Books I Read in 2024
I read 17 books in 2024, which if you can believe it is actually an improvement for me, though more in consistency of making a habit of reading than in pace. Since there are so few, I’m going to work up the list, with the note that all of these are good books I enjoyed. https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/118209919-andrew-bell?page=1&shelf=read-in-2024&sort=position
17: Supernove Era, Cixin Liu, 2003
An earlier work by megahistory sci-fi visionary Cixin Liu, Supernova Era poses the question “what if the children inherited the earth – and only the children?” The premise of an unforeseeable generational discontinuity is too interesting to be fully explored by such a short and strangely-plotted book, which seems to end as if awaiting a sequel which never appeared, and there is also a sense of discontinuity within the narrative; but when the Epoch Clock blinks out, the sense of dreadful grandeur breaks through.
16: Culture Care, Makoto Fujimura, 2013
I’ve stumbled into knowing artist and theologian of art Makoto Fujimura not through his work, but by interacting with him on Twitter, where he impressed me first as a wise and calm voice in difficult times. Culture Care argues for a renewed centrality of the artist as a gardener of culture, read through a view of both creation and humanity that acknowledges the indispensability of beauty. While the pedagogical style of the writing doesn’t match the beauty of the book’s point, that point is both necessary and deeply encouraging.
15. God Emperor of Dune, Frank Herbert, 1981
The fourth book in the series inaugurated by the classic Dune, God Emperor is both the last in the series that I’m interested in reading (given the unfinished and rapidly declining quality reputed to the final books), and also the most interesting one after the original, though its quality does not rise to that level, and perhaps not even to the level of Messiah or Children. The account of the millenarian man-worm is thought-provoking in the extreme, and frustrates my attempt to make sense of the endless arguments about Herbert’s ultimate moral or political point – other than that his universe is unimaginably bleak.
14. When the Sleeper Wakes, H.G. Wells, 1899
H.G. Wells was one of the earliest authors I developed a fascination for in middle school, and this book is a kind of synecdoche for everything good and bad about him that captures the way these aspects of him are interrelated and cannot be teased apart. There’s Wells’ utopian social vision, a genuinely heroic emphasis on the fight for justice against the oppression of capital; there’s the way he frames this vision in ways that flatter Wells’ own class; there’s the dystopic dimension of the monumental future he envisions, especially present in hindsight; there’s my ever-present uncertainty about which parts of his vision are meant to read as aspirational and which as appalling – with Wells, I can never distinguish his fantasies from horrors; and then of course there’s the extremely troubling marriage of his early progressive-era socialist politics, and an extremely base and disturbing social-Darwinist-inflected late colonial form of racism, which in this case is unfortunately central to the plot. But through all of this, the overwhelming imagery of the future, its mammoth windmills carving up the night, brutal riots in the subterranean dark, the smoking hulk of the Council Tower looming like the wreck of a second Bable, all combine to create a dream of unsettling vividness.
13. Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose, 2006
I first read Francine Prose’s guide to writing well by reading during the brief semester I spent as a creative writing major. I revisited the book several times as I taught composition, ransacking it for excerpts to assign to my own students, which I suppose is endorsement enough. I suppose it seems obvious that the key to writing well is reading well and widely, but sometimes obvious truths bear repeating, lest they be forgot.
12. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin, 1923
Zamyatin is the darker and wiser child of Wells, a socialist with actual experience of a utopian-aspiring totalitarian society. A courageous man of integrity, Zamyatin was imprisoned by the Tsar while fighting for his revolutionary ideals as a Bolshevik prior to the 1917 revolutions in Russia, who in turn became a dissident against Bolshevik rule almost immediately after they took power and the brutal nature of the new state became clear. He has the honor of having written the first book banned by the Soviet government, and he demonstrated more chutzpah than perhaps any other author by writing directly to Stalin to request to go into exile, since he was not allowed to be published in Russia. Shockingly, Stalin assented. But Zamyatin is not simply an author and idealist with a film-worthy biography: We was banned for a reason – it is an extremely powerful and shockingly horrifying vision of well-intended dystopia that both predates and influences later writers like Orwell, while somehow also going further into a more extreme hopelessness than his successors ever did. There is a glaring and nightmarish brightness to this future, and a horror of the inescapable fate of this world. Zamyatin directly addresses Christianity, which he did not find to be an antidote, in his mind, to this blank eschaton – in fact, the novel suggests that Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor is perhaps a logical consequence of any universal moral claims taken to a logical extreme. But personally, I can only fall back desperately on a Christian eschatology of inexplicable hope in the face of ideas this disturbing.
11. The Big Burn, Timothy Egan, 2009
I admit that this history is pitched toward my biases and attachments; it valorizes the US Forest Service and provides heroes in the form of Teddy Roosevelt, and especially Gifford Pinchot, and all the foresters like Ed Pulaski, set against the villainy of cartoonish late gilded-age timber baron Senators. It’s noble bureaucrats as heroes, trying to save their corner of the world from shortsighted profiteers. This is perhaps a rosy view of things, but it’s a slice of American history I am very fond of. It also takes place in the great National Forests of the Northwest, where I grew up. I would even say that my preferred architectural and stylistic aesthetic is loosely represented by the term early-20th century Forest Service & National Park Service vernacular. I want to highlight two quotes which are worth remembering. The first is from Gifford Pinchot, founder of the National Forests, a man who accomplished a great deal, writing as he often did in his diary: "Footless, useless, selfish, dumb, and generally of no use to anybody...Rotten as usual...This uselessness probably a result of so much gadding about & so many late hours after that very severe western trip. Anyway, am disgusted with myself most thoroughly." I take this as a great encouragement, that someone so great was so frequently dispirited and dismissive of himself. The second quote is from President Roosevelt, who reminds us that “There is nothing more practical in the end than the preservation of beauty.”
9. The Arabian Nights, Many & Unknown, at least 9th Century AD
For as much as we have to be cognizant of the dangers of othering & objectifying Orientalism, and this version of the stories arrived in English refracted through that prism, I do think that there is a valuable place in the imagination for the exotic, half-imagined land just beyond our horizon – and in fact, that is the role China plays in some of these tales. But the setting that most fixes my attention is that Dream of All Cities, Baghdad of the Abbasids. How I wish I could see it!
6. The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, 1921
Cherry-Garrard speaks to us for the dead who surround him, only surviving member of the incomprehensibly hellish Winter Journey to Cape Crozier after Bowers and Wilson, beloved, heroic Wilson, were lost with the entire Polar Party. I have been to Fairbanks in winter, but I cannot conceive of the meaning of 109.5 degrees of frost, and with no heat but intermittent kerosene.
10, 8, 7, 5. Showa, Shigeru Mizuki, 1989
I logged the four volumes of Showa separately, but it really is a single continuous work of history unlike any other. In Japan, the reigning Emperor gives their official name to the years of their reign, fixing it in the calendar as their era. The Emperor Showa witnessed the wheel of fortune turn so many times for Japan that it might have been spinning. From the rubble of the devastating earthquake that destroyed Tokyo in 1923, Japan sank into ungoverned imperialist expansion abroad and the strangulation of its fledging democracy at home during the shocks of the Great Depression. Radical young right-wing military officers erupted against the state, even as it was suborned by plutocratic oligarchs. Then, the increasingly suicidal meatgrinder of war in the pacific, and finally the silent, ashy peace of near-total immolation. The purgatorial, strange moment of turning where the world pivoted into a new course; the new injustices and political struggles with the new establishment, so fearful of anything Red. And then, slowly, but surely, the burgeoning acceleration into the future, to the commanding heights of economic power, social stability, and technological and cultural prestige.
But this graphic novel is not a simple recap of the most incomprehensible period of Japanese history; it is also the autobiography of Shigeru Mizuki, the oddball delinquent turned soldier turned starving comic book artist, who inscribed the entire arc of those 63 years with his pen and his own life over that period. There is nothing quite like a history told my a man who lived through it, not as a politician or person of historical agency, but simply as a normal – if, perhaps not average, man.
When academics write about history and literature, they often play the game of periodization - how to divide up history into chunks, where to draw the lines between different cultural moments. There's an acknowledged artificiality, and ultimately a kind of futility to this - reality will always be slipperier than the words we use to describe it. But there is a reason we frame history into periods - it's because it is how we experience it. We only live a little sequence of history out, and that is our story on the earth. So to make sense of history, we have to put the story into terms we can likewise comprehend. I don't think this means that the true span of history lacks a narrative, nor that we will not be able one day to comprehend it in the way we do our lives. But that requires a different kind of Life.
I'm stuck thinking about this because Shigeru Mizuki performed perhaps the greatest act of periodization in writing his book. Japan formally denotes the passing of time by the reigns of its Emperors, and in that sense, the period was ready-made. Likewise, it is no great leap to observe that this period contained within it such turns of fate by which the world was repeatedly remade in unrecognizable forms, that it was well worth treating as a whole. The stroke of brilliance was framing this story through Mizuki's own life. In doing so, he created a Showa period that was legible to any human, not through historical anecdote, but by indexing events in the kind of life we all live in common, however surprising and different our particulars may be.
4. The Wise Men, Walter Isaacson & Evan Thomas, 1985
We need history, we need stories and heroes and villains (even if at turns the same people play both roles), to make sense of life – or at least that is my excuse for allowing this book to imprint too quickly and completely on my political identity. There is a large helping of nostalgic hagiography in this book, but it is also honest about the sins of the titular wise men, which include the implementation of Japanese internment on the part of McCloy, and Dean Acheson’s creation of the very Red Scare which ultimately undid his career. Despite this, the constructive good that these six friends did is pitched so squarely at my particular technocratic, institutionalist, globalist, liberal bias, my fantasies of C Street experts with real power, that reading it immediately elevated my view of the Truman administration to new heights. I realize that this is a dangerously imperial temptation I indulge – but I think it is also an aspirational corrective to the debased political imagination of the present, where the American so-called ‘deep state’ is being ripped apart by an overgrown man-child who lacks the capacity to imagine the possibility of gaining supreme power, and actually using it to better the world, as we once did. But there was no undefiled golden age of American statecraft – even at its best, they muddled through moral compromise, specious corruption, internal backstabbing and undeserved falls from grace, and the machine they built was a necessary foundation for repairing the world, but set in motion it proceeded to destroy countless lives inadvertently in the Periphery over the course of the Cold War. So, in sober caution and the humility of a nation that has done great harm, but also in the faith that it is possible to use power to do good, let us pick up the pieces of our shattered republic, resume the fight to sinew together the world, and raise a glass to Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Charles Bohlen, Bob Lovett, John McCloy, and the great Averell Harriman.
3. How Do You Live?, Genzaburo Yoshino, 1937
I personally am frightened of the question that is this book's title. Years of moral anxiety, coupled with an unyielding selfishness, have compounded to make me err on the side of assuming I am unwilling to live in whatever difficult way I feel I am supposed to, whatever that might be, and to treat the topic as a source of anxiety. And it is, I suppose. Still, this book does what the better sermons do (even though it is not a Christian book), not ending simply in conviction, but in comfort and peace.
In 1937, Genzaburo Yoshino, a man who had already been persecuted by the thought police for his political activities, buried the vital core of his humane values in this officially inoffensive half-novel, half-essay written to prompt Japanese children to think about ethics and the responsibilities of being a person. While it exists as something which could only have been produced in that exact moment, it is also utterly universal. In fact, I think there are aspects of this book which would be unknowingly echoed by Lewis. I am particularly thinking about the inference of a world that is Right by experience of the world that is wrong. 84 years later, Hayao Miyazaki put the book into his film The Boy and the Heron, prompting it to be translated for the first time into English, for which I am immensely grateful. This is a painfully beautiful, direct examination of life, with all the honesty that is due to children.
"In the same way, when a person is living in a way that's not normal for a human being, suffering and hardships of the heart let us know that. So then, thanks to that pain and suffering, we can clearly grasp what a human being should naturally be. If it weren't natural for people to live together in harmony, then why would we suffer when we felt a lack of harmony? If we should try to live a life of love and goodwill toward others but instead find ourselves driven by hatred and hostility, we feel unfortunate because of that, and for that reason, we suffer. Furthermore, anyone should be able to cultivate their own talents and to work according to those talents, so people suffer when they can't do that, and feel they can hardly endure it. People feel sad and suffer like this because it's not natural to have such hatred and hostility toward each other. Also, because it's wrong that they cannot freely cultivate the talents with which they were born. Generally, when people feel they are miserable, when people suffer, it's because that kind of misery isn't natural. Copper, we must find a way to draw knowledge from all our suffering and sadness!"
2. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, Christopher Clark, 2012
"Depend upon us, gentlemen, everything will be superb" - Russian Minister of Agriculture Alexander Krivoshein.
Perhaps the most affecting works of history I have read, and one which upended my impressions about which nations were primarily responsible for the conflagration. I realize that in some sense, my reaction throughout is perhaps in tension with the spirit and truth of the book - that the collapse into war was a tragedy with many fathers, and that the desire to affix blame has a tendency to collapse that reality into a false simplicity. Ultimately, the war was the rotten fruit of a shared imperialist culture, and its upstart cousin, irredentism (the same thing in a different mask), which all involved parties had formed themselves in over the course of the prior century. But I cannot resist pointing an accusatory finger, if only in response to the profound sense of historical injustice at the mirage of simple German aggression which has been public orthodoxy both because the Entente won, and then because after 1945 German academics themselves were invested in examining their own Prussian sins - not incorrectly, but incompletely.
Section 1, Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles reads as follows: "The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her Allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies."
This article is a lie. Frankly, in the interests of historical truth and justice, I wish the United States would formally retroactively disavow and remove its signature from the treaty. Do not read into this the slightest excusal of what Germany chose to do with its narrative of victimhood from the treaty - there is a perverse faction at work even today which seeks to cloak its malevolence in the nuances of once having been wronged. Reality is far more complex, and it is possible for two things to be bad at once. But let us be clear: while Germany bears some responsibility for the war, and certainly bears the degree of responsibility which can be assigned to some incompetence at the outset, it is not the guiltiest party. The Kaiser was a buffoon, not a warmonger; the Schlieffen plan was an automated mechanism of death, a sort of proto-dead hand device - but it emerged in a context. And in that context of years of decisions leading up to the war, one thing becomes terribly clear: the Entente has lied to us, or we have entertained their lies. For years prior to the war, key leaders in each of the Triple Entente states envisioned a war which would begin along very similar lines to how it actually did, contemplated the possibility, and accepted it as either not something to necessarily avoid, or in fact as a potential boon. I oversimplify - all the players were diffuse and complex, internally fractious - not just the governments, but in some cases (Lord Grey) the people. But the machinery of alliance was not simply a happenstance - they built it, piece by piece, and they were not totally blind to how it would work - even if they were insulated psychologically from the idea that it would actually come to that, or what, in fact That would be.
In conclusion, there is no power without blood on its hands, especially since all governments, even in the best countries, commit violent injustices, and the governments of Europe in 1914 were monstrous imperialists. But there are different kinds of blood-guilt. The Ottomans were innocent casualties. The Italians were feckless and fickle. The Germans were selfish and quick to attack in their fear - but their fear was not unfounded, and their situation was far more constrained than their enemies - and they were not really on the wrong side. Britain and France may have been the nicest, wealthiest, most liberal countries to live in, but as the wealthiest, most powerful colonial empires, with the greatest degree of latitude, they bear special responsibility - they chose to commit themselves to the possibility of this scenario, years earlier - and they really did have the option not to. For Britain, it was the cold calculus of protecting its stolen lands in Asia by keeping the Russians friendly; for the French, their bruised political ego from 1871 and their fear of Germany led them to start down a corrupting path; by the time August 1914 arrived, their leaders were already sanguine about the prospect of war. Serbian irrendentism was of course the inciting spark of the war, enabled and fed by elements of Serbia's government, and moreso by its populist political culture, and it is hard to avoid seeing Belgrade as a special source of evil in the course of 20th century politics - but Serbia was a small country, and the war would not have escalated if it had just been between them and Austria. For that, the culprit must be Russia, whose choices led directly to the outbreak of general war - choices motivated by a structure of beliefs adopted by a culture of leaders who saw the world in fundamentally self-serving terms: Russia had rights to lead all Slavs, Russia had rights to preempt any other power in controlling the Turkish Straits (at the expense of the Ottomans), Russia had rights to interests in the Balkans, while to them Austria had no right to self-defense. But do not think I am simply trying to excoriate Russia because we are presently in conflict with them - this was of course a different Russia in a different time. No, in fact I almost feel more anger towards the French leadership who seemed happy to move things closer to war for their own egoist purposes, or toward the British who have so mythologized the conflict into a noble struggle, obscuring the fundamentally indefensible motives and the sheer negligence on the part of the leadership. It is a special kind of privilege to see the possibility of a war, and yet to feel unthreatened by it to the degree of ambivalence. And they should have known better.
Austria-Hungary, for all its faults, was a decent country by the standards of its day, and was murdered by opportunistic vultures. Germany was a guilty imperialist aggressor, but it was cornered, provoked, and then framed as the monster which it then proceeded to become. The winners, meanwhile, patted themselves on the back, created a papier mache 'world-peace', and ruined the 20th century for everyone.
1. Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis, 1951
I wrote a whole post about my complicated reaction to finally completing this most influential of modern theological works, which I link here: https://www.andrewroosbell.com/blog/on-finishing-mere-christianity
