—Pithy Summary’s end-of-the-year lists!—
Enjoy, don’t enjoy, scoff, smile, roll your eyes – it’s a free country, do what you want.
—Top three books that offer a special perspective on life and make you wonder how you even really got through life as such a basic and you’ll never see it the same again—
Sapiens – At the end of the day, we’re a bunch of fancy primates living in our fancy, made-up world
The Black Swan – Unexpected things happen and maybe instead of just letting them happen to us, we can find ways to make them happen in our favor
The Omnivore’s Dilemma – If you’re going to start an incredibly ambitious New Year’s resolution about your food, start here
—Top three books about how the hell-bent machinations of institutions and the uber-wealthy are just absolutely swindling us and stitching the wool over our eyes but we just listen to the newest Taylor Swift album and try not to think about it, I mean, why—
An American Sickness – Yes, your hospital bill is suspiciously high, weird how that happens
Perfectly Legal – Yes, you are literally paying more taxes than Jeff Bezos is
Saving Capitalism – Yes, you are subsidizing the fancy-jet-bound adventures of rich CEOs who don’t even bother to say thank you, rude
—Top three books that offer a unique historical perspective on that one subject it felt like you had to learn every year in high school and yet for some reason you never really paid attention so you actually don’t know that subject very well—
Citizens of London – What really happened in WWII, anyway
The Butchering Art – Did you know that back in the olden days, they’d just straight up saw legs off and call that surgery
The Ghost Map – If you didn’t know this after the pandemic, please don’t drink water from a dirty well shared with all your neighbors
—Top three books about things we should know as adults but don’t because we’d rather watch cat videos because everything is fine, and how much more can these authors emphasize that it’s important to care about other people—
$2.00 a Day – There are poor people in America. Incredibly, desperately poor, unable to crawl into manageable poverty because of policies and systems outside of their control. To what do we owe our neighbors?
How to Blow up a Pipeline – This is not an instruction manual but rather a manifesto about how the world is on fire and why we may have a physical and moral interest in stopping that fire
The New Jim Crow – It is perhaps by design that so many POC are in prisons and hey even if you’re anti-CRT, feel free to give this one a shot