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2025: My Year in Books

01 Sunday Feb 2026

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Note: If you are here solely for Fantastic Four content, you may want to skip this post. While this blog is almost all FF recaps these days, I occasionally still post things like this.

Last year was my sixth tracking the books I read. I again reached my goal of at least 24 (two a month) but the contours of my reading felt much different this year. I read more genre fiction, less non-fiction, and the total number of pages read declined to 7,908 from 8,986. There’s a few reasons for this. Probably the biggest is I had knee replacement surgery in March which meant I spent two months on serious painkillers which affected my concentration, leading me to read fewer weighty books. Also, for the first time in several years, I didn’t judge a business book contest, which meant I had less non-fiction. And I joined a fun science fiction and fantasy group on Facebook, which gave me a lot of ideas for new books and authors to read.

As is my practice, what follows are the books I read in the order I read them, with an image of the version I read (if I can find it). Apologies for any formatting wonkiness; WordPress is a frustrating platform in many ways.

1, The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula K. Le Guin (1971), 144 pages
2, The Farthest Shore, Ursula K. Le Guin (1972) 197 pages


I began the year completing The Wizard of Earthsea trilogy I began in 2024 (and hadn’t read since I was teenager). While these books are slim, they are not slight. Le Guin is wonderful writer, combining lyrical prose with measured, nuanced storytelling that belie these books’ young adult marketing. They concern the further adventures of Ged, who was introduced as an impulsive young wizard in the first book and in these volumes matures into someone both wiser and more relatably human. Unlike in the first book, in these he isn’t the sole protagonist, and in Atuan, the story really belongs to Tenar, a young woman trapped in a priesthood. I have since learned Le Guin wrote two more Earthsea books, and I look forward to eventually reading them as well.

3, The Harvest, Robert Charles Wilson (1992), 394 pages

I’ve liked most of what I’ve read by Wilson, an underrated science fiction author, but this one was a dud. Some of that is due to the plot, about most of humanity joining a unified world-mind that promises immortality while a few stragglers resist. The story felt familiar, and echoes Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (and seems to anticipate TV’s Pluribus). But the bigger disappointment is the pacing, which drags, and Wilson’s attempts at profundity, which fall flat.

4, Nicked, M.T. Anderson (2024), 215 pages

This madcap, quasi-historical romp was a Christmas present, and a welcome one, because it’s unlikely I would have found this gem on my own. It concerns a medieval monk who gets roped into a scheme to steal the bones of St. Nicholas from Asia Minor and bring them to Bari, in present day Italy, where they will cure the plague (and bring power and prestige to the city). Along the way he encounters a dog-headed man, a gay romance and all sorts of hijinks. Anderson writes with brisk confidence and humor, making this book a short delight.

5, The Door into Summer, Robert Heinlein (1957), 291 pages

I loved Robert Heinlein’s juveniles as a kid, and his The Moon is a Harsh Mistress remains one of my favorite science fiction novels, so I’m always looking for a book of his that captures that spirit. Unfortunately, most of what I’ve read by him lately has been lacking and The Door Into Summer falls into that category. The premise is harmless — it’s basically a time-travel heist with some fun ideas. But the purported romance – between the protagonist and a woman he knew as a child and is now an adult — feels seriously inappropriate and and taints the whole book. I try not to judge books written decades ago by the standards of today but I don’t think grooming was OK in the 50s either.


6, Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card (1986), 382 pages

The best science fiction book I read last year and one of the best books, period. A sequel of sorts to Ender’s Game, Card had the idea for Speaker first, then wrote Ender’s to set up the moral and philosophical questions that Speaker wrestles with. It’s an astonishingly ambitious book that takes on the nuances of Catholicism and Brazilian culture (in the form of an extra-terrestrial colony), the consequences of genocide, the ethics of cultural anthropology, and what it means to confront truly alien civilizations. There’s so much going on in this book, and it’s so elegantly written, I can’t recommend it highly enough. I know Card has written and said some deplorable things since it was published, but that doesn’t discount the power of this work.

7, Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang (2002), 304 pages

I tend not to read short story collections, but I was happy to make this exception. This is another terrific science fiction book, with stories that display Chiang’s incredible range and depth. In these stories, Chiang’s demonstrates his fluency in fields ranging from Mesopotamian engineering to Victorian alchemy to higher-order mathematics. The title story is the basis of the movie Arrival (the film is much altered, although still wonderful) but my favorite is perhaps an account of the building the Tower of Babel, from the perspective of a stone mason.


8, The Second Sleep, Robert Harris (2019), 297 pages

I started reading Robert Harris a few years ago and he’s quickly become one of my favorite genre authors. Most of his books are grounded in historical events, making this an outlier. It appears set in medieval England, but without giving too much away, the plot veers into the realm of speculative fiction and out of Harris’s typical territory. I’m not sure it’s among his best works but I admire him for trying to do something different and it certainly kept my attention.

9, Earthlight, Arthur C. Clarke (1955), 177 pages

Along with Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, Clare is regarded as one of the three grand masters of science fiction, and as with Heinlein, I feel I’m reading Clarke to chase the thrill I got after reading his books as a teenager. Unlike Heinlein, Clarke’s books tend to be more predictable in their quality, and Earthlight is a typically solid example of his early work. Basically a spy thriller set on the moon, the story is a bit of a slow boil before reaching an impressive and memorable climax. It suffers from a lot of the same dated qualities of most sci-fi from this era (everyone is white and male) but it’s not as egregious as many.

10, The Prize, Daniel Yergin (1992), 790 pages


One of two big non-fiction books I read last year, I picked it up years ago at my local library’s book sale but began it in January when I interviewed for an energy editor job (reader, I didn’t get it). It’s an exhaustive and fascinating history of the global oil industry, starting in Western Pennsylvania in the 1800s and traveling from Texas to Baku to Romania to Indonesia to Iran to Alaska. In many ways it’s a history of the 20th century (it ends with the Gulf War) and it’s startling to see the role oil played in so many major events, from Pearl Harbor to the Suez Crisis to every conflict in the Middle East. And of course, the U.S. recent adventures in Venezuela makes understanding the history of oil exploration and exploitation all the more urgent.

11, The Leopard, Tomasi di Lampedusa (1958), 230 pages

Arguably the best book I read last year, it’s another one that sat on my shelves for years before I finally picked it up. Set primarily in Sicily in the 1860s, against the backdrop of Garilabldi’s unification of Italy, it’s ostensibly the story of the Prince of Sicily (his family crest bears a Leopard) and his family. But it’s really a lyrical elegy for a vanishing way of life, as modernity creeps across Sicily and the aristocracy struggles to adapt. It’s beautifully written with a wry sympathy by an author who understand the inevitability of change but wants to take the time to remember the silly, elegant world that has vanished. The coda, set in the early 20th century, is heart breaking.

12, Bel Canto, Ann Patchett (2001), 318 pages

Another candidate for best book I read last year, and another book I picked up more-or-less at random at a library book sale. I’ve admired Ann Patchett’s writing since I encountered it in The New Yorker years ago, and this novel — probably her breakout book — is amazing. Telling the story of an American opera singer taken hostage in a South American country, it’s an ingenious exploration of the power of art and beauty within the framework of an engrossing narrative. By the end, we feel part of the community she has created.

13, The Songs of Distant Earth, Arthur C. Clarke (1986), 319 pages

My second Clarke book of the year, this was written 30 years later and while more ambitious, it was less satisfying. Set on a remote, oceanic colony of Earth, the story is set in motion when a spaceship carrying the last refugees from Earth arrive. There’s a lot going on and Clarke has interesting ideas but the characters never feel very compelling and ultimately it’s less than the sum of its parts.

14, Archangel, Robert Harris (1998), 421 pages


Another book by Robert harris, this one is more in line with the historic fiction I associate with him and represents Harris at the peak of his powers. A thriller set in Russia in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it follows a dissolute English academic in Moscow who gets sucked into a revanchist plot by former Soviet officers. The book is at its best when ties the horrors of Stalinism to the evils of the present. The ending is a bit baroque but it’s a fun, engrossing read.

15, Pronto, Elmore Leonard (1993), 373 pages


I read a few Elmore Leonard crime thrillers as a teenager but didn’t really get the appeal. But a enthusiastic reappraisal of Leonard’s oeuvre by Anthony Lane in The New Yorker this summer piqued by interest and I read a few more I pulled from my father’s book shelf. In a word, they’re terrific. Leonard is a gifted stylist, writing with clipped economy while managing to convey both color and character. There’s a tone of bemusement under it all, even as he created page-turning tension. This book introduces Raylan Givens, a sneakily smart U.S. Marshall who pursues a fugitive to Italy. Givens becomes a recurring Leonard character and the basis of the TV show Justified. It’s a fun story with a satisfying payoff.

16, Unknown Man #89, Elmore Leonard (1977), 264 pages

More Leonard. This one, written a decade before Pronto, is grittier and set in in Leonard’s native Detroit. The protagonist is a street-wise process server who gets sucked into a morass of dead criminals, jovial murderers and tarnished dames. The noir oozes off the pages and stains your fingers. Anther fun read.

17, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (1884), 325 pages

Yes, I had never read Huck Finn until this year and yes, this was a source of some embarrassment. But I decided to rectify this after reading the glowing review for James, the retelling of the book from the perspective of Jim by Percival Everett, and deciding I needed to read the source material first. Given how significant this book is in the American canon, I doubt I have much original to add, but it seems pretty clear Twain is trying to do two things at once. On the surface, the book is very much a story about a clever child on a big adventure. But beneath that surface, it’s a sly commentary on the social conventions of the American South and a stinging critique of slavery. The book is at its best when Jim takes the stage and we feel the weight of his bondage. Unfortunately, those scenes are too few, and the books is dominated by the shenanigans of Huck and the characters he encounters on the Mississippi. Those vignettes can be fun, but especially by the last few chapters — a long and painful sequence involving Tom Sawyer — they can feel very tedious.

18, Powers and Thrones, Dan Jones (2021), 639 pages

This is the big work on non-fiction I read last year. I have an amateur historian’s fascination of the early Middle Ages and this book grabbed my attention a few years ago at Dussman’s in Berlin (one of the world’s great book stores imho). Jones, the kind of English historian who hosts shows on the BBC, has written a number of popular histories and this is probably his most ambitious, spanning 1,000 years from the fall to Rome to the discovery of the New World. Jones breaks it up thematically, with each chapter focusing on a segment of medieval society, such as monks, merchants and Crusaders. Some of it felt familiar but a lot of it was new and Jones has a breezy style that make it all easily digestible. It’s so good I can forgive the nakedly transparent Games of Thrones marketing ploy


19, Shoot at The Moon, William Temple (1966), 238 pages

I took a flier on this book after seeing it at a bookstore. I never heard of the author but the British Library’s imprimatur suggested it was worth my time. Unfortunately, it fell short. While it contained some interesting ideas and a colorful scoundrel of a protagonist, it was too hard to set aside its very dated ideas about how space travel would be organized (in this book it’s something like a Victorian polar expedition) and the dynamics between men and women. I still think there are hidden gems in mid-century sci-fi but I concede they are getting harder to find.

20, City Primeval, Elmore Leonard (1980), 222 pages

My third and last Elmore Leonard book of the year. This is another fun one set in Detroit. The hero is a beleaguered cop who gets drawn into a twisty story involving corrupt judges and a violent gunman from Oklahoma. It feels like peak Leonard, and maybe for that reason serves as the basis of the TV show Justified: City Primeval, in which Raylan Givens is inserted into the plot but otherwise is pretty faithful to the book.

21, Coffin Moon, Keith Rosson (2025), 305 pages

Coffin Moon was a selection of my local book store’s book club, and a departure for me a in few ways. It’s a new release, which I almost never read, I bought it in hardback (ditto) and it’s a horror novel, a genre I generally skip past. All that said, it was a very fun book and I’m glad I took the plunge. Stephen King’s influence is clearly present, but that’s not a bad thing (if you’re going to steal, steal from the best) and Rosson injects it with his own flavor, particularly in the protagonist, a Vietnam vet suffering from PTSD who crosses paths with a nasty vampire.


22, The Nice House on the Lake, James Tynion and Alvaro Martinez Bueno (2021)

I debated whether to include this graphic novel on this list, in part because I read a digital version, but I’ve included a comic collection every year since I started this project, and of all the comics I read last year, this felt the most novelistic. Ironically, after declaring I don’t read much horror, this is also a horror story, although of a very different nature than Coffin Moon. Twelve young adults are invited to a weekend at a luxurious Wisconsin lake house by Walter, their common friend. His secret purpose was to shield them from the end of the world, and as they remain trapped at the house, it’s soon revealed he is not who they thought he was. Each of the 12 chapters (which were release as individual issues) focuses on one of the characters and their complicated relationships with Walter and each other. Much of it is told in flashback to their times in high school and college, and Tynion has a deft touch writing about young people navigating friendships, resentments and LGBTQ identities. A sequel, A Nice House by the Sea, about another 12 people in a similar circumstance, began in 2024 but to my knowledge hasn’t been completed.

23, Old Man’s War, John Scalzi (2005), 303 pages

I really wanted to like his book more than I did. Described as a modern science fiction classic in the Facebook group I joined, it felt like a deliberate homage to earlier space-military books I loved like Heinlein’s Starship Troopers or Joe Haldeman’s Forever War. The wrinkle in this book is that senior citizens are recruited to fight in space, where their consciousness is transferred into younger bodies. The premise was fun, but the characters were flat and lifeless and the big twist was telegraphed mile away. The is Scalzis first book and I may pick up something he wrote later to see if he improved with age.


24, The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri (2003), 291 pages

Another contender for best book I read last year. This was an achingly beautiful novel, written about an ordinary family living an ordinary live but whose stories become extraordinary in Lahiri’s telling. The focus is on Gogol, a young Indian-American named after the Russian author (hence the title), and his life as the son of immigrants who remain deeply tied to their home country. Lahiri writes with incredible empathy and you can’t help caring for all the characters, even those who are later revealed to be less than trustworthy.

25, Storm Front, Jim Butcher, (2001), 355 pages

Another Facebook group find. This is the first in a long and apparently beloved series about Harry Dresden, a wizard who works as a Chicago private investigator. Butcher is very clearly playing with the hard-boiled pulp style of Chandler, and it was fun reading this after all the Elmore Leonard. There’s nothing deep about this book, but it’s well-crafted genre fiction and a nice departure after the Lahiri.

26, The Word for World is Forest, Ursula K. Le Guin (1976) 113 pages

Technically a novella, I was able to sneak this one last book in in the last days of the year. I’m glad I did, as it’s a great story. Le Guin intended this a parable about Vietnam, set on a colony planet where blundering humans terrorize a population of natives who then rise up and fight back. But it’s much richer than just an allegory, and she infuses her imagined world and its inhabitants with vivid details that bring it all alive. It’s a masterclass in economy and simplicity of story telling, and much more memorable than many books far longer. Le Guin is rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors.


A final note: This year I tried, and failed, to read The Vorhh by B. Catling. Hailed as a landmark book of modern fantasy, I found it impenetrable and gave up after 100 pages. Oh well.

2024: My Year in Books

24 Friday Jan 2025

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Note: If you are here for Fantastic Four content, you may want to skip this post. While these days my blog is almost all FF recaps, I occasionally still post things like this.


Last year was my fifth tracking and counting the books I read. Although I technically read 27 books, I’m only counting 24 (more on that in a bit) and therefore just reached my goal of two a month. As usual, I was very unsystematic about what I read, and my choices ranged from gifts I received, books I found at my parents’ house, things I picked up at library sales, entries in a business book contest I judged, and books reviewed in the Times. I read more science fiction and fewer non-fiction books than the previous year, and totaled 8,986 pages, down from 10,215 in 2023. I enjoyed most of what I read, although there were a few duds.

The books are presented in the order I read them. As always, for the images, I have tried to find the cover of the edition I read. Also, apologies for any layout wonkiness. WordPress was being particularly difficult with this post.



1, A Coffin for Dimitrios, Eric Amber (1939), 302 pages

This novel was named one of Time’s 100 best mysteries and thrillers of all time, and because my father was an Eric Ambler fan and it was on the shelf at my parents’ home, I decided to give it a shot. Set in Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria between the wars, it’s darkly atmospheric and full of intrigues and double-crosses. I’m not sure I ever quite bought into the premise — the protagonist is a novelist compelled to solve a mystery to satisfy his own curiosity — but Ambler propels the plot along briskly and sticks the landing.


2, The Dead Zone, Stephen King (1979), 513 pages

I began reading Stephen King books a few years ago, and have pretty much enjoyed everything by him I’ve encountered. I’ve stuck mostly to his science fiction, and they are engrossing reads. This one, about a young man who after an accident realizes he can see into the future (the “dead zone” of the title refers to the quasi-hypnotic state he enters into) and the complicated consequences that follow. I read this while suffering from pneumonia and it offered the just the right amount of plot without requiring too much concentration.


3, The Ferryman, Justin Cronin (2023), 538 pages

Easily the worst book I read in 2023. I saw this in one of the little free library boxes in my neighborhood, and because I enjoyed Cronin’s Passage trilogy, it seemed like it was a safe bet. It was not. The story is basically a version of The Matrix in which events play out in the mind of a slumbering protagonist, who in this case is in cryogenic sleep abroad a space ship. Except we don’t learn that until the last quarter of the book and instead of his imagined world being interesting or exciting, it’s incredibly tedious. I returned this book to the neighborhood library and regret not attaching a note of warning.


4, The Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown (2013) 375 pages

This was recommended by a CEO I interviewed years ago, and I when I saw a copy at a library sale, I picked it up and finally read it last year when I heard a movie was coming out. It reminded me a lot of Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, another richly detailed story of plucky American courage and achievement against the backdrop of World War II (or in this case, the rise of Nazism). Brown interviewed the surviving members of the U.S. Olympic 1936 eight-man rowing crew, and tells a compelling story, with the focus on one rower from a hardscrabble background in Washington State. Brown is great at describing the complicated and slightly mystical sport of rowing, an activity that demands high levels of stamina, technique, teamwork and equipment. I suspect some of the details and dialogue lost to history might have been embroidered by Brown, but it all added up to a satisfying read.


5, The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin (1971), 184 pages

After reading The Left of Hand of Darkness two years ago I was eager to explore more of Le Guin. This book, about a man with the power to remake reality through his dreams, is less successful, in part because it’s set in late 1960s Portland, Oregon (where Le Guin lived), and being tethered to that era makes it somewhat dated and clunky. The protagonist is also a bit of a cypher, and his romantic connection didn’t really work. But Le Guin’s wildly imaginative premise made it worth reading.



6, The Oracle Year, Charles Soule (2018), 402 pages

Soule is one of my favorite comic book authors and I bought this, his first novel, from him at New York Comic Con. The fun plot concerns an aimless 20-something who suddenly can predict the future, and his attempts to escape the evil doers who want to control him. Stephen King’s influence is obvious, from the surprisingly resourceful hero to the MacGuffin-like origin of his powers, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t an entertaining story.



7, An Officer and a Spy, Robert Harris (2013), 429 pages

Starting with Fatherland, which I read a few years ago, I’ve mostly enjoyed the Harris books I’ve read and this may be his best. It retells the infamous Dreyfus Affair as a thriller, as Major Georges Picquart, a French officer who is first convinced Dreyfus — a Jewish artillery officer—is guilty of spying, then unearths evidence of his innocence. The story is really Piquart’s not Dreyfus’s, and his battles against France’s military establishment and his own prejudices. Harris does a masterful job of recreating France in the early 1900s, and mining the historic record for the elements to transform a well-known historical event into a compelling, and suspenseful, thriller. One of the best books I read in 2024.



8, Infinity Gate, M. R. Carey (2023), 499 pages

I really enjoyed this science fiction novel, which I first encountered in a New York Times review. It’s a multiversal novel and so instead of taking place on multiple planets across the galaxy, it takes place on multiple Earths, most of which are part of a vast empire, the Pandominion. While the premise of the novel is intriguing, it’s real strengths are the richly realized characters who populate the novel, some of whom are from our Earth, and some from other similar and no-so similar Earths (one character comes from an Earth where humans share a common ancestor not with apes but with rabbits — she’s very good at jumping and kicking). When I bought this book, I was under the impression M.R. Carley was a woman, thereby helping me increase the number of books by female authors I am reading, a goal of mine. Alas, the M. stands for Michael, and Mike Carey is another comic book writer turned sci-fi author.



9, The Man Who Broke Capitalism, David Gelles (2023), 234 pages

This book arrived at my door last year by accident, due to some confusion on the publisher’s part about whether it was a finalist among the business books I was judging (it wasn’t). I read it because I’ve written about Welch and GE on-and-off over my career, and while there wasn’t anything in it that was particularly revelatory, it works really well as a primer on the trends in American business over the last 40 years. I would recommend it to a high school student (or I guess anyone) curious about why companies act the way they do.



10, The Dragon Masters and Other Stories (2016), 183 pages

Jack Vance has become one of my favorite science fiction authors, as much for his incredibly imaginative stories as for his uniquely styled, almost archaic writing voice. I bought this collected volume in London years ago and after reading Big Planet and The Blue World over the last few years, finally turned to The Dragon Master and Other Stories, a collection of three novellas from the 50s and 60s which is somewhat confusingly included in this larger collection. The three stories are all fairly amazing and weird and thought provoking in their own ways. If you want to give Vance a try, The Miracle Workers, about a feudal society that lost and rediscovers science, is a fun introductory work.

11, The Tripods Trilogy, John Christopher, (1967-68), 618 pages

I’m conflating these three books into one because they are really written for children and each are very short. Fairly obscure now, I bought these books — about a boy who finds himself part of a rebellion against aliens that have enslaved most humanity — as a middle-schooler and loved them. I have reread them a few times since, most recently as a nostalgic break as I read something much denser (see below) and as escapist science fiction, they hold up well. They are dated — there are almost no women or girls in them, for example — but Christoper’s writing is wonderfully crisp and economical, and a great lesson in how less can be more.

12, Bleak House, Charles Dickens (1853), 1053 pages

One of my reading goals is to tackle the so-called great books, the one’s that populate lists of the greatest novels ever written (like this one). Bleak House was a project, but a fascinating and rewarding one. While it concerns a slow-moving court case, Jarndyce vs Jarndyce, about a contested will, it contains layers and layers, with dozens of characters, multiple subplots, many humorous scenes, and maybe most interestingly, two narrators that alternate chapters (one is an omniscient third person narrator, the other is Esther Summerson, a young orphan who ends up living in Bleak House). The story zigs and zags, and is at times a detective novel, at times a romance, and at times pointed social commentary. Dickens can be both bombastic and subtle, sometimes on the same page, and at times I felt I overlooked important plot points, requiring me to flip back and forth a lot to see what I missed. By the time I finished, I felt like I had climbed a mountain; I was exhausted but very glad of the experience.

13, The Witch Hunter, Max Seeck (2020), 384 pages

Another selection from my father’s bookshelf, this was the only other real disappointment of the year. A police procedural in Finland, the setting is promising, but the plot is outlandish, the characters overwrought and the whole thing is too melodramatic. I hung on until the end to see how is tied up but it was a chore.

14, The Passage of Power, Robert Caro (2012), 692 pages

This was my other big project of the year: reading the most recent volume of Caro’s Lyndon Johnson biography. I’ve been reading one a year for the last four years and they are all extraordinary, for the depth of Caro’s reporting, for his elegant and propulsive writing, and for the sweep and insight with which he unfolds the events in mid-century America. This volume concerns LBJ’s vice presidency, which was grim, and his first year in office as president following Kennedy’s assassination, which was glorious. If I have a critique, it’s that Caro moves too quickly through the year of his presidency, maybe because he feels like it’s been covered sufficiently elsewhere, but compared to the stately pace with which he describes other periods in Johnson’s life, it almost felt rushed. Now I have to wait for volume five.

15, The Human Target, vols 1 and 2, Tom King and Greg Smallwood, (2022 and 2023)

Every year I read a lot of comic books and every year I don’t count them toward my reading totals with one exception: comics written by Tom King. King’s comics are so novelistic in their themes and stories they feel like literature, and The Human Target, which collects a 12-comic miniseries is one of his best. As with his other comics, here King takes another obscure DC character with a long history and puts him through the wringer. While his other stories like The Omega Men and Strange Adventures take place on distant planets, The Human Target is much narrower in its focus, a noir story about a down-on-his luck detective who impersonates assassination targets (hence his name). Here, he becomes entangled with the characters from Justice League Europe, a beloved comic from the 80s known for its slapstick humor. But now the characters are anything but funny, and it’s a bit of a jolt seeing some of them all grown up. While I’d recommend these to anyone who loves great storytelling, the biggest impact will land on comic readers whose memories of these once simply rendered characters are about to get upended.

16, Conclave, Robert Harris, (2017), 391 pages

I generally don’t read multiple books by the same author in any given year (a practice I violated multiple times this year) but I liked An Officer and Spy so much that when I heard a Conclave movie was coming out, I wanted to read it in anticipation of seeing the film. But the book was a disappointment, at least compared to Officer, and in fact I felt the movie was much better. Ultimately, Conclave the film did a better job of capturing the pomp and majesty of the Vatican, and the story’s conspiracies and its big twist at the end — all of which seemed highly unlikely in the book — seemed much more plausible in a movie.

17, Taming the Street, Diana Henriques (2023), 354 pages

For the last few years I’ve served as a judge in a business book contest, and I read a handful of new business books over five weeks each fall. This was the first of this year’s batch, and the best (and the one awarded first place). Henriques, a longtime business journalist who wrote the definitive account of the Bernie Madoff scandal, describes the depredations of the stock market in the 1920s, and the birth of the Securities & Exchange Commission under Franklin Roosevelt. It’s full of colorful characters, including Joseph Kennedy, the roguish first chair of the SEC (and JFK’s father), and Richard Whitney, president of the New York Stock Exchange, whose downfall is stranger than fiction. It’s a fun read, the reporting is impressive and its lessons, about the importance of smart regulation to safeguard the financial system and grow the economy, are impossible to ignore.

18, Number Go Up, Zeke Faux (2023), 261 pages

Another contest book, this one by a former colleague. There’s no denying the subject — cryptocurrency and the many grifters who have tried to make money from it — is incredibly compelling, and Faux is a great storyteller. Much of the book is told in the first person, as Faux tries to unwind the company behind Tether, a particularly notorious cryptocurrency, and he gets incredible access to crypto bros who seem to tell him everything. But the first person narrative is also a weakness, since the book follows his reporting without always giving us the bigger picture.

19, Extremely Hardcore, Zoe Schiffer (2024), 298 pages

The last of the contest books, and the least successful. It’s basically a chronicle of Elon Musk’s first year running Twitter, and the employees who both benefitted and (mostly) suffered as a result. It’s extremely detailed and well reported, but the employees we meet don’t feel fully developed, and the book is very narrow in its scope. I would have loved a bigger picture via of Musk’s world and where Twitter falls in it. Especially now, as Musk as taken even more importance in the world, the book’s limited focus feels like a real detriment.

20, Rogue Protocol, Martha Wells, (2018) 158 pages

This is the third Murderbot novella I’ve read and the least successful. The premise is a lot of fun: basically a security robot, highly specialized in killing things, breaks free of its programming and develops a conscience. Unfortunately, this books is a direct sequel to the previous one which I read last year, and since I forgot most of the details, I was mildly confused by the robot’s motivations and the role of the sinister corporation that seemed to be pulling strings. Also, a lot of this story takes place on a satellite, and its specific layout and design is both very important to the narrative and frustratingly hard to picture.

21, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, Eric Cline, (2015) 190 pages

I encountered this book after seeing a bookstore copy of its sequel (After 1177 B.C.), and deciding that it looked interesting enough that I should read this first. In fact, this was very interesting, although not exactly what I expected. The book tells the story of the incredibly vibrant eastern Mediterranean kingdoms of the late Bronze Age and their unraveling. Eric Cline, an academic historian, promises an all-audiences book, but it’s not written as a narrative. Instead, he methodically, and at times ponderously, walks us through the upheaval of civilizations from Egypt to Mycenae to the Hittites, and examines all the evidence that points to their destruction. The book is full of references to historians and archeologists, and its end notes and bibliography run nearly 100 pages. Along the way Cline dispels the idea that an invasion of the mysterious “Sea Peoples” brought about ruin, and in fact he dismisses the idea that 1177 B.C. was the pivotal year (despite the book’s title). Instead, he argues it was a combination of factors, mostly climate related, that led to famine, wars, and the interruption of trade that caused a multi-decade long decline into the Iron Age. His main, prophetic takeaway is that no civilization lasts forever, their ends are multi-faceted and complicated, and no one realizes it’s happening at the time.

22, Echo of Worlds, M.R. Carey (2024), 502 pages

I liked Infinity Gate so much that I pre-ordered the sequel and, again breaking my vague rule about reading the same author twice in one year, devoured this one too. In some ways this story is a more conventional adventure; the cast of characters, assembled at the end of the last book, now embarks on a series of missions to save the multiverse. There are some amazing action set-pieces, and the story has an exciting urgency to it. The resolution of the events at the end felt slightly anticlimactic, but the biggest disappointment was finishing it and realizing there may not be another book in the series.

23, A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin (1980), 182 pages

Yet another violation of my rule (see above). I grabbed this in part because I remain Le Guin-curious, in part because I was curious if it held up from when I last read it, close to 40 years ago, and in part because I was stuck without anything to read. It’s really a wonderfully written book, a classic fantasy bildungsroman, about Sparrowhawk, a shepherd boy with a talent of magic who enrolls in an academy for wizards. The magic in this book isn’t the frivolous stuff in Harry Potter but deeply serious, and his mischief leads to horrible consequences he barely survives. In truth, it’s themes were probably way over my head when I read it as a young teen, and the Le Guin’s writing is lyrical and evocative. A terrific book.

24, The General in his Labyrinth, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1991), 270 pages

I bought this book, about the last years of Simon Bolivar, after a family trip to Colombia five years ago, and brought it with me on a vacation to El Salvador. It was a good choice, as El Salvador retains a lot of the decaying colonial vestiges described by Marquez, and it wasn’t hard to picture the Colombian towns and villages Bolivar rode though 200 years ago. I last read Marquez 30 years ago, and I had forgotten his brilliant wordplay and hallucinogenic imagery. This book is perhaps more realism than magic, given its biographical nature, and there are lots of names and locations to keep track of, but the prose is wonderfully lush and hypnotic and the book is captivating.

2022: My Year in Books

31 Saturday Dec 2022

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(Note: If you frequent this blog for Fantastic Four content, feel free 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.)


For the first time since I started setting annual reading goals, I reached my target of 24, or two a month. That was possible for a few reasons: A, My wife and I took a trip to Germany, which meant lots of time on airplanes, trains and in an Airbnb with no television. B, I was a judge in a business book contest, which meant I had to power through four books in five weeks and C, Somewhat sheepishly, I deliberately chose some short books to balance out some of the longer ones.

As always, the books I read this year were chosen for a variety of reasons. Some I read for work, some have been on my list for years, and some I picked up almost at random. As ever, I aimed for a mix of non-fiction, literary fiction and genre fiction, and I tried to improve the diversity of the authors I read. One regret is that I didn’t read what I would consider a classic. Next year!

Here, in order, are the books I read this year (for illustrations, I do my best to show the version I read, which isn’t always possible):

1, Hyperion, by Dan Simmons (1989)

Hyperion frequently shows up on lists of the greatest works of science fiction and accordingly it had been on my list for a while. It did not disappoint. Hugely ambitious, it borrows the structure of the Canterbury Tales to tell the story of interstellar pilgrims on the planet Hyperion, all with their own complicated stories, and it wrestles with themes of faith, fate, loyalty and duty. There are also many references to the poetry of Keats. The only frustration is that it ends with a cliff-hanger, basically demanding you read the sequel (see below).


2, How Rome Fell, by Adrian Goldworthy (2010)


I don’t recall exactly how I ended up with this book, but it’s possible I grabbed it from the stack of review copies they gave away at Bloomberg, which means I’ve had it for nearly a decade. This is a big, traditional history that marches readers through the second half of the Roman Empire, from about 200 AD to the fall of Rome. Goldsworthy goes emperor by emperor, and 12 months after reading it, they mostly are a blur. What remans is a sense of the precarious nature of power—some emperors lasted only a few years, or months—and the importance of institutions in establishing legitimacy. Rome didn’t fall because of invasion, but from internal decay.


3, Educated, by Tara Westover (2018)

I’d been interested in reading this since it came out, but I decided to wait until it was in paperback. Unfortunately, it was such a big bestseller that took a very long time, but I finally bought it in a LAX bookshop and read it in one sitting on a flight to Hawaii. It wasn’t quite what I expected—I took the title too literally and thought it would be about Westover’s actual education once she reached college after her horrible home schooling. There was some of that, but it’s mostly about her escape from her family’s possessive, abusive clutches. It’s an incredibly vivid portrait of rural poverty, dysfunction and the poison of religious orthodoxy.


4, The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons (1991)

Instead of neatly wrapping up the events of Hyperion, it’s sequel unravels things further, giving us more backstory about the pilgrims, more world-building that explains the events that led them there, more time travel, and (much) more Keats. The events do reach a conclusion, but Simmons has written several more books that continue the story that I doubt I will read. This was enough.

5, The Anomaly, by Hervé le Tellier (2020)

Another work of science fiction, but so different from Hyperion that it proves how silly these genre classifications can be. Told through seemingly unrelated vignettes, all about different passengers on a flight from Paris to New York, this French novel takes on some big questions about the nature of reality and the purpose of existence. This was a Christmas present from my mother, I think.


6, The Voltage Effect, by John List (2022)

I read this in preparation for an interview with its author, John List, a University of Chicago economist I have been writing about since around 2010. In this book, List attempts to use some basic economic principles to explain why some businesses succeed and scale (achieving the voltage of the title) and why other whither and die. List has worked with a who’s who of companies, from Uber to Walmart, and the book is enlivened by anecdotes from his consulting work.


7, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Means of Ascent, by Robert Caro (1990)

Last year I set the goal of reading one of Caro’s LBJ biographies a year until (hopefully) he finishes the fifth and final one. This is the second, and while it’s not as comprehensive as his first, it might be better. It deals with seven momentous years of Johnson’s life as a Congressman, including his (incredibly dodgy) wartime service and his (even dodgier) campaign and election to the Senate in 1948, which takes up most of the book. Caro clearly has a soft spot for Johnson’s opponent, former Texas Governor Coke Robertson, and goes into painstaking detail to show all the tricks, legal and otherwise, LBJ employed to beat him. I have referred to these books the Sistine Chapel of journalism, and I meant it.

8, The Night Ocean, by Paul LaFarge (2018)

I read a New York Times review of this book when it first came out and was intrigued because it concerns the life of controversial horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, whose work I am not quite a fan of but more vaguely fascinated with. When I saw The Night Ocean at our local library sale, I grabbed it. The novel isn’t really about Lovecraft but about story telling, and story tellers, reliable and otherwise. There are many overlapping narratives about various disciples and admirers of Lovecraft, and it all felt a bit more post-modern than I really wanted.


9, Fatherland, by Robert Harris (1992)

This is the first of a series of Berlin-related books I read during my trip their this summer, and it might be the best. Harris takes up a familiar question—what it Hitler had won?—and spins a very compelling police procedural about a reluctant Nazi detective who sets out to solve a murder and gets caught up in a plot with much bigger stakes. It’s not as ambitious as The Man in the High Castle, Phillip K. Dick’s classic of this genre, but it’s more fun to read.


10, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John Le Carré (1963)

LeCarré seems like the quintessential Cold-War spy novelists and this book seemed like the quintessential Cold-War spy novel, so it made sense to read it in Berlin. It’s engrossing, bleak and incredibly intricate. There are plots within plots within plots, and every time you think you understand what’s going on, another layer is revealed. It’s not my favorite genre, but I can understand the appeal. I bought it at Dussmann’s, a great bookstore in downtown Berlin, whose English-language section is better than most U.S. bookstores.


11, The File, by Timothy Garton Ash (1997)

Another purchase from Dussmann’s. Ash, now a high-powered author and historian in the U.K., was a student in East Berlin in the late 1970s. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he requested the file on him collected by the Stasi, the East German secret police, and he interviewed the various Germans who informed and spied on him. It’s a pretty fascinating book, made much more so because our visit to the Stasi Museum while in Berlin.


12, Between the Woods and the Water, by Patrick Leigh Fermor (1986)

This is the second of three books by Fermor describing the overland trip (mostly by foot) he took from Holland to Turkey as a teenager in 1933 and ’34, but written decades later with an adult’s wisdom and perspective. The first book, which I read maybe 10 years ago, was dazzling, described the first part of his voyage, through Germany and Austria and in retrospect, I probably should have re-read that one in conjunction with our trip, since it was more relevant to our travels.

This second volume, which I mostly read on the flight home, takes Fermor through Hungary and Romania, is equally dazzling. Unlike the first volume, which seems more attuned to the political moment, the second one feels more carefree, as Fermor falls into with successive isolated aristocratic families who are happy to entertain this exotic British schoolboy as he makes his way across Eastern Europe. It’s a poignant picture of a world lost to World War II and communism; in some cases literally, as he visits an island in the Danube which was later covered under 100 feet of water by a Romanian dam.

One side note: The version I took to Germany didn’t have a map, so I amused myself by trying to figure out his itinerary by using the digital Delta airlines map on the seat back in front of me (mostly unsuccessfully). When I got home, I realized that I had two versions the book (one must have been a gift), and the version I didn’t bring had excellent maps of his voyage. Oh well.

13, The Man in the Bunker, by Rory Clements (2022)

Another Dussmann’s purchase, the last of the Germany books I read this year, and maybe the least satisfying book overall. It’s another alternate history, and in retrospect, I think I was looking to capture something as fun as Fatherland. Instead it’s a pretty listless thriller about a British academic and Dutch soldier investigating whether Hitler was really killed in 1945.

14, A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan (2011)

I picked this up after reading a review of Egan’s most recent book, The Candy House, which is a sort of sequel to Goon Squad. This is the type of book I don’t read much of— its concerns are relationships and individual development and maturity, and it’s set in the ordinary, quotidian world, more or less. Additionally, there’s no real narrative—it’s a set of interlocking vignettes in which the same characters appear over decades. But I really enjoyed it. Egan writes with verve, and the characters and scenes are richly realized.


15, Big Planet, by Jack Vance (1952

I first heard about Jack Vance in a New York Times Magazine article that argued he was an unrecognized giant of science fiction. I’ve read a handful of his books since then and I think it’s a pretty accurate description. This is a short adventure story, but written in Vance’s typically elegant, clever style. It’s not nearly ambitious as Hyperion, but it doesn’t need to be to succeed as a great book.


16, Flying Blind, by Peter Robison (2021)

This was the first of the business books I read as a contest judge and—spoiler alert—by far the best (it won our first prize). Robison, Bloomberg’s Boeing beat reporter, painstakingly explains the chain of failures that led to the Boeing 737 MAX disaster, and spends time with the victims and their families, putting a human face on the tragedy. But he goes much further, situating Boeing’s disregard of safety and its regulatory capture of the FAA, as part of a deeper rot in capitalism, whose origins can be traced to Jack Welch’s rapacious stint as CEO of General Electric. If you only ever read one business book, this is a pretty good one to read.

17, Trillion Dollar Triage, by Nick Timiraos (2021)

Another contest book, and maybe my least favorite of the four. It’s about the Federal Reserve’s response to the economy shutting down for Covid-19, and it’s really a love letter to Jerome Powell, the Fed chair. The book is really a series of committee meetings and the very limited action rarely takes place outside DC. It’s very well reported but felt rushed and after a while all its details become numbing. It’s really a book for hardcore Fed groupies.



18, The Founders, by Jimmy Soni (2021)

The third contest book. This is basically an oral history of the founding of PayPal, which is interesting in that the founders were, among others, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk (heard of him?). It’s well written and very thorough, but the author, Jimmy Soni, seems a little too star-struck and uncritical of what he’s describing. The biggest flaw is there is almost no followup about what all these various characters did after PayPal, and that, ultimately, is why anyone cares about this story.


19, A Shot to Save the World, by Gregory Zuckerman (2021)

The last of the contest books. Ostensibly about the race to develop a vaccine for Covid-19, it’s really a history of mRNA vaccines and the companies invested in them. As a result, it starts decades before anyone has heard of Covid, and walks through the science in great, and often confusing, detail. To his credit, Zuckerman, a Wall Street Journal reporter, does a good job involving us in the many characters he introduces, but the book often felt like a slog.



20, All Systems Red, by Martha Wells (2017)

After grinding through those business books I wanted something short and breezy, and this was perfect. This very slim book is the first installment in the “Murderbot Diaries” a science fiction series that tells the first-person adventures of an android built to be a security system and who develops freewill. It was fast and fun, and I look forward to reading the rest of the series.


21, The Omega Men: The End is Here, by Tom King and Barnaby Bagenda (2016)

I read a lot of comic books, but I’m too much of a snob to consider most of them literature. This Omega Men series, which I read for the second time this year, is different. The 12-issue series collected here tells the story of the rebellious Omega Men and their fight to free their star system from the oppressive Citadel. But unlike other similar stories, the Omega Men aren’t all virtuous, and their methods aren’t all heroic. The series asks hard questions about ends justifying means, the cost of freedom, and the value of fanaticism. Prior knowledge of these DC comic characters isn’t strictly necessary but author Tom King, who wrote the amazing Mr. Miracle, does enjoy playing with that universe’s second-tier heroes and pulls in a Green Lantern to act as our witness to the horror that unfold.


22, The Invention of Nature, by Andrea Wulf (2015)

This was recommended to me by my father, because like its subject, Alexander Von Humboldt, I, too, attempted to climb Chimborazo, the highest mountain in Ecuador (But unlike Humboldt, I made it to the top. Ha!).

Wulf’s book is a long argument for the importance of Humboldt in the history of science and the study of the environment, and she makes a persuasive case. Humboldt (1769-1859) was a dashing, charismatic figure who was friends with everyone from Goethe to Bolivar, and whose travels to South America and subsequent writings more or less invented the concept of ecology, the idea that natural systems are tied together. Wulf shows how he was centuries ahead of his time in seeing the costs of deforestation, and she devotes chapters to his huge influence on figures including Darwin, Thoreau and Muir. While she’s honest about his flaws—he was a boor who loved the sound if his own voice—she’s clearly enamored with her subject and wants him restored to his proper place in the pantheon of greats.


23, The River, by Peter Heller (2019)

A few people recommended The River to me, and once I realized it was written by the same author as The Dog Stars, which I read last year, I thought I would give it a shot. A brisk, page-turning thriller suffused with vivid descriptions of the natural world, it’s the story of two college kids on a (very) ill-fated canoe trip in the Canadian wilderness. I enjoyed it, but it felt like neither fish nor fowl: The story and its impossibly competent, heroic protagonists was too improbable to take seriously as a novel, but it was too introspective and meditative to read like the sort of Louis L’Amour-western adventure the author clearly admires. Ultimately, I was left with the same dissatisfaction I felt after reading The Dog Stars, which is that the Heller wants to be a respected nature writer, but writes books he hopes will be made into a movies.


24, The King in Yellow, by Robert Chambers (1895)

This was a gift from my teenage son, who knows of my interest in Lovecraft. Lovecraft read this collection of short stories, published in 1895, and seems to have taken some inspiration from some of them. The first four stories all reference “The King in Yellow,” a book-within-a-book that contains horrible secrets that drive men mad (a very Lovecraftian idea), and a few of the stories are genuinely creepy and unsettling. The other stories in the collection vary enormously in style and quality, and the last four or so involve the lives of Bohemian American artists in Paris, which seem autobiographical and are unfortunately pretty dull.

2021 : My Year in Books

30 Monday May 2022

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Welcome to a very belated round up of the 15 books I read in 2021 (honestly, I meant to do this in January). I fell way short of my goal of reading 24 books, or two a month, but as will be clear, I read some monstrously long books that put 24 out of reach. As I do every year, I try to mix up my reading, between fiction and non-fiction, sci-fi and literary fiction, classics and lesser known stuff. And as in years past, my reading was divided between books I have had on my list for years and books I chanced upon, many at our local library’s book sale. Over the last few years I have tried to be more deliberate about the diversity of the authors I read, with mixed success.

1, Money: The True Story of a Made Up Thing, by Jason Goldstein (2020)

This is a fun and fast tour through the history of money and finance by a guy I’ve know for years. Jake finds a lot of quirky details and anecdotes to enliven the subject, and goes deep into some corners of the financial world —the invention of money market funds, for example—that are often overlooked in discussions about the history of capitalism. Given the rise of crytocurrencies, Jake’s essential question—why do we believe in money?—seems extremely relevant

2, The Moth and the Mountain, by Ed Caesar (2020)

This was a Christmas present, and would appear to be just the sort of book I would go for, combining history, mountaineering and adventure. But the story, about Maurice Wilson, a World War I veteran fixated on flying to Nepal and climbing Everest, never is more than the sum of the parts. In part, it’s because Caesar struggles to pin down Wilson, an apparent flimflam man whose motivations always seem murky. And in part, because the most dramatic aspect of the story, the actual attempt to climb Everest, is basically undocumented, and so feels like a footnote to his story.

3, The Powerful and the Damned, by Lionel Barber (2020)

I realize now this is the third recent nonfiction release I read in a row, which is highly unusual for me. Usually there’s more variety in my choices, but I read this one for work, in preparation for an interview with Barber, which I wrote about for Quartz. It’s an engaging book, written by a professional name dropper who met and interviewed everyone from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin and is happy to share his personal and sometimes snarky views about them all. Barber ran the Financial Times during the financial crisis and Brexit, but for media insiders, his accounts of the newspaper’s sale to Japan’s Nikkei might be of the most interest.

4, The Stand, by Stephen King (1978)

Reason one I didn’t reach 24 books last year was this 1,300 page monster. I am a late convert to King, and since I am more of a sci-fi guy then a horror fan, this was always high on my list to read. It didn’t disappoint, although it did ramble at times, and the King heroic archetype—the underestimated working-class white guy—feels a bit cliched at this point. Still, the rich character development, and the ambition and size of it all, made it an engrossing read.

5, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, by Sean Howe (2013)

As a lifelong comic book collector, it was a only a matter of time before I read this. There weren’t a lot of surprises in it for me, but it did fill in a lot of gaps in my understanding. Interestingly, this book is a business history more than a cultural history, and the big takeaway is the consistent shortsightedness of Marvel’s management. Whatever were triumphs of its artists and writers, they were despite, not because, of their bosses.

6, Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishigiro (2006)

After the previous year’s disappointment reading Ishigiro’s The Buried Giant, I wasn’t quite ready to write him off. It was a good call, because this is a powerful, heartbreaking story. A slow burn, it begins as a deep dive into the lives of children at an English boarding school before revealing itself as a dystopian parable. It’s sad, thought-provoking and one of the best books I read last year.

7, Beyond the 100th Meridian, by Wallace Stegner (1953)

I bought this in Flagstaff on a family vacation to the Grand Canyon, in part because it’s about the Colorado river and the western landscape, and because I’ve never read anything about Stegner and always wanted to. It’s a biography of 19th century explore and scientist John Wesley Powell, and it’s really two books on one. The first half is about Powell’s expedition to float the length of the Colorado, which no one had done previously. The second is about his later career as a a government official with the US Geologic Survey, and the politics and policies that shaped the settling of the American west. The first part of the book was thrilling, the second was a bit wonky but deeply interesting as it explains a lot about why the US west looks the way it does today.

8, The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jeminson (2015)

“World building” is a bit of a science fiction cliché but there sure is a lot of it in this book. Jemison’s trilogy got a lot of attention, and most of it is deserved, as she describes a world where geologic events play a central role, and the mutants that can shape them are shunned and feared. There are some obvious metaphors about race, and a plot twist that wasn’t that hard to see coming, but in all a pretty satisfying read. I didn’t, however, feel compelled to read the rest of the trilogy. Maybe some day.

9, Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir (2021)

My teenage son and I listened to this as a book on tape (yes, I am counting audio books) during a long road trip across the midwest and it felt like a great choice. Like in Weir’s The Martian, there’s a lot of hard science, but it’s offered in such a palatable way that it’s never a struggle and instead makes the outlandish plot almost convincing. The story, about a scientist battling an alien menace, is told as a series of digressions, which seemed like an unnecessarily complicated structure but on the whole the book is fast-paced fun and by the time we reach the end, surprisingly moving.

10, Crazy Horse, by Larry McMurtry (1999)

I picked this up at Mt. Rushmore, near the Crazy Horse monument. Not a lot is known about Crazy Horse, the Sioux warrior and mystic, and McMurtry, author of massive books like Lonesome Dove, wisely doesn’t try to pad out the story. Instead, we have a slim, spare, well-told account of Crazy Horse’s life at the end of a Native culture and the beginning of a genocide.

11, The Path to Power, by Robert Caro (1982)

The other monster I read in 2021, and probably by proudest reading accomplishment of the year, was the first volume in Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson. At some point, maybe after reading excerpts of Caro’s most recent book in the New Yorker, I vowed to read his LBJ series, one a year, until I was done (I’m currently reading the second). This first volume, which takes us up to LBJ’s first senate campaign in 1941, when he was about 30, is an amazing achievement of reporting and writing. Caro not only carefully unfolds every detail of LBJ’s early years, but spends whole chapters explaining the geology, economy and history of the Texas Hill Country from whence he came. Calling it the Sistine Chapel of journalism doesn’t seem like an exaggeration. It can be hard to read at times, not out of any fault of Caro’s, but because LBJ is so vile, amoral and unlikeable.

12, The Magician’s Assistant, by Ann Patchett (1997)

Ann Patchett wrote an amazing essay in the New Yorker about her three fathers (two are step-fathers) and after that I thought I would try her fiction. This books is unlike most books I read—it’s a quiet, contemporary story about a woman processing grief, in which most of the main characters are female—but I thoroughly enjoyed it. It took a little while to build up speed but the second half flies by.

13, A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine (2019)

More science fiction. If I recall, I picked this up as a free review copy that made its way to Quartz. It’s structured like an old-fashioned space opera with an intriguing premise, about a civilization that takes on the memories of their predecessors, and where verse and poetry have enormous cultural capital. Unfortunately, Martine (a nom de plume for Anna Linden Weller, a US historian) never really achieves escape velocity, and the plot, about an out-of-her-depth provincial ambassador in the empire’s capital solving a murder, seems to be mostly series of meetings and conferences before an obligatory action sequence ending.

14, The Good Earth, by Pearl Buck (1931)

I picked this up at our local library’s book sale, mostly out of curiosity. It’s a book I knew mostly by reputation, but had never encountered it or had to read it in school (apparently that’s where many people encounter it). I thought it was fascinating. Written by the daughter of missionaries who grew up in rural China, it’s the story of a peasant who endures hardships and famine as he builds wealth and raises a family in an almost medieval society. Buck is sympathetic to Wang Lung but doesn’t romanticize him or his callous treatment of his wife and children. While dated in parts, the book still feels like a valuable window on an element of Chinese history and culture that seems relevant today.

15, The Dog Stars, by Peter Heller (2012)

Another library-sale pick up. I would categorize this book as literary post-apocalyptic fiction, and include Station Eleven in the same category. This isn’t as good as Station Eleven, but it’s still pretty good, blending action and adventure with some beautiful nature writing and philosophizing about what it means to be alive. The plot concerns an amateur pilot who lost his wife and most everything else to a superflu, and now lives in a Colorado airport with his dog and a slightly terrifying survivalist. The story veers into cliches at times, and some plot developments are just too convenient, and at times the book made me wonder if I wasn’t really reading the treatment for a movie.

2020: My year in books

27 Sunday Dec 2020

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After a very (very) long hiatus, I’m back blogging on Percival Henry, this time to sum up my year in reading. After a few years of feeling I haven’t read as much as I should, this year I deliberately tracked what I read and pushed myself to complete more books. And while the 18 I read still isn’t all that impressive a total, it’s an improvement over last year. As you’ll discover, I’m not particularly strategic about what books I acquire, and I’m willing to take chances on a book based on the author’s reputation, or the jacket design or because it is cheap. I have huge stacks of unread books, some which I’ve lugged from city to city (or country to country) for decades, so part of my project is whittling away the unread books in my life. When possible, the cover images below are from the edition I read.

Here the are the books, in the order I read them, with a brief review.

1, The Scavengers Guide to Haute Cuisine, by Steven Rinella (2006)

The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine: How I Spent a Year in the American Wild to Re-create a Feast from the Classic Recipes of French Master Chef Auguste Escoffier: Rinella, Steven: 9780812988444:

I read this in January, as part of my research for a feature I wrote for Quartz about Rinella, host of the Netflix series Meateater, which you can read here. Rinella is a big personality and a talented writer and both come across in this book, a light-hearted odyssey describing his attempts to hunt, fish, and gather all the ingredients for a 45-course feast. As I mentioned in my article, while it was obvious that Rinella is a much better hunter than I am, it was unsettling to discover he is probably a better writer, too.

2, Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance (2016)

This image may contain Building Housing Nature Outdoors House Countryside Rural Shelter Cabin Hut and Shack

I picked this up last year at our local library’s annual used book sale, in part because it got a lot of attention after Trump’s election and I wanted to see what the fuss was about. Vance is his most effective as guide to the the pathologies of multi-generational rural white poverty and the forces that sustain it, although it doesn’t do much to explain Trump’s election, as some have claimed and which subsequent scholarship has refuted. He’s less effective at weaving a narrative, and his weaknesses as a untrained writer are often apparent.

3, The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Isihigiro (2015)

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

I read Ishigiro’s The Remains of the Day years ago and loved it, so when he won the Nobel Prize in 2017 I thought I would try him again. I picked up a used copy of The Buried Giant at the Strand bookstore knowing nothing more about about than the dust jacket but the idea of turning the tropes of a fantasy novel into literary fiction intrigued me. The premise—a quest to slay a dragon set in Arthurian England amidst warring Celts and Saxons—has lots of promise. Ultimately, though, it was a disappointment. The book is really an extended allegory about memory and loss, and its characters are never fully realized but instead serve mainly to stretch out the story so Ishigiro can make his thematic points.

4, The House that Ruth Built, by Robert Weintraub (2011)

The House That Ruth Built

Another book purchased for $2 at our local library sale. Nominally a book about Babe Ruth and the 1923 Yankees, it’s actually much more. It’s an account of the founding and early years of the Yankees; a profile of the incumbent baseball power in New York, the Giants, and their ferocious manager John McGraw; and a fun tour of the speakeasies and nightclubs of early 1920s New York City. More than a baseball book, it’s a cultural history and I was surprised how much I enjoyed it.

5, Sword and Citadel (Book of the New Sun parts 3 and 4), by Gene Wolfe (1981 and 1982)

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Perhaps my proudest accomplishment in this year of reading was finishing Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun quadrilogy. Widely recognized as among the greatest works of science fiction (and I think justifiably), these books are intricately plotted, densely written, sophisticated in their ambition, complex in their themes, and absolutely absorbing. Broadly about the adventures of an apprentice of an executioner’s guild, the books take place in an unrecognizably distant future, on a earth that became a space-faring civilization before forgetting its achievements and descending into feudalism, with the occasional relics of science surfacing as magic. The series has a cult following that has spawned websites and even a podcast dedicated to unraveling them, and I read these books with a dictionary next to me to help decipher Wolfe’s archaic vocabulary. I recommend them wholeheartedly but they are not casual reading.

6, The Girl from Kathmandu, by Cam Simpson (2018)

One of my ambitions this year was to read the books of my friends and colleagues. I think I put off reading them out of an irrational jealousy of their accomplishments, but I have vowed to overcome my pettiness. I this case, I’m really glad I did because Cam, my former colleague from Bloomberg in London, wrote a magnificent book based on reporting he began when he was at the Chicago Tribune about the deaths of migrant workers in Iraq after the US invasion. The level of reporting on display here is breathtaking, and Cam’s almost anthropological examination of family life in rural Nepal is fascinating. Unfortunately the narrative doesn’t resolve itself with the satisfying resolution we hope for, but as Cam well knows, life can be more complicated than fiction.

7, The Wanderer, by Fritz Leiber (1964)

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Probably the worst book I read in 2020. Leiber has a big reputation in science fiction and fantasy, the book won a Hugo, and the cover looked really cool, so it seemed like a good bet it would be worth my time. Dear reader, it was not. This story of how a scattered assortment of humans react to a new planet showing up in earth’s orbit is painfully dated, often sexist, and borderline racist at points. The narrative bounces among various groups of characters, none of whom solidify into real people, and while the premise is promising, the story goes completely off the rails at the end when the aliens appear and engage in intra-species sex with one of our heroes. It’s worse than it sounds.

8, Truman, by David McCullough (1992)

Truman By David McCullough

I have been lugging this huge book around ever since I acquired it in the early 90s (I’m assuming it was a gift, but sadly I don’t recall from whom). I remember starting it when I was in my 20s but abandoning it early, since I had no patience for McCullough’s slow unwinding of Truman’s family history. But perhaps I just wasn’t ready for it; McCullough’s books are written for middle-age dads -—there’s a reason they always appear in the weeks before Father’s Day—and I am now the target demographic. It’s a great, fascinating book about a great fascinating man. Truman is perhaps our most accidental president. His life, in many ways, was a series of occasions of falling up and if it wasn’t for his stint in the Army during World War I —which stamped him as a leader and problem solver—he might never had left his family’s farm in rural Missouri. McCullough is really a master of this sort of writing. It’s an admiring biography without ever being hagiographic, and is awash with anecdotes and Truman’s own letters that enliven the story.

9, We were Eight Years in Power, by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2017)

I bought this collection of essays to read “The Case for Reparations,” perhaps Coates’s most well-known work, as background for a project I edited for Quartz about How to do Reparations, but went on to read them all. The book flickers around the autobiographical, and through the introductory notes before the essays Coates charts his progression from a marginally employed blogger to one a leading public intellectual invited to the White House. The Obama presidency looms large in this book, as Coates seems to wrestle between fury at Obama’s unwillingness to really grapple with the evils of racism, and grudging respect for the man’s ability to operate in a white man’s world, in a way that is alien to Coates. Coates’s seething anger at injustice is never far below the surface, and it’s bracing, sometimes startling, to have the world’s cruelty explained so plainly.

10, Mr. Miracle, by Tom King and Mitch Gerads (2019)

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I read a lot of comic books and graphic novels this year, but Mr. Miracle was the only one that felt novelistic in its scope and ambition. The book, which collects a 12-issue limited series, concerns itself with the bifurcated existence of Scott Free, an escape artist and occasional superhero, who has fled the horrors of his youth on the planet Apokolips to settle into middle-class existence in Los Angeles with his wife, the warrior Big Barda. The story draws heavily on a rich web of characters and stories created by comics legend Jack Kirby in the early 1970s, and writer Tom King has fun playing off the cosmic grandeur of Kirby’s Fourth World with the banal existence of raising a family in contemporary America. But there’s a lot more going in here as Free, the ultimate escape artist, wrestles with depression and suicide, and struggles to extricate himself from his brutal past and the shadow of his monstrous adoptive father, Darkseid. King and artist Mitch Gerads take full advantage of the visual medium to play with our perceptions, and we’re never quite sure how solid a grip Free has on reality. Mr. Miracle is a book that rewards a familiarity with the characters and their backstories, so it’s unclear to me how a new reader would take it all in, but I found it both entertaining and thought provoking.

11, Finders Keepers, by Stephen King (2016)

After decades spent snobbishly dismissing Stephen King, I’ve gradually come to respect and enjoy his books. This is the second in a trilogy of crime novels centered around Bill Hodges, a retired detective, but the real star is the villain, a creepy loser obsessed with the works of a Salinger-esque novelist. The book has a lot to say about authorship and fandom, territory King probably knows better than most, but it never feels didactic.

12, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King (2000)


I read this more-or-less at the same time as I read Finders Keepers, and it was fun to see King’s thought process at work. The autobiographical elements of this book were more appealing to me than the writing advice, in part because his story as a self-made writer is legitimately fascinating, and in part because his writing guidance is geared more toward aspiring novelist than jaded journalists. But I enjoyed it all.

13, Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather (1927)

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

Another book that I’ve carted around most of my adult life. The account of a French cleric’s molding of the Santa Fe diocese in the years after the Mexican-American war, it’s a lyrical portrait of faith, character, and most of all, landscape. There’s no real plot, but a series of vignettes that trace the lives of Bishop Latour and his faithful companion, Father Vailland, as they navigate the complex world of Native Americans, Spanish Mexicans, and the new Americans pouring into the territory. With spare, elegant writing Cather describes life on the vast frontier and a community that seems perched on the very edge of the known world.

14, Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke (1973)

Rendezvous With Rama

The literary equivalent of comfort food. This was either the second or third time I’ve read this science fiction classic, which I bought for my son, but read on my own when he lost interest. In many ways it’s a perfect sci-fi story: an unknown vessel enters the solar system and a plucky band of astronauts is sent to investigate against a backdrop of political maneuvering back home. I remember loving it when I first read it as a teenager, and while it’s a bit dated (the casual sexism of the astronauts is ironically old fashioned) overall it holds up remarkably well. I think it’s no accident I read it in the weeks leading up to the presidential election when escapist nostalgia was very appealing.

15, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2016)

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

The Underground Railroad got a lot of attention when it came out, and its marriage of the brutal realities of slavery and the fanciful creation of a literal railroad buried beneath the antebellum south offers a lot. Yet for me the book was never more than the sum of its parts. Whitehead’s depiction of life on a plantation was both horrifying and unfortunately familiar, and the book only really picks up when escaped slaves Cora and Caesar find themselves in South Carolina in a situation too good to be true. I wished Whitehead had more fully embraced the alternate history aspect of his story and investigated the origins of the railroad, but it feels like he shied away making that leap, not wanting to trivialize history by turning it into fantasy.

16, Gigged, by Sarah Kessler (2018)

Another book by a former colleague which I put off reading far too long. In this case, my procrastination did Sarah’s book a disservice, because it feels we’ve already passed moment she captures in her book, when the gig economy seemed new and different, and poised to upend the traditional arrangement between management and labor. Very few people today are excited about the potential of the gig economy, and at best it seems away for workers furloughed by the pandemic to scrape together extra money, and at worst another way for Silicon Valley to siphon money from the rest of us. Sarah does a great job of rounding up characters who represent different facets of the gig economy—an Uber driver who feels suckered, a housewife hacking out a living on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a rural social worker matching workers and with opportunities— and smartly observes that gig work isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition. By the time Sarah’s book came out in 2018, it was already pretty clear who the winners and losers of the gig economy, and perhaps no one should be surprised the one gig worker who flourishes in her book is the tech bro who was doing just fine before he left his full-time job.

17, Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand (2010)

Another volume picked up at the local library’s used book sale. I didn’t know a whole lot about it, other than it was by the author of Seabiscuit, it was about an Olympic distance runner, and the movie adaption (which I haven’t seen) was directed by Angelina Jolie. As perhaps might be expected from those clues, the book is a an stirring story about, you guessed it, someone overcoming some serious adversity. In this case, it’s Louis Zamperini, the misfit son of Italian immigrants who discovers a gift for distance running in the 1930s, races in at the Berlin Olympics, becomes a bombardier on a B-24 in World War II and becomes first a castaway, then a prisoner of war in Japan. The story, which oscillates between heroic, harrowing, and horrifying, is amazing and told 60 years later with a remarkable level of immediacy and detail that might raise the eyebrow of a more skeptical reader (or seasoned reporter). No matter how it came together, it was a riveting story to read and I learned a whole lot about the Pacific theater of World War II and probably more than I wanted to about the suffering endured by POWs.

18, Black Betty, by Walter Mosley (1994)

Walter-MOSLEY-Black-Betty-First-Edition-1994

I think I’ve had this book since it was first published. I spent a summer as an intern at W.W. Norton & Co in 1992, right when Mosley was beginning to experience some success (if I recall correctly, he was still working in IT, not having had the breakthrough that would allow him to quit his day job). He had published two books by then, and I remember how excited we were when it was revealed that Bill Clinton was a fan. Black Betty is his fourth book, and continues the story of Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, an occasional amateur detective scuffling his way through a noirish Los Angeles in 1961. Mosley borrows heavily from Raymond Chandler, and like The Big Sleep, Black Betty features misunderstood dames, a hero struggling to stay afloat, and a hopelessly convoluted plot. The big difference, of course, is that Mosley’s hero is Black and so Rawlins has to navigate two worlds, that of black Angelenos, and of the whites who employ and exploit them. Rawlin’s world weariness gets a bit tedious, but despite its age and historic setting (26 and 59 years ago, respectively) the story and its concerns are remarkably contemporary.

Year of Fiction: Leviathan Wakes, by James S. A. Corey

12 Friday Sep 2014

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Among the new statistics taking over baseball is the concept of the “replacement player.” To judge the value of any player, you can measure then against a generic player that might be available to a team as a replacement (hence, the new stat WAR, or Wins Above Replacement). A replacement-level player is basically competent but not outstanding. He won’t do much to hurt you but won’t help, either.

“Leviathan Wakes” is replacement-level science fiction. It’s not terrible, but it’s pretty bland and – time will tell – probably forgettable.

I picked it up on the recommendation of a bookstore clerk in Manchester, and after plowing through some thicker stuff, I was eager for a breezy page turner. “Leviathan Wakes” is set in the not-too-distant future. Humans have spacecraft and have colonized the moons and planets, but haven’t escaped the solar system. The book is the first of a planned trilogy that intends to document mankind’s leap to the stars.

The “author,” James S.A. Corey, is actually the pseudonym of two writers, one of whom is billed as “the assistant to George R.R. Martin,” which explain’s Martin’s breathless blurb on the cover.

The story itself is a lengthy, slightly confusing and occasionally entertaining tour of the asteroid belt, told through the alternating perspectives of an idealistic space pilot and a disillusioned police detective. Their stories converge over an abandoned freighter, a missing woman and a rogue space germ that causes horrifying mutations. The backdrop is an unstable political balance between Earth and Mars that topples into war.

All of this is rich material, but it suffers in the telling. The two main characters too easily fall into genre cliches, the supporting characters are thinly drawn and their milieu of space stations and mining colonies is so standard-issue they seem ordered in bulk from Acme SciFi. (It really suffers in this respect when compared to Heinlein’s Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which has a similar setting, but is far more inventive in creating a unique culture away from Earth). The plot has some twists, and it picks up steam toward the end, but it lumbers on for too long, sagging in the middle. The twin narratives – a device familiar to readers of Martin, and which works in his far-flung narratives – seems unnecessary here, as the two characters frequently cross paths and share the same story.

“Leviathan Wakes” is never outrageously bad, and there are worse ways to pass the time. But it’s hard to root for a replacement player.

Books completed this year:

1, The Man in the High Castle (Dick)
2, Disgrace (Coetzee)
3, The Finkler Question (Jacobson)
4, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Heinlein)
5, Beautiful Ruins (Walter)
6, Petropolis (Ulinich)
7, The Caves of Steel (Asimov)
9, Winter in the Blood (Welch)
10, Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel (Ulinich)
11, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson)
12, Moby-Dick (Melville)
13, The Road (McCarthy)
14, The Corrections (Franzen)
15, Leviathan Wakes (Corey)

Year of Fiction: My Next Book

18 Wednesday Jun 2014

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I finally finished — after many months of on-again, off-again reading  — Moby-Dick. I have many thoughts about it, and when I get time I’ll write about what I hope are some of the least obvious ones. But in the mean time I need to select the next book in my Year of Fiction. After plowing through that 19th century behemoth, I want to read something a bit more contemporary. But rather than make this hard decision myself, I’ve decided to crowd source it. So please vote in the poll below.

 

(And yes, I know I should have read these books by now. That’s the point!)

Year of Fiction: Winter in the Blood, by James Welch (1974)

10 Thursday Apr 2014

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A short note about this spare, elegant novel.

This is another book I’ve been carrying with me for years, always in a pile to read but never quite reaching the surface. I can’t say for sure but I suspect I was given it as a gift when I lived in Montana (I left there in 1998). Like a lot of books set in Montana, Winter in the Blood evokes the the landscape that defines the place and as I read it on the train during my London commute, I was thrust back to my long drives across the state, from Browning – heart of the Blackfoot Reservation –  down through the prairie along Highway 89 toward Great Falls. James Welch avoids the trap of writing about the scenery the way a tourist might, and instead of rhapsodizing about the snow capped peaks and lush grain fields, he described the way a fly rubs its hands together and how a cow craps itself.

Winter in the Blood is the story of a few months in the life of an aimless, nameless narrator, an Indian man who acts and is treated younger than he is (“I’m 32,” he interjects every time someone calls him a boy). Haunted by the death of his brother years before, he drifts across the land, helping at his mother’s farm between dissolute trips into town, which begin in bars and end in bed with a series of anonymous women. Nominally in search of a former girlfriend who stole his gun and razor – perhaps a too-obvious metaphor of the emasculation of the Native American – he find more meaning in visits with an old, blind Blackfoot man who survived the harsh winter that devastated his tribe nearly a century earlier. Death lingers everywhere, claiming relatives and livestock without remorse, and nature is the only source of permanence. The farm’s animals are drawn with more character and personality than the barflies and vagabonds the hero encounters in town, and as he loses his money and possessions in surreal and drunken encounters, it’s his labor on the farm that he returns to and that offers him a connection to the land and his past.

Books completed this year:

1, The Man in the High Castle (Dick)
2, Disgrace (Coetzee)
3, The Finkler Question (Jacobson)
4, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Heinlein)
5, Beautiful Ruins (Walter)
6 Petropolis (Ulinich)
7, The Caves of Steel (Asimov)
9, Winter in the Blood (Welch)

 

Year of Fiction: The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson (2010)

07 Friday Feb 2014

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I resolved to read more fiction this year, and specifically tackle the enormous backlog of books I’ve been accumulating (and lugging from city to city, and continent to continent) for 20 years now. My strategy is to stop reading the New York Times on my commute and read paperbacks. It’s really only about 40 minutes a day but it adds up and I’m slowly nibbling my way through my stack. I intend these reviews to be very short. I’m also using this to keep track of what I’ve read.

The Finkler Question, set in contemporary London, is the story of the gloomy, directionless middle-aged Julian Treslove and his narrow circle of friends. Treslove is a gentile, but his friends are Jewish and he is drawn deeper and deeper into their world. The book explores modern Jewish identity, anti-Semitism and Zionism, overlaid with questions about aging, mourning and loss. Jacobson is a skilled stylist, and writes with humor and insight, but the book starts slowly and never picks up speed. Treslove starts out unsympathetic, and never seems convincing as a character – he’s more of a collection of neuroses. (It didn’t help that I read The Finkler Question immediately after finishing Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee, which treads some similar territory to much more powerful effect). There’s a claustrophobic quality to the work, as the book’s handful of characters keep on bumping into each other, and every conversation and event circles around the same theme of Jewishness. With its small cast, domestic setting and heavy message, I wonder if it might have made a better play than novel.

Books completed this year:
1, The Man in the High Castle (Dick)
2, Disgrace (Coetzee)
3, The Finkler Question (Jacobson)