A Year in Reading: Michael Pollan

What I get to read is not necessarily what I want to read–research pulls me this way and that, and then teaching exerts its own gravitational force, and then there’s book club, so I’m not exactly the captain of my reading list. But this year I finished a book, which opened some space for actual reading, rather than “research.” The single most provocative book I read this year was The Evolution of Beauty by Richard Prum, one of those books that changes the way you look at everything, from the feathers of birds to the penises of humans (and ducks) to the ways female choice shapes evolution. Everything about this book is unexpected, including the prose–fine and often funny. I got through book two of My Struggle, which became my insomnia go-to; Karl Ove Knausgaard’s account of becoming a father and at the same time a writer I found deeply affecting, especially as these bolts of bliss burst through his usual overcast of melancholy. I also loved Autumn, his book of short essays about the eruptions of wonder in everyday life. What’s great about liking Knausgaard is you can be sure there’s always more where that came from. The unexpected hit of our book club was Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, probably his best book but so scabrous it’s hard to recommend. The voice of Teju Cole, in both his novel Open City, and his essays, has been great company this year and, while I try to stay off cable news and Twitter, Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland has given me a slant view of the news that makes considerably more sense of it than Anderson Cooper or Lawrence O’Donnell. Writers (I’m embarrassed to say were) new to me whose voices I found particularly striking were Leslie Jamison (The Empathy Exams) and John Jeremiah Sullivan (Pulphead).

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