Best books of 2024

Cafe Society
21

I read 54 last year, 41 fic, 13 non.

The best of the bunch were:

FICTION
The Caretaker, Ron Rash
The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver
The Mighty Red, Louise Erdrich
Playground, Richard Powers

NONFICTION
Blood in the Machine, Brian Merchant (History of the Luddite Movement)

22

I’m gonna get me a couple of these.

23

I didn’t read much that was newly published in 2024, but one I did was The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians trilogy.

It’s an Arthurian tale in which a talented but socially isolated and decidedly common young man sets out to join the Knights of the Round Table. Arriving at Camelot early in the book, he finds that . . .

. . . King Arthur has just died, and the major Knights of The Round Table are absent; the only ones left are kind of second stringers. And they join up and have adventures as they try to figure out what’s going on. (Arthur does appear a fair amount in the book, in many lengthy flashback chapters which trace the origins of his kingship and the Round Table.)

I wasn’t sure that Grossman’s authorial tone—which can tend to the wry and somewhat snarky—would work in an Arthurian tale. But I ended up liking it just the same, so if you want a book like that and especially if you enjoyed the Magicians books, I’d certainly recommend it!

(On the other hand, I have seen more than one person say that they were turned off of the Magicians books because the protagonist, Quentin, can be kind of a mopey sad sack. If so, I will warn you that our protagonist here, Collum, is cut from similar cloth.)

24

Ah but in The Magicians everybody is also an horrible person, whereas in The Bright Sword Quentin , for all his mopey sadness, is a likeable person.
At least that’s why I felt, and that explains why I finished (and liked) The Bright Sword but abandoned the other book in disgust.

25

These are maybe the 10 best books I read in 2024, in the order I read them:

  • Math Games with Bad Drawings by Ben Orlin. Orlin is a master at writing about math in ways that are interesting, enlightening, and worth reading across a broad range of levels of mathematical expertise. I loved his earlier Math with Bad Drawings and Change Is the Only Constant. I didn’t enjoy this one as much, because games aren’t as fun to read about as they are to play, but I did enjoy it.
  • The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Interesting and (to the extent that their claims are correct) important.
  • To Green Angel Tower by Tad Williams. The massive third volume of his Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn epic fantasy.
  • Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor. A fun first book in The Chronicles of St. Mary’s, a series of books about time travel that remind me of Connie Willis’s works in that genre, albeit more fast-paced and pulpy.
  • Uprooted by Naomi Novak. A really good standalone fantasy, whose main antagonist is a delightfully menacing evil forest.
  • Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow. A novel of early 20th century America, not quite like anything I’ve ever read before.
  • The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde. Set in a version of the UK where intelligent rabbits coexist (though not entirely harmoniously) with humans. Not as wacky and inventive as some of his other books, but I found the storyline to be one of his most satisfying.
  • The Fifth Witness by Michael Connelly. Fourth in his “Lincoln Lawyer” series. Just an entertaining, well-constructed page-turner.
  • The Heartbreaker by Susan Howatch. The ninth and last of a series of loosely-linked novels that combine psychology, religion, and sex. I’m sad that she didn’t write any more after this, because I haven’t found anyone else who writes 'em like this. This book is both deeply Christian and deeply R-rated, and it has a protagonist whom I at first found very off-putting but was rooting for by the end (even as I still wasn’t sure how much I actually like him).
  • Misreading Scripture with Individualist Eyes: Patronage, Honor, and Shame in the Biblical World by E. Randolph Richards and Richard James. Like Richards’s earlier book, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes (also good but I didn’t read it in 2024), this is an informative look at the world of the Bible, how it differs from the modern Western world, and how that causes modern Western readers to misunderstand it.

Honorable mentions:

26

I’m so happy to see this on your list! Lukianoff’s sequel, The Cancelling of the American Mind, was on my Top Ten list this year, but Coddling was also on my list the year I read it. Both The Coddling of the American Mind and The Cancelling of the American Mind are two of the best nonfiction books I have ever read, lingering in my mind and affecting my perspective long after I finished reading.

27

Glad someone started this thread (or two of them!) before I was able to.

I read 47 books last year, three fewer than the year before. My Top Ten:

Space Cadet by Robert A. Heinlein - Still a favorite YA sf book of mine, although the lack of female cadets at the elite space academy is a definite shortcoming.

Surely You Can’t Be Serious by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker - Like Dendarii_Dame above, I really enjoyed this behind-the-scenes guide to the making of Airplane! I recommend the audiobook, which includes interview snippets with lots of the cast and crew.

Fatherland by Robert Harris - I re-read this favorite alternative history/police procedural novel, about an SS criminal investigator looking into the mysterious deaths of several elderly Nazis in 1964 Berlin, just before Hitler’s 75th birthday celebrations. Both chilling and engrossing.

Inland by Tea Obreht - Novel about a wrangler for the U.S. Camel Corps and a hardbitten (and possibly mad) frontier mom in drought-stricken Arizona, and how their paths unexpectedly intersect. The best Western I’ve ever read, and now easily on my all-time Top Ten Favorite Novels list, too.

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain - Raucous, funny, very informative guide to becoming, and remaining, a top chef.

The Annotated Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, ed. by Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson and Anthony Dean - Fascinating commentary on Chandler’s classic hard-boiled detective classic, with particular attention to gender roles, chivalry, big-city corruption and (most amusingly) the use of similes. Lots of interesting background detail.

Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett - Terrific WW2 spy novel about the Allied deception effort as to the location of the D-Day landings, and the tenacious German spy who threatens to expose it.

The Runaway Jury by John Grisham - Clever, fun legal thriller about a groundbreaking tobacco-liability trial in which one of the jurors - or is it two? - has an agenda of his own. A real page-turner.

And So We Read On by Maureen Corrigan - Very interesting look at F. Scott Fitzgerald and the writing, initial failure, rediscovery and amazing eventual success of The Great Gatsby.

James by Percival Everett - The story of Huckleberry Finn as told by his runaway-slave friend, Jim (or James). Beautifully-written and moving, although Everett takes considerably liberties with Twain’s original tale.

Runners-up for the year:

Time for the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon, Elleander Morning by Jerry Yulsman, Redeployed by Phil Klay and The World As It Is by Ben Rhodes.