(Note: If you frequent this blog just for Fantastic Four content, you may want to skip this post. While my personal blog has largely been devoted to my issue-by-issue recaps of the Fantastic Four, I still use it for occasional posts like this.)

As in years past, I set myself a goal of reading 24 books this year. And for the first time, I surpassed it, reading 28. There were a few reasons, but a big one is I consciously read a lot of short science fiction books between (and sometimes as I read) longer books as a change of pace. I was aided by a February trip to Powell’s in Portland (maybe the best book store in the country) where I scooped up a lot of used books. Also, like last year, I served as a judge for a business book contest, so I read a bunch of those, and like last year, I traveled overseas, which both gave me reason to read about my destination (Japan) and a lot of time on planes and trains to read.

What follows the books in the order I read them. I’ve done my best to include images of the edition of the book I actually read, but in some cases that’s not possible. On to the books:

1, 11/22/63, by Stephen King (2012), 849 pages

I’m a late convert to King, having abandoned my youthful snobbery, and what I’ve read, I’ve mostly enjoyed. He has certain identifiable tics—all his heroes seem to be under-estimated white guys in their mid-to-late 30s, for example, and the supernatural mechanisms driving the story are often irrelevant to the plot—but in this case that didn’t detract from what was a big, fun read. I’m not a big Kennedy-assassination guy, but King did an impressive amount of research into Lee Harvey Oswald and makes compelling the days, weeks and months in Dallas preceding Nov. 22. He fully immerses us in the America of the last 50s and early 60s and we feel genuine pangs of regret that we can’t stay there.

2, The Ghost, by Robert Harris (2008), 400 pages

This is the second Harris book I’ve read, after Fatherland last year, and by comparison it’s nowhere near as good. While I recall enjoying it, I have almost no recollection of the plot, unlike Fatherland, which is much more fresh in my mind despite my having read it six months earlier. This book concerns a ghost writer who gets pulled into a political conspiracy after agreeing to write the memoirs of a British prime minister. Fun but disposable.

3, The Women in the Dunes, by Kobo Abe (1956), 239 pages

This is the first of the books I read in preparation for our trip to Japan. Regarded as a classic of post-war Japanese literature, it’s a strange, highly stylized novel about a school teacher who falls into a pit on a remote beach and ends up trapped there with a woman who lives in a house surrounded by sand. It operates as an extended allegory and is compared to work by Kafka and Camus. I can’t say I loved it but it was definitely memorable and contains some provocative ideas.

4. The Puppet Masters, by Robert Heinlein (1951), 347 pages.

Heinlein is a giant of mid-century science fiction, and as a young teen I loved his “juveniles,” books written for younger readers. I’ve found his more adult-oriented books hit-or-miss—his reactionary politics and sexism can get tedious—but books like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress are amazing and I’m always tempted to find another great one. The Puppet Masters is sort of in-between, a plot with adult themes and concepts but written early enough not to be too laden with his ideological hangups.

The plot is reminiscent of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, though it was written six years earlier, and involves alien invaders who seek conquest through mind control, a very Cold War theme. It features a typically scrappy Heinlein hero and his beautiful-yet-docile female partner, who through wit and bravado save the day against all odds.

5, Tau Zero, by Poul Anderson, (1970), 208 pages

A thin book I picked up at Powell’s, Tau Zero is at its best an ambitious exploration of Einsteinian physics: What would happen to relative time if a manned space ship approached the speed of light? The story hinges on a spaceship of Earth’s best and brightest seeking to colonize a new planet before things go awry. The plot is at times breathtaking as Anderson explores huge concepts in engineering and cosmology. His grasp of writing and characterization, however, don’t match his science, and the crew of the ship often read like cardboard cut-outs of people. When I explained the book to my teenage son, he said “it sounds more like a thought experiment” and as usual he was right.

6, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Marukami (1994), 603 pages

A great deal has been written about The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a sprawling and surreal novel set in 1990s Tokyo with significant flashbacks to wartime Manchuria, and this is hardly the format to fully explore its complexities. I found it fascinating and compelling, as well as frustrating and puzzling. I’m not sure how well it prepared me for a trip to Japan, but I’m glad I read it.

7, The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin (1969), 330 pages

Another Powell’s pickup, this book has gotten a lot attention lately for its depiction of a gender-fluid offshoot of humanity. That’s just one of the many imaginative aspects of this book, however, which involves a human ambassador on a frozen planet involved in complicated diplomatic maneuvers. I don’t think I’ve read anything by LeGuin since the Earthsea books I read as a teen and I was very impressed. In some ways this book is the opposite of Poul Anderson’s: sophisticated writing and character building, with only a passing interest in the science.

8, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, by Herbert Bix (2000), 688 pages.

This comprehensive biography is all the more impressive considering how much material about Emperor Hirohito’s life and activities was off-limits to scholars when it was written. Despite that handicap, Bix paints a full picture of a man raised from boyhood to consider himself a god, and how the cult of the emperor led to Japan’s militaristic expansion and Pearl Harbor. Bix rejects the conventional narrative that Hirohito was a helpless bystander to his generals during World War II, and argues he had much more control over Japanese war-making than either Japanese or U.S. authorities were willing to admit.

9, Ringworld, by Larry Niven (1970), 288 pages.

Another science fiction classic, Ringworld combines extraordinary concepts with playful writing and imaginative world building. The plot deals with an expedition of humans and aliens to a solar system dominated by a vast ring that circles a sun. It’s unfortunately marred by the sexism that’s endemic of sci fi from this era, but on the whole it’s a fun adventure with some big ideas.

10, Last Year, by Robert Charles Wilson (2016), 351 pages

Robert Charles Wilson is a terrific science fiction author who doesn’t seem to get the attention he deserves. Last Year works from a fun premise about time-traveling tourists from roughly our present who visit the wild west of the 1870s, written from the perspective of a local hired to be a security guard. As in previous books of his I’ve read, Wilson pays a lot of attention to the people who populate Last Year and while the plot isn’t very memorable, his lead character very much is.

11, Path Lit By Lightning, by David Maranssis (2022), 574 pages

This biography of Jim Thorpe was a present from my wife and for that reason and others I wish I liked it more. For those unaware, Thorpe has a claim on being the greatest athlete ever—a college football legend, he won the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Olympics, then played professional baseball for almost a decade—and his life story as an uprooted Native American ticks all the boxes for a compelling biography. Yet somehow this book was less than the sum of its parts.

One reason is that Thorpe wasn’t particularly introspective and left no interesting journal or letters, and Maraniss struggles to imbue him with much personality or agency. Another reason, one that may be specific to me and my interests, is that Maraniss gives very short shrift to Thorpe’s track and field exploits. While Thorpe’s football career gets chapters of attention, Maraniss breezes through Thorpe’s Olympic performance in a few pages and seems generally uninterested in the sport.

The book comes most alive when Maraniss documents the shabby treatment of Native Americans in that era, and the exploitative nature of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School where Thorpe spent most of his youth. It’s a largely forgotten and ugly chapter of US history and Maraniss deserves credit for examining it.

12, Murder Your Darlings, by Roy Peter Clark (2020), 315 pages

Roy Peter Clark is a much-respected instructor and coach of writing for journalists and I bought this copy from him at a conference for business journalists at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he teaches. It’s full of useful advice and helpful ways to think about writing, but it probably works best as a something you dip into now and then when looking for inspiration, vs. a book you plow through start to finish, as I did. (The title refers to the need for writers to excise phrases they particularly love in the interest of improving their prose).

13, Artificial Condition, by Martha Wells (2018), 158 pages

This slim book is the second in Wells’ Murderbot series, about a sentient bodyguard robot who throws off its shackles and escapes servitude. I liked the first one better but this was still a fast and fun narrative-packed read.

14, From Doon With Death, by Ruth Rendell (1964), 181 pages

In the middle of a much longer book (see below) I was eager for something short and distracting, so I pulled this more or less at random from my parents’ bookshelf. I don’t read a lot of mysteries and this one, a police procedural set in the British countryside, wasn’t really the sort of thing I would gravitate to. Still, I was taken by Rendell’s writing, which is so spare and unadorned that it’s almost haiku-like.

15, Strange Adventures, by Tom King, Mitch Gerards and Evan Shaner (2020)

My general policy is not to include the many comics I read in this annual list, but I continue to make an exception for those written by Tom King, who masterfully reimagines established superheroes in new and often disturbing ways and whose books are novelistic in their scope and ambition. In this case, he takes Adam Strange, a pulpy DC character from the 1960s, and envelopes him in a complicated swirl of diplomacy, politics, family, war and deceit. The story, which collects 12 individual comics, doesn’t apologize for being a superhero story, yet feels alarmingly contemporary in its cynical view of the world. The amazing art by Gerards and Shaner, who alternate scenes based on where they sit in the story’s chronology, adds a dimension unique to comics. Some comic purists hate how King drags their childhood heroes into the adult world but I find it exhilarating.

16, Master of the Senate, by Robert Caro (2002), 1050 pages

I set a goal of reading one volume of Caro’s LBJ biography a year and three years in, I’m still on pace. It’s hard to say which of the three is the best—they are all extraordinary—but this book is the first to deal with Johnson as a national figure, chronicling his rapid rise from Senate freshman to majority leader and a pivotal player in first bottling up, then slowly passing, civil rights legislation. It’s also an in-depth exploration of how political power works in the Senate, and in the country more broadly, and includes rich portraits of men (and it’s mostly men) like Richard Russell and Hubert Humphrey whom Johnson climbs over on his ascent to the top. Its lessons are relevant today and it should be required reading for anyone interested in national politics.

17, Beyond the Trees, by Adam Shoalts (2019), 316 pages

I picked this up in a bookstore in Montreal and it’s the sort of book that typically appeals to me: a solo adventurer venturing across a remote landscape. Plus, I’ve actually spent time in the Canadian arctic. But it didn’t quite work for me. Shoalts, a graduate student and travel writer, attempts to hike and (mostly) paddle across Canada’s far north in the few months when the lakes and rivers are free of ice. Yet that narrow window means he has to travel almost continuously, and so there is very little time for exploration or adventure outside of his journey. Nothing much happens except his relentless paddling, and because he’s so well prepared and single minded, there’s little suspense or excitement. I hate to fault Shoalts for not being reckless or taking unnecessary chances, but it would have enlivened his book..

18, In Patagonia, by Bruce Chatwin (1977), 202 pages

By coincidence, another travel book. Decades ago, I read Chatwin’s Songlines, about his travels in the Australian outlook, and his accounts about how the aborigines thought about their world, and how utterly different it is from a Western concept, had a big impact on me. Chatwin’s trip to South America has a similar feel, as he examines the historical and natural peculiarities of this very remote place, yet it didn’t resonate in nearly the same way. In part, it’s because the Patagonians he encounters are still descendants of Europeans, and share a Western outlook. But it’s also because Chatwin’s basic schtick—a young, world-weary Englishman who coolly observes the locals before heading home—sits a lot differently now than it did when I read the Songlines in the early 1990s.

19, These are the Plunderers, by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner (2023), 324 pages

This was the first of the four business books I read for a contest, and the worst. The subject—how private equity ruins almost everything it touches while enriching a few—is more than worthy of a book, but it deserves better than this attempt. The authors—who include former Times business columnist Gretchen Morgenson, who should know better—have assembled a grab bag of facts and anecdotes that are slapdash and unorganized. It lurches from a history of Leon Black and Apollo to separate accounts about Blackstone and KKR, full of invective about their predations but with little that feels like real insight. The while thing felt polemical and very familiar to anyone who has paid any attention to the last 30 years of the business world.

20, Mickey7, by Edward Ashton (2022), 311 pages

My son gave me this book for a birthday present and I read it while taking a break from a much more ponderous business book (see below). It was a fun, engrossing read, about a ne’er-do-well who signs up for hazardous work on a space mission with the understanding that he could be killed and restored to life as a clone (this happens seven times, hence the title). I suppose there are some big ideas here about the nature of consciousness and the self, but mostly it was a goofy lark. I recommend it.

21, Built From the Fire, by Victor Luckerson (2022), 492 pages

Nominally a business book, this is a richly reported history of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, sometimes called “Black Wall Street,” which was burned to the ground by white rioters in 1921 and slowly rebuilt. At the narrative and moral center of the story is the Goodwin family, which owned a newspaper and practiced law, and it’s as much their history as one of their neighborhood. The work that went into writing this book is impressive—there are more than 100 pages of end-notes—but the detail can feel overwhelming, particularly in the last section which is concerned with current events in Tulsa. The book probably could have ended in the 1970s, when Greenwood fell victim to misguided urban redevelopment efforts, and lost 150 pages but none of its power.

22, Unscripted, by James Stewart and Rachel Abrams (2023), 349 pages

This is classic, old-school business storytelling from Jim Stewart, whose class I took in J-School, and Rachel Abrams. Intricately reported and unsparing in its tawdry details, this book tells of the messy battle to succeed Sumner Redstone and his Viacom media empire. There is almost no one in this book who emerges looking good, and the bad behavior, particularly of Redstone’s two parasitic mistresses who turn him against his family, is vile. Unfortunately, the book never really rises above its material to make a more interesting point, and at the end it just feels voyeuristic and gossipy.

23, Yellen, by Jon Hilsenrath (2022), 324 pages

This was the fourth book I read for the contest and I thought the best (although Built from the Fire won). It’s not flashy, but a patient chronicle of the rise of Janet Yellen from nerdy Brooklyn school girl to one of the most important people on the planet. It’s also a carefully explained history of the last 50 years of macroeconomics, digestible enough for a beginner yet detailed enough to be interesting for more informed readers. Yellen and her husband, Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof, had a front-row seat, and were participants, in most of the major discussions that have shaped modern economics. If you wanted to understand how the global economy got to be where it is in 2024, this book would be a good place to start.

24, Glory Road, by Robert Heinlein (1964), 277 pages

Another attempt to rediscover the Heinlein that I loved, this one was a disaster. All of Heinlein’s vices are on display in this book: the heavy-handed moralizing, the absurd sexism, the stereotypical hero. The plot concerns a former G.I. loafing around Europe who is pulled into an extra-dimensional fantasy adventure by a magical space princess with amazing breasts. Escapades ensue. I was very tempted to abandon it halfway through but pushed through out of sense of duty. One strange twist: deep into the book I encountered phrases and details that I dimly recall reading before, evidence this wasn’t the first time I read Glory Road. My subconsciousness must have suppressed the memory.

25, The Cold Millions, by Jess Walter (2021), 244 pages

Jess Walter is an old friend (we both worked for the same newspaper, though not at the same time) and I felt guilty for not reading his most recent novel until now. Luckily for me, the book is excellent which sparing me the discomfort of having to write something unkind. Set in-turn-of-the-century Spokane, when the city was awash in money from mining and timber, and in desperate men looking for work, it follows a young hobo caught in a swirl of union organizing, anarchism and plutocracy. It’s a gripping read, beautifully written and fully invested in the past it brings to vivid life.

26, The Blue World, by Jack Vance (1966), 180 pages

Another work of mid-century science fiction, this one is fortunately much better than the last. Both a fun adventure and sophisticated allegory, The Blue Planet takes place on a watery world, inhabited by descendants of a crashed space ship who have reverted to a pre-modern civilization. The hero takes issue with his society’s obeisance to a destructive sea monster, setting in motion a series of events with profound consequences. Vance is an under-recognized master and the Blue World is enlivened by his colorful style and anachronistic wordplay, as well his clever world building. I really enjoyed this book.

27, Golden Hill, by Francis Spufford (2016), 344 pages

Maybe the best book I read this year, Golden Hill was smart, funny, tragic and deeply moving. Set in 1749 New York, still English but not quite England, it follows a young man recently arrived with a mysterious past and more mysterious future. There’s adventure, suspense, romance, and lust, and it all moves along briskly. The book’s language and mores feel authentic to the age, but its themes are very modern, and it includes some genuine surprises. Highly recommended.

28, The Age of Grief, by Jane Smiley (1980), 180 pages

One of my reading goals every year is to tackle some of the books I’ve owned for years, sometimes decades. This book was, I believe, was the last one assigned in a college class on American literature (we read stuff like Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris) and for whatever reason I never read it but have dutifully kept it with me for 30 years. I suspect one reason I avoided it is the title and cover image (they don’t exactly promise a fun read), as well as my aversion to short story collections. But it was short enough to fit into the last week of the year, and I was glad I finally took the plunge. The stories are sharply realized glimpses into modern life, populated by flawed but sympathetic middle-class Americans full of feelings but often unable to express them. The title novella, about married dentists, doesn’t have much actual grief, but lots of sadness, and the best story, about a rural Christmas with overbearing relatives, felt painfully true.

That’s it. That’s the list.

For completeness sake, I’ll note here I started two other books but didn’t finish them. One, Six Four, a Japanese detective novel by Hideo Yokahama, got lost between Tokyo and New York while I was halfway through it. The other, Too Like the Lightning, a newish science fiction novel by Ada Palmer, I found pretentious and dull, and gave up after about 100 pages