I was pretty good about keeping up reading last year. Let’s see if we can keep it up this year.
Author: Michael Pollan
Published: May 15, 2008
Listened: December 11, 2020
Roland Griffiths’s 2006 paper, Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance, describes a study in which 36 or so participants were given psilocybin, a psychedelic compound, as part of a mediated session. Of those participants,
67% of the volunteers rated the experience with psilocybin to be either the single most meaningful experience of his or her life or among the top five most meaningful experiences of his or her life.
It was this study that spurred Pollan’s exploration and documentation of the state of psychedelic research, use, and culture and I can see why. This single result, phrased exactly as such, is wondrous. Imagine being able to book an appointment to experience the single most meaningful experience of your life the way one books a hair appointment. Such an appointment would involve relatively little risk (while bad trips do happen, the risk of receiving psilocybin under the support of trained experts is low). Psilocybin is also not considered addictive, which is surprising, given the potential upside. This points of course, to something particularly special about psilocybin and its family of compounds, but it also raises interesting personal questions. Namely, what are my own life’s most meaningful experiences? If asked, would I take psilocybin? What would I want to get out of a psilocybin experience?
I’ve always had a high internal resistance to change - high inertia. But having listened to Pollan’s thorough exploration of psilocybin, I could be convinced that this resistance to new experiences may lead to my missing out on rewarding experiences and understandings. As one oft used analogy goes, I have a feeling that the grooves of my mind are deeply and rigidly set. Perhaps an experience that resets my mind may be a boon.
These ideas are infectious simply because they appeal to the ego. The what-if’s are irresistible. I have suggested the book indiscriminately and although few have pursued it, I will continue to recommend it if only because the idea is so personally compelling.
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Published: 2011
Read: November 22, 2020
It is structurally fitting that Madeleine, our novel’s heroine, in intensely interested in “The Marriage Plot” of Victorian novels and meets her boyfriend in a class on semiotics. As its name suggests, this novel is a modernization of that particular genre of novels that concern marriage and the family life. It has carefully studied its predecessors in Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, and others and is deeply influenced by their lessons. As a modernization, The Marriage Plot is deeply interested in adapting the romance structure to more modern times. That’s the name of the game of semiotics and of the book. Essentially, how does one tell the story of Anna Karenina in 1982 America instead of in 19th century Russia?
First, there are some direct translations. One updates the Russian landed gentry into their Ivy League elite equivalents. Instead of avoiding one’s domestic problems by moving to Italy, one avoids one’s problems by doing a summer abroad in Italy and India. Next, there are the aspects that can stay the same. A sister in the midst of relationship troubles can still be asked to dissuade the imminent divorce of a sibling. One can still suffer heartbreak from rejection and attempt to forget one’s desires only to come back at the slightest sign of hope. Finally, there are the elements that must change as they are no longer fitting. No longer is a failed marriage a life sentence. No longer is a woman’s role to get married and tend to the house. So drowning oneself in the Gulf of Mexico or throwing oneself in front of an oncoming train are no longer a fashionable endings. Instead, one may chose to announce their divorce before stepping onto a departing subway car. Certainly, this last change has happened incrementally over time, as Middlemarch certainly featured far fewer suicides than its predecessors but it did not feature many divorces.
The structural comparison work and semiotic analysis that The Marriage Plot has already done makes it easy for its readers to understand both the genre and more clearly identify the various decisions the authors make. And as one thinks more deeply about the various decisions the authors make, one can more clearly understand the various structures in other novels but also in The Marriage Plot itself. For instance, I better appreciate the introduction Eugenides crafts, which both serves as an introduction to the various characters while including the essential blend of conflict and intrigue necessary to draw readers into the fold. Similarly, I am impressed by the way that the various perspectives of the main characters are written such that one can jump from perspective to perspective with enough hooks that have the segments interconnected while also avoiding overlapping temporal segments that might otherwise drag down the story.
If anything, after reading The Marriage Plot I may finally read Barthes’s S/Z to figure out what the hubbub is with Barthes and semiotics.
Author: Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Published: April 12, 2005
Listened: November 7, 2020
Apple introduced formal support for podcasts into iTunes in June 2005. While unconnected, I find it amusing that podcasts and podcasting took off right around the publication of this book because this book is exactly a podcast series bundled together. With its loosely interconnected stories told in a casual, easy to understand format, Freakonomics is more entertainment than educational on the edutainment scale. The authors present many claims, such as the idea that the legalization of abortion in the US (and elsewhere) lead to a reduction in crime twenty years after. The authors explore many niche ideas, such as the idea that names may affect one’s success in life. This particular idea is, to my surprise, not actually as random as I would like to portray it as. Apparently multiple famous people have postulated various ideas about names. Dale Carnegie has said that, “The most important word to anyone is their name.” Malcolm Gladwell has apparently discussed the fact that more dentists are named Dennis.
I’m not compelled by all of the evidence or arguments presented in the book, but often they concern such large or such small topics that it is hard to treat Freakonomics as anything but entertainment.
Author: Bob Woodward
Published: September 11, 2018
Listened: October 30, 2020
For all four years of the Trump presidency, there has been constant media coverage of the White House and its residents’ actions. So many of the events that Woodward covers come of no surprise. However, the interesting element is that Woodward manages to include some of the opinions and perspectives of the actors involved, which is often different from the sort of perspectives that are put on display in the articles and reporting that one encounters day to day. It is very interesting, though perhaps not useful, to realize that many of the people in high places still have very normal reactions and demands.
Author: Matthew Desmond
Published: March 2016
Read: October 30, 2020
I am fortunate to have never needed to think of housing as a question. But for many, housing isn’t a guarantee, but an option, and sometimes not even an option. Evicted is a look at what transpires when housing is a decision - when parents need to decide between buying Christmas presents or attending a funeral or paying rent and the systems that give rise and have risen from those decisions. Systems such as utility moratoriums that create unique cycles of behavior
Many tenants who in the winter stayed current on their rent at the expense of their heating bill tried in the summer to climb back in the black with the utility company by shorting their landlord. Come the following winter, they had to be connected to benefit from the moratorium on disconnection. So every year in Milwaukee evictions spiked in the summer and early fall and dipped again in November, when the moratorium began.
Earlier in the month, she had filed the paperwork and received a court date of December 23, which would be the last eviction court before Christmas that year. Sherrena knew the courthouse would be packed. Many parents chose to take their chances with their landlords rather than face their children empty-handed on Christmas morning.
If utility moratoriums and the date of Christmas are an example of a large system that drives many individual behavior, Evicted also signs light to the opposite phenomenon, where many individual actions cause large systems. Landlords, based on their individual decisions and judgments could segregate cities.
Landlords were major players in distributing the spoils. They decided who got to live where. And their screening practices revealed why crime and gang activity or an area’s civic engagement and its spirit of neighborliness could vary drastically from one block to the next.
And in this world made up of individuals making individual decisions, being forced to constantly make decisions about housing leads to a degradation of humanness.
Ultimately, Desmond makes the case through individual characters that housing is broken.
As an aside, one of the most interesting aspects of the book is Desmond’s description of how he came to know the many people that he follows in the book. I’ve always enjoyed reading a first person perspective of how people do their work, how people come to their final product. Desmond’s tale of living in Tobin’s trailer park to finding someone in the Milwaukee north side to live with is deeply revealing.
Author: Michael Lewis
Published: June 17, 2003
Read: October 8, 2020
Moneyball is a fantasy work. I do not mean this disparagingly, in fact, quite the opposite. My personal experience with the game of baseball consists wholly of throwing a ball around with a neighbor once, watching a professional game in a field trip to Atlanta, and briefly discussing the subject with my college roommate. But Moneyball isn’t a book about sports for sports people. Moneyball is a book for nerds. And even better than a book for nerds, it is a fantasy book for nerds. It glorifies the statistically inclined and features the overlooked academics overthrowing an old boys’ club. Moneyball could have been a relatively straightforward analysis of the game of baseball and the Oakland A’s strategy for constructing a team. Thanks to Moneyball, we know this strategy would not be very successful.
In 1978, James came out with a second book, and this time, before entering his discussion, he checked his modesty at the door. The book was titled 1978 Baseball Abstract: The 2nd Annual Edition of Baseball’s Most Informative and Imaginative Review. “I would like to produce here the most complex, detailed, and comprehensive picture of the game of baseball available anywhere,” he wrote, “and I would like to avoid repeating anything that has ever been written before.”
Word had spread this time: 250 people bought a copy. To an author who viewed a sale of 75 copies as encouragement, the sale of 250 was a bonanza. James’s pen was now an unstoppable force.
Instead of a document for geeks entitled, for instance A Study of Sabermetrics in Major League Baseball, (apologies to Jason Chang and Joshua Zenilman), Lewis left the bulk of the statistics at the door and instead concentrated on the power of story. By focusing on individual people, their surroundings, their background, their thoughts and feelings, Moneyball has all the heroes, lore, tradition, defeat, underdogs that any fantasy writer would hope to include. Consider the emotional weight added to the method of player selection that the A’s begin using:
As the thirty-fifth pick approaches, Erik once again leans into the speaker phone. If he leaned in just a bit more closely he might hear phones around the league clicking off, so that people could laugh without being heard. For they do laugh. They will make fun of what the A’s are about to do; and there will be a lesson in that. The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you’ve never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It’s a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the person for the job.
There’s a certain power to language and storytelling here which is certainly no surprise to anyone reading the book. Lewis writes
Established closers were systematically overpriced, in large part because of the statistic by which closers were judged in the marketplace: “saves.” The very word made the guy who achieved them sound vitally important. But the situation typically described by the save–the bases empty in the ninth inning with the team leading–was clearly far less critical than a lot of other situations pitchers faced. The closer’s statistic did not have the power of language; it was just a number.
Author: Jean Shepherd
Published: October 1966
Read: September 28, 2020
I love the conceit of the book, in which the narrator returns home to his small Indiana hometown, meets an old friend and begins reminiscing.
He had drawn a beer for himself and another for me, broken out a bag pretzels, and we began to do some really good, slid Whatever-happened-to …?, Did-she-ever-marry …?, When-did-they-put-on-the-bowling-alley-down-at …?, and all the rest of it.
I love it in part because its so familiar. The book perfectly captures my experience returning to my small Indiana hometown and meeting with my old friends and reminiscing. Both Shepherd and I love to exaggerate and embellish for entertainment purposes and tell stories of our misadventures.
To begin with, heat, in Indiana, is something else again. It descends like a 300-pound fat lady onto a picnic bench in the middle of July. It can literally be sliced into chunks and stored away in the basement to use in winter; on cold days you just bring it out and turn it on. Indiana heat is not a meteorological phenomenon–it is a solid element something you can grab by the handles.
Shepherd just happens to be more compelling of a storyteller than I. For instance, his description of mosquitoes doesn’t accurately portray the reality of Indiana, it merely accurately portrays the feeling of Indiana.
Everyone is coated with an inch and half of something called citronella, reputedly a mosquito repellent but actually a sort of mosquito salad dressing.
The entire book is firmly grounded in Indiana. Shepherd even sneaks in a mention of euchre, to firmly establish his Indiana credentials.
But perhaps the most familiar aspect of the whole book is the feeling Shepherd captures of being someone who grew up and then left. Every time I return or talk to someone else from home, there’s this strange tension between the warm attachment I have for my hometown and the aversion to its humbleness. Or as Shepherd describes,
Inwardly I shuddered, realizing how narrowly I had missed being one of the boys myself, forever doomed to the Sheet Mill where I had once spent a few harrowing centuries one summer.
Author: Andre Agassi (in collaboration with John Joseph Moehringer)
Published: August 10th, 2010
Read: September 2rd, 2020
I don’t know anything about tennis and I did not know who Andre Agassi was; yet I flew through Open in two afternoons. It didn’t matter that I did not understand tennis because Open is about Andre’s relationships. The relationship he had with his trainer, his coach, his girlfriends, his rivals, and most importantly, his relationship with the game of tennis.
I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have.
Yet despite Andre’s supposed hate of the game, Andre can’t stop playing. Andre’s polarized, contradictory relationship with the game evokes a certain admiration and jealousy from me, for reasons that I need to sort out with a therapist. But I love it nonetheless. It reminds me of a similar sentiment from Vonnegut’s Slapstick,
He asked me politely how my work was going. I think he respects but is baffled by my work.
I said that I was sick of it, but that I had always been sick of it. I told him a remark which I had heard attributed to the writer Renata Adler, who hates writing, that a writer was a person who hated writing.
I told him too, what my agent, Max Wilkinson, wrote to me after I complained again about what a disagreeable profession I had. This was it: “Dear Kurt–I never knew a blacksmith who was in love with his anvil.”
We laughed again, but I think the joke was partly lost on my brother. His life has been an unending honeymoon with his anvil.
To me, there’s something intimate about these admissions that forms a kinship with their authors. But as Andre notes in the end, his autobiography is highly edited, even if it feels off the cuff, intimate, unfiltered. There are the little literary flourishes that are included. Andre loves the immediate callback. After a hard loss, Andre says,
Without thinking, I begin lighting things on fire. Paper, clothes, shoes. For years this has been one of my furtive ways of coping with extreme stress. I don’t do it consciously. An impulse comes over me and I reach of the matches.
Later on in the chapter, after describing a painful series of tournament losses, he writes,
Even though I’m a punching bad for sportswriters, big companies beg me to pose with their products. In the middle of 1989 one of my corporate sponsors, Canon, schedules a series of photo shoots, including one in the wilds of Nevada, in the Valley of Fire. I like the sound of that. I walk every day through a valley of fire.
There must be like a tennis volley. Ideas get tossed back and forth in quick succession. In the end, I don’t mind that the carefully edited sense of fellowship because of how good the book is.
Author: Wataru Watari
Illustration: Ponkan8
Published: 2011 (2016 English)
Read: September 1st, 2020
I have been rewatching the anime with friends and picked up the light novel to compliment the viewing. So it’s the third time I’ve been exposed to the material at hand. I’m actually very impressed by the anime adaptation of the source material. They take liberty in editing and cutting out material, but I think they did a great job in keeping the essential elements and trimming the rest.
I do like the afterword the author leaves for us.
Real youth is when two guys stop by a fast-food joint like Saizeriya after school and loiter around until evening, surviving only on fountain drinks and focaccia, desperately bad-mouthing people and complaining about school to kill time. Stuff like that. That is the real teen experience. I’ve gone through it myself, so it’s absolutely true.
I guess Daily Lives of High School Boys is more accurate to that version of life than My Youth. Still, for how many interesting takes and jumps the light novel has, the author seems surprisingly grounded.
Author: Paul Krugman
Published: January 2020
Read: August 25th, 2020
In thinking about this book, I think that one way to talk about books and writing in general is to discuss two primary aspects, its content and its presentation. While this might be a fairly obvious dichotomy, it is a helpful mental guidepost.
Author: Chan Koonchung (陈冠中)
Translator: Michael S. Duke
Published: 2009
Read: August 11th, 2020
At its heart, The Fat Years is political commentary and prediction. Elements of science fiction and romance and bits of plot and character development give the work a thin enough veneer to masquerade as fiction rather than a lengthy op-ed. However, despite being the most upfront of the works of political criticism I have read, it somehow reads as the least critical. At the end of 1984, the totalitarian government betrays, tortures and breaks our protagonist. At the end of Brave New World, the savage hangs himself to free himself from the World State. At the end of The Fat Years, all of our characters continue their average lives in the high functioning socialist market economy of China. Although the novel itself lacking all subtlety - the characters declare their feelings directly on the page with no subtext - the extremely mild criticism of China’s government may be, unexpectedly, intentional.
After all, unlike in the other dystopias, the government described in The Fat Years is not significantly different from the government that exists today. There is no genetic engineering happening as happened in Oryx and Crake and there is no revolutionary event as in The Handmaid’s Tale. Thus, The Fat Years feels not like a portrayal of the result of falling down a slippery slope, but rather like the next little tumble down that same slope. And if I am able to look at the world of The Fat Years and remark that it seems perfectly acceptable - then perhaps that is the concern that Koonchung is attempting to highlight. If only that were as direct as the other elements of the book.
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Published: 1976
Read: July 31st, 2020
Slapstick may be the first Vonnegut that clicked for me. I had read Slaughthouse 5, which falls between Breakfast of Champions, which went completely over my head, and Cat’s Cradle and Player Piano, which I both thought were interesting but did not burrow into my mind. But Slapstick was different. I think in part because it was autobiographical, or as close to it as Vonnegut allowed himself to be. But despite this, I would not blindly recommend this book to everyone. I’ve met many people that would read and understand it - but it just wouldn’t click with them. But even to those people, I think I would recommend Vonnegut’s prologue.
The prologue, like the rest of the novel, is wonderful and funny. But it is so concise that I think the time would be well spent for anyone. And it peeks into Vonnegut’s psyche
For my own part, though: It would have been catastrophic if I had forgotten my sister at once. I had never told her so, but she was the person I had always written for. She was the secret of whatever artistic unit I had ever achieved. She was the secret of my technique. Any creation which has any wholeness and harmoniousness, I suspect, was made by an artist or inventor with an audience of one in mind.
I don’t think this last sentence holds true universally, but it clearly was true of Slapstick.
Author: Frank Herbert
Published: August 1, 1965
Read: June 25th, 2020
Dune reads like a solid science fiction/fantasy book. It is grand in scope with its interplanetary empires and political scheming, fantastical in spirit with its sharp environments and prophetic visions, and personal in touch with its sound relationships. Perhaps that is sufficient enough praise for a book that, despite its age, stands tall among the contemporary counterparts that were allowed to be inspired by it. It is hard to read Dune without drawing immediate contrast to the science fiction/fantasy works that have come after it, but at the time, it is possible for me to imagine that Dune registered at a different level. After all, Dune has wormed its way into all facets of culture.
Author: Bobby Fischer, Stuart Margulies, Don Mosenfelder
Published: 1966
Read: June 14th, 2020
Due to my recent chess interest, I picked up this book, which is very accessible and meant for chess casuals and newcomers. The most interesting part of this book is actually the physical layout of the book. You are meant to read only the page on the right. Thus, on the back of each page (or the left page when the book is open), the text is printed upside down. This way, when you have read only the right page through the book, you flip the book around and continue reading on only the right page from the end back to the beginning. Incredibly smart layout.
Author: Peter Kuper
Published: 2018
Read: June 3rd, 2020
Kafkaesque is used to describe a scenario that is complex, bizarre, or illogical. At this moment in time, when protests are erupting in hundreds of cities across the United States during a time marked by pandemic and quarantines, the world seems to resemble Kafka more and more. Kafka is upsetting timely for the moment, but I also found uncomfortable fraternity in Kafka’s more personal Kafkaian labyrinths. From Give It Up! to A Hunger Artist, Kafka could not be more depressing or more relevant to the world or to me than at this moment.
Peter Kuper’s interpretation of Kafka’s flash fiction makes Kafkaesque: Fourteen Stories the absolute best way to be introduced to Kafka. If I could redo my introduction to Kafka - I would not have read The Metamorphosis or attempted reading The Trial until having first been introduced to Kafka through his flash fiction and Kuper’s interpretation of it.
Special thanks to my friend Caro for gifting me this book for Secret Santa last year!
Author: Naomi Novik
Date published: 2018
Date read: May 20, 2020
Recently, I have been watching Hikaru Nakamura stream and play chess online. Hikaru accounts for chess novices like myself by orienting his commentary towards more basic chess notions, such as pins, forks, and other tactics rather than more serious named openings like the Sicilian Defense. But perhaps the most entrancing games, the ones that keep me mesmerized, are the Odds games. An Odds game is one in which one player begins down material, perhaps with the queen removed or the two rooks or any combination of pieces removed. It strikes me as miraculous that one could win from such a position. If the opponent took only even trades (my bishop for your bishop), they would come out ahead. But Hikaru manages to win. It is possible because chess is a hard game and chess is a hard game because it is easy to make mistakes. Mistakes that allow your opponent, who is inherently weaker, to win material slowly but surely, until the tides have turned and the power imbalance is flipped the other way.
Spinning Silver’s strongest theme is that its strong female leads are all playing Odds games. Each one begin from a position of inherent weakness, and each one strategizes, bargains, and maneuvers their position to power. And although this emphasis on strong female leads is overwhelmingly conspicuous, I don’t mind it in the least. For when I was younger, I was incredibly dense. Certainly more dense than others my age. And especially when it came to reading. And I would have needed at least the level of intentionality demonstrated here in order to derive the useful lesson at the heart of this story. There are Odds games in life, and if you think harder than your opponents, it is possible to overcome them.
Author: Ted Chiang
Date published: May 7, 2019
Date read: April 26, 2020
Some have compared Ted Chiang’s stories to riddles. They are closer to reverse riddles. Rather than hiding the trick (it was an icicle) and asking one to work backwards to the consequences, Ted Chiang is upfront about the trick - this door accesses time 5 seconds ago, this device enables communication between parallel universes, this technology enables perfect memory - and asks what the consequences are.
The stories are narratively tight. They encapsulate small corners of big universes. There are a few words spent on the universe and many words spent on the small corners. And the stories almost always end up where they started and are all worth reading.
Author: Liu Cixin (刘慈欣)
Translator: Ken Liu
Date published: 2008 (En: 2014)
Date read: April 19, 2020
A work of raw imagination. While it lacks the subtlety of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go or the bewilderment of Murakami’s IQ84, The Three-Body Problem makes amends through its extensive portrayal of science and inventive devices to give those theories narrative gravity. There is much to admire about the direct approach that Liu Cixin employs to tell a multifaceted story.
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Date published: September 26, 2006
Date read: January 20, 2020
Cormac McCarthy was inspired by the hills of Texas to write The Road and I just happened to be traveling to Houston at the time I read the book. My college friends and I visited the Space Center, which reminded me of The Martian by Andy Weir. I was also reminded of The Left Hand of Darkness, which my friends and I are reading for book club. While both of those books feature extended parts of grueling survival travel, The Road distinguishes itself by being a hopeless one. There is no end goal. It is the constant struggle of survival combined with the oppressive despair that makes The Road a marvel to read. McCarthy mixes grief, despondency, love and wonder together in a way that makes knowing that death is unavoidable somehow okay in the end.
Author: J.D. Salinger
Date published: 1953
Date read: January 13, 2020
Dan Harmon, the creator of Community, talks about the basic structure that stories follow. It has eight parts, and it goes like this:
Dan writes,
Realize that it’s hardwired into your nervous system, and trust that in a vacuum, raised by wolves, your stories would follow this pattern.
And if you’ve read Chekhov, an acclaimed master of the short story, you can see this pattern in action. Sure, the subject matter, situation, premise at hand varies wildly and the packaging is fresh each time, but at the end of the day, Chekhov’s stories feel complete and whole. With Salinger, I felt like most stories left me with a sense of incompleteness. Not necessarily because his stories don’t necessary follow this pattern. Some do and reek of being excerpts instead of chapters of his characters’ lives.
Unsurprisingly, my favorite from his collection was also the most complete- For Esme with Love and Squalor. It’s a touching story of compassion and it makes you feel that mysterious sense of belonging which can escape everyone.
But stories like Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes and A Perfect Day for Bananafish tick the other way, squirreling themselves into your mind for differing reasons.
It’s hard to get a complete sense of Salinger from the lot of these stories, but reading a single one is enough to get a concrete read of who Salinger is and where he comes from.
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Date published: March 1969
Date read: January 5, 2020
Book club book. It’s of a much different form than one might expect from a science fiction book. It’s more alien political and cultural understanding than action. Even though those aspects, which drive most of the plot, do not need to be set in a science fiction world, there are other elements that demand the setting. Which I think separates out this sort of book from other science fiction books. There’s just more happening in this one. There’s more to discover, to imaginate, to learn about of this world.
I’ll pull excerpts out of this review that describe it better.
There were no lasers, no damsels, no chosen ones. There was war, yes, but a real war, a war not for the fate of the galaxy but for hatred and fear (things that rang true while living in America in late 2001). There was science, too, but it wasn’t the science of physics or technology. It was the science of culture. The science of bodies.
Another duality–and again another, in that this book is both about gender and not about gender at all.
Genly knows he needs to unpack his biases. He spends the entire book trying to do just that.
The book is subtle in the way that many science fiction books are not. I do not read subtle items very well which made The Left Hand of Darkness more challenging.
I think that society has changed since it’s original publication, but I do not think that those changes have made the book less relevant–perhaps only more subtle.