Favorite books of 2024
The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Largest Organ by Monty Lyman
Read for: A finely calibrated mix of skin-related biology, sociology, and medical anecdotes; light skin care advice; a journey from the lifecycle of individual skin cells to how skin influences human philosophy
This survey of the skin lives in the genre of “follow a weirdly specific topic through its impact on the world.” It is my Platonic ideal of a non-fiction book. I imagined the author to be a grizzled old dermatologist, based on the loving descriptions of how skin cells work and the range of anecdotes about skin conditions around the world. He’s actually a 32-year-old British psychiatrist who happens to write well and apparently is passionate about our largest organ. What could be a basic description of the skin’s layers turns into an elegy. Keratinocytes are born in the deepest layer of the epidermis, then move up to the next layer, and the next, where “they make the ultimate sacrifice…at the end of their month-long life, chipped away by the scratches and scrapes of the outside world, these scales flake off into the atmosphere…Keratinocytes create a fine but formidable outer defence, protecting the trillions of cells inside our body. Never was so much owed by so many to so few.”
Enjoy the vignettes about how late-night snacking can cause sunburn the next day, why our fingers wrinkle in water, and more.
Read with: 📖 Clean: The New Science of Skin and the Beauty of Doing Less by James Hamblin, a funnier book taking on the beauty industry and norms. The most helpful insight from this book was thinking about the difference between true “hygiene” (hand-washing) and performative “cleansing rituals” (daily showering).
Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
Read for: A short book to update your brain with the latest neuroscience; a way to rethink old models about the brain; an opinionated take on what this neuroscience means with some shade thrown on past research
In high school, I took two years of psychology classes. I learned from a young age that brains are amazing, brains can fool us, and that research evolves quickly. Still, I’ve walked around with old knowledge for two decades, storing away factoids like “Broca’s area is where language is produced” (since debunked or at least complicated).
This book is a pleasant cold splash to update your knowledge on the brain. For example: The “triune brain” model is wrong. We don’t have a brain with layers comprised of a lizard brain (automatic instincts), an emotional brain (limbic system), and a rational brain (”neocortex” or “new cortex”) that are at war with each other. The idea comes from Plato, who said that rational thought needs to rein in your animalistic instincts and emotions. The theory gained scientific traction in the 1960s when neuroscientist Paul MacLean looked at slices of brains through microscopes, and it was popularized in the 1970s by Carl Sagan. By the 1990s, neuroscientists had new methods to look at the brain, and “learned that evolution does not add layers to brain anatomy like geological layers of sedimentary rock.” The author paints a picture of the brain that’s much weirder, more flexible, more powerful, and more bound to other brains than we think.
Read with:
📖 Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions by Batja Mesquita, written by a student of Feldman Barrett
📖 The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoe Schlanger, another book about the frontiers of science that makes you think differently about ourselves and life
Thicker than Water: A Memoir by Kerry Washington
Read for: A family story, how she fell in love with acting, joyous childhood summers at the pool, common life hardships
Unsurprisingly, Washington is a great storyteller. She starts and ends with a family secret, which she learned late in life after Scandal finished its run. In between, she covers the vulnerability of girlhood, her childhood love of swimming (which shaped Olivia Pope’s routines), and how time reshapes parent-child relationships.
Read with: 📖 Finding Me by Viola Davis for a very different memoir. Her life story is vivid and jolting. The book starts with herself as an elementary school kid, cussing and running from bullies who punched and kicked her into the snow. She doesn’t just mention growing up with rats and no plumbing in Rhode Island. She details the specific defensive tactics she and her sisters used to protect against rat bites: Tying bedsheets to themselves, arming themselves with a softball bat they won in an acting contest. The writing in the book can feel repetitive at times, but the story leaves you in awe of her journey. It might be better as an audiobook.
The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money by Ron Lieber
Read for: Stories about how different families approach money and finance; an argument that if you’re less awkward about it, money can be a positive way to transmit values; a reminder that honestly you can do whatever you want as a parent
I can’t resist books on parenthood and child-rearing, even if most of them are dreadfully repetitive. Newer publications seem especially preachy and rigid. I enjoyed this book, written by a journalist ten years ago, more than I thought I would. Rather than chapters of opinion and half-baked references to academic studies, it was full of fun interviews with families and the diversity of ways they transmitted their values through their approach to money. These stories are organized around practical questions that come up in many families: allowance, how to answer the question “how much do you make,” how to discourage materialism while not judging other families’ decisions, encouraging giving and gratitude. Here’s what some families did instead being influenced by the inflationary rates of the local tooth fairy market: give a dollar coin at the end of a trail of fairy dust, give currency from other countries to spark conversations about other places, swap for different types of animal teeth. Annoying ideas if spread through social media influencers; jumping off points for creativity when reading this book.
Read with:
📖 The Price You Pay for College: An Entirely New Road Map for the Biggest Financial Decision Your Family Will Ever Make by Ron Lieber. I have studiously avoided content that will suck me into the black hole of the college admissions race, knowing that I have decades to contend with this topic. But I liked the author’s other book so much I picked this one up too — and found that college admissions have gotten weirder than I had imagined. Given the headlines on student loan crises and college affordability, I was surprised to learn that just 11% of students pay the full sticker price of tuition. The other 89% get either need-based scholarships or “merit aid.” Colleges use different terms for “merit aid,” but Lieber points out that most merit aid is not funded by a pool of scholarship money. He calls it “a coupon” or a “price cut” designed to lower the sticker price to something families will accept. Offering merit aid is a tool for colleges to attract students they want and increase acceptance rates. In return, wealthy families get to feel good about the award-winning student they raised and to feel relief about not paying full price. Over the last 15 years, colleges have been in an arms race of increasing the sticker price while needing to offer competitive merit aid packages, hiring more consultants to help them navigate this changing “marketplace” to fill their classes (much like airlines use dynamic pricing to fill seats). I wouldn’t be surprised if this is what has led to the growth of families hiring college admissions consultants, too. It reminds me of what’s happened in healthcare, where growing complexity has required more brokers and middlemen to help all sides navigate the maze, which increases the overall cost of healthcare and adds more complexity, and so on, until everyone hates the game but has to play it. The conclusion of this book is that families should consider what they value from a college education and not get blinded by rankings. He finds that many college professors opt to send their kids not to prestigious research institutions, but to liberal arts colleges like Wooster focused on teaching undergrads. Yet even as the author guides you to the conclusion to opt out of the game, he’s apparently enmeshed himself deeper — parents can purchase his video course on negotiating merit aid for just $199.
📖 The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Raising Self-Reliant Children by Wendy Mogel, an early 2000s book that uses Jewish teachings applied to parenthood. Some parts are noticeably out of trend (don’t waste too much time on their feelings), which offers perspective on the many ways to be in a family. She reminds you of “the blessing of longing” to teach gratitude and a sense of when is enough, that you can channel a kid’s most annoying traits into household responsibilities, and that all children are both incredibly special and completely ordinary.
Babel, Or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R.F. Kuang
Read for: A story that feels like “an Asian Harry Potter goes to graduate school at Oxford,” nerding out about words and translation
This is a fantasy book crossed with an opium war-era historical fiction. If you’re at all into linguistics and things that get lost in translation, your favorite part will be about how the magic works. The rest of it hits familiar beats and is a fine scaffold for the magic, especially if you liked school.
Read with:
📖 Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo and the many related books in the “Grishaverse.” It’s also a fantasy series for young adults with a diverse, globe-trotting cast. I preferred how this series used familiar settings but adapted them based on how the magic might shape geography and culture within that universe. (Babel replicates our world’s history; it just happens to have magic in it also.)
❌ Don’t read with The Poppy War, the author’s very popular first series. The origin story made no sense (protagonist raised as a servant by cruel guardians who somehow let her study endless nights for a national exam to attend a prestigious military academy instead of marrying her off like they had planned). I couldn’t get through the last third, which was mostly a gory account that makes the point that war is bad.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Read for: Wondering about different types of intelligent life and how they might construct societies different from ours; mental space travel to faraway planets; insights into the intelligence of spiders, octopuses, slime molds, crows, and AI
Alien life will probably be completely incomprehensible to us, like this book’s super-intelligent spider species that communicates through web vibrations. The spiders’ evolution echoes human history, from primal, instinctive survival to superstitious societies to an arachnid scientific age. The second and third books follow an enjoyably parallel, if predictable, structure. The new worlds you explore are fun enough to go along for the ride.
Read with:
📰 An Arachnophone Pays Homage to the Spider by Kathryn Schulz, an article that covers some of the amazing and terrifying true facts about spiders that are key plot points in the series
📚 The Inheritance Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin. This is a completely different series, which also kept me company during long newborn nights. The first book, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, is so effective at building an unsettling, creepy setting that it’s almost hard to recommend. But I admired how completely different in tone her three books were, especially compared to Children of Time and its sequels.