#reading 2024

[starrynightsxo]

"it's literally just a book" okay, and? I don't see your point.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"The spectre of corporal punishment continued to hang over fishing communities in the early nineteenth century. An incident which occurred in Burin in 1810 illustrates the symbiotic relationship between sectarian tension, class conflict, and the use of public whipping. According to the local justice of the peace, the problem started when he sentenced a local man to be whipped:

In the first place a man was brought before me with a complaint that he had gone on board one of Mr. Spurrier's vessels, prevented the crew from working and beat two of them and threatened the master - his sentence was to receive 39 lashes at the usual place of punishment - but the morning the punishment should have taken place nearly the whole of the Irish servants came to Mr. Morris (a merchant here) and offered £150 rather than it should be executed (the punishment) - but they had said before should the prisoner be brought to the place of punishment, they would shed some blood and take him away by force - Some other cases of the same nature, and equally as bad, have now come before me - when the people have threatened to take the life of the first constable that should attempt to apprehend the offender.

The magistrate viewed this incident as involving much more than simply a protest against whipping. He portrayed it as the outbreak of a serious challenge to the social order which only the presence of the Royal Navy could extinguish:

The Irish servants (which are very numerous) are at this time absolutely in a state of mutiny and without some armed force be stationed here, the lives of the inhabitants are in danger. Probably on account of their wages they may be kept within bounds until the expiration of their time of servitude (20th October) but, when they become their own masters, I could not answer for them. If His Excellency therefore would have the goodness to station one of His Majesty's Schooners here for the Winter, it would have an excellent effect and I have not a doubt but that regularity and good behaviour would, by that means be kept in this district.

So long as servants were kept under contract, they were seen as controllable, but the justice of the peace dreaded the prospect of facing masterless men. Like his predecessors in the eighteenth century, he saw the Royal Navy as the vital safeguard of authority."

- Jerry Bannister, The Rule of the Admirals: Law, Custom, and Naval Government in Newfoundland, 1699-1832 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 253-254.

[theimpalatales]

Dracula referring to his books as “my friends” is both hilarious and relatable

[thebellaedit]

“That same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”

Moby-Dick

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[cromulentreader]

Reading Peeta announcing a made-up marriage and pregnancy was the funniest thing I read all year.

[floweroftheforest]

2024 Reading List

These are all the books that I read over the course of this year:

(Not pictured Catch 22 cause I gave it away)

My favourite book I read this year was We Have Always Lived In The Castle (Shirley Jackson, my beloved)

[froguemorgue]

my goodreads yearly review 😫 wish i could have not finished the love hypothesis but i promised my friend i'd read. not my cup of tea in any universe.

love hypothesis is RUINING MY VIBE!!!!

[lightthewaybackhome]

Watership Down by Richard Adams My rating: 5 of 5 stars 2024: I completely missed that last year was my 30th anniversary of when I first read this wonderful book. I will say that reading it yet again this year, I continue to have the same reaction: tears and loneliness when I finish. This book is like getting to go home and then having to leave over and over and over. A couple of new things this year: First, I decided that I'm going to alternate each year between the audiobook and the paperback. The years I read HP I'm going to use the audio book. Second, I somehow missed that Adams served in WW2 in the past, but always felt like he must have based on the way he wrote the rabbits. Lo and behold, it's in the introduction and I feel like an idiot. He did serve in WW2. You can really feel it in the book. Third, I was struck by the end when they listened to the doe tell a story about El-ahrairah and Rabscuttle and it's Hazel and Fiver's story. They had been woven into El-ahrairah's myth. For some reason that really stood out to me as something exquisitely beautiful. I'll miss my friends until next September. 2023: my goal was to read this book as quickly as possible, just really focus and soak it in. Man, I love this book. Every time I read it, I love it even more. The warrior story, Hobbit, Englishness of it all. It's just so good. 2022: Much like Lord of the Rings and Band of Brothers, this book feels like coming home. It's turned into one of my coziest reads and feels like very old friends. Each time I read it now, I'm struck by the WW2/Hobbit feel of it. The free rabbits stand up to the power-hungry tyrant and succeeding. Then, making life better for everyone. I love this book. 2021 re-read: finishing this on a cold, wet, lat November evening was perfect. This is the first time in years that I've read the book instead of doing an audio book. It took me a while to read it not in the narrators's voice, which made the reading slow going. Once I adjusted, I was fine. I love this book more every time I read it. It's such a perfect blend of fairy-tale, horror, nature documentary, and English warriors. I don't know why I'm always surprised by how hobbitish it is. The whole book is a bunch of Hobbits. Also, this time I was able to translate Bigwig's insult of Woundwart almost subconsciously. I just started laughing. I had to look one word up, but yeah, I just translated the Lapine into English. Again, just like reading Harry Potter, I don't understand how anyone who has read this book is buying into the idea that we can give up freedoms for safety without it becoming tyranny. It's never for the greater good. Love this book. Love it. ----- Third read through, so probably 4th or 5th time I've read this book. There were beautiful scenes that really stood out sharply, and I giggled at the creative cussing. But really, I just love everything about this book. ---- I just finished this book again as part of my Annual Autumn Reading. I love this book so much. I think I love it cause it's like reading a whole book just about hobbits. This is one of those books I love because I hate finishing it. I hate it. It just, I just cry and cry because it's like all my friends have kept running without me. ---- A beautiful story. probably one of my top five favorite books. Parts of it remind me of Lord of the Rings while others remind me of Band of Brothers. It has that very British Country feel that I love along with the mixture of happy and sadness, youth and old age, and then Just a hint of war. Beautifully done. View all my reviews

[mollfie]

I am a quarter of the way through Homeland and I had a few messages warning me that the books are old and might not hold up and ... what are you talking about, this is so good??? I've read old fantasy books from the same era that are way worse. It's fun and a bit camp but that's exactly how a D&D book should be.

I'm not here for literary fiction. I'm here to have a good time. I don't want to read anything else which is kind of bad because I should be reading a book for work...

[nocticola]

Reading 2024: Laura Eklund Nhaga Demi & Ace Audiobooks [English] (2022) Read by Laura Eklund Nhaga & Katri Swan

Episode 1 My Last Time (10.7.2024)

Episode 2 Call Me Foreigner (10.7.2024)

Episode 3 Show Your Work (28.7.2024)

Episode 4 When Harry Met Demi (28.7.2024)

Episode 5 Unit of One (28.7.2024)

Episode 6 Ai Querida (28.7.2024)

[starrynightsxo]

books, books & more books...

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"The contested legitimacy of law threatened the political stability of the two parties. That Republicans took over at the moment of Prohibition’s constitutional codification complicated the emerging identity of conservative politics. Republicans notoriously provided little funding and federal oversight, and reformers thus had a convenient scapegoat for social dysfunction for which their own forbearers were largely responsible.

Prohibition’s unpopularity also flummoxed Democrats. Prohibition was both the grand culmination of bourgeois progressivism and anathema to the Democratic base, which had championed the right to drink since its clashes with antebellum Whigs. The Democrats identified the problems of legitimacy and lawlessness in the early 1920s but vowed to make Prohibition work. In the 1920 presidential election both Democrat James Cox and Republican Warren Harding were reluctant to divulge their enforcement plans, frustrating the Anti-Saloon League. Ultimately Cox signaled moderate support for the Eighteenth Amendment, a question “as dead as the issue of slavery,” and pledged full commitment to enforcement. Cox and his running mate Franklin D. Roosevelt lost to Warren Harding. In 1924, Democrat John Davis ran against Harding’s and Coolidge’s reputation of cronyism. Davis related law and order to his identification as “a progressive . . . [who] cannot see a wrong persist without an effort to redress it.” He lamented an impotent executive branch and a vigilante atmosphere, in which “administration of the law” had become a matter “little different from those of private vengeance.” The answer resided in steadfast “enforcement of the law, and all the law,” whether against “wealth that endeavors to restrain trade and create monopoly" or against liquor. Officials failing to enforce Prohibition should be held in contempt. Davis denounced the lawless social conflict undercutting political legitimacy. The “solidarity of the great war” had yielded to “a chaos of blocs and sections and classes and interests, each striving for its own advantage, careless of the welfare of the whole.”

Talk of national unity and the rule of law could not conceal the widespread violence and lawlessness, the corruption from top to bottom. Enforcement was conspicuously uneven, targeting the poor and people of color. In the legal black hole of upside-down federalism, enforcement sometimes fell to vigilantes, a haunting echo of World War I. Lawlessness abounded in both the flouting and the enforcement of the law. In September 1924, New York judge Alfred J. Talley was quoted condemning America’s high murder rate in an article titled “The Most Lawless Nation in the World.” In 1926, in testimony before a Senate committee, he attributed a doubling of homicide rates, and rampant corruption and crime, to the impossibility of enforcing Prohibition.

Americans agreed that Prohibition’s shortcomings could not be ignored, but sharply disagreed on the remedy. Some rethought their positions and others became more vigilant. Irving Fisher had opposed Prohibition but told Congress in 1926 that he had “radically changed” his “attitude,” and advocated “increasing the legal machinery” and only “fuller enforcement” would bring “real personal liberty.” In 1929 the Bureau of Prohibition moved from the Treasury to the Justice Department. That same year Assistant Attorney General Mabel Willebrandt conceded that her policy unleashed lawlessness. She condemned the “wholly unwarranted . . . killing by prohibition agents,” decried the hypocrites drinking while they enforced Prohibition. But she proposed strengthened enforcement, better coordination between Justice and the Treasury, more controls on industrial alcohol, tightening the border with Canada, and abolishing patronage.

Willebrandt, “First Lady of the Law,” embodied this difficult time for both progressivism and the Republicans. Her presence in ways brightly captured the reform spirit as she had championed the hodgepodge of early-century progressive causes. She opposed Prohibition personally but supported strict enforcement for the sake of legal integrity. At any rate, Prohibition soon became her albatross. It had promised a middle ground of order between extremes and between different class interests. But instead of producing a middle ground between anarchy and despotism, it produced a mixture of both—the sort of fusion of lawlessness and mobilization that could be organized in a coherent, politically viable manner during warfare, but not during peacetime. America was in a state of pacifist militarism, drained from war but lackadaisically mobilized, and it needed rationalization under new structural and ideological patterns. Many progressive reformers, seeking more humane conditions for prisons or police reform, had staked their lot with Prohibition and lost credibility."

- Anthony Gregory, New Deal Law and Order: How the War on Crime Built the Modern Liberal State (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Univervisity Press, 2024), 60-63.

[theimpalatales]

"You smiled. Even though I couldn't see you, I could tell. You smiled and in my head it was as bright as day."

Yellow

(If you use my link, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org whose fees support independent bookshops.)

[reelaroundthedavekan]

Decided to increase my StoryGraph reading goal to 44 books for 2025. My goal in 2024 was 40 and I got to 42 (14,107 pages), so I think I can do it.

If you like to track your reading, I highly recommend StoryGraph (https://app.thestorygraph.com). It is a great alternative to GoodReads and they are constantly adding new features.

Here are my books from 2024

[thebellaedit]

"If I had been downright honest with myself, I would have seen very plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea. But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing, and tried to think nothing."

Moby-Dick

(If you use my link, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org whose fees support independent bookshops.)

[cromulentreader]

“Though she wasn't easy on the eyes, she was easy on his soul.” ― Grace Draven, Radiance It turns out I really needed Revulsed-to-Lovers in my life. This is possibly the best romance I've read this year. I'm a bit over the halfway mark and loving this one.