Some books I enjoyed reading in 2024 – Orange County Register

Two and a half years ago I wrote that I was racing my brother to a lifetime achievement of reading 1,000 books.

Since my brother is eight years younger than me, meaning I have a near decade-long headstart, it’s imperative that I beat him.

I now have a lead of around 80 books, thanks to an obsession with winning and two years of sleepless nights provided by my two toddlers (who are apparently just as committed to my victory as I am).

Here’s the best of what I read in 2024.

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“A Moveable Feast” by Ernest Hemingway: I read Hemingway mostly because I’m supposed to, hoping that one day I’ll see what the hype is about. I’ve labored through most of his novels, but this one hit differently.

It might have been simply the right time in my life or all the gossip about the Fitzgeralds. Either way, this was the first Hemingway book I actually loved.

“The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III” by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser: This was my third Peter Baker book and it was just as great as the others.

I usually have a tough time with biographies and weighty works of history because they get bogged down in boring details. That might be fun for historians, but I’m only into details that matter. I don’t care what someone ate for dinner unless it was something crazy like a travel companion.

Baker and Glasser write clean, compelling, authoritative copy that keeps the story moving. This book made me a little smarter and was a pleasure to read.

“San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities” by Michael Shellenberger: Once I got past the terrible title (San Fransicko, really?), I found an illuminating history of bad policy decisions in San Francisco and its seeming inability to deal with things like homelessness, drug overdoses and crime.

While I don’t necessarily agree with his overall conclusion of how to fix these problems (no spoilers!), I do largely agree with his conclusion of how we got here (OK, one spoiler: progressive ideology).

“Bad Therapy: Why Kids Aren’t Growing Up” by Abigail Shrier: As with “San Fransicko,” Shrier goes to great lengths to show the path to failure, where a generation of kids is consumed by their feelings.

As a father, I was terrified by the insidiousness of the problem. Though the rest of this list is dominated by the horror genre, “Bad Therapy” was the scariest book I read all year.

“Horror Movie” by Paul Tremblay: Am I just desensitized or is horror less scary? I can’t think of a newer horror book that made me too scared to walk past an open window or look in the mirror. New horror seems to strive more for literary legitimacy than pure scariness, but it still makes for good reads.

To that end, Tremblay’s latest book was suspenseful and creepy over multiple timelines, offering an intimate view of madness. I loved this book.

“Carrie” by Stephen King: This book is more sad than scary. The first half of this book is simply heartbreaking as Carrie, the protagonist, is bullied and abused by basically everyone she ever met.

Though she ultimately gets her revenge by burning hundreds of people alive (this book is too old to worry about spoilers), I couldn’t help but side with Carrie.

This was King’s first book and it’s easy to see why he became a legend.

“Episode Thirteen” by Craig DiLouie: Haunted house books are my favorite and while this isn’t a haunted house book, per se, the setting is in a house where weird stuff happens.

What’s interesting about “Episode Thirteen” was that I found it through iBooks recommendations. Its cover was cool enough that I read the summary and decided to buy (turns out you can judge a book by its cover). It also shows that the algorithm is more insightful than online lists of scariest books ever.

These lists, while occasionally helpful, are actually quite absurd. For example, the book “Coraline” by Neil Gaiman appears regularly on such lists. But why? It has pictures, builds almost no suspense and no one dies (at least not that I can remember). You could like this book all you want, but saying it’s one of the “25 Greatest Horror Books Of All Time,” as Sughnen Yongo wrote in Forbes, defies logic.