I'm reviewing all 39 books I've read from July 2022 until now, each in one very-normal-length-probably sentence!
Huh, 39, the same number as when I did this last year — cool coincidence! Except, wait, wasn't last year all the books from July 2021 to June 2022, an interval of 12 months? Whereas this post spans an interval of…16.6 months?
Well…I had fun writing one-sentence book reviews last year, so I really was planning to do another one this summer! But alas, I spent my time other ways, the internettiest of which were recording episodes and telling the tales of my joke-turned-real podcast, creating some of my all-time favorite puzzles, and adapting my "nice numbers" blog posts into a #SoME3 video that I procrastinated so badly that its audio quality reminded one commenter of "getting flashbanged in counter strike" yet nevertheless has over 28,000 views. (I promise I'm gonna upload a more listenable version soon; I recommend you wait for that one, for your eardrums' sake.)
The point is, I promised myself I would only work on One-Sentence Book Reviews when writing one-sentence book reviews felt like a break from other tasks, instead of a goal in and of itself. And two months later, look at me now, at a park, possessed with the desire to write some happy little one-sentence book reviews. (Well, actually I'm writing this intro at a cafe, but I wrote many of the reviews at a park.) And write them I did!
As always, my enjoyment of books is often more about them connecting with me or being interesting to me than being good in any neutral sense. These reviews reflect my experiences with the books (in some cases, my memory of my experience with the books, over a year out) — yours might be different!
Oh, also: when I said that I "read" 39 books this year, I didn't exactly finish all of them — the ones I'm still reading, or gave up on, I've marked with DNF ("did not finish"). In response to any allegations that I conveniently drew the line at a place where I could reuse my thumbnail template with 39 books from last year…well, let’s just get onto the reviews, shall we!
In chronological order by when I begun them:
1. Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1991) by Salman Rushdie One of those meta books that one can enjoy at all ages, on multiple levels, but I think it’d have taken me a long time to finish if I hadn’t read it on a plane flight.
2. The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (2010) by Elif Batuman The autobiography and first book of one of my current absolute favorite authors, The Possessed was the most bogged down by literary ramblings in her oeuvre; still, I really enjoyed many parts, especially those chronicling her travels in Uzbekistan.
3. The Healthy Brain Book of Sudoku Variants (2022) by Bastien Vial-Jaime [DNF] On the Cracking the Cryptic Killer Sudoku app, I've found Bastien's puzzles to be consistently the smoothest and most fun, so I was thrilled when I acquired his book, which I've enjoyed so far and keep in my backpack for idle moments where I could use some puzzling relaxation — the puzzles are fairly accessible, too.
4. Skink—No Surrender (a Skink book) (2014) by Carl Hiassen I listened to this young-adult adventure novel as an audiobook on a road trip with my family, and we found it sufficiently entertaining.
5. Pride and Prejudice (1813/2003) by Jane Austen, edited by Vivien Jones [DNF] I started reading this because I was told it had good fanfiction, and that I should develop an opinion on Mr. Darcy, but I was too bored of the characters, even the slightly-less-boring Mr. Darcy.
6. What If? 2 (2022) by Randall Munroe Basically it's a worse version of the original What If? (except that it has more weird and worrying questions!), but original What If? was really really good, so overall I found it a solid but not spectacular read.
7. Guards! Guards! (a Discworld book) (1989) by Terry Pratchett Four months after being gifted two Terry Pratchett books, I read one and was like "this was so fun, why did it take me so long!" but then it took four more months for me to read Guards! Guards!, and…it was even more fun, why did it take me so long!…but certainly I have some invisible mental block toward reading more of these, because it's been almost a year, yet I haven’t sought out any more Terry Pratchett books.
8. SAT Prep Black Book: The Most Effective SAT Strategies Ever Published (2015/2017) by Mike Barrett and Patrick Barrett Highly recommended SAT prep resource — partially because it ingeniously reframes the SAT as a test of reading comprehension/parroting (even the math section) and a test where every answer should be unambiguously, mathematically correct (even the verbal section), but partially because it's honestly fun to read: I found myself tackling 100 pages in a sitting when I swear I just meant to glance at the book.
9. The Boyfriend List: 15 Guys, 11 Shrink Appointments, 4 Ceramic Frogs and Me, Ruby Oliver (Book 1 of the Boyfriend List series) (2005) by E. Lockhart I was in the library, randomly saw this book (which I first read in sixth grade) and it's sort of interesting to reread with more perspective on high school, attuned to dynamics I wasn't before.
10. The Boy Book: A Study of Habits and Behaviors, Plus Techniques for Taming Them (Book 2 of the Boyfriend List series) (2006) by E. Lockhart I know, the subtitles are a bit much, but I was impressed by the execution, fun, and footnotes of the first book, and sometimes it's nice to be immersed in some fictional drama :)
11. The Treasure Map of Boys: Noel, Jackson, Finn, Hutch, Gideon—and Me, Ruby Oliver (Book 3 of the Boyfriend List series) (2009) by E. Lockhart I'm struggling to remember specifics about the third book compared to the previous two, but I think it was of comparable quality.
12. Why We Broke Up (2011) by Daniel Handler, art by Maira Kalman [DNF] The cover and the story were both aesthetic when I read the first few chapters of this book in the library, and I wondered whether I'd have the urge to finish it (like with The Boyfriend List), but I guess I never wondered enough about the rest of the plot; sometimes that's how it goes (c'est la vie).
13. As You Like It (1623) by William Shakespeare [DNF] I coincidentally ended up doing a reading of this Shakespeare play, which I happened to perform in elementary school, and it was sort of entertaining but I forget most of the details.
14. Cloud Atlas (2004) by David Mitchell The structure — the first halves of six interlocking stories moving forward in time followed by their second halves in reverse order — is aesthetically pleasing, but my favorite part of Cloud Atlas (which, PSA, is fully distinct from Liam Cannahan's also-2004 The Cloud Atlas, an apparently much worse novel which multiple people I know of have read by accident) was simply the high quality of the stories, especially the second through fifth.
15. The Roleplay (2022) by…me and some friends Did you know you can just, like, take the text from your middle-school roleplay chat, and make it into a physical book (I used Barnes and Noble, like with my puzzle book, but I think there are various good options), and then it feels incredibly nostalgic and surreal?!?
16. Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (2014) by Michael Lewis Michael Lewis's storytelling abilities are hard to beat, and I particularly enjoyed this account (even if it might be a bit embellished) of sketchy techniques used by high-frequency traders, like setting up a very fast exchange with good prices but only small numbers of shares available, in order to detect when people were buying shares — and then front-run their trades to make a guaranteed profit.
17. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014) by Nick Bostrom I'd been meaning to read this seminal book about AI existential risk even before the rise of ChatGPT, and while parts are certainly outdated, it's a good overview of a slippery, terrifying unknown: what will a computer much smarter than us — smarter like humans are smarter than ants, smart enough not to depend on us at all — be like, and (how) can we avoid dying in the process?
18. The Idiot (2017) by Elif Batuman What I had written was "I reread this book, one of my all-time favorites, after recommending it to some friends: they thought it was fine, but not captivating or remarkable in the way I did, so I think there's something about The Idiot's writing style that just randomly connects with me," but then one of these friends started rereading the book and found it much funnier — so it just might be one of those books that really reads different depending on the headspace you're in; incidentally, musician Phoebe Bridgers' three-sentence review (with fewer words than mine…) is spot on.
19. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022) by Gabrielle Zevin I was pulled into the world of this novel — simultaneously about inter-gender creative friendship, the art of video game design, romance and tragedy — immediately and fully; it richly deserves all the accolades it's won, and I highly recommend all of it (except the very ending, which I found slightly unsatisfying).
20. The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet (2021) by John Green I found these "reviews of different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale" simultaneously entertaining and deep when I consumed them in podcast form — annoyingly, their bookification didn't add much, but if you want to consume these, you should choose whichever of "book" or "podcast" you typically prefer.
21. The Green Mile (1996) by Stephen King [DNF] Set in a Southern prison in 1932, this serialized Stephen King novel was interesting and made good road trip audiobook listening (though the serialization sometimes led to repetitiveness) and my family came close to finishing it but then the audiobook expired.
22. The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human (2022) by Siddartha Mukherjee [DNF] I don't typically read biology nonfiction, but I was gifted this book, so I've split the difference and am reading it very slowly (but I will finish it!); my favorite parts are probably those on the history of biological discovery and theorycrafting.
23. Hamilton: The Revolution: Being the Complete Libretto of the Broadway Musical, with a True Account of Its Creation, and Concise Remarks on Hip-hop, the Power of Stories, and the New America (2016) by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter Rereading this renewed my appreciation for the craft that went into every single phrase (verbal and musical) in Hamilton: I found this book both fascinating and full of inspiration for how to make a great musical.
24. Working (2019) by Robert A. Caro This short autobiography (an approachable 200 pages!) of an incredible biographer (...the cause of my 143-word sentence that you'll encounter shortly) is filled with wonderful anecdotes and lessons: the one that stuck with me the most was the great importance of using details to create a "sense of place" in nonfiction as well as fiction.
25. The Box and the Dragonfly (Book 1 of the Keepers series) (2015) by Ted Sanders [DNF] This obscure book, which was displaced in my reading life by the enormous The Power Broker and which I do think I'll return to in the future, felt like tropey yet well-executed YA mystery so far, but I've only read five chapters and I don't want to give any summary judgement.
26. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974) by Robert A. Caro 1162 pages long (two-thirds of the original draft's length) yet still devoid of fluff, rich with fascinating historical political anecdotes (granted, I'm the sort of person who enjoys Wikipedia pages about old elections), and impossible to fully capture in one normal-length sentence, Caro’s covid-bookshelf classic The Power Broker follows city planner Robert Moses' unelected rise to enormous power, attained via leveraging his own indispensability at actually getting urban development projects of an unprecedented scale done (through both insane hard work/talent and aggressive ends-justify-the-means, reminiscent of a poorly-aligned AI given free rein), while also thoughtfully illustrating the consequences of his power on the powerless — like those who were forcibly evicted for a mile of urban highway that wouldn't solve congestion anyway due to a phenomenon Moses willfully ignored (induced demand) — and painting a complex picture of his irreversible effect on New York.
27. Crossword Constructor's Handbook (2004/2015) by Patrick Berry I constantly see this book recommended online to people looking to get into crossword construction, so I thought it was worth reading for some inspiration — I still haven't submitted any crosswords to The New York Times, but it's not the fault of the handbook, which I would recommend to people interested.
28. Counting by 7s (2013) by Holly Goldberg Sloan When I was younger, this was my favorite book (these days, I'm scared by the idea of picking a favorite book); I differed from the protagonist in many ways, but I think my love of the novel stems from the way it makes my experiences feel understood: it’s nice to have a book that’s always here for you.
29. The Puzzler: One Man's Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life (2022) by A.J. Jacobs As a puzzle creator, I was ready to be skeptical of a mass-market book about puzzles, but I was impressed by the coverage of puzzles I knew, deepening my appreciation of the coverage of puzzles I didn't and inspiring me to recommend Jacobs' The Puzzler to anyone interested in a tour of the wonderful worlds of puzzle-dom.
30. There Are No Shortcuts (2003) by Rafe Esquith [DNF] As I idly read a few chapters of this over-the-top account by a teacher who extended his school day to 6:30am–6:00pm for some students ("there are no shortcuts," after all), had them stage elaborate Shakespeare plays, and more, I mentally predicted, as a matter of pure mental prediction, that the author would go on to get cancelled…and as it happens, he was fired by LAUSD for misconduct in 2015 (though they ended up settling the lawsuit).
31. Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All (2020) by Ernö Rubik [DNF] An aesthetic little book with a nice mix of anecdotes and philosophical musings, I actually did finish and enjoy Rubik's Cubed when I first read it a few years ago, but only ended up rereading a few chapters this time.
32. The Elements of Computing Systems: Building A Modern Computer from First Principles (2021) by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken [DNF] This is the textbook for the "From NAND To Tetris" class I'm taking, which I love; I think if I wasn't doing all the projects and actually building a computer architecture from the basics, I'd have read this book in a weekend, since it really scratches my itch to understand how computers really work from the ground up, with accessible writing and humorously irrelevant quotes from literature to start each chapter.
33. Moby-Dick; or, the Whale (1851) by Herman Melville, introduction by Andrew Delbanco, commentary by Tom Quirk [DNF] I admit I always dismissed Moby-Dick as a dry old novel that's assigned in stereotypical English classes, but now that I'm reading it for my own English class, I'm actually impressed by a lot of the innovative and experimental structural chaptering choices Melville makes, but disappointed by the relentless, endless sentences written by someone who clearly has a compulsive obsession with whales (yeah, it's not just Captain Ahab, it's absolutely Herman Melville too).
34. Real Live Boyfriends: Yes. Boyfriends, Plural. If My Life Weren't Complicated, I Wouldn't Be Ruby Oliver (Book 4 of the Boyfriend List series) (2010) by E. Lockhart One summer day, I went to a park, tried to work on college applications, read this entire book instead, and enjoyed it despite the fact that the high-school-senior protagonist's only college-app-related activity seems to be…making…this film…where she records other characters giving definitions of love…and stuff…but she's not at all stressed about her essays??
35. Turtles All The Way Down (2017) by John Green Another comfort-book reread; I love the authenticity with which John Green writes about nerdy characters struggling with mental health and relationships while maintaining elegance and enjoyability.
36. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (2015) by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner [DNF] Sometimes books publicizing innovative theories (here, that forecasters operating on public information, using good techniques, can outperform domain experts) still contain lots of interesting nuance if you already agree with the theory, but alas…this was not one of those books for me.
37. Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (2023) by Michael Lewis You might've heard about this book — Michael Lewis, the luckiest writer, already shadowing Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX when it all imploded into fraud — and I'm still not quite sure what to make of it all, but was pulled into Going Infinite immediately as a work of storytelling, that's for sure!
38. The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles (2002) by Steven Pressfield This self-help book, framing productivity as a battle against an enemy by the name of Resistance, divided into microchapters with names like "Resistance is Universal," "Resistance Never Sleeps," and "Resistance Plays For Keeps," is fun to make fun of (honestly, just look at that kerning — or more accurately, lack thereof), and I thought it was basically stupid when I first read it a few years ago (on CGP Grey's recommendation, I think), but the productivity funk I've been in has made The War of Art feel empowering too.
39. Paper Towns (2008) by John Green I've read this book at least three times before, but this feels like the first time I've actually read all the words — it's still fun in places, but I felt much more repulsed by Margo's manipulativeness and the obsessive male gaze of the protagonist and his friends — which is the point, I think; the characters grow over the course of the novel, and I think I grew a bit with them.
Well, that's a wrap on my books from July 2022 to mid-November 2023!
I think the strat for doing these blog posts consistently (and escaping the ones where I'm like "I don't really remember") is writing the reviews immediately after I finish each book. I'm hoping to do this for Book Review Year 2024 (from now to next November), so I'll hope to see you then.
In the meantime, thanks for reading, and I hope you all have a nice Thanksgiving week! (Or really a nice week in general, even if you're reading this at a time besides Thanksgiving week.) Anyway, all the best from me.
—Jacob
PS: Writing this blog post really made me appreciate how ubiquitous in nonfiction, yet rare in fiction, subtitles are.