Books of 2024

I’d read the abridgement in 2017, but I decided last year to give the whole thing a go. Having an ebook version was a necessity, as it is about 5,000 pages, 11,000+ including end-notes. Still, a surprisingly easy read. Really interesting history, Gibbons tells a very compelling story over such a long arc that I was never bored, but just wanted to learn about what happened next.

Fine, quick read. Kinda Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the Thing in Itself, filtered through a YA story.

A recommendation from a friend based on my reading Decline and Fall. Enjoyed it; nice to get a more zoomed-in version of the history, and to have it conveyed with such lovely language.

Read based on a recommendation from an interesting local project/business, “Young W”. I think it suffers from the problem of reading a classic or foundational book in the modern era, where it seems very obvious, divorced of context.

The sections of this book on Roman history were interesting enough, neat to be able to recognize them from the Decline and Fall. Overall though, I didn’t feel like the book really made a compelling a case for its thesis, nor for the analogy between the “West” and the (Western) Roman empire.

Quite a few sections in this book also made me very annoyed, but generally a later section somewhat walked back the most infuriating omissions. I suspect that one of the authors I could get along with and the other would drive me nuts.

This has been on my “to-read” list for years now; finally got around to it after reading the above other Roman history books. This was a great read. The author does a great job of contextualizing and explaining Caesar’s actions, the political world he grew up in and became a part of, and relates it all to modern political structures as well.

Nice little “popcorn” mystery, read in an afternoon.

Great recommendation from a friend. Quick read, based on a series of lectures about the nature of history as a discipline. The author discusses the notion of “objective” history, history as a science, the role of a historian. Very interesting, really enjoyed it.

Felt like reading some poetry, so cracked this tome. Pretty fun going, although Greek mythology does get a little repetitive at times (god wants to “ravish” someone, one way or another person ends of getting transformed into a tree or bird or something).

Funny book to read intermittently while working on the more serious work (below) and while the baby scoots around.

Really fascinating book; I’ve been describing it as a non-fiction version of Dune. Incredible story, well and thoughtfully told.

Fun book, received as a birthday present. More about the history than the diving, but the author is quite a scuba person, so there are some fun little details about that. Neat history, some fascinating stories. The pictures of the wreck of the Terror in particular are amazing.

What a fun read! I knew that this was a classic, obviously, and that it could be challenging, but I found it a ton of fun. The way the writing style is so dramatically different with each chapter was really cool.

Starting in on this massive tome, really enjoying it! Beautiful, deliberated paced meditation on the nature of memory and our emotions.

If volume one was mostly about the nature of childhood memories, the second volume seemed to revolve around the experience of falling in and out of love. Continues to be beautiful and engaging.

Continuing on, this volume’s main theme seems to be capital-S “Society”.