2024 - My Reading Year in Review

Hit my 50 book goal again!

I hit my 50 book target on November 30th this year, and snuck in a few extras by year end, finishing up on 56. It was definitely a mixed bag - some really great reads that I’d highly recommend, and a few real misses, some of which surprised me.

A word on my ratings system. I hate systems that allow you to hedge or vacillate. So I stick with 3 ratings:

• Must Read - I believe you should find a way to make the time and space to read this book.

• Worth a Read - If it sounds up your alley, then you’re probably going to appreciate it, but I wouldn’t tell you to reorient your life to make it happen.

• Find Something Else To Do - These aren’t necessarily bad books, and in fact I took something from all of them. However, they didn’t fundamentally move me, teach me, or inspire me - could be because of the content, the writing, the structure, or something else.

I then pulled out a 4th category, which is a subset of the Must Read - the books that stood out as amongst the best I’ve ever read in that genre. 10% of this year’s reads, which is about where I landed last year as well.

Without further ado, here’s the complete list.

16 Fiction Books

All Time Great (or - Drop Everything and Read It)

• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

• Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  

Yes, I really did just read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time. It was actually my New Year’s Day 2024 read. Yes, everyone should read it.

There are many themes that are surfaced and explored in Pachinko, but as a Third Culture Kid it was the struggle around identity and belonging (am I Korean? Japanese? Both? None? Does it matter? Do I want it to matter?) that resonated deeply. It’s a four-generation piece of historical fiction that oddly fluctuates in pacing and structure, and yet kept me wanting to read one more chapter before putting it down for the night.

I really enjoyed Half of a Yellow Sun for a lot of similar reasons, but even more so because it opened my eyes to a conflict and period I knew little about (the Nigerian Civil War / Biafran War of the 1960’s). The examination of the legacy impacts in a post-colonial society - power, class, and privilege - and the thinking it provoked around the post-Westphalian nation-state concept. For clarity, although I am a globalist, I’m not hankering for the days of global empires (though the most powerful modern states are trying to recreate them in what they believe to be more subtle ways).

Must Read

• Pilgrim’s Way by Abdulrazak Gurnah

• Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

• Men in the Sun and other Palestinian Stories by Ghassan Kanafani

• A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines

• Netherland by Joseph O’Neill

  

I seriously considered putting Pilgrim’s Way in the top category, but concluded that I might be exaggerating my own appreciation of the book because it turned out, unexpectedly for me, that the central character anchors himself through cricket. Then again, he did win a Nobel Prize for his works, so maybe I’m being harsh. Either which way, it was one of those reads that is just beautifully constructed. The care put into every sentence is apparent, and each one holds you. And when you step back and realize that this was written not recently, but nearly 4 decades ago in 1988, the power it holds grows by an order of magnitude. It’s painfully real - a little bit like a fictional version of Wilkerson’s book, but dealing with exile and belonging in the context of the post-colonial immigrant experience in Britain.

Worth the Effort

• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

• The Upper World by Femi Fadugba

• Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

• *Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (see comment below)

My first looks at both Ishiguro and Murakami. I could probably have put Never Let Me Go a category up, and in fact if I were to rate it now, some months later, I would - but I’m staying true to my instinctive reactions. Will definitely read more of both - and looking forward to reading some more surreal work. Colorless Tsukuru is next - reputed to be in between the realism of Norwegian Wood and some of his most out-there work.

A quick comment on Ender’s Game. I enjoyed the book. It wasn’t quite the work of genius that it was hyped up to be - but it’s also to be expected that when you’ve been hearing how great something is for the best part of 40 years, it’s likely to disappoint.

However, after reading it, I was curious about his choice of the term “buggers” (ostensibly a low grade curse word, but one that is rooted in homophobia and religious prejudice - a Bulgarian Christian sect that was deemed heretic, resulting in the use of propagandistic accusations of “unnatural acts”) and some of the needlessly childish homophobic references.

I initially attributed this to this having been written in a different era, but then I poked around and found some of the author’s recent op-eds. These articulate some hateful perspectives that I am not willing to implicitly support if I can avoid doing so. Even more so because he expresses them with pointed intransigence.

No more books in this series for me, alas.

Find something else to do

• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

• A Sport and a Pastime by Jamie Salter

• Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje

• The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

Every one of these last four was a struggle for me. Oscar Wao was perhaps the biggest disappointment - the asides and extensive footnotes were brilliant, and the core of it was just really up and down. Surprised it receive the level of acclaim that it did - but I have unusual tastes sometimes!

21 Non-Fiction Sports Books

All Time Great (or - Just Read It)

• Over and Out: Albert Trott: The Man Who Cleared the Lord’s Pavilion by Steve Neal

• Cardus on Cricket by Neville Cardus (collection of articles and essays)

I’m a complete sucker for a book that explores, intentionally or otherwise, sport in a socio-political, socio-cultural, and socio-economic context. Definitely one of my post-retirement explorations. Albert Trott turned out to be a great vehicle for exactly that. I’m enough of a cricket tragic to have been aware of him, and that he hit possibly the biggest six ever seen at Lord’s. When you find out that his grandmother was a slave in Antigua, and understand his family’s place in society and journey across generations, which for him peaked when he flirted with cricketing greatness, but culminated in suicide at the age of 41, so much more is unlocked.

As for Cardus - well, we should all re-read him from time to time. As with many things, one’s perspective and reaction changes with time. This time, I paid a lot more attention to how his cricket writing evolved over his own life, from exquisite Dickensian paid-by-the-word prose to genuinely evocative cricket writing. I had also never previously noted his casual mention of the nobility of The White Man’s Burden (that’s a reference to Kipling’s poem in which he exhorted America to do their noble duty and civilize the Philippines). A product of his place and time, I’m sure, and I’ll leave it there.

Must Read

• Last in the Tin Bath by David Lloyd

• Steve Smith’s Men: Behind Australian Cricket’s Fall by Geoff Lemon

• AB: The Autobiography by AB De Villiers

• Boundary Lab by Nandan Kamath (bias alert: author is a friend and former teammate)

• Six Machine by Chris Gayle

Worth the Effort

• Able by Dylan Alcott

• Fearless: The Amazing Underdog Story of Leicester City by Jonathan Northcroft

• Miracle Men by Nikhil Naz

• Sec, Drugs, & Rebel Tours by David Tossell

• Who Wants to be a Batsman by Simon Hughes

• Gentlemen and Sledgers by Rob Smyth

• 10 for 10 by Chris Waters

• Second XI: Cricket in its outposts by Tim Wigmore & Peter Miller

• Cricket 2.0: Inside the T20 Revolution by Freddie Wilde & Tim Wigmore

• Hard Yards: The Highs and Lows of a Life in Cricket by Mike Yardy

Find something else to do

• The Fix by Declan Hill

• The Vincibles by Gideon Haigh

• Cricket’s Strangest Matches by Andrew Ward

• Around the World in 80 Pints by David Lloyd

David Lloyd did well to feature at both ends of my sports list. And months later, I’m still dumbfounded that I found something by Gideon Haigh to be excruciatingly mediocre. Clearly the best amongst us can have an off day.

19 Other Non-Fiction Books

All Time Great (or - Drop Everything and Read It)

• The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Can’t say enough about this one. It’s not often that I get through a book of this nature in one sitting, but I simply couldn’t put it down. Wilkerson’s prose is exquisite, her storytelling evocative, and rarely have the lines between fiction and non-fiction been so effectively blurred. She has made the pervasive and lasting higher order impacts of systemic oppression and racism tangible at an individual level. Issues that are often spoken of in the abstract, and thus too easy for deniers to dismiss in the abstract, are therefore elevated. And yet she leaves us also admiring the resilience and fortitude of the human spirit. There is always a path towards better. For anyone who cares to understand and then be a part of a continued sustainable solution, this cannot be missed. Her new work, “Caste,” is on my shelf but will be bumped up in the queue now!

Must Read

• Pathogenesis by Jonathan Kennedy

• Evicted by Matthew Desmond

• Transformed by Marty Cagan

• Panther Red One by S Raghavendran (bias alert: written by my uncle)

• Why We Kneel, How We Rise by Michael Holding

Worth the Effort

• Greatness by Don Yaeger

• Beyond Lion Rock: The Story of Cathay Pacific Airways by Gavin Young

• Scarcity by Sendhil Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir

• Quantum Physics for Beginners by Carl Pratt

• Financial Intelligence by Karen Berman & Joe Knight

• Smart Brevity by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz

• The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

• Richistan by Robert Frank

• Number Four: Pik Uk by Stewart Burton (bias alert: author was a year ahead of me in school in Hong Kong, for a year)

• Number Four: Lai Sun by Stewart Burton (see above)

• Wisdom at Work by Chip Conley

• Working Backwards by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr

Find something else to do

• 15 habits of Conscious Leadership by Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Klemp

There was nothing wrong with this last one - just didn’t go far enough to be new or thought provoking, despite being on point for the most part. I don’t love this genre in general - for the most part people are wasting resources in writing these books - so sprinkle an appropriately large pinch of salt on my assessment. Can anyone be an authentic leader by trying to follow a set of principles or rules laid out? I understand that’s very much not the aim of the authors - to create a cohort of inauthentic leaders rigidly trying to adhere to something they’ve read - but it is what I often see playing out.

Thanks for reading - and thanks for reading. Hope you took away one or two ideas from this list, and I’d love to hear what you’ve read and loved, or are looking forward to!