Book round-up: December 2024

 

I spent a lot of this month re-reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings because some friends were doing a read-through and you know what, it was not time wasted. Also re-read another old favourite and one new fiction book that I liked and finished and, well, 2024. At least I made it to the end.

Fiction

The Hobbit (J R R Tolkien)

I have obviously read The Hobbit before, like, more than once but the mild twist here is that this was a comic book edition first published before the Peter Jackson movies (any of them) and it was really neat to see the familiar story in the art style of an earlier era. It really is a lovely children’s tale and I look forward to reading it to the kiddo once he’s old enough. 
 

Rakesfall (Vajra Chandrasekera)

I really enjoyed The Saint of Bright Doors but this book was even weirder and more experimental, genre-spanning in an impossible to define way, and by the time we got to the third set of PoV characters who were kind of the same characters but also not I had to concede that this was not the right book for me at this time. It was a very interesting kind of weird and experimental though, and I’d like to come back to it one day when I have the brain space for it. 

Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (Robin Sloane)

This was published in the early 2010s and is now through the magic of the world moving on a paean to a place and time that definitively doesn’t exist anymore (San Francisco when people thought don’t be evil was a motto Google took seriously), a cozy unchallenging non-murder mystery about a bookstore and the intersection of history and technology. It’s been just long enough that I can take its optimism about Silicon Valley as a period piece instead of being annoyed by it, YMMV.

The Lord of the Rings (J R R Tolkien)

I think I last re-read the trilogy in about 2013 and did you know that it’s very good actually? I’m serious, I think Tolkien is often overlooked because he’s so foundational to so much of modern Western fantasy literature but these are actually beautifully written and paced books and some of the things they have to say about fascism and compromise and despair are, frankly, way too relevant to the present moment. Also they’re funny, they’re not comedies but the humorous moments are real. Probably if you’re reading this blog you’ve either read these books or decided they’re not for you a long time ago, but if for some reason neither of those is true: hand on heart, it’s worth it. 

The Christmas Mystery (Jostein Gaarder)

A magical realism-ish story about a Norwegian boy finding a magical Christmas calendar that contains a story about a young girl travelling backwards in time from Norway to Palestine to witness the birth of Jesus Christ. It is, obviously, a pretty religious text but (as a life-long atheist) I find it fun some years to read it one chapter per day through December. Some bits of it have not aged well (the book is about thirty years old now) but nothing’s aged appallingly. I probably won’t read it again for a few years, or maybe ever, but it was nice to revisit this year. 

Non-fiction

No Shortcuts (Jane McAlevey)

A series of case studies about unionising and winning fights with employers in 21st century America, and what factors lead to success. The American union scene is, uh, wildly different to the NZ union scene in very many ways, legally and culturally (I knew someone once who was doing a PhD comparing them; one day I should track down her thesis) and I mostly found it interesting in terms of understanding the differences, but I think there’s still some solid general advice here for anybody who wants to organise membership-based groups with the aim of making change. It’s very much in conversation with Rules for Radicals so I’m glad I read that first.