My 2024 in Books
My annual journey across the books I read over the year. If you’re looking for a good read (or books to avoid) then you’ve come to the right place!
Happy New Year! This is the first Dispatch of 2025, and I'm pleased to share that next issue will be the 150th. Thank you for the gift of your attention over the last three years.
Note: Since this week’s issue is longer than most, your email might truncate it, particularly if you use gmail. At the truncation, just click “View entire message” to read the whole thing.
I. Overture
(Before we get to the book lists… scroll down if you’re in a hurry.)
This is the eleventh year that I’ve kept a running list of every book I’ve completed for the first time (or a re-read after many years or with a new context) and then shared that list as the first thing I post in the new year. It’s only the third time I’ve done so in this newsletter because I launched The Dispatch at the end of January, 2022.
One reason I do this is that it helps me chart the course of a yearlong intellectual and emotional journey. I read a lot of things that aren't books: newspapers, magazines, newsletters, reports, and comic books, but books are different. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the question, “What is a book?” quite a bit, but that’s a topic for another Dispatch.
If you're curious about previous lists, then you can see the 2023 list here, the 2022 list here, the combined 2021 and 2020 lists here, the 2019 list here, the 2018 list here, the 2017 list here, the 2016 list here, the 2015 list here, and the first list from 2014 here.
As always, thanks to my friend David Daniel for the inspiration to do this.
The links to buy the books are typically to Bookshop.org for paper books and Libro.fm for audiobooks. Amazon gets enough of our money, and Bookshop donates a slice of every purchase to a local bookstore of your choice.
I read 32 books in 2024, which is fewer than usual, but the quality was higher than usual—so much so that I can’t choose a top three, as I usually do.
What follows immediately below is the short list of authors, linked titles, and when I finished reading the book. The longer list with notes is below that, and a list of books I’m looking forward to in 2025 is at the end.
II. The Efficient Version
1. Bujold, Lois McMaster. Demon Daughter: a Penric & Desdemona Novella. Finished 1/15/24.
2. Klein, Naomi. Doppelganger: A Trip Into The Mirror World. Finished 1/27/24.
3. Wells, Martha. System Collapse: The Murderbot Diaries. Finished 3/1/24.
4. Estrin, Michael. Not Safe for Work: A Porn Valley Mystery (Book One). Finished 3/5/24.
5. Wagner, Matt. Mage: The Hero Discovered. Finished 3/18/24.
6. Zevin, Gabrielle. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: a Novel. Finished 3/30/24.
7. Ranganath, Charan. Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold On to What Matters. Finished 4/13/24.
8. Straczynski, J. Michael. Becoming Superman: My Journey From Poverty to Hollywood. Finished 4/21/24.
9. Wagner, Matt. Mage: The Hero Defined. Finished 4/24/24.
10. Weber, David. Toll of Honor (Honor Harrington). Finished 4/28/24.
11. Everett, Percival. James. Finished 5/14/24.
12. Mollick, Ethan. Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. Finished 5/16/24.
13. Kuang, R.F. Babel: an Arcane History. Finished 6/28/24.
14. Butler, Octavia E. A Few Rules for Predicting the Future: an Essay. (Art by Manuel Bowman.) Finished 6/29/24.
15. Phillips, Gary. Violent Spring: an Ivan Monk Mystery. Finished 7/3/24.
16. Bujold, Lois McMaster. Penric and the Bandit: a Penric & Desdemona Novella. Finished 7/7/24.
17. Asaro, Catherine. The Down Deep (Dust Knights Book 1). Finished 7/11/24.
18. Bradley, Kaliane. The Ministry of Time. Finished 7/18/24.
19. Vonnegut, Kurt. A Man Without A Country. Finished 7/27/24.
20. Follmuth, Alexene Farol. Twelfth Knight. Finished 8/5/24.
21. Banks, Iain M. Consider Phlebas: a Culture Novel. Finished 8/16/24.
22. Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Finished 8/22/24.
23. Banks, Iain M. The Player of Games: a Culture Novel (Book 2). Finished 8/26/24.
24. Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge With AI. Finished 9/15/24.
25. Butler, Octavia. Parable of the Sower. Finished 10/2/24.
26. Connelly, Michael. The Waiting: a Ballard and Bosch Novel. Finished 10/22/23.
27. Del Rey, Jason. Winner Sells All: Amazon, Walmart, and the Battle for our Wallets. Finished 11/11/24.
28. Proehl, Bob. The Nobody People. Finished 11/29/24.
29. Grisham, John and Jim McCloskey. Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions. Finished 12/4/24.
30. Chast, Roz. Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? A Memoir. Finished 12/7/24.
31. Dench, Judi and Brendan O'Hea. Shakespeare: the Man Who Pays the Rent. Finished 12/7/24.
32. Banks, Iain M. Use of Weapons: a Culture Novel (Book 3). Finished 12/20/24.
III. The Long Version (with notes)
1. Bujold, Lois McMaster. Demon Daughter: a Penric & Desdemona Novella. Finished 1/15/24.
Gosh I love this series... and just about anything that Bujold writes. I would have finished it earlier if not for CES. This one was more domestic, less action than usual (like her terrific A Civil Campaign in the Vorkosigan SF books, one of my favorites), but it was welcome. Anybody who enjoys fantasy will like this series, which is a spin-off of Bujold’s World of the Five Gods novels.
2. Klein, Naomi. Doppelganger: A Trip Into The Mirror World. Finished 1/27/24.
I read the first half of this for the Creative Destruction Lab book club—Klein was a guest at the meeting—and kept going. It's an intriguing and odd exploration of doppelgänger's in culture and politics, told through the device of how frequently people confuse Klein with Naomi Wolf, the now right-wing whack job who started out as a popularizer of third wave feminist thought. Lots to like about this book, although it's a bit all over the place. I leaned in, wrote a lot of engaged marginalia and took a lot of notes, so that's all good. I don't know how I feel about it in the end, though.
3. Wells, Martha. System Collapse: The Murderbot Diaries. Finished 3/1/24.
I'd been starting but not finishing books at this point, which was upsetting. In the case of this latest entry in the terrific Murderbot series, this one follows immediately after the events of Network Effect, which I didn't remember well. So, last week, I wound up re-reading Network Effect in its entirety, which was pleasant... although bizarre because I really didn't remember reading it (even though it's in my notes as having read it in May of 2021; Molly Wood reported having the same challenge.)
It's actually a flaw in a series if nothing memorable happens in a book, which is rather like my objection to the Mick Herron Slow Horses books. System Collapse was agreeable, a neat adventure with characters from Network Effect. At the end, though, Murderbot is in almost exactly the same emotional place that it was in at the end of Network Effect.
Side Note: perhaps because Martha Wells herself is female, I've always thought or Murderbot as leaning towards female even though it is assertively genderless. That made it weird to learn that Alexander Skarsgård, who is far from genderless, will star as Murderbot in the recently announced AppleTV+ series. I'll still watch it, though.
4. Estrin, Michael. Not Safe for Work: A Porn Valley Mystery (Book One). Finished 3/5/24.
A laugh out loud novel about the misadventures of a young journalist who finds himself working for the second best trade publication in porn. I can’t stress enough how hilarious this book is. I'm pleased to know the author, and I enjoy his weekly Situation Normal newsletter.
Now I’m eagerly awaiting Book Two.
5. Wagner, Matt. Mage: The Hero Discovered. Finished 3/18/24.
This is a hardback first edition collecting the first arc of Wagner’s Kevin Matchstick saga—a graphic novel. This is a partial reread: I read some or all of it many years ago, when I was working at DreamWorks, and this collection got pitched to us. I was enthusiastic at the time, but the executives in charge of acquisition weren’t. That still annoys me. It was a very fast read back in the day because I had one night. This time, I got to savor it. I’m so glad I did: Matt is an acquaintance, and I admire his work immensely. This is a fantastic epic that is intimate at the same time, and it’s an Arthurian update. I’m now looking for a hardback of Vol 2.
And I still want it to be a prestige TV series. AppleTV+, are you listening?
6. Zevin, Gabrielle. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: a Novel. Finished 3/30/24.
Although I read a lot, I don't read a tremendous amount of literary fiction, which this novel definitely is.
Digression: Looking back, the last unquestionably literary books I read were Curtis Sittenfeld's Romantic Comedy (August 2023), Joseph O'Connor's Shadowplay: a Novel (October 2022), Jennifer Egan's The Candy House (September 2022) and A Visit from the Goon Squad (August 2022), and Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague (February 2022).
This is not to say that much of the other fiction I read is not literary. Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer: a Memoir (May 2022), Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose The Time War (June 2022), as well as Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace (both in August 2023) all come to mind as literary works that are also genre fiction (Kobabe is a graphic novel; the rest are science fiction). End of digression.
I enjoyed Levin's book immensely, but I must confess that I doubt I would have finished it without the deadline of going to hear her speak a few days later at Portland's Literary Arts event. There's a great deal of emotional drama between the main characters (Sadie and Sam), but aside from one very big surprise the events tend toward the internal... and I'm fond both of plot and of higher stakes than the story of a friendship over decades. If you like literary fiction at all, this is a must read.
A surprising number of people I know did not see the reference to Macbeth in the title. Odd.
7. Ranganath, Charan. Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold On to What Matters. Finished 4/13/24.
Magnificent. I started the book, read the first four or five chapters, then got distracted... and when I came back to it my memory of the first chapters was insufficiently fresh (a bit ironic for a book about memory), so I started over... this time making even more marginalia, checks, and underlines.
The author does a remarkable job of translating complex neuroscience into clear, muscular prose that enlightened me about how the mind works in many ways. One central idea is that we humans have two different, overlapping but distinct forms of memory (episodic and semantic) that work together, which was helpful and a useful additional conceptual tool alongside things like data-driven versus schema-driven processing and/or Kahneman's System 1 and System 2. Ranganath's tools are different but complementary.
I can't recommend this one highly enough, and I look forward to reading it again.
8. Straczynski, J. Michael. Becoming Superman: My Journey From Poverty to Hollywood. Finished 4/21/24.
Straczynski is the creator of Babylon 5, which is one of my all-time favorite TV series. (I've watched the entire five year run three times.) He is as prolific a writer as can be.
The highest compliment I can pay to his memoir is this simple truth: I found a copy that my local library was getting rid of and bought it for a dollar. I started reading it as I left the library walking home. I kept reading the entire 1.6 mile walk, something that I have never done before. I kept reading until dinner. When it was time for me to do the dishes, I looked and saw that the audiobook was part of my Spotify subscription, and listened while I cleaned. After cleanup, and after helping my daughter with something, I returned to reading. I finished the 460 page book around 12:45am, less than 12 hours after I first picked it up.
The man can write.
9. Wagner, Matt. Mage: The Hero Defined. Finished 4/24/24.
The sequel to #5, above... although I couldn't find a hardback and wound up grabbing a trade paperback of the comic collection (not that it really matters) at Powell’s. It's terrific! This is the middle volume of a trilogy, and as such has an Empire Strikes Back vibe where the story accelerates, a lot gets decided, relationships form, and then there's a bit of a "what next?" cliffhanger.
A hardback of Book III is coming soon via Kickstarter, and I’m in.
10. Weber, David. Toll of Honor (Honor Harrington). Finished 4/28/24.
As I mentioned in an earlier newsletter, this was a bit of a bait and switch. The cover says, "A New Honorverse Novel," but it's actually a paraquel, which is an old story told from a different point of view... sort of like Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is a paraquel for Hamlet.
In this case, Toll of Honor straddles the fourth and fifth books: Field of Dishonor and Flag in Exile. Honor Harrington herself barely shows up, and we see a bunch of events from those books through the eyes of different characters. It wasn't a bad way to spend a few hours over a weekend, but it was far from the same experience as a new book chronicling new adventures of the main character. It took me a long time to get past feeling cheated by the bait and switch, a big marketing misfire.
I only figured out what this book was after I went to the Baen Free Radio Hour podcast (Baen is the publisher), downloaded an episode featuring Weber talking about this book to Apple Podcasts, and then looked at the transcript. Next time, I'll just go to Amazon, which (unlike the publisher's page and the page on Weber's site) lists the book as "Toll of Honor (1) (Expanded Honor)." Scrolling down, the AI generated summary of the customer reviews read...
Customers find the storyline enjoyable and enjoyable. They also say the book fills in some background on the mainline series. However, some readers feel the content is not new and a waste of money. Opinions are mixed on the writing style, with some finding it well written and others saying it's too much time rehashing the Harrington/Pavel Young feud.
... which is accurate.
11. Everett, Percival. James. Finished 5/14/24.
Wow! What a magnificent book.
This novel came out in March. When I found out that it was a reimagining of Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of Jim, I immediately put it on hold at the local library. It showed up this week; I picked it up yesterday. Today, I've been fighting a cold all day, so my concentration has been poor for work, but I could still read, so I finished the book.
Huckleberry Finn is one of my favorite novels, and it pains me that my kids will probably never read it because it contains the "N word," thinking it racist rather than a novel that is dead set against racism.
Everett's version is terrific: moving and very scary. I don't agree with The New York Times review that calls it a "knockout comedy" because I didn't laugh at all, but looking at it through the dark comic lens of the movie American Fiction, based on Everett's Erasure, I can see why the review made that leap.
Since I know Twain's novel well, I could appreciate how Everett adapted and inverted many of the moments from Huckleberry Finn, including one shocking twist that I did not see at all, but which, upon reflection, is true to Twain's sensibility. No spoilers here, though.
I think it might be hard to appreciate James if the reader hasn't read Twain's novel, but perhaps one day I'll chat with somebody for whom that is the case.
12. Mollick, Ethan. Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. Finished 5/16/24.
This is the book I recommended most in 2024. I’m in good company in this, as Frank Cooper, CMO of VISA, shares my enthusiasm.
It’s a generously clear, and helpful book that explores how our lives will change with Generative AI, exploring vast scenarios in concrete ways. I have so many AI books, most of them unfinished because they get mired in technical details or doomsday scenarios. One helpful thing that Mollick does in this book is to engage with how much human life will change even if Generative AI never gets any better than it is today, which it already has since he wrote the book in 2023.
Highest recommend for anybody remotely interested in AI. You should also subscribe to his One Useful Thing newsletter.
13. Kuang, R.F. Babel: an Arcane History. Finished 6/28/24.
Amazing. My friend Beatrice Mousli, who taught an entire course about this book, gave me a copy when we were wandering around Powell's. It's an alternate history. Most of the action takes place in an 1830s England where—instead of an Industrial Revolution—there's a magical revolution because of certain mystical properties of silver. Our protagonist, Robin Swift, goes to Oxford in order to learn mystical silver working and translation, which is how the magic works. (It makes more sense when you’re reading.)
It's an interesting, complex world, and an compelling, complex plot. It took me a while to get into it, but I think that has more to do with where my busy head was than the book itself. I discovered that an audiobook version was available as part of my Spotify subscription, so I made progress mostly by listening to it at first, until it hooked me. The first half is relatively slow, but the second half is action packed. Kuang is incredibly prolific, having written five substantial books before she turned 29. I then handed the book to La Profesora, who also loved it.
14. Butler, Octavia E. A Few Rules for Predicting the Future: an Essay. (Art by Manuel Bowman.) Finished 6/29/24.
This beautifully-crafted little book from Chronicle preserves the text of a 2000 essay published in Essence magazine that deserves preservation. In it, Butler explains her process for writing near future science fiction and argues for the value of prediction itself.
This was an impulse purchase at checkout at the delightful Smith Family Bookstore in Eugene, Oregon, where I was for the day with my son. According to the salesclerk, I was the first person to succumb to this impulse purchase since they had laid out a handful next to the register. I need to think more about how this small event represents bigger things about the intersection of geography, friction, curation, and discovery…
15. Phillips, Gary. Violent Spring: an Ivan Monk Mystery. Finished 7/3/24.
A terrific mystery / thriller from 1994 that I would never have read if not for a newsletter issue by Michael Estrin (see #4 above), which I discussed here.
Monk is an engaging character with side characters around him that are memorable, particularly Judge Jill, his girlfriend. The plot clicks along speedily, and I'm eager to read the next one. The cover of my old paperback reads, "Soon to be an HBO Motion Picture," but it never happened, sadly, because this would make a great short series or feature.
16. Bujold, Lois McMaster. Penric and the Bandit: a Penric & Desdemona Novella. Finished 7/7/24.
As with #1, above, I inhaled this once I had an hour or two to read. Besides Penric and Desdemona, none of the regulars appeared in this adventure, which featured a new character named Roz (a man). There was a plot point that I saw coming way in advance, but the overall arc was entertaining. Not my favorite of these, but I'll take not-favorite Bujold over most authors’ best work any day.
17. Asaro, Catherine. The Down Deep (Dust Knights Book 1). Finished 7/11/24.
A sequel series to Asaro’s “Major Bhaaj” series within her long-running Skolian Empire multi-series universe. I’m not sure why Asaro restarted the numbering since this one is a direct continuation of the previous books, but it doesn’t bother me. A spritely adventure story and a good onramp for new readers. I read it in about a day on a business trip.
I’m also delighted to learn that Asaro has a new series that I somehow missed… the first will be a treat for a long plane ride.
18. Bradley, Kaliane. The Ministry of Time. Finished 7/18/24.
I love a good time travel story (my all-time favorite is The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers), and this one delivers. It’s a combination adventure, romance, and time travel story that surprised me consistently. Bradley deserves all the raves this book is getting. I don't want to spoil anything about this great book. I know my description makes the book sound like straight science fiction, but it’s more literary fiction in sensibility.
19. Vonnegut, Kurt. A Man Without A Country. Finished 7/27/24.
Got this out of the library after a social media meme about one section caught my eye... so I tracked down the provenance of the meme, found that it was truly Vonnegut, and decided to read the book because I may turn it into a newsletter.
The section about farting around (that is, the meme) was the only optimistic moment in an otherwise sad, angry, and bitter book. Vonnegut wrote it around the time that the Supreme Court installed George W. Bush as president, and there are frequent references to that time. He would have been even more negative at the present moment, I suspect.
20. Follmuth, Alexene Farol. Twelfth Knight. Finished 8/5/24.
Enjoyable YA novel that rejiggers the story of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night into a modern day high school. If this sounds familiar, then you might be thinking of the 2006 movie She's the Man with Amanda Bynes and Channing Tatum.
What's different and effective about Follmuth's novel is that she entirely removes the cross-dressing, "Viola pretending to be Cesario/Sebastian" part of the plot; instead, Jack "Duke" Orsino and Vi Reyes meet in an online video game, where Vi plays under a pseudonym. It's Shakespeare with a pinch of Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, although one person holds up two points of the triangle.
21. Banks, Iain M. Consider Phlebas: a Culture Novel. Finished 8/16/24.
Sprawling, ambitious, science fiction space opera series that I've been hearing about for years and finally started. The thing that finally tipped me into reading it was Banks' notion of "neural lace," which sounds sufficiently like what Ray Kurzweil is exploring in The Singularity is Nearer that I wanted to see to what extent Banks anticipated Kurzweil (as science fiction so often anticipates science, see my "Retro Futures" columns).
Sadly, neural lace shows up somewhere later in the series, but that doesn't matter because this novel is fantastic. Intricately plotted, surprising, thoughtful, and consistently interesting. High recommend. An imaginative, powerful book with a terrible title.
22. Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Finished 8/22/24.
I loathe this book so much that I won’t even link to it. I’ve written about it at length here, so I don’t need to recapitulate my analysis. The short version: don’t waste your time. You can also listen to me and my friend Joey Dumont argue about this book on an episode of his True Thirty podcast.
23. Banks, Iain M. The Player of Games: a Culture Novel (Book 2). Finished 8/26/24.
Amazing. So much different than Consider Phlebas (#21, above): no recurring characters but the same universe.
It’s hard to explain the Culture, but it’s a bit like if The Federation from Star Trek did not have its non-interference Prime Directive.
I want to gobble this series up, but I'm trying to pace myself. Some of the best thinking around the differences between human and machine intelligence I've read in fiction, all just along the way. Still no neural lace.
24. Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge With AI. Finished 9/15/24.
A sunnily optimistic and very dense book about AI that updates and continues (and shortens!) The Singularity is Near from 2005. Kurzweil goes deeper and wider on the implications of AI than most other thinkers to explore its impact on health, longevity, and human satisfaction. It's nice that he is sunnily optimistic and looker deeper into the future than most writers. My next AI book is Nexus by Harari, which looks as dour as Kurzweil is sunny... the two of them put together probably equal a balanced take. Time will tell.
25. Butler, Octavia. Parable of the Sower. Finished 10/2/24.
How did I miss this book? I'm upset with myself that I didn't read this years ago. What was I thinking? It was published in 1993, and it's amazingly prescient about climate change and political polarization. I need an emotional break before I read the sequel, and I'm already in deep mourning that Butler died before completing the trilogy of which this is the first.
26. Connelly, Michael. The Waiting: a Ballard and Bosch Novel. Finished 10/22/23.
As usual, I inhaled this after I snatched it from the book table at Costco. It's a special kind of validation for an author to be at Costco, which is more discerning and less smugly literary than The New York Times Bestseller list.
As always, a fast-paced, character-driven detective story... or a series of three adjacent stories that don't have much to do with each other aside from the characters (like an A, B, and C plot in a one-hour TV series). One nice development is that the "Bosch" of Ballard and Bosch is nicely ambiguous since Harry Bosch's daughter Maddie is now a cop and working with Renee Ballard in the Open Unsolved Cases unit at the Los Angeles PD. Former series protagonist Harry Bosch is now semi-retired, although still a big part of the action.
27. Del Rey, Jason. Winner Sells All: Amazon, Walmart, and the Battle for our Wallets. Finished 11/11/24.
I was in London for the launch of RMN Europe Ascendant Boot Camp (part of my role at Ascendant Network) when my friend and boss Susan MacDermid recommended this book to me.
It's a fascinating look at the longtime rivalry between the two largest retailers and how that rivalry created evolutionary pressure on both. It taught me a lot and clarified my sense of retail in the 21st century, which is key to "retail media," which is the RM of RMN... the N being "Networks." Del Rey is a terrific writer who puts the humans behind the merchandise into focus. The book came out in 2023, and so it ends just as the pandemic's end was beginning. I hope he revisits the book in a few years to think through the post-pandemic end or writes a sequel.
28. Proehl, Bob. The Nobody People. Finished 11/29/24.
Recommended by my friend Benjamin Karney. It took me a while to get into it, but then I was hooked. This is a recombinant X-Men story, where instead of mutants the superpowered are "Resonants." It's very much an X-Men through the lens of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. This is one half of a story, the other half being The Somebody People, which I'll dig into soon.
29. Grisham, John and Jim McCloskey. Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions. Finished 12/4/24.
I listened to this book as an audiobook via Spotify.
The book's title is 100% accurate. The tales told by the two authors, read by Michael Beck, are breathtaking in their descriptions of lying police, crooked prosecutors, people sent to prison wrongfully for decades, and in one case an innocent man put to death. It is a harrowing read (or listen), and a compelling one. I don't know if I would have finished the book if I read a paper copy. I might have put it aside because the stories are so chilling.
There were moments when I was walking and listening that I stopped dead in my tracks, jaw agape, in shock at the events in the book. I might have alarmed the neighbors.
30. Chast, Roz. Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? A Memoir. Finished 12/7/24.
My friend Juliet recommended this book. It's a poignant and hilarious account of the author's relationship with her parents throughout her life, and particularly when they got to their 90s. Chast is most famous as a New Yorker cartoonist and has an instantly recognizable style. This is the first of her longer works that I've read, and I loved it.
31. Dench, Judi and Brendan O'Hea. Shakespeare: the Man Who Pays the Rent. Finished 12/7/24.
I finished the Chast book in one sitting, but I listened to this delightful audiobook over the course of weeks. Dench's vision has deteriorated, so sound-alike actress Barbara Flynn narrates most of the Dench parts of this long dialog between Dench and her close friend and fellow actor Brendan O'Hea. I wrote about this one at length here.
There were so many fascinating insights that I bought a hard copy of the book.
32. Banks, Iain M. Use of Weapons: a Culture Novel (Book 3). Finished 12/20/24.
Another terrific, thoughtful, imaginative read. As with Player of Games and Consider Phlebas, Banks does not reuse characters or locations in this third book in what I suppose I should call a series, but it's unlike any other series I've read. This one was the most formally inventive of the Culture books so far, with a double helix narrative that took me a while to understand, but I appreciated it even more once I did. Still no neural lace, but at this point I don’t care. I’m in it.
How sad that Banks died young of cancer at 59.
IV. Books I Look Forward to Reading in 2025
Here are two books that I’m in the middle of reading and want to finish soon…
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari
and
Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild
Otherwise, and in no particular order…
• Anything by Lois McMaster Bujold or Michael Connelly
• Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport
• The Somebody People by Bob Proehl. Sequel to The Nobody People.
• Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler. Sequel to Parable of the Sower.
• Mage: Volume III: The Hero Denied by Matt Wagner.
• The rest of the Culture Series by Iain M. Banks.
• Perdition, USA by Gary Phillips. The second Ivan Monk mystery
• Amazon For CMOs: How Brands Can Achieve Success In The New Amazon Economy by Kiri Masters, Mark Power
• AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can't, and How to Tell the Difference by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor
• North Woods: A Novel by Daniel Mason
• Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI by Mark Abraham and David C. Edelman
• The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
Thanks for reading! See you Sunday for a more typical Dispatch.
*Image prompt: “the words ‘My 2024 In Books’ where all the letters are books.” Ideogram.ai was the only image generator capable of spelling the words correctly. ChatGPT and Adobe Firefly made beautiful images that were misspelled.