Best Books I Read: 2024

I made the catastrophic mistake of procrastinating on writing my reviews until the end of the year, which I promise* I will never do again - having to rely on half-remembered impressions of books I read months ago to produce a batch of hastily-written reviews all at once is poor form.

* Maybe.

Below are my top 5 for each category, in alphabetical order by author as always. For fiction, my top recommendation this year is the collected Conan series, represented here by the first volume (out of 3). Yes, it really was that good. For non-fiction, I split my recommendation between FIASCO (if you like finance), and Love and Let Die (if you like James Bond and The Beatles, and who doesn't?). Transforming Noise is extremely impressive but there's just too much math in it.

As always, my Goodreads, which has the full versions of these reviews, is here.

Fiction:

Céline - War. Céline is such a fascinating mixture of great writer and repulsive human being that when it was announced in 2021 that much of the presumed-lost 1944 manuscript of this partially-completed novel had been discovered and rescued, I couldn't stay away from the translation. Céline's service in World War I has attracted a lot of commentary for how it affected his completed novels, but never has his experience been so clearly drawn on, with protagonist Ferdinand's sufferings clearly derived from Céline's own as he attempts to recover from his traumatic injuries in a nightmarish hospital that will ruin other literary efforts like Catch-22 for good. Despite being unignorably incomplete - characters change names in between chapters, the action jumps jarringly from one scene to the next, and the narrative has the disjointed, abrupt, and surreal quality of a half-remembered dream - it is riveting thanks to Céline's distinctive voice, which rolls along in an unstoppable, almost delirious wave. Don't expect a complete novel, let alone something that has the cumulative impact of Death On the Installment Plan, but do prepare for a typically unflinching, almost celebratory attitude exploration of the filthy, brutal, grotesque nature of war.

James Clavell - Shogun. If Shogun was a clickbait YouTube video, its title would be something like "White Guy SHOCKS Sclerotic and Insular Feudal Society By Disrupting the Balance of Power In (Not Quite Fluent) Japanese!", but it is of course far richer than that. I was a big fan of Clavell's earlier novel King Rat, and I read this one while only vaguely aware of the new TV miniseries, but after finishing it I can see why it remains so generally popular after nearly 50 years in spite of its extreme length and intricate focus on the cutthroat intrigue of 17th Japanese court politics, which you don't generally tend to see in best-sellers. Loosely based on the true story of William Adams, an English navigator who became a samurai and vassal to Tokugawa Ieyasu, the unifier and first Shogun of modern Japan, the novel is famous for its heft and seemingly all-encompassing erudition about the time period, and though it is not actually completely accurate about many historical details, its thriller-like pacing (just count the number of times protagonist John Blackthorne narrowly escapes from certain death at the last moment) turns what could have been a lifeless otaku tome into a real page-turner, as they say. I'm a big fan of historical fiction novels that explore how surprisingly interconnected the pre-Industrial Revolution world actually was, and Shogun lands halfway between the nautical subject matter of David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and the grand sociological scope of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.

Robert E Howard - Conan Volume 1: The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian. I've been a big fan of the 1982 Schwarzenegger movie since I saw it as a kid, but I had never gotten around to reading the source material, which as always with such iconic figures was a big mistake on my part. Conan is one of the immortal heroes of modern popular culture, but while the generic image of Conan as a brooding half-savage warrior is perfectly valid, what's missing from the ubiquitous Frank Frazetta images of him is the sheer sense of motion and life in the world that Howard created around him. One of the things that makes Conan so appealing is that he is one of those rare protagonists who does not really undergo any kind of personal transformation as a result of his adventures - his hero's journey is about the places he goes, not the person he becomes. Much like James Bond, he is (or should be) relatively static in his psychology so that he can be inserted into each installment without too much worrying about emotional growth or overly strict chronology; each episode should start with him coming out of nowhere and end with him heading anywhere. This collection (volume 1 of 3) presents the first tranche of Conan stories in publication order, which allows you to savor Howard's uniquely creative sword-and-sorcery genre fiction (which he helped pioneer) that's set in richly detailed renderings of real-life societies under barely-disguised pseudonyms - "history with the serial numbers filed off". The adventures have an incredibly satisfying rhythm to them, as Howard gets more mileage than you would think possible out of such a simple setup. It's hard to pick a favorite, but "Queen of the Black Coast", "Black Colossus", and "Rogues In the House" are particular standouts. The mark of a great writer is not only the ability to come up with something new, but to make the old feel new, and despite these Conan stories turning 90 years old they have yet to be bettered.

Larry McMurtry - Dead Man's Walk. The earliest book chronologically in the Lonesome Dove series (third in publication order), Dead Man's Walk does not reach the heights of Lonesome Dove itself's epic melancholy, but it's still an enjoyable read. Prequels are always tough to manage, as you have to do something new within the confines of the world you've created for yourself while being careful not to undermine anything in the original source material that people love. One of the main attractions of Lonesome Dove is the buddy-comedy friendship/partnership between the fun-loving rogue Augustus McCrae and the too–serious, uptight Woodrow Call, and this novel explores their origin story as two young and hapless Texas Rangers assembling in Austin for an ill-fated mission to capture Sante Fe from Mexico. Lonesome Dove was in large part a deconstruction of the cowboy myths of Texas, and Dead Man's Walk does much the same thing for the Texas Rangers, depicting them as comically incompetent, poorly led, senselessly brutal morons who are outfought by the Indians, the Mexicans, and even the environment of Texas itself. The real-life Santa Fe Expedition in 1841 was a key part of Texas President Mirabeau Lamar's plan to make Texas a viable independent country in contrast to Sam Houston's plan to have Texas annexed by the United States as quickly as possible (for more on this clash of visions, see Jeffrey Kerr's excellent Seat of Empire), and here it is mixed with the similarly disastrous real-life Miers Expedition of 1842 where an attempt to raid Tamaulipas resulted in captive Texans being literally decimated by lot. Dead Man's Walk mostly succeeds in adding a satisfying early chapter to our heroes' lives while setting them up for their future adventures. The consistent message of the series so far seems to be that you should be careful about trying to leave Texas, a message I take to heart.

Qntm - Valuable Humans In Transit. I loved Qntm's previous book There Is No Anti-Memetics Division, a highly enjoyable collection of short stories set in the SCP (Secure Contain Protect) literary universe, a collaborative open source X-Files paranormal sci-fi/horror project. This new book on the other hand is a collection of (mostly) standalone original sci-fi stories. Many of them play around with form (encyclopedia article, chatlog, tweetstorm), which occasionally becomes crucial to interpreting their meaning. Most of them reminded me of one well-known sci-fi classic or another, but not necessarily in a derivative way, just that they touched on familiar tropes or premises in a way that was recognizable yet still unique. The fact that much of contemporary science fiction is created on or informed by the internet has had a lot of interesting yet hard-to-quantify effects on the genre - for example, it feels like there is some important conceptual difference between Harlan Ellison's 1967 story "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" about the perils of runaway AGI, and the film The Matrix, or even Gwern Branwen's excellent 2023 short story "It Looks Like You’re Trying To Take Over The World" - but the creative way that these stories engage and play around with familiar conventions while taking advantage of the effects that the internet has had on our experience of fiction makes them modern, thought-provoking, and enjoyable.

Non-Fiction:

John Higgs - Love and Let Die. If only all pop culture sociology could be so perceptive and filled with genuine affection for its subject matter. Taking as its starting point the intriguing coincidence that The Beatles' first single "Love Me Do" and the first James Bond movie Dr. No premiered on the exact same day of October 5, 1962, Higgs explores how the two franchises became so globally popular while still remaining so distinctly and uniquely British (modern Great Britain remains a cultural superpower long after its empire began to fade, but it remains to be seen if Top Gear and The Great British Bake-Off will have the staying power of their predecessors). What's interesting is that they are almost polar opposites: James Bond is the archetype of the lone hero embedded in a world of death, while The Beatles, spreaders of love, are the exemplar of a band where each member is a part that's less than the whole. Reviewing their respective works with the eye of a loving but clear-eyed fan, Higgs does not shy away from contentious angles like race, gender, and so on, but this book is a masterclass in how to discuss these subjects in an enlightening way without resorting to tired culture war tropes. It's a cliché that you don't necessarily need to be a fan of something in order to read a book about it, but I think even a non-enjoyer of The Beatles or James Bond (yes, those folks are out there) would still enjoy this, as it is inarguably fascinating that these two franchises are still going after all these years, inspiring legions of imitators and derivatives yet remaining somehow unsullied.

David Hillis - Armadillos to Ziziphus. A charming love letter to the Texas Hill Country from one of its most ardent aficionados. Hillis is an evolutionary biologist with impeccable local bona fides: he helped name the Austin blind salamander Eurycea waterlooensis, which lives in Barton Springs along with its slightly more famous cousin Eurycea sosorum (named after the famous Save Our Springs ordinance). He lives out in the Hill Country at the Double Helix Ranch near Johnson City raising Texas longhorns, so Central Texas is not merely an academic interest for him. He chronicles the flora, fauna, climate, rocks, and rivers of the Hill Country, going into entertaining explorations of each and dropping interesting knowledge of our complex ecology on every page while also highlighting how threats like climate change might manifest. Nothing will give you a more direct appreciation of the Edwards Plateau (titled thus after Haden Edwards, a settler of Mexican Texas who declared the Republic of Fredonia) than exploring it in person, but even a native Austinite like myself learned a lot about everything from armadillos (which did not arrive in Texas from their native South America until the 1800s) to the ziziphus (a spiny fruit-bearing bush which quail nest in) from this loving tribute to one of the most beautiful and fascinating environments in America.

Frank Partnoy - FIASCO. It's rare for finance books to reach a truly mass audience: the dry, niche, often extremely technical subject matter means that the readership is typically mainly fellow finance types. But to paraphrase Leon Trotsky's aphorism about the dialectic, you may not be interested in finance, but finance is interested in you - even if you don't know a derivative from a debenture, sooner or later we all have to live with the downstream consequences of whatever mischief the finance world is up to, and so every once in a while - generally, after a huge crisis - there becomes a general market for a explainer/popularizer like Margin Call, The Smartest Guys In the Room, or The Big Short. FIASCO is not as well known as those luminaries, or other classics of finance like Den of Thieves, Barbarians at the Gate, or When Genius Failed, but I am not really sure why, since it is just as well-written and entertaining, and even though it was published in 1997, it could not be more relevant to the modern finance landscape. Frank Partnoy was a derivatives salesman at First Boston and Morgan Stanley in the early and mid 1990s, meaning he had a direct view of some of the biggest financial events of the era, like the Mexican peso crisis, an Argentine bond issue, the Orange County bankruptcy, and more. But while Partnoy's experience with the shady side of high finance leaves him a firm skeptic of the industry, he does a remarkable job of showing why exactly the demand for these complicated financial products exists (for example, why governments would want to borrow in one currency but pay back in another, or how the government of the Philippines could finance the privatization of their state power company), and he has the clearest descriptions of structured notes, reverse repos, inverse floaters, and so on I've seen.

Jeff Pearlman - Football For a Buck. As a Buffalo Bills fan, my knowledge of the USFL before reading this book was basically limited to 2 things: 1. Jim Kelly used to play there because he didn't want to play in a cold weather city like Buffalo, and 2. Donald Trump bankrupted it (in a hilarious bit of foreshadowing, the book begins with a photo of a letter to Trump from Tampa Bay Bandits owner John Bassett threatening to punch him in the face over his destructive negotiating style). Pearlman has written what looks like a nearly definitive chronicle of the incredibly entertaining story of the most prominent of the many failed alternatives to the NFL, one of the most plutocratic and parasitic sports leagues on the planet. Professional sports has always had an uncomfortable relationship with antitrust law (the book's title is a sadly ironic reference to the $1 verdict the USFL won from its antitrust lawsuit), as the built-in artificial scarcity of teams, players, game rights, championships, and so on is the very thing that makes them so appealing; competition is usually the only way that businesses improve their product, but aside from the AFL, every attempt to create a rival pro football league to the NFL has been stifled. "Self-destructed" might be a more apt verb to use for the USFL's failure, for it was actually doing surprisingly well in spite of the NFL's hostility, as well as its own comically amateurish internal operations, but it could not survive Trump's short-sighted and self-interested attempt to move the league's schedule from spring to fall in hopes of getting a buyout, leading directly to its collapse. Politically-oriented lessons from this episode are left as an exercise for the reader, but there are plenty of really funny stories in here, so it's worth reading for the football angle alone.

Chen-Pang Yeang - Transforming Noise. It's hard to exaggerate how impressive this fascinating treatment of the history of research into the nature of noise is, as it's easily in the 95th percentile of popular science works I've read in terms of ambition, depth, and rigor. I came across it thanks to some intriguing references in music critic Alex Ross's April 15, 2024 New Yorker column "What Is Noise?" where he discusses noise in musicological terms, but Yeang's scope is much larger and more technical than merely music, covering the shift in the concept of noise from simply "loud sounds" to electromagnetic interference, a statistical property of motion, a limiting principle for measurement, an inherent aspect of communication, an obstacle to cybernetic control, a tool in cryptography, an instrument in finance, and more. Along the way you will encounter seemingly every important physicist or mathematician of the 20th century - Einstein, Smoluchowski, Langevin, Bachelier, Planck, Nyquist, Schottky, Helmholtz, Boltzmann, Wiener, Uhlenbeck, Shannon, Black, Scholes, Merton, and so on - but Yeang is actually trying to show how the ideas connect to each other, e.g. how Einstein and Smoluchowski's treatments of Brownian motion each differed from Bachelier's, or how Schottky's treatment of shot noise connected to Planck's work on black-body radiation, or how Shannon related the secrecy essential to cryptography to noise, and so forth. Stephen Hawking had a famous story about writing A Brief History of Time where his publisher told him that each equation he included would cut his potential audience in half; by that principle the audience for this book is maybe about four people total, but I am glad to be one of the four.