Some essays I want to write at some point include

• How corruption in China compares to corruption in American politics

• Why Bruce Catton’s The Potomac Army series is better than Robert Caro’s LBJ saga

• Deep dive into the writing in Ian Toll’s The Pacific War series and how he sets up scenes and transitions from individual engagements to strategic dilemmas as smoothly as I’ve ever read

• Over paternity leave I read ten different books on the theme of “oh I raised my kid in X country here’s what it was like”. I could compare and contrast, tier list countries…

Vote for what you’re interested in in the comments?

Top Ten

Religion

Genesis, Exodus, and Prophets.

After a lifetime of reading the torah in bits and bites, dutifully reading footnotes and commentary, this year I tried a new tack with an audiobook bible binge, listening straight through first the Robert Alter and then the King James Bible. Alter feels deeply foreign and startling while KJB’s language gently washes into you. The plotblast in Genesis can be overwhelming but this experience helped my brain refocus away from my natural default of specific verses and word choice and towards broader arcs.

Bob Thurman’s Jewel Tree of Tibet (audiobook) + Circling the Sacred Mountain

Donald Lopez’ Buddhism: A Journey Through History and The Buddha: Biography of a Myth were fantastic intros but the Buddhism books this year that left more of an impact were Robert Thurman’s. His Jewel Tree of Tibet lecture series puts Headspace to shame. This book, a combination of guided meditation and lectures best enjoyed via audiobook, gives a sense of just how strange the Tibetan cosmology is and allows you a taste of it yourself with his Lake Manasarovar visualization. Falling asleep to random episodes of his podcast leads to weird and wonderful dreams.

Circling the Sacred Mountain is a travelogue with paired narrations to a trip to Tibet in the 1990s. One is the enlightened Robert Bowman, the other an annoying hanger-on whose experience is very skippable. I felt the blade wheel of mind reform.

He also does some superb phrase translations, like Superbliss-Machine Embrace (Buddha Paramasukha Chakrasamvara).

Now recall the three roots, finding the points that make the most sense to you: that death is a certainty; that the time of death is completely unpredictable; and that nothing of this life will trans­late into the next except what