While most of the year was spent with my nose persistently, often perplexedly planted in Kandel's Principles of Neural Science, I made my way, cover to cover, through thirty-eight books in 2024, thirteen of which, maybe unsurprisingly, also had to do with neuroscience. Sometime in 2023, I spent an afternoon diving through boxes of used library books with M and found a good copy of Kandel's In Search of Memory. Probably before I knew of his Principles and while still at Columbia, I attended a public lecture in the Low Memorial Library rotunda, roughly around the time of the publication of In Search... from what I can remember. He had won the Nobel less than a decade earlier, was very much a Big Deal, and I couldn't tell to what extent he was still actively involved in the neurobiology department at Columbia. So having picked up In Search... at the library, I finally finished it. It turned out to be the last book of four of his I finished in 2024, his last four books in reverse order as it turns out. They're all wonderful.

A lonely three fall under fiction, only one of which was written in the last half century--last year was only a little better and I don't feel guilty for, again, blaming Kandel. Inspired by references in Erik Larson's book, I think, I reread Frankenstein which was more haunting, more relevant, and more of a joy to read than when, during undergrad, the same copy was literally and chronologically tucked into a stack of required reading somewhere between Aeschylus and Joyce. But a surprising category was biographies, having read more this year than in the last two combined. Some standouts were Salman Rushdie's Knife which bursts with human empathy and brutal candor ("we would not be who we are today without the calamities of our yesterdays" hits infinitely harder from Rushdie's mouth than any similar parental pontificating from mine). Christoph Wolff's magisterial Johann Sebastian Bach has been on my list for years and was only somewhat successful at tempering, but might have exacerbated, what amounts to hero-worship on my part. Lastly, Kitchen Confidential. I was embarrassed to realize that I had inherited a distaste for the Rebel Chef in my years of working in restaurants. But when friends who I had shared 'the line' with as food runners many years ago mentioned reading Bourdain, I couldn't resist. I've read many of the predictable speculations as to which pseudonym or false flag was a stand-in for "this chef", "that restaurant", but what rang loudest for me was the respect for the staff that echoed throughout his memoir, from porters to pastry. And the motherfucker can write.

So, any best ofs? I don't think so. I've read less fiction and less on artificial intelligence than I thought I would have this (last, goddamn it) year, but Emily Wilson's Iliad and Lefkowitz and Romm collection of The Greek Plays will get a lot of attention in 2025. On the brain, I'm looking for books on perception and attention. I hope to finish Diarmaid MacCullogh's single-volume history of Christianity as well as a couple of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary era American histories and biographies. I'll see where I land in twelve months.

J.D. 2024-01-01