My Eight Best Books of 2023
Here's the best of what I read in 2023. Prior lists: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 and 2016.
The list has eight books this year, not ten, for just eight made it to the level I’d feel comfortable recommending to the world. I think this is a function of my reading, not the imminent collapse of civilization (which, apparently, is right around the corner).
Last year, I disrupted and innovated like crazy by picking a Book of the Year. This year’s BotY is: Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford.
I don’t usually do much recreational reading in what I think of as the sphere of my work life. But this book came to my attention as part of the learning journey I am on, and I am glad it did. We think of AI as this techno-utopian “thing” that lives in the cloud. It isn’t. It is a thing of, and in, the physical and political world. Read this book to learn more.
As always, I provide a line or two of commentary on, and a quote from, each work. The titles link to the Amazon Kindle store page for the book. Page numbers are provided for the quotes if available, and Kindle locations, if not.
The List
(fuller descriptions and a quote follow below)
Autobiography
Six Records of a Life Adrift, Shen Fu
Fiction
What Strange Paradise, Omar El Akkad
History
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Shirer
Emperor of Rome, Mary Beard
Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, Ian Johnson
Rome and Persia, The Seven Hundred Year Rivalry, Adrian Goldsworthy
Society
Technology
Autobiography
Six Records of a Life Adrift, Shen Fu
I’ve written elsewhere about my learning journey at Stanford, and I referenced this work in an essay over the summer. This beautiful work — likely an autobiography, although we cannot be sure — takes us into the lives of a failed scholar and his wife. The period is the end of the reign of the Qianlong emperor and the first part of the reign of the Jiaqing emperor. There is something delicately subversive about how Shen Fu portrays his marriage with Chen Yun — it is mutually respectful to a degree that appears unusual for that period. It was a different time, yet some things are universal as you can see in the quote below.
We played a drinking game which I lost frequently, and I wound up getting very drunk and falling asleep. (p 28)
Fiction
What Strange Paradise, Omar El Akkad
My friend Molly Wood and I had Omar El Akkad on Futureverse, the climate fiction podcast she and I host. This book was the primary text for our discussion which you can hear and read here. It is utterly brilliant (and heartbreaking). Here I want to mention that the one place in the entire novel that references climate change is the quote below. The climate crisis will devastate the Global South, in ways that we do not even begin to comprehend.
Once, years earlier, Amir’s father told him that none of this started with bombs or bullets or a few stupid kids spray-painting the slogans of revolution on the walls. It started with a drought. You come from farmers, he said, and five years before you were born the earth turned on us, the earth withheld. (p 48)
History
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Shirer
When I was eighteen, a callow student at Penn, a looooong time ago, I blundered into this work by William Shirer. I knew little to nothing about Nazi Germany. This book, written by an eyewitness journalist, landed on my brain with the force of several thermonuclear explosions and triggered a lifetime of reading about how the horror of the Holocaust could have occurred. I re-read it this past year and can tell you that time has not diminished its force one bit. If you know very little about this period and are not an academic historian, this really is the best place to begin.
Such was the conglomeration of men around the leader of the National Socialists. In a normal society they surely would have stood out as a grotesque assortment of misfits. But in the last chaotic days of the Republic they began to appear to millions of befuddled Germans as saviors. (p 239)
Emperor of Rome, Mary Beard
I periodically go through a frenzy of reading about ancient Rome and found my way to this book by Beard, a noted scholar of the period. This book is a very unusual look at the actual “lived experience” of Roman emperors — how they lived, what they ate, whom they consorted with, and so on. This is an inversion of the “great man” approach to history (of the “and then Caesar conquered Gaul” variety) — it doesn’t dispense with the great men but instead looks at them from another vantage point.
It is an uncomfortable fact that, throughout history, autocracy – tyranny, dictatorship or whatever we call it – has depended on people at all levels who accept it, who adjust to it, or even find it a comfortable system under which to live. (p 407)
Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, Ian Johnson
It is a statement of the obvious that autocratic states employ history and make myths around that history to exert control. Yet in every autocratic state, some find a way to document alternate histories. China in this period is no different — it is just that we hear very little from the inside. This book goes some way towards correcting that gap. It is informational but also extraordinarily moving. It is one thing to write histories ensconced in academic comfort; quite another when you could die for doing so.
Memory, though, is a fraught term. As we know from our own lives, memory shifts as we age. This malleability is especially true of the concept of “collective memory."… In this sense, the term applies to China’s underground historians. Through digital technologies, they have formed a collective memory, and as a loose, shifting group of people they are trying to rewrite the history of the People’s Republic of China. (p 140)
Rome and Persia, The Seven Hundred Year Rivalry, Adrian Goldsworthy
Goldsworthy is no stranger here — his is the very first book on my very first year-end book list, and as I wrote then: “Anything by Goldsworthy on the Roman era is worth reading.” This book filled a large blank in my reading about ancient Rome, namely the rivalry with two consecutive Persian dynasties, the Parthian and the Sasanian. It sheds light on several interesting matters, not the least of which is the swift implosion of both sides when confronted by the new forces emerging out of Arabia.
The change that occurred in the seventh century was one of the great revolutions in the history of the world. With hindsight, it all seems to have happened incredibly quickly, with the Romans losing Palestine, Syria, and Egypt in little more than a decade, and the entire Sasanian empire collapsing in similar fashion almost as swiftly. (p 576)
Society
The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization, Peter Zeihan
Zeihan’s core thesis is that the curve of progress stops here — the world is the best it has ever been and ever will be, and it is all downhill from here. Books (and views) like this have a long history of being utterly wrong (look up Ehrlich on population, as one example). The piece of his argument I do agree with fully is the idea that the United States is uniquely positioned to survive and thrive. There is much in here to spur thinking, agree with, and disagree with.
This relatively loose definition of what being “American” means makes it far easier for the United States in specific, the settler states in general, and in the broadest definition any federal or confederal system, to absorb rafts of new immigrants… In the world to come that’ll be a helluva handy characteristic. (p 99)
Technology
Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence, Kate Crawford
Because most of us interact with the new generation of AI tools through software on devices, we have almost no understanding of the enormous physical footprint of all that it takes to deliver that ChatGPT dialog box on our iPhones. This is similar to many other forgettings in modern society of huge material objects all around us — for instance the empires of incarceration or the archipelagos of senior living facilities. The quote below lays out Crawford’s thesis — you may not agree with her after reading this marvelous and brilliant book, but you will not look at AI the same way.
In contrast, in this book I argue that AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. Rather, artificial intelligence is both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labor, infrastructures, logistics, histories, and classifications. AI systems are not autonomous, rational, or able to discern anything without extensive, computationally intensive training with large datasets or predefined rules and rewards. (p 8)