The little one is a bit older and I had marginally less call this year, but I also had to take the boards in June, so reading time definitely benefitted from the flexibility of ebooks on the phone and the magical powers of Audible. Overall, it was a better reading year than 2015.

1. The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth (fun language romp)
2. Stoner by John Williams (quiet, understated, lovely)
3. The Buddha Walks into a Bar by Lodro Rinzler
4. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (of course I cried)
5. Corsair by James L. Cambias
6. The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert (Pulitzer winner)
7. The Rolling Stones by Robert A. Heinlein (1970s sci-fi, not the band)
8. The Bogleheads Guide to Investing by Mel Lindauer, Taylor Larimore, and Michael LeBoeuf
9. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
10. The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances by The Oatmeal
11. Calamity by Brandon Sanderson (The Reckoners #3)
12. Medical School 2.0 by David Larson
13. Pay Yourself First by David Hurd and James Hemphill
14. Changing Outcomes by David Hurd and James Hemphill
15. The Cartel by Don Winslow (incredibly gruesome but so good)
16. Physician Finance by KM Awad
17. A Doctor’s Basic Business Handbook by Brandon Bushnell
18. The Year They Tried to Kill Me by Salvatore Iaquinta (to me, the new House of God)
19. So You Got Into Medical School…Now What? By Daniel Paull
20. Why Medicine? By Sujay Kusagra
21. Broadcasting Happiness by Michelle Gielan
22. Bream Gives Me Hiccups by Jesse Eisenberg
23. The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson (Wax & Wayne #1)
24. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
25. Dimension of Miracles by Robert Sheckley (audiobook perfectly narrated by John Hodgman)
26. The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates
27. My Year of Running Dangerously by Tom Foreman
28. What They Don’t Teach You at Medical School by Dr. David Kashmer (still feel like that’s the wrong preposition in the title…)
29. What if? by Randall Munroe
30. Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson (Wax & Wayne #2)
31. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (so depressing)
32. A Little History of Philosophy by Nigel Warburton (this was surprisingly fun)
33. The Earth Moved by Amy Stewart (apparently earthworms are really important)
34. Drinking Water by James Salzman (really wanted this to be like Kurlansky’s Salt or Cod, but it wasn’t anywhere near as good)
35. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
36. The Marshmallow Test by Walter Mischel
37. Diet Cults by Matt Fitzgerald
38. The Hunt for Vulcan by Thomas Levenson (long before we demoted Pluto, we used to think there was a hidden planet Vulcan. Weird!)
39. Rejection Proof by Jia Jiang
40. The House of Wigs by Joshua Allen
41. The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson (Wax & Wayne #3)
42. The Emperor of Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee (well-deserved Pulitzer winner)
43. Bricking It by Nick Spalding
44. The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee (between the two, Emperor is better)
45. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J. K. Rowling
46. The Element by Ken Robinson
47. The Thirteen Word Retirement Plan by Stephen Nelson
48. Student Loan Debt 101 by Adam Minsky
49. The 4 Percent Universe by Richard Panek
50. Simple Sabotage by Robert M. Galford, Bob Frisch, and Cary Greene (the pdf of the CIA’s declassified original field manual that inspired it is better).
51. As You Wish by Cary Elwes
52. Mistborn: Secret History by Brandon Sanderson
53. The Emperor’s Soul by Brandon Sanderson (Huge winner, great novella)
54. The Medical Entrepreneur by Steven M. Hacker
55. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
56. Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
57. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (just lovely)
58. Words of Radiance (Stormlight Archive #2) by Brandon Sanderson
59. The Wealth of Humans by Ryan Avent (smart writing about technological innovation and societal change)
60. TED Talks by Chris Anderson
61. Medium Raw by Anthony Bordain
62. Animal Farm by George Orwell
63. Born a Crime by Trevor Noah (was really great as an audiobook)
64. How to Think About Money by Jonathan Clements
65. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
66. Ready Player One by Earnest Cline (fun homage to classic video games and 80s culture masquerading as a novel)
67. The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

Classics I visited included a Tale of Two Cities, The Jungle, and Animal Farm, which were all super depressing. I continue to wonder why I read any of the pop-psych/inspirational/self-help type books given that they are all approximately the same and should nearly always be an essay or two and not drawn out to book length. I also read a bunch of short finance, med student, and doctor books for research/blog purposes, which were almost all meh.

On the fun side, I did catch up on most of Brandon Sanderson’s books while waiting for Patrick Rothfuss and George RR Martin to finish their next books. Now I have to wait for Sanderson’s third Stormlight book as well, which won’t come out for another year (and the last book in Mistborn Era 2 is like two years away).

Did love The Alchemist though. Just a beautiful, lovely little story. And every doctor should read The Emperor of Maladies.

Between the birth of our first child in April and by far my busiest call year of residency, 2015 was shaping up to be an abysmal year for pleasure reading. Ultimately, the saving grace was the combination of my much-lengthened daycare-related commute with Audible (the free 30 day trial/two free audiobooks via that link got me completely hooked). Audible is fantastic, and it’s not an exaggeration to say it’s changed our lives. Dead time in traffic or folding the laundry is no longer the dreary waste of time it used to be; it’s a chance to “read” (okay, listen). Even with Audible, I still ended up with fewer books than I read in 2014 (and this year’s list is padded with some pretty short stuff).

1. Firefight by Brandon Sanderson (Reckoner’s #2)
2. The Eye of Minds by James Dashner (Mortality Doctrine #1) (Not as good as The Maze Runner, which while entertaining, wasn’t all that good either)
3. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo (changed how I fold all of my laundry)
4. Yes Please by Amy Poehler (wife’s choice, meh)
5. The White Coat Investor by James Dahle (re-read)
6. Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari (wife’s better choice)
7. The Martian by Andy Weir
8. 1984 by George Orwell
9. Walk the Sky by Robert Swartwood and David B. Silva
10. Sapiens by Yoval Noah Harari (like Guns, Germs, and Steel, but less rigorous and much broader in scope)
11. The Pearl by John Steinbeck (so depressing)
12. A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E. Schwab
13. America Again by Stephen Colbert (funny, but not as good as I am America)
14. The Art of Money Getting; or, Golden Rules for Making Money by P. T. Barnum (old, kinda fun, free, my highlights here)
15. Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg (may be an anthem for working women but perhaps should be read by men just as much. And then one should expand the ensuing mindfulness to include every group and minority you can think of).
16. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
17. This Is Water by David Foster Wallace (the book version of this short essay is pretty much a fluffed out graduation present. The original essay is still available online for free.)
18. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (so good)
19. Hiroshima by John Hersey (the ethics of the atomic bombings in World War II was something we discussed in history class, but this follows the stories of several survivors of the attack. It’s harrowing. I’ve never read anything like it. It’s much more digestible in book form, but the New Yorker released a big chunk of it free online for the 50th anniversary.)
20. Super Mario by Jeff Ryan
21. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
22. Why We Make Things and Why It Matters by Peter Korn
23. The Dorito Effect by Mark Schatzker (actually a very fascinating pop-sci discussion of modern food breeding and technology)

A few books make the list from my wife’s Audible choices. There are also a couple of classics that I somehow hadn’t read before, but I’m going to keep trying to do that every year to make up for only pretending to read the assigned books in high school. Here’s to a lively 2016!

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.