Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

I read this book in my senior year of high school and it very strongly shaped how I approached problems and how I understood my purpose. What makes the book good are its technical aspects. The writing is eloquent and smooth, making for a pretty easy read, and the characters are diverse and really help expound Huxley's ideas. I especially like how he uses roughly 4 different types of characters to make his point about society and purpose very clear: there's Bernard, the different but cowardly psychologist, there's John, the "savage" who grew up away from civilization reading Shakespeare, there's Helmholtz, the tall, very popular man who feels a lack of strength in his writing, and everyone else, happily addicted to soma and their place in society.

What makes the book great is chapter 17, when John, speaking with the Controller Mustapha Mond, discusses the sacrifices society has made to be "civilized" and peaceful, and John makes the most brilliant and convincing argument for unhappiness and suffering I have ever read: (if you're going to read the book and you haven't before, I recommend skipping this part, because the build-up and that entire chapter is literary gold)

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence.

"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.

The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan

I have read more books by Rick Riordan in the past decade than any other author. I love his stuff; everything he writes is so genuinely fun to read. Even in college when I was bogged down by work and assigned reading I still made time to read and reread his books. They are so great for 4 reasons:

Plot. The books are long but because the plot is well paced, they are fun to read from start to finish. I often read his books on the plane because they take a lot of time, require low brain power, and remain engaging / interesting the whole way through. I also have always enjoyed ancient mythology, and I appreciate how he does extensive research to take old stories and modernize them in fresh ways.
Writing. His writing is good. There are some “fellow kids” moments in his books, especially in the later ones, but the voices of each character shines through fairly distinctively, and the imagery he paints is clear.
Characters. The characters are my favorite part of his books. He tackles a lot of complex ideas in his books, mostly through his cast of distinctive and well thought out characters. Each have unique motivations, behavior, and attitude, based off of their background and their experiences. This is most powerfully demonstrated in The Heroes of Olympus, where he successfully swaps perspective between 9 main characters across 5 books.
Consistency. He churns these books out, consistently at an amazing quality bar, at least once a year, across different storylines and mythologies. That week in the year in September/October when he releases a new book has always been a great week for me in the last 8 years.

Beartown - Fredrik Backman

Before Beartown I read A Man Called Ove, also by the same author. I liked both for pretty similar reasons: in both, Backman does a great job building suspense, setting up situations, and writing great and varied characters. I think Beartown is the better book though for a few reasons:

In my opinion it is harder to write a tragic book. Balancing difficult, heavy themes with hopefulness and tenderness without being cheesy is walking a very fine line; building suspense without being overly dramatic has a very low margin of error.
I very much respect authors that are able to write in different styles and tones. Beartown is a huge departure from Backman's typical, feel-good works, and far from his whimsical style and gratifying novels, Beartown is dark, heavy, and deeply profound.
Beartown is the more emotionally powerful book. A Man Called Ove had hints of it but everything was resolved so nicely that the book largely felt warm. Beartown is much more brutal and the resolution much more glacial but as a result the book is also much more rewarding and nuanced. Mixed in with the sad are some beautiful moments of forgiveness and courage, appreciated even more in the backdrop of immense injustice and suffering, and I felt it all in this beautiful book: pain, respect, sympathy, passion, anger, sadness, pride, joy.

The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut

I read a bunch of Vonnegut in the last two years (both around the new year, both super fun) and Sirens of Titan was by far my favorite of the bunch. In Vonnegut’s books he consistently grapples with this question: how do we meaningfully live as humans when it’s very possible that we live pointlessly and powerlessly in an uncaring, predestined universe? His answer is mostly the same across all his books: you exist to love other people, and that’s all the purpose you can have and all the purpose you need. Sirens of Titan is my favorite book of his because I think it shares that core message better and more touchingly than any of his other books.

None of Vonnegut's other stuff has the same gut-punching strength of when (spoilers) Salo opens the sealed message he's been carrying for 200,000+ years (end spoilers). What you feel is the weight of the worthlessness and senselessness of everything we've built and everything we are. Everything grand, like monuments, history, government, and religion, but also personal, like friendships, love, family, everything we think gives us meaning- all of it is shit, and no one is free from it. No one can overcome or even comprehend it: the humans are controlled by Rumfoord, Rumfoord is controlled by Salo & the Tramalfadorians, and the Tramalfadorians are all unthinking, programmed machines. In the end of all of this, after a lifetime of exploitation and a race of exploitation, Malachi Constant still manages to say this:

It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

That is nice.

Laughable Loves - Milan Kundera

I got really into Kundera’s stuff for a few months in 2017 and read a bunch of his books. I like his writing style and I think he tackles interesting themes-- I particularly enjoy thinking about the horrors of romance, the weight of lightness, and the closeness of tragedy and comedy. I picked Laughable Loves though not just because it’s my favorite Kundera book, but because Laughable Loves is what crystallized my love of short stories. I primarily love two things about short stories, both made abundantly clear by Laughable Loves:

Even more so than novels, the central theme and motivating vision of a good short story collection is extremely clear, and it is a pleasure to see how these various ideas get developed and fleshed out over the course of a short story. Seeing this happen several times over really helps you understand the author's project.
All of this also has to be accomplished in limited length, so short stories have to be very economical about setting up and resolving the story, which suits me because I admire brevity and tightness in writing. Short stories often just get right into it and end with a bang, and I love endings and beginnings.

A Little Life - Hanya Yanigahara

A Little Life is a super touching book about the friendship between four men in New York from college to middle age. It’s also the saddest I’ve read in a long while, the first time I teared up reading a book in the last couple of years). I love this book because it’s extremely full of life. There are lots of very heart-wrenching moments, but sparsely sprinkled within those parts there are some very beautifully heartwarming moments. I read it at a time when I was anxious about something else, and I found the book a wonderful if very painful escape. It was very easy to sink myself into the book and feel like I was sharing their world. My only gripe is that the book is sometimes too sad, to the point of being kind of relentless, but for me it was a fairly minor complaint for a very long and very enjoyable book. Also in my opinion A Little Life is the best title + cover + content combo (except perhaps Infinite Jest). It is such a fantastic distillation of the themes of the book. A Little Life is about all the different ways that life can be little: with exasperation, with joy, with acceptance, with pain, with awe, with deep sadness, and it’s so perfectly captured both by the title and by the photo on the cover, Peter Hujar’s Orgasmic Man.

The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller

The Song of Achilles is a reimagining of Achilles’s story from Patroclus’s perspective. It is a really interesting and well written book, but it is on the list mainly because it helped me understand something I really really like in books. I know the legend of Achilles from (sort of) reading the Iliad in college, so this book took source material I was already familiar with and showed me depth in a whole new story from another angle I haven’t considered yet. I really really enjoy that. It is one of the things I most appreciate in books because every time I read a book like that, it helps me realize again that the potential for a great story exists everywhere, even in things I’ve already seen. Each experience helps me see the world a little differently and makes me more humbly open to my view or understanding of something being incomplete.

The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

I read The Remains of the Day earlier this year for book club and it was one of my favorite books of the year. After I read the book I watched an interview with Kazuo Ishiguro shortly after the movie adaption was released. In an early part of the interview, he talks about how “we are all butlers,” and it totally blew me away and completely fucked me up. I’ve honestly been thinking about ever since. That idea also pairs nicely with some themes in Infinite Jest, because in a world where we are all butlers in service of something larger, what do you choose to serve & give to, hoping but not knowing if your contributions will be valuable and valued?

Another part of the book I really like is the unity of style and theme. The Remains of the Day is really short but the prose is so flourished that it makes the book feel much longer than it actually is. It is a little annoying at first, especially when he’s talking about butler stuff, but eventually you figure out that the style is intentional and it complements the character and the message. It’s always extremely cool when an author pulls that off, because it gives the book a subtlety that makes the main points more palatable and realistic.

The Devotion of Suspect X - Keigo Higashino

The Devotion of Suspect X is by far the best detective novel I’ve ever read. There are so many things it absolutely knocks out of the park:

The pacing and length are perfect: it really feels like nothing can be cut or moved, and it remains extremely entertaining all the way through.
The characters are fleshed out and interesting. Their motivations make sense and I’m invested in how the story ends. I hate detective novels where the victims are basically caricatures, and halfway through I don’t really care who dies or who did it because I no longer care about any of them.
What’s most impressive though is the story. It’s a whodunnit story except they reveal the murderer in the start of the book, and still manages to have one of the most incredible twists that is somehow extremely surprising and also feels very satisfying and “correct.”

This is literally a perfect book, 10/10. There is no better version of this book possible. I didn’t get any great insight from this book, but it made it on the list anyways because I admire it so much.

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest is my favorite book of the decade. It is the most rewarding book that I’ve ever read. I’ve read it twice, the second time writing a blog post every 80 pages or so, and I still feel like there’s so much that I’m missing. Beyond the style, story, endnotes, individual passages, structure, characters, etc. all of which are phenomenal and very interesting, I think the primary reason why I am so drawn to Infinite Jest is because I also read it at the right time in my life. Infinite Jest is ultimately a book about how to choose and what to choose, and how that choice is the single most important choice in your life.

“Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen.

Since reading IJ I have thought a lot about the idea of temples and worship and how that shapes who we are and what we do. What are you a fanatic for?

A truly enormous novel, not just in size.