Best Books of 2023 – Chapter 1

Happy New Year!  Now celebrating its 11th annual edition, I thought I would begin the New Year by posting around New Year’s Day my favorite books that I read from the prior year.

This year, I read a total of 55 books, 39 fiction and 16 non-fiction, a healthy increase over the 48 books I read in 2022.  And of these 55 books, about a fourth of them made my “Best of” list.  So, settle up by a fire in a comfy chair, get nice  and cozy, and enjoy learning about what I considered as great reads over the next four weeks.

As has occurred several times in the past, the first book I read in the new year also made my “Best of” list, one of two books given to me by my daughter and son-in-law for Christmas: The LEGO Story by Jens Andersen published in 2021 (English translation by Caroline Waight published in 2022).

Giving books for Christmas has been a standing tradition for my daughter and son-in-law.  They both have input but when my son-in-law has made the gift selection, he has done a great job of picking excellent scientific books often related to his field of astronomy.  And for this first book which he chose for me, it was almost as if he had explored my world from Seattle with one of his telescopes.  For unbeknownst to him, that very fall, I had purchased my very first LEGO kit just for me and was assembling it around the Christmas holidays.

So having finished this LEGO Mustang not long before the new year, this book was a natural selection for my first to read in 2023.

This book tells the intriguing story of LEGO, a Danish company from its very beginnings all the way through to the fourth generation of family owners.

The company name is a contraction derived from the Danish words “leg godt” which translated means “play well” and seems most appropriate considering the products they manufacture.  Being a family-owned business, the book is filled with historical family photos covering its 90-year existence as well as images of early toys they produced.  Having had unique access to both the third-generation owner as well as company archives, the author has written a complete and authoritative accounting of the company’s history.

While LEGO is best known today for its iconic bricks, few know that the company actually started out making wooden toys and the debate about whether or not to continue producing wooden toys factors heavily in the story.  In fact, the author presents both the good and the bad of the many family arguments about what toys to produce, whether or not to build theme parks, and if the creativity afforded by many different shaped bricks was lost with the introduction of detailed instruction booklets.  When the company was struggling during the early to late 2000s, unwise decisions made earlier were not glossed over by the author but rather readily exposed.  And the challenges of producing toys desired by girls has been and continues to be an ongoing problem.

One of the surprise discoveries for the company management revealed in the book was that their toys were not just for kids, but for adults as well.  Having now finished and thoroughly enjoyed the book, I can easily identify myself as an AFOL—an Adult Fan of LEGO.  So, the next time I purchase and have fun assembling a LEGO kit, I can do it with a clear understanding of how those multi-shaped bricks have evolved into the colorful pieces in my hands.

The second book I read in the new year that also made my “Best of” list was the other book my daughter and son-in-law gave me for Christmas, The Car by Bryan Appleyard.  You might be able to tell from the smile on my face from the photo above that I knew on Christmas morning that I was going to enjoy both these books and indeed I did.  And the subtitle to the book, The Rise and Fall of the Machine That Made the Modern World, intrigued me as well.

Being the life-long car lover that I am, I have read a lot of books about cars.  Many of them were about individual car companies or individual car models (e.g., the Miata or the Mustang).  This book on the other hand, covered the history of the car from its very beginnings, through its progressive adoption and replacement of the horse and buggy, through the tremendous road building to accommodate the ever-growing number of cars, to its predicted demise as we know it today.

While bringing in relevant stories from throughout the world as it factored into its history or its development, his primary focus for this book is on the car industry and car consumers in America and specifically a car with an internal combustion engine (or ICE as the author abbreviated it).

Even though I have read a number of car books before, I learned things in this book that I never knew. Most of the books that I have read were by American authors, but Appleyard is a British journalist, which I realized as soon as I ran across his spelling of tire as “tyre.”  Sometimes it takes an “outsider” to provide a different perspective on a subject which Appleyard certainly has done.

I read with interest the mosaic of stories he wove together learning tidbits of interesting information along the way, but it was the final two chapters that provided the sobering realization to the subtitle to his book.  Anyone who has seen a recent car commercial or read a newspaper article knows of the tremendous proliferation of electric vehicles (EVs).  And of governments who will begin to outlaw ICE vehicles in the 2030s.

Several years ago, I wrote a post about the reintroduction of electric cars (Cars with a Charge!) and even predicted that my grandchildren might well one day learn to drive in an electric car.  Unlike ICE cars, electric cars have no need for a transmission and so the driving experience will definitely be different for someone like me who has driven a manual stick shift car for over 50 years.  In spite of the offer of instant torque and exhilarating acceleration, I will miss the fun driving experience I have known my entire life of working the transmission through the gears.  But I readily embrace the reintroduction of electrics and I hope to own one myself, just alongside my fun and sporty ICE car.  My fear is Appleyard’s final prediction that EVs will soon after morph into the autonomous vehicles (AV) that are already being tested today.  This will be a sorrowful day for all of us car lovers since the driving experience will be completely taken away.

     To be continued…