Each month my goal is to read a minimum of five books on a variety of topics from different genres. Here are the books I read in September 2024. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on MORE TO COME. Enjoy.

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The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (2023) by Ned Blackhawk opens with the provocative question, “How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed Indigenous peoples be the world’s most exemplary democracy?” Winner of the 2023 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Blackhawk’s important new work seeks to reimagine our history “outside the tropes of discovery.” If history “provides the common soil for a nation’s growth,” he asks his readers to consider a new approach where “Indians no longer remain absent or appear as hostile or passive objects awaiting discovery and domination.” Blackhawk wants the reader—and ultimately the nation—to recognize the centrality of Native Americans to our history and ongoing story as we appreciate the true extent of Indigenous power and agency. A significant piece of new scholarship.

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Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World (2024) by Sara C. Bronin is an illuminating survey of the omnipresent tool driving the development of most American communities. An architect, attorney, policymaker, and professor who writes in an accessible and approachable style, Bronin shows the real-life consequences of codes that maintain racial segregation, build inequality, prioritize cars over people, and force us into choices that harm our health, our civic life, and the world in which we live. Changing our existing zoning policy is not easy. The new code that results from change is not a panacea. Yet in this ultimately optimistic work, Bronin makes a compelling case for what reformed and reimagined zoning codes can achieve. Read my most recent author Q&A as I have a conversation with Sara about the future of zoning in America.

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Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America (2020) by Adam Cohen is a devastating and damning argument against today’s Supreme Court and the Republican party’s fifty-year plan to circumvent the Constitution, overturn the gains of the New Deal and Civil Rights eras, and cement inequality into American law and life. Cohen surveys Supreme Court rulings on a variety of topics to expose how little the Court does to protect the rights of the poor and disadvantaged. Since the Nixon era “the Court has, with striking regularity, sided with the rich and powerful against the poor and weak, in virtually every area of the law.” I returned to this book after investigative reporters for the New York Times uncovered the cynical moves of Chief Justice Roberts to give former president Trump everything he wanted and more, at the expense of our democracy.

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The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928) by Agatha Christie finds famed detective Hercule Poirot, now semi-retired, on the luxurious Blue Train running from London to the Riviera. Another passenger, the pampered millionaire’s daughter Ruth Kettering, is murdered en route and her expensive jewels are missing. Kettering is one half of an unhappy couple, each having an affair and each on the train, although they are unaware of that fact upon departure. A cast of eccentric characters are also included in this work which, while perhaps not in the top tier of Christie novels, is nonetheless worth the ride.

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The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore (2024) by Evan Friss is an eye-opening and charming tour of bookshops through the years and across the country—places often owned by individuals who believe in the profound power of literature, creativity, and the freedom of expression. Benjamin Franklin was there at the founding of the country’s love affair with bookshops. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense—encouraged by Franklin and the first best-seller in America—kickstarted the revolution as well as the growth of bookshops across the colonies. Friss moves on to highlight a variety of shops and booksellers, taking us all the way to Ann Patchett’s Parnassus bookshop in Nashville, the face of today’s renaissance of independent bookstores. This is a deeply researched yet highly personal consideration of the enduring power of places devoted to the buying and selling of books.

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What’s on the nightstand for October (subject to change at the whims of the reader)

• To Fall in Love, Drink This: A Wine Writer’s Memoir by Alice Feiring
• The Art of Communicating by Thich Nhat Hanh
• The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton
• Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz
• Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit

Keep reading!

More to come…

DJB

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NOTE: Click to see the books I read in August of 2024 and to see the books I read in 2023. Also check out Ten tips for reading five books a month.

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Photo of the London Art Library by Sebastien LE DEROUT on Unsplash