What I Read
NOS4A2
By: Joe Hill
Joe Hill is one of my favorite horror authors. This is a 10-year-old book and it’s timely, as it’s Christmas themed and I’m reading it during the holidays.
Player Piano
By: Kurt Vonnegut
I read this for one of my MPA classes and it was a surprisingly prescient vision of what the future would look like after widespread automation and displacement of humans in manufacturing (really all) jobs.
An American Marriage
By: Tayari Jones
This was a heavy story about newlyweds impacted by wrongful imprisonment. There is injustice in the world that disproportionately impacts black communities in America, which is a focus of the story. As the characters go, there are no villains, but it’s tough not to pick sides. Only do so with honesty and introspection.
Eat & Run
By: Scott Jurek
This was a surprise. I did not expect this book to be as compelling as it was, but I started reading it on Friday and had finished it by Saturday. It’s mostly an autobiography, but also contains a number of vegan recipes that actually sound pretty good.
What I Started Reading
I usually don’t bother with this section, but I spent a lot of time in 2019 reading books for my classes at CUNY, including Introduction to Public Affairs, Business and Public Policy, and Public Policy and the Culture of Science. They were really good books, even though I didn’t finish most of them.
American Dialogue, The Founders, and Us
By: Joseph J. Ellis
Ellis compared and contrasted views of founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in a way that was illuminating to my understanding of the Constitution.
The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age
By: Tim Wu
A good review of the history of antitrust policy in the United States, and a compelling argument to implement similar policy today.
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
By: Yuval Noah Harari
These Truths: A History of the United States
By: Jill Lepore
This is the book I most want to go back and finish, as it seems to be a more exhaustive history of our country than I learned in school.
The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
By: Tim Wu
The Two Cultures
By: CP Snow
The Constitution: An Introduction
By: Michael Stokes Paulsen
The author wrote this as his son progressed from a teenager to college student, and it’s a great primer on the Constitution.
Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness
By: Bruce Rosenblum