All the books I have read since the winter solstice, 2024
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
I devoured this book while in my parents' house right after winter solstice 2024. It was the right location for me to read this book, an adventure tale about a sweet, smart teenage boy named Christopher. I've seen some criticism that it violates the "nothing about us without us" precept (Christopher is autistic, if you're just catching up). But I appreciated that its plot is focalized through Christopher's experience and the narrative style actually quite gracefully and subtly assumes that the reader will identify with him. Or maybe most people don't experience the book that way, I don't know. In any case, I think it's fine for fiction writers to imagine minds and lives that are very distant from their own.
Invention of Nature
I can't ever resist history of natural sciences stuff that's actually about the humanities. This is sort of a biography of Alexander von Humboldt, and sort of a history of the idea of nature as one unifying concept containing cascades of interlocking, interconnected systems. Did you know I'm obsessed with how "world" and "planet" became coterminous? Anyway, this would pair well with Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes, which is also about that, and also about nature and the descriptive systems we make to try to parse it, if you were for some reason making a, like, nature/culture syllabus.
Little, Big
Little, Big is a family novel that is also about magic, which is a combination that I found breathtaking when I read it the first time, in my 20s, and which I really did not vibe with this time around. Like many family novels, there's the quotidian stories of kids growing up and partnerships evolving over the long course of years, and then there are questions about who's really in the family and who knows what secrets and whatnot. Only the secret is that some people in the family have magic — well, they can see into other realms — and some don't, and the ones who don't are like "wtf is going on here." When I was younger, I identified with the magic havers. This time, with the confused losers. But I don't think the mismatch arose because I lost my sense of magic. I think it's because I decided at some point that naming things precisely is magic, and then the idea that maybe I'll someday crack the code/see what everyone else sees lost its power. I will say, though, Crowley does some impressively understated world-building, which I think invites this kind of "wait is magic all around us?" muddle in a neat fashion.
48 Laws of Power
This book has an information architecture problem, like, I think maybe it should be only 4 or 6 laws, with subsets. Also it's got a very strange approach to historical examples, often completely removing them from important context which, imo, is usually key to doing power analysis. But this isn't really power analysis, it's self help. I was trying to learn how to defeat my enemies, and it did give me the important insight that I shouldn't share information simply because I have it. Fun read.
Hare with Amber Eyes
I am a huge sucker for interwar Mitteleuropa content, and de Waal delivered.
Peace Like a River
It took me forever to finish this book, which is, to be totally honest, sappy af. I grabbed it out of a Little Free Library the summer of 2023, just a couple of months after I ended a relationship with a person I once thought was my life partner. I was in a particularly delicate state, and had also committed to reading only the books the universe provides, because in the way that messy ends to long partnerships are always about completely random-seeming things, the end of this one carried a fair amount of book clutter-related trauma. Anyway, apparently in June 2024 I tweeted that it's like Sometimes a Great Notion but pious. I'm feeling pretty meh about the U.S. these days, so C20 Americana wasn't really doing it for me. A Great Notion is a good book, though.
Fourth Wing
This entire list exists because I wanted to do a rant about how I think this book is fascist propaganda, but I didn't write it down at the time, and now the only thing I can remember about Fourth Wing, which the friend who introduced me to the book calls "dragon smut," is that there's a sex scene where two people who aren't supposed to be fucking do it anyway and it literally burns down one of their closets (they're human, but their dragons fuck when they do, or something). So that's what you need to know about how light a touch Yarros gives her symbolism.
Railroaded
It's impossible not to see the Silicon Valley of the 21st century in Railroaded, though it is in fact about the development of the railroads in the Western U.S. and Mexico in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It's an academic history, but very readable. I got kind of lost in the machinations of all the railroad personalities, but I did learn a weirdly large amount about how trains brake. I guess the big takeaway is that the U.S. got the railroads that made their original backers and builders (the head guys, not the laborers who laid track and constructed cars and stuff) money on speculation, not the railroads that would have really benefited the local economies of the western states; and the major innovations of the railroad era were at least as much about controlling the flows of capital, including from public into private coffers, as they were about controlling space via these new fast trains.
Doppelganger
A book about everything, but it works. You should read it if you want some clarity on why RFK Jr. and his ilk are obsessed with autism right now.
We Don't Know Ourselves
The chattiest book I've ever read, and despite the fact that I'm half Irish and that's ostensibly a thing my mom's side of the family cares about, full of almost entirely new-to-me information. It also featured the gem of a line "the imperative of all journalism is to be constantly trying to bring down the government."
Imperial Radch Trilogy
I guess I got into sci-fi/space fantasy this year, because I absolutely loved all three of these books, and reading them took up basically my entire Autumn and Samhain.
Here's my take: These are books about state-building, which I know maybe doesn't sound riveting (although maybe I'm just a weirdo who's obsessed with state building; I didn't do one of these for 2024 but I spent the entire second half the year doing a deep dive into nationalism, its origins and its study. Anyway), and about empire, which I'm just openly obsessed with. The trilogy's narrative project is getting a whole bunch of disparate characters to recognize the value of having, and the difficulty of building, social organization systems after the somewhat rigid ones they are used to fall apart for various reasons. The challenge is that each of them is so acculturated to one type or another of cohesive social structure (ships that function as perfectly closed systems; empires with apparently rigid rules around who is and isn't a subject), that no one can initially see their thing a structurally equivalent to other characters' things. So the books spend a fair amount of time putting characters into various forms of culture clash in order to defamiliarize concepts, for them and also for readers, concepts like "civilization" and "human" and "government." I am pleased that I can still generate a close reading, and no idea whether it makes these books sound good, but they are. Also, if you want to contemplate issues like whether AIs have consciousness, autonomy, or value in a human ethical framework, and you want to do it in a literary venue other than whatever insane shit the techno-futurist utopians are shouting about on X.com formerly known as Twitter, you should read 'em.