2024: The Year in Largely Non-2024 Books
Here's my best of books list for the year. Total sample size a bit above 50.
BONUS TITLE: I read this first book when it came out, and have thought about it pretty regularly ever since. Have you read it? You should probably read it. Just read it.
And now my annual Top Approximately 10 list, in Approximate Descending Order:
KGB archivist Mitrokhin risked his life smuggling home bits of secret history for 2 decades. His epic account details the KGB’s methods—some of which failed to die with the Soviet Union. Active measures have never been more successful.
Some of the most successful, lucrative crimes are standard ways of doing business, the M brothers chronicle in this ghastly, rigorous account of how money and ideology overtook US politics. Essential reading for 2025.
What’s there left to say? As long as there’s love, there is plenty to say. CB trolls through Beatles marginalia to assemble a very smart, very funny narrative mosaic. A refreshed version of the greatest story ever lived.
“There are 8 TM novels I haven’t read so I’ll do one a month till done,” I thought. That was January. I read this horror tale of broken families and broken people and was so eviscerated by it, I decided to regroup and read 1 TM a year till I finish.
So creepy! The people are so terrible! And they get worse! PH novels set psychological crypto-demons at each other. The mystery cooks and the light-dimmer only moves in one direction. Tension, degradation and confusion reign.
CH’s characters aren’t cartoons. They’re not 3D-real either. Some are hapless, some are criminal. He stirs them together into intricately plotted chaos so gripping you don’t even realize they’re hilarious till your heart returns to normal resting rate.
领英推荐
Can’t imagine what reading it was like then if it still lands the way it does today. It’s a textbook: Everything is exactly where it needs to be and nothing's extra. Perfectly terrifying. Where it's cliche you have to remind yourself she invented it.
Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the Twin Towers is an ingenious device for harnessing disparate, broken characters into one story. The writing is empathetic, the mystery a riveting slow-burn, and it's neat to watch it all come together.
World War II—and consequently most of the 20th century—hinged on 6 minutes of an air-sea battle 1,000 miles NW of Hawaii. This detailed history of the battle puts you in every consequential seat, to see what happened and why.
Not many books make me howl laughing. This did. A relentless, vicious, acid plot exposing wrongs so deep and so pervasive that they are ripe for the most devastating weapon in a dissident-writer’s arsenal, satire.
Historical fiction can place a reader within past horrors. Butler goes even deeper by creating Dana, her lead character, and sending her back to the early 1800s to witness—and experience—slavery first-hand. Sending a modern woman back in time makes the shock that much more palpable, even if Butler had to tone down historical accounts of slavery to keep her readers.
A life so extraordinary he spent much of his lifetime just telling it. Everything that made him great is today in short supply: books, autodidactism in service of humanist morality, hard work, and dissent that won't go away until injustice does.
The West’s story of WW2 solidified while Soviet and E German archives were still locked up. TS assembles all of it to tell the story of the Bloodlands, the N-S swath of E Europe where Nazis and Soviets together flat-out murdered 14m, including Hitler's 6m Jewish victims.
Astounding in structural, narrative complexity, masterful with language, AR packs lifetimes of emotional experience between two covers. There is “loss of innocence” and then there is this—a dark shredding of innocence by mistakes, bad people and dangerous times.
Climate change policy and communication
1 个月great list Eric. I need to do Toni Morrison but will take your advice of 1x / yr. I did Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey over the break (before news of the Nolan adaptation, so feeling v. hip and relevant)
Advancing mass timber construction as a housing and climate solution. Pre-doctoral candidate in disease ecology.
1 个月What a great idea and a great list! Thank you! I've had the Beatty for some time; now I will read it. I love your description of Hill House; very interested in the Wolves of K Street and all the rest. I read the Roy long ago and still remember some of the meticulous detail.
Pioneering Author, Speaker & Entrepreneur Advancing Water Resilience from Source to Sea
2 个月Nice selection, Eric Roy in particular is a top choice, especially as she faces criminal charges for 14 year old statements…