A 2024 Reading-List for 2025 (partial)

I list a few of the books that I read and/or reread in 2024. I list them because I think you too ought to read them in 2025. A dozen or so of them can be summed up it a review essay I published in Fall 2024 dealing with Gilles Kepel’s body of work, but especially his interventions of the last fourteen months. A link to the essay is copied here.

Importantly, these books reminded me, the child of war that I remain, that war is grim; that you should never start a war; that one ought to never enter war without an exit plan. Nizar Qabbani said it best in his brilliant 1967 Marginalia on the Notebook of Defeat; “This is the summary or our defeat,” he wrote in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab defeat (he was incidentally one of the few Arabs of his time (and ours) to admit defeat when defeat there was):

The summary of our tragedy is that wage war armed with the Oriental’s knack for oration and verbiage,

With empty bravado, saber rattling, hectoring, and rhetorical arm-flexing that never killed a fly…

We enter war with obsessive virility trying to prove our manliness…

We enter wars without an exit plan; knowing how to start them, not knowing how to end them…

Yes, it’s you he was talking to. Yeah, yeah you. You know who you are.

And this was only 1967. But October 7, 2023 and its aftermath came to show that very little, since, has changed.

Here are a couple of relevant (poignant) quotes from a couple of the (older) books, before listing the titles themselves, and a very Happy New Year. Let us try doing better next year.

First Camus, because he described October 7, 2023 three quarters of a century earlier; then Dorgelès, because he described it with even more clarity a whole century earlier (both my translations from the French originals).

Camus (ca. 1955):

Night had fallen, after a torrid day, in this corner of the Atlas where the detachment had set up camp at the top of a soft hill guarded by a rocky gorge. Cormery and Levesque were slated to relieve the sentry at the bottom of the gorge. They called out to their comrades, but no one was answering their calls.? Then, at the foot of a hedge of prickly pears, they finally located a comrade. His head was turned backwards, oddly facing the moon. At first they had not recognized him given the strange shape of his head from their angle. But the explanation was quite simple. His throat had been slit open, and from his mouth protruded a livid swelling, which turned out to be his genitalia. It was then that they got a full view of the body, with its legs spread apart, the soldier’s trousers split open, and its middle section, now under an indirect reflection of the moon, twinkled a muddy puddle. A hundred meters further down, behind a large rock, the second sentry had been presented in the same way, in the same choreographed carnage […] Incensed at the scene, Cormery cried out that “those who did this were not human beings”; that “they were not men.” Levesque… replied that, for them, that was precisely what men did, how real men behaved and ought to behave; their culture, their ways. “Perhaps,” replied Cormery, “but they are wrong; a man does not do what they did." Levesque pushed back, noting that for them, in certain circumstances, a man must bring himself to doing exactly what they did, what may to other be unthinkable. But Cormery screamed as if seized in a fit of madness: “No! Manhood, manliness is about restraint; about self-control; a man restrains himself; that is what a man does...” adding “you see, I am poor; I come out of an orphanage; they slapped this outfit on me; they dragged me into this war; but, me, I restrain myself."

Dorgelès (ca. 1916):

War is bloody; war is devastation; war is trenches and retreats, and terrible forced marches… without respite, without soup, without ends in sight… War is the wounded terrified and stumbling… war is stragglers, haggardly and stalled out before getting shot by gendarmes putting them out of their misery; war is abandoned knapsacks, family photographs, personal effects, and military artifacts thrown into ditches along forlorn roads; war is a single day’s battle, always fierce, sometimes crowned with a pyrrhic victory, always ending in loss… War is furtive stolen “stone slumbers” caught on an embankment, or on a roadside, with passing caissons crushing the feet of those tarrying in their sleep; war is pillaged grocery stores, devastated farms, moldy bread viciously fought over, voraciously wolfed down; war is roads strewn with carpet weavers and oxencarts and cluttered paths where children and women in tears pile up… war is villages consumed by flames, blown up homes and roads and bridges, friends bloodied and exhausted but left all the same behind… war is tragic columns of utter human devastation, at their nadir, still being chased by relentless barking cannons…”

And now, the books that say it best:

Houris (Kamel Daoud),

The Revenge of Geography (Robert Kaplan),

Le Premier Homme (Albert Camus),?

La Promesse de l’Aube (Romain Gary),

Les Croix de Bois (Roland Dorgelès),

De Gaulle; A Certain Idea of France (Julian Jackson),

The Thirty-Year Genocide (Benny Morris)

Woke Racism (John McWhorter)

The Parasitic Mind (Gad Saad)

Le Labyrinthe des égarés (Amine Maalouf, didn’t finish reading, but will keep trying),

Prophète en son Pays (Gilles Kepel)

Holocaustes (Gilles Kepel)

Le Bouleversement du Monde (Gilles Kepel)