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.

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