Oliver鈥檚 Year in Books

What did you read this year?

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2024

7,099

pages read

books read

Oliver Kim

Shortest Book

pages

The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante

Longest Book

473

pages

Average book length in 2024

262

pages

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

Most Shelved

1,163,746

people also shelved

African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979-... by Nicolas Van de Walle

Least Shelved

270

people also shelved

Oliver鈥檚 average rating for 2024

4.1

The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

Highest Rated on 欧宝娱乐

4.47 average

Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami

Oliver鈥檚 first review of the year

Picked it up at a bookstore on a whim because Murakami's style is genial and easy to read. But the book's "Aww Shucks I'm Just An Average Joe Who Happens To Sell Millions of Books" attitude eventually became a little grating.

You get the sense that Murakami is withholding something; one simply does not publish so many books without more interesting things to say about craft. This kind of genial Average Joe simplicity seems as much an affectation ...more

翱尝滨痴贰搁鈥橲 2024 BOOKS

Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil Hrabal

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

Visions of Inequality by Branko Milanovi膰

liked it

Georgia O'Keeffe 1887-1986 by Britta Benke

Spring and All by William Carlos Williams

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

it was amazing

it was amazing

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante

Pandolfini's Ultimate Guide to Chess by Bruce Pandolfini

The Economics of Feasible Socialism Revisited by Alec Nove

Oliver鈥檚 last review of the year

Alec Nove's "The Economics of Feasible Socialism" has the wrong title -- it should really be called "Why Marxist / Leninist Economic Orthodoxy is Wrong, with One Chapter at the End about Feasible Socialism". Writing as Nove was in 1990, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were still enough true believers in Actually Existing Socialism that taking down Marxist orthodoxy was probably still a worthwhile intellectual exercise (though Alec Nove's "The Economics of Feasible Socialism" has the wrong title -- it should really be called "Why Marxist / Leninist Economic Orthodoxy is Wrong, with One Chapter at the End about Feasible Socialism". Writing as Nove was in 1990, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were still enough true believers in Actually Existing Socialism that taking down Marxist orthodoxy was probably still a worthwhile intellectual exercise (though the fractures in that system were quickly becoming apparent). But, in 2024, I'm not sure there's anyone who still needs to be convinced that the Soviet economy was sclerotic and inefficient. Or, put another way, I'm not sure there are believers in the OG Marxist-Leninist Gospel who could conceivably be convinced by the kind of genial, carefully reasoned arguments put forward by a Menshevik's son. But I suppose none of this is Nove's fault -- he died in 1994.

The last chapter is really the only part of the book that lives up to the promise of describing "Feasible Socialism", and the only one I'd recommend for a layperson. In Nove's market socialism, the public would own the commanding heights of the economy, and decisions would be subject to democratic (ideally parliamentary) votes. Of course, there would still be private enterprise, with competitive free markets for consumer goods, but limitations to scale and monopoly. The state would conduct extensive public investment, and take charge of providing high-quality health care and education.

As a vision of the economy this seems so eminently reasonable that, to me, it is eye-wateringly boring. That probably is a point in its favor. But Nove's plan is still only a barest outline -- how are we to arrive at Boring Utopia? It's still not quite clear to me where market socialism ends and Actually Existing social democracy begins. (There's also probably interesting intellectual work to be done theorizing how Nove's ideas might interact with new developments, like the rise of index funds -- imagine an entity like Vanguard or the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, owned by the American public.) The historical experience of socialism has shown that, even with well-intentioned theories, the bits that you leave out are just as important as the bits you leave in. ...more

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