I had six reading goals for 2023. I only notched four of them. I didn’t set any reading goals for 2024, other than to knock off one of my 2023 goals: read a biography. I read three this year (Woodrow Wilson, Frederick Douglass and Alexander Hamilton). These were long reads! Overall, I read 21% fewer total pages in 2024 compared to 2023 (alas). But those big rock bios translated into 38% fewer books. Nonetheless, it was a good year, and I’ve selected ten gems to share. I think my top ten offers some nice variety this year. Take your pick!
Personal Development
The thesis of this book posits that our modern world, with all its comforts, has made us not only soft, but less fulfilled and less happy. By embracing things like danger, boredom and hunger, we can 're-wild' our systems to invigorate our lives. The book weaves through a story of an extended arctic caribou hunt on which the author went to experience discomfort in its various extremes. The science discussed I have mostly seen elsewhere, but the lens resonates. I handed it to my wife after finishing it with the following statement for context: “This is how I want to live.”
If You’re in My Office, It’s Already Too Late: A Divorce Lawyer’s Guide to Staying Together, by James Sexton, Esq.
This was my surprise “loved it” book of the year. As a divorced divorce lawyer, Sexton does not claim to have the answer for how to have a happy relationship. But he has extensive experience in facilitating the demise of failed marriages. He shares the recurring patterns he sees in his legal practice. As someone who aspires to avoid ending up in Sexton’s office, I found it instructive and entertaining. It’s cautionary to see how minor fault lines can become major rifts if you don’t actively work on nurturing the marriage.
Endure: How to Work Hard, Outlast and Keep Hammering, by Cameron Hanes
Cameron Hanes runs 20 miles a day and lifts weights every day simply to support his passion for bow hunting. He does this while maintaining a full time job, And by the way, he has kids. Clearly his body has a capacity to recover to an extent that mine currently does not. But more than that, you’ve got to admire his sheer dedication and will. He stresses over and over again in the book that he’s not special, he just works hard, a notion that Angela Duckworth, author of Grit, would admire. I didn’t come across any new ideas in Endure I hadn’t heard elsewhere, but I appreciated hearing Hanes’ story.
Novels
Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver
This modern adaptation of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield is a winner. Set in Appalachia during the height of the opioid crisis, the story is at times emotionally crushing. Maybe that’s not what you want out of a book. But I think such emotional investment by the reader is a sign of strong character development and compelling narrative by the author. Now maybe I should actually read the Dickens novel…
A Storm of Swords, Book 3 of A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R. R. Martin
I watched the HBO series “A Game of Thrones” before I had even heard of the books. Now I read one of the books each year. I still picture the characters as the actors, but each year I get further from the television series, and so it seems less repetitive. I usually pick up one of these books in January and get some anticipatory excitement. Like, ooh, new year, I get to read another Game of Thrones book! I love a good fantasy novel, and Martin’s prose is just the right combination of not-too-elevated but still well-composed.
Memoir
Running for My Life: One Lost Boy’s Journey from the Killing Fields of Sudan to the Olympic Games, by Lopez Lomong
This memoir tells the extraordinary story of a boy whom South Sudanese rebels forcibly recruited (i.e. kidnapped) at age 6. As an adult, he runs for the United States in the Beijing Olympics. (I don't think that's a spoiler, since it's in the title.) His first passion, however, was soccer. When he was growing up in a refugee camp, there were so many boys who wanted to play soccer every day that they made a rule in order to create a bottleneck. Any prospective player, as a prerequisite to participating in pick-up soccer, had to run around the camp perimeter first. This entailed running 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) each day before he could jump into the soccer game! The storytelling and prose is so dialed into the way he perceived the events at the time of their occurrence that I listened to it again with my kids. They were clamoring for more after each listening session. After a brutal ten years as a refugee, he finds a loving set of adoptive parents in New York. The adoptive parents in this true story make a good foil to the devastating depiction of foster care in Demon Copperhead.
Biography
Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow
A finance professor at Georgetown gave me a copy of this biography when it first came out 20 years ago. I started it back then, but didn't get very far. Somehow it didn't fit into the summer after senior year of college. I retrieved it recently after getting tickets to the Broadway musical. The three chapters I was able to read before seeing the show enhanced my enjoyment of the musical, though they covered only the first two songs. I stuck with it this time, though. Chernow's volume is thick, but very readable. Maybe not a beach read, and it took me more than the summer to finish it (about 100 days). And the show was so good that I suppose I'll just have to see it again, now having read the full book!
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, by David Blight
Winner of the Pulitzer prize for history, this is quite a massive tome. I listened to the audiobook, which clocks in at about 38 hours of listening. This was probably a mistake. I usually listen to audiobooks while driving, and this one demanded more attention. The geography touches on a number of familiar scenes. Some places I expected (Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, New York, Harper's Ferry). Other places I did not (Ireland, Chambersburg, Dominican Republic). I learned that Douglass spent a great deal of time in England and Ireland. He also briefly stopped in Chambersburg, PA to meet with John Brown in advance of Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry. (In the Chambersburg meeting, Douglass informed Brown that he would not be partaking in the ill-fated adventure.) I also was surprised to learn that Douglass was part of a delegation sent to Hispaniola after the Civil War to assess the annexation of Santo Domingo (today's Dominican Republic).
Collection
The Best of Edward Abbey, compiled by Edward Abbey
Rummaging through a closet, I found a 1988 edition of this book that I had borrowed from someone back in college but had never picked up. In graduate school I read Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and had quite enjoyed it. Anyone who has spent time in the American southwest will appreciate Abbey’s writing about that region. This collection includes both nonfiction essays and excerpts from novels. I prefer his non-fiction works such as Desert Solitaire. His love of the natural world is endearing and inspiring yet at times misanthropic.
Consider the following: “But where is home? Surely not the walled-in prison of the cities, under that low ceiling of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides and acid rain—the leaky malaise of an overdeveloped, overcrowded, self-destroying civilization—where most people are compelled to serve their time and please the wardens if they can. For many, for more and more of us, the out-of-doors is our true ancestral estate.” The view of urban living is grim but incisive. The notion of the outdoors as our “true ancestral estate” inspires me, but I also like many aspects of cities and have lived in or near them most of my life.
Abbey, too, was not opposed to city living. He spent a year in Hoboken, about which he penned this fantastic prose: “The infinite richness. The ecology, the natural history of it all. An excellent workshop for the philosopher, for who would venture out into that gray miasma of perpetual smoke and fog that filled the streets if he might remain walled up with books, sipping black coffee, smoking black Russian cigarettes, thinking long, black, inky thoughts?” I love that image of the writer “thinking long, black, inky thoughts.” I’m going to sip some more black coffee now.
History
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, by Laura Hillenbrand
This is the story of a US bombardier named Louis Zamperini, an Olympic miler whose plane crashed into the Pacific, leaving him and two other survivors on a raft. They set the record for longest ocean survival on a raft, only to fall into the hands of the Japanese as prisoners of war after drifting westward. After the ordeal at sea it’s hard to fathom the hardship and brutality Zamperini suffered at the hands of his captors. At one point soon after it was over, he said he would have killed himself if he’d known what he would go through. It’s a well-written and inspiring story of survival, made even more interesting for me because of the running angle.
Reading goals for 2025? To read at least one book in each of the following ten categories:
Biography
Fantasy
Mental resilience training
Memoir
Parenting
Personal finance
Real estate
Relationships
Stoic philosophy
Diversify your portfolio! Here’s to your next great read in 2025!
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