It was a much shorter list this year because I spent a lot of effort getting into classical music, so I’ve given it its own section.

Books

Standouts in bold.

• Troubled by Rob Henderson. Autobiography depicting the author’s experience with the foster care system. Surprisingly this is a page turner and the topic is something we should all learn more about. [goodreads]
• The Missing Billionaires: A Guide to Better Financial Decisions by Victor Haghani and James White. Cognitive biases cause systematic investment errors. A claim I hadn’t heard: There isn’t much generational wealth in the US because heirs tend to squander it and make bad investments. [goodreads]
• Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon. Cool topic, uneven epistemics. My review on Goodreads is here.
• Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland [goodreads]
• Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories by qntm. Cool conceptual scifi short stories by the antimimetics guy. [goodreads]
• Poor Charlie’s Almanack, talks by Charlie Munger. Avuncular.
• The Secrets of Consulting by Gerald M Weinberg. There’s always a problem. It’s always a people problem. [goodreads]
• The Universal Christ by Richard Rohr. I was not able to figure this one out and didn’t finish it. Weirdly though reading it did make me think about what it would mean to embody Christ in the world, and actually caused me to handle a few situations better.
• Unsong by Scott Alexander. This novel asks, waht if Kabbalah was real? Wordplay and puns would matter a lot.
• The Secrets of Our Success by Joseph Henrich [goodreads]
• Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior. The life of two sisters in semi-feudal rural Brazil. [goodreads]

The clear winners were Holland’s Dominion and Henrich’s Secrets of our Success. They both tell the story of why we are the way we are.

Henrich’s Secrets of our Success traces the early origins of hominids and Homo sapiens. Why did humans take over the world? He argues forcefully and with a mountain of evidence that human intelligence is not the reason humans are dominant. Rather it is our ability to learn from one another and develop culturally mediated bodies of knowledge that accumulate over time that separates us from other animals. One scary implication: cultural improvement generally comes about via selection. So if our own culture “gets sick” the way that will be resolved is that we will lose out to other healthier cultures.

Tom Holland asks questions about more recent cultural evolution that happened in Western Europe during its Christian era. Why is our culture and morality the way it is? Why do we think people are “equal”? Why do we think there is a thing called “human rights”? Why do we ban slavery? The roots of all of these lie in the history of European moral thought, as it developed under Christianity and Roman Catholicism. Holland also documents how these ideas were intentionally packaged up as universal, rather than Christian, to make them more persuasive in the Ottoman Empire and beyond. Bigtime viewquakes in this book come from simply asking questions about things most people take for granted. This book pairs well with Henrich’s book The WEIRDest People in the World and Sarah Ruden’s Paul Among the People.

Honorable mention goes to Troubled, a touching and very readable memoir of one child’s experience in the foster care system.

Classical Music

It got started when I listened to Tyler Cowen’s podcast with Rick Rubin about music. I really enjoyed it and thought, it would be great to listen to books that have music in them. Strangely there aren’t a lot of actual audiobooks that do this, but Audible has many courses by Robert Greenberg, my neighbor in Oakland, that mix the art history of music with actual selections. I went a little overboard and listened to all of the following:

• How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd Edition
• Bach and the High Baroque
• The 30 Greatest Orchestral Works
• Great Masters: Haydn - His Life and Music
• The Chamber Music of Mozart
• Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas
• The String Quartets of Beethoven
• Great Masters: Mahler - His Life and Music

These were fantastic and I felt like they really shifted me from vaguely knowing stuff about classical music to feeling fairly confident about what’s going on with the great masters. Some things I learned:

General observations

• I found generally I needed to listen to a fair amount of music through, in the background if necessary to get the ear for them. After that I really enjoy most pieces. I need to do this less now that I have a lot under my belt.
• Spotify sucks at classical music because it doesn’t have a concept that the same piece could have multiple recording artists. I’ve been paying for Idagio because it’s a much better catalogue and it can be cool to see what recordings are more or less popular, but the actual streaming is buggy. I don’t think there’s an ideal solution to this.
• Naming conventions are indefensibly bad. Everything is a weird numbering scheme with opus numbers plus pieces are literally just named after their tonal mode. Some of the value with Greenberg’s lectures is he explains this stuff.

Baroque Era

• I was suprised to find the Baroque era easy to love. It’s all about someone playing an instrument virtuosically and the band getting into it. They go very hard. I’ve been spinning Jean Rondeau’s Dynastie album on repeat, first track on youtube here. But pretty much all of Bach’s concertos (e.g. BWV 1042, Brandenburg 5) are just a riot. Right now I’m also getting into Giardino Armonico’s Handel op 6.
• Chaconne or Passicaglia is a very simple art form that results in gorgeous works, especially the solo violin piece by Bach. That might be one of my favorite pieces of music now but I did have to listen a few times to get it.
• Greenberg’s explanation of the Goldberg Variations (also a type of Chaconne!) was extremely helpful, he dedicates 4 whole lectures to them! Again an absolutely amazing piece that took me quite a bit of exposure to warm up to.
• Bach’s Cantata BWV 140 “Wachtet Auf” is almost like a sequence of super catchy pop songs. Video here.
• I’m almost embarassed how much I love everything Bach did.
• The French court of Louis XIV had a lot going on. French Overture was basically something Lully cooked up to be Louis’ theme song, see a depiction here. His successor Rameau’s opera pieces are really cinematic, for example Entrée de Polymnie.
• Francesco Corti’s harpsichord recording of Handel’s suites is excellent for working, maybe the first time I’ve been addicted to harpsichord music.

Classical Era

• Haydn was really jarring after listening to a lot of Baroque. I had to sort of detox. I ended up loving his string quartets the most, especially opus 76. For example here he makes the sun rise in Op 76 no 4 youtube.
• Nothing can go harder than Mozart depicting the Don getting owned by the undead statue that he invited to his house youtube.
• My favorite Mozart other than opera ended up being the late string quintets and his divertimento for string trio, but all his late piano concertos are great too and it’s fun to think of him rocking the house for a quick buck. Check out Uchida doing #20 here.
• Beethoven’s piano concertos were a big discovery for me. #4 and #5 are desert island music, I’m honestly more partial to them than any of his symphonies. Trifonov playing #5 is here.
• Beethoven’s piano sonatas are ridiculously good and it seemed to me actually explored a broader range of musical ideas than his symphonies or quartets. I think of his sonatas as his creative sketchbook. He was also one of the greatest pianists of his time. The famous ones are awesome like Apassionata and Waldstein, but I found myself listening to op 26 and op 54 on repeat. Listen to Lisitsa play the Apassionata here.
• I found I had to work hard to get into quartets. Maybe this is the most alien format for 21st century ears. But Beethoven’s are truly awesome. I connected best to Razumovsky 1 (here), Harp, and the A Minor op 132.
• It is astonishing that Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven all lived in Vienna at roughly the same time. What we call “Classical Music” is really just the scene going on in Vienna in the 1780s and 90s.

Romantic Era

• I did not connect to the romantic era strongly this year.
• I did see Mahler’s 4th symphony in concert and it is awesome.
• I also saw Salonen conduct Mahler’s 3rd and it is also awesome. It really requires you to sit and pay attention to it for 90 minutes, and being in person really helps maybe even partly just for the attention, although the dynamics is also really hard to reproduce in a recording.
• I believe Trifonov’s Mazeppa (watch here) was his breakout performance. Listening to this next to other recordings can help you understand why not all performances of classical music are created equal.

Modern Era

• Trifonov has an awesome CD of early Russian musicians called Silver Age. I especially love the recording of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto #2, you can see him performing it live here.
• Shostakovich is pretty awesome, I spent a bunch of time with Levit’s recording of his preludes and fugues, teaser here. Or for something with no chill whatsoever, check out quartet 8 mvt 2 for a head banger here.
• There is still orchestral music being written! John Adams is easy to love as a contemporary composer. Listen to Yuja Wang playing his concerto “Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?” on youtube.