Best Reads of 2024

A Wonder Report in Defense of Reading

As 2024 comes to a close, I want to share my favorite reads from the past year with you. But first, I want to talk about reading itself: what it is, what it means to me, what reading means to a free and flourishing society, what we are risking when we stop reading, or even lose the capacity to really read, to read with intention, absorption, curiosity, and depth.

These are a few of my favorite things …

I. Once Upon a Time…

When I was five, my parents packed up the house, loaded all we owned into a rented U-Haul and the familial VW bus, and drove my brother and me from California to our new home in Indiana. Dad drove the U-Haul, with my little brother riding shotgun, out of his mind with excitement because he was getting to ride in an Actual Truck. I went with Mom in the VW bus, thinking I would have her all to myself and that we could read so many stories together. I quickly discovered the obvious: When Mom was driving, she couldn't read to me. My cherished copy of Mouse Tales was going to travel thousands of miles across country on my lap, open, unread – unless, it occurred to me, somewhere in northern Nevada, I read it to myself.

Thus began the great endeavor of that road trip. Mom couldn't read to me while driving, but somehow she could keep her eyes on the road and also teach me how to read – I spelled out the letters in each word, and she explained how to sound the words out. By the time we rolled up to our new limestone ranch house in Indianapolis, I was reading Mouse Tales to Mom, instead of waiting for Mom to read Mouse Tales to me.

Ever since, reading has been one of the best gifts of my life. It has been a constant – whatever else has been going on, I have always been reading. From the time I was six, I was reading myself to sleep at night, and I still do. As a child, I brought books with me everywhere — just in case — and I still do.

So it breaks my heart to see reading dying. Because that is what is happening.

II. When reading dies, we die a little bit, too

Serious reading, reading that requires work and commitment over time; reading that demands concentration, imagination, and thought; reading that takes us out of ourselves, changes us, makes us more than we were before — that kind of reading has not simply fallen out of fashion. That kind reading has also fallen out of possibility.

Studies show that half of us don’t read a single book from one year to the next — and for a growing number of us, “don’t read” means “can’t read.” Young adults are showing up at college with such poor reading skills that even literature professors at top schools are giving up on the idea of assigning books, settling instead for shorter works, or short excerpts from long ones.

When I was at Berkeley majoring in English, I had a combined reading load of 1,000 pages a week. When I was teaching English literature at Penn, I routinely assigned my students 200 pages per week — it was the only way, if you were teaching big, fat novels by Defoe, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, Bronte, Austen, and others, which I was. And 200 pages per week just wasn’t hard if you did the tiniest bit of planning. On day one, I did the math for the students: 200 pages a week equals 28 pages per day, which should take you less than an hour. Or, if you prefer, 40 pages per day, just over an hour, Monday through Friday, with weekends off.

We have fallen very far indeed when we can no longer ask college students to spend an hour a day reading for a single course, when we cannot count on them to be able to ingest 30 pages of fiction in that amount of time. It screams total loss of concentration, complete absence of time management habits, utter failure to develop essential comprehension, processing, and retention skills. It also screams absolutely abdication of responsibility by adults, who, as parents, teachers, and important others, must ensure that children have what they need to grow into the capable adults of tomorrow.

We are the poorer for this failure, cognitively and emotionally. Not reading harms our ability to think: it makes us less able to follow and retain complex ideas, less able to wrap our minds around the thoughts of others, less able, more simply, to focus, to pay attention to anything outside our own immediate wants, sensations, and impulses. Not reading is also bad for our ability to be good people: it makes us less able to understand one another, less able to care, less able to connect.

Reading is the practice of getting better by getting over ourselves: done consistently and well, it enlarges our minds and shrinks our egos. Reading, in other words, is critical for human flourishing. The decline of reading is bad for us as individuals — and it is potentially catastrophic for our society.

Societies that read are societies that can accommodate and even celebrate differences of belief, opinion, and lifestyle. Such societies genuinely benefit from diversity: they welcome the friction that comes with variety and disagreement, and they turn it into opportunity. Such societies can be truly prosperous, truly open, truly free. The converse is also true: Closed societies cannot accommodate the challenge that comes with diversity of thought. This is why authoritarian governments ban books.

There is so much talk these days about government overreach, corruption, ideological imposition, and the theft of our basic freedoms. This talk varies in its specifics, but it is consistent across the political spectrum, and rightly so. What we must understand: Tyranny cannot survive a society of readers. But it thrives in environments where reading — where the free, independent exploration of ideas — has been suppressed, or, as in our case, where it has been willingly discarded and devalued in favor of superficial screen-based distractions.

In giving up our ability to read, we are, however unwittingly, volunteering to give up our freedom. This is an actual emergency unfolding in real time; it’s urgent for everyone, no matter what we believe or how we vote.

Strange as it may seem, there is only one antidote to the unthinking ignorance and the profoundly thoughtless vulnerability that non-reading creates — and that is to read. As quiet and innocuous as that sounds, it’s powerful, and it’s also an absolute necessity: if we wish to protect our liberty from power grabs, no matter where they come from, we must become a society of thoughtful, curious readers once more. We fail to understand this at our peril.

III. My favorite books of 2024

The above is a gigantic preamble to the hugely important why underneath this otherwise very simple post.

I read 70-some books this year, not counting the ones I put down because they just weren’t what I needed in the moment. I only know this because I went back through my diary to make this list. And the point is, all that reading just happened. There was no counting along the way, there were no goals or quotas, there was no forcing it, there was zero boredom — there was just happy, continuous reading, a little bit with coffee in the morning before work; a little bit in the evening after work; a little bit before bed; a lot on weekends. Over time, it adds up!

Herewith, a few of my very favorite reads from the past year:

Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye. I read this over the summer, lying in the hammock after work, nursing a beer and pausing now and then to look at the sky and chew on Atwood’s magnificent prose. This is a coming-of-age story about bullying — about what it's like when your growing up coincides with your becoming the target of your friends’ cruelty. It's about how immersive that is, how impossible it is to get clear about what is happening and who is wrong, and it's also about how that stays with you through life, sometimes in what you remember, and sometimes in what you forget. Absolutely stunning.

Tana French, The Hunt. Tana French started writing crime fiction by accident, while killing time at casting calls. I am so glad she did. She writes a truly elevated murder mystery, always with Ireland as a backdrop, always deeply attuned to character and motivation and conflict, not to mention the land and the weather, which are always characters in their own right. The Hunt is her latest, a sequel to The Searcher. Start there, or go back to the beginning with 2008’s In the Woods and watch her grow her talent over time.

Jane Gardam, Crusoe’s Daughter. It is unusual for me to discover a new major minor English writer – or a minor major English writer – at this point in my life. And yet that is exactly what happened with Jane Gardam this year. Her voice and her sensibility are one of a kind, and once I got a taste of it – which happened when I stumbled upon her best known novel, Old Filth — I couldn't stop. I read a stack of Jane Gardam novels this year, and Crusoe's Daughter is my favorite. It's about an orphan girl growing up with crazed spinster aunts on the Yorkshire coast in the early 20th century, and I will say nothing more about it except that it is everything.

Erik Larson, The Splendid and the Vile. Erik Larson is probably my favorite historian working today. He has an amazing way of turning deeply, comprehensively researched material into spellbinding, suspenseful story. He has written about Victorian murderers, world’s fairs, the birth of radio, hurricanes, and, repeatedly, war. The Splendid and the Vile tells the story of Winston Churchill's first year as prime minister, which happened to coincide with the Blitz. It’s an intimate biography, a dense work of military history, a political thriller, and, most of all, an unforgettable portrait of what true courage and leadership look like. In Churchill’s case, it involved countless cigars and a surprising amount of nudity.

Hilary Mantel, Fludd. Hilary Mantel is rightly remembered for the genius achievement of the Wolf Hall trilogy, which not only set a new standard for historical fiction, but changed how scholars of the Renaissance understood their own field. That said, she was much, much more than that. She had so many channels, and could work in so many different modes. Fludd is a tiny little novella, set in a small northern English industrial town in the middle of the 20th century, and it is about, initially, a minor churchy conflict — the bishop wants the priest to take the statues out of the church and the priest doesn't want to. This does not sound like it's going to lead to great fiction, but it does, and it happens from the very first paragraph. It's laugh out loud funny, it's tender and beautifully observed, it's a little spooky, and it's a very astute look at how costly — and how worth the cost — it is to break free from the pressure to conform.

Daniel Mason, The Winter Soldier. Daniel Mason is a clinical psychiatrist on the faculty at Stanford, and somewhere in there he finds time to write extraordinary fiction. He's a born historian, and his novels range widely – from colonial Burma to Puritan New England to the Europe of World War I. The Winter Soldier is a gorgeous and totally unusual tale of a group of misfits who find themselves running a field hospital deep in the Carpathian mountains during World War I. There's hardship, there's compassion, there's innovation, there's loss, and love, and heartbreak. Most of all, it’s an exploration of how we can become more than ourselves when circumstances require it.

Nancy Milford, Zelda. This is the definitive biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, and it is the story they don’t tell you when you read The Great Gatsby in school. The short version is that Zelda Fitzgerald went mad and spent most of her short adult life in asylums. The longer version is that her husband stole her prose, her ideas, and her very personality; used them without attribution in his own work; punished her when she objected; and, when he had finally used her up, locked her away. I couldn’t put it down.

Anne Patchett, Tom Lake. Anne Patchett has got to be one of the most fluid writers working today. She could write about paint drying and make it lyrical and compelling. In Tom Lake, she does the impossible: She writes about perfect happiness and contentment, and she does it with tension, urgency, and surprise. The novel is a portrait of a mother's love for her daughters, a wife's love for her husband, and, most importantly, of what it means to live life with no regrets, even when that life involves a great deal of lost opportunity.

Evan Stark, Coercive Control. I read this for a project I'm working on, and it blew my mind. With this book, Stark framed the legal concept of coercive control after decades of attempts to reduce domestic violence resulted in not much harm reduction at all. Stark realized that physical violence is part of a much larger and ultimately more dangerous cluster of controlling behaviors aimed at subjugating victims (usually women) and depriving them of their liberty. This book is a massive rethink of what violence and abuse are, of how they have been modernized to fit within a legal system that does not permit physical assault, but is quite open to non-physical forms of abuse. Coercive Control is a jaw-dropping takedown of the status quo, and it has led to legal change in Europe, Australia, and some US states. It is also a scholarly work, and it is a very dense, slow, deep read. I spent months with it. Totally worth it.

IV. Invitation

I always love to hear about what others are reading, ands I offer this list in that spirit. Maybe there is something here that strikes you as just the thing you are looking to read yourself — and maybe, too, you’d like to share some of your own favorites from this year in the comments. I’d love that!

As we head into the new year, my hope is that through sharing, we can help one another find amazing books. Along the way, we can encourage each other to read and read and read some more — which in turn will help us think more clearly, love more deeply, disagree more constructively, fear less terribly, open ourselves more easily, live more purposefully, and just plain be a lot more meaningfully than it is possible to be without a steady, significant reading life.

So, happy new year! May 2025 be very good to you, and may it contain a ton of great books.