NOTE: This post is long but is written to be skimmed. Scroll through and see what piques your interest. It is also the final entry for Book Week at MORE TO COME. As we come to the end of the year, I began on Monday with one post each day to close out my reviews and to showcase the 60 books I read during 2024. Today’s entry is that year-end review.

---

With 2024 drawing to a close, I’m delighted to share the annual list of books I’ve (mostly) enjoyed over the past twelve months.* I’ve grouped these 60 books into broad categories, to help you find those of special interest.

• The top reads (I’ll revisit these over the years)
• Author interviews (talking with writers)
• History and biography (and all that entails)
• The places where we live (natural and man-made)
• The times we live in (politics and civic life)
• Memoir (tell me your story)
• Fiction (novels, murder mysteries, short stories, poetry)
• Theology and more (thinking about purpose and mindfulness)
• Outbursts of radical common sense and whatever else tickled my fancy (otherwise known as the miscellaneous section)

I hope you enjoy learning about the treasures I pulled from my reading shelf this past year. Clicking on the link under the book title will take you to my original review. After the first two categories, I begin each additional section with my top choice for the year followed by the others in that subject area listed alphabetically by author. And please feel free to use the comments to tell me which books most touched you in 2024.

Now, let’s jump in and see what was on the list.

---

THE TOP READS (I’ll revisit these over the years)

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.” Blackhawk wants the reader—and ultimately the nation—to recognize the centrality of Native Americans to our history and ongoing story. A significant piece of new scholarship.

---

A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman (2022) by Lindy Elkins-Tanton is much more than a memoir, as one of the nation’s leading planetary scientists updates the way science is presented and framed while challenging us to consider ways to ask the right questions to drive deeper analysis and change. Elkins-Tanton describes the debilitating impact of bullying and microaggressions especially on women and then pivots to describe the innovative ways she has built collaborative working groups. This book forces the reader to consider all the ways we contribute, for better or worse, to the culture in our organizations.

---

Small Things Like These (2021) by Claire Keegan is a short yet deeply moving novel set in small-town Ireland during the Christmas season of 1985. Bill Furlong is a coal and timber merchant who, while delivering a load to the local convent, makes a discovery that forces him to consider his past and the choices he must make. This little gem of a book brings us face-to-face, in a simple yet memorable fashion, with how we confront our past while also serving as a deeply moving story of “hope, quiet heroism, and empathy.”

---

When We Cease to Understand the World (2021) by Benjamin Labatut (translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West) is a troubling and haunting book that I could not put down “about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction.” By taking the real-life discoveries of scientists and adding rich fictional detail to link their compelling stories with real-life consequences, Labatut makes the reader face uncomfortable truths. Labatut “has written a dystopian nonfiction novel set not in the future but in the present.”

---

The Overstory: A Novel (2018) by Richard Powers is a work that—like all brilliant pieces of fiction—tells us more about reality than we often care to see. This majestic fable is actually an interlocking collection of nine human stories that, in the end, center trees as the main characters. It takes time to understand how these stories might be connected, but Powers begins to drop hints in the very first pages: we should be listening to the trees to truly understand connection. The Overstory changed the way I will see the world. One simply cannot ask more of a piece of literature.

---

To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul (2023) by Tracy K. Smith, the former Poet Laureate of the United States, is a “memoir-manifesto” which examines her life and her family history as a microcosm of the Black experience in America. Smith writes of the spirituality of the soul, her move toward sobriety and accountability, and her own growing spiritual practice. She makes the case that the soul is not merely “a private site of respite or transcendence,” but it is also a tool for fulfilling our duties to each other. It is a powerful and moving prayer for Americans to accept accountability and do the hard but necessary work of living together with others.

---

AUTHOR INTERVIEWS (talking with writers)

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. Writing 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. In this ultimately optimistic work, Bronin makes a compelling case for what reformed and reimagined zoning codes can achieve. Sara chats with me about the future of zoning in America.

---

Why Louisiana Ain’t Mississippi . . . or Any Place Else! (2022) by Jay Dardenne with photography by Carol M. Highsmith is a companion book to a Louisiana Public Broadcasting documentary and a beautifully illustrated guide to a fascinating piece of America. Dardenne is a long-time politico who provides a short but insightful introduction. The bulk of the book is composed of Highsmith’s wonderful photographs, capturing the flavor of this place which calls us back again and again. Carol answered my questions and shared some of her favorite photographs in this author interview.

---

Witness at the Cross: A Beginner’s Guide to Holy Friday (2021) by Amy-Jill Levine examines the stories, texts, social contexts, religious background, and perspective of those who watched Jesus die. Dr. Levine, known as AJ to friends, brings her deep understanding of scripture, insightful commentary, broadness of perspective, and engaging wit to help us consider this climatic moment in the Christian story. AJ also graciously agreed to answer my questions about this work.

---

Earth & Soul: Reconnecting Amid Climate Chaos (2024) by Leah Rampy comes from an “intersection of spirituality, ecology and story.” In helping us understand why our souls ache for a deeper connection with the earth, Rampy invites us to think, contemplate, live, and act differently. She travels to edges—where sea, land, and sky meet—because “the division between heaven and earth, past and present, living and dead can blur, and a sense of oneness permeates time and place.” These thin places are where we can choose our stories for the future, stories that will last long beyond our lifetimes. Leah answers my questions about her work in another of the MTC author interviews.

---

The Edith Farnsworth House: Architecture, Preservation, Culture (2024) by Michelangelo Sabatino is a richly illustrated, deeply researched, and well-crafted source of unending pleasure for the eyes, mind, and soul. Sabatino and his fellow authors Ron Henderson, Hilary Lewis, Scott Mehaffey, and Dietrich Neumann, have produced a work that broadens our perspective while helping undermine the conventional view of the house as merely a formal object sitting on its site as conceived wholly out of the mind of Mies van der Rohe. In this author interview, Michelangelo talks about key aspects of this important new book.

---

HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY (and all that entails)

The CIA: An Imperial History (2024) by Hugh Wilford sheds important and eye-opening light on an agency shrouded in secrecy and cloaked in conspiracy theories. Wilford’s new work—with appeal to both scholar and the general public—is a thoughtful look at the CIA’s ties to European empires and America’s own imperial instincts. At a time when we are debating the importance and very future of democracy, this book is timely, informative, at-times deeply troubling, and an altogether vital work about the often unintended and disastrous effects of unaccountable power.

---

Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists (2012) by Anthony M. Amore and Tom Mashberg is a detailed look at the high-stakes world of art theft. Major art theft is generally committed by common criminals associated with local crime rings, and the reader learns how they run the gamut from comical bunglers to cunning and dangerous thieves who will stop at nothing in the commission of their crimes.

---

Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (2008) by Timothy Brook uses the paintings of Johannes Vermeer to encourage readers to view certain objects as doors which we can “step through into the teeming social, economic and political context which lies beyond.” Once we step into these worlds, Brook then deftly explains how the early years of the seventeenth century took mankind from isolated communities to interconnected worlds.

---

Follow the Flock: How Sheep Shaped Human Civilization (2021) by Sally Coulthard weaves the rich and fascinating story of sheep into a vivid and colorful tapestry. While there are at least a thousand breeds and crossbreeds, Coulthard makes the point that these unique animals have changed us as much as we have changed them.

---

Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence (2013) by Joseph J. Ellis combines original accounts, insightful analysis, and first-class storytelling skills to bring the reader into the critical summer of 1776. Few historians write as knowledgeably and effectively about the revolutionary period in America as Ellis, who in this short work brimming with fresh perspective addresses what he calls the “crescendo moment” in American history.

---

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. Benjamin Franklin was there at the founding of the country’s love affair with bookshops and Friss takes us all the way to Ann Patchett’s Parnassus bookshop in Nashville, the face of today’s renaissance of independent stores devoted to the buying and selling of books.

---

The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War (2024) by Erik Larson examines the motives and actions of a small minority of rich white men who decided that slavery—and the lavish lifestyle owning other human beings enabled for them and their families—was worth defending to the point of tearing the country apart. Larson focuses on the chaotic months between Abraham Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Fort Sumter: a period marked by “tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals.”

---

Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey (2023) by Robert “Mack” McCormick (and edited by Smithsonian curator John W. Troutman) is the musicologist’s long-awaited biography of Johnson that isn’t, in fact, a biography. As Troutman details in an extensive preface and afterword, this work may not be the book one expects, but as a study of the biographer’s craft and a window into the Delta during Johnson’s brief lifetime, it is one well worth considering.

---

The Costa Rica Reader: History, Culture, Politics (2004) edited by Steven Palmer and Iván Molina expands the perspectives around this intriguing Latin American nation by bringing new voices to the conversation. This work is composed of short pieces that give a much fuller understanding of Costa Rica, showing it “as a place of alternatives and possibilities that undermine stereotypes about the region’s history and call into question the idea that current dilemmas facing Latin America are inevitable or insoluble.”

---

Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug (2020) by Augustine Sedgewick is a compelling look at the volcanic highlands of El Salvador and the story of James Hill. In 1889, the 18-year-old Hill disembarked in El Salvador from Manchester and wound up “bringing the industrial mentality of his native city to coffee cultivation in his adopted country,” in the process turning El Salvador into perhaps the most “intensive monoculture in modern history—a place of extraordinary productivity, inequality, and violence.”

---

THE PLACES WHERE WE LIVE (natural and man-made)

G.E. Kidder Smith Builds: The Travel of Architectural Photography (2022) by Angelo Maggi (Foreword by Michelangelo Sabatino) is a beautifully illustrated and long overdue assessment of the work of George Everard Kidder Smith (1913–1997), a “multidimensional figure within the wide-ranging field of North American architectural professionals in the second half of the twentieth century.” Trained as an architect, Kidder Smith did not build buildings; instead, he designed, researched, wrote, and photographed a remarkably diverse collection of books focused on architecture and the built environment. This abundantly illustrated overview of Kidder Smith’s work is full of wonder, joy, and some sadness and is—in the end—simply a book to savor.

---

Avant-Garde in the Cornfields: Architecture, Landscape, and Preservation in New Harmony (2019) edited by Ben Nicholson and Michelangelo Sabatino is a scholarly exploration of an iconic small town in Indiana that provides insights and new perspective into architecture, landscape, preservation, spirituality, and philanthropy. The book traces how nineteenth century utopian aspirations based on the renewal of society through faith and later science became the touchstone for a transformation through preservation and reinvention of New Harmony’s traditions.

---

Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility (2023) edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua is a project “to try and return hope and power” to our path forward in the climate crisis through twenty-six essays written by climate scientists, indigenous people, activists, religious leaders, historians, and futurists. Movements rarely “win” in the complete sense, Solnit writes, but “naming and reviewing the movement’s progress helps build momentum for the next win and the win after that.”

---

Helsinki’s New Living Room—Oodi Library (2021) by Wif Stenger (for the Scandinavia Review) describes the public enthusiasm for the design of the city’s new flagship library. Oodi is a “wavy, radiant structure” that opened in late 2018 as Finland celebrated its 101st Independence Day. Creativity is at the heart of Oodi (“Ode”), a spirit that has been taken in kind by its visitors.

---

THE TIMES WE LIVE IN (politics and civic life)

Age of Folly: America Abandons Its Democracy (2016) by Lewis H. Lapham surveys the period from 1990 to 2015 to make the strong case that America’s imperial impulses have shaken our democratic principles. Drawn from monthly commentaries produced as the editor of Harper’s Magazine and essays written as backstory to various issues of Lapham’s Quarterly, Lapham makes the case for history as folly’s antidote. Lapham wants to teach us that “we have less reason to fear what might happen tomorrow than to beware what happened yesterday.” A nation denied knowledge of its past, he asserts, “cannot make sense of its present or imagine its future.”

---

American Oligarchy (2024) by the editors of Mother Jones provides a single-issue focus on the rise and ramifications of the American Oligarchy, pulling back the curtains that have been hiding their rampant pilfering of our country’s wealth. This eye-opening read shows again and again that it’s not only about the spoils but also about “what everyone else is losing in the process.”

---

Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice (2015) by Bill Browder is the story of an unlikely hero who took on the oligarchs and political leaders of post-Soviet Russia. Once the largest foreign investor in Russia, Browder was expelled from the country in 2005 as a threat after exposing corruption in business and government. His Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, ended up in jail where he was tortured and killed, changing the direction of Browder’s life with a transformation told in this thriller-like account.

---

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. 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.

---

The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars (2019 with a new 2022 Foreword) by Meghan Daum could be summarized as a work about “feeling old, spending too much time online, and getting ornery about the politics of young people.” There are plenty of times when Daum comes across as that person yelling “get off my lawn” at the kids, but there are also thoughtful questions around outrage vs. empathy as the author suggest that “to deny people their complications and contradictions is to deny them their humanity.”

---

Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection (2024) by Charles Duhigg is the best-selling author’s most recent deep dive into ways we can navigate the basics of life. Similar to his exploration of habits, Duhigg blends timely research and top-level storytelling chops to help us understand how to connect with others.

---

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know (2021) by Adam Grant makes the strong case that to have real intelligence, we need to rethink and unlearn what we believe and assume. Although we favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt, we need to let go of knowledge and opinions that “are no longer serving us well” and anchor our sense of self in flexibility rather than consistency.

---

Don’t think of an elephant: Know your values and frame the debate (2004) by George Lakoff is about framing messages. “Framing is about ideas—ideas that come before policy, ideas that make sense of facts, ideas that are proactive not reactive, positive not negative, ideas that need to be communicated out loud every day in public.” Finding language that fits your worldview—your values—is key. And yet it goes beyond language because ideas are core. Language simply “carries those ideas, evokes those ideas.”

---

On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy (2024) by Lee McIntyre shows how the effort “to destroy facts and make America ungovernable” is the culmination of decades of strategic denialism designed to deny facts that clashed with financial or ideological interests. Political parties learned about denialism from the tobacco lobby, which sprang into action following the first scientific report in 1953 linking smoking to lung cancer, and January 6th was “the inevitable result of seventy years of lies about tobacco, evolution, global warming, and vaccines.”

---

Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (2016, originally published in 2004), by Rebecca Solnit begins with a discussion around the demands of hope but soon pivots to note that joy is an especially good way to support the work which hope demands. This year seems a good a time to consider Solnit’s thoughts on hope and joy in the face of despair, and to take the long view which she favors.

---

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) by Timothy Snyder is a guide to resisting authoritarianism. This small but powerful work provides present-day advice in the vein of that used by the Founding Fathers when they sought to build a governmental system of checks and balances that would be resistant to the tyranny that overcame ancient democracies.

---

MEMOIR (tell me your story)

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times (2020) by Katherine May makes the case that the cycles of life seen in nature are the touchstones to how we should live as humans on this earth. Wintering, in this thoughtful memoir of a mindful year, is “a fallow period in life when you are cut off from the world, feeling rejected.” It’s also inevitable. Katherine May shows us how “an occasional sharp wintering” can help us heal and grow. We “must learn to invite the winter in” and while “we may never choose” to winter, “we can choose how.” Winter, you see, “is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”

---

To Fall in Love, Drink This: A Wine Writer’s Memoir (2022) by Alice Feiring is a self-described “love letter to wine and a lifelong coming of age story.” Feiring believes that the best wine writing is about life, and in a series of eleven personal essays she explores her own life’s story while sharing her love of natural wine.

---

Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing (2023) by Ben Jealous is a work of pragmatic and enduring optimism in a sea of national malaise. Jealous uses a series of more than 20 modern-day parables from his life to make the point that we must truthfully and fully address the tensions that have been building up throughout this century if we are to survive.

---

My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music’s Black Past, Present, and Future (2024) by Alice Randall is memoir, history lesson, and manifesto that upsets the stereotypes about Country Music. Randall’s goal is to make certain that everyone recognizes and remembers the First Family of Black Country Music, and this engaging and enriching book—along with a companion album featuring young Black female artists playing the Alice Randall songbook—is an important step along that path.

---

Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy (2023) by Jamie Raskin is a searing memoir covering the first forty-five days of 2021 that saw Congressman Raskin lose his only son to suicide, endure a mob’s violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, and lead the second impeachment against the former president who planned the outlines of the assault and incited that mob. The work is a “vital reminder of the ongoing struggle for the soul of American democracy and the perseverance that our Constitution demands from us all.”

---

FICTION (novels, murder mysteries, short stories, poetry)

The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers (2024) by Samuel Burr is the tale of a group of extraordinary minds gathered together by Miss Pippa Allsbrook: polymath, a professional enthusiast of crossword puzzles, creator of The Sunday Times puzzles, and—most importantly—Chief Cruciverbalist, Founder and President of The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers. She is one of thirteen members of the Fellowship who live together in her historic family estate in the English countryside, moving through the many puzzles put before them and ultimately addressing the puzzle each of us faces to belong, to find our own missing pieces, to discover who we really are. 

---

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), Agatha Christie‘s first novel, finds Arthur Hastings going back to England from the First World War due to injury. He is invited to spend his sick leave at the beautiful Styles Court by his old friend John Cavendish, whose stepmother, Mrs. Inglethorp, is soon found poisoned. When suspicion falls on the family, Hercule Poirot is invited to investigate. 

---

The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928) by Agatha Christie begins with 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. While perhaps not in the top tier of Christie novels, this work is nonetheless worth the ride.

---

The Dirty Duck (1984) by Martha Grimes is the fourth in the 25-book series of Richard Jury mysteries written by the best-selling author. Superintendent Jury is just passing through Stratford when he is brought into a murder investigation for Miss Gwendolyn Bracegirdle, a rich American tourist who is murdered after drinking too much gin with an unnamed companion who leaves lines of Elizabethan verse for clues after the crime.

---

The Word in the Wilderness (2014) by Malcolm Guite features a poem for each day of Lent. In this thoughtful forty-day journey through the season in which we traditionally reorient ourselves, slow down, and recover from distractions, Guite suggests that in the hands of writers such as the great Irishman Seamus Heaney, poetry—much like prayer—can be “banquet, music, journey, and conversation.”

---

Magpie Murders (2016) by Anthony Horowitz is the talented writer’s tale of intrigue involving editor Susan Ryeland, her crime-writing author Alan Conway, and Conway’s detective, Atticus Pünd, “who solves mysteries disturbing sleepy English villages.” Ryeland knows she must put up with the writer’s troubling behavior in order to keep the successful works flowing, as we discover in this delightful whodunit within a whodunit.

---

Death at La Fenice (1992) by Donna Leon, the first in the Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery series, is set in the celebrated opera house La Fenice, where the world-famous conductor, Maestro Helmut Wellauer, is poisoned between the second and third acts of a performance of La Traviata. Leon sets themes that will return in her series: the truth can be very hard to discover in this life and justice isn’t always simple and easy. In the end Brunetti finds himself having to balance what happens against the challenges of seeking a just outcome.

---

Willful Behavior (2018) by Donna Leon is the eleventh in what is now a 33-book series featuring the Venetian detective Guido Brunetti. The story begins as Brunetti receives a visit from one of his wife’s students “with a strange and vague interest in investigating the possibility of a pardon for a crime committed by her grandfather many years ago.” The girl becomes a stabbing victim, and Brunetti’s next case, leading the detective toward long buried secrets of Nazi collaboration and the exploitation of Italian Jews during World War II.

---

A Thousand Mornings (2012) by Mary Oliver covers a lifetime of daily experience. Oliver, who writes in a style that has been described as a “pathway of invitation,” returns to the land around her Provincetown, Massachusetts home—the marshland and coastline—to observe and be amazed by the everyday.

---

Felicity (2015) by Mary Oliver is a wonderful work where “great happiness abounds.” Described as “our most delicate chronicler of physical landscape,” Oliver examines what it means to love another person” in this short book of poems. Don’t Worry, the work’s very first poem, helps us understand the notion that love, like time, works in ways mysterious and wonderful.

---

THEOLOGY AND MORE (thinking about purpose and mindfulness)

How to Fight (2017) by Thich Nhat Hanh with illustrations by Jason DeAntonis begins by reminding us that how we respond to unkindness by others is a practiced habit, resulting from well-worn pathways in our brains. We feel slighted and we generally retaliate immediately. However, we can change our minds and develop new habits, new ways of approaching life’s challenges. In these short meditations, Thich Nhat Hanh “instructs us exactly how to transform our craving and confusion.” Paradoxically, we have to learn to take good care of our suffering in order to help others do the same.

---

No Man is an Island (1955) by Thomas Merton reflects on the vital nature of community and the commandment to love our neighbor. In a series of sixteen essays, the twentieth century American monastic and writer looks at the life of the spirit and makes the case that “by integrating us in the real order established by God,” this life puts us “in the fullest possible contact with reality—not as we imagine it, but as it really is.”

---

Attitudes of Gratitude: How to Give and Receive Joy Every Day of Your Life (1999) by M.J. Ryan begins with thoughts on gifts—what happens in our lives when we begin to practice gratitude—before turning to the underpinnings of action and ending with practical ways we can develop and maintain thankfulness in our daily lives. In this series of brief motivational essays, Ryan reaches back to timeless wisdom to teach us how to unlock the fullness of life—no matter the current circumstances—through the simple joy of living from a grateful heart.

---

The Power of Reconciliation (2022) by Justin Welby addresses the issues of peacemaking for facilitators of community and societal, rather than religious, issues. It is challenging in its message and, at times, in its applicability to issues more relatable to the common reader. However, in tackling an issue that is front-and-center in today’s fractured world, it is also vitally important.

---

OUTBURSTS OF RADICAL COMMON SENSE AND WHATEVER ELSE TICKLED MY FANCY (otherwise known as the miscellaneous section)

How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks (2023) by Adam Nicolson looks at the pre-Socratic philosophers from between 800 and 450 BCE who moved us beyond the oppressive world of god-kings and their priests, and on the importance of place—Megale Hellas (Greater Greece)—in shaping how they thought. He makes the brilliant case that day-to-day existence in the “bustling port cities” of archaic Greece, where there was an emphasis on “fluidity . . . interchange and connectedness,” gave birth to philosophy. Trade, along with the coming and going of peoples and ideas that trade brings, required “new ways of thinking about the world, of configuring our relationships with one another.” It required, Nicholson asserts, a “harbor mind.”

---

The Greek Way (originally published 1930, reprinted in 2017) by Edith Hamilton is a well-known survey of Greek literature and art that is definitely a product of its time. Hamilton was a powerhouse of her age, with influences that still exist. There is much to admire in this slim work, but also much is required to place this book and Hamilton’s worldview into its proper context.

---

Moving On: A Practical Guide to Downsizing the Family Home (2013) by Janet Hulstrand and Linda Hetzer is “a downsizing bible” which includes some of the lessons they have learned in helping others with this task we all seem to face. In that process they have found “throwers” and “keepers” who, perhaps surprisingly, can work effectively together to downsize and declutter.

---

Why The Museum Matters (2022) by Daniel H. Weiss makes the case that art museums have been vital in the growth and understanding of our culture and continue to have a critical role in our communities today. A short history includes his look at the way Enlightenment ideals of “shaping ideas, advancing learning, fostering community, and providing spaces of beauty and permanence” were key to the development of the modern art museum. The future of art museums is far from secure, but Weiss sees a future “where the museum will serve a greater public while continuing to be a steward of culture and a place of discovery, discourse, inspiration, and pleasure.”

---

Now and Forever: Windows by Kerry James Marshall at Washington National Cathedral with Original Poem by Elizabeth Alexander (2023) by Washington National Cathedral tells the story of the decision in 2017 to permanently remove windows that honored Confederate Generals and replace them with two new windows at the nation’s best-known house of worship. This richly illustrated and easily accessible guide helps the reader—and ultimately those who view the new windows by acclaimed American artist Kerry James Marshall and accompanying poem by Elizabeth Alexander—put these works in context.

Enjoy!

More to come…

DJB

---

*To check out previous lists, click here for the posts from

• 2023,
• 2022, 
• 2021, 
• 2020, 
• 2019,
• 2018.

See also: Seeing myself in the books I read: 2024 observations.

---

The Weekly Reader links to the works of other writers I’ve enjoyed. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.