Favorite books and music of 2022

 As the season of "Year in Review" posts comes to an end, I'm thinking not only about the projects I saw through to completion this year (the biggest of which were the final revisions of my book manuscript), but the wonderful array of books and music I've consumed this year. Here's the roundup, along with some comments and observations.

Music

Strangely, my music consumption this year was modest compared to what it's been during previous years. Perhaps I was so absorbed with my various writing tasks, as well as with grant applications, prep for my CD recording in June, and the like, that I just didn't have it in me to engage in the depth of listening to match what I did in 2021. However, there were a few noteworthy albums I enjoyed. In classical music, the biggest discovery was Benjamin Allard's recording of the complete Bach organ works (with a few clavichord performances thrown in). I'm trying to listen to this relatively closely, so I've been slow to progress through the huge set; however, even just judging by the first couple of discs, the achievement is amazing. The playing is spectacular, and the music--much of which is new to me--is really brilliant. I've also been listening somewhat obsessively to the Peabody Trio's recording of Beethoven's Op.70 (these are on modern instruments, but are wonderfully flexible and deep), as well as to Robert Levin's complete Mozart sonata cycle, which I'll be reviewing next year. Outside of classical music, I've really enjoyed Ethan Iverson's jazz album "Every Note Is True" (especially for its large-scale pacing).

Books

But it was a good year for reading! As ever, I've been somewhat lazy about keeping up with academic literature in my field. I tend to think that the bad stuff, which isn't worth reading anyway, will turn out not to have mattered, and that the good stuff will keep rearing up over the coming years, and that if this is true it makes sense to hold off and read things a few years after they're published. Nonetheless, I did enjoy some new or new-ish academic books. Highlights in this category were:

• Matt Strohl, Why It's OK to Love Bad Movies (not exactly in my field, but there were enough resonances with my academic interests that I was able to review it for the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism)
• Adeline Mueller, Mozart and the Mediation of Childhood (a brilliant and exacting study, the kind that makes me realize just how lazy a historian I actually am)
• Rebecca Cypess, Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment
• Mark Ferraguto, Beethoven 1806
• Yoel Greenberg, How Sonata Forms (an excellent book, written in fabulous prose. The hardcore music-theory portions I'm not really qualified to comment on, but the premise, framing, and methodological discussions are revelatory and pertinent)
• Nicholas Mathew, The Haydn Economy
• Tom Beghin, Beethoven's French Piano
• John Butt, Bach's Dialogue with Modernity (can't believe it took me so long to get to this!)
• I also read a bunch of Benedict Taylor, whose stuff is pretty amazing (The Melody of Time remains a highlight)

Outside of academic writing, I had a particularly rich year of reading novels. Because I don't tend to keep track of how many novels I read per year, I don't actually know whether there were more than usual in 2022 (and in any case, I'm usually reading some sort of fiction)--but I have the sense that there were. Interestingly, although I didn't explicitly set out to read novels by women (I had tried this sort of thing in 2017 or '18, deciding to read only female novelists for a year), much of what I read ended up being by women, just by accident. There were some revelatory new finds for me:

• I read three novels by the wonderful Tessa Hadley - Free Love, Late in the Day, and The Past. I suspect that The Past may have been, in some absolute sense, the "best" of these; but Late in the Day was the one I found most moving and important, for my own life
• Octavia Butler, Blood Child - I didn't really enjoy this collection, but I'm told that my taste is faulty
• Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black - this was an amazing book, with some of the most beautiful sentences I've read in a long time. I didn't ultimately care for the story or characters, but the truly gorgeous prose was enough to keep me involved
• Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris - spectacular novel. If Mantel's sentences are the most beautiful I've read recently, Bowen is perfection at the level of the paragraph. A gorgeous novel, in every way.
• J.M. Coetzee, Foe - it took me about 66% of the book before I really got into it, but once this happened, it was excellent. And it's interesting to see seeds of Coetzee's trademark terseness in this early book of his. It was less sparse than his mature work, but there were passages of real beauty, where one had the sense that each word had been chosen with astonishing care, and this seemed to prefigure the experience of reading, say, Disgrace or Elizabeth Costello.
• Nabokov, Mary - again, astonishing prose, and remarkable book
• Rachel Cusk, Aftermath - is it fiction, or not? I found it moving but perplexing
• Proust, Swann's Way, in the Lydia Davis translation. This was great, and I tweeted a bit (in May? June?) about some favorite passages. I didn't love Proust when I read the cycle (in the old translation) some years ago, and though I see that this new edition is a big improvement, I still mostly didn't enjoy the text. There were some wonderful, revelatory, moving passages, though! But I found myself thinking back to that quip about Wagner, that there are lovely moments separated by terrible half-hours.
• Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow - recommended by a friend. Very easy to read, feels like literary candy. I didn't like the prose style, which felt smarmy and smug...but the last third of the book had some lovely things in it, and the ending was moving.
• Orwell, 1984
• Skinner, Walden Two

I also read some wonderful non-academic nonfiction:

• Russ Roberts, Wild Problems - highly recommended, very humane book with lots of wisdom in it
• Dan Moller, The Way of Bach - also highly recommended, a rare success at turning some detailed philosophical discussions of music and art into a reader-friendly trade book with a narrative arc. A model for what I'm trying to write at the moment, and far smarter, better, and deeper than some other attempts at this genre
• Tyler Cowen, An Economist Gets Lunch - tons of fun! I was less thrilled with his Discover Your Inner Economist
• Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist

I also read some good academic books from other fields, most notably Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth, Aaron Hanlon, A World of Disorderly Notions, Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture, and a few others.

All of this probably means that the "Recommended Books" tab on this blog needs to be updated!

Finally, I started and then abandoned a bunch of books that I just couldn't get into, despite (in all of these cases) wanting to be able to get into them. Perhaps my tastes just aren't quite up to the task, or I'm missing something?

• Ali Smith, Autumn
• Susan Blum, Ungrading
• Oliver Roeder, Seven Games (this, for instance, was a book I really wanted to love)
• Larry Lockridge, The Great Cypress Think Tank
• Jeremy Denk, Every Good Boy Does Fine
• Nick Riggle, On Being Awesome
• Laura Kipnis, Against Love
• Agnes Callard, Aspiration
• George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

I'm sure there were others as well, but I can't remember them.

And to end, I'll say that what I'm most looking forward to reading at the beginning of 2023 is more Elizabeth Bowen, Anita Brookner, and Maeve Brennan! Another year beginning with female novelists.

Happy new year!

ChatGPT and the animals

 Like most people I know, I've spent the last month+ experimenting with ChatGPT. I've asked it to write poetry; I've asked it arcane questions about various books and articles; I've asked it to create imaginary dialogues, podcasts, arguments, and debates between thinkers I admire from different centuries. And like most people who have put the new platform through its paces, I've come away with a mixed appraisal of its various skills. I've been impressed by its ability to handle requests that generally fall under the banner of what people think of as "creative" tasks; its poetry, for instance, especially within certain constraints, is a particular highlight. And I've enjoyed the dialogues it can come up with, spinning genuinely interesting fictional conversations between historical figures who, in reality, never met. I've been less taken with its logical abilities, which are questionable at best, and at worst make it abundantly clear that the bot isn't actually thinking, but just parroting text back at us. David Deutsch's flying-horse question gives a neat demonstration of this: the bot flatly contradicts itself and misunderstands the question in a way that can only mean it doesn't actually know what it's saying.

Playing with the bot has afforded one kind of pleasure; but nearly as fun and interesting has been to observe various public thinkers' reactions to this new technology. In particular, I've been struck by the far-reaching claims voiced by Tyler Cowen, who for much of this year has been making cryptic references to a coming revolution in AI tech that, he argues, will entirely transform how we use the internet, as well as how we work with and produce ideas. He says that ChatGPT is just the first step on this path--"bread crumbs, not dessert"--and although he could well be right, some of the individual claims he makes seem questionable to me.

For instance, he claims in a recent blog post that ChatGPT's linguistic competence likely narrows the gap between human and animal intelligence. This seems wrong to me--indeed, it's striking that one could make exactly the opposite argument just as plausibly (perhaps more plausibly). Although Tyler doesn't flesh out his version of the argument, I assume his line of thought would run something like this: ChatGPT displays enormous competency without needing to think; the competency approaches that of humans w/r/t language-use; this suggests that we aren't quite as special as we thought, and that other program-running devices like animals (which are like versions of ChatGPT, except they're programmed by evolution rather than by OpenAI) can approach the type of skills we have; thus we differ from them in degree rather than in kind.

However, that argument says much more about Tyler's "priors" than it does about humans or ChatGPT. If anything, to my eyes an argument with the exact opposite conclusion seems even more compelling! Here goes: ChatGPT shows that a program can display enormous competencies without needing to think; animals display enormous competencies, which many people want to attribute to thought; however, we can now see a demonstration that behavior that strikes a casual human observer as thought-like might not depend on thought at all; thus, it follow that animals might not actually need to think in order to perform the tasks they can perform; and if that's the case, the gulf between humans and animals is very likely to be wider than people think!

Of course, the fact that ChatGPT demonstrates that an entity can perform thought-like actions without thinking says nothing about the question of whether some other entity does need to think. So, this argument is purely analytic. CPT's ability to write sonnets doesn't ultimately settle the question of whether rats are conscious. But the version of the argument that I've laid out seems, to me, to increase the plausibility that complex behavior by non-humans can be accomplished algorithmically. Of course, just as Tyler's version of the argument says more about his priors than it does about animals, the same is true for my version. I was already inclined, intuitively, to buy the arguments of philosophers who think that consciousness exists only in people.

Tyler's other claims about the philosophical implications of ChatGPT seem equally stretched. He asks, for instance, why the aliens haven't visited us. Now that we see how easily the trappings of intelligence can be conjured by programmers, surely evolution or some other such force must have created far more intelligence across the universe than we can know? But, to build on Deutsch's point about GPT and the flying-horses, the better conclusion to draw would be that the outward suggestion of intelligent behavior is misleading, and that genuine thought remains rare, on our planet and possibly elsewhere as well.