Book Time #24: Next Year and Postwar
Hello everyone,
I hope you had a great summer reading many excellent books. I had a disappointing summer on that front. It seemed like every book I picked up didn’t satisfy. I’ll tell you about one of those books below.
But before we get to that, two housekeeping items.
I hope you’ll check out my recent article at Bloomberg about New Jersey Transit’s struggles. We collected three months of live train data from NJ Transit, LIRR, and Metro-North to show how much worse NJ Transit is than the other two commuter railroads. I got to work with incredible colleagues to make it a reality and I’m proud to share it.
Longtime subscribers will remember the Starter Packs, where I read a couple dozen books on one subject. This was fun but a lot of work. So for next year I’m going to do a new thing called Ten On, where I pick 10 books on one subject to read for the year. I will still read (and write about) books on other stuff, but the year’s focus will be the Ten On series. Unlike the starter packs, I am not positioning myself as an expert on the year’s theme. In fact, I will likely pick subjects I am decidedly not an expert on. So the biggest difference for you, I think, is that I am telling you the 10 books in advance so we can go on an intellectual adventure together.
On that note: 2026’s Ten On theme will be China.
I have read hundreds of books on the U.S. and Europe. I have read maybe three on China. This needs to change! The focus will be on modern China, but I won’t totally neglect other eras. The near-final list of Ten On China books are:
Ten Lessons in Modern Chinese History, Zheng Yangwen
China: A New History by John K. Fairbank
Two Kinds of Time, Graham Peck
The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Kenneth Pomeranz
The Search For Modern China, Jonathan Spence (Note: I may replace this with Spence’s The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution because Search for Modern China is 1,000 pages)
Red Capitalism, Carl Walter & Frasier Howie
Blood Red Sunset, Ma Bo
Invisible China, Scott Rozelle & Natalie Hell
The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge To China's Future, Elizabeth Economy
Wild Swans, Jung Chang
Again, I won’t start reading these until next year, so there’s time to add them to your lists. Feel free to read along with me!
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, Tony Judt
Postwar is one of the most celebrated non-fiction books of the century so far. Perhaps this raised my expectations too high, because I found it to be lifeless. Full disclosure: I only read 744 of its approximately 1,100 pages. I slogged through the first two-thirds before it finally hit me. I did not like this book.
I did, however, respect it. Judt, no doubt, has intense mastery of the subject, a wealth of knowledge on arcane tidbits. Which was exactly the problem. Reading this book felt more like being cornered at a cocktail party as someone tries to impress you with his knowledge rather than reading a cogent narrative. It is unfortunate to read so much and feel as if you learned so very little.
By its own admission, the book is an opinionated history. This would be a strength in better hands, but Judt’s interests too often lay in the obscure. Long passages are devoted to theorists or academic offshoots. More space is devoted to short-lived political movements of little consequence in small Eastern European countries than, say, the Eurovision Song Contest, which debuted in 1970 and has been followed annually by hundreds of millions of people. It is difficult to glean from this book what matters and what doesn’t.
The breadth of ground covered here, with apparent expertise, is truly gobsmacking. But Judt is no guide through history. I get the sense decades of working on the subject deprived him of perspective of what non-academics might want out of such a book. Nor is Judt a good enough writer to pull this off. He too often uses big words when shorter would do—"propitious" is apparently his favorite word—and loves to drop a Latin or French phrase into the text when it could easily be substituted for a common English word (“...quietly content to see the matter postponed sin die”). Too many sentences are run-ons, contain vague phrases, or unexplained jargon.
Judt is, to be fair, more than capable of writing crisp, clear sentences like “Men and women no longer lived in the same places as their parents and often did very different jobs.” The problem is that I made a literal note of this sentence because it is such an outlier. Maybe some of you know what “meretricious substitution” means, but I do not. Reading this book felt more like hacking my way through a dense jungle than being led down a cleared path.