Five Best Books of 2014

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success:
West by Northwest book of the year.

Last January I began recording the books I read at the encouragement of number of book club friends.  The list measured my reading habits, and I thought it would be fun to use a post to review and reflect on the authors that I spent time with during 2014. My listmaking rules were simple: I included any book that I finished. I give most authors 100-pages to prove their words are worth my time before the book goes direct to the library donation pile. These partial reads (maybe another dozen) were not included in my list.

From the list of 32 books that I did complete, seventeen books were memorable. Fifteen lesser titles were interesting enough to pass my 100-page rule at the time but did not bring about lasting change in my life. Some, a half a year later, bring back no memories at all. The seventeen that did stick include such staples as Aldo Leopold ("A Sand County Almanac"), Edward Abbey ("The Monkey Wrench Gang"), Karen Armstrong ("The Spiral Staircase"), Neil Gamon ("Ocean At The End Of The Lane"), Raymond Chandler ("The Long Goodbye"), and Edgar Allen Poe (Collected Works). As you can tell, my reading choices span fiction and non-fiction, genres and years. A good read is a good read. Other authors on the 2014 list are less well known but no less enjoyable: Reza Aslan ("Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth"), Kate Atkinson ("Life After Life"), Andy Weir ("The Martian"), Diane Setterfield ("The Thirteenth Tale"), Tom Standage ("The Neptune Files"), and Sylvia Nassar ("A Beautiful Mind").

From those seventeen, I was able to select my personal five best books of the year. My favs tend to be non-fiction rather than fiction which follows my reading preference for history, science, nature and education/psych theory. Truth, I usually find, is often stranger and more entertaining than fiction.

5. "The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln" (2012) by Stephen L. Carter. I have read many Lincoln and Civil War biographies and was interested in this alternate theory of what would have happened if Lincoln had survived John Wilkes Booth's attack.  Carter presented the defense of Lincoln's extreme actions during the war and subsequent Reconstruction in the form of a legal brief by a defense team defending the President. The plot and characters stretched credibility, and the ending disappointed, but the legal and historical discussion was quite interesting. It all could have happened. Or most of it.

4. "Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House" (2013) by Peter Baker is another defense of an administration against critics, but this did happen. I don't usually read recent political histories since they often seem superficial or have an obvious agenda. The President came off a little better than the Vice-President in this book but I never felt like I was being bludgeoned by bias. The excellent detailed onslaught of reporting by Baker bombarded me, a former journalist, with feelings of "shock" and "awe." The writing was unpretentious and narrative entertaining. You could not make up these characters.

3. "Thordarson and Rock Island" (2013) by Richard Purinton is a locally published collection of letters and local history that I bought at Peninsula Bookseller in Fish Creek. Chester Hjortur Thordarson was a Chicago inventor and businessman, and a proud Icelandic descendant who bought most of Rock Island, just off Washington Island in Door County's northern tip. Purinton tells Thordarson's story through decades of correspondence. With very little commentary, the letters carry the narrative and reveal the complex personality of Thordarson, his friends, family and foes, and his dreams of his Door County retreat. The use of letters tells the story through the pen of Thordarson rather than the author -- an interesting technique.

2. "Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation" (2013) continues Michael Pollan's immersive exploration of the world around us. I have been a fan of Pollan's since "Second Nature" (1991) and "A Place of My Own" (1997). "Cooked" continues Pollan's new-journalism exploration of how we use food prepared through baking, barbecuing, brewing and booyah. Stories, information and inspiration keep each of the four sections of the book readable and entertaining. It's technical information with a spoonful of sugar.

1. My top read of the year is: "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success" (2006) by Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D. I was introduced to this text while taking a course in an alternative strategy to teaching math -- I would say Common Core, but don't want to scare readers. Dweck is an optimist who preaches that everyone can improve by adopting a Growth Mindset rather than a Fixed Mindset. A Growth Mindset person is always looking for new ideas, new techniques, new ways of doing things, new ideas to adapt to a changing world. She provides examples, exercises and encouragement to change not only the way you do things, but the way you view and interact with the world.

You are what you read and this is what I have been during the last year. I look forward to new volumes and pages in the year ahead. Pardon me while I go to my reading chair, for as the quip goes, "So many books, so little time."