I recently finished “reading” the audiobook of Aziz Ansari’s Modern Love (coincidentally narrated by Aziz Ansari), which is essentially an amusing presentation of real sociological research focused on how dating has changed in the internet era. Made for a good listen in the car on the way to daycare, which has become my primary reading time of late.2We can thank a very cute infant for that.

It’s an interesting exercise to take a step back and see how in just a few years the foundation of our relationships and framework for making new ones has completely changed. The sections on international romance, particularly in Japan, were a highlight.

As someone who likes having their biases confirmed, my other favorite part of the book was its discussion of studies that demonstrate how social media is increasingly distorting how we view life satisfaction.

That’s the thing about the Internet: It doesn’t simply help us find the best thing out there; it has helped to produce the idea that there is a best thing and, if we search hard enough, we can find it. And in turn there are a whole bunch of inferior things that we’d be foolish to choose.

Too many choices can be paralyzing and just as depressing as having too few. Seeing other people’s curated images causes us to believe that other people are happier than we are, that their choices are better than ours, and that even if we are happy, maybe we could be happier. And all this in turn makes us sad. Perhaps, the solution:

Spend more time with people, less time in front of a screen, and—since we’re all in it together—be nice to people.

2014 wasn’t a particularly big year for my library, but it is the first year I kept track of all of the books I read for pleasure, reproduced here in the order I consumed them:

1. Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson (Reckoners #1)
2. Divergent by Veronica Roth (Divergent #1)
3. The Calling by Robert Swartwood
4. Insurgent by Veronica Roth (Divergent #2)
5. Allegient by Veronica (Divergent #3, finished the same day)
6. Steps by Jerzy Kosinski (National book award-winner…in 1969)
7. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
8. Canticle by Ken Scholes (Psalms of Isaak #2)
9. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (a completely epistolary novel, rare form)
10. Antiphon by Ken Scholes (Psalms of Isaak #3)
11. The White Coat Investor by James Dahle MD (Basic financial literacy for physicians)
12. Legion by Robert Swartwood
13. The Dishonored Dead by Robert Swartwood (a highly unusual Zombie thriller)
14. The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day 1)
15. Requiem by Ken Scholes (Psalms of Isaak #4)
16. The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss (The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day 2)
17. A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Fire and Ice #5)
18. Maze Runner by James Dashner (Maze Runner #1)
19. Cod by Mark Kurlansky (the spiritual prequel to Salt; that’s right, history through fish!)
20. The Scorch Trials by James Dashner (Maze Runner #2)
21. The Death Cure by James Dashner (Maze Runner #3)
22. The Kill Order by James Dashner (Maze Runner Prequel)
23. The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss (Kingkiller side-novella)
24. Light Boxes by Shane Jones
25. Stiff by Mary Roach (cadavers do more than just get dissected, though that happens too)

Binge-reading young adult mega-hits over the course of a weekend off seemed to predominate interspersed with lengthy epic fantasy. For the record, the Maze Runner series isn’t as strong as either Hunger Games or Divergent. And truthfully, the weak third book in each of those trilogies almost ruins those series as well. Still can’t wait for Rothfuss to finish the Kingkiller trilogy; I almost wish I hadn’t already read the first entry so that I wouldn’t need to wait for the final/third book to come out!

The current Ebola scare and the growing story of its mismanagement made me remember two excellent books:

1. The Hot Zone, the nonfiction thriller about Ebola that I found highly disturbing in middle school. For an even scarier read, try its spiritual sequel, The Demon in the Freezer (in which Preston details how much bioweapons grade Smallpox the former Soviet Union may have misplaced). I don’t know if Preston invented the nonfiction biomedical pageturner, but he was extremely good at it.
2. The Stand. Stephen King’s magnum opus was re-released uncut and unedited (1200 pages!) in 2012. Viral apocalypse literature at its finest. It’s no spoiler to say that the government does neither a great nor honest job when faced with a deadly virus.

SPEAKING OF: Richard Preston reprises his old role to breakdown the current Ebola outbreak in the New Yorker.

Yesterday I read and finished the short novel Steps, which had been recommended to me specifically because it is composed entirely of short vignettes. What I didn’t know at the time was that Steps, which was published in 1968, won the National Book Award for Fiction, and that its author, Jerzy Kosinski, was a Polish Jew whose family survived the Holocaust by posing as Catholics with the help of sympathetic local villagers in central Poland. Like Primo Levi, he also committed suicide later in life.

The vignettes in Steps are anchored by an extremely uncomfortable and disturbing eroticism. The prose is elegantly terse. Details of character and plot are obfuscated by the allegories of the individual vignettes, but the narrative arc does at times become more distinct. The book left me feeling disturbed, confused, and thoughtful. It’s quietly poetic without being indulgently lyrical.

Oddly, as a coincidence of sequence, in my mind Kosinksi’s unyielding depiction of amoral sexuality and intimacy as power is an even starker than it might otherwise be. Because last week I read Veronica Roth’s completely unrelated Divergent series, an about-to-be-a-huge-movie YA dystopian [romance] trilogy. In Roth’s series, every plot point is punctuated by breathless descriptions of heavy petting. Innocent, if dangerously co-dependent, one-in-a-lifetime “true” love.

If a young adult romance is predicated on an idealized version of what we want love to be or think love is, then I’m not sure exactly how to describe Kosinski’s counterpoint.

Nanoism makes a brief cameo in the March 2013 issue of The Writer magazine as part of an article “Hey, shortie!” by Karen M. Rider about flash fiction. In this appearance, I am—as always—attempting to argue that the joys of tiny tales do not come at the expense or eschewment of longer pieces but are instead a reflection on the fullness of our days and our ever-growing interconnectedness. Or something. Find it online here.

I read an article the other day stating that MFA programs are on pace to churn out sixty thousand new writers every ten years. Between that and sheer volume of information available and accessible online, the next battle for grassroots entertainment is not production but curation and aggregation: there is too much to read even a significant fraction.

That’s where projects like David Backer’s FictionDaily come in. Each day, the site hosts a snippet and link to three free stories online: one very short, one short, and one genre. It’s a gateway, and it’s these curated gateways that users will trust to collected and filter the independent publishing for consumption. Soon, the site will begin publishing socially progressive stories as well.

In addition to featuring both Nanoism and one of my stories, FictionDaily now hosts a short interview with yours truly.