Monday, January 9, 2017

Best in 2016 Non-Fiction

One of the few goals for the past year I was able to achieve was reading more (at the cost of film watching), so I thought I'd share my Top Ten books of the year (non-fiction only), since this is the first time I actually read enough to make such a list. I would also recommend The New York Review of Books, which I subscribed to for the first time this year (only 3.99 for the digital version). It allowed me to learn about the existence of many of the titles on my list, through both their reviews and advertisements. 

 All books read in Kindle format unless noted as audio.



My favourite book of the year, a scholarly yet very readable analysis of popular American music from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, the period in which rock and roll becomes rock and in the process becomes almost exclusively white. Each chapter explores the connections between two different sets of artists or styles, such as Sam Cooke/Bob Dylan, The Beatles/Motown, and others. Also includes a podcast series as part of the Slate Academy, six episodes in which Hamilton discusses each of his chapters with a different guest, a great supplement to the already rich original text. 


Novelist Nguyen provides both a deeply researched and scholarly work on the war while also showing off his ability as a storyteller and imaginative thinker. Dense but rewarding and surprisingly non-dogmatic in point of view. Also one of the better meditations on the often discussed topic of memory, mixing in anecdotal material with historical content seamlessly. 


Milanovic is the major thinker on the subject of inequality from a global perspective and his latest work is both a fine analysis of the current situation (growing internal inequality within states even as global inequality has decreased) as well as a warning about the consequences of inequality going forward: "Rising inequality indeed sets in motion forces, often of a destructive nature, that ultimately lead to its decrease but in the process destroy much else, including millions of human lives and huge amounts of wealth. A very high inequality eventually becomes unsustainable, but it does not go down by itself; rather, it generates processes, like wars, social strife, and revolutions, that lower it." (98)


My favourite writer discovery of the year is the scholar Alice Kaplan, who specializes in French culture of the 1930s/1940s. Her latest book traces the creation of Camus's masterpiece, written during the war, and how these historical forces impacted its form. Also recommended highly is Kaplan's 2001 study The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach. 


5 Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz, TV (The Book): Two Experts Pick the Greatest American Shows of All Time (audio)

A pair of great books on canon formation. Critics Sepinwall and Seitz set out to systematically rank American television shows and create a canon for the long disreputable but now culturally emergent art form, and make their case very convincingly while also providing a useful history of the medium. Scholars Beaty and Woo, however, examine the whole process of taste-making, using the theories of Pierre Bourdieu to examine what it means to call any individual comic book "the greatest," with each chapter taking on a different case study. The result is a great introduction to both comic books and their history as well as the sociological study of aesthetics. 


A dense but thought-provoking text, reminiscent of Zizek in arguing for the counter-intuitive but overall more rigorous and coherent than Zizek usually manages. McGowan begins with the premise, taken from later Freud, that humans primarily desire loss and how capitalism as a system is particularly adept at providing this. Pure theorizing, which many can find off-putting, but with many ideas well worth considering on a wide array of topics, such as privacy, sacrifice, religion, romance, abundance/scarcity, and fetishistic accumulation. 


A wide-ranging journalistic account of many groups of women in the Arab world and their importance to the future development of these societies. Zoepf manages to express her perspective on this world while always emphasizing her outsider status and the difficulty of fully understanding these women's conflicted relationship to their, from a western point of view, repressive societies. Zoepf is neither an apologist for Islamic anti-female views nor for the "false consciousness" claims of many western feminists, instead seeking to describe and ultimately understand. 


A new take on the endlessly discussed New Hollywood cinema, this time from the often neglected perspective of sound design. A rare scholarly book of film studies that is also very knowledgeable about technical matters and the concrete particulars of artistic practice. It also provides a different set of criteria for artistic evaluation with sound as a more important element, leading to a rethinking of the New Hollywood canon and its auteurs. 

A strange read for me in that many of the primary literary examples Konstantinou discusses (William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, various recent meta-fictions) I haven't read, with the exception of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and some of Wallace's non-fiction. However, Konstantinou does an excellent job of describing the novels and the character types (the hipster, the punk, the coolhunter) that form the basis of his wide-ranging analysis of irony and post-irony in American literature since the 1950s. 


Maybe Klosterman's best book to date, taking his gifts for speculation and thought experiment and applying this to the perfect topic: the past as it was experienced at the time. Naturally, this also leads to a discussion of the future, and how our current time period will eventually be seen. Manages to be light and fun without being simply frivolous. 

Honourable Mentions 









Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)