Stumbling on Happiness - Daniel Gilbert

My sister Jessica gave me this book in my sophomore year of high school, and since then I have read the book on average probably once a year (my original copy’s spine is now very fucked up).

There are a few things I think this book does extremely well:

Depth. Daniel Gilbert presents a very interesting argument about the shortcomings of our imagination and why we have such a hard time figuring out what makes us happy in the past, present, and future. The book is clearly super well researched, and everything is backed up with cited & summarized studies.
Organization: Stumbling on Happiness has one overarching “point.” Every chapter works on its own but they also all fit well together under the main point, and the progression from chapter to chapter is clear.
Style: Stumbling on Happiness is fun to read and easy to understand. Some arguments are a little complicated at times, but Gilbert combines funny and educational examples with a conversational style that makes even the most complicated points “flow.” He also opens each chapter with a Shakespeare quote, which I appreciate a lot.
Influence: this one is more personal. How much did this book change the way I think about things? How different do I “see” after reading this book? Stumbling on Happiness fundamentally changed the way that I viewed the concept of happiness and what it meant. Very few nonfiction books continue to be relevant and interesting for me across almost a decade, but I continue to think about the things I learned in that book today.

Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter

Godel Escher Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid is the most ambitious work of nonfiction that I’ve ever read. Out of all the nonfiction I’ve read, outside of straight up textbooks this book tackles the most complicated material, and even then I think it’s very different because textbooks usually don’t build towards a specific argument. In this book, Hofstadter presents his huge project tying together what seems like three non related things (math, art, music) to tackle the big question of consciousness. What does it mean to be conscious? What is the quality of consciousness? What are our mathematical and logical limits of expression and therefore limits of thought?

I picked this book mostly because I think the subject is very interesting and the book is cool, but also because I deeply admire Hofstadter. He is so smart. In GEB he presents complex ideas in relatively simple ways, and structures his arguments in chapters that build on each other nicely, none of which is possible without a deep understanding of the material and the underlying concepts.

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays - David Foster Wallace

Consider the Lobster is a collection of short essays about a random assortment of topics. It is also my first exposure to David Foster Wallace and the beginning of my literary adoration. In books (and in general everything I like), I admire and appreciate things that make me see differently, especially if it happens in subjects that I previously thought were minor, obscure, uninteresting, or already understood. In almost every essay in Consider the Lobster, like a magician, David Foster Wallace accomplishes that, demonstrating his startling capacity for thinking deeply, making the mundane interesting by distilling keen insight from the obvious. This is the type of nonfiction essay writing that I really admire, and if I could write more nonfiction, the type of stuff that I really want to do.

The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song From Every Year Since 1979 Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed - Shea Serrano

In The Rap Year Book from 1979 to 2014, Serrano picks the most important rap song of every year (not the best, which is a slight but important distinction). In his explanations & justifications for his choices, he covers a lot of history of rap, various trends in rap, and the innovative rappers who changed the scene.

Three things make this book particularly outstanding.The first is that he is very knowledgeable and passionate about rap. It is clear that he has been deeply involved in the music scene and has loved rap and followed it ardently for many years, and nothing is more interesting to me than someone who knows a lot and cares a lot about a subject. I also love the concept of thinking deeply and seriously about some very not serious concepts.

The second is his writing. I’ve written hundreds of book reviews at this point, and the two parts I consistently have the most trouble with are a compelling introduction to the book and a distillation of what is really important about the book. Shea does both of these things SO well. In every section, he clearly articulates why he thinks the song is important and how the song either epitomizes the apex of a movement or innovated an entirely new one. These are complicated ideas that he explains conversationally, a deceptively difficult thing to do. On every chapter his style and voice comes through so distinctively that he is clearly present on the pages. It is something that I continue to strive for in all my writing.

The third is the art. Every chapter has art of the rapper, and every chapter has some kind of infographic or a style map, where Shea tags some lines in the song with an icon indicating certain traits/trends. The art is cool and funny and the quality/ silliness of it complement the quality/ silliness of the writing.

Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America - Mark Padoongpatt

Flavors of Empire is about Thai food in America, specifically in Los Angeles. It examines why there are so many Thai restaurants in America, and explores how food is much more complicated than what most people imagine, using food as a way to demonstrate how socioeconomic and cultural structures of power extend to unexpected areas. In particular Padoongpatt presents food culture as a manifestation of how "the relationship between white culinary appropriators and the groups they extract from are deeply embedded in historically constituted relationships of power." More than any other book, it helped show me that everything is political, and nothing escapes structures of power, even commonplace things like food.

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone - Olivia Laing

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone is about author Olivia Laing being lonely in New York and exploring her loneliness through the work of four different artists: Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, and Henry Darger. Over the last few years, especially with my art history minor, I’ve read a lot of writing on art, but The Lonely City is my favorite book on art I’ve read so far. She’s good at explaining the art and the artist, and I definitely understand these four artists’ work much better, but what she does great is that she humanizes the art and gives it a real, visceral purpose. She helped me understand what the artist was aiming for and helped me emotionally feel the art better. In this case the book was also particularly meaningful, because I also spend a lot of my time thinking about loneliness. One of her main points is that loneliness makes people shut off from one another, and the way to counter that is to be aggressively open and hopeful and communicative. In that way, through the work she presents and by sharing the artists’ loneliness (and hers), The Lonely City makes you feel less lonely. That is a lovely function of art, and also why I enjoy engaging with art by focusing on the art, because art makes you feel less lonely. It is not just that someone felt the same things you felt, someone felt the same things you felt and felt it so strongly that they had to make it real, make it art, and when you are feeling lonely, there is nothing more comforting than that.

Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement - Angela Davis

Freedom is a Constant Struggle is a collection of interviews, speeches, and essays by Angela Davis. More than any other book, this book helped me really begin to understand the concept of intersectionality, the idea that struggles everywhere for freedom are one and the same. Minorities and the oppressed everywhere have things to learn and share from each other, but more than just that, all of these struggles are connected because the source that powers and builds the system that necessitates these struggles is the samem and mechanisms of control used in one plane are often applied to another. People in Ferguson are connected to people in Palestine not just because their experiences are similar, but also because these experiences stem from the same global system of racism and capitalism.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities - Jane Jacobs

The Death and Life of Great American Cities is about city planning. It is a super good book; Jacobs is clearly an expert talking passionately and cogently about a subject she knows a lot about. She says in the beginning of the book that there will be no pictures because the reader should draw on their own experiences visiting and living in cities, and that is not only very bold but also very true. There are so many good descriptions of cities. Reading the book totally changed how I understand what a good city is and how to accomplish that, especially because most of her examples are based in NY. I now have a very different experience walking through a city, which is particularly enjoyable because reading the book gave me a richer and more structured understanding to something I already intuitively knew. More than that though, The Death and Life of Great American Cities shows again that any subject can be extremely interesting and there is the potential for any subject to be worth learning about, even something a typically dry and ignored topic like city planning.

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion - Jia Tolentino

Trick Mirror is a collection of short essays by Jia Tolentino, writer for the New Yorker. Jia is my favorite essayist since DFW in Consider the Lobster. She writes with the same critical, sharp insight into herself and into society & pop culture. Jia is frighteningly smart; the essays in Trick Mirror have some of the most brilliant incisive thinking on social media, modern feminism, marriage, etc. that I have ever read. Jia doesn’t only think about something on a much deeper level; she also explores each level carefully and thoroughly. It is the same type of detail, completeness, and extensivity of argument that I admire in DFW’s work. She is also the only writer I know besides Shea Serrano that manages to mix in pop culture meme speak in her writing without sounding like a fellow kid. After Trick Mirror, I am a huge Jia stan and I will happily read anything that she writes. Jia also has good taste in books. I’ve read 3-4 books that she’s recommended on twitter and all of them have been bangers.

A People’s History of the United States - Howard Zinn

A People’s History of the United States is a history of the US from Columbus to Clinton’s presidency, taking the perspective of the people, the marginalized on each side of history. It takes a lot of ideas that I was familiar with and applies them to American history. More than any other book I’ve read, A People’s History is a grueling takedown of America, revealing it to be the terrible and inhumane country it has always been and showing us that the current state of America that many of us lament and abhor is just more of what it’s always been. Trump is not an anomaly; he is the natural product of a system that has always favored the rich and the powerful. The terrible things his administration has done are not unique in America’s history; we have always committed atrocities both internationally and domestically. The one cheerful aspect of the book though is that it has required all the power and ingenuity of the system to crush our natural inclination of generosity and camaraderie, and the future of a united people has never been impossible.