Another Year of Reading

My book report for 2024

I started my Substack a year ago with a report on the books I had read in 2023. I had kept a resolution to read fifty books that year, and I enjoyed it so much that I resolved to do it again in 2024. I’ll confess that I raced through some lightweight fare in December to reach my goal, but I ended the year pleased with the effort.

As before, I read a mix of fiction and non-fiction. Much of the fiction was in the realm of mysteries and thrillers – what one friend calls sitting down with “a nice, relaxing murder.” Another group of titles were part of a mostly-failed search for modernist fiction as good as a couple of my 2023 favorites. With the help of friends, I also found several authors, new to me, whose work I enjoyed.

In nonfiction, I read several books as background for a paper I have forthcoming in the journal California History, and one as background for a paper I’ve been reviewing for the Business History Review. I’ve mostly tried to avoid “big ideas” books since my encounter with Malcolm Gladwell, but it turns out I couldn’t stay away altogether. But some of my most enjoyable reading was in unusual topic areas.

Above the shelves at Clio in Oakland, California

Here are the highlights, and a few pans, from my reading for 2024:

Fiction – Mysteries and Thrillers

Let’s start with the mysteries and thrillers. I have to give special notice to Nicholas Meyer’s Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell. Nick is a personal friend, so I have to admit to some bias, but it’s a terrific book. Nick has always, since The Seven Per-Cent Solution, been meticulous about fitting his Holmes stories into their historical context and the narrative arc of the original Conan Doyle canon. This one is set in World War I, after the last of the Conan Doyle pieces, but it follows on “His Last Bow” in a logical way. Nick’s Watson sounds just right, and the story moves along wonderfully. A Holmes pastiche of a different type is Anthony Horowitz’s Moriarty. Like Nick’s Seven Per-Cent Solution, it develops an alternate history of the period after Holmes’s apparent demise at the Reichenbach Falls. I liked this one, too, but I can’t say much more without spoilers.

I also read several of what you might call classic mysteries including Agatha Christie’s The Mystery of the Blue Train and The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, and Rex Stout’s Plot it Yourself and The Second Confession. Not quite so old are Walter Mosley’s Every Man a King and John Lescroart’s Treasure Hunt. Brendan Slocumb writes mysteries set in the world of high-end classical music, also dealing with the challenges musicians of color face in that milieu. I liked Symphony of Secrets better than The Violin Conspiracy, but both were good.

One of my friends pointed me to Stuart M. Kaminsky and Andrea Camilleri, both of whose lead characters are detectives trying to solve murders involving powerful, corrupt elements – the KGB or FSB for Kaminsky, and the Sicilian Mafia for Camilleri. The detectives really do want to solve the murders, but what makes these stories so good is the finesse with which they avoid getting crosswise with the KGB/FSB/Mafia. A Cold Red Sunrise and Death of a Dissident (Kaminsky) and Game of Mirrors (Camilleri).

If you love thrillers, I have to point you to Eric Ambler (as my friend Nick pointed me), who wrote some of the earliest and best titles in the genre. Ambler was a master of description – sly and understated, yet often brilliant. In A Coffin for Dimitrios, the protagonist, Latimer, is a writer of mystery novels, who decides on an impulse to try to investigate a real-life murder. I’ll just say that the murder is not what it appears to be (are they ever in mystery novels?), and Latimer finds himself far over his head in what proves to be a dangerous situation. The book is also a tour of Central Europe in the years before World War II, a time when the war had not yet started, but was beginning to seem inevitable. After A Coffin for Dimitrios, I couldn’t resist hunting up other Ambler titles. Uncommon Danger is another thriller set in Central Europe, mostly Linz, Austria and Prague. The protagonist is again a writer, this time an English free-lance journalist, who falls into the middle of a wartime intrigue in which he is quickly over his head. There’s plenty of fog-of-war confusion, moral ambiguity, and action upon action. Satisfying and entertaining.

Nick also pointed me to the more recent work of Robert Harris. Act of Oblivion is the story of the hunt for Col. Edward Whalley and Col. William Goffe (Whalley’s son-in-law), who lived on the lam in New England for 15+ years after the Restoration. (The Act of Oblivion was a measure basically wiping out the memory of Cromwell’s republic, and a bill of attainder against the regicides, including Whalley and Goffe, who signed the warrant for the execution of Charles I.) While Whalley and Goffe (and John Dixwell, another regicide) have major thoroughfares named for them in New Haven, and even Yale students have heard of Judges’ Cave on West Rock, where they hid out for quite some time, the known historical details of their flight and concealment are pretty sketchy, creating the opening for an interesting novelization. Harris has taken up the challenge well. He creates just one major fictional character, Richard Nayler, for whom the hunt for Whalley and Goffe becomes an obsession. After reading Act of Oblivion, I was a Harris admirer. After Archangel, I’m a fan. This one is set in Russia in the chaotic years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Fluke Kelso is an almost-great academic, who finds himself chasing down an obscure, and potentially scandalous, Stalin diary. The chase takes him from Moscow to, you guessed it, Arkhangel, and back. This is much more of an action thriller than Oblivion. While I guessed some of the general shape of the twists and turns of the plot, I didn’t figure out too much of it. As long as this one is, it’s a page-turner.

Two unusual and ambitious mysteries turned out to be very good. Katie Williams’s My Murder takes place in central Michigan, in a future with technologies – immersive VR, autonomous taxi services, ubiquitous screens – advanced from today’s, but still recognizable. The story turns on one technology that is more fanciful. We meet Louise as a recently-awakened clone of a murder victim, carrying with her all the victim’s memories and background except for the time period immediately surrounding the killing. She eventually decides to find out who killed her (the man convicted of the crime seems not to have done it), and what she discovers is – well, that would be a spoiler, wouldn’t it?

Top Choice

Last year, my top choice, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, was a real standout. This year I liked a number of titles better than others, but there wasn’t really a runaway winner. But I’ll tap for the top spot the second unusual mystery, Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz. I stepped into it a little too slowly, but once I was well in, finished this longish novel in a shortish time. Joe Barrow is a detective in the city of Cahokia, in an alternative history in which that great pre-Columbian city thrived and survived as a multiethnic metropolis into the 20^th Century (with the Mound, which in reality is just off I-70 not far east of St. Louis, as its central feature), and St. Louis remained a tiny village. In Spufford’s 1922, Cahokia is the principal city in the State of Cahokia (much of Illinois and Missouri), the Republic of Deseret is an independent country (but negotiating admission to the US), and Alaska is still Russian. What the book really is, is a noir thriller, in which the gruesome murder that opens the action is part of a power play aimed at breaking the hold of Cahokia’s dominant, indigenous culture and bringing it under the sway of the broader white power structure in control of the rest of the US. It’s an interesting premise, and the action and mystery are satisfying and entertaining. As with Act of Oblivion, my knowledge of the local geography helped with my enjoyment of the book, but it wasn’t quite so critical here as in Harris’s novel.

General fiction

Another new favorite author is Amor Towles. My introduction to him was the Showtime adaptation of his A Gentleman in Moscow, and the book doesn’t disappoint. It spans something like 40 years in which a Russian nobleman is under house arrest in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow after the Revolution. To some extent it is just a series of vignettes, but it bears a deeper look in terms of how the protagonist does and does not change over the decades. There’s a noticeable difference between the book and the series: In the TV show, it was snowing all the time, but much of the action in the book takes place on June 21, from year to year. The Lincoln Highway is a crazy and wonderful novel about a small group of young adults, who are trying to create new lives for themselves, but just don’t quite know how to do it. Towles uses a number of interesting narrative devices – chapters numbered in reverse order, subsections focused on particular characters (one of whose sections are in first-person narrative), and a not-quite-right (intentionally) set of classical allusions, so that we don’t miss the point that what we’re reading about is an Odyssey. The whole story is a long series of missteps, and at the end, when the protagonist, Emmett, is finally on his way to his new life, the circumstances are questionable enough that we don’t get to imagine this is just a literary romance.

Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman is set primarily on the Turtle Mountain reservation in North Dakota. It traces the lives of the Native American community as they navigate family relations, the needs of daily life, and their relations with the broader American community. The driving plot point is a bill proposed in Congress that would have basically eliminated the system of reservations, but the interactions between the Turtle Mountain community and other parts of the United States take multiple forms, some of which are simply awful. A striking feature of this novel is its pacing, which is somehow both leisurely and urgent – I’m hoping that I’m not misreading it when I say that I think that’s meant to convey how life at Turtle Mountain was. I was a bit sad to reach the end.

I also read a few more literary fiction titles. George Eliot’s Silas Marner isn’t as great as her The Mill on the Floss, but it’s a beautifully-crafted novel, and qualifies as a romance. Willa Cather’s O! Pioneers! is an American pastoral novel, set primarily on a Nebraska homestead, which Alexandra Bergson, daughter of the original homesteader, turns into the most successful farm in the neighborhood. The book’s strength is in the playing out of a broad range of human emotion and experience in the narrow scope of prairie life. Perhaps the contrast between the vastness of the prairie and that narrow scope is kind of an enabling metaphor. All that said, it relates to an odd experience I’ve been having lately: the name of William Jennings Bryan seems to be popping up all over the place – here, The Ballad of Baby Doe, and elsewhere. I’m finding myself with an increasing interest in reading up on Bryan. Anthony Trollope’s Dr. Wortle’s School is sort of a typical Victorian novel, originally serialized for a popular audience. Set in a school positioned as preparatory for Eton, and then Oxford, it has much to do with the places – better schools, and the Church – where the more affluent portions of the middle class rub shoulders with the nobility. The most interesting parts of the narrative explore places where private morality can disagree with both conventional, public morality and religious teaching. On sort of a parallel track runs the distinction between personal gentility and formal social rank. From this remove, the novel shows both the self-stabilizing and shifting of Victorian society. Trollope is no Dickens or Eliot, but I would nevertheless come back for more.

I read some clinkers, too, I won’t describe them all, but a couple were failed attempts to blur the boundary between the author’s imagination and that of the protagonist. The worst of them, I’d say, was Andrés Stoopendaal’s The Dunning-Kruger Effect. This is another self-consciously postmodern novel, much like Melissa Broder’s Death Valley, in which the novelist and the first-person narrator are the same. But it lacks even the bit of depth I found in Death Valley, and it certainly falls short of the deliberate confusion between the first-person narrator and the novelist Gospodinov achieves in Time Shelter (one of last year’s list). Worse, while Death Valley stops at writing about writing, The Dunning-Kruger Effect reaches the point of writing about writing about writing. I’m tempted to say the title in this case amounts to inadvertent truth in advertising.

Nonfiction

Given my research project, most of my nonfiction reading is in history. My favorite nonfiction title wasn’t related to my research, though. It’s the one I mentioned in my previous Substack post, Joshua Hammer’s The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu. This is the story of a small number of people, aided by everyone they could recruit, who saved the literary patrimony of the Sahel (the arid strip south of the Sahara) from jihadists in the years around 2010. The first big message, of course, is that such a literary patrimony exists at all, and the first part of the narrative is about the assembling of a widely dispersed collection of medieval manuscripts into repositories in Timbuktu. Much of the book then recounts the attempted jihadist takeover of Mali in around 2012, and the steps the self-appointed conservators of the manuscripts took to preserve them from destruction. As poor as the Western image of the intellectual heritage of the Sahel is already, imagine if the jihadists had succeeded in destroying these documents!

For my own research, I read Scott Reynolds Nelson’s Oceans of Grain, which ties the interests of American farmers and traders to the geopolitical wrangling over Ukraine that has been going on for centuries. Rodman W. Paul’s California Gold is a study of the actual mining technology used and developed during the Gold Rush. Malcolm J. Rohrbough’s Days of Gold examines the lives of both the emigrants that came to California in search of gold and the families they left behind. Joshua R. Greenberg’s Bank Notes and Shinplasters studies the use of paper money in the US during the nineteenth century.

In my comment on O! Pioneers! I mentioned William Jennings Bryan. I picked up Ray Ginger’s edited collection, William Jennings Bryan: Selections to try to understand the man a little better. Ginger is an unsympathetic biographer, but his selections of documents are good, and they illuminate Bryan’s religiosity, his demagoguery, and his skill as an orator. In all, these documents helped me place Bryan in history a little more clearly, so while this wasn’t the most exciting book I’ve read all year, it was worthwhile.

In political economy, I have to cite one classic, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. I also read Marc-William Palen’s Pax Economica. It presents an intriguing thesis regarding free trade, arguing that historically, at least, it was not a right-wing, neoliberal policy position, but one with a long history in left-wing groups, who largely connected it with peace, economic development, and interdependence among nations. Palen takes us through the protectionist “American System” going back to Alexander Hamilton, and then critiques and actions from liberal radical, Marxist, feminist, and Christian groups. The book, unfortunately, is long on detail and short on analysis, so it was a bit of a slog. But Palen seems to be an admirer of Cordell Hull, FDR’s secretary of state, and seems to feel that the closest the left-wing free trade project came to succeeding was in the few years between the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. It’s a provocative and largely persuasive thesis, but I do wish it were less burdened with names and places, and thus clearer in presentation and analysis.

Another provocative title was Ruchir Sharma’s What Went Wrong with Capitalism. Sharma’s book is mostly an indictment of big government. His overall thesis is that large and growing government, easy money, and an increasingly entrenched bailout culture have undermined global economic growth, and, by implication, are threatening to de-stabilize the global economy in general and the US economy in particular. He seems a bit more ambivalent about the effect of regulation, appearing to recognize that rules are important, but that getting them right is nearly impossible (and growing government tends to result in regulation for its own sake. The book is often repetitive, and surprisingly poorly edited, but Sharma makes a couple of persuasive points. First is that Reagan didn’t do anything to shrink government, and that one of the failures of neoliberalism is its belief that we’ve ever tried smaller government in recent decades. Second, and perhaps most likely to affect my thinking, is that decades of very easy money have been a major factor in rising economic inequality. He does seem to hanker after a nice, cleansing depression, and it occurs to me that there are influential people with that viewpoint. That’s something to watch for.

For general interest nonfiction, I have to cite David Grann’s The Wager. The Wager was the most backward of the ships in the Anson squadron, whose flagship actually managed to take the Manila galleon in the early 1740s. Grann has written a novelized account of real events. He does not seem to have fudged anything really essential, but do we really know that the captain paced the quarterdeck on such-and-such an occasion? The other problem with the narrative approach arises where there is genuine, substantive doubt. Grann is good about identifying points of that type, but at times he must risk interrupting the narrative flow to do so.

More interesting and unusual was Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World. Based on a large collection of documents housed at the New York State Library, it is the story of the 17^th Century Dutch colony of New Netherland, the center of which was the settlement at the tip of Manhattan Island, eventually protected (from the English, not the Natives) by a wall across the width of the island. Shorto argues persuasively that our American mythos of entirely English origins elides the importance of this Dutch colony to the character both of New York itself and of the United States. He argues, for example, that the religious tolerance of the First Amendment derives from the Dutch traditions of New Amsterdam, and certainly not from the theocratic Puritans of New England (the ones we meet in Act of Oblivion). Shorto interweaves history, conjecture, and analysis well.

I have to give special mention to a surprisingly good, specialized, self-published title –especially in light of the devastation underway right now in the LA area. Lee Klinger’s Forged by Fire is a surprisingly thoughtful and engaging discussion of the application of what Lee calls Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), the techniques for managing land and biological resources developed by Indigenous peoples over generations, to contemporary problems in forestry and landscape management. Lee argues, among other things, that the Muir wilderness ethos tends to disregard, or overlook, the human influences that shaped such cultural landscapes as our California oak savannah before the arrival of western settlers. “Protecting” such lands and insisting that we leave them untouched actually initiates a detrimental transition from sustainable management to chaotic overgrowth, vulnerable to destructive wildfires and other catastrophes. Lee emphasizes the application of “cultural fire” as one of the important techniques of TEK, and explores non-incendiary techniques to clear underbrush, control pests, and raise the pH and nutrient content of forest soils. He calls these techniques “fire mimicry;” he has used them on oaks at our house.

There were clinkers among my nonfiction titles too. Most disappointing, because of the hopes I’d had for it, was Rob Eastaway’s Much ado about Numbers: Shakespeare’s Mathematical Life and Times. It seemed like a clever idea, which could support a few hours’ airplane reading (though I worried, needlessly as it transpired, that this might be sort of a Shakespearean kabbalah.) My main problem is that the book was more lightweight than I had expected, as though the author had a pretty good idea and then discovered that there wasn’t really quite so much in it as he had thought. Eastaway does try to connect Shakespeare with other contemporary intellectual developments, but while the connections appear to be there, Eastaway’s development of them seems thin. The book also suffers from weak editing, with too many factual errors and plausible, but unexplored, surmises.

I’ll finish with two “big ideas” titles, one awful, one good. The awful one was Peter Zeihan’s The End of the World is Just the Beginning. Zeihan appears to be one of those guys that make their living by going around with big-picture forecasts scary enough that people will pay him to tell them more. The book starts out with the kind of cradle-of-civilization fables that I’ve become tired of reading, segues into geography-is-destiny arguments, and then slides into demography-is-destiny-too arguments to explain why civilization is about to collapse. But to make it all work, his real, central thesis is that the last 75 years of advances around the world have rested on the US-led, rules-based, global order, which is going away. Zeihan tries to counteract the weight of the topic (and the length of the book) by writing in a breezy style, but much of the time that just seems fatuous. He could have most improved the book by making it shorter – he repeats himself quite a bit, contradicts himself, too. Is Egypt blessed with a geography that protects them from invasion, or is it easy to invade? China’s population is in collapse, but there will be ample labor for agriculture as it de-industrializes, yet there won’t be enough labor to grow rice? Add in factual errors and misstatements – he put Catherine the Great in the 19^th century, and asserted that the dollar didn’t exist until the Federal Reserve Act – and the sweeping conclusions, presented under a sensationalized title, lose some of their force. More incisive are his analyses and forecasts concerning specific commodities and crops. I imagine those are his bread and butter, and assuming he has the ability to add meaningful detail on specific topics, I could see some parties’ being willing to pay him for those.

The good one, somewhat to my surprise, was Francis Fukuyama’s Liberalism and its Discontents. I feared that this would be another one of those books filled with cherry-picked, anecdotal evidence to support some plausible, seemingly insightful sophistry. But Fukuyama is no Malcolm Gladwell. Liberalism and its Discontents is a carefully-crafted, well-argued articulation of what classical liberalism is and is not, of its strengths, and particularly of its limitations. Fukuyama separates classical liberalism from neo-liberalism, democracy, and nationalism, parts of our political furniture that have implications for liberalism, but which stand apart from it. For Fukuyama, the essential elements of liberalism are respect for individuals and rule of law. He breezes through the easy critiques of liberalism from the far right. To his credit, he approaches anti-liberal tendencies on the left (especially those that might place respect for group identities above respect for individuals) with more care. I find him generally persuasive, but not always correct. I don’t think he would mind my (or anyone’s) disagreeing with him at points, though.

So much for my 2024 list. I’m already on my way for 2025.

The books:

David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (New York: Doubleday) 2023

Rex Stout, The Second Confession, 1949 (Bantam Paperback)

Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession (Knopf) 2023

Scott Reynolds Nelson, Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World (New York: Basic Books) 2022

Herta Müller, The Passport (Tr., doesn’t say by whom), originally 1989, Serpent’s Tail, UK

Brendan Slocumb, Symphony of Secrets (Vintage Paperback, originally published 2023)

Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Civilization (New York: Harper Business) 2022

Shawn Connors, Chain Reaction: A Story About Power in the Age of Climate Change (Self-published, I hope, under the name Atomic Garage Movement, LLC, Naples, Florida) 2023

Stuart M. Kaminsky, Death of a Dissident (Ivy Mystery paperback) 1981.

Leonard Stejneger, Georg Wilhelm Steller, the pioneer of Alaskan natural history (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press) 1970

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Books I - III (Penguin English Library) 1776

Andrea Camilleri (tr. Stephen Sartarelli), Game of Mirrors (Penguin paperpack) orig. 2011

Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press) 1997

Agatha Christie, The Mystery of the Blue Train 1928. Harper paperback

Anthony Trollope, Dr Wortle’s School 1881. Penguin Classics paperback

Joshua R. Greenberg, Bank Notes and Shinplasters: The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic (Philadelphia: Univ. of Penn. Press) 2020.

Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman, 2020. Harper Perennial paperback

Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway (Viking) 2021

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow (Viking) 2016

Stuart M. Kaminsky, A Cold Red Sunrise Ivy Books paperback 1988

Carlo Rovelli, There are Places in the World Where Rules are Less Important than Kindness, tr. Erica Segre and Simon Carnell. Riverhead paperback, 2018

Melissa Broder, Death Valley Scribner paperback, 2023

Jack El-Hai, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII (New York: Public Affairs) 2013

Andrés Stoopendaal, tr. Alex Fleming, The Dunning-Kruger Effect (New York: Atria Books) 2021

Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and its Discontents (Picador paperback), 2022

Rex Stout, Plot it Yourself (Bantam paperback), 1959

Meghan Daum, The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars (Gallery Books paperback), 2019

Agatha Christie, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (Wm. Morrow paperback) 1962.

Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (Houghton-Mifflin paperback) 1913

Brendan Slocumb, The Violin Conspiracy, (Vintage paperback) 2022

Nicholas Meyer, Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell (New York: Mysterious Press) 2024

Rodman W. Paul, California Gold: The Beginning of Mining in the Far West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press) 1969 (originally 1947)

Lee Klinger, Forged by Fire: The Cultural Tending of Trees and Forests in Big Sur and Beyond (Big Sur: Sudden Oak Life Press) 2024

Rob Eastaway, Much Ado About Numbers: Shakespeare’s Mathematical Life and Times, (New York: The Experiment) 2024

George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman (New York: Plume paperback) 1969

Robert Harris, Act of Oblivion (New York: Harper paperback) 2022

Ray Ginger, ed., William Jennings Bryan: Selections (Indianapolis: Bobbs, Merrill) 1967

Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz (New York: Scribner) 2023.

George Eliot, Silas Marner, (Penguin English Library paperback) 1861

Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan & the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America (New York: Doubleday) 2004

Anthony Horowitz, Moriarty (New York: Harper) 2014

Marc-William Palen, Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World (Princeton: Princeton University Press) 2024

Katie Williams, My Murder (New York: Riverhead Books) 2023

Ruchir Sharma, What Went Wrong with Capitalism (New York: Simon & Schuster) 2024

Eric Ambler, A Coffin for Dimitrios (Vintage Crime paperback) 1939

Joshua Hammer, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, and their race to save the world’s most precious manuscripts (Simon & Schuster) 2016 Simon & Schuster paperback

Walter Mosley, Every Man a King (New York: Mulholland Books) 2023

Eric Ambler, Uncommon Danger (London: Hodder and Stoughton) 1941

Robert Harris, Archangel (New York: Random House) 1998

John Lescroart, Treasure Hunt (New York: Dutton) 2010