David Dubrow

Author

Top Ten Books of 2021

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When you decide that you’re going to write books, no matter what kind, the decision irrevocably changes how you read. Writers read for pleasure like everyone else, but they also analyze what they read, determining what works from what doesn’t and why.

I do that, at least.

The best fiction makes you forget that you’re in the act of reading; the best non-fiction turns you into an engaged student (or activist).

What follows is a list of which books made the greatest impression on me over the last twelve months. Lists like this tend to be quite personal. I’ll leave it up to the reader to suss out what makes me tick. I already know.

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10. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu. The first in a sci-fi trilogy, it’s a taut, imaginative trip into near-future technology, extraterrestrial intelligence, and recent Chinese history, viewed through a purely materialistic lens. There’s nothing spiritual or aspirational about it, making it the Hugo-winning apotheosis of 21st century science fiction, which tends to explore nihilism over grace. Books two and three (The Dark Forest and Death’s End, respectively) got progressively less interesting, and the physics, as it advanced, became more like magic than science (A.C. Clarke, call your agent). If you read Three-Body, you’ll have to read the other two. You should read Three-Body anyway.

9. Grendel by John Gardner. The story of Beowulf as told by the monster, it’s a novel to be both enjoyed and admired. Clever, funny, gory, literary, and thoughtful, you only need to read the first page to understand why it’s a classic piece of literature. Gardner was a brilliant writer who died way too soon.

8. Wilderness of Mirrors by David C Martin. The non-fiction story of two men, William King Harvey and James Jesus Angleton, who worked for the CIA; Harvey was instrumental in exposing Soviet spy Kim Philby (who was in England’s MI-6), and Angleton had known Philby for years without suspecting a thing. Both Harvey and Angleton were complete loons in their own way, and if you ever thought that America’s clandestine intelligence service was anything other than accidentally competent, this book will disabuse you of that notion.

7. Couples by John Updike. I first read this novel in the mid-1990s, after finishing Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, so I thought I would give it another spin. The themes of love, infidelity, and yearning remain relevant decades after the book was written. His graphic depictions of sex (especially in the 1960s) and frank discussions of intimacy are likewise shocking; Updike does not leave anything unsaid (one critic once said of him, “Did this guy ever have a thought he didn’t put on paper?”). I take it that the novel is at least a little bit autobiographical; I’m just glad I wasn’t Updike’s neighbor back then. This is still my favorite book of his.

6. Neighbors by Thomas Berger. Another novel of suburbia (after Updike’s Couples). Earl Kreese, a staid, boring, regular guy finds himself dealing with a pair of crazies who have just moved in next door. The absurdity in this novel borders on the surreal, but it’s hysterically funny for both the new neighbors’ antics and Earl’s reaction to them. Among many other excellent novels, Berger wrote Little Big Man.

5. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. This was my first Murakami novel, and remains my favorite. Bizarre, filled with magical realism, ghost sex, and questions of identity and grief, it keeps you interested, even throughout the frequent descriptions of the protagonist’s mundane doings when not encountering weird phenomena. Since Kafka I’ve read several other Murakami books, which range from the tedious (1Q84) to the fascinating (A Wild Sheep Chase). Murakami is a writer who most people either love or don’t. I liked a good bit of what I’ve read, and didn’t like other bits.

4. Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning. If you’ve ever wondered how average Germans could murder so many Jewish men, women, and children in Poland during WWII, this is your book. A nonfiction work of horror, once you read it you’ll never forget it. I disagree with the writer’s conclusions, which take at least some of the individual responsibility away from the murderers, but this is still a vital text. Graphic and brutal.

3. H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq. I’ve been an avid reader of Lovecraft and his associates since my teenage years, and Houellebecq’s analysis of the man and his mythos puts them in a new light, making them shine again. What an amazing book. I also enjoyed Houellebecq’s novels Serotonin and Submission in 2021, and highly recommend them.

2. The Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung. A guide to intermittent fasting: why it works and how you can make it work for you. Fasting has helped me immensely since I started it (I read Fung’s book in one night and began fasting that next morning). I look and feel better every day. Life-changing.

1. The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor. I couldn’t stand O’Connor’s novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, but as a short story writer there was no one better in American literature. She shocks, she elevates, she hits you in the gut, sometimes in the same story. It’s an anthology I can’t wait to read again. The best book I read in 2021, and several of the previous years, also. Absolutely brilliant.

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I’m interested to see what 2022’s top ten are going to be. 2021 will be hard to beat!

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Update: 6-1-2020

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Over the last several weeks of distance learning for my son and dealing with the other effects of the Corona crisis, I’ve found time to read books in the wee small hours.

A notable effort is Alex Berenson’s nonfiction book Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence. The issue of pot in America is so fraught with misinformation, competing political narratives, and controversy that before Berenson’s book it was impossible to determine fact from fiction about any of it. After Berenson’s book it’s still impossible, but what Berenson does is shine a spotlight on the potential dangers of marijuana, and how we did so little research of any kind before decriminalizing it in major areas of the U.S. There’s a massive difference between cannabinoid oil used for medicinal purposes and the THC in today’s marijuana, and pot lobbyists have exploited ignorance about the one to promote use of the other. We don’t know a great deal about both long- and short-term use of today’s strains of pot, and yet we’ve accepted marijuana as a cure-all for everything from insomnia to nausea to anxiety. Berenson does as well as anyone can to cut through the jargon and misinformation, but there’s so much garbage that his book can only be considered a necessary first step to understanding a subject few people seem to want to get to the bottom of.

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I first discovered Jonathan Carroll’s novels in the house of friends who let me stay with them the first few weeks I moved to Colorado decades ago, and I’ll be eternally grateful to them for both their hospitality and library. At the time I started with Carroll’s Sleeping in Flame, a book about a man who discovers that he comes from a far stranger and yet more familiar place than he realizes, and he has to come to terms with a nightmarish legacy that threatens to turn his entire reality inside-out. Surreal, bizarre, and yet matter-of-fact, it’s the perfect introduction to Carroll’s incredible universe of magical realism. Over the years I acquired every Carroll book I could get my hands on, and enjoyed them all.

But, as it turned out, I’d read some of them out of order, namely the Answered Prayers series.

Answered Prayers follows the lives of people touched by the surreal, all of whom know each other in some way: Walker Easterling, Cullen James, Weber Gregston, and others. Odd names, yes. And, like most of Carroll’s books, at least some of the action takes place in Vienna, Austria. While I don’t think I missed anything by reading them out of order, over the last few weeks I reread the series in order of publication, getting the overarching story in full:

  1. Bones of the Moon
  2. Sleeping in Flame
  3. A Child Across the Sky
  4. Outside the Dog Museum
  5. After Silence
  6. From the Teeth of Angels

After Silence is a bit of an outlier, referencing characters from the other novels but lacking the magical connection that binds them. Outside the Dog Museum is kind of a frustrating read, with the protagonist a difficult person to like and a lot going on without much resolution. From the Teeth of Angels is the most disturbing work of the series, and leaves an unsettling mark on you long after you’re done reading it.

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In addition to reading, I did some writing for Romans One.

This piece talks about going somewhere outside of Hollywood for your entertainment:

You can rail about empty Hollywood tripe produced by hateful narcissists every single day, but until you make the difficult and necessary choice of not watching it, even the stuff you like, you’re contributing to a horribly corrosive system that will never change on its own. The more time and money you give them, the more sewage they’ll pump out.

And here, I discuss social media:

The use of social media, with its laughing/crying emojis, eye-rolling gifs, and relative anonymity, separates the true self from the internet version in ways that make us all seem awful and unlovable. The consequences of ruining someone’s afternoon over a disagreement are minimal, at best. Pile-ons are encouraged. If your ideological opponent says something patently stupid, it would be wrong not to ratio him. Right? Teach that “dummy” a lesson.

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Reading books and avoiding the social media dopamine circus make me more into the person I want to be, so I’m going to continue to do that. I encourage you to do the same.

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What’s for Dinner? Two Book Reviews

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Several months ago, accomplished writer Kristin Devine, who wrote a blurb for Appalling Stories, recommended a book to me by Michael Pollan called The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. Written in 2006, it asked the question What should we have for dinner? in a way that explores food choices, nutrition, survival, taste, farming, and ethics, among many other issues. It’s a tremendously entertaining book, and the universality of its themes keep it relevant fourteen years after its original publication.

As with all non-fiction books, I did what most of us do: I unquestioningly accepted those premises that reinforced my already-held opinions, rejected those that I found entirely antithetical to my worldview, and hoped that I would learn something somewhere in the middle. Pleasantly, as this is a mostly apolitical book, I found a great deal to learn from and enjoy, and it opened my eyes to issues that I had opinions on, but hadn’t considered very deeply. So The Omnivore’s Dilemma is an unqualified success. I learned something. And, more importantly, it’s influenced me to make some different choices: namely, what’s for dinner.

Civilization means taming, as much as we can, the somewhat arbitrary nature of the universe. We build houses and install central heating because the weather’s not always warm and pleasant. We develop language and communication skills because everybody else has different feelings and desires from us. And we preserve food because nourishment doesn’t just drop from the sky like the Israelites’ manna. In something as seemingly straightforward as farming, for example, there are many complicating factors: disease, weather, economics, and expanding human populations to feed. So we tried to solve these problems using artificial fertilizers, chemical pesticides, monoculture farming (corn), breeding crops for desirable characteristics, and so on. The end result of these solutions is that we’re all better fed, but we’re not all healthier. There’s a widening gap between being fed and being nourished, and we see that in rising rates of obesity and other health concerns that are, unfortunately, somewhat self-inflicted. So what do we do?

Pollan doesn’t offer many solutions, but that’s deliberate: he does the journalist’s trick of leading you to the point of view he wants you to adopt with the way he presents the information. It worked for me, in some limited fashion. We’ll see if it has any long-term effects on my health.

One change we’re making at our house is substituting whole grains for some of the white flour we eat, particularly in bread. (As nobody’s succeeded in making a whole wheat pasta that tastes good, we’re sticking with the standard stuff, however.) My favorite hobby is baking bread, so I went back to texts like Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads and Artisan Breads Every Day to develop my skills in the whole wheat realm. In the bibliography of ABED Reinhart mentioned a seminal book called Six Thousand Years of Bread: Its Holy and Unholy History. Published in 1944 by H.E. Jacob, a German Jew who was imprisoned in both Dachau and Buchenwald, the book’s title says it all.

It would be wrong, however, to describe the book as a history of bread; it’s actually a history of mankind’s relationship with bread, starting from prehistory and ending with the advent of World War Two. Jacob describes every facet of this relationship, from grain types to farm implements, religious rites to cultural customs, and famine to war. His airy, storytelling style keeps it from being a dry recitation of events, and instead narrates the love affair with wheat we humans have engaged in for millennia. You’ll learn why both the miller and the baker have been so reviled throughout history, the secrets behind food riots in France and Germany, and how America fed the Allied forces in World War I, among many other things. It’s lengthy and detailed, but if you want the inside story on such a universal, foundational food, Six Thousand Years of Bread is a must-read.

Bon appétit!

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Two Book Reviews

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I want to tell you about a couple books I read. Every once in a while you find a novel or two that’s hard to forget.

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Roger Keen’s Literary Stalker is written about writers for writers, but if you’re not masochistic enough to consider yourself a writer don’t let that put you off: it’s a tremendously fun read for anyone. Throughout the book, Keen aptly skewers both the act of writing and the business of writing so accurately that I found myself simultaneously snickering aloud and squirming in my chair whilst reading it, which works perfectly for something one might call a metafiction thriller.

The main character, Nick Chatterton, is a gay man trying to break into the novel-writing business after having had several horror short stories published. I only mention that Nick’s gay because his lifestyle takes up a not-insignificant part of the novel, and some of the graphic detail had me dreading what might happen next. During his career, Nick has made some enemies/frenemies, and as he writes this new novel after the style of the Vincent Price revenge movie Theatre of Blood, he blurs the line between his protagonist’s murderous actions and his own. Everything leads up to Nick facing his imagined (or not-so-imagined) nemesis, a Neil Gaiman-like author with massive popularity, and things explode from there.

Keen (and I must say this) has a keen eye for the passive-aggressive, transactional nature of social media, showcasing both its absurdity and how seriously we take it. “If you don’t click Like on my post, I won’t Retweet your book sale link,” etc. Not only that, but he delves deep into the psyche of a stalker’s twisted personality, with the jealousies, fantasies, and delusions that come with it.

Across the board, Literary Stalker does what it sets out to do, and does it extremely well. I can’t say that about a lot of recently-written fiction, so check this one out.

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Samuel Finlay’s Breakfast with the Dirt Cult is a profoundly affecting novel about the war in Afghanistan, and what the conflict does not just to protagonist Tom Walton, but everyone in his orbit. I know nothing about the writer myself, but the text makes one imagine that it’s a semi-autobiographical piece, a wrenching memoir of a young man’s time in the U.S. Army.

Tom Walton is an intellectual kind of soldier, as comfortable with Aristophanes as he is with a battle rifle, and much of the action takes place inside of his head. His musings on civilization, politics, culture, and intimate relationships get extremely raw at times, and much of it is inarguable, even if it devolves into occasional ranting. We get to know Tom inside and out, no-holds-barred, and in learning so much about him we can’t help but become him in both major events and minor.

I didn’t serve in the military and can’t speak firsthand to its accuracy. Nevertheless, his descriptions, characters, and use of jargon all ring true from my time working with veterans. The futility, for example, of climbing a mountain in the dead of winter to look for a terrorist who’s already fled, and the often arbitrary and capricious rules governing personal/professional conduct are starkly drawn, and make one wonder what exactly we’re trying to accomplish with our presence in Afghanistan.

Long stretches of the text are absolutely hilarious. The conversations are exactly how men talk, particularly men put under enormous pressure and in close quarters for extended periods of time.

If I had a criticism, it’s that the parts of the novel where Tom is no longer in the field dragged a little; the story structure needed that tent peg of danger to maintain its momentum. Nevertheless, Tom’s trials and agonies leap off the page and throttle you, keeping you gasping for breath with each turn of the page.

If you read nothing else about the war in Afghanistan, this is the book you need.

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