Books Of The Year (2023)

These are the books I most enjoyed reading in 2023. (2022’s list is here.)

Non-Fiction

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us — Ed Yong (2022). Without question, An Immense World was most fascinating book I opened in 2023. Ed Yong is an immensely talented writer for The Atlantic; his previous book was I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life.

Young writes “about animals as animals”. He wants to learn and explore their senses to better understand their lives. He quotes American naturalist Henry Beston: “They move, finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”

His ability to describe scientific concepts in clear, accessible language and humour (one of his many footnotes surprised me with a reference to AC/DC) makes this book a fascinating exploration of how the world looks, sounds, smells, and feels to a variety of creatures both great and small.

Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.

There is a wonderful word for this sensory bubble — Umwelt. It was defined and popularized by the Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909. Umwelt comes from the German word for “environment,” but Uexküll didn’t use it simply to refer to an animal’s surroundings. Instead, an Unwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience — its perceptual world. . . . [A] multitude of creatures could be standing in the same physical space and have completely different Umwelten. . . .

Our Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn't feel that way. To us, it feels all-encompassing. It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.

We cannot sense the faint electric fields that sharks and platypuses can. We are not privy to the magnetic fields that robins and sea turtles detect. We can’t trace the invisible trail of a swimming fish the way a seal can. We can’t feel the air currents created by a buzzing fly the way a wandering spider does. Our ears cannot hear the ultrasonic calls of rodents and hummingbirds or the infrasonic calls of elephants and whales. Our eyes cannot see the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes detect or the ultraviolet light that the birds and the bees can sense.

Even when animals share the same senses with us, their Umwelten can be very different. There are animals that can hear sounds in what seem seems to us like perfect silence, see colours in what looks to us like total darkness, and sense vibrations in what feels to us like complete stillness. There are animals with eyes on their genitals, ears on their knees, noses on their limbs, and tongues all over their skin. Starfish see with the tips of their arms, and sea urchins with their entire bodies. The star-nosed mole feels around with its nose, while the manatee uses its lips. . . .

Giant whales have a volleyball-sized sensor at the tip of their lower jaw, which was only discovered in 2012 and whose function is still unclear. Some of the stories in these pages are decades or centuries old; others emerged as I was writing. And there’s still so much we can’t explain. . . .

Snips from An Immense World about whales, rats, and light pollution:

Human hearing typically bottoms out at around 20 Hz. Below those frequencies, sounds are known as infrasound, and they’re mostly inaudible to us unless they’re very loud. Infrasounds can travel over incredibly long distances, especially in water. Knowing that fin whales also produce infrasound, [Roger] Payne calculated, to his shock, that their calls could conceivably travel for 13,000 miles. No ocean is that wide. Together with oceanographer Douglas Webb, Payne published his calculations [in 1971], speculating that the largest whales “may be in tenuous acoustic contact throughout a relatively enormous volume of ocean.” The response was brutal. Leading whale researchers told him that his paper was pure fantasy. Colleagues hinted that critics had been questioning his mental health behind his back. “When you get to distances like that, people just refuse to believe that it’s true,” Payne told me.

This is from page 231 and by this time, we’ve read a few examples of how seemingly outlandish data was proven right, so we know it won’t be long before Payne’s supposed fantasy will be revealed as an amazing fact. Chris Clark was a sound technician who worked with Payne in 1972. Two decades later, the Navy offers Clark a chance to observe real-time whale recordings from their SOSUS hydrophones.

Amid the spectrographs — visual representations of the sounds that SOSUS picked up — Clark saw the unmistakable signal of a singing blue whale. On his first day, Clark saw that more blue whale vocalizations had been recorded from a single SOSUS sensor than had been described before in the entire scientific literature. The ocean was awash with their calls, and those calls were coming in from enormous distances. Clark calculated that one individual was 1,500 miles from the sensor that recorded it. He could listen to whales singing in Ireland with a microphone situated off Bermuda. “I just thought: Roger was right,” he says. “It is physically possible to detect a blue whale singing across an ocean basin.” For Navy analysts, these sounds were regular parts of their workday, irrelevancies to be marked on the spectrographs and promptly ignored. For Clark, they were mind-blowing epiphanies. . . .

Clark recalls veteran sonar specialists telling him that different parts of the sea had their own distinctive sounds. “They said if you put a pair of headphones on me, I can tell you if I’m near Labrador or off the Bay of Biscay,” says Clark. “I thought that if a human being could do this in 30 years, what can an animal do with 10 million years?”

The scale of a whale’s hearing is hard to grapple with. There’s the spatial vastness, of course, but also an expanse of time. Underwater, sound waves take just under a minute to cover 50 miles. If a whale hears the song of another whale from a distance of 1,500 miles, it’s really listening back in time by about half an hour, like an astronomer gazing upon the ancient light of a distant star. If a whale is trying to sense a mountain 500 miles away, it has to somehow connect its own call with an echo that arrives 10 minutes later. That might seem preposterous, but consider that a blue whale’s heart beats around 30 times a minute at the surface and can slow to just two 2 beats a minute on a dive. They surely operate on very different time scales than we do.

There is also this wtf? moment:

Whales weren’t always big. They evolved from small, hoofed, deer-like animals that took to the water around 50 million years ago.

Four pages later, we learn about singing rats:

In the winter of 1877, Joseph Sidebotham was staying in a hotel at Menton, France, when he heard what sounded like a canary singing on his balcony. He soon discovered that the singer was actually a mouse. He fed it with biscuits, and it reciprocated by singing for hours by the fireplace, cranking out a tune as beautiful as that of any bird. His son suggested that all mice might sink similar melodies at pitches too high for humans to hear. Sidebotham disagreed. “I am inclined to think the gift of singing in mice is but of very rare occurrence,” he wrote to the journal Nature.

He was wrong. Roughly a century later, scientists realized that mice, rats, and many other rodents do indeed make a wide repertoire of “ultrasonic” calls, with frequencies too high to be audible to humans. They make these sounds when playing or mating, when stressed or cold, when aggressive or submissive. Pups that are separated from their nests make ultrasonic “isolation calls” that summon their mothers. Rats that are tickled by humans make ultrasonic chirps that have been compared to laughter. Richardson’s ground squirrels produce ultrasonic alarm calls when they detect a predator . . . Male mice that sniff female hormones produce ultrasonic songs that are remarkably similar to those of birds, complete with distinctive syllables and phrases. Females attracted to these serenades joined their chosen partners in an ultrasonic duet. Rodents are among the most common and intensively studied mammals in the world, and have been fixtures of laboratories since the seventeenth century. All that time, they’ve been spiritedly talking to each other without any human realizing, exchanging messages that slipped beneath the senses of the oblivious researchers and technicians milling around them.

Yong also writes about the increasing plague of light pollution:

Throughout centuries of effort, people have learned much about the sensory worlds of other species. But in a fraction of the time, we have upended those worlds. We now live in the Anthropocene — a geological epoch defined and dominated by the deeds of our species. We have changed the climate and acidified the oceans by releasing titanic amounts of greenhouse gases. We have shuffled wildlife across continents, replacing indigenous species with invasive ones. We have instigated what some scientists have called an era of “biological annihilation,” comparable to the five great mass extinction events of prehistory. And amid this already dispiriting ledger of ecological sins, there is one that should be especially easy to appreciate and yet is often ignored — sensory pollution. Instead of stepping into the Umwelten of other animals, we have forced them to live in ours by barraging them with stimuli of our own making. We have filled the night with light, the silence with noise, the soil and water with unfamiliar molecules. We have distracted animals from what they actually need to sense, drowned out the cues they depend upon, and lure them, like moths to a flame, into sensory traps. . . .

In 2001, when astronomer Pierantonio Cinzano and his colleagues created the first global atlas of light pollution, they calculated that two-thirds of the world’s population lived in light-polluted areas where the nights were at least 10 percent brighter than natural darkness. Around 40 percent of humankind is permanently bathed in the equivalent of perpetual moonlight, and around 25 percent constantly experiences an artificial twilight that exceeds the full moon. “‘Night’ never really comes for them,” the researchers wrote, In 2016, when the team updated their atlas, they found that the problem was even worse. By then, around 83 percent of people — and more than 99 percent of Americans and Europeans — were living under light-polluted skies. Every year, the proportion of the planet covered by artificial light gets 2 percent bigger and 2 percent brighter. A luminous fog now smothers a quarter of Earth’s surface and is thick enough in many places to blot out the stars. Over a third of humanity, and almost 80 percent of North Americans, can no longer see the Milky Way. “The thought of light traveling billions of years from distant galaxies only to be washed out in the last billionth of a second by the glow from the nearest strip mall depresses me no end,” vision scientist Sonke Johnsen once wrote.

Finally, three footnotes that are a bit lighter in tone:

Page 21:

Leopard urine smells of popcorn. Yellow ants smell of lemons. Depending on the species, stressed frogs can smell of peanut butter, curry, or cashew nuts, according to scientists who painstakingly sniffed 131 species and won an Ig Nobel Prize for their efforts. Crested auklets — comical seabirds that have tufted heads — roost in massive colonies that, quite delightfully, smell of tangerines.

Page 59:

There’s always at least one person who writes in with a pompous and incorrect corrective, so let’s get this out of the way: The word octopus is derived from Greek and not Latin, so the correct plural is not octopi. Technically, the formal plural would be octopodes (pronounced ock-toe-poe-des) but octopuses will do.

Page 340:

Scientific studies on light pollution tend to use the acronym ALAN to refer to artificial light at night. Unfortunately, this means that a lot of papers read like they are passive-aggressively shouting at some guy called Alan, who is single-handedly screwing things up for wildlife. “ALAN may affect a diverse array of nocturnally active animals,” says one. “The biological impact of even low intensities of ALAN may be marked,” claims another.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals — Oliver Burkeman (2021). This is the extremely rare self-help book that immediately made sense to me. If you are fortunate enough to celebrate your 80th birthday, you will have lived 4,000 weeks, which Burkeman rightly says is “absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short”. Making the most of the limited time we have has been a serious concern of humans for thousands of years. Seneca: “This space that has been granted to us rushes by so speedily and so swiftly that all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live.” I hope to write more about this book and its ideas in the coming months.

Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey — Mack McCormick (ed. John W. Troutman) (2023). Mack McCormick drove thousands of miles throughout the south in the 1960s and 70s, chasing every possible lead, and talking to anyone who may have known the blues musician Robert Johnson, who was murdered in 1938. He planned to publish his groundbreaking and mythbusting book on the real Robert Johnson — the actual man, who was married and a father, as well as a travelling musician — free of any tales of crossroad agreements with the devil and other horseshit — in the late 70s. Publication again seemed imminent in the early ‘90s, as a complete collection of Johnson’s recordings became an unlikely best-seller, but nothing ever appeared. McCormick died in 2015. This book, which uses the title he had, is a version that is close to what he had written in the ‘70s before doubt, constant re-writing, and extreme paranoia (about others stealing his research) set in. Editor John W. Troutman’s afterword describes the process that led to the book’s publication and shows McCormick’s unscrupulous side, revealing how he took advantage of two of Johnson’s elderly descendants.

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries from A Secret World — Peter Wohlleben (2016). I read a lot about trees in 2023, including two novels (The Overstory and Greenwood) that also explored the extraordinary idea (or possiblity) that trees in a forest communicate with each other, share nutrients, and warn others of dangers. Not everyone believes this occurs.

A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order — Judith Flanders (2020). Here is a book about a subject to which few people have likely given thought. I learned about the history of the index last year. Now I discovered why the letters of the alphabet are ordered like they are, and how the concept of arranging things in alphabetical order (such as office files) slowly evolved over hundreds of years.

Evel: The High-Flying Life of Evel Knievel: American Showman, Daredevil, and Legend — Leigh Montville (2012). As a kid, I never gave much thought to what Evel Knievel did when he wasn’t flying over a dozen Mack trucks on a motorcycle or spending weeks in the hospital after a crash that was repeatedly shown in slow-motion on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Growing up in Butte, Montana, Robert Knievel would do anything on a dare (an impulse he never outgrew), he was a habitual thief and criminal (regularly stealing from his friends), he was apparently a savant at selling insurance policies (!), he attempted several jumps despite being pretty sure he wouldn’t make it, jumping the Grand (and then Snake River) Canyon was an obsession for years, he burned through money as though the good times would never end (they did), and he was an astonishingly self-centered and a misogynistic asshole. He lived quite a life and Montville tells quite a story.

The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet — Jeff Goodell (2023). Okay, this book was not fun, as that term is usually understood, but it was informative and scary. I prepared myself for something akin to David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth (which was on last year’s list), but it was not as relentless and bleak.

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World — Naomi Klein (2023).

Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution — Elie Mystal (2022).

City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 — Timothy J. Gilfoyle (1992).

Get Your War On: The Definitive Account of the War on Terror 2001-2008 — David Rees (2008).

Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century — Simon Reynolds (2016).

Fiction

Crook Manifesto — Colson Whitehead (2023). Until Whitehead publishes a less-than-brilliant novel, I’m going to assume his writing talent is literally limitless. He has written nine novels, all of which differ significantly from one another. Well, almost all. Crook Manifesto is the second book of a Harlem crime trilogy, centered on a furniture store owner who sometimes fences stolen goods (though it’s so much more than that withered description), so it resembles its predecessor. Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2017 and 2020 with consecutive goddamn books. No one has ever done that before. And he’s written one of the all-time great books — no exaggeration — about New York City: The Colossus of New York. Whitehead is a consummate New Yorker and he understands the city on every possible level. His uncanny ability to meditate on universal truths and (seemingly) without effort weave those together with his own memories, observations, and opinions from any vantage point (first, second, and third persons) — is never less than masterful and always awe-inspiring.

The Wolves of Eternity — Karl Ove Knausgård (2023). Wolves — apparently a companion to his last novel, The Morning Star — was published in the fall of 2023. Both books present the lives of various people (some of which are interconnected) leading up to the strange and ominous appearance of a bright, large star in the sky. In Wolves, the initial section of a teenaged Syvert was worth the price of the book. Readers of only English are several years behind Knausgård’s writing pace; we’re seeing his work from the past in our future, somewhat like the light travelling to us from a distant star. He has already published his next two novels in Norwegian (Det tredje riket and Nattskolen, which translate to The Third Kingdom and The Night School) that — best case — will be available in English in (I hope no later than) late 2024 and late 2025.

Lady Joker (Volume 2) — Kaoru Takamura (2023).

The Overstory — Richard Powers (2018).

Bleak House — Charles Dickens (1852-1853).