2024 Reading Recap: books
Recommendations for your holiday reading
For those of you looking for books to read over Christmas, here’s a series of rapid-fire reviews of books I (re)read in 2024 — if you like the sound of any of these, remember to support independent bookshops, and order them through Bertie.
(This is the best AI could do when I asked it to draw a pile of books with the titles below.)
The Lottery and Other Stories
Shirley Jackson is one of my wife’s favourite authors; she’s also probably the most influential writer you’ve never heard of: authors ranging from Stephen King to Joanne Harris claim to have been influenced by her, and her work has been adapted in other media multiple times (her influence stretches out as far as Scary Movie 2, which is a parody of an adaption of The Haunting of Hill House.)
Her novels are great, but her short stories — which belong to the twisted humour meets horror genre — are even better. They are a study of power dynamics, but unlike the modern study of power dynamics, which reduces power imbalances to observable characteristics such as gender or race, Shirley Jackson explores dominance through the unexpected subversion of norms. Her predatory characters break social norms, but use those same norms to paralyse their victims: for example, in one of her stories, a man is expelled from his own flat by his guests; in another, a woman is reduced to embarrassment by a person stealing from her. They are masterclasses in the art of gaslighting, written decades before the term became popular (though the term comes from a 1944 film with that title).
Fun fact: the Lottery was first published in the New Yorker, and led to the largest amount of mail ever received by the magazine — so shocked and appalled were its readers.
The Looking Glass War
I reread this this year, as I often re-read John le Carre novels when I’m in-between other books. If The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is a depiction of the ruthless execution of a perfect plan, The Looking Glass War shows the callousness of mediocrity, incompetence, and indifference.
In it, officers working for a government department whose prestige has declined after the war decide to mount an operation for which they are ill-equipped, wishing to restore their organisation’s glory. They do so without regard to their own agents’ safety.
In a way, it’s a depressing preview of the decline the UK has suffered since WWII.
Ashenden: Or the British Agent
Another book for fans of spy novels, this is a collection of short stories by W. Somerset Maugham, featuring a British spy in the time of WWI. Much lighter and funnier than The Looking Glass War, though not without its moving and tragic moments. My only issue with it is that some stories’ endings felt a bit abrupt, and so the transition from one story to the next was jarring.
Sample quotes:
And,
Table for Two and Rules of Civility
Table of Two is Amor Towles’s new collection of short stories, and includes a novella that’s a sequel to his previous book, The Rules of Civility.
I think the common theme in Towles’s books is the navigation of foreign social and cultural milieus. Think of the Count in A Gentleman in Moscow, imprisoned in a hotel run by communists, and confronted with a new Russian world; or Kate in The Rules of Civility, an immigrant now scaling Manhattan’s high society; or a Goldman Sachs MD overachiever trying to manage his blunder after humiliating a widower in Table for Two. And I think the conclusion we’re meant to draw from all these stories is that we humans are unexpectedly adaptable, as long as we have the right attitude, le bon esprit.
Both books are fun to read, though the short stories in Table for Two seem a bit too plasticky, more Jeffrey Archer-like than Towles’s other works.
Sample quote:
Get the Picture
Speaking of navigating novel milieus, I never cease to be amazed by the number and intricacy of different subcultures. There are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of them, each with its own norms, taboos, and pecking order. Some are massive but completely unknown to outsiders: Magic the Gathering players, furries, Harry Potter fanfic writers. Others are well-known, but their inner workings are invisible to the layman; the art world is one such community, and Bianca Bosker’s book is a foray into it.
It’s a fascinating book, maybe the best non-fiction book I read this year. At times, it’s a pretty depressing indictment of art insiders: many come across as pretentious, snobbish ‘experts’ who use art to inflate their self-importance, and who are therefore keen to make art exclusive and abstruse — out of the reach of Joe Schmoes:
For these gallerists and art experts, art is not about beauty: it’s about ‘context’. In fact, beauty is mistrusted, and disdained; and the advice these people give to aspiring artists has nothing to do with improving technique or anything so meaningful: it’s about how to network better, how to become part of the insider club (as Bianca points out, Yale’s art school offers courses such as gender dialectics, but not drawing).
Such people abhor (or pretend to abhor) the commercialisation of art. But this means that, contrary to their professed politics, they tend to be overly-privileged and likely to promote artists who are better at playing these high-status-seeking sorts of games.
(It’s common for people to dismiss modern art as ‘something my two-year-old could paint’. But that’s missing the point: the skill these modern artists have is not to paint a realistic-looking tree, but to come up with a novel or interesting idea, express it well, and ingratiate themselves into the clubby art world. This may all sound like BS to you — but these are hard things to do.)
On the other hand though, Bianca comes across gallerists and artists who share a joyous, expansive appreciation of beauty, people for whom art is a way of being more mindful and appreciative of the world around us.
You should add this book towards the top of your list.
Perfumes: the Guide
I came across this book by chance while browsing at Daunt’s. What a find it was — a wonderful immersion into the world of fragrance, written by authors who are both experts in the field and surprisingly good, often acerbic, writers. Highly recommended for wannabe dilettantes (sadly, I myself have the right personality to be a dilettante, but lack the memory to develop deep knowledge in any given field; a month after reading this book, I’d forgotten the difference between chypre and fougere).
(Also, similar to Get the Picture, books like this are a reminder of the joy we can find in the small things if we pay attention to our senses.)
The Ceasar Palace Coup and The Smartest Guys in the Room
I’m listing these two together, because they’re both tales of financial shenanigans. The former is about Ceasar’s Palace acquisition by private equity firms: TL;DR PE groups kept re-structuring the legal entities controlling various Las Vegas casino assets; but the various legal entities had different shareholders, and more importantly, different creditors, and the inter-entity sales of assets meant some of them felt short-changed, and so they sued.
The latter is about the rise and fall of Enron, a saga at whose heart was Enron’s questionable bookkeeping. Enron would record the (grossly optimistic) forecast of future revenue as income as soon as a deal was signed, and similar to Ceasar’s Palace, it transferred assets and liabilities between entities that were in practice affiliates, but were allowed to be treated as third parties.
In both cases, smart people convinced everyone (including, I’m sure, themselves) that they were creating genuine value out of financial engineering, even if there was no impact to the underlying economic reality: this is why, sometimes, asking naive questions such as ‘how much actual cash is produced by this’ is more insightful than running advanced models.
(To be clear though: other times financial engineering does create value by, for instance, spreading risk — or, more zero-sum, by securing more favourable regulatory and tax treatment. But in these cases, there is economic value produced too: the odds of severe loss to a particular group are reduced, or an entity minimises its tax bill, etc.)
Sample quotes (from Smartest Guys):
You should always be suspicious of companies tracking novel metrics!
Remembrance of Things Past
I re-read the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past (Swann’s way). Here’s the thing: it’s undeniably well-written, and the themes it explores (memory, social norms and changes) are fascinating… but… it is grating having to absorb all that through the book’s histrionic narrator.
I remember one day I was reading this book in a park in London, after which I walked around St. James, and I was looking at statues of explorers and adventurers and soldiers, and contrasting their character and deeds to the narrator’s existential crisis about going to the theatre without telling his parents. It makes the book seem so inconsequential, despite the breadth of its scope.
In Memoriam
I bought In Memoriam after my boss recommended it to me, which, I realised after having ordered it, is a very unwise move: what if I hated it? And my boss asked me about it? I don’t lie, so that would make for an awkward conversation.
But thankfully I did like it. In Memoriam is a deeply moving story about public school boys — two of whom are in love with each other — fighting in the trenches in WWI. Alice Winn’s powerful prose brings to life the horror of the war, the intimacy between her characters, their fear and their bravery, and ultimately their hope. Like I said, deeply moving.
Noble House
Noble House is the perfect book to read if you need a respite after the emotional bludgeon that is In Memoriam. It’s set in Hong Kong in the 60s, and it has everything: industrialists and financiers and spies and double and triple agents and love affairs and betrayals and kidnappings and gangsters and hostile takeovers and horse racing and bank runs and natural disasters and fires and ancient feuds and I’m sure I’ve forgotten things because it runs to like a thousand pages. Probably the most fun book I read this year.
An English Murder
I re-read this this year. It’s a cozy murder mystery by the largely forgotten Cyril Hare. It features all the tropes of the genre — a country house cut off from the world by a blizzard during Christmas, a murder, a butler, you get the picture. The only thing against it is that it’s very easy to guess who did it. Good book to read by the fire though.
Middlemarch
Perhaps the best book I read this year. Middlemarch takes place in a fictional county in England at the time of the Reform, and it follows the lives and relationships of a few of its residents.
It’s hard to say why I liked it so much. I mean, yes, it celebrates integrity and simplicity of character and manner, and I appreciate these things, but so do many other novels. I suppose George Elliot does it particularly well: she doesn’t exalt these virtues in a sanctimonious way, and Middlemarch doesn’t come across moralistic a la Dickens. She doesn’t highlight virtue by contrasting it with caricaturish evil. On the contrary, she shows deep understanding of and kindness towards human weakness. For example:
There may be coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them. He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs. If this be hypocrisy, it is a process which shows itself occasionally in all of us.
And then there’s the last paragraph, which a friend has had printed and framed:
for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
(Very similar in spirit to this epitaph in an unvisited tomb that my wife spotted:
More and more I come to appreciate people who are like this, and put straightforwardness of character above ambition or intellect. There’s too few of them.
)
Science Fictions
Great review of everything that’s wrong with academia, and the root causes of the replication crises. Stuart Richie explores cases of fraud, publication bias, p-hacking, mis-reporting of scientific studies, stripped of all nuance in the media, and so on. Reading this book is kind of depressing though — if we can’t trust scientists, whom can we trust? :(
Difficult Men
This book purports to be a history of the advent of the golden age of television.1 I don’t think it is that, at least not a definitive history: it misses too many shows and genres. But it is an interesting book, not so much because it’s well written or because it tells a good story, but because it touches on a large number of subjects, and is therefore good food for thought.
Reading this book, a reader may find themselves thinking about the interplays between culture, art, and economics (e.g.: how do socioeconomic factors affect cinema visits, and how does that in turn affect TV viewership?), or whether artistic excellence requires perfectionism and micro-management (can only difficult people lead successful projects?), or why do we instinctively root for the protagonist, even if they are objectively a bad person?
Porterhouse Blue
Something between a vulgar P.G. Wodehouse and Lucky Jim, Porterhouse Blue is a satire of stuffy Oxbridge institutions and reactionary Fellows. The world it mocks doesn’t really exist any more, so the book’s not particularly relevant. But it’s still funny.
Sample quote:
Ornament and Crime
A collection of essays by architect Adolf Loos, touching on everything from furniture to men’s hats. The general theme, as you can deduce from the title, is Loos’s aversion to aversion to ornamentation. I said this in my links reading recap: all arguments defending an aesthetic worldview are arbitrary, and rely on baseless assumptions or assertions. Loos’s argument against ornamentation rests on 3 such inter-related assertions:
First,
In a highly productive nation ornament is no longer a natural product of its culture, and therefore represents backwardness or even a degenerative tendency.
At no point does Loos explain why ornament is not a natural product of our culture, or what it even means for something to be a natural product of any culture.
Second,
Ornament is wasted manpower and therefore wasted health. It has always been like this. But today it also means wasted material, and both mean wasted capital.
Loos attempts to construct some theory of value according to which non-functional elements are wasteful — but there’s no objective theory of value! If someone likes brogues in their shoes, then brogues are valuable.
Third,
The form of the object should be bearable for as long as the object lasts physically. I would like to try to explain this: A suit will be changed more frequently than a valuable for coat. A lady’s evening dress, intended for one night only, will be changed more rapidly than a writing desk. Woe betide the writing desk that has robe changed as frequently as an evening dress, just because the style has become unbearable.
Basically Loos thinks that any kind of ornamentation is subject to fashion trends, and hence ephemeral. But, a) that’s just not true — I’m writing this with my laptop resting on a Louis XVI style desk, and while I’ll grant you I’m much more old-fashioned than most people my age, there are lots of people who appreciate and use antique or vintage furniture and objects and clothes. And b) even if it were true, maybe Loos can argue ornamentation is inherently wasteful, but the degree to which this is a bad thing is still subjective.
Ironically, Loos’s prose is certainly not minimalist and purely functional and free from ornamentation.
The New York Trilogy
I didn’t understand this book at all. Wikipedia tells me it’s a postmodern interpretation of detective and mystery fiction, but its point completely eludes me. If that sounds like your cup of tea, go for it.
2025 preview
And that’s a wrap!
If you have any recommendations for 2025, please send them my way. Here’s my list for now:
I chose to read it because I felt it’d be relevant to my job. I’m a product manager; PMs, like television (or music conductors) , do not have a functional role in tech companies: they do not write code, they do not design interfaces, they do not produce marketing assets, they do not build financial models (though they may have past experience doing these things) (incidentally, this is why I’ve previously argued that companies should abolish product management at a corporate function, and only keep it as a role that people who belong to other functions can perform). Our job is to coordinate everyone who is doing those things.