My favorite things about breaks are the time I spend on the back porch reading and sipping coffee while Lil Kendrick LaMeow snoozes in my lap.
I knocked out several on my list this Christmas:
17: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein was a re-read. It's been roughly three decades, and this sci-fi classic holds up. Written in a time when we assumed manned colonies on the moon were a near inevitability, this book is far deeper than merely a space adventure story, getting to the heart of what constitutes governance, human responsibility, and the ways our free will enhance (or damage) the interplay between the two. If you're looking for a newer treatment of the same ideas, Travis JI Corcoran's "Powers of the Earth" is the first in a two-book series I found quite excellent.
18: I first encountered Leif Enger with his debut Peace Like a River, which I immediately added to my American Literature class syllabus back around 2005. He's taken a couple of decent swings since then, but his latest novel I Cheerfully Refuse is the first time he's managed to bottle lightning again. Part travel adventure, part murder mystery, part magical realism, this novel felt a bit like Amor Towles and Gabriel Garcia Marquez made a literary baby. I loved it.
19: Somehow, despite a life of reading politics pretty relentlessly — particularly fascinated by libertarian authors — I had never read Isabel Paterson's God of the Machine. Paterson was a correspondent of Ayn Rand, and heavily influenced the work Rand produced later. I found the central metaphor of her book quite apt — that to properly consider the organization of a political economy, we have to consider the dollars and products involved as representative of a circuit of energy, which simplifies the process of thinking of the ways we can maximize (or impede) the conversion of inputs to output. I particularly enjoyed two chapters: one chapter discusses the ways in which a focus on "humanitarian" pursuits is necessarily doomed to failure to the degree that it fails to account for the immutable laws of the "energy circuit"; one of the final chapters is a remarkably prescient look at the flaws inherent in the way the US has chosen to pursue education at scale. You would be hard pressed, looking backwards from this vantage point, to read that chapter and conclude anything other than that everything Paterson saw coming actually happened (or is happening). That's my take, anyway. Your mileage may vary. I am possibly too libertarian for my own good at times.
20: There Is No Antimemetics Division is one of the most original pieces of science fiction I've ever encountered. A self-published book by some twitter personality named @qntm, it invites the reader to consider the existence of a sort of "dark matter" of ideas, capable of destroying all human thought and existence. I don't want to say too much, because it's a book that should really be experienced as blindly as possible. Suffice it to say there is an ontological / political point being made by the book that I found both compelling and well-executed. Though the book is difficult to purchase now, its original format as a wiki / hub / online experience is still available here. Or you can check out my copy in the library.
21: BOOM: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation is a thrillingly optimistic book, much needed in a world where every online experience seems to revolve around a political argument over the proper distribution of resources. The book's central thesis is simple: We can make enough stuff, so quit worrying and start building. Yes, some things won't work -- but we seem to always end up better off after the bubble pops anyway, so make as many as you can. In addition to elucidating the characteristics and history of net-positive bubbles, the book ends with a look at several areas that the authors assume are swiftly headed bubble-ward. If you're interested in futurism, tech, or econ generally, you'll dig this one.
22: The Messenger by Daniel Silva is simply the next excellent spy novel in a long series of excellent spy novels I'm working through. This particular series has its roots in the half-century of Israeli / Palestinian conflict, which necessarily includes a great deal of history I didn't know. Overall, a very excellent diversion between headier books.
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