Posted on by rjonakait

Books 2024

Two years ago, I wrote about my reading habits, which include listing all the books I have read in a year. (See “My Book List” of January 2 and 4, 2023.) I continue to keep such a list; it’s a good thing I keep it because I remember few of the books I finish. What I wrote previously still applies: “I do wonder why I read. I read few books closely. I remember well only a few of the books I finish. I do get some fodder for this blog from my reading. It produces the ‘First Sentences’ I occasionally post. Sometimes the reading gives me an idea for a post or a quotation to use. But I don’t read as if I am researching for the blog or anything else. I read because I read.” Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World typifies much about my reading. I remember that the book has a lot of fascinating information and insights, but I can’t now tell you what they are. As I read over this year’s list, however, I realize that a few still stick in my mind. These include:

Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song. Dylan’s musings about popular songs are often surprising and set me in search of many he wrote about. Thank you, YouTube.

Patrick Bringley’s All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me. Bringley left his job with the New Yorker after the untimely death of his brother and became a guard for ten years at the Met. He writes movingly about grief and art.

Rupert Holmes’s Murder Your Employer: McMasters Guide to Homicide. A clever book. I would say it was Harry Potter-ish, but since I have not read any of the Harry Potter books, I’m guessing.

Vanessa Walters’s The Nigerwife, a striking mystery with a setting that opened a new world to me.

Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017. This is essential reading for making any sense out of the Mideast. It was the selection of two different book groups I attended.

Chris Van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food that Isn’t Food. This convinced me that I should not eat ultra-processed foods. And someday perhaps I won’t.

Abraham Riesman, RingMaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America. Is Trump’s best friend really Vince McMahon?

A.J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution’s Original Meaning. Amusing and insightful about our founding document and how we now often mistakenly regard it.

Walter R. Brooks, Freddy and the Perilous Adventure (illustrated by Kurt Wiese). I still enjoy the sly wit of Freddy the Pig books.

Christopher Morley, Parnassus on Wheels. An old-fashioned delight from the beginning of the twentieth century.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message. Coates always makes me think and makes me check my assumptions.

Percival Everett’s James. At times this retelling of Huckleberry Finn took my breath away.

Posted on by rjonakait

First Sentences

“Jean McConville was thirty-eight when she disappeared, and she had spent nearly half her life either pregnant or recovering from childbirth.” Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.

“I didn’t believe them. They had said that it was going to be easy and, like the fool I am, I believed them.” Craig Johnson, Kindness Goes Unpunished.

“Two Pennsylvania State Police troopers sat inside an unmarked car waiting for the go-ahead to do something they had never done before, arrest a Catholic priest for lying to a grand jury.” Matt Birkbeck, Quiet Don: The Untold Story of Mafia Kingpin Russell Bufalino.

“Name almost any job: dental hygienist, rodeo clown, dog walker, mall Santa, chicken-sexer—they all demand some kind of definable skill set. The one exception is a member of Congress.” Bill Maher, What This Comedian Said Will Shock You.

“In the basement of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, below the Arms and Armor wing and outside the guards’ Dispatch Office, there are stacks of empty art crates.” Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me.

“In 1560, fifteen-year-old Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici left Florence to begin her married life with Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara.” Margaret O’Farrell, The Marriage Portrait.

“As dawn broke over New York City on Friday morning, April 6, 1917, newsboys hawked the city’s paper from street corners up and down Manhattan.” Christopher C. Gorham, The Confidante: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Helped Win WWII and Shape Modern America.

“I approached Texas Monthly’s cover story on ‘The Top 50 BBQ Joints in Texas’ this summer the way a regular of People might approach that magazine’s annual ‘Sexiest Man Alive’ feature—with the expectation of seeing some familiar names.” Calvin Trillin, Trillin on Texas.

“With the world’s sea level rising fast, the assumption that land is the only thing that can’t fly away, or the only thing that lasts, is for the first time now shown to be demonstrably false.” Simon Winchester, Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World.

“Her majesty disliked what she considered to be overheated homes.” Tim Mason, The Darwin Affair.

“In the spring of 1994, I first traveled though China’s Xinjiang Province, a region inhabited by 11 million Turkic Uighur Muslims who, as learned from interview after interview, were even then trapped in a grip of surveillance and brutal repression by the Chinese authorities.” Robert D. Kaplan, The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy from the Mediterranean to China.