Five books I enjoyed, Summer/Autumn 2024 Edition

This should have come out more than a month ago, but I sunk a lot of time in to redeveloping the site, and because my ability to use version control drops off a cliff past around 7pm (it seems), I never bothered to keep the activities of mucking about with the website proper and writing articles split.

This marks the first of these posts since I decided to track my reading digitally^[1] (as opposed to an analogue system). Previously I'd keep track of this through my personal notebook, making entries per book and then writing an index in the back of the notebook. This was fine, except that each time I finish a book (which is getting rarer now we've got a kid around to take up all my spare time) I'd be starting a new index. I really need to externalise the index into its own book, which seems like a lot of work.

While a digital book catalogue doesn't feel nearly as romantic or tactile, I hope that it's actually more useful in some imagined future where I need to consult my notes on a given book. That doesn't normally happen - I'm not a practicing academic or anything, and a lot of the time if I'm that interested in what a book had to say I'd much prefer to get it off the shelf and leaf through it, but you never know.

This list is curiously divided in two: I tended to read large, weighty, "high-fibre" books - the kind of thing you feel you should read, it keeps appearing on all these lists - interspersed with re-reads of some of my favourite, comforting books. It makes sense: after digesting something challenging, you want to return to something easy, something you know you'll enjoy. A section of those books appear below.

The Power Broker - Robert Caro. This absolute doorstop of a biography follows the life of New York urban planner and public official Robert Moses, who "built more structures and moved more earth than anyone in human history", as per 99% Invisible's introduction to the book. I read it as part of the 99% Invisible read-along, and once again I must recommend the e-reader as a device which masks the immensity of large books. A 1,200 page biography, in physical form, is daunting (as well as a good work-out for your arms and a handy weapon in case of home invasion). On your e-reader, that just means the progress bar at the bottom of the screen fills at a slow rate.

It's worth situating this book, outside of its context. Again quoting from 99pi:

Outside of New York City, Robert Moses wasn’t exceptionally well known. Inside of New York, he was mostly accepted by the media as simply the man who built all those nice parks. But The Power Broker, which is subtitled Robert Moses and The Fall of New York, changed all that.

Importantly, this book highlighted not just what Moses managed throughout his career, but how he managed it: by conning planning committees into providing funding, running roughshod over communities, bullying his peers and his superiors into his way of working, and focussing myopically on the car as the sole means of transport. It's by no means a one-sided affair - Moses managed to build a lot of impressive infrastructure in his time - but it highlights just how much Moses' methods and overall philosophy overshadow his achievements.

Ironically, despite all the bridges and parks and roads Moses built, this book feels like it cements him most strongly into history. The final chapters of the book show Moses in retirement, already forgotten and increasingly irrelevant to the world he's left behind. Perhaps the most poignant lesson from the book is that even if the entirity of a city's infrastructural system revolves around you, work still won't love you back.

Anyway, yeah, this book won a bunch of prizes and is well worth reading to understand how cities, local government, and infrastructure work.

Fever Crumb - Philip Reeve. I first read the Mortal Engines series in 2020, and I returned to them following Caro because I needed something simple to decompress, and because I'd been reminded of the series through a discussion with a friend. The original tetralogy holds up passing well, but I'll be honest - it didn't blow me away as much as it did the first time. I actually prefer Fever Crumb, Reeve's second trilogy set in the same world, a prequel of sorts that showed the world Mortal Engines grew from. Perhaps it's because the series relies less on the gimmicks of the first, and instead just lets its characters explore the world. While the later plots get to the world-hangs-on-your-decisions scale we saw in the first series, at least for the first two books the scale stays nicely personal.

Magic for Beginners - Kelly Link. Link has written a number of magical realism short story collections, but this is one of my favourites. I feel the stories walk that fine line of surrealism without complete absurdity, of speaking in metaphor without falling all the way into literary abstraction. And also it contains the novella also entitled Magic for Beginners which I'm particularly fond of, and which lives in my mind rent-free.

The Thin Red Line - James Jones. Sometimes you remember a film or a book exists, and that it takes up an oversized amount of space in the general consciousness even though most people couldn't tell you what goes on in the book, and you decide "I guess I should read it to work out what it's all about". That's why I read this book.

The novel - semi-autobiographical, or at least "based on a true story" - follows an inexperienced United States Army company as they land on and battle for the Pacific island of Guadalcanal in the Second World War. We see them lose their innocence and become inured to the tragedy of war and the arbitrary way in which injuries and death stalk them on the battlefield.

I don't tend to read war fiction, so I couldn't tell you how much (if any) of the storytelling in this book breaks new ground in the genre. Even absent any of that context, though, it felt incredibly empathic to the poor grunts involved in the dying portion of the war. We spent some time on the high-level action, sure, but only enough to situate the personal.

The Will of the Empress - Tamora Pierce. It's a wonder that Tamora Pierce has never appeared on one of these lists in the past. Her novels occupy a warm spot in my heart as the childhood series I never read during childhood. When I get sick, I tend to load up one of the may series on my e-reader to tide me over^[2]. And sometimes I'll just go, "It's been about six months since I read one, which shall I read this time?"

Among them all, Pierce's Circle of Magic series (and its sequels) are perhaps my favourite. I have a soft spot for magical Bildungsromans so it's no surprise. The first tetralogy follows four misfit mages as they are rescued from their current lives and brought to the Winding Circle temple in Pierce's medieval/renaissance fantasy world. The four kids, aged around ten, build a strong rapport and face various challenges across the books, each story allowing one of the children to hold the spotlight while the other three support them. The second series, The Circle Opens, takes place around four years later, as the children separately travel the world with their mentors. I think it's not as strong as the first series, but still a great series. And following this are three books, of which I believe The Will of the Empress is the standout. It follows the children, now aged around eighteen, as they deal with how they've all changed while also trying to ensure they solve the problem of the day.

There's a narrative Stockholm Syndrome which happens in long series I think - the more time you spend with characters, the more joy you get from their interactions. This definitely applies here.