What I was reading in November and December of 2024
Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (originally 1948)
Kind of depressing to state why I picked this one off the shelf. Probably will take my time to read it in slow sips. Arendt would not know our internet, but she would be familiar with how our tech overlords have opted to wield its public platforms and internal infrastructures:
The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality. (9)
Disinformation and AI slop anyone?
Aaron Burch’s A Kind of In-Between (2023)
A lot of Burch’s essays take place in the summer on road trips. He’s a college professor so that makes sense that he would take road trips in the summer. Tone is sincere and reflective and pretty down to earth. Kind of reminded me of the tones in Josh Spilker’s somewhat autobiographical novel pls advise (2018). Think I enjoyed most reading Burch’s essays one after the other as opposed to encountering them as strays across the vast spread of all the indie lit sites because they really do work well together.
Taylor Byas’ I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times (2023)
Byas’ poems take place mostly in Chicago where she grew up. There’s a great deal about home and trauma and desire here. That also means there’s a lot of tension and contradiction that makes the poems worth holding onto.
Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1940)
This one’s a Western.
Susan Cooper’s Over Sea, Under Stone (1965)
Family is looking to read Cooper’s The Dark is Rising Sequence together. None of us are familiar with it, but we’ve liked the mystery of this one so far.
Michael Lynn Crews’ Books are Made out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Influences (2017)
Care to guess why I have currently stalled on this again. This time the reason is because the author as subject turned out to be a Sport who stopped by a swimming pool and dipped more than his toe.
Vinson Cunningham’s Great Expectations (2024)
Wrote more about this one to cap off October, but I think it definitely goes down as one of the year’s more memorable reads.
Scott Howard-Cooper’s Kingdom on Fire: Kareem, Wooden, Walton, and the Turbulent Days of the UCLA Basketball Dynasty (2024)
Think I picked this up when we lost Walton earlier in the year. I’m still in the parts largely focused on Kareem. I read Seth Davis’ biography on Wooden a few years ago, so a lot of the details about the internal workings of the UCLA program feel familiar, like I’m remembering more than reading. It’s also crazy to read this in the wake of so many coaches, from Tony Bennett to Jim Larrañaga just a few days ago, leaving the college game behind. In other words, I think NIL would have killed Wooden if he weren’t already dead.
Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (1959)
“A rhinoceros! I can’t get over it!”
[See above comments on reading Arendt; they probably apply to this play.]
Denis Johnson’s The Laughing Monsters (2014)
I bought a hard copy version at a big discount a long time ago, but I can’t remember whether I made that purchase before or after May 24, 2017. I read Johnson’s last book The Largesse of the Sea Maiden in 2018. And I kind of put off The Laughing Monsters because I do feel the need to ration his books.
The starting point for many readers is the short story collection Jesus’ Son, but my introduction to Johnson passed through Tree of Smoke. That’s still my favorite of his and The Laughing Monsters leans more towards it than Jesus’ Son.
Yusef Komunyakaa’s Night Animals (2020)
Still my favorite poet, as in I don’t even really worry about the words mean, there’s just a weight and a presence and a stirring of breath.
Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (2020, translated 2020)
Physics. Physics. More physics. And some physics with a few instances of figurative language that might not be figurative. Who knows? I’m told this one’s a novel, but I’m not sure whether it’s a particle or wave. Would read again, though.
David Maraniss’ They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace Vietnam and America, October 1967 (2003)
A book worth reading.
Greil Marcus’s Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs (2022)
Whether A Complete Unknown is any good or not, my working theory is that it probably can’t be nearly as interesting as all the Dylan recordings over the years, documentaries and live footage already in circulation, the movie I’m Not There, and pretty much most of the books about the artist behind the artist behind the artist, including Marcus’ Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs.
Charles Portis’ Gringos (1991)
I completed my Year of Reading Portis. Some interesting parallels exist between Portis’ Western True Grit and his last novel Gringos. Someone should explore that tracing at arm’s length by the latter.
Leonardo Sciascia’s The Day of the Owl (1961, translated 1963)
This novel about a police investigation of a murder within a Mafia-run state that was once a Fascist state that descended from one of the world’s great empires has me looking forward to the future of my own country’s wild flirtations with obvious corruption with bright, unfettered optimism.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King (1955)
We did it! We read all the way to the Gray Havens and embraced Sam as our tale’s Ed Tom Bell.
Margaret Verble’s When Two Feathers Fell From the Sky (2021)
Still thinking about the relationship between sky and earth in this book, or logic and material, or belief and material, or history and dirt, or . . . .
