Category: Blogs and Internet

I didn’t make much time to write commentary on newer books this year. Faves:

• Crossroads, by Jonathan Franzen
• Life between the Tides, by Adam Nicolson
• Impossible Views of the World, by Lucy Ives sat on a wishlist for months and months

2021’s list

2020’s list

2019’s list

2018’s list

2017’s list

2016’s list

2015’s list

2014’s list

Jenny Odell explains why I kept scrolling through the bird site, like a laboratory pigeon hitting the lever to get a food pellet, even when every fifth pellet was an ad and most of the others were repeats.

Entrainment, a term that originated in biology and then spread to the social sciences, refers to the alignment of an organism’s physiology or behavior with a cycle; the most familiar example would be our circadian rhythm. The signal driving entrainment, in this case light and dark, is called a “zeitgeber” (German for “time giver”)….

Something like entrainment seems to be at work in our relationship to Twitter and other forms of social media. The rate of updates and notifications provides a powerful zeitgeber — one that can even override our circadian rhythm, as any nighttime scroller knows.

I’ll go ahead and link to my Goodreads list now, even though I’ll probably finish A Thousand Acres before the of the year. Top marks for

• Sue Hubbell, A Country Year
• Jonathan Meiburg, A Most Remarkable Creature
• Kate Atkinson, Big Sky
• Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels
• Thomas Pynchon, V.
• David Shields, Salinger
• the final two volumes of The Familiar

• 2020’s list
• 2019’s list
• 2018’s list
• 2017’s list
• 2016’s list
• 2015’s list
• 2014’s list

Five quite good books, out of the 24 that I logged into Goodreads this year:

• Richard Ellman, James Joyce
• Tom Horton, Bay Country
• Jill Lepore, These Truths
• Jane Smiley, Moo
• Ali Smith, Summer

• 2019’s list
• 2018’s list
• 2017’s list
• 2016’s list
• 2015’s list
• 2014’s list

Three re-reads this year. Standouts are David Treuer’s The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee and Robin D. G. Kelley’s biography of Thelonious Monk.

• 2018’s list
• 2017’s list
• 2016’s list
• 2015’s list
• 2014’s list

Some favorite authors and topics are the highlights this year, but no five-star titles.

• 2017’s list
• 2016’s list
• 2015’s list
• 2014’s list

Rinker Buck was a pleasant surprise (and a book exchange pickup). Stephen Batchelor appeared on the freebie shelves at work. And I finished two monster-good works: Caro’s The Power Broker and Haskell’s The Forest Unseen.

• 2016’s list
• 2015’s list
• 2014’s list

Henry Beston and David Maraniss were my new faves of 2016.

• 2015’s list.
• 2014’s list.

I have still one book to report on to Goodreads, but I can go ahead and set up the link now.

2014’s list.

Or at least all the books that I’ve told Goodreads about.

It’s been ten years since my first Wikipedia edit. I’ve been a lot more active in the last two years than the previous eight.