Jordan Mattox

1. All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy 

Sadly, we lost one of our great writers this year. Blood Meridian is one my favorites of all time, despite the gruesome, blood soaked content. I had always intended to read his borderland trilogy, and used the sad occasion to finally pull the trigger. This is a story of two teenagers who decide to leave their Texas ranches behind and ride into Mexico looking for adventure and fortune. The book is a travel narrative, mixed with intense sequences of action and violence that foreground McCarthy’s beautiful descriptions of the landscape. Must read.  

2. A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles 

I read Towles Lincoln Highway book last year and loved it. I was told by good authority that this one is even better. The story follows a Russian aristocrat, Count Rostov (a reference to War and Peace, which I am also reading this month), who is put under in a famous hotel in Moscow after the Bolshevik Revolution. Mixed with philosophical speculations, literary references, and scientific metaphors, the book is a master class in mixing heady ideas with deep pathos as we grow attached to Rostov and the people in his orbit. 

3. Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift 

Over the summer, I like to mix in a few classics. I do this for a few different reasons. First, I like variety. Two, it can often be interesting to look at the world through the eyes of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, looking at their assumptions and how they contrast with mine. And finally, modern syntax and diction is becoming increasingly fragmented and simplified. Complex ideas and thought require complex sentences, winding paragraphs, and more specific word use. This book is a satire of the English world that Swift lived told through travel narrative. The protagonist, a doctor aboard a ship, encounters fantastical worlds that poke fun and deconstruct his world. Good book, but periodically difficult. 

4. War and Peace Vol. 1 & 2 by Leo Tolstoy 

Some of you might remember that I read Anna Karinina this spring, which was an unparalleled reading experience. War and Peace was waiting in the wings, looming at me, so I tried to use some time off of work in July to plow through. I made it about halfway through the 1200+ pages this month. The translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have made the Russian sing in English, and I will read anything that they have translated. Both of Tolstoy’s great novels are explorations of human nature and change, but where Anna Karinina was about how a mundane affair affected the world around those involved, War and Peace seems to be about how history affects the individual. I will likely have more concrete thoughts when I finish. 

5. These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner

This is another book on my the world is fucked up tour. This book unpacks and breaks open the world of private equity. We are involved in it: many of the largest pension programs and investment groups use private equity to get large returns for their clients. They do this by squeezing the middle class by strip mining businesses and laying off workers at otherwise productive companies. The way it works is that they buy companies and then saddle them with massive amounts of debt, that the companies must pay off with profits, and then they strip mine them for real estate, cut jobs to seemingly raise profitability and then many of these companies go bankrupt. Important read, but endlessly frustrating.