Books of 2024

James by Percival Everett

Underground Empire by Farrell & Newman

[Oops, an unfinished version of this post went online December 30 just before midnight.]

This is my annual post listing and briefly discussing books I read in the most recent year. It seems kind of hard to believe, but I have produced such a post every year since 2005. This is a link to the 2023 list if blog readers want to work backwards. You will find that the books are loosely ranked within categories. 

Also, I posted short reviews of almost all of these books at Goodreads. 

Non-Fiction

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Underground Empire

Laura Neack, National, International, and Human Security

Michael Doyle, The Cold Peace

Most of the non-fiction I read this year was related to baseball (see below), but I did manage to complete a few other books. The Neack volume was the text in my spring 2024 Security Studies course and it worked very well. I would use it again, though I'm on sabbatical 2025-26 and don't teach Security in 2024-25. Doyle's book is interesting and offers some thoughtful comparison chapters thinking about autocracy today (especially in China and Russia) versus Mussolini's fascism and Japan's imperial period before World War II. As an international relations liberal, Doyle is concerned about how the domestic characteristics of states shapes their foreign policy behavior. He offers some insights about US competition with China and Russia and thinks about how to avoid disastrous outcomes that are plausible in a new Cold War.

The outstanding non-fiction book of the year for me was Farrell and Newman's Underground Empire. They make a convincing case that the US has exploited widely unknown economic and technical advantages for its own ends. Basically, they describe centralized chokepoints relating to the internet, banking, microchips, etc. The list of examples when the US exploited its leverage includes the nuclear deal with Iran and the Trump administration's sanctioning of an ICC prosecutor and another official. With Trump returning to power,  I would urge everyone to think seriously about this almost hidden ("underground") but potent US power that seems quite vulnerable to abuse. The authors dream about using the tool to stop climate change or corruption, but I'm skeptical that those will be priority items on the US agenda 2025-2028. 

Baseball non-fiction

Roger Angell,  A Pitcher’s Story

Lucas Mann,  Class A 

Tyler Kepner, K: A  History of the Game in Ten Pitchers

John Sickels, Bob Feller

Keith Law, The Inside Game

Barry Svrluga, The Grind: Inside Baseball’s Endless Season

Ron Backer, Baseball Goes to the Movies

Denny Matthews with Matt Fulks, Tales From the Royals

Yes, I read quite a number of baseball books this year and the list above does not even include the annual Baseball Prospectus that I consumed as well. Angell's book is about David Cone who struggled during the 2000 season even as his NY Yankees won another World Series. It's good and I'm not just saying that because Cone was drafted by the KC Royals as a local athlete who later returned to the team and excelled. 

I much enjoyed the books by Mann, Kepner, and Sickels and would recommend all of them. Mann writes about professional baseball in small town Iowa and it speaks to many political issues too -- working conditions for labor, immigrant labor, globalization, the consequences of corn subsidies, etc. 

Since I read Angell at the beginning of the year and the Sickels bio of Bob Feller at the end, I essentially bookended my reading year with 2 interesting stories about very talented pitchers. Feller pitched in the 1930s, when he was a teenage sensation and young star player, then lost multiple years to his voluntary service in WW II, and returned as one of the best pitchers in the game before his fastball lost its heat. He'd probably be very famous if his career had not been interrupted. 

The Kepner book is about pitching too, focusing on 10 different kinds of pitches used by athletes in the highest level of the professional game. 

I'm a big admirer of Keith Law's work but I did not learn that much from this book. Most likely, this is because I've previously already learned a great deal about the game from Law and other similarly analysts. 

The Backer book is OK though I disagreed with the author about the quality of many movies he discusses. The Matthews/Fulks book is really only for KC baseball fans and even then is not great. Too many stories are undeveloped or even untold. 

Literature and Genre Fiction

Percival Everett, James

Matt Haig, The Humans

J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 

John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick

Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

Colson Whitehead, Zone One

Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night

Don DeLillo, Falling Man 

The best fiction I read this year is appearing on many "best of" lists -- James, by Percival Everett. I don't often read new books, but I'm glad I read this one as it is outstanding. You probably already know that is a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the runaway male slave that helps Huck.  I really liked the satirical film American Fiction last year, which was based on another of Everett's novels. 

Haig's book made me laugh out loud and Coetzee's novel provided valuable insights about colonialism. Both are fairly quick reads. The Portis book is also good and worth reading, though it is a bit dated in parts. If you look at the Goodreads page for Witches of Eastwick, you'll find many reviewers who consider this an offensive book by a misogynist. I honestly do not think it is that bad and feminist author Margaret Atwood wrote a glowing review in the NY Times decades ago.  Would she still like it?

I was a bit disappointed in the Whitehead zombie book because I have had far better experiences with some of his other novels. Mailer was worth reading as history, but is obviously dated. There are other flaws too. It had been a few years since I read a book by DeLillo and this post-9/11 work is not one of his stronger novels, unfortunately. 

Genre Fiction

I.S. Berry,  The Peacock and the Sparrow

Kate Atkinson,  When Will There Be Good News?

Eric Ambler, The Dark Frontier 

Philip Kerr,  The One From the Other

Richard Dean Rosen, Saturday Night Dead

Donald E. Westlake, ,Plunder Squad (as Richard Stark)

David Goodis, The Burglar 

Duane Swierczynski, Fun & Games

Donald E. Westlake, Don’t Ask

PD James, Cover Her Face 

Lawrence Block, Hit Man

The above books are a cut above the ones listed below. The I.S. Berry spy novel is really good and I urge people to read it. I had read a favorable piece about the author in the Washington Post and am glad that I followed up. It won many awards, including an Edgar, and appeared on many "best of" lists in 2023.

Many of these books are parts of series that I am reading. The Atkinson book is an entertaining entry in the Jackson Brodie series, though he's arguably not the most interesting character in the story. Kerr's Bernie Gunther has survived WW II and the Nazis, but still finds plenty of corruption and crime. Rosen's former major league baseball player-turned-detective Harvey Blissberg starts the story with a vague baseball connection, but this is really about a murder involving a TV show similar to Saturday Night Live. The title is thus a play on words. 

Unsurprisingly, since I do virtually every year, I read the next books in sequence in the Parker and Dortmunder series by Donald Westlake (he wrote Parker books as Richard Stark) and these examples were entertaining. I'm having trouble finding the next Parker book but hope to read it soon. 

I had never read the first PD James book featuring Adam Dalgliesh, but now I have.  It was fine, but not outstanding. Obviously I am reading that series out of order, but I am trying to correct that error. I didn't mean to start a new series by Block since I have not finished his Matthew Scudder books, but the work was on my shelf and seemed interesting. It is though the chapters seem more like short stories. Some apparently were originally published that way in magazines.

The books by Ambler, Goodis, and Swierczynski are standalone books worth reading. You will find crime and/or intrigue. Or both. 

Peter Schilling, The End of Baseball

Agatha Christie, ABC Murders

Jason Matthews, Kremlin’s Candidate

Sara Paretsky, Bitter Medicine

Robert Parker, Pale Kings & Princes

Chuck Palahnuik, Choke

Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice

Ross Macdonald,  Trouble Follows Me

 

Sue Grafton, N is for Noose 

Derek Raymond, The Devil’s Home on Leave

I'm not going to say much about the remainder. Most I gave 3 stars on Goodreads, so they are not terrible, but they all lack something. The bottom 2 books here were especially disappointing as I have enjoyed a number of Grafton's earlier books in the Kinsey Milhone detective series and had been recommended Raymond's work. 

As you can see, there are some mediocre efforts here in series involving Christie's Hercule Poirot, Paretsky's VI Warshawski, Parker's Spencer, and Fleming's James Bond. 

I wanted to like the Schilling book, and enjoyed much of it, but in the end I felt it needed both tighter editing and fewer major characters. 

The Red Sparrow series ended in a somewhat disappointing way as far as I'm concerned though I enjoyed the first book quite a bit more and probably liked Kremlin's Candidate more than book #2 Palace of Treason.

Visit this blog's homepage.

For 280 character IR and foreign policy talk, follow me on twitter.

Or for basketball, baseball, movies or other stuff, follow this personal twitter account.

Films of 2024

A couple walking down a sidewalk past a movie theater (public domain stock photo).

There are a large number of 2024 movies I intend to watch and some of the very best ones will be appearing on screens in front of me in the coming weeks of the new year. I say screens because this year I actually saw more than a handful of films in the theater -- for the first time since December 2019 (or maybe early 2020, I don't recall precisely). 

As for the films I saw, readers can find my brief reviews and ratings at Letterboxd. On that site, I have been religiously logging all the films I've seen, not merely those released in 2024. It appears I watched 97 films this year; thus, the list of new films below reflects only a small portion of my total movie viewing. It does include a few foreign films that were technically released in 2023 but were not widely distributed in the USA until this year. 

As longtime readers know, this is an annual list and here is a link to last year's post if you want to work backwards through my viewing experiences. 

Films from this first set of films will probably receive award nominations, or at least deserve strong consideration. Two of them received recognition last year.

Green Border **

Zone of Interest **

Thelma *

The Teacher's Lounge **

Kneecap

Lee *

If you are a film buff, you probably already know about the Oscar nominations for two of the foreign films from 2023 -- Zone of Interest won an Oscar and was nominated for another; The Teacher's Lounge was also nominated. They are powerful and important films with very different subjects (Nazi death camps and elementary school theft). Green Border is an exceptional foreign film about Syrian refugees that opened in Poland in 2023 but was not available until mid-year 2024 in the US.  Though eligible last year, it was not nominated for an Oscar after facing domestic political backlash. 

Thelma is quite a different film, a fairly lightweight comedy action movie. We saw it on a big screen at the State Theater in Traverse City, as part of the reimagined TC Film Festival. Now, through much of the year, Tuesdays are reserved for festival films. Our show featured a Zoom discussion with the director-filmmaker Josh Margolin after the screening, featuring Q&A by Michael Moore. That may have influenced my rating, but it is a very entertaining movie.

Kneecap is about Irish rappers...and British colonialism, so be sure to check it out too. Lee, starring Kate Winslet, is an excellent biopic about a pathbreaking female photo journalist. Its release was delayed by the Hollywood acting/writing strikes of 2023.  We saw this at the State Theater in Traverse City (home of the revamped TC Film Festival  mentioned above) during my fall break in late September. 

Next, these films were quite good and might receive award consideration. More likely, they will be remembered as very solid movies:

Girls Will Be Girls *

Civil War
The Missile *

Between the Temples

Will & Harper

June

Rebel Ridge

The Teacher Who Promised the Sea * & **

Carry-On

The three films with asterisks are foreign films that my spouse and I saw at the Blue Mountain Film Festival in late spring in Canada. There are some terrific acting performances in these movies and all address important topics. Green Border from the above list was also at the festival but we didn't attend, partly because it is very long. 

Readers may be more familiar with two movies I saw on Max and Netflix this summer, Civil War and Rebel Ridge. They are entertaining and definitely worth seeing. Both have been picking up some votes (#32 and #55 currently) on critics' "Best of 2024" lists.  We watched Civil War in the same fall break weekend that we saw Lee and both feature female photojournalists during wartime. 

Between the Temples (#40) is funny thanks to a strong cast with good material. Through no fault of his own, I'm sure, Jason Schwartzman sometimes rubs me the wrong way. He's watchable here.

Will & Harper (#97T) has received a lot of press and it is a thoughtful and entertaining film. June is a documentary about June Carter Cash. I like her music and appreciated the doc.

Carry-On is an action movie on Netflix with a Christmas setting. Will it be the Die Hard of the 2020s (and beyond)? There's a reasonable chance of that. The hero isn't as funny as Bruce Willis sometimes was in the earlier film (iirc).

Finally, these films in the last set were less interesting to me though generally watchable and entertaining in one way or another:

Hit Man

A Quiet Place Day One

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice 

Problemista

Love Lies Bleeding

Trap

This list actually includes several films that are appearing on critic "best of" lists. Love Lies Bleeding is currently standing at #24 on that list, making it arguably the best film I saw this year. While I think I know what it was trying to say, too much of it didn't really click with me. Likewise, my spouse and I didn't find Hit Man or Trap (#32 and #46) to be all that great. They were too formulaic and predictable, even when they were going for novelty, if that makes any sense. 

In contrast, we had very low expectations for the Beetlejuice sequel and we kind of liked it. We rewatched the old one in preparation too. Problemista  (#88) was both quirky and fun (and was also delayed by the Hollywood labor strife). The Quiet Place prequel was OK but it didn't have that much to offer beyond what the prior films in the series did.

I'm obviously missing a large number of highly rated films from 2024 and plan to see them through 2025 (and beyond). I used to provide a list (and I still might) of top-rated films that I have not yet seen, but I didn't do it the last couple of years and no one complained. 

NOTES: 

* I saw these movies in theaters!

** Foreign releases from 2023 not really distributed in the US until 2024. 

I will update this if I watched any new films before midnight on the 31st.

I also saw "Blood of Angels" in a theater, a film made by local artists that I know personally. 

Visit this blog's homepage.

For 280 character IR and foreign policy talk, follow me on twitter.

Or for basketball, baseball, movies or other stuff, follow this personal twitter account.