10 Books That Changed My Mind
2020 was a difficult year, and initially, I wasn’t even considering making a review of the books that I had read, because I thought it wasn’t really a lot — however — when reflecting further upon it I realized that in 2020 I actually managed to read several incredible books that helped expand my mind and realize new things about the world and myself.
I have listed some of them below — in no particular order. Some of the main themes this year have been nature (we spent almost 6 months living in the Swedish forests so guess that decision impacted me a bit 😂), education, motherhood, and history.
What about you? Did you read any books that you can recommend for 2021?
1. “Think Little” by Wendell Berry
What struck me most about this short two-essay collection is that, except for a brief mention of Nixon, it could have been written this year rather than 50 years ago. I’m not sure if Berry is particularly prescient, or if we as humans are just incredibly slow in adopting more sustainable land policies, but it was kind of incredible to read something written so long ago that’s just as applicable and current today. The book’s two essays, “Think Little” and “A Native Hill” both address environmental issues, agriculture specifically. The first essay, “Think Little” is more overt and critical, while “A Native Hill” delivers its message through a lyrical telling of Berry’s native grasses, forests, and hills. Both essays made me think, reconsider, and swoon for more rural life, but I found “A Native Hill” particularly moving. In fact, I found myself frequently thinking that Berry put to words things I’ve often felt, viscerally, but never quite put into concrete, actual words.
Passages I enjoyed:
”The time is past when it was enough merely to elect our officials. We will have to elect them and then go and watch them and keep our hands on them, the way the coal companies do” (Think Little).
” Most of us are not directly responsible for strip mining and extractive agriculture and other forms of environmental abuse. But we are guilty nevertheless, for we connive in them by our ignorance. We are ignorantly dependent on them. We do not know enough about them; we do not have a particular enough sense of their danger” (Think Little).
“One early morning last spring, I came and found the woods floor strewn with bluebells. In the cool sunlight and the lacy shadows of the spring woods, the blueness of those flowers, their elegant shape, their delicate fresh scent kept me standing and looking. I found a delight in them that I cannot describe and that I will never forget. Though I had been familiar for years with most of the spring woods flowers, I had never seen these and had not known they were here. Looking at them, I felt a strange loss and sorrow that I had never seen them before. But I was also exultant that I saw them now — that they were here. For me, in the thought of them will always be the sense of the joyful surprise with which I found them — the sense that came suddenly to me then that the world is blessed beyond my understanding, more abundantly than I will ever know.”
2. “Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood” by Moyra Davey
Mother Reader is a collection of essays, stories, journal entries, and excerpts of novels addressing the confluence of motherhood and creativity. The works are generally arranged in chronological order and reading them is like taking a step back into history. The initial passages are ripe with bitterness so flagrant I could practically smell it: creative women whose partners would not do their share of parenting and left these women with all the childcare responsibilities — it reminded me of how lucky I am to have a supportive partner.
In Mother Reader, motherhood is scrutinized for all its painful and illuminating subtleties and addressed with unconventional wisdom and candor. What emerges is a sense of a community of writers speaking to and about each other out of a common experience, and a compilation of extraordinary literature never before assembled in a single volume
3. “From Brain to Mind — Using Neuroscience to Guide Change in Education” by James. E. Zull
Zull moves us from the physicality of the brain as a muscle and biological object via the different processes triggered in brains to the metaphysicality of the mind, connecting input with hormones triggered by electrical charges, leading to joy and how we can use it to teach and learn more successfully. Definitely a worth-while read.
4. “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants” by Robin Wall Kimmerer
This goes as a Top 10 Books of All Time in my opinion. Robin grew up in nature, was trained as a scientist, and returned to nature. This book seems to be the story of how she integrated these widely disparate traditions (scientific knowledge vs indigenous wisdom). For anyone who struggles with integrating science and naturalistic philosophy, this book may help illuminate the path along the way. It is an absolutely wonderful book that I will keep re-reading.
5. “The Great Mental Models” by Shane Parrish
Shane’s done a wonderful job over the past few years making mental models approachable through FS.blog. A mental model is a way to look at a problem through a certain lens: an economist will look at a problem one way, a biologist another, and a statistician yet another. Learn the big ideas from the big disciplines and you’ll be able to twist and turn problems in interesting ways at unprecedented speeds. His blog already documents a subset of models, but in this book, Shane goes in even more depth with rich examples of each under the umbrella of ‘General Thinking Concepts’, e.g. Occam’s Razor. This is the first in a 5-part series: the encyclopedia of the big ideas from the big disciplines.
6. “The Overstory” by Richard Powers
Powers takes on the single most important topic of our time: the effects of humans on the planet and the possibility of a future. Through 9 varied characters, he brings to life the old forests, the lives of individual trees, the quest for AI, and the love people are capable of, among other themes. It’s a tour de force of creation and, at 500 pages, it could have gone on forever and I would have been happy. It will also break your heart, but it’s not completely without hope.
Powers seems to envision only two scenarios: either humankind will wipe itself out and the earth will generate new, unforeseeable solutions to life or artificial intelligence will impose a solution on a humanity which cannot save itself. To those who have read optimistic works like Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now” or related perspectives such environmental pessimism is somewhat startling. I deeply appreciate the accuracy of the science, the literary craftsmanship that went into embodying these ideas and the importance of his overall message.
7. “The Unwomanly Face of War” by Svetlana Alexievich
“In the center there is always this: how unbearable and unthinkable it is to die. And how much more unbearable and unthinkable it is to kill, because a woman gives life. Gives it. Bears it in herself for a long time, nurses it. I understood that it is more difficult for women to kill.”
I cried many times when reading this book. For those of us who were lucky enough to have never seen war, know conceptually that it’s a terrible thing, and somehow idealize the heroism of it, this book will set you straight.
The war was a holocaust beyond imagination. The women that share their stories saw things happen that are burned into their memories. Each woman’s statement complements and expounds on the others. It is not an easy read. But it gives you a unique perspective on war and why it must be prevented in all cases. These horrors do not justify the world that resulted as a result. So many lives were shattered and the political ramifications were not a solution either. Their stories should be recorded for history and taught to our children in every country.
It must not have been easy to go through these stories, and this was only her first book, which is expanded with material that was censored when the book was first released in the 1980s. She has gone on the write similar books on Chernobyl, the Afghan war, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Interestingly enough many Russians I know never read her — even though many of my own family members went through similar horrors, including my great grandmother, great grandfather, and grandmother.
8. “Climate — A new Story” by Charles Eisenstein
This book is full of compassion and insight about human alienation from the natural world that has led to our current climate crisis. It challenges readers to reevaluate many widely-held cultural beliefs and assumptions that could very well end up killing us and everything on the planet. At root, Eisenstein is asking us to recognize the different stories we tell ourselves and how these stories are not working. The Story of Separation from the natural world is leading to disaster. We focus on fear rather than on what we love. He takes to task the global warming narrative that is yet another us vs. them narrative. He makes a strong argument that fear won’t work in the end. Only love works. “We work to save what we love,” and that’s why protecting local ecosystems usually works much better than abstract larger-scale projects. He calls for a Story of Interbeing.
This is not a book of only what doesn’t work. Eisenstein has plenty of great examples of Interbeing, a recognition of how to live within and love the natural world and how to act on that. He points out the many ways in which the planet is suffering that has nothing to do with the climate crisis. Our overuse and misuse of plastics is one example. Another is our methods of agriculture which involve deforestation, monocropping, pesticide use, and a resulting insect holocaust. He gives us ways out of this human-caused disaster through regenerative agriculture methods.
“Human well-being and planetary health are inextricably connected.” That’s why we have to stop thinking of ourselves as separate from nature. “The world is a living being,” and we are a part of that living being. “The earth is still alive,” he tells us. “Now is the time to choose life. It’s not too late.”
Charles Eisensteins books a very thoroughly researched and packed with information and insights. By now I think we have all his books in our home library and I often find myself returning to them. Can greatly recommend reading them all!
9. “The Glass Bead Game” by Hermann Hesse
“No permanence is ours; we are a wave That flows to fit whatever form it finds… Each of us is merely one human being, merely an experiment, a way station. But each of us should be on the way toward perfection, should be striving to reach the center, not the periphery.”
The Glass Bead Game is the last full-length novel of Hermann Hesse. I remember reading Hesse’s Siddhartha and Steppenwolf right out of high school. There was something both disquieting and uniquely calming about these strange little books that Hesse wrote detailing his love and fascination with Eastern thought and philosophy. I figured this year I would read the Glass Bead Game. It is in many ways Hesse’s subtle answer to the growing Fascism in his country. But, at its heart, it isn’t an anti-Fascist book. He is aiming for more. He is thinking bigger.
It is a book about harmony and the arts. The exploration of how music, mathematics, intellectualism and life can become transcendent and beautiful. The Glass Bead Game is a mysterious fill-in that allows it to be at once none and all of man’s endeavors. It is a holy raga, a tactile masbaha, a literary syncretism, that captures the whole of man’s achievements and is practiced by an elite few. Using the framework of the Game Hesse is able to look at the dynamic of all of man’s achievements as being both beautiful, worthwhile, but also frivolous and fleeting. He looks at the tension between those who remove themselves from mankind’s experiences with those who live IN the world. There is a pull and a reciprocity between these two groups. He is looking for those things that balance those groups and ultimately those things that cause these groups to separate.
10. “The Life of the Mind” by Hannah Arendt
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
Considered by many to be Hannah Arendt’s greatest work, published as she neared the end of her life, The Life of the Mind investigates thought itself, as it exists in contemplative life. In a shift from her previous writings, most of which focus on the world outside the mind, this work was planned as three volumes that would explore the activities of the mind considered by Arendt to be fundamental. What emerged is a rich, challenging analysis of human mental activity, considered in terms of thinking, willing, and judging.
Reading this book was a revelation for me. You can’t read this without feeling a sense both of your own individual importance and your own individual insignificance; how important it is to understand that before you were born there was no you, and after you die there is likewise no you, and this space where this you matters a great deal. In one passage Arendt remarks that, at least philosophically, we could see our lives as entirely a dream of our own making, only waking as our life ends. If this is true (and if we believed it why would it not be?), we are foolish not to make this dream beautiful.
I’ve long suspected that, given the state of affairs in the U.S and generally in the world. currently, there is no royal road to a new understanding. The comedy, the social media responses, it all seems to be free will, but how much of it can be predicted before it’s even said? And how stupid it sometimes seems, when at the same time we seem to value the very things we say we detest (celebrity without accomplishment; wealth above morals or doing what is right). I don’t like it much either, but it seems the true cultural change comes from reading authors like Arendt, and spreading the ideas around. I could be wrong, but it's worth a shot. As David Byrne once famously sang, “..baby what did you expect staring at the TV set, fighting fire with fire?”
