2024 Bookpost
Read this year:
- Mike Davis: Old Gods, New Enigmas -- Fascinating collection of essays about labor history, nationalism, and the climate. In a rare overlap with my speculative fiction interests, there's a neat essay on how the deserts of Mars in the popular imagination can be traced back to theories of epochal desertification propounded by the anarchist Peter Kropotkin (the first time the idea of climate change was proposed in western science).
- Willa Cather: O Pioneers
- Machiavelli: The Prince
- Simon Garfield: Just My Type -- Entertaining anecdotes & history, not actually useful for learning typography.
- Peter Wilson: The 30 Years War: Europe's Tragedy -- Very big, very dense, very well-researched. But for the love of god it needs MORE MAPS, especially at the campaign-scale.
- Moebius & Alejandro Jodorowsky: The Incal -- Stunning art, insipid plot.
- Jean-Vincent Blanchard: Eminence: Cardinal Richelieu and the Rise of France
- Michael Kirkbride: The 36 Lessons of Vivec -- Despite being a Morrowind Fanatic since ~2010, I hadn't read these in full till now. Unhinged but brilliant, absolutely feels viable as a mystical gnostic text.
- Matthew T. Huber: Climate Change as Class War
- Sarah Bakewell: Humanly Possible
- Cristina Rivera Garza: The Taiga Syndrome -- It's got some wonderfully surreal scenes, but the language feels over-optimized to sound deep or 'literary'. Might be a translation issue.
- Robert Kurvitz: Sacred & Terrible Air -- See here
- Yuri Herrera: Ten Planets -- There's a funny story in here about a dungeon where monsters are imprisoned and forced to make art.
- Roger Zelazny: Jack of Shadows -- Interesting for how it inspired the quasi-supernatural dimensions of the D&D thief but otherwise inferior to the Jack Vance novels it's imitating.
- Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 -- One of my all-time favorites.
- Yelena Moskovich: A Door behind a Door -- An experimental novella about Russian immigrants trapped in a series of nested parallel crime stories. INSTEAD OF REGULAR PROSE. It uses all-caps header text followed by short passages, creating a disjointed reading experience. LIKE YOU'RE PIECING THE STORY TOGETHER FROM NEWSPAPER CLIPPINGS. Or website blurbs. I liked it.
- Jorge Luis Borges: The Book of Imaginary Beings -- Excellent fodder for the imagination.
- H.G. Wells: The Time Machine -- I'm gradually trying to read all books in the 'dying earth' genre, and AFAIK this one directly inspired Smith & Hodgson. It holds up pretty well.
- Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars -- Interesting mainly for its obvious impact on everything that came after. Even by the standards of early 20th century pulp fiction it's really racist.
- Diane Purkiss: The English Civil War: Papists, Gentlewomen, Soldiers, and Witchfinders in the Birth of Modern Britain -- The opposite of Wilson's 30-years war book, not great at laying out the chronology of major events but very effective at drilling down to individual characters (from many social strata) and the worlds they occupied.
- Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan -- 10/10, see here
- Samuel Butler: Erewhon -- As a 'machine-tickling aphid' myself, the 'Book of the Machines' absolutely made up for an otherwise mildly interesting book.
- Gustave Flaubert: Salammbo -- See here
- Ajay Singh Chaudhury: The Exhausted of the Earth
- Wolfram Eilenberger: The Visionaries
- William Egginton: The Rigor of Angels
- Patrick Stuart & Tom K. Kemp: Gackling Moon -- Very fun to peruse but I can't running a game with it. Kemp's illustrations are enchanting.
- The Stars my Destination: Alfred Bester -- Wild that a story from the 50's anticipated half the tropes of cyberpunk while also being an exciting, well-crafted revenge story.
- Herman Hesse: The Glass Bead Game
- Anon. The Song of Roland
- Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers
- Ursula K. LeGuin: The Word for World is Forest -- Really good, a nuanced meditation on the use of violence against oppressors that steadfastly avoids easy answers.
- Patrick Vinton Kirch: A Shark Going Inland is my Chief
- Tom Coffman: Nation Within: The History of the American Occupation of Hawaii
- Ursula K. LeGuin: The Left Hand of Darkness -- Gorgeous, thought-provoking, easily in the top 5 from this year.
- Jack Vance: Wyst: Alastor 1716 -- Disappointing compared to his Dying Earth books but had some fun moments.
- Jeffrey Lewis: Revelations in the Wink of an Eye: My Insane Musings on Watchmen, from Conspiracies to Stupidities -- Jeffrey Lewis is one of my favorite indie musicians; I picked this up at the merch table at one of his concerts. It's a truly compelling study of Watchmen (and revisionist comics in general) that made me want to go back and re-read it.
- Obsidian Entertainment: Pentiment -- Technically not a book, but as a text-based work of fiction I'm counting it. Extremely beautiful and well-crafted, does a great job of capturing the 'life-world' of renaissance Europe across different social strata in a way that feels authentic.
- Kwame Anthony Appiah: The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity
- Robert Bringhurst: The Elements of Typographic Style -- Superb, written with humor & style. Every time I peruse it I get the itch to fire up Typst and make something.
- China Mieville: The City & The City -- Fun, but once I picked up on the main gimmick I wasn't blown away. Mieville created vivid, memorable cities but failed to populate them with characters worth caring about.
- Robert Aickman: Go Back at Once -- As a big fan of Aickman's 'strange stories' I wasn't sure what to expect from an explicitly non-supernatural novel. Happy to report that it's still weird as hell & very funny.
- Arthur Schopenhauer: The Art of Controversy or The Art of Being Right
- Jon Peterson: Playing at the World 2e -- I'd guess a decent chunk of my readership is aware of this one. As a DIY D&D enthusiast, I really enjoyed learning about Braunstein, Blackmoor, and other transitional refereed wargames, as well as all the ways early fans made the game their own.
- Kevin Young: Abolishing Fossil Fuels
- Phillip Jose Farmer: Dark is The Sun -- An obscure 'Dying Earth' novel from 1979. The plot & characters are mid & the writing is worse than Smith, Vance, or Wolfe. However, it has oddly brilliant fictional ecology: carnivorous plants with stinging-insect symbiotes, living boats that mate by firing air cannons at each other, airships made out of virus nano-assemblers with symbiotic bat-person colonies, a metallic trilobite that eats uranium, tons of weird bugs, megafauna, plants, & other creepy-crawlies. Reading pulp to extract gameable bits has been hit & miss, but this one had lots of material for monsters & magic items.
This is, I think, the most books (and pages) I've ever read in a 365-day window. Having previously struggled to find time & motivation for reading, this year represents significant progress toward living the kind of life I want to live. Here are some habits/techniques/practices that helped (& didn't help) to achieve this:
Not so helpful:
- Speed-reading techniques. I find that I just sacrifice comprehension when I try to practice the usual speed-reading techniques. That said, I think my normal reading speed has gotten faster with practice.
- Having a rigid syllabus. I used to try to write out reading plans, but I find that when I finish one book I often have a very strong desire to read about something completely different. I'd rather read whatever I want in the moment and ultimately read more than force myself to stick to a plan.
- Reading e-books on my phone or computer. I though that this might help me read during times when I would otherwise be scrolling, but it's usually too easy to tab over to something more instantly gratifying.
What worked can be grouped into three broader categories.
- Habit formation / regularity / structure
- Dedicating 15-45 minutes to reading in bed every night. I'm still not as consistent as I'd like to be, but daily reading (even in small amounts) adds up and reduces the friction around initiating reading at other times of day.
- Reading & finishing short books on airplane flights. Or in general, taking advantage of any time spent trapped away from other distractions.
- Not gaming. Listing this one non-judgmentally because I like video games & have played many. But I've found that they tend to occupy the same hours of my life that I'd use for reading. When I do less of one, I tend to do more of the other. (The only game I really spent much time with this year was Pentiment, itself basically a novel).
- Friction reduction / balancing competition with other entertainment
- Having multiple books in-progress at once. I try to pair fun 'low-friction' books with challenging ones. For example, I could only handle around 10 pages of Titus Groan at a time, so I'd read a bit and then switch to something else. The 'low-friction' books seem to benefit by contrast; I blasted through The Time Machine, A Princess of Mars, Ten Planets, Jack of Shadows, and The Book of Imaginary Beings faster than if they had been my 'main' book at the time.
- Leaving books lying around the house. My phone is almost always on my person. Keeping books within arms-reach in places I tend to hang out (the coffee-table, my work desk, bedside table, even my tiny home gym) helps them to compete for my attention. This works best with books that can be absorbed in short chunks.
- Keeping finished books on a dedicated shelf. It feels gauche to admit, but I love to see the shelf fill up over the course of a year. Tying books to extrinsic reward mechanisms evens the playing field slightly vs. other sources of dopamine.
- Adding a social aspect
- Being in two different book clubs. (One focuses on ecosocialism, the other philosophy). Obviously, the schedule and deadlines help. Beyond that, it's also a great way to discover new books and eliminate decision paralysis about what to read next.
- Writing book reviews. I post some here, some on Goodreads and lit.salon. I love reading others' reviews and am usually slightly underwhelmed by how mine stack up in comparison, but the sifting & processing required to write even a short, anodyne review usually deepens my appreciation for what I've read & feeds back into motivation to read more.