2024: If Words Could Talk

A brief summarization of a year of heavy reading

Reading is my main avenue of entertainment. This may shock you, because why? Why would any 21st century humanoid living in the internet era admit this? What kind of sicko are we dealing with here? Get thee cable, man! Listen to a podcast, already.

Hours and hours of my life spent within the pages. This is the same person (me) who can’t pay attention for the length of a changing stoplight, but put a book in his (my) hands and I’m gone. This is the kid (also me) who failed every class I could get my hands on but who read the collected works of Carl Sandburg before age thirteen. There’s something going on here. I don’t want to get cringey and say it’s my happy place, or it’s my “jam.” But, I mean, what else is there really to do? The words are there, someone’s got to read ‘em. Apparently, that someone is me.

I don’t watch much TV—never have, never will. Something about the flickering hypnosis of it, the calculated, corporate drip-feed of emotion, makes my skin crawl. Books? Now, books are another beast entirely—sly, insidious, but at least they don’t insult your intelligence right out of the gate.

And I tell myself I don’t have time for movies, that two hours in front of a screen is a luxury I can’t afford. Whether that is ture or not is rendered moot by the fact I’ll sit like a lunatic for three, four, hell, five hours devouring a book, lost in some printed fever dream. It’s not about time. It’s about appetite. My hunger is for books.

Last point: I like reading because I’m in charge. I create the characters and draw scenes in my mind rather than have them given, or forced, on me. This may be the true point of difference between hardcore readers and everybody else.

It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have anything else to amuse them. - Samuel Johnson

In 2024 my book consumption really ramped up. Also in 2024, I found that foregoing evening wine radically increased the amount of pages I could put away in one sitting. I will take that tradeoff.

When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading - Henny Youngman

I'd hand any of these books to you without a second thought:

I Cheerfully Refuse - Leif Enger. Lyrical post-apocalyptic on the North Shore.

The Hard Stuff - Wayne Kramer. Redemptive rock and roll tragedy.

The Night Watchman - Louise Erdrich. Deep empathy for the characters stays with me.

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold - John Le Carre. My first, will read more.

Earlier - Sasha Frere Jones. Raw personal journaling centered on NYC and music.

The Music Lesson - Victor Wooten. Music theory fantasia.

The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead. Impactful mythopoeic slavery narrative.

James - Percival Everett. I knew there was another side to Huckleberry Finn.

Instant Replay - Jerry Kramer with Dick Schaap. Old time hockey, but with football.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon. How does he do it?

The Sympathizer - Viet Thanh Nguyen. Party loyalty versus being human.

The Soul Of A New Machine - Tracy Kidder. Building a supercomputer in 1980.

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell. Stunning stuff. Watched the movie right after. Yes.

Winter In The Blood - James Welch. This is the actual hard stuff.

Matterhorn - Karl Marlantes. The last novel you or I ever need to read about the Vietnam War. (Sympathizer and Matterhorn have permanently cured me of any further interest in the conflict.)

Vermilion Drift - William Kent Kruger. Quality Minnesota mystery.

Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson. Tale of an ogre.

Two books upon which I gave up halfway:

The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen. The abject disdain I had for the characters made this family saga more nauseating than entertaining. Like watching a cringey, scripted reality show.

The Everything Store - Brad Stone. Jeff Bezos has an idea, bullwhips people into doing it, throws a tantrum, makes scads of money. The point is made early on.

Ongoing/bedside:

The Collected Stories of John Updike: peeking in America’s bedrooms.

The Collected Stories of John Cheever: see above, but with more booze.

(Short stories are great when you’re between books.)

The Paris Review

How to Think Politically - Garrard & Murphy. Easy, fun primer on centuries of political thought.

The Origins of Cool in Postwar America - Joel Dinerstein. Self-explanatory.

The History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell. Not a beach read. Small chunks.

Automobile Quarterly – Historical, accurate carology, well-written. Call it fantasy.

Thanks for reading (no pun intended). Next up for me is Don Quixote. See you in 2026.