Tag: book review

I read or listened to 73 books in 2024. Here are my favorites.

David Evans

I enjoyed lots of different kinds of books this year. Here are my top 10 plus some honorable mentions.

Top 10, in no particular order.

I always have trouble recommending books to people, since people are looking for very different things in books. So here’s what to find in each of my top ten.

If you don’t need a lot of plot, but you beautiful prose and deep, thoughtful reflections on friendship, exile, literature, and life, I recommend Hisham Matar’s My Friends. I listened to this one slowly, chewing on each chapter. I liked it even more than Matar’s memoir, The Return, which I also enjoyed.

If you seek a beautiful, gentle book about people who seem to be stuck in their lives learning how to move forward, I recommend Michiko Aoyama’s What You Are Looking For Is In the Library (translated by Alison Watts). That description sounds schmaltzy, but it really isn’t. I found it very moving.

Horror is not a genre of literature that generally draws me, but Mariana Enriquez’s short story collection Things We Lost in the Fire (translated by Megan McDowell) is a powerful reminder of how horror can shine a light on social ills. I wrote this in my longer review: “In almost every story, I found myself both engaged in the plot and the characters but also asking myself, What is this telling me about violence? about gender? about poverty? about class? about connection?” I also listened to this book in Spanish, Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego, and the Enriquez’s original wordplay is even better. I especially enjoyed the stories “Spider Web,” “Adela’s House,” and “The Neighbor’s Courtyard.”

Before reading Luis Alberto Urrea’s novel Good Night, Irene, I’d never heard of the “clubmobiles,” a mobile service during World War II. But this deeply researched (the author’s note at the end is first class) and moving novel about women serving in a largely forgotten capacity during the war is wonderful. It brought me to tears.

If you’re up for some very dark comedy, James Hannaham’s Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta invites us into the company of an Afro-Colombian trans-woman as she spends her first weekend out of prison. With flashbacks to her time in prison, there is some tough stuff here. But Carlotta is an amazing protagonist. The audiobook, read by Hannaham as well as Flame Munroe, is an excellent performance.

If you like a thriller, S.A. Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed, about an African-American sheriff trying to stop a serial killer in a southern Virginia town is top notch. Lots of excitement, lots of race drama, plus meditations on faith and references to Yeats and Shakespeare.

If you’re up for cringe comedy, R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface is a hilarious takedown of the publishing industry. A character vaguely presents as Asian to sell a book that she stole from her deceased friend. I couldn’t stop listening to this protagonist making bad decision after bad decision.

If you want to follow a trio of friends over decades, try Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, about video game designers pushing the boundaries of design and friendship. It’s a moving story; I didn’t think the ending was as strong as the start and middle, but I was thoroughly engaged. I have no interest in video games, but Zevin made me care.

If you want pure, silly fun in the form of a surreal thriller, I recommend Bob Mortimer’s The Satsuma Complex. The audiobook (read by Mortimer and Sally Phillips) is absolutely hilarious. A legal assistant gets mixed up in intrigue, there’s a talk squirrel, the cast of characters is wacky and wild. Funnest book I read this year.

And the one re-read (and the one graphic novel) in my top ten is My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Volume 1. From my longer review: “This is a dark coming-of-age tale: ten-year-old Karen Reyes (living in 1960s Chicago) experiences traumas that no child should have to, even as she learns of the intense traumas of others while trying to solve the mystery of her murdered neighbor. She processes some of her experiences and feelings and identity by identifying with … monsters: she disguises herself as a monster, and every few pages of this graphic notebook fictional memoir is the cover of a horror comic book. Anyway, my review is all over the place in part because the book is so FULL: the feelings and the art and the characters and the action and the plot. The Holocaust, queer identity, civil rights, class divides. It’s all here, and it all somehow hangs together. I’ve never read a graphic novel like this one.” (And I’ve read a few.)

In addition to my ten best, I’ll add six honorable mentions:

  • Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, by Ruth Franklin. “I read this biography in tandem with other of Jackson’s work: a short story collection (Dark Tales) and a graphic adaptation of her most famous story (Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”: The Authorized Graphic Adaptation). A year or so ago I read one of Jackson’s two most famous novels, The Haunting of Hill House. I think that this biography will be most enjoyed with a familiarity with Jackson’s work. But Franklin is a skilled chronicler and I’m excited to read more of her work” (from my longer review).
  • Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors, by Aravind Jayan. “In Trivandrum, a city in Kerala, India, a couple of college kids are fooling around in a secluded spot, and—unbeknownst to them—they’re being filmed. Later, the footage makes its way to a pornographic website, local people start discovering the video, and everything goes pear-shaped. This might sound like a spicy novel, but it’s not at all (besides a brief, oblique description of the video). Rather, it’s a fascinating exploration of intergenerational dynamics, of siblings mediating between parents and other siblings, of how (to quote Tolstoy) ‘each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way'” (from my longer review).
  • The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller. A beautifully written retelling of the story of Achilles, told by his companion Patroclus.
  • American Zion: A New History of Mormonism, by Benjamin Park. This is the single volume history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that I’d most recommend. Lots of representation of underrepresented groups. Lots of focus on how conflict within the organization led to changes. I learned a lot (and I’ve read a bit in this space).
  • Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World, by Yepoka Yeebo. This intertwines the story of a very long con by a Ghanaian man with the post-independence history of Ghana. Both strands are fascinating. It took me a while to get into it but ultimately pretty awesome.
  • The Magician’s Nephew, by C.S. Lewis (audiobook narrated by Kenneth Branagh). This is my favorite of the Narnia books, and Branagh’s narration is great.

Happy reading in 2025!

book recommendation – The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, by Atul Gawande (narrated by John Bedford Lloyd)

David Evans1 Comment

a little long, a little overexuberant, but Gawande is always worth reading when he’s writing about medicine

I loved Atul Gawande’s collection Better. At the end of that collection, he talks about experimenting with checklists to reduce accidents in surgery. This book is entirely dedicated to that concept. When he focuses on the medicine, whether his own practice, that of other doctors, or in public health work, he really elucidates the experience of medical practice and shows how checklists have made a massive difference in patient health. I found the description of his work at the World Health Organization, and the subsequent failures and successes of their work with checklists, to be particularly interesting.

One of the most compelling insights is how checklists can shift the balance of power within a surgery, empowering nurses and other staff to stop surgeons from making mistakes and forcing pre-operative communication and (resultant) team-building. This shift – from the evidence presented here – has massive positive impacts for patient health.

When Gawande strays into construction and financial markets, the examples are less compelling (I started to wish the book had been one of Gawande’s great New Yorker articles). For example, he shows how several successful financial traders have used checklists, but there is no counterfactual in the style of the trials employed in medicine: There also seem to be lots of successful financial traders without checklists! Nevertheless, Gawande has convinced me that it is worth experimenting with checklists to reduce errors in my own life.

Below are excerpts from two professional reviews (both New York Times). Both were very positive, but the excerpts demonstrate the caveats. Finally, I include a link to the Wall Street Journal review, which is more negative. (Incidentally, I believe the WSJ reviewer misreads Gawande’s last case study, of an emergency airplane landing in the Hudson River.)

Note on potentially offensive content: None.

Robin Marantz Henig, "A Hospital How-to Guide That Mother Would Love," New York Times, 23 December 2009. Very positive with caveat.

But in his effort now to apply the checklist to all walks of life — venture capitalists, skyscraper construction workers, restaurant chefs — he occasionally treads uncomfortably close to the territory claimed by his New Yorker colleague Malcolm Gladwell, taking a single idea and trying to make it fit almost every situation. Maybe there’s a case to be made for why checklists help in enterprises as diverse as finance and government, but Dr. Gawande doesn’t really make it convincingly. Nor does he need to.

Sandeep Jauhar, "One Thing After Another," New York Times, 22 January 2010. Very positive with caveat… Overreach!

Gawande’s missionary zeal can give the book a slanted tone. For instance, there is almost no discussion of the unintended consequences of checklists. Today, insurers are rewarding doctors for using checklists to treat such conditions as heart failure and pneumonia. One item on the pneumonia checklist — that antibiotics be administered to patients within six hours of arrival at the hospital — has been especially problematic. Doctors often cannot diagnose pneumonia that quickly. But with money on the line, there is pressure on doctors to treat, even when the diagnosis isn’t firm. So more and more antibiotics are being used in emergency rooms today, despite the dangers of antibiotic-­resistant bacteria and antibiotic-associated infections.

Even when doctors know what works, we don’t always know when to apply it. We know that heart failure should be treated with ACE inhibitor drugs, but codifying this recommendation in a checklist risks that these drugs will be prescribed to the wrong patient — a frail older patient with low blood pressure, for example. Checklists may work for managing individual disorders, but it isn’t at all clear what to do when several disorders coexist in the same patient, as is often the case with the elderly. And checklists lack flexibility. They might be useful for simple procedures like central line insertion, but they are hardly a panacea for the myriad ills of modern medicine. Patients are too varied, their physiologies too diverse and our knowledge still too limited.

Less positive – WSJ:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704320104575015294037289412.html