In the lead up to Christmas we’re asking readers, contributors and people we’re fans of here at Nextness to tell us their favourite book of the year. Whether it inspires your own holiday reading list or helps you buy for that hard-to-please brainiac, please enjoy Wishlisting: books we loved in 2012. Part One here. Part Two. And now: Rachel Hills, David Trewern, and Ben Harris-Roxas.
Rachel Hills | In Praise of Messy Lives, by Katie Roiphe.
Journalist and literary critic Katie Roiphe isn’t too well-liked in the small-l liberal feminist circles I inhabit online – in fact, I’ve been paid a couple of times this year to deconstruct her articles. But man, the woman can wield a sentence! In Praise of Messy Lives, Roiphe’s collection of essays on everything from divorce and single motherhood, to Gawker, Jane Austen and Joan Didion, is startlingly well written, full of lyrical phrasing and deft observations. Better still, it feels like reading the blog posts of your soon-to-be new best friend: you may not agree with everything Roiphe has to say (I didn’t), but you can’t wait to tear into it with her over the dinner table.
Rachel Hills is a journalist who writes on gender, culture and the politics of everyday life. | @rachelhills
David Trewern | Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson.
The Steve Jobs biography was my favourite book of 2012… of course! It made me think about the dynamics, the relationships, the drivers that shape a person to go well above and beyond what most humans can achieve. Two sides to the coin: there is a very high cost that comes with this level of greatness. Both for people close to Steve Jobs (such as the mother of his first child) and Steve Jobs himself, whose cancer could well have been exacerbated by the highly stressful environment that he kept himself in. Some interesting parallels with Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.
David Trewern is the Founder of DTDigital, and Chief Digital Officer at STW Group. | @davidtrewern.
Ben Harris-Roxas | The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever, by Alan Sepinwall.
We’ve lived through a golden age of television drama in recent years. Sweeping, epic tales are now told over entire seasons. Broader narrative arcs are now plotted out well in advance (look, Lost was a good show, shut up). Detailed worlds are created and explored. Characters actually change.
The Revolution Was Televised chronicles this change. The book describes twelve shows ranging from Oz to Breaking Bad. Each chapter is made up of interviews and criticism and they each stand alone. If you haven’t gotten around to watching The Wire yet you can skip the chapter and avoid spoilers. Sepinwall writes beautifully and has obviously given a huge amount of thought to each show.
I have wondered if this book, a genuinely great piece of television criticism, can only be written now that television as a medium has ceased to be disruptive, to be scary. The same thing happened with film scholarship; film could only be taken seriously once it had been overtaken by TV in people’s daily lives. The great moral panics of our era now centre around the internet, not TV, so maybe that’s why it’s now acceptable to take TV seriously.
If I have a small issue with this book it’s that there is an unstated assumption the era of long-arc television is current and will endure. I tend to think it’s on the decline. Intricate non-episodic drama was enabled by the spread of cable television and DVD season box sets. Both these distribution channels are becoming less dominant and more fragmented. Hulu and Netflix original programming may be a source for this type of program in future but really, nobody knows what TV will look like even three years from now. Interestingly Sepinwall has subverted traditional distribution channels himself by self-publishing this as an ebook, despite being one of the U.S.’ best known television writers.
It’s certainly the best value book I’ve ever bought for $7.
Ben Harris-Roxas is a public health consultant based in Sydney. He writes for Limited News and is the one of the most consistently valuable tweeters we’ve followed this year. | @ben_hr.