A year very full of babies and book writing! I’m making a lot less progress through my planned reading than I hoped, but I think this might be the longest list of “favorite” reads to date. So not too bad a year. And my oldest is reading BOB books on her own, so one day soon she’ll have her own list of favorite (solo) reads.
As always, I’m listing books in chronological order to avoid picking favorites (with one exception + some thematic grouping). So, with no more ado, here are my favorite books I read (for the first time) in 2024:
THE POWER BROKER
by Robert Caro
I started reading The Power Broker at the hospital the night before my son was born. I finished just before I returned to work. Apologies to him if this means he grows up weird(er). I wrote a reflection on the book for Word on Fire.
It’s just a wonderful epic of New York, which moves easily across the years and back and forth between the scale of sprawling highways and the personal tragedies of New Yorkers (including Moses!). I took about a month of on and off reading long excerpts to my husband.
The Good Virus
by Tom Ireland
Sometimes a book comes along at just the right time. I read this history of using bacteriophage viruses to defeat bacteria while… pregnant and recovering from a staph infection. “I wish I could go to Georgia [country] and just get injected full of weird viruses so I could get better,” I said feverishly to my husband.
I’m not saying you should do that, but some people with massively antibiotic resistant infection have and found healing. Phage therapy is fascinating and weird because you are setting two ambiguously alive things at war in your body. While drug development is about standardization, phage therapy is a matter of selectively breeding an antagonist to your disease.
The Country of the Blind
by Andrew Leland
A memoir of preparing to become completely blind due to degenerative illness. It wound up getting cited in my forthcoming The Dignity of Dependence (coming in the fall!) due to Leland’s fascinating discussion of ideological splits between using a guide dog or a cane. Does depending on a living being versus using a tool make someone more disabled (pejorative) in the judgement of the surrounding culture?
Motherhood on Ice
by Marcia C. Inhorn
An ethnography of egg freezing! Well reported and more interested in truth seeking than in laying up ammunition for the culture war. One of those books you borrow from the library and order your own copy midway through chapter two. I drew on this book for my Lamp feature on infertility, IVF, and fairy tale bargains.
The Fund
by Rob Copeland
Ok, this book made my list because I’ve had a number of friends work at Bridgewater (the hedge fund profiled in this book) and I had a schadenfreudic experience reading. Here’s how I always described Bridgewater to others:
You know all those things that annoy you about office culture? The little lies everyone understands you have to tell? Bridgewater decided they weren’t going to have any of those normal problems and invented much more exotic problems.
Technically, I’d like to see more experiments with office culture, but Bridgewater devolved into lengthy, Maoist self-criticism sessions (taped and played for new recruits!) plus a side of sexual harassment.
(My other “I loved this more than you might” favorite read is Do I Know You? by Sadie Dingfelder. I just have no idea how this reads if you don’t, like me and the author, have prosopagnosia.)
Metaphysical Animals
by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman
A group biography of Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Mary Midgley. Many wonderful historical details (like the lengths Anscombe went to to get away with teaching in trousers). But best as a portrait of philosophy as a fundamentally social activity. When we ask how to live (and how we know), we wind up asking how to live alongside others. Good to have philosophical friends who will offer comment on both your papers and your life.
How Buildings Learn
by Stewart Brand
I’m only seeing this listed used, and you’re going to want it in print, not as an e-copy. Brand offers detailed drawings of how building can be designed from the start to have room to flex and grow with the needs of their occupants. The object level details are fascinating, but floating above it is a guide on how to live with humility. Apply Brand’s guidance to your own life and you have a good middle way between a shrinking false humility that shirks the responsibility to build and a controlling pride that assumes your idea for now should stand forever. Genuinely an aid to prayer for me.
Origen’s Revenge
by Brian Patrick Mitchell
I read this on the recommendation of Mrs. Psmith, and I really enjoyed it as a mapping of Hebrew, Greek, and Christian thinking on male-female complementarity. How do you get away from the idea of women as slightly defective men? Or of maleness and femaleness just being shallow skins on generic humans? Acknowledging our differences quickly feels dangerous, because we have trouble trusting others to treat us fairly if we can’t demonstrate our sameness.
The Wrong Stuff / Reentry
by John Strausbaugh / by Eric Berger
Two stories of space programs that broke all the rules, outstripped their competitors, and launched rockets more cheaply than anyone felt possible. The Wrong Stuff is the story of the Soviets. Reentry is the story of SpaceX. You will have a real easy time telling which rocket you should be willing to board.
Both have a lot of outrageous approaches to problem solving you’ll want to read aloud to someone. Both are the story of space programs where failure was not an option, because the regime/Elon would kill you. But the Soviets, although brilliant at brute forcing solutions, are ultimately playing a game of keeping up appearances—never more so than when they tell cosmonauts in descent to deal with a warning light by covering it with tape. (They all die.)
SpaceX has remained tightly focused on scaffolding rockets that could take us to Mars and beyond. They’ve managed to continue to really care about the next step in that process, even when they’d built a successful company by other metrics. Sometimes, when I get stuck, I ask myself “What would I do if it really mattered that I solve this?” and, inevitably, new ideas present themselves (some out of proportion to the problem). SpaceX runs with that mentality all the time. If you’re going to read Reentry, read Liftoff first.
The Occasional Human Sacrifice
by Carl Elliott
A series of thoughtful profiles of people who blew the whistle on unethical medical practice (and blew up their lives in the process). The author (himself a whistleblower) is fascinated by the choiceless choice many of his subjects describe. Far from experiencing a moral dilemma, they saw only one path forward that they could go down and remain themselves. I was also interested in what forms of restitution, memorial, or simple apology followed exposure. (Not much!)
Lying for Money
by Dan Davies
A witty recounting of different forms of financial fraud. Fun enough on that front, but the deeper theme is that way fraud acts as a map of where we choose to/are forced to trust each other. Reminded me of A Burglar’s Guide to the City.
Red Plenty
by Francis Spufford
Did you want to read a vividly detailed story of the collapse of reasoned quantification into paranoiac madness but you skipped over The Fund because you’ve never heard of Bridgewater? Spufford’s Red Plenty is a semi-fictional story of the failures of Soviet Central Planning. He draws deeply from the historical record and notes his departures at the back. You keep hoping things will take a turn for the truly fictional and swerve from the famine and pain coming.
Frostbite
by Nicola Twilley
Sort of a complement to the two preceding. Like Red Plenty it touches on the incredible chain of interlocking decisions that gets cheese from… (checks notes) massive underground refrigerated caves to my door. Like Lying for Money it’s the map of a war against creeping corrosion (fraud/rot). Really brings home how much everything you eat remains alive in some sense—it’s slowly dying not inertly resting.
The Last Samurai
by Helen DeWitt
A very weird book and I liked it. A precocious boy goes looking for his father among a range of potential candidates is technically a plot description, but we’re a long way from Mamma Mia. Just jump in and remember, a real samurai will parry the blade.
Buried Deep
by Naomi Novik
The second fiction book on the list is Novik’s collection of short stories. (Particular favorites of mine were “Buried Deep,” “Seven,” Lord Dunsany’s Teapot,” and “Castle Coeurlieu.”) And of course, I love Spinning Silver which eventually grew out of the shorter telling here. Novik’s magic always has a shimmer of real magic. And she’s got a eucatastrophic bent that I deeply appreciate.