Our Reads of 2024 (original) (raw)

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Staff Member

Mar 20, 2000
redacted
Club:
Lisburn Distillery FC
Nat'l Team:
Guam

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

"The dreams of men, the seeds of commonwealth, the germs of empires." 2.

Summer of Night a horror novel set near my home town, out on the edge of the prairie, in which the forces of evil are stirred up by a turn-of-the-century lynching and a rich family covering up some other dark goings on by Dan Simmons. I've been in the town that the fictional Elm Haven of the novel is based on, and it was pretty weird, but just standard issue small town dealing with strangers weird, nothing evil. The novel is set in the year of my birth, and Simmons does a good job conveying the life and culture of that time period, so full credit to him there. And he gives my hometown a couple of cameos, which keeps a theme going with the last book, though nothing evil happens there. As far as he knows, anyway.
bigredfutbol repped this. 3.

Staff Member

Oh man—my “to read next” pile is pretty substantial. 4. > FINALLY finished The Shadow Rising, currently on a break from The Wheel of Time books, maybe forever.

Picked this one up as she has written a trilogy that sounded interesting and I figured I would read a different book by her to see if I like her writing style.

Only about 60 pages in. 1830s London/England/Oxford, alternate history of sorts, not fully explained but there is some mystical link between translations between languages, etymology of words, and silver whereby the silver can be imbued with magical properties or something. Intrigued to find out more. And I guess the book is a critique of British Imperialism, capitalism, and academia's role in those two things.

5.

Weird. In your post, the image is 50lines of code, but then I quote your post and the image appears. 6. > T'was a very quick edit by me! 7.

Staff Member

Mar 20, 2000
redacted
Club:
Lisburn Distillery FC
Nat'l Team:
Guam

Bless Me, Ultima - Rudolfo Anaya

8.

Damn nice guy, by the way. AND a good writer. Go figure. 9.

Platonism in the Midwest, a book from 1963 chronicling the late 19th century movement centered around Jacksonville and Quincy Illinois which led, for about 20 years, to these small towns out on the edge of the prairie being dominant centers for philosophy (replacing Concord, MA, though eventually to be replaced by universities like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and eventually Chicago). Now, to be sure, German populations in St. Louis, Cincinnati and Terre Haute had rival centers for Hegelian thought, but in the words of author Paul R. Anderson, ******** those guys (actually, he just says that's the subject for a different book -- though both the Platonists and the Hegelians had connections to earlier abolitionist activists in all their various centers. 10.

Staff Member

American Republics by Alan Taylor. I've read & re-read his American Colonies (as well as three or four of his other books) but somehow I have managed to get around to this one before American Revolutions which comes in between those two. (So I know what I'll be buying next time I give myself permission to buy more books).

Taylor made his name as one of the leading "borderlands history" scholars, and that approach was at the heart of the "Colonies" book, which looked at the colonial era from the perspective of multiple fronts in the European colonialism of the North American continent rather than the usual English/Atlantic coast-centric perspective of traditional histories. In this book, he builds on that continent-spanning framework to consider American expansion from a similarly broad perspective.

This is absolutely synthesis history which leans heavily on an impressive range of secondary sources, but Taylor has more than earned the right to do so. Well-written as usual, Taylor's main theme here is that "Union" was both a perennial ideal and a tenuous, fraught reality from the very beginning of the Republic for multiple reasons. I'm enjoying it, although given that my MA was in 19th century Am. history, there are fewer surprises here for me than in many of his other books, given that his scholarly focus was on the colonial and early Republic eras. 11.

The Things They Carried by Tim O' Brien. It's a faction novel about soldiers in the Vietnam War. Should be interesting. 12.

Staff Member

Mar 20, 2000
redacted
Club:
Lisburn Distillery FC
Nat'l Team:
Guam

Hella Town: Oakland's History of Development and Disruption - Mitchell Schwarzer

Well-done history, if any one is interested in Oakland any more. 13.

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, a book I read as part of my kindle unlimited thing so it was sort of free, and worth every penny. I avoided it because I assumed it would be a memoir of her problems that stemmed from being mistaken for the increasingly erratic conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf, but it also has some pretty interesting meditations on contemporary politics: one of the best one was on how lefties like Wolf and RFK Jr. have become darlings of the Trumpiverse (the source of their transformation was, in part, because of TRAUMA. That is, they were traumatized when they were called out on a huge careless mistake during a BBC interview (in Wolf's case) or basically getting laughed at for their increasing weirdness (RFK Jr.). I have a few qualms about some of Naomi Klein's theories, but it was worth reading. 14.

Staff Member

Mar 20, 2000
redacted
Club:
Lisburn Distillery FC
Nat'l Team:
Guam

Bang the Drum Slowly - Mark Harris

Now I can’t get the song out of my head! 15.

A Winter Haunting, a follow up to an earlier horror novel Summer of Dark by my Central Illinois homey Dan Simmons. Two characters from the first novel return in this one (one of whom has been dead since being run over by a combine, the other of whom is a professor and writer getting his ass kicked by a mid-life crisis that itself precipitated a failed marriage AND the end of the affair with a former grad student that wrecked the marriage. Usual ghost story tropes (is he being haunted or is he insane?) woven in some novel and surprising patters. 16. >

After finishing the 1162-page book, I've now started on a 704-page one. And I snuck in a couple of graphic novels along the way. 17.

Damn shame Graeber's no longer with us. I assigned one of his books a few years ago (Bullshit Jobs) and one of my students emailed him for a clarification. He was quite generous and even answered the follow up. Thankfully, the student was a good one and his question was solid (and Graeber confirmed my interpretation that the student was questioning).

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