alex’s Year in Books

What did you read this year?

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2024

32,064

pages read

books read

alex

Shortest Book

104

pages

Longest Book

pages

Average book length in 2024

364

pages

Most Shelved

111,785

people also shelved

Least Shelved

people also shelved

alex’s average rating for 2024

3.9

Highest Rated on Goodreads

4.68 average

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen by Larry McMurtry

alex’s first review of the year

it was amazing

McMurty is America’s Proust, if that means anything to you, or if that means anything at all. That is to say, after peeling back the layers of relativity, Proust and MccMurtry are brothers because they're both thinking about time and what time really does to us.

Lonesome Dove isn’t just a masterpiece, it’s the product of a harvest-a harvest of the past. McMurty long evaded his own past, spending 2+ decades writing books on contemporary Texas. He d McMurty is America’s Proust, if that means anything to you, or if that means anything at all. That is to say, after peeling back the layers of relativity, Proust and MccMurtry are brothers because they're both thinking about time and what time really does to us.

Lonesome Dove isn’t just a masterpiece, it’s the product of a harvest-a harvest of the past. McMurty long evaded his own past, spending 2+ decades writing books on contemporary Texas. He didn't want to dig the soil he came from, and only dug in when he saw it for it was, as America’s past.

The story of his grandparents, in on the land grab right at the end of a long western migration, was the story of American expansion. Once he understood himself as like them, as one of the last people, he understood in some way their struggle was a mirror to his own. Once he understood himself as one of a privileged few with access to a living memory, McMurty looked back and poured himself and them out onto the page. What came out was a masterpiece. A book so real you could smell it.

How did he do that?

This long essay isn't just an explication of Lonesome Dove. It's a panoramic view from a writer who has had the privilege and the pain of being at the end of something. A man who's held a secret. The secret of personal knowledge and poured that knowledge into a book for mass consumption into a world that treated it all as pure alien.

McMurty is writing it all in A Dairy Queen because he understood in all that movement the world can't stand still.

As a young writer, he benefited from that fast American pace, becoming a writer instead of a farmer. He outpaced his father who got in late and had to manage the decline. But in that toil and tragedy McMurty was able to see the generations past. And in that suffering, he was able to dig so deep into the personal he broke through to the universal. Just like Proust. Just like the great writers of all time

This book tries to explain the man behind some of the great and some of the subpar books in the American canon. It situates a boy who saw the world of his ancestors shrinking and chose to run to books. And in that journey, he found a way to give them all new life in a land beyond land.

Anyone who loves Lonesome Dove needs to read this long essay. Because Lonesome Dove is a great book, and great books demand some sort of explanation. McMurty has done us a favor by trying, as best as he can, to do that. It is a glory to read. ...more

ALEX’S 2024 BOOKS

it was amazing

The Terrorist Next Door by Daniel Levitas

Patricide in the House Divided by George B. Forgie

Coming through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje

Love and Saint Augustine by Hannah Arendt

it was amazing

All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers by Larry McMurtry

it was amazing

Eros and Civilization by Herbert Marcuse

The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom

Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition by Glenn A. Magee

it was amazing

The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard (New York Review Books by Søren Kierkegaard

Against the American Grain by Dwight Macdonald

Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight by Shoshana Felman

it was amazing

The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays by Richard Hofstadter

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter

it was amazing

Wilderness and the American Mind by Roderick Nash

Symbolism and American literature. by Charles Feidelson

The New Radicalism in America by Christopher Lasch

it was amazing

Selected Writings, 1950-1990 by Irving Howe

The Civil War a Narrative by Shelby Foote

The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age by Hans Urs von Balthasar

The Glory of the Lord Vol 6 by Hans Urs von Balthasar

it was amazing

Mohammed and Charlemagne by Henri Pirenne

George W. Bush and the Redemptive Dream by Dan P. McAdams

The Gospel According to Tolkien by Ralph C. Wood

That All Shall Be Saved by David Bentley Hart

it was amazing

The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance by Harry Levin

In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike

Freud's Moses by Professor Yosef Hayim Yerus...

Deep Politics and the Death of JFK by Peter Dale Scott

The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling

it was amazing

A Harsh and Dreadful Love by William D. Miller

alex’s last review of the year

really liked it

a short but deep look into Freud's later works, particularly Totem and Taboo, Civilization and Its Discontents, and their relation to his final work-Moses and Monotheism. Freud's theory that cultures are like a body and pass down repressed trauma is intriguing. While a lot of it at large feels fanciful, there does seem to be some truth it is gesturing towards.

Obviously the historical evidence Frued relies on and extrapolates on in Moses and Mono a short but deep look into Freud's later works, particularly Totem and Taboo, Civilization and Its Discontents, and their relation to his final work-Moses and Monotheism. Freud's theory that cultures are like a body and pass down repressed trauma is intriguing. While a lot of it at large feels fanciful, there does seem to be some truth it is gesturing towards.

Obviously the historical evidence Frued relies on and extrapolates on in Moses and Monotheism is nearly nonexistent. It goes as such: Monotheism was first realized by the Ancient Egyptians, but then suppressed by their own priests. One of the monotheistic priests, Moses, fled Egypt and took the Hebrews with him, and instead taught them the theology of Monotheism. At some point in the desert, the Hebrews killed Moses and returned to polytheism, while the prophets would return, like the return of the repressed, to call the Jewish people back to Monotheism.

It is one of the books that is easy to point to to explain why Freud should be discredited. The abandon that he takes with even the scholarship of the time feels egregious, and yet under that, beneath the soil of fact, Freud is adamant there is something to be learned. The old cliche from Aristotle that "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it" is worth unpacking. Maybe not just a call for liberal tolerance, there is something to be gained from following where our ideas lead us. Freud added nothing to the understanding of biblical history, but he is getting at why are we magnetized to this story. What pulls us towards it, what pulled him towards the story of Moses, and in turn what does that mean for Frued, as a Jew, and as a founder of Psychoanalysis.

Yerushalmi does a great job placing Freud's final work in dialogue with the rest of his work and life. Moses and Monotheism is a looking back, a survey of the founding text of Judaism used as a sideways look at the life of Freud, the school of Psychoanalysis, being a Jew in Europe, and being a human alive in the 20th century. Like Moses, Freud is the collector of a long inheritance and lawgiver, and this book suggests that maybe even broken tablets contain some wisdom ...more

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alex’s first review of the year

alex’s last review of the year

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