My Favorite Books from 2024, Part II — July through December
Here are the fifteen books I’ve read in the second half of 2024. As I stated in Part I of this summary covering the first half of 2024, I plan on writing a more substantive analysis tackling what I learned from a selection of the books that moved me the most.
More Hall, McMurtry, and Murakami
- A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety — Donald Hall
- Life Work — Donald Hall
- String Too Short To Be Saved — Donald Hall
- Books: A Memoir — Larry McMurtry
- What I Talk About When I Talk About Running — Haruki Murakami
I became enamored with the work of Donald Hall this year, and after reading two books early on, I read three more in the third quarter of the year. His book “String Too Short To Be Saved” is certainly the most literary, and has some beautiful passages about spending summers with his grandparents who ran a New Hampshire farm. That said, I think I enjoyed his musings about work in “Life Work” a little more, and I loved the short pieces about aging in his post-humous book “A Carnival of Losses.”
Larry McMurtry’s “Books” was a wonderful dip into the world of book collectors and running a bookstore. It’s just a series of short anecdotes and musings from throughout his life, but it works so well. As for the Murakami book on running- his writing is so minimal and direct that I finished this book as though I was going on a run with him. I enjoyed learning about his life experience as a marathon runner, though I enjoyed the book he wrote about writing, which I read last year, a little more.
Life Stories of Artists
6. I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together — Maurice Vellekoop
7. Things the Grandchildren Should Know — Mark Everett
The Vellekoop graphic memoir is something I pulled off the Atwater Village library shelf. It is the life story of a gay illustrator who grows up with religiously conservative parents in Toronto and his experiences finding his place in the world. I enjoyed the drawings in this book a lot, though I think I tend to say that about all graphic novels.
Sometime in November I had the urge to go back and listen to the music by the band Eels, led by Mark Everett. They had their moment back in the 1990’s, and I had stopped listening long ago. I tore through this book in a few days because I enjoy reading about how people make it in the music industry. Everett experienced a lot of tragedy in his life, but he is also a testament to just committing to art as a way to move forward.
Non-Fiction on Topics of Interest to Me
8. The End of Trauma — George Bonanno
9. Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life’s Work — Steven Pressfield
10. Failure to Launch — Mark McConville
“The End of Trauma” was not a great read, but it was interesting and to be perfectly candid, I finished it because the author’s conclusions confirmed my general belief about how people handle difficult things. Bonanno basically used research to flip the common understanding of trauma on its head — most people don’t experience PTSD when bad things happen, and how one handles bad things is often related to the strength of a person’s coping skills.
“Turning Pro” is a companion book to Pressfield’s “The War of Art,” which I read last year. I found this book at my free little library, and these kinds of simple and direct self-help books are always good at kick-starting you into gear for whatever it is you want to do. I keep books like this around because I think it’s good to dip into their positive energy. In fact, I may re-read this book going into 2025 to make sure I go into the year with a strong mentality.
“Failure to Launch” is a book I ordered from the library, but midway through I found it so good that I ordered a paperback copy from Amazon so I could underline key passages and write notes in the margins. There are a lot of great insights in this book, which is about the cohort of young people between the ages of 18–29 who “fail to launch” into their lives and what parents can do about it. I will probably write more about this later, but I think the key takeaway is that these kids, of whom I was definitely one of them when I was in my 20’s, did not develop some essential life skills in their teens and thus were somewhat unprepared to go into the adult world.
An Odd Detour Into High School Primers on the Soviet Union
11. Russia and the Former Soviet Republics — Thomas McCray
12. The Collapse of the Soviet Union — Andrew Langley
In the past few years I’ve travelled twice to Armenia, a country that was formerly part of the Soviet Union. I’ve always been interested in how authoritarian countries function- both at the government level and what ordinary life is like. In 2023 I ordered a book by the New Yorker editor David Remnick that I was confident would provide both insight and good writing, but I found it too long-winded and lacking in structure. Then this year I stumbled on these high-school level introductions, and they were perfect as orientations to the topics. I think basic fact-based books are underrated. Sometimes we need a little more narrative than a Wikipedia page, but not a long treatise on a topic.
A Wonderful Late Year Entry Into the World of the New Yorker
13. Let Me Finish- Roger Angell
14. A Life of Privilege, Mostly — Gardner Botsford
I’m so glad I stumbled on “Let Me Finish.” Angell was the fiction editor at the New Yorker magazine for decades, and not only is the writing excellent— a mix of personal memoir and pieces about the interesting people he has known in his life — but he mentions other writers and people that I am now very excited to read about. Angell mentions the second book here by Garner Botsford, another New Yorker editor, so I went and got that one from the library and it too was superb. I simply love this style of clear, witty writing that doesn’t have pretensions and is mostly about ordinary life with a dash of the extraordinary things that happen once in a while.
The Final Books I Read This Year
15. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse — Charlie Mackesy
I picked up “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse” a few months ago and ignored it until a few days ago, when I ran out of other books. And this book was lovely. Gorgeous drawings and a simple story about making one’s way in the world. I picked the book up from the little free library across the street from the Catholic Church a few blocks from my house.
I’ve kind of adopted this little library — people are sometimes put pamphlets, advertisements, and random junk in it. Every time I go by I clear out all the non-book items, organize the books by size and straighten the spines, and make sure the books look presentable when someone opens the small doors. Some books have been there for a long time, but most eventually leave. I usually find 3–4 great books a year in here.
16. Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir — John Banville
And the final book, which I finished a little over an hour ago, is this quiet pleasure from an author I used to read more intensely over a decade ago, when I read more difficult literature. Banville is almost 70 and writing about his adopted hometown of Dublin, and while there are several extended dull parts that are like being on a boring guided tour, the man can write a gorgeous sentence and the good parts here are poignant and even sublime.
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*Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant — Roz Chast
These last two books I actually read back in 2022, but I forgot to include them in the 2022 round-up and they are great, so I’m adding them here. Roz Chast does New Yorker cartoons, and these two books are graphic novels. The first one is about how she handles her aging parents, and it’s terrific. Dark and light at the same time. The second book is an introduction to New York City, which she made for her daughter if I recall and then decided to publish.
See Part I of the books I read in the first part of the year here.
