How were 2, 6, 18, 38, and 60? Are they worth tracking down and reading or nah?

The Brass City is pretty good character-driven contemporary fantasy, with bonus points if you like Middle Eastern flavor (unsurprisingly).  Nothing super special, but probably worth reading.

How Democracy Dies and The Triumph of Christianity are both…unconvincing, which is a bad thing for extruded pop nonfiction product to be.

Mismatch is worth reading if you care about education policy, and if you’re not skittish about facing down the ramifications of the achievement gap etc.  As with many topical nonfiction books, it’s better at posing a problem than at providing good answers – in particular, the author kicks the can from higher education to primary/secondary education in a way that’s likely to infuriate you if you know anything about the existing problems in middle and high school – but overall I recommend it.

Shutting Out the Sun is very weird and kind of nuts.  It’s meant to be the Comprehensive Explanation of the Hikikomori Phenomenon, and it is…definitely not that thing.  It makes a lot of very sweeping assertions, some of which probably have some insight in them and all of which are ultimately very questionable.  It’s a hella interesting book, but much more for what it says about the author than for what it says about Japan; it was written right before the 2008 crash, and it’s very much in the vein of “here’s how Japan should fix itself by being more like the awesome US,” and I feel like it prefigures some of the stranger argumentative flourishes you see on the weird-right today.