Month: December 2024

My 2024 Reading List

One of my resolutions last year was to just read more for pleasure and indeed fiction proved one of my most joyful escapes in what was a pretty rough year. I kept things fairly light, with a lot of genre fiction I had been meaning to get to for a while now (I have the long running goal of reading all the Hugo Award winners). I think I had wanted to read a couple dozen books and I got close. If we count Moon Witch, Spider King as a few books considering the length, I think I can say I achieved my goal.

Here’s my list of books I read (not counting any for work), with some scattered thoughts.

  1. Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher – My hot take is that while the shenanigans around Babel at the 2023 Hugo Awards was deplorable, the better book actually won.
  2. Network Effect by Martha Wells – How many series just get better and better?
  3. Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf – Finally knocked this one off my to-read list and am looking forward to watching the Tilda Swinton adaptation this year.
  4. Pietre le Letton by Georges Simenon – First in a couple of old-school mysteries I read this year.
  5. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler – The second
  6. Number Go Up by Zeke Faux – I normally avoid pop history/reporting turned into books, but this was a funny, lucid explanation of the bs behind crypto.
  7. Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow
  8. Count Zero by William Gibson – Will finish this trilogy this year.
  9. Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychadelic Science by Benjamin Breen – I blogged about this one.
  10. Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
  11. To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer
  12. Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch by Gretch Rivka – The best historical fiction I’ve read in a good while.
  13. Just Kids by Patti Smith – As memorable as everyone said it would be
  14. The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei
  15. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin – Entertaining, but my gamer brain kept telling me that the central creation of the story couldn’t have been made before the Indie game surge of the 2000s.
  16. The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hsashi Kashiwai – Made me so hungry.
  17. Moon Witch, Spider King by Marlon James
  18. Near Strangers by Marian Crotty
  19. Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion
  20. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Paris and the Public Urinal

The “Homewood Privy, c . 1801,” Johns Hopkins University Homewood Campus, Personal Photograph.

One of my ongoing academic obsessions, since they were the subject of my very first publication, is the history of public urinals. I even got to help out with a memorial plaque that’s going up in Paris at one of the last remaining pissotières in the city (not sure if it’s up yet). I can’t help but notice them, especially historic ones like the one on Johns Hopkins’s campus in Baltimore pictured above, when wandering around a city. But also when they pop up elsewhere. Right now I’m reading Patricia Highsmiths’s The Talented Mr. Ripley for the first time and when Tom first goes to Paris he describes what he first notices:

It was the atmosphere of the city that he loved, the atmosphere that he had always heard about, crooked streets, gray-fronted houses with skylights, noisy car horns, and everywhere public urinals and columns with brightly colored theater notices on them.

The public urinal indelibly marked the city, here as one part of its very modernity. The Talented Mr. Ripley first appeared in 1955; by the 1980s, the classic pissotières were removed in favor of the self-cleaning (and pretty gross) facilities that now dot the Parisian landscape.