pascal, the charismatic and idiosyncratic head of Sony Pictures.
Fritz, who covered Hollywood for the Wall Street Journal, uses the emails as the foundation of a history of Sony Pictures and of Hollywood in the 21th century, when franchises ate the movie business whole and when the only way Sony was able to survive on its own was to continue to pump out Spider-Man movies, even if that meant cutting deals with Disney and incorporating Spider-Man into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which Sony itself could have had sole control over for a mere $15 million.
If you’re wondering why Hollywood is the way it is — and why Spider-Man will be returning to the silver screen year after year after year — this is the book to read.
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And here’s everything else xI finished this year.
The Great Cat Massacre*, Robert Darnton
The Civic Foundations of Fascism, Dylan Riley
Smiley's People, John le Carré
Leave the World Behind, Rumaan Alam
Twilight of Democracy, Anne Appelbaum
The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, Julia Lovell
Consent*, Vanessa Springora
The Wind from the East, Richard Wolin
The Life of the Mind*, Christine Smallwood
Fake Accounts*, Lauren Oyler
On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan
The Sense of An Ending*, Julian Barnes
Desperate Characters, Paula Fox
Lucinella, Lore Segal
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
Empire of Pain*, Patrick Radden Keefe
The Netanyahus*, Joshua Cohen
The Skies Belong To Us, Brendan Koerner
Less Than Zero*, Bret Easton Ellis
Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney
The Vanity Fair Diaries*, Tina Brown
Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker*, Renata Adler
Detransition Baby, Torrey Peters
Dogs of Winter*, Kem Nunn
Temper CA*, Paul Skenazy
Tapping the Source, Kem Nunn
Scar Tissue, Anthony Kiedis
We Play Ourselves*, Jen Silverman
Beautiful World, Where Are You?, Sally Rooney
The Unrepentant Marxist, Louis Proyect
Strong Motion, Jonathan Franzen
Crossroads*, Jonathan Franzen
The Loneliest Americans*, Jay Caspian Kang
In The Freud Archives*, Janet Malcolm
The Bostonians*, Henry James
The Big Picture*, Ben Fritz
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
Washington Square, Henry James
Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties*, Tom O’Neill
City of Quartz*, Mike Davis
After Henry*, Joan Didion
Forging Global Fordism*, Stefan Link
What do the asterisks mean?