2024: Best Of

Kashamadupe

Books

Every year, I toy with the idea of ranking all the books I read in a year. Every year, through some combination of incompetence, forgetfulness, and circumstances beyond my control, this does not happen.

This year, I continued the trend of reading more fiction, more memoirs, and not finishing books I didn’t find interesting. However, there’s a nagging sense that I should have read more. That means that I had a mostly good reading year because the day that my verdict is “excellent” is the day that I know that I’m dead.

The Best

Book 1 in The Years of Lyndon Johnson series.

This is the greatest biography series ever written, no cap. I haven’t started Volume 2 yet (shame on me), but this is the sharpest, most intensive, most revealing examination of any political figure ever.

I’m not alone in thinking this. This is an excerpt from a Goodreads review:

Warning: Once you begin The Path to Power, the first volume in Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson, you can never go back. You will never again be able to read a biography without comparing that biography to this. You will never again read about a person’s life without saying: Caro could have done this better. For me, the still-uncompleted series (up to four books now) comprises the greatest biography I have ever read.

It is not even a contest.

Reading this book, I came away with a renewed appreciation for both Caro and LBJ. This book was a massive undertaking, and the depth of the research Caro did is unmatched even among the best biographers. Johnson comes away as an insanely ambitious person who did anything, absolutely anything to get what he wanted.

See him at the start, already disadvantaged by his father’s financial failure and falling into ruin, with his rubbish excuse for an education, raised in the Hill Country, America’s backwater, and you are immediately struck by his drive, a fierce, unquenchable necessity to be first, to win, to dominate — coupled with a limitless capacity for hard, unceasing labour in the service of his own ambition. He goes to university and uses that as an opportunity to further refine his ruthless political skills. He mesmerizes superiors as well as subordinates. He has an uncanny ability to insert himself into the core operations of any situation he finds himself in. Caro is a masterful writer, and LBJ is one heck of a subject.

This is the sort of book where you don’t need any prior knowledge to delve into. Just come with an open mind, and let Caro do his thing.

Some brilliant highlights:

“NO RADIO; no movies; limited reading — little diversion between the hard day just past and the hard day just ahead. “Living was just drudgery then,” says Carroll Smith of Blanco. “Living — just living — was a problem. No lights. No plumbing. Nothing. Just living on the edge of starvation. That was farm life for us. God, city people think there was something fine about it. If they only knew …”

“In every election in which he ran — not only in college, but thereafter — he displayed a willingness to do whatever was necessary to win: a willingness so complete that even in the generous terms of political morality, it amounted to amorality.”

“But then one evening in November, 1939, the Smiths were returning from Johnson City, where they had been attending a declamation contest, and as they neared their farmhouse, something was different. “Oh my God,” her mother said. “The house is on fire!” But as they got closer, they saw the light wasn’t fire. “No, Mama,” Evelyn said. “The lights are on.” They were on all over the Hill Country. “And all over the Hill Country,” Stella Gliddon says, “people began to name their kids for Lyndon Johnson.”

Have you ever read a book where you just go “Give this person the Nobel Prize. Now”? This book is one such book, and Han Kang is THAT GUY.

This book is about violence, but it doesn’t show that violence in action. We are left with the aftermath of the Gwangju Massacre. It is a book about trauma, real trauma, and the devastation of knowing that your own country turned its gun on you. It is about the legacy of a brutal massacre, and how one event can transform the soul of a nation.

As someone who lived through EndSars and the brutal massacre of October 20, the parallels with this uprising are chilling. Like Gwangju, protesters sang the national anthem while they were being gunned down. Like Gwangju, they thought that if they waved the flag, the military would not shoot at them. For a lot of young Nigerians (especially the ones that emigrated soon after), this was a seminal moment in understanding themselves as ‘citizens’. How can you continue calling themselves members of a country in the wake of such maliciousness? Who are they afterwards?

The one stage in the process that you couldn’t quite get your head around was the singing of the national anthem, which took place at a brief, informal memorial service for the bereaved families, after their dead had been formally placed in the coffins. It was also strange to see the Taegukgi, the national flag, being spread over each coffin and tied tightly in place. Why would you sing the national anthem for people who’d been killed by soldiers? Why cover the coffin with the Taegukgi? As though it wasn’t the nation itself that had murdered them.

Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves the single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, slaughtered — is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?

After you died I couldn’t hold a funeral,
So these eyes that once beheld you became a shrine.
These ears that once heard your voice became a shrine.
These lungs that once inhaled your breath became a shrine.

It happened in Gwangju just as it did on Jeju Island, in Kwantung and Nanking, in Bosnia, and all across the American continent when it was still known as the New World, with such uniform brutality it’s as though it is imprinted in our genetic code.

Glass is transparent, right? And fragile. That’s the fundamental nature of glass. And that’s why objects that are made of glass have to be handled with care. After all, if they end up smashed or cracked or chipped, then they’re good for nothing, right, you just have to chuck them away.
Before, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn’t be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were was humans made of glass.

Tier 2

In any other year, Intermezzo and Someday, Maybe would have been “The Best”, but the quality of my reading this year was truly sky-high.

Both books deal with the same subject: grief. But in different ways, and from different contexts. While Intermezzo deals with the grief that comes with losing someone to illness, Someday, Maybe is rawer, choosing to examine the soul-crushing pain of watching your true love commit suicide.

Rooney is a brilliant writer, and her true gift is in examining relationships through mundane, daily interactions. Nwabineli is overwhelming, and Someday, Maybe should probably come with a trigger warning.

Peter and Ivan, the two main characters of Intermezzo, could not be any more different. Peter is a successful lawyer, but he’s medicating himself to sleep and in a complicated love triangle. Ivan is closer in personality to me, so I have a bit of a soft spot for him. A 22-year-old socially awkward chess player who feels like he’s on the outside looking into social interactions. A loner. Both have unlikeable elements, but Rooney shows them the same grace she shows her characters in other books.

How often in his life he has found himself a frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems, watching other people participate effortlessly in structures he can find no way to enter or even understand. So often that it’s practically baseline, just normal existence for him. And this is not only due to the irrational nature of other people, and the consequent irrationality of the rules and processes they devise; it’s due to Ivan himself, his fundamental unsuitedness to life. He knows this. He feels himself to have been formed, somehow, with something other than life in mind.

It’s easy, Ivan can readily see, to become upset and angry on behalf of a woman who likes going to bed with you.

How often in life he has found himself a frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems, watching other people participate effortlessly in structures he can find no way to enter or even understand. So often that it’s practically baseline, just normal existence for him. And this is not only due to the irrational nature of other people, and the consequent irrationality of the rules and processes they devise; it’s due to Ivan himself, his fundamental unsuitedness to life. He knows this. He feels himself to have been formed, somehow, with something other than life in mind.

Someday, Maybe is intense stuff. It’s grief from start to finish. Eve, the main character, finds her husband, Quentin, in a pool of blood on New Year’s Eve. No one saw it coming. She’s crushed. Nwabineli manages to immerse the reader in unrelenting grief from page one, and the result of this book is a fascinating exploration of suffering, loss, the importance of family, and hope.

Grief is not neat. Pain is not dignified. Both are ugly, visceral things. They rip holes through you and burst forth when they see fit. They are constant, controlling companions, and if they don’t destroy you or your relationships with others, they certainly go a long way to damaging you, disfiguring you internally and altering your existence so much so that when you are lucid enough to look at yourself, at your life, you are astounded (and often disgusted) by what you find staring back at you.

Nobody tells you that irrational hope is a side effect of grief. And they should because it is dangerous.

Nobody tells you how the first time you laugh after a major bereavement will destroy you. You may not have even registered that you don’t laugh anymore — another point on the itemized list of things grief steals from you.

Grief makes you believe you are special, its one and only; like it is not careening around destroying millions of lives every day and is devoting all its unwanted attention on you.

You should read Black Edge. If for nothing else, read it for this passage:

THERE TEND TO be two types of people who seek out jobs on Wall Street. The first are those with wealthy parents who were sent to the right prep schools and Ivy League colleges and who, from their first day on the trading floor, seem destined to be there. They move through life with a sense of ease about themselves, knowing that they will soon have their own apartments on Park Avenue and summer houses in the Hamptons, a mindset that comes from posh schooling and childhood tennis lessons and an understanding of when it is appropriate for a man to wear seer-sucker and when it isn’t.

The second type call to mind terms like street smart and scrappy. They might have watched their fathers struggle to support the family, toiling in sales or insurance or running a small business, working hard for relatively little, which would have had a profound effect on them. They might have been picked on as children or rejected by girls in high school. They make it because they have a burning resentment and something to prove, or because they have the ambition to be filthy rich, or both. They have little to fall back on but their determination and their willingness to do whatever it takes, including outhustling the complacent rich kids. Sometimes the drive these people have is so intense, it’s almost like rage.

Steven Cohen came from the second group.

The Best Minds is an intense recollection of Michael Laudor’s descent into the clutches of paranoid schizophrenia. It’s at once tender, funny, and harrowing.

“Schizophrenia doesn’t attack a single region but affects networks connecting multiple parts of the brain, including those involved with our ability to imagine things that don’t yet exist, along with our ability to believe in what we imagine. In that regard, it is the most human of disorders, a reminder of how remarkable our minds are. It’s like the Tin Man realizing he has a heart because it’s breaking.”

“People are always telling young athletes to get an education so they will have something to fall back on in case of injury; nobody tells the academically gifted what to fall back on if something goes wrong.”

“Nothing Michael did seemed hurried. He moved through the hall the way he spoke, disregarding the impatient world. This, too, was a sort of confidence, as if he was attuned to some invisible rhythm of his own. James found it impossible to picture Michael running.
Michael didn’t run even on the first day of his torts class when he discovered that the room was on fire. Nobody else was paying the slightest attention to the flames that wreathed the walls and lapped at the ceiling like a living thing. Michael didn’t shout, “Fire,” but he was unable to persuade his body to keep its seat. He rose, gripped by terror, and walked out of the burning room shaking but unmarked.”

When I read The Trading Game, my first thought was “This guy listens to podcasts at 2x speed, maybe higher”. It’s a car crash of a book. As someone with a non-casual interest in finance, this book hit a bit too close to home. Watching everyone transform after the holidays to career junkies spouting terms like M&A, Macro, ORR? Some stuff changes, but a lot stays the same.

“There is no way to get a job without an internship, unless you’ve got contacts, and the only time to get an internship is now. If you don’t get an internship after second year, you’ll have to get an internship after third year. After your internship, 50 percent of interns will get an offer of a full-time job a full year later, so if you interned after third year, you’d be facing a full year of unemployment. But really, that’s just theoretical, because no investment bank is going to hire an intern at the end of their third year — they’ll know everyone rejected you in second year, and nobody’s going to want a rejected intern.
“So that’s it. It’s make or break. It’s do or die. Your future will be decided now. Forget about your “Maths and Economics.” You need to know what a CDS is. What’s M&A? What’s IBD? How can you not know Gary? Everyone knows! And you need to send applications. These internships are ridiculously overapplied, and you don’t have any connections. Your only hope of getting one is to apply to at least thirty banks. How many have you applied to so far? None!?!”
None was the answer. I was lost.”

“I cannot emphasize enough how much of my early experience of trading consisted of this. Of listening to traders, of nodding along sagely, of pulling the faces of a boy thinking deeply, and of understanding nothing at all. At the time, my lack of comprehension seemed to me so overwhelmingly complete, so painfully obvious, that I could not for the life of me understand how the act was not noticed. After fifteen years in finance and economics, I now know why. Everyone’s doing it, all of the time.”

“Two rules for life:
Be right in the end.
Be alive at the end.
Write them down.”

Honourable Mentions

• Character Limit, by Kate Congler and Ryan Mac.
• The Deal, by Elle Kenedy.
• Material World, by Ed Conway.
• Mr Salary, by Sally Rooney.
• Under The Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer.
• Watchmen, by Alan Moore.
• The Clock of the Long Now, by Stewart Brand.

Series

• Shogun.
• Spy x Family
• Industry.
• Love, Death, and Robots.
• Black Mirror.
• Severance.
• My Adventures With Superman.
• X-Men ‘97.

Movies

• Dune, Part 1 and Part 2.
• Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
• Challengers.
• Spy Kids 1.
• Godzilla Minus One.
• Godzilla: King of the Monsters (quickly becoming my comfort movie).

If you’ve made it this far, you have my thanks and admiration. I appreciate your time and hope to see you again at the end of 2025 with another collection of books, series, and movies (mostly books though) to share.