Hardihood Books Newsletter 44
December, 2024
Happy New Year.
Welcome to the December edition of the Hardihood Books Newsletter. Thank you for supporting my work.
This newsletter is free to the general public. Please forward it to your friends and share it on Substack and social media. Occasionally, I like to give newcomers a taste of what I offer behind the paywall, and since these sorts of year-in-books are popular on Substack, I thought it would be a good newsletter to make available to everyone.
Housekeeping:
No news.
Next Month and Beyond:
The usual publishing schedule will resume in 2025, with two short stories, two installments of a novella (I’m going to continue doing two installments in War in the Galaxy for a while, because it’s shaping up to be my longest yet by far), and two essays. Some people might wonder why I don’t stick with fiction – most of Substack is given over to nonfiction, particularly of the kind of lengthy, meandering essays I tend to write. These are the kind of articles which perform the best on Substack and I enjoy writing them.
Books I Read in 2024:
For those who are new, each year I end the year by reflecting on some of the books I read that year. I don’t list all of them, but I try to make recommendations readers may enjoy. If you are a paying subscriber, you can comment with your own list and some recommendations.
By my count, I read twenty-six books in 2024. What counts as having read a book? I count books I read cover to cover. Reading the introduction, appendices, endnotes, foreword, etc. is not required, however I usually do read these (I even sometimes skim the acknowledgements). I do not count audiobooks, for the reason that I struggle to pay attention to audiobooks in the car, and therefore rarely feel like I have fully read a book after having listened to the audiobook. I don’t count books begun in 2023 and I won’t count the book I’m currently reading, however I will mention both (Outlive by Peter Attia, and A Man of Iron by Troy Senik), because both are very good.
I have a wide taste in fiction and nonfiction, and so I usually alternate fiction and nonfiction every other book. Perhaps this seems odd, but I found that if I don’t follow this practice, I tend to get stuck in nonfiction for a while and my ability to write fiction suffers. In the future, because I read so much nonfiction in the form of articles (by wordcount, orders of magnitude greater volume than the books I read), I may need to read two fiction books to every nonfiction book. However, I find I have too many nonfiction books that I want to read, and in the last few years I’ve found myself (to my surprise) conforming more and more to the trend for male readers of enjoying nonfiction more than fiction.1
This rule isn’t hard and fast. For instance, how would I characterize Livy? Is he writing nonfiction, because his is an historical account of Rome from the early monarchy through the Republic? Or is he writing fiction (because Rome wasn’t really founded in 753 B.C. by a twin named Romulus who was nursed as a baby by a wolf)? I count it as nonfiction, because much of it is historical, and that bit which is legend (i.e., Horatius at the bridge, Scaevola, Romulus disappearing into a cloud at the end of his life) is an accurate recounting of the common Roman myths of the time (i.e., Livy is telling us that this is what people believed, or at least what they talked about). And who knows, perhaps there is more truth to some of them than we realize.2 I would count The Aeneid as fiction.
Speaking of Livy, I read Livy’s Early History of Rome (Books One through Five). Livy wrote one hundred and forty-two volumes of history, but only thirty-five of those survive. My book contains the first five of these. Livy begins at the beginning, Romulus and Remus, and takes readers through the seven kings of Rome to the founding of the Republic in 509 B.C. From there, the Early History covers the first century and a half of the Republic, ending in 386 B.C. During that time, the Twelve Tables (the Roman constitution) were written, Coriolanus and Cincinnatus had their day, and the offices of Roman government were fully developed.
It is little exaggeration to say that the first century of Republican Rome was marked alternately by wars and civil strife. When not at war with their enemies, the patricians and plebeians were close to civil war (sometimes, only external threat kept them together). On multiple occasions, with enemies at the gates, the plebeians refused to fight, only to be convinced to give it one last stand by some rallying speech by a consul or senator, who would lead the Roman people to a resounding victory. Then the patricians would stab the plebeians in the back (or vice versa) and they’d be at each other’s throats again.
But through this conflict came the construction and expansion of Roman civil society, Roman institutions, and Roman law. Various figures are constantly giving speeches (written by Livy) about fidelity to the law, free society, fair administration of justice, rights of free men, and equality before the law. To be sure, Rome fell far short from these in many regards and at many times, but Livy’s inclusion of them speaks to a Roman tradition which emphasized such things, however imperfect their society was. Being temperamentally inclined to measure societies based on the worst human beings are capable of, rather than the best I can imagine, I am constantly impressed by the achievements of Roman civilization two millennia ago. Of all the Roman historians I have read, I have liked Tacitus and Livy the best, for both believed in the ideal of Rome. In my favorite line from the entire book, Livy said, “I hope my passion for Rome’s past has not impaired my judgements, for I do honestly believe that no country has ever been greater or purer than ours, or richer in good citizens and noble deeds.”
As mentioned, I began the year by finishing Outlive, by Peter Attia, which I started in 2023. I am a fan of Attia’s podcast and would generally recommend the book to anyone interested in health and longevity. I’m agnostic on his stance towards cancer screening (i.e., aggressive and early screenings), which is the most controversial part of the book. On the subject I am most qualified to comment on, physical exercise, I wish more people followed the recommendations in his book, which are very sound.
After that, I read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein. For those who haven’t read it, the moon, which has been turned into a penal colony, declares independence from Earth on the Fourth of July, 2076, and wages a war for liberty and self-determination. This was easily my second-favorite Heinlein novel, behind the unfairly-maligned Starship Troopers.
Speaking of science fiction, I read Andy Weir’s Hail Mary. The Martian was decent, but this was much better. Weir is coming into his own and will establish himself as one of the great science fiction authors of the twenty-first century by the end of his career. I wrote about Hail Mary in an essay from earlier this year.
The best novel I read this year was S. by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. I reviewed it here. I highly recommend this book for anyone who likes stories with puzzles in them. It reminded me of the children’s series by Lemony Snicket – A Series of Unfortunate Events – except less macabre. Even if you’re not typically the kind of person who would read this sort of book (I’m not), I think you’ll enjoy it.
I thoroughly loved Walt Harrington’s Artful Journalism. If you have any interest at all in writing, or if you enjoy reading newspapers, you will find it worth reading. Harrington gives very solid advice to young journalists (writers) and also offers commentary on the philosophy of journalism. By which I mean that he denounces the creeping trend of the last thirty years (which is unfortunately taught in some journalism schools) that not all the facts of a particular story need, strictly speaking, be true, so long as the narrative is true. He points out that we have a word for this: lying. In memorable passages, he recounts the great lengths he went to make sure that every single mundane fact (i.e., the temperature of the day, the details of the flora and fauna, etc.) he reported in every story was exactly correct.
Benjamin Dreyer would tell me that I should have ditched the word “exactly” in the previous sentence, although I felt the need to depart from good grammar to hammer home a point that too many journalists appear to miss. Exactly correct may be redundant, but judging from the number of reporters whose standards for “true” falls somewhat short of “actually happened” when certain “facts” conveniently fit their story, it needed emphasizing.
Speaking of Dreyer, I read (and loved) Dreyer’s English, which is part style guide, part book on style. It isn’t a substitute for The Elements of Style (by William Strunk and E.B. White), which I plan to reread in 2025, but it covers a number of topics which have grown in relevance in the internet age. Dreyer laces it with stories from his editing days, including one from when he copyedited Richard Russo’s Straight Man.
I also read Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction, which takes on English-class topics such as setting and character from a standpoint of “how does a writer actually achieve a certain effect in the reader?” I highly recommend it for anyone who writes fiction.
I was slightly disappointed by Amor Towles A Table for Two, which is well-written, but is not of the caliber of A Lincoln Highway. The best story in it is the novella at the end.
Similarly, I was disappointed with Sophie’s World, a middle grade (young adult) novel from the early 1990s which teaches the history of Western philosophy through a young girl’s eyes. I’ve long been intrigued by it, but found that the bizarre plot mostly served as a vehicle for somewhat dry descriptions about Plato and Aristotle and Kierkegaard, better versions of which could be found on Wikipedia. There were mischaracterizations, convenient holes, and even the occasional error in these descriptions, and the girl often offers very anodyne commentary (i.e., to the effect that people in the past should have treated women better, or that the environment is important) which isn’t very profound or illustrative of anything. I also found it interesting that a nearly five-hundred-page novel on the history of Western Civilization never contains the words “America” or “United States.”3 Finally, the girl’s father’s hopes that the efforts of his U.N. peacekeepers to bring about world peace seemed remarkably naïve and foolish in the light of what happened in the intervening decades. This was made obvious by the fact that he is stationed in Lebanon, and I was reading the book as Lebanon figured heavily in the news this past year (which, if those U.N. peacekeeping efforts had been anything other than a failure, it wouldn’t have, or at least it wouldn’t have in the way that it did).
Finally, I have some honorable mentions. Kurt Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House, On the Laws and On the Commonwealth by Cicero (which I count as two separate books because he wrote them years apart, although neither survived to the modern era fully intact), The Prince by Machiavelli, The Star-Rover by Jack London, Tortilla Flat and The Moon is Down and Cannery Row by John Steinbeck, What the Anti-Federalists Were For by Herbert Storing, Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg (a history of an ideology – the title is taken from a quotation by H.G. Wells, who said that what America and Britain needed was a “liberal fascism,” or an “enlightened Nazism”), Reflections of a Neoconservative by Irving Kristol, Has Anybody Seen My Toes by Christopher Buckley, and The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H.G. Parry (a touching and lovely story which any lover of fantasy and literature from the 19th century should enjoy).
In the new year, I plan to reach the second volume of Plutarch’s Lives (I don’t have the first), The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter, and The English Experience by Julie Shumacher, in addition to other books.
In Closing:
Thank You and Until Next Year,
Ben Connelly
Women buy and read most fiction, including I believe in stereotypically “male” genres. Men tend to read business books, self-help, biography, history, and popular science.
By which I don’t mean that Romulus and Remus were raised by wolves, but that Publius Horatius Cocles may have been a real person.
The Soviet Union, which hadn’t fallen when the book was written, merits only a very vague, passing reference.