From blood-soaked Oklahoma oil fields to the chaotic underbellies of restaurant kitchens. From post-apocalyptic America to Patagonia. Rockstars, shipwrecks and snowflakes. I am never quite sure what inspires each year’s reading escapades, beyond the occasional recommendation.
This year’s collection came mostly from the local library, which my bookshelf, wallet, and wife are happy to hear. The library has long been my refuge — unless my child tags along. I love not knowing what I’ll see on the shelves, and the duds don’t deter me from the next foray in my random literature adventure.
Across America, library visits have been on the decline over the past decade, which makes me a little sad, though I’m not terribly surprised. Well, more for me then!
Here are the 12 books I read in 2024. (Here the ones from 2023, 2021, 2020 and 2019)
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
David Grann
The Osage Indians were once the richest people in the world, after the discovery of oil reserves on their reservations in Oklahoma. If you know anything about American history, you can probably already guess what happened next.
Absolutely loved this book, and no wonder it was made into a movie (which I’ve yet to watch).
As masterfully paced as any great mystery, Grann peels back the layers of treachery one layer at a time, to the point where no one is innocent. So far-encompassing are the crimes that these events are also credited as the origin case that led to the rise of the FBI.
Parable of the Talents
Octavia Butler
The sequel to Parable of The Sower, the story follows the protagonist as she struggles to survive in post-apocalyptic America. Alternating between glimmers of hope and unspeakable brutality, hopeful communities become concentration camps, families tear and reunite, and religion and stories become a crutch to help make sense of it all.
Haunting and beautifully written, Butler captures the full range of things that humans are capable of. Some parts are hard to get through. One teaching from this parable: better learn how to use guns and grow food.
The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music
Dave Grohl
Celebrity biographies are most interesting when they reveal the messy, human side of their subjects. Dave Grohl’s feels very sanitized (especially in comparison to his rockstar peer Anthony Kiedis’s autobiography, “Scar Tissue.”) Sure, there is plenty of reminiscing on the tragedy of Kurt Cobain’s passing, and some color on into the chaotic, grimier side of pre-fame life. But as soon as the stories approach anything juicy, nothing is really revealed.
The book reinforces Dave’s reputation as the wholesome rocker and family man. That is, until three months after reading this, reports came out that he had an affair and a child out of wedlock. That’s hardly unusual and hardly the worst a celebrity has done. But it does make this book feel even more hypocritical.
Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
Abigail Shrier
Parents usually want the best for their children. But when does this cross into the kind of overparenting that turns our kids into snowflakes?
At its best, Shrier makes salient observations about how easy and tempting it is these days to find labels, diagnoses and therapy for anything that feels uncomfortable during the naturally messy period of childhood and parenthood. At its worst, she paints a broad-stroke conspiracy that the medical and mental health professions, along with schools and teachers, are somehow all in on this (as if they had the time and resources). She reserves harsh words for social-emotional learning for encouraging kids to over-ruminate about their feelings.
This was a tough, love/hate read. It’s very telling that the first testimonial for the book comes from Amy Chua, author of the Tiger Mom book.
How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others and Being Deeply Seen
David Brooks
I’m wary every time I pick up a self-help book. But sometimes I can’t help myself. They often feel preachy, long-winded, and sometimes make me feel like a worse person.
Naive me was expecting a checklist of how to be a better conversationalist. But Brooks reminds us that good conversations and deep connections often come from asking good questions, rather than being the main character and talking. It’s about helping someone figure out things for themselves, rather than helping them directly.
This was reassuring as I’m not much of a conversationalist. The subtitle of this book centers on seeing, but it really is about listening.
Based on a True Story: A Memoir
Norm Macdonald
The gold standard for deadpan, absurdist comedy, Norm’s aspiration for a good joke is when the buildup and the punchline are the same.
This book is so Norm — based on his life, but never quite sure what is real, because there are parts that are absolutely ridiculously false. He recounts his time at SNL (where he got fired for making too OJ jokes), growing up in Quebec City, bouts of gambling addiction, all the while fantasizing about murder, Sarah Silverman, and holding quarrels with his ghostwriter. It’s really hard to describe this book, or even recommend it, unless you’ve had a taste of Norm. A good litmus test is his Moth joke.
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
James McBride
This critically acclaimed book has all the ingredients for its rave reviews: a rich, diverse cast of cultures and caring peoples, whose lives intersect through the eponymous grocery store. Set in the early 20th century, it’s a melting pot kind of American story featuring Black and Jewish communities navigating race, class and injustice. People down on their luck but getting by with each other’s help.
The writing is charming in a folksy sort of way, but I just couldn’t really get into it. There are amusing backstories that bring the characters to life, but they all felt a little forced and cliché. As I write this six months after reading it, the main story actually isn’t all that memorable or novel.
Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
T. J. Stiles
Like most people, my only association of General George Custer is with his infamous Last Stand. This is one of those “he’s actually more interesting than his caricature” books.
As revealed through his letters and court martials, Custer was a schemer, sucker, and dreamer, indignant and inept at times, but also capable of rallying his troops to unlikely victory. He snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, and vice versa. He fought for the Union, freed slaves but did not believe in civil rights and held tremendous sympathy for the Confederate cause. Off the battlefield, he dabbled in romantic and commercial misadventures throughout the Civil War, Reconstruction and Indian Wars. In many ways, his personal contradictions mirror the nation’s own struggles to reconcile its own ideals and actions.
Piranesi
Susanna Clarke
If you can get past the first 80-or-so meandering pages, this pace picks up and quickly becomes a page-turner. It’s like a blurry dream that, once it starts getting clearer, enraptures you until perhaps the end, which is frustratingly open-ended.
Clarke’s magical prose effectively transports you into a fantasy world, into a house with statues, vestibules, infinite halls, dead people and unpredictable floods. This is the world that our protagonist explores with childish wonder, but soon he senses something just isn’t quite right. Is this labyrinth real, or just inside his head? This was an adventure that oscillated between being very confused and obsessed with following the clues to clear my confusion.
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
Anthony Bourdain
Having recently caught up on The Bear, I felt compelled to read the real-life story that inspired it. Who else to turn to than the late anti-hero who climbed the kitchen ranks only to eschew the pomp and circumstance and do his own travel show?
Anyone who has eaten at a restaurant would do well to read this book, if only to know which days to not order seafood on. There are many other practical culinary tips served in dark, self-deprecating humor, and plenty of stories of mischief.
More seriously, this is an illuminating look into the lives of people who you never see but fill your stomach, the high-strung stress and abuse they endure, and why they would ever choose such a profession. What is unquestionable: Bourdain’s pure love for food and all the joy, meaning and life it represents.
The Venture Mindset: How to Make Smarter Bets and Achieve Extraordinary Growth
Ilya Strebulaev and Alex Dang
Today we take everything from Amazon to McDonald’s and Uber for granted. But there were a million reasons why they were once terrible ideas. This book offers a series of mini case studies of how, in the face of doubt and rejection, investors believed — and profited handsomely. It starts with building the right race tracks that attract the best jockeys.
Venture capital flips conventional wisdom on its head and preys on your insecurities. Home runs matter, strike outs don’t. Getting lucky is a condition you can nurture. Consensus is dangerous. We’re predisposed to avoid failure, yet it is an ingredient of success (and, in most cases, is not that serious). It’s messy and uncomfortable, but what I appreciate is that this book offers good general principles without being prescriptive.
The Wager
David Grann
A group of ragged castaways from an expedition gone wrong one day arrive in England. Six months later, another boat from the same group shows up, accusing the first of betrayal.
The ill-fated boat is The Wager, which shipwrecked on an inhospitable island in western Patagonia after it got separated from its fleet as it rounded the tip of Southern America. Their story is filled with unbelievable misfortune, misery, and will to survive. Scurvy and typhus ravage the castaways. Hunger leads to mutiny. Just as unfathomable is that a handful of survivors made it back to England, from whose diaries Grann meticulously reconstructed their accounts.
It blows my mind that teenagers used to sail around the world in wooden vessels, with little knowledge of disease and medicine. But such was how Europe once conquered the world.
