I've been thinking about five books that stayed with me in 2024.
From the dozens I read this year, here are five books that have stuck with me.
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The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson (2020)
I remember Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring, published in September 1962, as the first book that had an impact on me about the threat industrial waste poses to our environment. It was the first time I realized that - in the name of our capitalist system - we were eating away at ourselves and our children’s future. I’ve become concerned enough in the past decade to read a bit more about the effects of climate change and its growing threat.
Then last winter our high school grandson was assigned The Ministry for the Future, a novel by science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, published in 2020, which I read along with him. I’m suddenly (if delinquently) stunned by the disaster we’re perpetuating.
Robinson begins with a fictional mid-2020s catastrophe in India where as many as twenty million people die in a heat wave when the temperature reaches 120 degrees Fahrenheit every day for weeks. The eponymous Ministry for the Future is a group created by a world-wide consortium of nations to understand the crisis and develop plans to finally deal with it. Conflicts between environmentalists and industrialists, whether individuals or governmental bodies, delay and confuse and for a time scuttle the process.
I had always dismissed science fiction as so much space opera: variations on themes from Star Wars. This book and Ursula Le Guin’s Language of the Night, which I read last summer, have changed my mind. I realized that the human stories and themes, however planted they may be in some strange landscape (or moonscape!), are as resonant with truth as the best of literary fiction that I read.
In this case, science fiction anticipated what is now our very nonfictional reality. 2024 will be the hottest year on record for the planet, just as last year was. Late last spring, temperatures in India settled in around 120 degrees Fahrenheit as Islamic worshippers made their Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Thirteen hundred pilgrims died from the heat.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin (2022)
I’ve never played a video game. (When I shared these first two reviews with a friend, she shot back at me, What’s wrong with you? No science fiction! No video games!)
I do remember when Pong came out in the 1970s and I watched my young children play, wondering what was so captivating about making a ball move back and forth across a dark TV screen. Since then, as the world of video games has exploded, I’ve had friends and family who are devoted to them, none of whom have persuaded me to give these games a whirl.
This book is the story of very young people who begin as dedicated players and by their late teens and into their twenties begin developing new games. It is a fascinating culture in which brilliance and social shyness, enormous income and the constant threat of failure coexist.
Like Ministry for the Future, which also introduced me to a new world, what captivated me were the relationships, this time among a group of young geniuses. By the end, the stories about rivalries in inventing and selling games becomes a very touching, very real love story in which two of these creators, having ricocheted from partner to partner, finally bump into one another again, too young to be as worn out as they are, too wealthy to fit in with so many of their generation, yet well-suited to find in one another not only the capacity to create games together but the bravery to settle into a life together.
I finished this book with a great sense of satisfaction: unlike my assumption that gaming was an escape from everyday life, I realize it's an expression of the deep humanity of those who create and play these games.
The Awakening, by Kate Chopin (1899)
The Awakening is the story of a young woman crammed into the expectations of a turn-of-the-century Edwardian culture; a world defined by men and reinforced by the women who conform to their dictates.
We first meet Edna Pontellier when she is a twenty-eight-year-old depressed mother of two who leaves most of the duties of raising her children to their nanny, much to the disdain of Léonce Pontellier, her proper businessman husband. The source of her unhappiness is a conflict that has troubled and confused her since she was a little girl:
At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life: that outward existence which conforms, the inward life that questions.
Now in her late twenties, on the edge of being dragged wholly into the roles and relationships assigned to her by her family and society, Edna opts out (her Awakening), leaves her husband and children and the polite society assigned to her, and finds her way as a single woman.
What I appreciated about Chopin’s heroine was not just the agency she claimed for herself but her willingness to live with the consequences of her decisions, including the difficulties and losses she encounters in choosing and creating her own independent future. Edna is a complex, fully articulated person - far more than the roles she's been expected to fill or the roles we wish she would fill as a feminist heroine. The brief final chapter is the culmination of her frustrating quest for freedom and an example of Chopin’s exquisite writing.
I’ve spent my adult lifetime scraping my way out of the patriarchal view of men and women I was raised with. I’ve read about and listened to the economic, political, and relational experiences of women as they were forced back into their 1950s post-war roles as wives and mothers, after having sustained the domestic family and economic worlds through the years of combat.
I have come to believe that when we have enough perspective to assess American culture in the twentieth century, this transition in the roles and identities of women as part of the broader struggle for civil rights and liberation may be one of the most significant social transformations of that century. As a husband, father, and grandfather of women, and in my work as a therapist, I’ve had personal connections to women in their various stages of this process. In shedding my patriarchal privileges, I share their continuing conflict so beautifully rendered in Edna’s character: that outward existence which conforms, the inward life that questions.
In learning to understand Edna from within her own world, I realize that these women I know and love have a predecessor: a twenty-eight-year-old wife and mother of two who risked her own worldly comfort and status to live from the inside out, not the outside in.
On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service, by Anthony Fauci (2024)
I don’t remember hearing Anthony Fauci’s name until 2019 when the Covid pandemic hit us like a runaway train, but it turns out he’s been leading our country’s viral research and vaccine interventions since Ronald Reagan was president. He was head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) from 1984 until he resigned in 2022 during the Biden administration.
Before he was the center of controversy during Covid, he had been the lead researcher and public face of efforts to contain the 2002–2004 epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and the outbreak in West Africa of Ebola in 2013-2016. His greatest achievement before leading our fight against Covid 19 was his work to find ways to combat the spread of AIDS which first appeared in the USA in the early 1970s and by the 1980s had become a plague, especially among gay men. In heated collaboration with gay activists, he led the urgent research that developed the first USA trials for AIDS vaccines in the early 1990s.
What gripped me as I read this memoir was Fauci’s consistent personal and professional integrity. President Reagan waited four years into his presidency before publicly naming AIDS as a national health crisis. Without bending to political forces from the left or the right, Fauci allowed the voices of the LGBTQ community to influence the urgency of his work in his lab and in raising funds for and public awareness about the epidemic.
Fauci became the face of vaccine politics during the Covid crisis, and was blamed for school closings, mandatory masking, vaccine requirements, and the denial of individual liberty by those who opposed these government interventions, despite strong evidence in support of their life-saving effects. Whether in his lab, at a presidential press briefing, or before a hostile congressional committee, he said what he believed, defended his and his colleagues’ research, and never shifted responsibility away from himself toward anyone else.
For his humane and professional commitment to public health, his contributions to the well-being of tens of millions of people in our country and around the world, as a model of community service, and for being a wonderful human being, he deserves an honored place in modern American history. On Call makes this case with overwhelming clarity.
The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World, by Sharon Brous (2024)
In 2004, when she was thirty years old, Rabbi Sharon Brous and a few friends founded IKAR, a congregation in Los Angeles that pays particular attention to young Jews who have given up on traditional religious practices but find themselves longing for a spiritual home, a community they can turn to for friendships, spiritual insight, comfort and care in times of suffering and despair.
I’ve been an ordained Christian minister since 1966 and although I’ve lived in interfaith conversations and social justice work for most of those years, I’ve never embedded myself in a Jewish community. What makes IKAR so attractive, and this book so compelling, is that it doesn’t begin with a recital of specific religious beliefs or required practices. Instead, it is a collection of stories about people in trouble who find, or occasionally resist, the embrace of a collection of come-as-you-are folks who begin their conversation not with what their faith is about but with riveting interest in who you are and whatever you might want or need from this community.
In her introduction, Brous writes,
The very human longing for connection – in our most intimate relationships, in community, with strangers, perhaps with God – is what I call the amen effect. It is a spiritual strategy, a sacred call to the faithful and the cynical, the believer and the atheist, perhaps especially to those alienated by religious certainties but still yearning to find meaning in moments both sacred and mundane.
With this initial invitation, I plowed through page after page, story after story, that invited me to examine my own deepest beliefs and needs, and to reach out to create such amen effects with friends and strangers.
Brous gets very practical about how to be a part of such a community. First, show up even at events, like funerals, that are difficult. Second, get to know your neighbors; take the initiative. Third, treat every person as an image of the Divine. Fourth, be of service every day. Fifth, find moments of joy and indulge in them. Sixth, tell the truth, even when the truth is that you’re having a really bad day. Seventh, don’t rush to fix someone’s problem, just sit in it with them. Eighth, don’t leave the conversation just because it’s uncomfortable.
My wife and I belong to a large progressive Christian congregation that has an historic and immediate commitment to social justice. But because of our size and our generational, economic, religious, racial, and ethnic diversity, it’s too easy for personal suffering and the need for quiet care to get lost in the tumult of our activism. Even in our personal need to be involved in too much and often in a rush to get it all done, we walk past those Beloveds who live close to a darkness that, in our hurry, we don’t stop to recognize or step into with them. We miss too many opportunities to engage in our own amen effects.
Beautifully written, bluntly honest about suffering, full of practical ways to be in community: what’s not to love about The Amen Effect! It’s a book I will return to time and again.