This year was full of good books and, as usual, ones written years ago. I only read one new release this year, the next newest was written in 2022, and the oldest was from the turn of the 20th Century.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin
I hadn’t read a book I couldn’t put down in a while, but this was one of two that kept me up at night this year. It’s gotten a lot of well deserved attention for drawing out the beauty in the ars-technica duality of video games, told through the lens of a group of friends stumbling backward into starting a triple-A gaming company, and dealing with the conflicting visions and values that shape any creative enterprise.
Buy Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow from your local bookstore.
The Sentence, Louise Erdrich
I’m pretty sure I finished this book before I published last year’s post. Published in 2022, it’s as if while the rest of us were still coping with the chaos of 2020 (Covid-19, George Floyd in particular) Louise already clearly saw how it changed us as a species — or maybe, rather, how it ought to change us. Among Erdrich’s books I’ve read so far, it’s perhaps the most “auto-fictional” of them all: Set in a native-owned bookstore in Minneapolis, complete with a confessional in the back, that must close its doors but continue to serve its community when the Covid-19 pandemic hits. Also like all her books, it raises questions fundamental to the human condition. In this case, what is a community and how do we show up for it when the world outside of it seems to be telling us to keep to ourselves? And a bookstore is a particularly good setting to explore that question.
Buy The Sentence form your local bookstore, or from Louise herself.
Department of Speculation, Jenny Offill
This book was such a delight. It was another I had trouble setting down in order to fall asleep at night. It’s a relatively familiar story but Offill’s experimentation with form and prose brings a suspenseful excitement that draws out the main character’s (The Wife’s) emotion and psychological state in a unique way. Worthy of all the awards and praise it received.
Buy Department of Speculation from your local bookstore.
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, Ananda Lima
Ananda is a family friend, Chicagoan, and a peer of Danielle’s, so I had the pleasure of reading an uncorrected proof of this one. Craft imagine’s the Faustian narrative but as one that’s more of an ongoing, transactional relationship with the Devil. They have sex at the beginning of the book and then he shows up in different parts of the protagonist’s life, and she writes stories for him.
The novel then is a set of loosely linked short stories. One I particularly enjoyed was about a vending machine at a hospital that dispenses tiny Americans, and a nurse who feels guilty about eating, and enjoying, them.
Congrats to Ananda on her fiction debut!
Buy Craft from your local bookstore. (I recommend Myopic Books in Chicago!)
Recoding America, Jennifer Pahlka
This was maybe the biggest civic tech book of 2023 and 2024, but not necessarily the best. I’m glad I read it. We need a reference like this to get people on board first principles like governments and the public deserve better people, policies, and outcomes; improvement in technology is one part of addressing the bigger whole. I only wish Pahlka had gone even further.
Hers is a narrative of how complex benefit delivery systems can be. It begins in California where she was brought in to help scale the state’s unemployment systems to deliver to the suddenly-much-larger number of applicants in the wake of Covid-19. These systems like so many others in government have existed for decades, been touched by dozens of different vendors — all of whom were self interested in ensuring only they could operate the systems, and fail the public and civil servants they’re meant to serve.
As necessary as this book is, it often read extractive: Pulling stories and experience out of weathered public servants. I wanted to see more about how we can start to see the work of civic technology as a core component of civic life. With Pahlka’s experience both in governments and as Code For America’s founder, I hoped to get more of this perspective. Nonetheless, it’s well worth reading.
Buy Recoding America from your local bookstore
Kafka
We’ve had this book of Kafka stories kicking around our house for as long as I can remember. It probably didn’t follow us abroad, but has definitely been on our bookshelf since we got back. I have no doubt Kafka is difficult to translate, which itself is a whole art with its own critical frameworks. This particular one was not my favorite but several of the stories it contained were maybe more affective than Metamorphosis.
Mark Harman released a new collection this year. I leafed through it and it is a much more accessible translation, heavily annotated with more exact definitions or explanation of the literal translation. I’ve thought about buying it at the risk of looking like a scholar, but I’m not sure I need to read another version of these stories yet.
Many of these stories are also online since all of his works are now in the public domain.
“The Metamorphosis” is an obvious one. I’d never read it in its entirety before, only an abridged version in high school. Reading it in full, there’s a new power dynamic I hadn’t seen before where the Samsa family’s community, and especially their “tenants” lead, almost demand, the family to realize to keep Gregor-the-insect alive. I’m really curious to see how Harman interprets this.
Other stories I hadn’t read before but enjoyed maybe more than Metamorphosis:
- “An Imperial Message:” A one page story that defines the term Kafkaesque.
- “In the Penal Colony:” A haunting story of a death penalty administrator who maintains a terrifying (and terrifyingly complicated) device to torture the convicts while slowly killing them. I saw a direct line to Saunders’s “Escape from Spiderhead” short here, too.
- “The Judgement:” About the conflicts among friendship, ego, and culture over time. I felt like a lot was lost in the translation and hope to read Harman’s soon.
Buy Harman’s Selected Stories Kafka translation at your local bookstore.
I remain pretty worried about the state of literature access in this day and age. We didn’t make much (any?) progress on defending the right to access during the Biden era, and I doubt we move forward in the second coming of Trump. More on that in a separate post.
Finally, we lost a family friend this year: Simon Fiesci, a victim of terrorism and gun violence—one of the 11 survivors of the 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo. I thought a lot about Simon while reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. It was an honor to know Simon, if only very briefly, and witness his commitment to justice. I hope he is at peace and wish his family the best as they heal and move forward.