Favorite not-fiction of my 2024

But I'm different honey, I'm from way down in the south

Nonfiction books

Thomas Brothers: Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism

Covering 1922 to 1932, this is one of the best books I’ve read at combining technical musicology with cultural context. Diagramming “Big Butter and Egg Man”, Brothers draws attention to minor differences in rhythm likely workshopped to engage crowds at the Sunset Cafe in Chicago, plus implied chords that suggest he learned some theory from Lil and/or some random German guy, all of which would mean zip without what Brothers calls the “fixed and variable model” and what Louis’s spiritual descendants might call a “song with a fucking beat”: unmistakably African-American and not many generations removed from Africa. What the hell Pops did to “Star Dust” remains inexplicable.

David Wootton: Galileo: Watcher of the Skies

Most interesting to me was Wootton’s necessarily speculative outline of the development of Galileo’s empiricism. It seems very likely that Galileo was a dedicated heliocentrist long before his telescope observations gave definitive evidence Ptolemy was wrong (though arguably not proof that Copernicus was right.) If so, this has profound implications for our understanding of how science as we know it coalesced, and since this is at the low end one of the five most important things to happen in the history of the world, I’m going to write an essay on this aren’t I ugghhhh.

Tricia Romano: The Freaks Came Out to Write

ERIC WEISBARD: Yeah, by ’91 at the latest nobody understood what Christgau was writing about. To this day I don’t know if Peter Stampfel really exists.

NELSON GEORGE: Bob was the best editor I ever had. I once came in with 2,000 words on Luther Vandross, and after going back and forth for three hours, we cut it down to the single word “suave”. And then he changed it to “moist”.

ROBERT CHRISTGAU: Did I mention that I went to Dartmouth?

Tina Post: Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression

It starts with the above Rich Homie Quan (RIP) T-shirt, quickly moves on to on-camera Black deadpan from Joe Louis to queuers in a relief line, then takes a long tour through performance and gallery art like Malevich’s Black Square and its echoes in contemporary artists like Glenn Ligon. It ends with a chapter on Buster Keaton, who traveled with one Willie Riddle for ten years, and about whose race one can make a “reasonable inference”. Academic but just readable enough for the interested lay reader.

Jonathan Eig: King: A Life

Unlike the Taylor Branch books, a traditional biography. So you get a lot more on MLK’s early life, which is important to understanding the development of his thought, and his affairs, which is important to understanding the sheer variety of his extramarital life, I guess. Lots of Coretta, a useful corrective. I do prefer the Branch books, however, which is just to say I prefer history to biography.

Robert Bradley: Eating Peru: A Gastronomic Journey

As a first-timer in Peru, this was of some but limited use as a guidebook, since no matter how good the seafood in random North Coast beach towns sounded, I was going to do the Lima-Cusco-Machu Picchu gringo trail. (Glad I threw in Trujillo, though.) Still I found value in sorting through the different varieties of peppers and potatoes, and in the discussion of how Peru’s recent rise in status as a gastronomic destination has mostly benefitted intellectuals and the bourgeoisie (and as an academic travel writer, Bradley’s as much a bourgeois intellectual as I am.)

Extremely niche book of the year, but my two subscribers who might be interested should read it already: Jon Langmead, Ballyhoo!

Poems

I read a bunch in Spanish this year, so here let’s focus on stuff in mostly-English (one of the below does have some Spanish and two have Chinese, with the one by a longtime crony of mine naturally the more obscene):

Alice Notley: The Fortune Teller (much more readable version in Being Reflected Upon, my poetry book of the year)

Brandon Som: Close Reading

Jorie Graham: Translation Rain

Robyn Schiff: Information Desk (complete version in the book of the same name)

Tze Ming Mok: Last Time in Hong Kong

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Fiction list coming Christmas-ish.