I’m about five months into a semi boycott of Amazon. Bezos kowtowing to Trump is only one reason for my disdain for Amazon. I don’t like the way they treat workers.I don’t like that Bezos brags about wanting Amazon employees to be “terrified” because terror is supposed to spark creativity and innovation or some stupid shit. I don’t like that Amazon is one of the biggest recipients of corporate welfare among US businesses (right up there with Walmart and McDonald’s). I don’t like Amazon’s impact on the environment, and its phony climate pledge greenwashing attempts. And I don’t like centibillionaires. I don’t think it should be possible for one person to grab and hoard that much wealth.
I still shop on Amazon - and then I go to other merchants to actually buy what I need. There’s something very satisfying in using Amazon to do the research and then giving the money to another business, and I don’t even mind paying more. In fact, I LIKE paying more, just to make a point. I’m that petty.
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But I do still have a Kindle, and so I haven’t yet broken with Amazon altogether. I’d go back to a Barnes and Noble Nook, but Kindle books are not compatible with Nook hardware because of course they’re not. I have too many Kindle books to abandon the technology altogether. So Jeff Bezos will still get a little bit of my money. When I figure out a way to remedy this situation, I will. Meanwhile, this was a very long and meandering way to introduce my 2024 book list. I read almost all of these books on my Kindle.
Enough. Cassidy Hutchinson. This book exists, and yet Donald Trump is President, once again. No good deed goes unpunished. SMDH.
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History. Lea Ypi. I wrote about this one here but fair warning - this post is kind of a mishmash of random stuff (much like this entire blog) and you have to dig for the part about the book. Caveat emptor, readers.
Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. Mary McGrory. The best parts of this book, about McGrory’s New York literary life in the middle of the 20th century, are Helene Hanff-good. The rest of it is pretty good too, especially if you really care about correct use of “you and I” vs. “you and me” and if you have strong feelings about the serial comma. I do care, of course, but not enough to read whole chapters of exegesis explaining why it’s “Between you and me” and not “between you and I;” and not enough to listen to anyone’s impassioned arguments in favor of the serial comma. I am already on board, is the thing. It’s preaching to the proverbial choir. No need to sell me on the serial comma, Mary - I am already fully invested.
Middlemarch. George Eliot. I have an actual degree in English - summa cum laude! - and yet I had never read Middlemarch. But when both Zadie Smith and Martin Amis tell me that I need to read something, I read it. Zadie Smith, especially, is never wrong. I loved Middlemarch so much that I wrote about it at least twice, here and here. I might read it again very soon. Check this list again next year.
The Broom of the System. David Foster Wallace. I wrote about this one right here in yet another rambling word salad covering books, movies, college swimming, anxiety, and social media health influencers. This book was very important to me when I was young, and although small parts of it do not hold up, most of it has really stood the proverbial test of time, and I loved reading it again. Maybe I’ll read Infinite Jest again.
Prophet Song. Paul Lynch. If you’re already terrified that the United States is on a collision course with totalitarianism then this book will absolutely not reassure you. It is a great novel - but also grim and terrifying and much more realistic than most dystopian novels. Forewarned is forearmed, right?
Burn Book. Kara Swisher. I’m especially proud of the very last line of this little review, which I wrote nearly a year ago. It holds up, and so does Burn Book. BTW, if you don’t follow Kara on social media, you absolutely should.
Answered Prayers. Truman Capote. I just searched my Google Docs, thinking that I had written something about this somewhere, but I didn’t. I did find something that I wrote when I was still in school; and 11 years later, I stand by my undergraduate assertion that In Cold Blood is the greatest true crime story ever written. I read Answered Prayers after watching “The Swans,” the Hulu miniseries based on the book and the post-publication fallout. I felt sorry for poor lonely Truman, but I don’t blame Babe Paley and the rest of the Swans for cutting him off. You can’t sell your friends out in exchange for money and fame and expect to keep those friends.
The Big Myth. Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes. Last year, I attended a lecture by the great Dr. Donald Berwick, who recommended this book. A short synopsis: The “myth” is the spurious idea that the free market is the only thing that can accomplish anything of value and that we should let it run free like it’s a wild fawn in the woods. For a long time, politicians (mostly Republican but plenty of Democrats, too) were completely taken in by this myth, and our economic and tax and regulatory policy were all based on free market fundamentalism. And now that wealth is ever more concentrated at the top, and the middle class is shrinking while people on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale seem to keep getting poorer and most people can’t afford to buy a house unless they have generous and well-to-do parents and the country’s infrastructure is literally falling apart, it’s become clear, at least to some of us, that unregulated capitalism is just the slippery slope to failed-state status.Authors Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes point out that at one time, not that long ago, most people supported the liberal order established after the Depression and WWII, and that it took a very sophisticated, well-planned propaganda campaign to convince people that government oversight and regulation were bad and that the “invisible hand of the market” (invisible because it does not exist) was capable of fulfilling every human need and solving every problem. This propaganda campaign, which took the form of everything from TV programs to textbooks for every educational level from elementary to college, was so successful that by the early 1980s or so, most people believed Ronald Reagan’s famous “Government IS the problem” line. And that is why I blame Ronald Reagan as much as I blame Mitch McConnell for the sad state of affairs that is America in February 2025. It’s not just a big myth. It’s a big fat lie.
The Zone of Interest. Martin Amis. A rare case in which I saw the movie first and then read the book on which it was based. This is a fictionalized story about Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and his wife and children, and their idyllic life in a lovely home with a tennis court and a pool and beautiful gardens and household staff and a death camp in the backyard. Both the movie and the book are just astonishingly good.
Coming Home. Brittney Griner. I keep reading these Putin-is-evil books, even though I’m on board with this thesis and have been for some time now, and don’t need any further convincing. I didn’t realize until I read this that Britney Griner was the Angel Reese or Caitlin Clark of her time. I’ve never paid much attention to college basketball, men’s or women’s, and so I didn’t know that Griner was the number one pick of her draft year and the greatest player in Baylor WBB history. I’m not the only American who didn’t know much about Brittney Griner until her imprisonment in Russia - she acknowledges that most Americans had no idea who she was. But women’s professional basketball is extremely popular in Russia, and she was LeBron-famous there. The book is very good, and I’m very happy that Ms. Griner is safely back in the US. But of course, I’m sure that Trump would have gotten her out, too, now that Russia is our BFF.
We Were the Lucky Ones. Georgia Hunter. As an adult, Georgia Hunter discovered that she was the grandchild of Holocaust survivors. She wrote this novel based on her own family’s near-unbelievable story of courage, endurance, and plain luck. Not that many Polish Jewish families survived the war nearly intact, but Hunter’s family did, despite being scattered all over the world, both during the war and after. It’s a good, though not great book. And the Hulu miniseries based on the book is quite good.
If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury. Geraldine DeRuiter. This is a book of essays about food and cooking. I don’t normally read books about food or cooking but then I came across some social media discussion about the NYT’s rather negative review of this book, and that review and the resulting online pushback made me want to read it. NYT book and music and media critics need frequent reminders that most of us don’t care what they think. Anyway, I liked this book, which is not really about food and cooking. Or rather, it’s ostensibly about food and cooking, and it is, on the surface; but it’s really about misogyny in the restaurant business (and everywhere else), with side forays into family trauma and secrets, and a little bit of travel. Anyway, it’s very good. DeRuiter, known on social media as The Everywhereist, really knows how to write her way around the perimeter of a thing, and to keep going, spiraling inward until she gets to the root. I’d definitely read more of DeRuiter’s work. I might even read this one again.
No Judgment. Lauren Oyler. In 20 years, Lauren Oyler will be as good an essayist as Zadie Smith. She should quote me on this, because it’s the highest praise she will ever receive in her literary career.
Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry and The Hero of this Book. Elizabeth McCracken. “American wiseacre” is now on my list of phrases that I wish I had coined.
Autocracy Inc and The Twilight of Democracy. Anne Applebaum. Yes, as a matter of fact, this IS my idea of vacation reading.
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Murder on the Orient-Express. Agatha Christie. Speaking of vacation reading, I needed something to read when my Kindle went missing for a few days during our vacation, and
this was on the bookshelf at the beach house we rented. That bookshelf was filled with Tom Clancy and Mitch Albom and Danielle Steel and who knows what else, and so Agatha Christie was the only reasonable choice. And it was absolutely delightful. I’d never actually read any Agatha Christie before, but I was aware that Murder on the Orient-Express is one of the best-selling novels of all time (maybe THE best-selling novel of all time) and I enjoyed knowing that I was one of millions of people who have spent an August afternoon at the beach with Hercule Poirot figuring out who murdered the vile Mr. Ratchett. SPOILER ALERT: It was everyone. If you need a break from all of this (gesturing wildly at everything) you could do a lot worse than to spend a day with Agatha Christie or Margery Sharp or Muriel Spark or Barbara Pym or Nancy Mitford or P.D. James or really any British female novelist of the early to mid 20th century.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Gabrielle Zevin. As I wrote earlier, I was very surprised to find a novel about video game designers so absorbing, because this is a topic in which I have absolutely no interest. Zevin uses the video game industry and its fast-paced (and toxic) culture to tell a story about two brilliant young people and their decades-long on-and-off friendship, and their place in the time in which they lived, that being the waning days of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st. When I read fiction, I always want a happy ending. I wouldn’t describe the ending of Tomorrow as happy in any way, but it was fitting.
Girl, Maladjusted and The Social Climber’s Handbook. Molly Jong-Fast. Memoir and murder - two very different books by the same author.
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. Svetlana Alexievich. When I read this, I asked myself what the American version of this book might be like; what stories we would tell journalists and historians about the American Century and the end of the United States. At the time, I was just being dramatic. Now this is a perfectly legitimate question.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Alison Bechdel. Not long ago, I read a self-help book that wasn’t very good. I wrote about it, and about the fact that I never read self-help except for this one time. Maybe if I’d chosen a good self-help book, I’d be open to more from the genre, but self-help is dead to me now. Graphic novels are another thing that I never read, except that I did read this one, and it’s very good (not really a novel though, more of a memoir) and I might occasionally read more graphic novels, except not often because the print is usually too small and they don’t work particularly well on e-readers. I bought and read the actual paperback book because I liked the way it looked.
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It’s March 2025 now, and I’m almost finished writing this list of books that I read in 2024! Any day now! I should just power through and finish this thing right now but the tedium is getting to me. All these links. All these titles to italicize. All of this writing about stuff that I already wrote about. I’m literally dead from boredom.
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OK, back to work.
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Patriot. Alexei Navalny. We were at my son’s first college conference championship meet early last year when Alexei Navalny’s death was first reported. We had all watched “Navalny" together, and I bought the book soon after his death but didn’t get around to reading it until later in the year. Putin was so afraid of a peaceful political opponent that he hounded him literally to death. Navalny was so unafraid of Putin that he doubled down on his opposition to the regime every time he got out of prison. He was so unafraid that he walked away from freedom and safety in Germany, returning to certain imprisonment and eventual death in Russia. Similar extraordinary courage will soon be required in the United States. I hope that I’m up to it. I hope we all are.
On Tyranny and On Freedom. Timothy Snyder. I read On Freedom right after I finished On Tyranny, which was the book of the moment right after the 2024 election, when On Tyranny’s first rule, “Do not obey in advance,” was all over social media. I think that Snyder wrote On Freedom before On Tyranny, but you can read them in the opposite order, as I did. You can read one or the other, though I definitely recommend reading both.
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I’m finally at the end! Democracy Awakening (Heather Cox Richardson) is the last book I finished in 2024 - I started another book right after this, but I didn’t finish it until 2025 and so consistent with my customary practice, I will include it on my 2025 reading list.
Caveat emptor: The post linked to the words Democracy Awakening discusses the book only very briefly. It discusses pretty much everything else at considerable length.
I started reading Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American newsletter probably early last year. And when I say “read,” I mean that I skimmed it, and sometimes just looked at the first paragraph. Now I read that newsletter from top to bottom every single day. When the topic of all of this (gesturing wildly at everything) comes up in conversation, almost invariably someone will ask me (or I will ask them) “Do you read Heather Cox Richardson?” As much as I love Rachel Maddow and Timothy Snyder and Sherilynn Ifill and so many other pro-democracy writers and thinkers in the traditional media and online, I think that Heather Cox Richardson is the best of the best. As they say on social media, protect HCR at all costs.
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And that is it! A year of reading; roughly 80% dictators and political upheaval and 20% everything else. No wonder I’m stressed out. It’s only about 25 books, a low for me, but I think I read a few more books that I forgot to track. And it’s not a contest, anyway. 2025 is going to skew a little bit more toward fiction, I think. I studied for 2025 last year. I knew there would be a test.
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