1. Minoru Yamasaki and the Fragility of Architecture by Paul Kidder (started 12/21; finished 3/30): B

This might be the most academic book I have ever read. And, much like Because Internet last year, it took me a good three months to finish it—a bit longer even, for a book that's all of 251 pages long. I got the last third of it so done on the flights to and from Louisville for my trip there in late March, having started it in December, plus having renewed it at the library twice, then being forced to return it and check it out again, and then renew it twice yet again. And this was not because I was disinterested in the book; it’s a matter of putting myself in circumstances where I have the time and the lack of distractions—such as, say, a cross-country flight. And I certainly didn't want to give up on this book, which the library literally added to their collection at my request (a first for me!) after I learned of its existence in the wake of the 20th anniversary of 9/11 in September 2021.

The subject of this book has special significance for me, a longtime and huge nerd about skyscrapers, as Minoru Yamasaki was a graduate of University of Washington, grew up in Seattle, and designed, among countless other structures around the world, iconic skyscrapers from coast to coast: the collapsed Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, first completed in New York City in 1973; as well as Seattle's own building on a pedestal, Rainier Tower, completed in 1977. He also designed the Pacific Science Center, originally named United States Science Pavilion, at Seattle Center in 1962. He also designed Seattle's IBM Building (now just called 1200 Fifth), finished in 1964. This clear local-architect connection to the World Trade Center and the 9/11 tragedy naturally piqued my interest, and the anniversary coverage in 2021 made me aware of this, very new book. It reads a lot like something someone might read in a college class (although an architect friend of mine was bemused to learn that author Paul Kidder is a philosopher and not an architect himself) but I did still find it interesting and engaging—especially the last third or so, which included a chapter dedicated to the changing attitudes about the WTC design, particularly before and after the collapse of the Twin Towers. That said, it connected to a particularly niche interest of mine, and I can't imagine many other non-architects like myself having a great deal of interest in it.

2. A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries 2003-2020 by David Sedaris (started 3/30; finished 4/30): A-

There's hardly anything different I can say about this book that would be different from what I said about its predecessor, Theft by Finding: Here is a book with no narrative arc whatsoever, and the amazing thing about it is it's still easily one of the best books I've read all year. ...[This book] is a genuine triumph of editing, a showcase of Sedaris's best and most acute observations, and his satisfyingly caustic humor. I laughed out loud on nearly every page of this book, which might be even better than some of his deservedly celebrated collections of essays. And that's really saying something. I could not recommend this book enough. The only difference, I suppose, is that these diaries from his later years betray a bit of a crankier disposition, but given the amusingly pissy disposition of his youth, that's hardly a leap. The man is a hilarious delight either way.

3. Ten Steps to Nanette by Hannah Gadsby (started 4/30; finished 6/7): A-

It takes some time to fully appreciate the structure of Ten Steps to Nanette, which seems on the surface to be about how Hannah Gadsby prior life experiences of repression and trauma led to her ability to fashion those experiences and trauma into the work of art that was her 2018 standup special Nanette. Just as she did with the live show, however, she expertly holds the reader's perceptions in her very capable hands. In the end, it becomes increasingly clear that this book is largely about her exceedingly complicated relationship with her mother, a narrative so capably woven into the telling of all the other stuff that it culminates in an emotional gut punch that I am certain was very much by design. Everything about this book's writing, its storytelling, and its arc is by design, and deeply satisfyingly so; I did not feel manipulated, but taken on a journey by a person in meticulous command of her craft. This is hardly surprising, given how precisely constructed the live show was—what is fascinating to read is how much of a messy struggle it was for her to get it to that point.

4. The Library Book by Susan Orlean (started 6/7; finished 7/7): A

This book is utterly delightful. It's been a good five years, at least, since I enjoyed a book so thoroughly—it connects so many threads of things for which I have personal passion. And I don't even have a particular passion for books, broadly speaking! And that's the case for nearly every one of the incredibly fascinating subjects of this book. But, I do have a deep well of passion for the existence of public libraries themselves, not to mention all of these other things the book touches on, while relating them specifically to the Los Angeles Central Library building, constructed in 1925: architecture; urban development; population growth; statistics broadly speaking; hidden gems, particularly in cities as unfairly maligned as Los Angeles; civic pride broadly speaking; and perhaps most significantly in this case—disasters. There was a fire in 1986 that destroyed twenty percent of the library's books and other rare contents, a lot of it irreplaceable; an accused arsonist whose guilt was never proven both because of and in spite of his notoriously pathological lying; a years-long recovery process for the barely recoverable books damaged by either smoke or water; and both before and after that event, a long history of truly fascinating individuals who served as the City Librarian, whose lives and details Orlean spends a good amount of time on, weaving in threads of the national history of public libraries in the United States and how they came to be what they are today. I have long had a deep well of love for the Central Library building constructed in Seattle in 2004, and after reading this book am kicking myself that I never visited the Los Angeles Central Library during the five years that Shobhit lived in that city—even though I was downtown many times. It now has its own modernized-yet-complementary eight-level wing that was added in 1993, capping off seven years of recovery and restoration after the fire. It will be at the top of my list whenever I visit Los Angeles again, all thanks to this book about libraries, librarians, and the one library that has arguably the most fascinating history in the U.S.

5. Feral Creatures by Kira Jane Buxton (started 7/7; finished 9/4): B

After four nonfiction books read up to this point in the year, I had a hankering or a novel, which I don't read often and feel I should read more of. In my endeavor to come up with ideas for a fun novel to read, I recalled loving the Seattle-based apocalyptic bent-comedy novel narrated by a shit talking crow named Shit Turd, Hollow Kingdom, in 2019. So, I looked up that novel on Amazon to see what similar novels the website had to recommend—only thereby to discover this sequel had been published just last year! I was thrilled and could not have placed a hold on it at the library any faster.

. . . Well. Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy this novel, and delighted in how often it got me to laugh out loud. Still, the facts that I finished Hollow Kingdom in 19 days, and it took me nearly two months to finish Feral Creatures, are still clearly illuminating. Although this novel ends with a sort of "Wild Animals Battle Royale" extravaganza that feels a little like a replacement for something a little deeper, it's still wonderful just to be back in S.T.'s universe. As such, to this day I would recommend Hollow Kingdom to absolutely anyone; I would only recommend Feral Creatures, on the other hand, to those who are already huge fans of the first novel, and particularly its characters. This is somewhat like sticking with a TV show that's started to lose just a little bit of its steam because you have such affection for its characters.

6. The World's Worst Assistant by Sona Movsesian (started 9/4; finished 9/14): B+

After it took me two full months to read Feral Creatures, which I did genuinely enjoy in spite of it being predictably inferior to the novel to which it was a sequel, finishing The World's Worst Assistant in ten days almost felt like a stunning achievement. Except: to say that this is a light, breezy read is an understatement: it's only 272 pages long; it has far fewer words per page on average; it has cartoon interludes and mock-script interludes that create pages with even fewer words to read. In terms of any challenge to reading comprehension, this might as well be a children's book. On the other hand, if you are a fan of Conan O'Brien (as I am), or particularly a big fan of his podcast Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend (as I am), then this is a definitively entertaining read, equally touching on both O'Brien's own charisma, star power and self-effacing humor, as well as Movsesien's own, very distinct sensibility that has rightly won her fans in her own right. If you have little to no familiarity with either of these people, I'm sure this book would still be a fun read but it wouldn't be quite the same. This one is very much for the fans, for whom it definitely has its rewards.

7. Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing by Melissa Mohr (started 9/21; finished 10/12): B+

If you have any level of intellectual curiosity and you love swearing, this is the book for you. And given that this tracks history of offensive language dating all the way back to ancient Rome, the fact that it was published nine years ago hardly qualifies it as "dated" (one or two things that might be phrased slightly differently were it published in 2022 notwithstanding). In fact, fascinatingly, Holy Sh*t examines the two different meanings of "swearing" (the sacred and the profane), how one or the other has shifted in priority of offensiveness depending on its usage over the centuries, and how they have been related to each other over throughout. I did find the portion of the book covering the many centuries of the Middle Ages somewhat dull, just as I have always found any history of the Middle Ages to be, but thankfully, you can take the word "Brief" in the title quite literally: this is only about 250 pages, a brisk, overall fascinating read, a lot of it uniquely amusing. Especially when considering, for example, graffiti on the brothel walls in Pompeii.

8. This Is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan (started 10/12; finished 10/20): B

This book started with great promise, which lasted through the middle of its three sections, and then very much fizzled. Pollan focuses on three psychotropic plants here, in the book's three sections: opium; caffeine; and mescaline. The opium chapter may be my favorite, as it reprints and recontextualizes a piece Pollan had published in Harper's magazine in 1997, when the "War on Drugs" was in a radically different place—seeing added commentary from 2021, plus restored portions that had been cut from the original Harper's piece for legal and safety reasons, was very fascinating to me. The middle section, on caffeine, is nearly as fascinating for inverted reasons: instead of trying a drug for the first time, he wrote most of this piece while quitting caffeine cold turkey, and tracking the effects of withdrawal from this drug partaken regularly by 80% of the world (and I approach this material from the point of view of that other 20% who doesn't drink coffee). The final piece, on mescaline, was ultimately a disappointment: a self-indulgent account of a white man eager to experience an "authentic" sacred ceremony that uses the plant, even though by definition it could never be authentic, given his position as a white man experiencing the substance for the first time, not to mention the woman conducting the ceremony not even being Indigenous herself. Pollan spends a lot of time in this section hand-wringing about "cultural appropriation" only to do a version of exactly that; why he couldn't just partake in the substance on his own cultural terms, as he did both the others in the book (which have their own histories of sacred ritual, after all), I did not understand. That said, the man is a vividly descriptive writer and when his pieces work, they were very effectively. I just found his approach in the end to be misguided, which is unfortunate for it to have been the book's ending section.

9. The Submission by Amy Waldman (started 10/22; finished 11/4): B+

I couldn't tell you how long this novel had been on hold for my account at the Seattle Public Library—definitely not quite as far back as when it was first published in 2011, but quite possibly I'd had the hold paused for more than half the intervening eleven years. It had been a long time, which accounts for some minor elements of the book that have not aged particularly well, notably the idea of a white woman writing from the perspectives of both entitled White characters as well as marginalized people of color, particularly Muslims in post-9/11 New York City. The book's many accolades and awards from its time (which it would not at all likely receive today) notwithstanding, this largely accounts for my giving it a B+ in spite of it being arguably the most compulsively readable book I had read so far this year. (I only read two other books this year in less time. Sona Movsesian's The World's Worst Assistant, which I read in 10 days, really doesn't count, given its many cartoon interludes makes it a quick read even by slow-reader standards. And I only managed to read Michael Pollan's This Is Your Mind on Plants in eight days because I forced it, budgeting daily pages in the face of a Book Club deadline.) I finished The Submission, a novel about a blind contest to design a 9/11 memorial two years after the attack only for the winner to wind up being a Muslim man, in a solid two weeks—quick by my standards, especially considering it was not for Book Club and I had no looming deadline; I simply kept feeling compelled to pick it up and read it. The best kind of book. I read nonfiction by far the most often, felt like reading a novel again, and simply perused my longtime-paused holds at the library and finally selected this one. I was very glad I did, and rather wish now that I had read it a long time ago. I remain curious as to what specifically Muslim critics may have thought of this book, but setting that aside, the ensemble cast of characters struck me as quite vividly drawn all the way around.

10. Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris (started 11/4; finished 11/10): B+

I let too much time go by and didn't realize until I finished The Ministry for the Future that I had not dated when I finished this one! Well, I know I was starting on that one at least by November 11 so I guess I have to guess November 10. So, about a week for this book: a very easy, quick, often funny and often poignant read, as always with David Sedaris's collections of essays. Although I still have to say his diary anthologies are my favorite, I quite enjoyed this one, which revolves largely around the death of his father, the one of his parents he was not particularly close to. Sedaris's perspective is always uniquely compelling and often hilarious; I'm basically a broken record about him at this point—if pressed to choose a favorite writer, I would likely say it's him.

11. The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (started 11/10; finished 12/13): B+

It has been a long, long time since I read a book this long (in this case, 563 pages) in so short a time—barely more than a month, just shy of five weeks. Let's say an average of 113 pages per week. And that's without ever budgeting pages per day, the way I had to in order to finish both Holy Shit and This Is Your Mind on Plants so I would be finished with the latter in time for our first nonfiction Book Club meeting with coworkers! (In fact, those two books were a combined 640 pages read in 30 days, averaging 21.3 per day, except that in the end, when I finally realized I needed to budget page reading, for the last week and a half or so I was reading 34 pages a day. With Ministry for the Future I only had to average just over 16 pages a day, but that's way more than I usually ever averaged prior to this year. I'm calling it a win: more prolific reading, without having to force myself into it.) Anyway, the point is, I could not put this book down for long, and it became a staple of both my bus and train rides to and from work, and virtually every half-hour lunch break at work. I hardly read it while at home, and still managed to finish it far more quickly than I really expected to. This is a novel of "speculative fiction" regarding climate change effects in the near-future of coming decades, and how world governments respond to it, but particularly an international agency—that being the book's title—borne of the evolving Paris Agreement and starting with little to no real international authority, but with growing authority and effectiveness over time. The opening chapter is especially grim, detailing a heat wave in India that kills 100 million people; I feared what the rest of the book might bring after that, but nothing thereafter is quite a grim, precisely because that grim event becomes a sort of international inciting event, finally getting governments to start making real changes in response to climate challenges. And this book, although it does have a protagonist who is returned to every few to several chapters (that being Mary, the head of the titular Ministry), it functions largely as a fictional oral history, many chapters narrated by a nameless figure accounting for this or that event or action—one major climate catastrophe or another, or one of countless countermeasures. For example, pumping Antarctic glacier melt through wells dug to their depths and brought up to refreeze at their surface, to slow the pace of their sliding across land, thereby buying years of time. It's all very fascinating and meticulously researched. Everything included in this book is immediately plausible, which is alternatingly unnerving and hopeful.