As usual, I’m unsure about conclusions from my year in reading. There is no advance plan apart from challenging myself (cupcakes are fine here and there), and I wing it as the days pass.
However 2024 incorporated innovation, in the sense that for the first time in a long while I permitted myself to reread a few books from the generally distant past, all of which I’d characterize as influential.
In each instance, I was amazed at how much I’d retained.
Bruce Catton’s “Army of the Potomac” trilogy of Mr. Lincoln’s Army, Glory Road and A Stillness at Appomattox was a Christmas gift, circa 1970. I was a Civil War buff as a kid, and read my way through most of the public library’s stock. Catton was not an academic historian, and his focus on the “great men” is discredited nowadays.
But Catton could tell one hell of a story, a skill in part gleaned from listening to Civil War veterans spin yarns in the Michigan of his childhood, while sticking to the facts.
In like fashion, Frederic Morton’s A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889 (published in 1979) and Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 (following in 1989) are examples of “popular” history, helping in large measure to cement my Habsburg fixation.
Under the Frog, a novel by Tibor Fischer, takes place in Hungary, and “follows the adventures of two young basketball players through the turbulent years between the end of World War II and the anti-Soviet uprising of 1956.” I first read Fischer’s novel during the mid-1990s. It resembles M*A*S*H in tone, an impassioned case against totalitarianism, funny and tragic all at once.
I found Atheism: The Case against God (George H. Smith) at the library in late 1979 amid a turbulent, searching period of my life. It aptly complemented university coursework in philosophy, which became my major, and provided an abundance of confirmation for what had always been an absence of belief in deities of any sort. I can’t remember a moment in my life when the concept of “god” made sense, and Smith explained why.
40 years later, I’m flabbergasted by my level of retention. I internalized a great many of Smith’s points and have used them ever since when discussing the topic.
Of the remainder, here are five that I found particularly memorable, in no particular order.
- Malört: The Redemption of a Revered & Reviled Spirit, by Josh Noel
- The Accursed Mountains: Journeys in Albania, by Robert Carver
- The Race...Read more
