2012: The Year in Books
Reason writers pick the best books of the year
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Allison's prescriptions for policy cures include eliminating the Federal Reserve, cutting defense spending by at least 25 percent, and eliminating the minimum wage, or at least reducing it back to its prerecession level of $5.15 per hour. He also suggests replacing government deposit insurance with a private system. As for the big picture, Allison writes that the "fundamental cause" of the financial crisis is the philosophy taught in American liberal arts colleges. "The long term key to success is to recapture the elite universities from the Left," he writes.
I'm not endorsing all of Allison's analysis or conclusions. But he's succeeded at something that isn't easy: writing a new must-read book on the financial convulsions and their aftermath.
Peter Suderman, senior editor
For 25 years, the Scottish
science-fiction writer Iain M. Banks has written novels set in the
far-future universe of the Culture, a lawless, post-Singularity
civilization in which enlightened humans pursue hedonistic
pleasures while super-powerful artificial intelligences known as
Minds deal with trivial details like war and diplomacy. The series
deals with various conundrums of a world with unlimited resources,
but mostly it revolves around a single Big Question: What does a
free-thinking liberal civilization with unlimited options actually
do with itself—especially when confronted with a rival that
operates on different, usually authoritarian, rules?
That question rears its head again in The Hydrogen Sonata, Banks' newest Culture novel, when one of the Culture's historical allies prepares to leave this realm behind and ascend to another plane of reality. Banks gives readers a sense of the complicated inter-civilizational politics involved, as well as the thornier questions about the reality of a society's founding myths. The characters struggle with the morality of godlike power in A.I. computer simulations, the ethics of backing up one's soul, the complications of being able to store and duplicate your mind, and the economics of post-Singularity technological progress. But mostly they struggle to keep things interesting—a problem Banks never has.
Jacob Sullum, senior editor
In
Smoke Signals, an engaging and illuminating social
history of marijuana, Martin Lee shows that the plant's contraband
status is a result of historical accident, racial prejudice,
xenophobia, loads of cultural baggage, and an astonishing amount of
ignorance. While there is no shortage of books about marijuana,
Lee, co-author of the fine LSD history
Acid Dreams, brings new breadth and depth to the
subject. His rich, wide-ranging account is a little skimpy in its
coverage of recent developments but full of fascinating details
from further back, including ancient medical uses of cannabis, the
West's belated discovery of the plant's benefits, and its
popularity within pre-hippie bohemian circles such as the
19th-century Club des Haschischins, jazz musicians of the 1920s and
'30s, and Beat writers in the '40s and '50s.
Lee explains how marijuana's beyond-the-pale status, initially established by its association with blacks and Mexicans, was cemented when self-conscious dissidents (the Beats and then the hippies) embraced it, attracted largely by its illegality. Marijuana prohibition became self-perpetuating: The sort of people who were eager to use it as a signal of rebellion disgusted the sort of people who were determined to keep it illegal, and the plant's countercultural connotations have helped keep it illegal ever since. With marijuana as with opium, Lee observes, "the target of the prohibition was not the drug so much as those associated with its use."
Jesse Walker, books editor
Sally Wood's
Julia and the Illuminated Baron is not a good novel.
But it is interesting for reasons that transcend mere quality, and
it deserves a place on this list as a fascinating specimen if
nothing else. Today the Illuminati are the stuff of hip hop lyrics,
Alex Jones
rants, online
in-jokes, and airport-bookstore
thrillers: a conspiracy imagined alternately as the secret
rulers of the world or as a revolutionary force on the brink of
bringing the social structure down. Wood's novel, originally
published in 1800 and brought back into print this year, gives you
a chance to see a writer invoking the same legend two centuries
ago.
Of course this is a somewhat different version of the legend. Coming in the wake of the Illuminati panic of 1798, in which Federalists fretted that the secret society was aiming "to subvert and overturn our holy religion and our free and excellent government," Wood weds those anxieties to a Gothic melodrama set in pre-revolutionary France, featuring an Illuminatus who holds a young woman captive and plots against her virtue. Wood's Illuminati are a depraved band of nature-worshippers, seizing personal pleasures as they prepare for the Jacobin apocalypse. At one point Wood has a woman describe the order's initiation ceremony: "disrobed of all coverings except a vest of silver gauze, I am to be exposed to the homage of all the society present upon a marble pedestal placed behind which sacrifices are to be offered." The character adds, "This sect increases daily. They will in a few years overturn Europe and lay France in ruins."
Before this edition appeared, the only version of Julia that I could find was a barely legible scan of the original edition, made still less legible by the quirks of 18th-century spelling and by a host of typesetting errors. The Library of Early Maine Literature released this much more readable volume because of its local significance—it appears to be the first novel written in Maine—but the book is just as notable as one of the first appearances the infamous super-cabal ever made in American pop culture. Every artist who has alluded to the Illuminati since then, from Tupac Shakur to Robert Anton Wilson, has Wood's creaky tale in his family tree.
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time.
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"It is perhaps a stereotype for a young journalist to pick a book by Christopher Hitchens, a man who despite being far from a libertarian was nonetheless influential in my political development."
Hey, Feeney!
I think it's great that we get to hear from other voices here at Hit & Run.
Here's a book you might be interested in that was influential in Christopher Hitchens' political development:
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Hitchens' political philosophy, while flawed, was pure and at least grounded in a sane moral framework. In fact, he found joy in attacking his fellow leftists whenever he saw them favoring political expediency over morality.
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Now explain his neoconism.
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He thought we should have a policy of actively instituting regime change by military force whenever and wherever people's are threatened by their government.
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Calling Hitchens a "neocon" seems to imply that he favored using military force to advance US interests globally, which is actually something Hitchens railed against his entire life.
I think it's more appropriate to say that Hitchens allied himself with the neocons, post-9/11.
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Hitchens was a Trotskyist.
How he reconciled his hatred of imperialism with his enthusiasm for the Iraq War remains a mystery to everybody--including Hitchens.
But it seems to have had something to do with consistency being the last refuge of a scoundrel and his religious intolerance.
At heart, he was a Marxist, and anti-imperialist Marxist, who ended up an enthusiast for American imperialism. If Hitchens had contributed to this piece when he was Feeney's age, he might have written, "It is perhaps a stereotype for a young journalist to pick a book by [Trotsky], a man who despite being far from a libertarian was nonetheless influential in my political development."
Hitchens was a Marxist, Marxist, Marxist.
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Who cares? He was also a great writer and I appreciated his point of view, even when I disagreed with him.
Besides, if you haven't read Mortality, you really should. It may be the best book I read this year.
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I enjoyed reading his writing and watching him debate.
Can't say I agreed with him much. If he was influential in my development, it was in helping to foster my criticism of his kind of thinking.
Hitchens was a Marxist. He wasn't even a Kevin Carson type mutualist/anarchist. Anybody that finds Hitchens interesting and provocative just enjoys good debate and great writing. No problem there.
But if you find his thinking influential? Then why not claim Orwell* and Trotsky as influences, too? Why not pursue socialism instead of libertarianism?
*The man who wrote "Shooting an Elephant" would have disowned Hitchens for his support of the occupation of Iraq.
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"I would never have guessed at the time that conscription would be abolished by Richard Nixon, and still less that he would appoint Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan to the Presidential Commission on the subject. The two right-wing libertarians condemned the draft as 'involuntary servitude.' Today, almost the only people who call for the return of the system are collectivists and liberals."
Hitchens continued to call himself a Marxist for his entire life. But it seems that his definition of "Marxist" did not necessarily overlap with the groups "collectivists" or "liberals."
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Oh yeah, he saw the hypocrisy on the left. No doubt about it.
This isn't surprising. Hitchens was essentially part of the New Left in Britain, which didn't get the press of the New Left in the U.S. or Continental Europe, but Hitchens was essentially part of that movement and held several of its chief tenants. Among them, he was a Marxist--and he hated liberals:
Isserman (2001) reports that the New Left" "came to use the word 'liberal' as a political epithet."[37] Historian Richard Ellis (1998) says that the SDS's search for their own identity "increasingly meant rejecting, even demonizing, liberalism."[38] As Wolfe (2010) notes, "no one hated liberals more than leftists.".[39]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N.....liberalism
Not surprising that so many Marxists--like Hitchens--hated liberals. It's very much like libertarians who hate the sell-outs in the Republican Party, who masquerade as libertarians when convenient--only more so.
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Hey I can't tell but do you think that Hitchens was a Marxist?
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Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, originally published in 1962, was reissued by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.
In Wild Seed (1980) and the other books in her Patternist series, a large, linked cast struggles to fly below the radar while building self-sufficient communities with new kinds of rules about dispute resolution, religion, and sex.
So Ed Krayewski and KM-W find the best books of 2012 to be titles from 1962 and 1980.New books must really suck.
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Christopher Hitchens died on December 15, 2011. It's amazing how long ago it seems. I still have a copy of Steve Job's autobiography on my bookshelf that I need to start reading. Cancer sucks.
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...Don't get me started on Frank Zappa.
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Read the autobiography. Put it on the top of your reading list. It is fascinating reading about a probable sociopath who managed to create good things despite his lack of a conscience.
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*Excuse me. I meant "biography."
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So reason is in bed with Amazon, now? I recognize this as the clever ploy it is: to get people to sign up for Amazon prime so they can get free 2-day shipping so that they can get books for people that they otherwise would have a difficult time shopping for just in time for Christmas.
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If you don't have Prime, you're doing it wrong. I even grocery shop for non-perishables on Amazon now. My goal of never again doing retail face-to-face is nigh on a reality.
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Yeah, I agree about Prime. I only signed up because I wanted to watch something on Amazon video but now I love it.
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Ditto re Amazon Prime...and you can stream old episodes of MST3K!
It's great to see the PKD recommendation. Got interested in his books during my student days when he was a relative obscurity even within the world of science fiction. At any one time then only a handful of his works were in print, new editions of older novels/short story collections would go in and out of print. Must have taken me around ten years to read his entire corpus, now over thirty years after his death he is almost completely in print. The Man in the High Castle is definitely one of his best but there are others of his that are equally as good. Check out Flow my Tears the Policeman Said and Ubik.
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It's been a while since I've read E.O. Wilson. (As a biology major at Bama, it's a expected of you.) I couldn't enjoy his writing style, which I would characterize as fuddy-duddy. Then again, I read The Future of Life, which is about biodiversity. I'm sure I would enjoy his works about sociobiology a LOT more.
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Wilson's "The Ants" is fascinating stuff.
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No High Desert Barbeque? Fuckin-a.
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Bill Steigerwald....any relation to our dear, mysteriously-departed Lucy?
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"Bill, hey, sorry about firing your daughter. But, it it's any consolation, I'll be pimping your book in our end-of-the-year best books list...Bill. Bill, Bill! Are you there, Bill? BILL?!"
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If we're plugging for fiction books that weren't published in 2012, let's give a nod to the entire work of Jack Vance. The man's a wonderful writer and a clear believer in liberty.
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My two favorites of this year, one 2012 and one not.
Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins by Robert Spencer. A fascinating look at the early history of Islam. It looks like the "official" story is largely b.s. (Big surprise, I know.) Spencer is an anti-jihadist, but the book is convincing and based on academic sources. To quote:
- How the earliest biographical material about Muhammad dates from at least 125 years after his reported death
- How six decades passed before the Arabian conquerors—or the people they conquered—even mentioned Muhammad, the Qur’an, or Islam
- The startling evidence that the Qur’an was constructed from existing materials—including pre-Islamic Christian texts
- How even Muslim scholars acknowledge that countless reports of Muhammad’s deeds were fabricated
- Why a famous mosque inscription may refer not to Muhammad but, astonishingly, to Jesus
- How the oldest records referring to a man named Muhammad bear little resemblance to the now-standard Islamic account of the life of the prophet
- The many indications that Arabian leaders fashioned Islam for political reasons
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For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization by Charles Adams. Fascinating. How taxes caused the rise and fall of countries and empires. One example: the high taxes at the end of the Roman Empire made it easy for Islam to spread so quickly, because cities were offered a choice of fighting the Arabs, accepting lower than Roman taxes under them, or converting to Islam and not paying taxes at all. "Hail our new conquerors!"
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Thanks for the recommendation. I've been searching for a decent non-fiction read for the Xmas vacation.
Bought.
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the most famous dyslexic black lesbian science-fiction writer of the 20th century.
That's like saying, "The most famous Episiarch living in Seattle named Episiarch." I mean, really, there's more than one person like this?
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Is there a word for "You have gotten the joke without recognizing that you've gotten a joke"? Because we really need one.
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For years I subscribed to the American Scholar mainly to read Joseph Epstein's essays when he edited it, and I totally concur with Doherty.
Gillespie certainly makes the Steigerwald book seem interesting. I have always wanted to know more about Octavia Butler and never see her books in stores and never get around to googling her, so I thank Mangu-Ward for this info.
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