Favorite books of the year 2021

Which books really affected me? Here’s my list. There are no math books, even though I did read a few. They are mostly philosophy or writing books, listed below in no particular order.

• Steven B Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity, Yale Univ. Press. Smith is a political science professor at Yale and a Spinoza expert. This is a book of how Spinoza’s philosophy influenced political science thought today and how he (in the 1600s) laid out foundational principles for the American democratic republic of today. Smith’s very clear writing and well-laid out arguments make this a terrific book for anyone (like me) who’s a Spinoza fan. I’m reading Smith’s next book, Spinoza’s Book of Life, now. Excellent so far.
  
• Zoe Quinn, Crash Override, PublicAffairs Books. This is an eye-opening account of how misogynists use the internet and social media to attack women. While specific to abuse of women in the video game community, these techniques have been refined and expanded to attacking politicians and journalists today (see Ezra Klein’s article from 2014 and the article of Aja Romano from 2021, among others).
• Michael Botvinnik, One Hundred Selected Games, Dover. I’m so impressed with this former world champion chess grandmaster. This book sent me down a rabbit hole trying to research his life. He was very self-disciplined and held down a full time job as an engineer, solving some important electrical engineering problems for the growing Soviet state, while pursuing the world chess championship title. Do I agree with his personal views? No. He once said Stalin wasn’t communist enough! But he’s also a Jew that not only survived but thrived in the Stalinist era, not an easy feat. My favorite part of each game was the one moment in which an ordinary looking chess move was made (that is, ordinary looking to me) and then the next line of Botvinnik’s commentary was “Of course, this was the move that lost the game.” Of all the games, I don’t remember even once predicting the losing move. I loved the commentary though.
• Mel Scult, volume 2 of Communings With the Spirit. This is the second volume in Mel Scult’s series of selections from Mordecai Kaplan’s diaries. Volume 1 was excellent and I’m reading volume 3 now. Kaplan (who died in 1983 at the age of 102) was IMHO one of the most important and profound philosophical thinkers on religion and American society. Like Botvinnik, Kaplan was another extremely disciplined worker. This is the volume where Kaplan explains his interest with Spinoza’s philosophy. While Spinoza’s precise influence isn’t clear from the diaries, the influence is clearly there. For more details on this connection, see for example the 2000 scholarly article by Shaul Magid, now a professor at Dartmouth College. I’m reading volume 3 of Scult’s series now. Excellent so far.
• Ben Westhoff, Fentanyl Inc, Atlantic Monthly Press. After my step-son Zach died, I wanted to learn more about how fentanyl reaches the USA, where it comes from, and so on. To be clear, when the press uses the work “fentanyl” it usually means a fentanyl derivative which has been cooked up to avoid export laws in China (where some exports are allowed even though use is illegal). While the situation on the ground is constantly evolving, this explains a lot about the origins in China of these narcotic products and the idiocy of the current US drug laws.
• Steve Kaplan, The Comic Hero’s Journey. This book should be paired with Kaplan’s earlier book, The Hidden Tools of Comedy. Steve Kaplan (no relation to my knowledge to Mordacai Kaplan) is a director and looks at comedy from that perspective. Before I read these books, I’d read lots of books on comedy and thought I had an inkling of comedic structure. I was wrong. These books, and Kaplan’s online courses, which go into detail on these books, really taught me a great deal. I may not be funnier but I understand comedic structure (and comedy screenplay structure) much much better as a result of Kaplan’s books and classes.
• Charles Deemer, Screenwright: the craft of screenwriting, Xlibris Corp (reviewed on this blog here). Deemer taught screenwriting for many years at the college level and this book distills the down-to-earth lessons from his classes. I liked that he presented a number of screenplay templates, such as the 3-act paradigm and some of its “spin-offs”. Deemer’s book is out-of-print but still available in paperback (on amazon, for example) or free from ibiblio.org, in html format, at this link. The online version is not only free but it’s expanded greatly in some sections, such as the examples of breakdowns breakdowns using one of his templates. I don’t want to say this is better than, say Dan O’Bannon’s book, Dan O'Bannon's Guide to Screenplay Structure, but it is in many ways similar and (like O’Bannon’s book) pleasant to read. O’Bannon is more of a Hollywood icon than Deemer. O’Bannon wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for, among many others, the classic movies Alien (the first in the franchise) and The Return of the Living Dead (the first of several sequels to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which was co-written with John Russo - the complicated explanation of the sequels is discussed at this link). I like the organization of both of these books by Deemer and O’Bannon.