Books I read in 2024
February 4, 2025
This is a list of the books I read in 2024. ★ means I loved it; ⟳ is a re-read. Here are previous year lists: 2022, 2023.
The books are in reverse order of when I put them into Zotero; I read some books right away, while others waited around for five or ten months until the time was right.
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A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East 1914-1922, David Fromkin. A history of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, waning and fumbling British influence, and a lot of Churchill. A strong book on WWI as well.
The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millenium, Martin Gurri. An early exploration of the digital revolution and the transition of social power.
★The Golden Mole and Other Living Treasures, Katherine Rundell. A collection of Rundell’s LRB columns on animals; I read aloud to MWG on Whatsapp audio messages.
The Marriage Portrait, Maggie O’Farrell. A novel about the short life of Lucrezia de’Medici; death hangs over the entire novel but in my memory it was cheerful and hopeful regardless?
Orkney, Amy Sackville. A novel; I’m a sucker for an unreliable narrator but this might have gone too far. Beautiful setting.
Affordable Excellence: The Singapore Healthcare Story, William A. Haseltine. Excellent, short, delivers on the title. The importance of initial conditions. Import more doctors. They take induced demand very seriously. None of this matters if they can’t get fertility up.
★Here, Richard McGuire. The best visual art of the year? The importance of continuity.
Call to Arms, L.U. Xun. A seminal short story collection, critiques of early 20th century Chinese society.
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, Roger Williams. A 1994 controversial sci-fi novel about alignment. Not very deep; very fun.
Haig’s Enemy: Crown Prince Rupprecht and Germany’s War on the Western Front, Jonathan Boff. A biography of Rupprecht – Haig is absent. This was a good WWI year for me, largely kicked off by this book.
★Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest, Wade Davis. This book couldn’t quite decide what it wanted to be, alternating between a biography of Mallory, a meditation on psychological effects of the Western Front, a mountaineering guide, and a collection of essays. It really comes together.
A Countess Below Stairs, Eva Ibbotson. An early but very modern romance novel. A Russian countess flees the revolution to England, where she works as a maid in a Duke’s household. You can guess the rest of the plot. Ibbotson (of Which Witch? fame) is always worth reading.
Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino. A collection of sci-fi tales, fun and whimsical, with depth.
The Canadian Contribution to a Comparative Law of Secession: Legacies of the Quebec Secession Reference, ed. Giacomo Delledonne and Guiseppe Martinico. An academic volume on the 1998 Supreme Court of Canada Reference on the sucession of Quebec, looking at influences on global constitutional theory and practice. I intended to read just one essay, but this was really good!
Chaucer, G.K. Chesterton. A literary biography; the theology goes over my head. That’s OK: Chesterton wasn’t only a Christian apologist. The man is an apologist for much else: modernism, bureaucracy, incrementalism, and a certain type of aesthetic hedonism. Chaucer is the lens he uses here.
So Far So Good, Ursula K. Le Guin. A late collection of her poetry.
The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years, Sonia Shah. Not Great.
At Night All Blood is Black, David Diop. A novel about a Senegalese soldier fighting for France in WWI. Violence, colonialism, racism, madness.
The Morning Gift, Eva Ibbotson. Similar to A Countess Below Stairs, also focused on refugees, more of a memoir of Ibbotson’s own life.
High Adventure, Edmund Hillary. A story of his early life, and the conquest of Everest. There’s a reason we have ghost writers today.
Coronation Everest, Jan Morris. The story of the conquest of Everest – by the professional writer they brought along! Morris is one of my favorite writers, and I didn’t know she was on the 1953 expedition until I came across this book.
The Lost Explorer: Finding Mallory on Mount Everest, Conrad Anger and David Roberts. Details on a 1999 expedition to recover George Mallory’s body; no insight into the question of whether he reached the summit.
The Black Box: Cocpit Voice Recorder Accounts, Malcolm J. McPherson. Fine, but just read Cloudberg.
The World Through Blunted Sight: An INquiry into the Influence of Defective Vision on Art and Character, Patrick Trevor-Roper. An exploration of how visual impairments influenced their work. I thought it was the other Trevor-Ropert.
The Guns of the South, Harry Turtledove. A novel of alternate history; Robert E. Lee gets Kalishnikovs.
The Animal That Therefore I Am, Jacques Derrida. Continental philosophy on our relationship with animals. Our understanding of ourselves is imperiled by how we view and relate to animals.
The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, William Goldman. Read outloud to MWG over Whatsapp audio messages.
Carrying the Fire, Michal Collis. A memoir of a full life and a trip to the moon. Not as funny as sold to me, but excellent.
Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing, Robert Caro. How the greatest biographies are produced. The word “I” doesnn’t appear out of quotes in The Power Broker – Caro put all the “I”s here.
The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks agains the United States, Jeffrey G. Lewis. A speculative novel; I learned a lot. I didn’t know the range of the Hwasong-15, and now I do.
Uncommon Carriers, John McPhee. Immersive journalism; McPhee embeds with various freight transport systems; intimate portraits. The chapter on barges was excellent.
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee. A history of cancer from ancient times to modern treatment. Unfocused at times.
The Piazza Tales, Herman Melville. A collection of the short stories. I got it to re-read Bartleby, but every story was excellent
Harry, A History: The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon, Melissa Anelli. A document on the rise of fandom culture and online communities, by an insider and publisher.
The Trials of Lila Dalton, L.J. Shepherd. A novel; not worth my time, but I kept hoping it would get better.
Batrachomyomachia, or, the Battles Between the Frogs and the Mice, trans. Alicia Stallings. A beautiful and whimsical new translation of a Homeric parody. Grant Silverstein’s illustrations make me want a physical copy.
The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph A. Tainter. An argument that complex societies collapse when increasing complexity has negative marginal returns. Short and important, but not necessarily correct. Society has never been as complex as it is today.
Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, Daniel L. Everett. An anthropologist’s popular account of his (and his family’s) time with an isolated Amazonian tribe. Great anecdotes; I talked about this one a lot.
The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch. Fantasy; I wasn’t motivated to pick up book 2.
Nuclear War: A Scenario, Annie Jacobsen. Similar to the 2020 Commission Report above; much more speculative.
Debt of Honor, Tom Clancy. Sometimes you just need a Jack Ryan novel. Who is the 1990s era Tom Clancy of today?
Executive Orders, Tom Clancy. Ditto.
El Diego, Diego Maradona (transcribed by Daniel Arucci). A memoir of the greatest footballer of the 20th century. Profane and extremely detailed. I talked about this one a lot.
Xinjiang in the Twenty-First Century: Islam, Ethnicity, and Resistance, Michael Dillon. An examination of the status quo: ethnicity, religion, resistance.
Pivot of Asia: Sinkiang and the inner Asian frontiers of China and Russia, Owen Lattimore. From 1950; everything was already brewing.
Waiting to be Arrested at Night, Tahir Hamut Izgil. A memoir of life under surveillance and oppression, and escape, as a poet. Very recent.
High: A Journey Across the Himalays, Through Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal, and China, Erika Fatland. A travelogue.
⟳What’s Wrong with the World, G.K. Chesterton. A critique of modern (1920s) social reforms; arguments that progressive solutions often worsen the problems they aim to fix.
A Matter of Honor, Jeffrey Archer. A thriller, poorly dated.
Kolymsky Heights, Lionel Davidson. A Cold War thriller. The hero is an Alaskan native American. Parts get really weird. Overall good.
★The Man Who Rode the Thunder, William Rankin. A memoir of a fighter pilot who ejected in 1959 over a massive thunderstorm. It took him over an hour to hit to ground. He was struck by lightning while falling. It’s really good!
The General, C.S. Forester. A novel of WWI, pathetic and devastating with an appropriately stiff upper lip.
Scoop, Waugh. A satire of foreign journalists during African decolonization.
The Inheritors, William Golding. A novel imagining life through the eyes of a Neanderthal family as they encounter and are displaced by us. Meditations of consciousness, language, and violence.
★True Grit, Charles Portis. A western novel, truly funny and emotional.
In a Free State, V.S. Naipaul. A collection of novellas and stories; the one that sticks in my memory is about two Brits driving through a newly independent African country about to erupt in civil war.
The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarioans and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Norman Cohn. A history of medieval apocalyptic movements, with lessons on how social upheaval sparked reovlutionary groups.
Wife to Mr. Milton, Robert Graves. A novel about John Milton’s tumltuous first marriage through the eyes of his wife. Good, but I don’t know enough about the English Civil War to have really loved it.
The Nasty Bits, Anthony Bourdain. A collection of his long essays, journals, and meditations. I love the travel stuff, but his true passion was always New York’s restaurant scene.
A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, Laurel Ulrich. A very deep biography of someone we otherwise would never have heard of: a midwife in post-revolutionary Maine.
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, Richard Rhodes. More political and less physical than his more famous The Making of the Atomic Bomb. I actually preferred this one.
Dominion: The Power of Man, The Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, Matthew Scully. A G.W. Bush speechwriter makes the case for you, a red-blooded American, to go vegan.
Nine Lives: My Time as MI6’s Top Spy Inside al-Qaeda, Aimen Dean. A memoir of an al-Qaeda defector, a specialist in bomb-making. The most interesting parts are early in his life, when he fought in Bosnia and the Philippines.
Churchill, Andrew Roberts. A biography; does what it says on the tin.
My Family and Other Animals: A True Story, Gerald Durrell. A very funny account of a British childhood on Corfu in the 1930s, lots of wildlife and ribbing of his more famous brother Lawrence.
The Story of My Life, Helen Keller. A memoir, with a very long digression into a court case she was involved in at the time.
An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, Arundhati Roy. A collection of essays on early 2000s Indian social issues and the Iraq War.
Consent: A Memoir, Vanessa Springora. A memoir about a marriage, beginning in her teens and lasting half a century.
★Beauties, Anton Chekov. A collection of his stories, really excellent.
The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia, A.N. Lankov. A dry but fascinating modern account, from a Russian who has spent lots of time there.
William Blake, G.K. Chesterton. A biography: Blake as a mystic. We think that he was a madman. If you think he was mad, well, he was just the last holdout of the spiritualists against the tide of rationalism.
Raw Thought Raw Nerve: Inside the Mind of Aaron Swartz, Aaron Swartz. A collection of his blog posts from a short, chaotic, driven life. Wikipedia and Reddit.
★Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A journalistic novel. I’ve loved his non-fiction, and I’m easing into the big fiction.
Fine Structure, Sam Hughes. A sci-fi novel, very innovative and fun. Hughes (qntm) is an underrated and versatile plotmaster.
Readings, Michael Dirda. A collection of columns by the Washington Post’s books columnist. All of these are from before I could read, so they were all new. But I’m sure Dirda was in the water.
Very Important People, Ashley Mears. An ethnography of VIP nightlife culture, using her experiences as a model-turned-academic.
★The Fall of Constantinople, Steven Runciman. A reconstruction of the 1453 Ottoman conquest of Constantinople.
Samson Agonistes, John Milton. The famous poem. Truly great.
Understanding Power, Noam Chomsky. A thousand pages of transcripts of Chomsky in conversation.
Perspectives on the Security of Singapore, Ed. Barry Desker and Cheng Guan Ang. A collection of essays; didn’t quite scratch the itch but informative.
The Midnight Library, Matt Haig. I did not like this novel.
Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino. A collection of essays on life and culture, growing up in the late 90s and 2000s.
⟳The Cyberiad, Stanislaw Lem. A collection of sci-fi stories from one of the all-time greats.
The Shooting Party, Isabel Colegate. A classic depiction (and light satire) of English country life on the eve of WWI.
★Shuttle Down, G. Harry Stine. The space shuttle lands on Easter island. This is not a good book. I loved it.
Civilizations, Laurent Binet. An alternate history: the Inca and Aztec invade Europe. I had really high hopes based on HHhH and this premise. Competent but not blown away.
Sperm Whales, Hal Whitehead. Synthesizes decades of research on sperm whale biology, social behavior, and intelligence.
A Problem from Hell, Samantha Power. Power the journalist meditates on the past century of genocide, and America’s role. There’s a mini-200 page biography of Raphael Lemkin in the early chapters, which shines.
Imperial Reckoning, Caroline Elkins. A new history of the Mau Mau uprising, and the vicious British response.
Jony Ive, Leander Kahney. A biography of Apple’s great designer. Probably a bit too early to be Great. Ive is mostly working of OpenAI at the moment.
★Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov. A campus novel. Possibly the best book I read this year.
Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, H. Beam Piper. A sci-fi/alternative history from the 60s. Entertaining, ends abruptly
The Vegetarian, Han Kang. A South Korean novel about a woman who stops eating meat.
Our Lady of the Nile, Melanie Mauthner. A book about a catholic girl’s school at the source of the Nile in Rwanda, pre-genocide. Excellent!
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Mark Fisher. An argument; capitalist ideology is so pervasive that we can’t imagine alternatives, and this is what is causing depressive resignation that paralyzes political and cultural imagination.
The Grid, Gretchen Anna Bakke. A modern history of America’s aging electrical grid, especially focused on how problems of centralized design struggle with renewable engergy integration.
★Seven Seconds to Die: A Military Analysis of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War and the Future of Warfighting, John F. Antal. An analysis of the 2020 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, with a focus on how drones, sensors, precision weapons, and AI are changing things. Will certainly be important.
Ra, Sam Hughes. Really weird and innovative modern sci-fi. Hughes has a top notch imagination.
A Voyage Around the Queen, Craig Brown. A posthumous biography of Queen Elizabeth II. Compelling.
The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area, Malcolm Margolin. A history of pre-colonial life in the Bay Area, detailing their ecological integration and knowledge.
To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care, Cris Beam. A portrait of foster parents and kids. A system which refuses to work.
Orbital, Samantha Harvey. A novel; 24 uneventful hours on the ISS.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Trans. J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien translates the Middle English poem beautifully if not faithfully. Rollicking.
The End of the World, Geoffrey Dennis. A chronicle of apocalyptic predictiosn throughout history, examing religious prophecies, scientific scenarios, and cultural fears. From the 1920s, lots of rhymes.
Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism, Brooke Harrington. An academic goes undercover as a wealth manager. Not as informative as I hoped.
Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery, Theodore H. Schwartz. A brain surgeon writes about history and practice. The history chapters were weak, but he is a good writer and full of anecdotes.
Making the Corps, Thomas Ricks. A journalist embeds with a Marine Corps recruit platoon through boot camp, 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Perceptive about civil-military relations, but out of date.
The German Generals Talk, Basil Henry Liddell Hart. A British historian interrogates Nazi generals and writes up the war from their perspective. Very insightful.
On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, Alice Goffman. An ethnography of criminalized young black men in Philadelphia. Goffman got in trouble for getting too close to her subjects; the criticism was racial and sexual and flawed and just overall annoying.
China’s War with Japan: 1937-1945, Rana Mitter. A history of that front; the American title was America’s Forgotten Ally or something like that. Important to understand contemporary dynamics!
Massacre in Malaya: Exposing Britain’s My Lai, Christopher Hale. Really an excellent history of Malaya (and Singapore!) from the 17th century; Hale uses the Batang Kali massacre as an excuse to trace the history of the region.
Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age, Eric Berger. The second book in Berger’s SpaceX series, focusing on the Falcon 9 up through Falcon Heavy development.
Men at Arms, Evelyn Waugh. The first in Waugh’s WWII trilogy. Funny and insightful and I’m probably missing most of it by not being British.
Officers and Gentlemen, Evelyn Waugh. Second in the trilogy.
Unconditional Surrender, Evelyn Waugh. The conclusion; scathing of Americans.
The Eastern Front: A History of the First World War, Nick Lloyd. Lloyd is writing a trilogy on WWI, the first was on the western front, and now he’s moved on to the eastern. Very detailed military history.
Career and Family, Claudia Goldin. How women’s career opportunities (in America) evolved over generations. A master work of pop economics and rigorous history.
True Porn Clerk Stories, Ali Davis. A collection of essays about her experiences working at an adult video store in 2000s Chicago. Humorous and humanizing observations about customers, retail work, and society’s relationship with pornography.
19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, Eliot Weinberger. A collection of 19 (almost 40 in the new edition) translations of a Tang dynasty poem, accompanied by often-scathing criticism from Weinberger
Bea Wolf, Zach Weinersmith. A reimagination of Beowulf in modern suburban America, beautifully illustrating, begging to be read aloud.
East African: An Airline Story, Peter J. Davis. A history of East African Airlines, from the WWI days supporting the campaign in the Bundu to decolonization and bankruptcy. Excessively detailed.
Additionally, I re-read ⟳ all of the books in the 1632 series, the Murderbot series, and Wildbow’s Worm. But these are like candy and I’m midly ashamed.
I also spent a lot of time with sub-books this year. Two of my favorite physical books are the Penguin collections of Borges fiction and non-fiction, and I found myself opening these and reading small selections often. The same with Tales from Shakespeare and Shakespeare plays; Raymond Carver, Tolstoy, Orwell’s fiction and non-fiction, Ambedkar, and Keynes’ collections.
Poetry followed a similar pattern: I have two Norton anthologies and The Oxford Book of American Poetry on my tablet (in total, 5,000 pages of poetry!), and I would often flick through, sometimes reading them outloud on Whatsapp audio messages to people. I also revisited individual poets through the year: Byron, Rita Dove, Tennyson, Neruda, Tagore, William Blake, and Dickinson. But I’ve stopped trying to read books of poetry all at once.