I can't believe the last thing I posted on this blog was about Ezra Koenig! (Maybe some of you have forgotten who he is, given that he hardly tweets at all anymore. I don't blame you.)
Last year, I said I'd do away with reading challenges, and so I have. I've also done away with Goodreads ratings, for the most part: there's something absurd, isn't there, in asking the present-day reading population to rate Common Sense — for instance — on a scale of one to five. (It's currently at 3.97, for those wondering. One one-star review by a "Parentheses Enthusiast" remarks that the pamphlet is "DRY. DRIER THAN AN ANCIENT RAISIN IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ATACAMA DESERT.") But here are five books I read in the past year that I would have rated four or five stars, I suppose, and that you might feel similarly about:
5. THE SHEPHERD'S LIFE (James Rebanks)
One of the first things I saw when I arrived in England last May, apart from the inside of the Manchester airport, was a group of sheep grazing on a highway median. That set the tone for the next few months, during which I developed a surprising affinity for sheep of all stripes; I picked this book up in the same airport on my way home. Rebanks writes of his childhood (and adulthood) spent as a shepherd in the Lake District, so there are no highway medians here, but it's no less interesting for it. The Shepherd's Life is at once memoir and cultural history (its subtitle, in some editions, is A People's History of the Lake District). It is better as the latter than as the former, although Rebanks's account of his journey from his sheep to Oxford to London and (finally) back to his sheep is necessary — it shows us that he's the best-placed person to do what he does in this book, which is to advance a critique of capitalist society from the point of view of a pre-industrial profession. I don't know if that's what Rebanks intended, exactly, but I do think that's what makes this book so valuable.
#4 through #1, under the cut.
