Book Time #18: An Honest Accounting of The Books I Read In 2024
In 2024 I started 57 books, finished 35 of them, and read a total of 14,923 pages. This was about 2,000 pages fewer than each of the last two years. Turns out moving and starting a new job takes a lot of time.
To celebrate the end of a chaotic year, I’ve decided to embrace the chaos and do something different. Instead of a Top Books of the Year review—who needs another Best of the Year list anyhow—I’m going to empty my notebook and say something about every book I finished, excepting the ones I’ve already written about or disliked.
Why omit the books I disliked? The reasons I dislike books are usually not interesting. It was probably boring to me, or poorly written in a way that annoyed me too much to put up with, or I just wasn’t in the right headspace for that particular book at that particular time. I tend to avoid the Big Idea books by popular thinkfluencers that are easy—and fun—to criticize and I have no desire to publicly rip into some obscure writer or scholar’s life work, particularly if it’s a subject I’ve read little about.
With that said, did you have a favorite book you read this year? Please let me know! I’m always looking for good book recommendations.
Thanks for reading Book Time. Here’s to more good books in 2025.
Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America, Beth Linker. I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did, which is to say I wanted to love it but merely liked it. Some sections were a bit slow but overall the framing of posture science—sit up and sit straight!—as a moral panic was eye-opening.
The Rise of Corporate Feminism: Women in the American Office, 1960-1990, Allison Elias. The only reason I didn’t write a whole newsletter about this book is I don’t have anything to add. I learned so much, including that the movie Nine to Five with Dolly Parton and Jane Fonda was named after a real activist group (that presumably did not kidnap their boss). It also contains secondary insights into the nature of technological change in the white collar workplace that I didn’t expect. A terrific work of scholarship presented in an approachable way.
A Demon Haunted Land: Ghosts of the Past in Post WWII Germany, Monica Black. Strange book about a ghostly prophet in postwar Germany. Humans are bizarre.
Running Against the Machine: A Grass Roots Race for the New York Mayoralty. A postmortem on one of the oddest mayoral candidacies in New York City history: the Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin ticket. Hybrid platform of ultra-local control—New York City becoming the 51st state and each neighborhood, self-identified by its members through a process never articulated, as individual states—and top-down progressivism, including banning private cars from Manhattan, turning off electricity citywide once a month, and creating a massive citywide bike library. Shockingly, this proved to be a wildly unpopular platform and they lost horribly.
Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism, Kathryn Olmsted. Olmsted is one of the most underrated historical authors working today, a terrific writer with a keen eye for detail. This book will both make you feel better about this country—it has always been like this—and worse—it has always been like this.
Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science, M.G. Lord. One of the rare times a mix of memoir and history has worked for me.
Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style, W. David Marx. I read this during the roughly three-week period I thought I would have to start dressing up for work. Perfectly fine book, happy to be back in jeans and sneakers.
No Minor Chords: My Days in Hollywood, Andre Previn. I found this book accidentally while perusing the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center (an absolute gem of a library, by the way). Like a great Previn score, it is breezy, fun, and pops with life. There’s an anecdote in here involving Jack Lemmon that is one of my favorite small anecdotes of all time.
The Breaks of the Game, David Halberstam. My first Halberstam sports book. Turns out he’s just as brilliant writing about sports as war, politics, cars, and newspapers. Even if you don’t care about sports this book has a lot to offer about inter-generational conflict, race relations in mid-century, and the infiltration of investment capitalists into every tentacle of American life.
American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850-1873, Alan Taylor. I may write about this in more detail next year, but suffice it to say it lacks the magic of the first three in the series.
When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, William Julius Wilson. One of those old school sociology works that marshalls reams of data and supporting evidence to reach undeniable common sense conclusions that everyone ignores.
American Zion: A New History of Mormonism, Benjamin Park. This is only barely a book about Mormons. It is really about how institutions tell their own stories, craft their own narratives to fit the times, all while maintaining the air of tradition and permanency. Really impressive.
Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum, Kathryn Hughes. I’m surprised I read an entire chapter about whether George Eliot’s right hand was larger than her left. I am even more surprised I cared about the answer. And I’m most surprised of all by how much I adored this book. Favorite sentence of the year: “In the making of a life story it is always a chancy business which anecdotes find their way into the written record, and which fall back into the mulch of unrecorded experience.”
Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, Mike Davis. Originally recommended in Book Time #6 by Ryan O’Hanlon. He said, “I want to be clear: this isn't a guide to making a car bomb! No, Davis examines the rise of the car bomb as a response to the rise of airborne artillery. Oppressors now could cause all kinds of damage by shooting from the skies, so marginalized groups developed the car bomb as a cheap way to efficiently cause similar levels of damage. Feels especially relevant today.” Sadly, it is even more relevant due to the events of the last week.
What An Owl Knows: The New Science of the World's Most Enigmatic Birds, Jennifer Ackerman. It takes a lot of effort to make reading a book feel effortless, so I commend Ackerman for making the experience of reading this book feel like a never-ending procession of fascinating owl facts. I wanted to learn more about owls and this book delivered.
The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting, and the New Consumer, Juliet Schor. Veers too close to self-help at times. Oddly judgy about dishwashers. Some amusing descriptions of spoiled children. A good reminder the internet changed less than you think it did.
Don't You Know There's A War On?: The American Home Front, 1941-1945, Richard Lingeman. There are too many World War II books about the “war” part and not enough about the non-war stuff, so I was thrilled to find this book to answer basic questions I had about how rationing worked and whatnot. I’m glad I read it but unfortunately I can’t take it too seriously due to a lack of usable citations. At one point Lingeman tells the story of two GIs at a pub in England who take out photos of their wives only to discover they have the same photo of the same wife. I immediately flipped to the citations only to find that not only does this anecdote not have a citation, but the entire page doesn’t have a citation. Friends don’t let friends write books without thorough citations.
The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the History, The People, The Region, David Alff. “How can we hold on to what we have while waiting for something better to arrive? How can we ‘stay with the trouble’ of old infrastructure, learning to care for something imperfect, without retreating into futuristic fantasies? How can we muddle through?”