Year in Reading, 2024

Another rough year of reading; entering my second year of being a stay-at-home dad, and the kid gets ever more mobile and up to trouble. I could tell you more than you ever want to know about Sesame Street characters and tropes, but will limit myself to sharing the 36 books I finished this year, along with my bolded favorites.

If you want to know more about what I thought, I post my impressions/reviews over on Goodreads.

High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies by Eric Davis
The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut
The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War by Louis Menand
Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics by Kim Phillips-Fein
Suddenly, a Knock on the Door by Etgar Keret
Songs of a Dead Dreamer & Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti
The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam by James William Gibson
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts by Clive James
The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald
Fault Lines: A History of the United States since 1974 by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer
White Noise by Don DeLillo
In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcolm
The Age of Nixon: A Study in Cultural Power by Carl Freedman
Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next by Lee Smolin
I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole by Elias Canetti
The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer
The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World by Greg Grandin
The Third Reich in History and Memory by Richard J. Evans
To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949 by Ian Kershaw
The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View by Ellen Meiksins Wood
Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse
Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt (and Timothy Snyder)
Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9/11, Iraq by John W. Dower
The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II by John W. Dower
Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life by Richard Beck
Persuasion by Jane Austen
The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation by Tom Engelhardt
Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past, edited by Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt
The Magic Years: Understanding and Handling the Problems of Early Childhood by Selma H. Fraiberg
The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War by Stephen Kinzer
Conscience and Power: An Examination of Dirty Hands and Political Leadership by Stephen Garrett
Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed—and Why It Still Matters by Andrew Gumbel and Roger G. Charles
Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard

The neat numbered list masks some serious rough patches: weeks where I would go to sleep soon after the baby so I could get enough rest for the next day. Not conducive to reading, and as a result there were more books I started but had to abandon simply because I didn’t have the brain for it.

One excellent author especially prone to this problem: Ellen Meiksins Wood. She is a wonderful historian who focuses on how the social forces underlying capitalism came about, with the central insight that we can’t write a history of capitalism that carries within it the assumption that capitalism was always there, waiting for the right conditions to spread. Begging the question, and an incomplete explanation in any case.

Since so much of her work is untangling the shoddy or outright bad schema of other historians, it is both very difficult to read (because you have to kind of unwind other accounts and what you know) but also very specific and clear writing. A joy to read, but you have to sit down and pay attention in a way that was simply impossible for large chunks of the year. So I had to bail on two of her books, finally settling for a much-shorter The Origin of Capitalism which I was able to muscle through in a better week. Still, I really want to revisit her ASAP and hold her in much higher regard than the list above would indicate.

As usual, my reading was heavier on the non-fiction, specifically history around the Cold War and its aftermath and there were a few here that jumped up into all-time faves.

The Perfect War, on the Vietnam War, does an incredible job laying out the organizational pathologies in the US Military during that conflict. Unable to solve the legitimacy problem that bedeviled Diem and successors, they instead used the latest in industry, technology, and management techniques to dispense incredible amounts of suffering on the Vietnamese people—civilians and fighters alike. Kill Anything That Moves is a more recent book that focuses on reporting specific incidents and distilling the grunt-level experience—less academic and not as extraordinary, but probably a better foothold if you’re not read-up on the conflict.

Homeland by Richard Beck was the only book I read this year also published this year, but it was worth breaking my rule and shelling out for the hardback. There have been some other good books covering the American freak-out after 9/11 (and subsequent violence visited on the foreign other) like Reign of Terror by Spencer Ackerman, but Beck’s tome is the best at capturing and examining the weird feeling in American culture after the attacks, and how it was catalyzed by politicians and cultural institutions into some really nasty shit, across multiple administrations and through an ongoing expansion of executive power. I can’t really do it justice in a paragraph, but this is a heavy recommend.

Most of my reading doesn’t really count as uplifting, per se, but I did have some delights this year through discovering some new-to-me fiction. One highlight: Thomas Pynchon! I figured I’d enjoy Inherent Vice since the film is one of my favorites, but I was very happily surprised by how great Vineland was. Set in the depths of the Reagan years (but jumping back a decade or two at times), it’s a very empathetic look at characters trying to carve out some corner of humanity against an increasingly-repressive state and culture. If you’ve read and enjoyed David Foster Wallace, this feels like the missing link between his work and Pynchon.

I also read my first DeLillo (White Noise, way funnier than I expected) and Sebald (The Emigrants, very wistful), both wonderful authors I really need to read more of.

I also gotta shout out Thomas Ligotti: a god of horror, writing tales that’ll get under your skin. I’d started his Penguin Classics volume combining Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe a few years back, but finally got the time (and nerve) to sit down and finish it this year. I also finished The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, his only non-fiction, right at the end of 2023; it has stuck with me, to say the least.

It is, frankly, embarrassing how much of my mental health relies on reading a good book. A dud (and there were a few of those) can bum me out for days, while being in limbo between books makes me sit around the house and stare into space. Just gotta carve out the time and energy to keep reading, despite the distractions and amidst whatever random curveballs the kiddo throws at me. At least I’ve made it nineteen months without her chewing up any of my books.