RECOMMENDED READING.

Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn offers his list of "The Best Books I Read in 2024."  I like his criteria for picking books.

These are my favorite books from the year, with my entire reading list linked at the end. I love to read and this is meant to be fun, so please treat it in that spirit.

I know some of you will be disappointed that I don’t read more planning, engineering or urbanism books. I’m sorry, but they rarely interest me. I do read many of these books during the year, but unless I remember them (I generally read them in hardcover and don’t mark them down anywhere), they don’t make my list. So, this post is the actual list of books that I read in the past year.

I read only what interests me.

He offers a familiar bibliophile's complaint.

The older I get, the more I’ve found myself unwilling to spend time on books that I don’t find an immediate urgency around. They might be amazing books, but if it’s not what I’m burrowing into at the moment, I’m very unlikely to dive in.

There's some of that at work here at Cold Spring Shops, where there are lots of books that qualify for a review, but getting excited enough to write one is another matter.

Over there, on the other hand, is a very interesting greatest hits list.  You think Washington politicians are too full of themselves?  Put yourself where Louis XIV ought to go alone.

It was all part of a strategy to raise money while keeping your enemies close, but I can’t imagine being the family that paid big money for the hereditary appointment allowing them to remove the king’s chamberpot each day. Yet, someone did, as others did for hundreds of menial posts, all to have privileged access to the king.

There's much more, concluding (correctly) with modern monetary theory being an "apologia for our current bad economics."