Almost none of the books I recommend here were published in 2017. I seem always to be catching up. So much to read, so little time.
1 An exception was “The Undoing Project” by Michale Lewis, about the odd couple of Israeli psychologists whose deceptively simple experiments revealed our minds are only occasionally rational, analytic organs. Their work unintentionally spawned behavioral economics.
2 That led me to “Thinking Fast and Slow” by one of these worthies, Daniel Kahneman. Must reading if you hope to make sense of yourself and the world we keep making a mess of.
I habitually read new novels about the Israeli spy Gabriel Allon, the good cop under the bad regime of the Nazis, Bernie Gunther, and LA Detective Harry Bosch, so:
3 House of Spies
4 Prussian Blue
5 The Wrong Side of Good-bye
6 I am also catching up with the works of Tana French concerning the Dublin Murder Squad, so “The Likeness.”
Little by little I am working my way through the complete works of the fine American novelist Ward Just who writes about Vietnam, newspapering, and political power in Washington and Illinois. So I added to my shelf,
7 “The Weather in Berlin”
8 “In the City of Fear”
9 “American Romantic”
!0-15 I read the WWII novels of Olivia Manning, known collectively as “Fortunes of War,” but generally found packaged as “The Balkan Trilogy” and “The Levant Trilogy.” To my mind they get better as they go along, so if your patience is limited, try the Levant.
16 In a post of December I extolled anything by film historian David Thomson including his latest “Warner Bros.”
17-18 I also posted earlier about another author I am slowly reading all of, the literary biographer Charles Nicholl. This time I polished off “Somebody Else” about Rimbaud’s lost years in Africa and “A Cup of News,” a life of Thomas Nashe. The latter is probably only amusing to a reader interested in the lesser Elizabethans.
19 “An Open Book” tells how Michael Dirda from a blue collar Ohio family in the 1950s wound up the longtime book editor and reviewer of the Washington Post. By becoming besotted with books ay an early age, of course.
20 For a trip to Boston my daughter read and i reread “Paul Revere’s Ride,” like everything by David Hackett Fischer, historical reconstruction at its best.
21 And “Born A Crime,” Trevor Noah’s story of growing up a mixed-race child in the South Africa of apartheid, is equal parts horrifying and inspiring due to his unstoppable mother.
TV
I conclude the year with a fast canter through the fruits of the tube that attracted me.
Two comedies: 1 Veep and 2 Full Frontal
Two Sci-fi series: 3 The OA and 4 Stranger Things
5-9 Several series about bad behavior: “Taboo,” “Better Call Saul,” “Bosch,” “Fargo,” and the ironically titled “Good Behavior,” the last a kind of “Justified” lite.
10-13 The Final seasons of four shows: “Turn,” and “Major Crimes” ended tidily, “Orphan Black” triumphantly, and “The Leftovers” far more movingly than I would have expected. “Orphan” boasted the astonishing tour de force of Tatiana Maslany playing a dozen clones and “Leftovers” Carrie Coon and Justin Theroux as damaged lovers. Coon was also excellent in “Fargo.”
14-17 Series from abroad included “Tunnel: Sabotage” with the reliably excellent Stephen Dillaine and Clemence Poesy as a British cop and his French counterpart, the Italian crime family of “Gomorrah,” creepy serial killers and the female, French cop who hunts them in “Witnesses,” and an Israeli undercover squad about as morally questionable as the Palestinian terrorists they pursue in “Fauda.”
18-23 Finally, documentaries, including the first two-thirds of “The Story of China,” “Five Came Back,” “Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold,” “Do Your Job: Part II” about the coaching staff of the New England Patriots, and the biography of a writer, “The Untold Tales of Armisted Maupin.”