What is family? An obvious answer is the one we were born into, but don’t always keep close, as we age.
Sometimes family is the company you keep, which for much of the past 10 years has been the company I helped start.
And then there’s the family you start.
All three collided this year. Upon learning about the coming arrival of our first child, I left one work family and joined a new one. Upon his birth, my mother stayed with us for a month, which is the longest we’ve spent together in a long time. Upon her return home, I am learning what it is like to raise a family.
Parenting forces efficiency, to maximize every precious minute not spent feeding or rocking a baby to sleep. Writing, unfortunately for me, is a very inefficient act. Words, ideas, strings of thought come and go, capriciously, impulsively, uncontrollably. It can take an hour to get into the flow, and as soon as you hit a stride, it’s time to stop and take care of the baby. Then you start all over again.
But why am I worried about making time to write when I should be spending as much time as possible with my son during his precious, fleeting newborn moments?
Too bad! I’ve already committed to my now-annual year-end tradition of writing a book diary. Here’s what I read (or at least remember) this year.
Expecting Better
Emily Oster
I wasn’t expecting much when my wife, early in her pregnancy and halfway through this book, recommended it so I could learn what she was going through. I certainly wasn’t expecting a borderline page-turner. I ended up binging and finishing it before she did.
There are many questions that come with first-time pregnancy, and there is countless advice about what one should and should not do. Oster approaches and debunks commonly held assumptions in a matter-of-fact manner befitting an economist: Here are what published studies suggest; do as you will.
Neither overly reassuring nor judgmental, and at times wryly contrarian, her research and recounting of her own personal experiences helped me better empathize with what my wife was going through. Maybe what resonated is that she devotes chapters to some of my own guilty pleasures: guzzling coffee and gobbling sushi. My lifestyle didn’t change, of course. But it helped me understand my partner’s.
The Memory Police
Yoko Ogawa
If I had to describe this story as a color, it would be a monochromatic blue. If The Giver and 1984 had a baby, it would be this story.
The muted and understated prose follows a writer living under a surveillance state that erases things and memories it deems inconvenient. Naturally, people go missing. Then hats, birds, flowers, books, music (you get the point). Later, limbs also disappear, which seemed a bit extreme even for an allegory for totalitarian repression.
Ironically, I can’t remember many other details. Maybe it’s because the story did not strike me as all too original. Maybe it’s because events over the past years already felt pretty grim at times and I didn’t need more reminders. When a story is so unrelentingly hopeless it becomes, well, kind of pointless.
I Came As a Shadow
John Thompson and Jesse Washington
This is the memoir of John Thompson, the Georgetown basketball coach best known for taking the team to back-to-back titles and nurturing Patrick Ewing, Allen Iverson and many other NBA players. Less appreciated is his outsized impact on taking the business and culture of college athletics to new heights, defying racial discrimination along the way and redefining what it meant to be a Black athlete. A Black coach. A Black winner. A Black entrepreneur. A Black boss.
This book is less about basketball and more about teaching: Teaching oneself how to persevere in the face of injustice, real and perceived. Pushing others to be their best selves on and off the court. The fleeting thrills of victories, and the lifelong lessons from defeat. Sprinkled throughout are poignant observations that might resonate with many teachers, coaches, managers — anyone in the job of shaping people’s lives. Among them: “I think people who treat everyone the same are fools. Not everyone requires the same treatment.”
The murders of George Floyd and other innocent Black civilians last summer sparked widespread interest in books and book clubs on anti-racism. This belongs on those reading lists.
The Orientalist
Tom Reiss
Some stories transport you to faraway places. This one took me to Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, considered by some the easternmost “European” city, and home of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jewish-born writer who converts to Islam and fashions himself a prince.
Traversing geography and history, this biography tracks him across Middle Eastern deserts, Central Asian despots and cosmopolitan Europe, as he lives through the rise of Bolshevism, fascism, revolutions and World Wars. (Most fascinatingly, Lev masquerades as Muslim royalty in Nazi Germany.) Along the way, the author weaves in local histories of how fluidly different cultures intermingled at the time, challenging conventional notions of where the “West” ends and the “East” begins.
World history classes in the U.S. give surprisingly short shrift to Central Asia, despite its centrality to cataclysmic world events at the turn of the 20th century. Lev’s life often put him at those crossroads. This was a surprisingly rich read that stirred history nerd in me.
Parable of the Sower
Octavia E. Butler
Another dystopia — this one set just four years into the future, and right at home in California!
This is the first sci-fi novel I’ve read written by a Black woman, and featuring a largely Black cast of characters. And the style is refreshingly real. Unlike “The Memory Police,” this classic moves with the pace of a sci-fi novel as it follows a young girl’s harrowing survival in a lawless, drug-riddled society. The diary format adds a compellingly personal voice even as she describes unsettling scenes straight out of post-apocalyptic video games like The Last of Us and movies like The Purge.
As bleak as the journey is, there are glimmers of hope and humanity that shape the girl’s vision for a new religion — though less as a savior in the Jesus Christ sense but more as an organizing principle for change. In ways that felt unexpectedly Buddhist.
The Committed
Viet Thanh Nguyen
This is the sequel to “The Sympathizer,” the 2016 Putlizer fiction winner about a Vietnamese double agent living in the U.S. after the fall of Saigon. He is now in Paris, wrestling with existential crises one after another as a refugee raised under French colonialism, indoctrinated in communism, and enjoying the excesses of cosmopolitan capitalism as a drug dealer.
Featuring gangsters, philosophers and philosophical gangsters, the book at time reads like an entertaining, self-deprecating identity crisis. “Post-colonial self loathing” might be the most succinct way to put it. There is plenty of poetic waxing at the contradictions between political theories and lived reality, at the hypocrisy of Western philosophies retooled for the repression of colonies. Beware though: One must be pretty committed to make it through the occasional stream-of-consciousness diatribes that afflict our poor protagonist’s mind.
Klara and the Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro
Can robots have feelings? Can they be human? What is human? This is essentially one of those novels, about a girl with a mysterious illness who befriends a robot that serves as a caretaker, confidant and companion trying to understand the changes accompanying the girl as she grows up.
Told from the perspective of the robot, the story offers subtle musings on human nature in a simplistic, detached manner. Some people like this style. I found it a little devoid of personality. Nothing struck me as particularly profound or evocative. (“Perhaps all humans are lonely. At least potentially.” Yes, that’s true.)
The musings come off as a gentle meditation on life. But just as meditating can sometimes lead one to drift asleep, I found myself dozing off and having a hard time finishing this book. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for existential questions about life. Maybe I’ve done enough soul searching and have simply accepted that it’s not worth going too far down the rabbit hole.
Confessions of a Yakuza
Junichi Saga
Yakuza life is often shrouded in mystery, yet it stirs vivid imagination of fanciful gangster tales. The reality is surprisingly pedestrian.
That’s the takeaway from this series of life stories as recounted by a middling yakuza member to his doctor. And the confessions are pretty dry. He runs gambling dens, has run-ins with the law and serves time in prison. He has dalliances with women and gets syphilis. There are fights, the occasional murder and, yes, the pinky-cutting thing. But these are relatively minor details in a bigger story about how friends, families and society operated in an underground culture.
I bought this book expecting gangster tales. What I got instead was an oral history of major events during Showa-era Japan, which spans the country’s militant rise through World War II, and its recovery after. Most interesting are the details surrounding his surviving the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake (the most devastating one of its kind at the time) and getting deployed to the North Korean frontier during the war. All in all, a pleasant surprise.
The Cult of We
Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell
Like every journalist and, well, everyone, I piled on WeWork as it unraveled. And who could resist? Describing it as schadenfreude doesn’t do justice to the excessive hubris involved in propping up a real estate company leasing office space claiming to “elevate the world’s consciousness.”
This book rightfully rips the Neumanns and never fails to disappoint when describe all the lurid ways one can burn money. I got secondhand drunk reading about the tequila flowing at meetings and parties. It also fires plenty of critique at the media, investors and financial system that enabled this facade. The authors exercised incredible restraint in detailing all the delusional excesses and defiance of financial common sense.
The book should be a cautionary tale — on founder control, corporate governance, shortcut diligence, greed, ego and FOMO. But money has a way of making memories short. A bruised and humbled WeWork went public this year, rewarding some investors and returning Adam Neumann briefly to the spotlight. Private capital continues pouring in at rosy valuations.
Crying in H Mart
Michelle Zauner
They say never to judge a book by its cover. But the title and cover image of noodles caught my eye at Target. In the pages, the mouth-watering descriptions of the flavors and smells of Korean cuisine delighted my other senses.
This is not just a homage to Korean food. It is a testament to the role of homemade meals in familial bonding, particularly in mixed immigrant households where ancestral heritage and adopted citizenship often clash. The author, a Korean-American, recounts her upbringing across different cultures, the rebelliousness that naturally comes with the teenage years, and the soul searching upon her mother’s death. Food is the constant thread through all the ups and downs, and cooking is how she reconnects with her mother’s memory and Korean identity.
I’ve never read a book that made me so hungry and weepy at the same time. It also introduced me to Japanese Breakfast, the synthpop group for which the author is songwriter and lead singer.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Haruki Murakami
I’ve read this several times before. But every few years, particularly when I feel unhealthy or out of sorts, I come back to it. This is a series of essays about running and writing, and how they fuel each other, from novelist and marathon runner Haruki Murakami.
Part autobiography and part treatise on writing and running, this may not appeal to those who don’t do either regularly. But for those who try, like me, Murakami’s observations speak plain truth to the masochistic joys of both activities. There are quippy aphorisms I mutter to myself as I slog through the trail or a blank Google Doc, like: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
And when I’m in a writing rut and get moody at people around me, I try to explain this (often to no avail):
“When we use writing to create a story, like it or not a kind of toxin that lies deep down in all humanity rises to the surface. All writers have to come face-to-face with this toxin and, aware of the danger involved, discover a way to deal with it, because otherwise no creative activity in the real sense can take place.”
Often we measure our lives in major milestones — marriage, kids, a home, a promotion, a big payday. But what defines our lives are the small, repetitive and seemingly mundane things we do everyday. Step by step, word by word, these little acts shape us. And even if they don’t lead anywhere, they reveal a lot about who we are.
“Sometimes taking time is actually a shortcut.”
