1. Jason Isbell - Weathervanes
2. Iggy Pop - Every Loser
3. Bright Light Social Hour - Emergency Leisure
4. Bethany Cosentino - Natural Disaster
5. Margo Price - Strays
6. The Lemon Twigs - Everything Harmony
7. Allen Epley - Everything
8. Tanya Tucker - Sweet Western Sounds
9. Diners - Domino
10. Novelty Island - Wallsend Weekend Television
Picking up the old habit of writing actual detailed book reviews has been tough for me, both in finding the time and also in thinking of things to say. I read a lot of business, history, and economics books this year, and while they have been very useful and educational, with books like those I have the problem of either wanting to write a million words or just jotting down 2 sentences. I know that actually putting in effort and recording my thoughts will be of tremendous help to future me, but the lure of laziness is eternal. I have decided to compromise by linking to other reviews I found useful when getting my own opinions in order; I used to consider this cheating but as I've gotten older I've realized the benefit of bouncing my own thoughts against everyone else's out there.
Below are my top 5 for each category, in alphabetical order by author as always. For fiction, my top pick this year is Lonesome Dove, the Great Texas Novel. For non-fiction, I really can't decide between Barbarians at the Gate (the best Wall Street book ever), Mexico: Biography of Power (a truly unique history), and Thunder Below! (a superb war memoir), with Barbarians at the Gate probably taking the crown. Reading too many good books is better than reading too few!
As always, my Goodreads, which has the full versions of these reviews, is here.
Fiction:
Dashiell Hammett - Red Harvest. The original hard boiled detective novel. I had previously read The Maltese Falcon back in 2012, but this slightly earlier novel, Hammett's first, is actually quite different in fundamental ways: darker, less psychological, more action-focused, although there are not quite as many shootouts as you might think. It's inspired many films - the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple, Kurosawa's Yojimbo, Rian Johnson's Brick, etc - but none of those movies really capture what makes the novel distinct: the unadorned prose, the incredibly rapid pacing, and the single-mindedness of the unnamed protagonist as he runs around the city getting into gunfights and unraveling corruption schemes. There's a common trope about horror movies that modern cell phones make most of them too implausible; this novel is basically 100 years old, and while there are maybe a few too many large-scale shootouts for this adventure to escape front page notice today, the bones of the story are strong enough that there are surprisingly few aspects (the Prohibition setting, the endemic labor violence, a town being controlled by a mining corporation) that you couldn't cleanly update to a contemporary time period, which is why it's still so influential today.
Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove. Lonesome Dove is unquestionably the Great Texas Novel - even though half the novel takes place outside our borders, the implicit moral is that leaving here to chase after an unknown paradise is a bad idea - and more than that, it's one of the finest character-focused novels I've read. Rarely do you read such a plainspoken epic whose power comes so overwhelmingly from the simple interactions of the people in it; while most novels come off as overtly written in some way, with visible signs of the author's hand guiding the narrative or putting words in everyone's mouth, somehow Lonesome Dove seems to emerge organically from the landscape and the characters. When I bought my paperback copy in a used bookstore several years ago the proprietor stopped to tell me that I was in for a real treat and he was right; it's rare these days that I read a novel with such a truly affecting story.
Álvaro Mutis - The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. An extremely long, almost overwhelming chronicle of solitude, friendship, and the voyages in between. It's composed of 7 interconnected novellas told from a variety of perspectives, all revolving around the singular character of Maqroll the Gaviero (a pun meaning both "the Lookout" and "the Seagull"), perhaps the most melancholy sea adventurer in literature, as well as his friends Abdul Bashar and Ilona Grabowska, set in various Latin American and European locales at undefined moments in the immediate postwar era. Maqroll is less a citizen of the world than a visitor to it ("a hostage of the void", in his phrase), and the novel is filled with his wanderings: long journeys through fantastic landscapes, ludicrous illicit schemes hatched with unreliable partners in the shadow of hostile authorities, improbable cocktails consumed in dire living conditions, doomed love affairs accompanied by recondite literature, and, most of all, long meditations and appreciations for the power of the eternal ties that bind certain people to one another across oceans and continents, in any circumstance, despite any obstacle. Mutis is one of those one-and-done authors who earned his way into the pantheon of world literature on the strength of a single great work; he has crafted such a rich world for Maqroll and his companions here that despite this novel's great length, you finish it feeling like you've only gotten a glimpse of a nearly infinite tapestry of life.
Alexander Prokhanov - Chechen Blues. A harrowing fictionalized account of the beginning of the First Chechen War, which is not a war I'd known much about but has a grim reputation in Russia as a prime example of the brutality, dishonesty, and ineptitude characteristic of the new regime after the collapse of communism. There are two main narratives: one follows the everyman Captain Kudryavtsev in an armored brigade that's part of the first wave of Russian forces on an ill-fated mission to secure the rebellious Chechen capital of Grozny; the other follows Yakov Berner, a Boris Berezovksy-ish oligarch, back in Moscow, and his efforts to extend his corporate empire and his political influence via shady business deals. While Kudryavtsev and the other survivors of a Chechen ambush attempt to remain alive in the ruins of the city after the destruction of their brigade, their misfortune is just another opportunity for Berner to profit as he betrays his business partners (and the Russian people overall) for the opportunity to make a buck on an oil pipeline deal. Written in 1998 but not translated into English until 2022, this is a lyrical, angry, only barely allegorical representation of the Saturnalia of corruption that was endemic in the Yeltsin era.
Neal Stephenson - Termination Shock. The second of the newer Stephenson novels I've read this year after Seveneves, Termination Shock was much more consistently enjoyable all the way through. I think its more limited science fictional scope - a near-future scheme to temporarily reverse global warming via geoengineering with giant guns that fire sulfur into the upper atmosphere - made it easier for Stephenson to concentrate on writing a satisfying narrative with coherent characters than the overwhelming 7000 AD setting of the back third of Seveneves, but it doesn't hurt that the book is more immediately relevant, which also helps the infodumping to be focused and plot-related. It's tricky to write a novel about climate change that gets both the science and the politics basically plausible, but Stephenson pulled it off, and most miraculous of all, somehow the ending doesn't even feel rushed! This is the nearest successor to Cryptonomicon I've seen from him, and while the problem of climate change in real life is obviously bigger than the novel, I have rarely seen it portrayed so well in fiction.
Non-Fiction:
Bryan Burroughs, John Helyar - Barbarians at the Gate. I knew Barbarians at the Gate would be good, but it surpassed my expectations. It's probably the single most widely-praised business book of all time, along with maybe John Brooks' Business Adventures, and it deserves every bit of its acclaim. A good business book will present a business story or problem, explain why it mattered to the people involved, and most of all, connect it to something the broader world at large would care about, especially all-too-human feelings like greed and hubris. It's much more difficult than it seems to adequately convey the relationship between an abstract financial maneuver and the human motives underneath, particularly when it involves complex financial chicanery of the sort that takes a phalanx of lawyers and accountants to sort out, so it is nothing short of a miracle that Burroughs and Helyar's chronicle of the 1988 leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco for $25 billion, the largest in history (that's $64 billion in 2023 dollars) is not merely readable but thrilling. Even if you aren't interested in the world of 80s finance, reading this will give you invaluable insight into the modern business landscape, for example Elon Musk's increasingly frantic behavior these days after his own LBO of Twitter.
Sebastian Edwards - The Chile Project. This is probably the best single-volume history of Chilean economic policy from Allende onwards out there. A half-century after Pinochet's coup on September 11th, 1973, his ensuing horrific military dictatorship in Chile is typically only ever referenced in the US in the context of someone vaguely complaining about neoliberalism, that most all-encompassing yet indescribable of modern political typologies. I love pointless definitional debates about what that term "really" means as much as the next guy, but every once in a while it's nice to step back, put the nitpicky logomachia on hold, and reflect on what actually happened: how what had formerly been an unexceptional middle-of-the-road Latin American backwater dodged the twin threats of both a socialist meltdown and brutal authoritarianism to gradually become the richest country in the region. Edwards, who as a 19 year-old college student actually worked in Allende's price control directorate, discusses the economic policy advocated by the "Chicago Boys" of the title, the US-trained and influenced economists primarily responsible for guiding the Chilean economy during the many periods of political turmoil after the coup, surprising me with the well-documented conclusion that neoliberalism actually worked out fairly well for Chile.
Eugene Fluckey - Thunder Below!. Thunder Below belongs in the very first tier of war memoirs, both for its writing style as well as for the feats described. The memoirs of a submariner are going to be very different than those of a rifleman or helicopter pilot, but there are many scenes here that are every bit as harrowing as a risky landing or a sudden tank charge, as well as some of the most insightful and perceptive war writing you will read. Fluckey was the captain of the USS Barb, the submarine which set the record for greatest amount of enemy tonnage sunk during World War 2 over the course of 5 war patrols in the Pacific theater from May 1944 to August 1945. He pioneered brand-new technologies and tactics, like sub-mounted rocket batteries for shore bombardments, infrastructure demolition via amphibious assault (the only ground combat on the Home Islands in the whole war), risky Aboukir Bay-style convoy attacks off the Chinese coast, and at one point he hits his mission quota of enemy ships destroyed by literally ramming the final victim to finish it off, yet suffers barely a scratch.
Enrique Krause - Mexico: Biography of Power. This history book is the great man theory of history taken to the extreme, perhaps the ultimate example of trying to understand a country through the lives of its leaders from the conquistadors to the 1990s. While Mexico is right next door to us, as a Texan I only learned of its history very tangentially, via compressed descriptions of Santa Anna and elementary school trips to the Alamo. Krause presents Mexico as both a parallel nation to the United States in its efforts to forge a distinct identity from a multi-ethnic population, as well as its own unique world in how its rulers attempted to ride or direct the currents of ideology according to their own interpretations of the national destiny (which coincidentally often overlapped their own destiny). I actually learned about major figures like Santa Anna, Benito Juarez, Profirio Diaz, Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, and more in the context of their goals and backgrounds, along with how they related to each other. While there is not much in the way of descriptive statistics here, that is an extremely minor complaint given that this is a series of biographies; the only real gripe I have is that the book is nearly 30 years old and I would love to see a current edition covering the post-PRI era. After finishing this book, I think it is almost criminal that Americans aren't given a better understanding of Mexican history, especially as the demographics of our countries become ever more closely entwined, and the unfortunate tendency of presidential power towards caudillismo makes a clearer place for itself in our politics as well.
James B Stewart, Rachel Abrams - Unscripted. I've never seen HBO's Succession, but the show's patriarch (Brian Cox's character) was in large part based on Sumner Redstone, the recently deceased, extremely colorful owner of Viacom/CBS/Paramount. Stewart has long been one of my favorite business writers thanks to Den of Thieves and especially Disneywar, so this was a must-read for me. He and his fellow NYT journalist Abrams, who helped break the Harvey Weinstein story, present an enthralling account of a rapidly decaying Redstone caught in an incredibly lurid sex/money/power maelstrom as his friends, family, and "female companions" tried to seize their share of his estate in his final years of life, along with the interrelated downfall of Les Moonves, the serial sexual assaulter head of CBS. You can see why this book is already being optioned for its own Succession-type series (it's even already divided into seasons and episodes instead of sections and chapters), but it's all the more worth reading because of the massive effects these events had on the broader entertainment industry.
