My 2024 Book list: Challenging Book for Challenging Time

I read 44 books in 2024, extensively sampled throughout history, technology, society, and current events. That’s reflected in the first and end portions of my post, which spotlight my favorite nonfiction and fiction novels.

Yet, in a year defined severely by war, most of my novels focused around that issue. As a practitioner of urban policy, I’ve been tormented by the issue of how to defend citizens against assault. That’s the premise of the middle portion, which concentrates on the conflict in Israel-Palestine and was also the most hardest to write.

Nonfiction Highlights: On Culinary Traditions, Technologies, and Ideologies

These three novels are stand-alone highlights in how each examines dramatically different themes.

Three intriguing novels.

Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food | Fuchsia Dunlop

Being Italian makes me incredibly fussy and provincial when it comes to cuisine. Italian food is our sort of al dente power: neither hard nor soft, but just perfect to establish superiority and win over the globe. (I kid, but only a little.) And yet, Fuchsia Dunlop’s Invitation to a Banquet is such a tempting feast on the tremendous history, richness, and taste of Chinese food that it makes me reconsider my long-held ideas. Dunlop clearly argues that there is much more to Chinese cooking than most Western readers realize: layers of ingredients, technique, history, and other things that set this extraordinary field of cookery apart from all others. It is nearly cruel to read Invitation to a Banquet without being able to smell and taste the dishes Dunlop recounts. Be prepared to hurry to the closest genuine Chinese restaurant to satiate the urges the novel creates.

Nuclear War: A Scenario | Annie Jacobsen

The end of the world might be only one hour away. Jacobsen’s book, which reads like sheer terror, presents a minute-by-minute summary of a possible scenario of a nuclear exchange between major nations. Based on extensive interviews with civilian, military, and scientific leaders who have served throughout the U.S. atomic hierarchy, Nuclear War provides intimate details on how the world could spiral towards armageddon: from the decision-making of those in the White House, Pentagon, and Kremlin to catastrophic worldwide effects. Nuclear combat may bring hundreds of millions of deaths and civilizational collapse via the first explosions and accompanying firestorms, radiation, diseases, poisoning of water sources, nuclear winter, and — if all this wasn’t enough — ozone layer depletion.

In an era of nuclear complacency and increased threats, Jacobsen calls our attention back to the huge hazards provided by current arsenals.

The fact that no limitations exist to the destructiveness of this weapon renders its mere existence and the knowledge of its fabrication a risk to mankind as a whole. It is inevitably a bad thing regarded in whatever light.

Nuclear War does not give remedies but serves instead a rousing reminder that nonproliferation should be one of humanity’s core goals: few acts have greater impact than those which minimize the risks of nuclear war.

(I am presently reading Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which tackles a another aspect of this issue and will likely make it on the 2025 list.)

Maoism: A Global History | Julia Lovell

Maoism is an ideology of contradictions, which is probably what has made it so popular. Its contradictions make it eternally repeatable, enabling it to be altered and accepted across time and place: from rebels to totalitarian governments, from poor farmers to rich-country academics, from repressive regimes to advocates for more participatory communities. Lovell’s history of Mao Zedong Thought covers more than nine decades and every continent (well, except Antarctica), proving Maoism’s position as one of China’s greatest instruments of both soft and physical power – sometimes at Beijing’s demand, and sometimes indirectly.

Lovell also points out Maoism’s ongoing impact in how it continues to plague a People’s Republic caught between the desire to separate itself from Mao’s evils and to preserve the Chinese Communist Party’s ultimate leader . (This is particularly noteworthy at a time when President Xi Jinping is developing his own Mao-like cult.) Though Maoism’s popularity may be decreasing, Lovell makes plain that neo-Maoists are still among us. So too will the ideology’s contradictions continue to affect minds and countries.

Tragedy in Palestine and Israel

Middle Eastern events are a matter of great personal interest to me, and I spent a lot of time this year experiencing grief and striving to make sense of the history and struggle inside Israel and Palestine. (This is not to discredit happenings in other nations, of which I know less.) This sense-making process is without end, and needs being able to connect with and retain numerous views at once, which I sought to achieve via a series of books. Above all, I am motivated by the concerns of how to draw away from patterns of extremism and violence where civilians pay an extravagant price and how to construct a framework that respects and appropriately satisfies conflicting claims.

Six books that give distinct ideas and frameworks on Israel and Palestine.

Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel tells the arc of Zionism and of the Jewish state from an idea in the late 1800s to maturity in the mid-2010s. An alternative subtitle might have referred to the good, the bad, and the ugly of Israel: respectively, the establishment of Jewish self-determination in the historic homeland; the ongoing struggle to integrate Jews from different countries and religious currents into a modern state; and the repression of Palestinian rights from Israel’s foundation in 1948 to today. It is a journalistic and personal rather than historical account, and in that manner more powerful and affecting.

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi presents a counterbalance from the Palestinian viewpoint by concentrating on the recurrence of violence and failures of diplomacy to create a Palestinian state. In their different ways, Shavit and Khalidi jointly explain why there has been no peace in the Holy Land.

That unpeace — sometimes more quiet, sometimes more tense, sometimes totally violent — has weighed most heavily on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and on the Palestinian refugees in neighboring countries. In A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, Nathan Thrall powerfully recounts life under Israeli occupation in West Bank communities on the doorstep of Jerusalem. Using a family devastated by a bus accident that kills many Palestinian children as the narrative thread, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama lays bare the human dynamics that exist at the nexus of Palestinian society, its faulty self-rule, and interactions with Israel’s security tactics.

If Thrall’s study works mostly at the micro-scale, Tareq Baconi’s Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance concentrates on the dynamics between Palestinian parties and between Palestinian administrations and Israel from the 1980s through late 2010s. It presents a comprehensive examination of Hamas and reveals how Benjamin Netanyahu felt he could control the organization and utilize it to keep Palestinians divided. That error, along with increasingly militant Hamas commanders, led to the surprise and horror of Hamas’s homicidal October 7 strikes. (I also hope to read Amir Tibon’s The Gates of Gaza in 2025.)

And thus we approach the present, somewhat represented by Saul Friedländer’s Diary of a Crisis: Israel in Turmoil. The Israeli-American historian best describes the spirit of the event by paraphrasing a German movie in which a character declares:

One cannot consume as much as one would desire to spew up.

Diary of a dilemma started as personal musings on Israel’s constitutional dilemma in 2023. Friedländer witnessed as Netanyahu and his supporters moved to diminish the independence of Israel’s court and enhance the influence of religion in the state and society, generating enormous demonstrations and severe splits within the nation. It was in that setting that Hamas launched their assault, murdering 1,200 people, holding captive more than 250, and igniting the ongoing conflict. Since then, Israel’s assault on Gaza and the West Bank has killed more than 45,000 and displaced millions. Yet other consequences touch Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iran, and beyond. Friedländer gives a glimpse of the overlapping traumas and reveals the divisions inside Israeli society that will require addressing alongside any larger diplomacy.

These texts serve as a (incomplete) basis, which I complemented with substantial current reporting. A selection includes pieces on Hamas’ leaders and their murderous delusions; the failure of the Oslo Accords; the phenomenon of Israeli settler extremism; the rise of anti-Semitism and need for better anti-Semitism education; and on the definition, applicability, and politics — in Europe and globally — of describing the current conflict as genocide.

This combination of hate, injustice, death, dispossession, pain, and equivocation with no end in sight is the vomit-inducing reality we live in. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a trolley dilemma where heartless leaders battle over a lever that dictates the fate of others. How many “enemies” are we justified to murder to defend our own? How many of our own can we sacrifice to attain our ideological purposes? What labels will make it easier to waive aside limitations in murdering civilians?

It is time to break away from such a paradigm where all options are dichotomous, us or them. Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations does not give any ideas on how sustainable peace and cohabitation may be attained. But Walzer does argue persuasively for clear boundaries when combat becomes immoral in his chapter on guerilla warfare (pgs. 195–6).

But while it is always morally possible to fight, it is not always feasible to do all is necessary to prevail. In every conflict, conventional or unconventional, the laws of war may at some time become an impediment to the success of one side or another. If they could then be placed aside, however, they would have no value at all. It is exactly when that the limitations they impose are most vital.

He continues, describing a war that cannot be won “except by setting out systematically to kill civilians or to destroy their society and culture”:

The war cannot be won, therefore it should not be won. It cannot be won, since the only possible approach entails a war against civilians; and it should not be won, because the degree of public support that rules out other methods also makes the guerrillas the legitimate rulers of the nation. The battle against them is an unfair struggle as well as one that can only be carried out unjustly.

It is much too late to notice that neither Israel nor Hamas (nor any other side) can subjugate their adversary without killing the opponent’s civilian population. But this thought should be sufficient to startle people to see that there are alternatives to wars that are only won unfairly.

In September 2024, I participated in a program that brings together young leaders in policy from the U.S. and Europe to debate world matters. Eighty years ago, in 1944, it would have been impossible to have Americans, Germans, French, Britons, Italians, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, and others meeting on the basis of (mainly) similar ideals and the concept that our countries are allies. Our seminar reveals the inconceivable is definitely feasible.

Even at this darkest, stomach-churning time for Israel and Palestine (and Syria and Lebanon and many more), I cannot help but believe that such a future is also feasible for all individuals who name that country their home.

Of Fantasy and Science Fiction

I conclude on lighter reading. Though not intrinsically “happy,” both of these works are full of the possibility and satisfaction that may result from human (and human-adjacent) existence.

Two engaging novels.

Circe | Madeleine Miller

Sometimes, to be a demi-god is to be no deity at all. Circe is a dramatized autobiography of the famous Greek sorceress and — siren-like—it attracts readers into an engulfing universe of moods, colors, textures, and locales, from fabled regions to ancient towns. The work is also a biting critique that lays bare the conflicts between purebred deities, lesser gods, and mankind. Some joust for ever greater power while others battle only to live, but basic drives like pride, lust, and jealousy are constantly lurking to send destiny spinning as much towards heroic acts as to terrible conclusions. Circe sometimes watches, sometimes participates in these plans, leaving behind a complicated narrative that is full of life and teachings.

Children of Ruin | Adrian Tchaikovsky

This fascinating sci-fi book takes Adrian Tchaikovsky’s epic on genetics, evolution, and society to new dimensions. The first in the series, Children of Time, introduced us to the intriguing Portiids, a spider species that creates a sophisticated society via inadvertent human meddling. In the second part, arachnid and human characters sail around the galaxy and encounter new, intelligent life forms. (Hint: one of them also has eight arms. Unfortunately, one of the novel’s shortcomings is its scant consideration of this new species from its own viewpoint.) Children of Ruin wonderfully investigates how beings with drastically different consciousnesses, bodies, and communities could connect. Tchaikovsky provides a fast-paced story loaded with interesting thoughts and tension.