​

Favorite Books of 2024

When the clock strikes midnight on 2024 I'll have come damn close to accomplishing a goal of reading 50 books. Of those books, below were the ones that left the biggest impression. Listed in no particular order, except for the first one.

1. ​James by Percival Everett was far and away my favorite of the year. Not a bold choice since according to LitHub it was on more 'best of 2024' lists than any other book. Everett is brilliant and so is this captivating and funny twist on Mark Twain's Huck Finn, retold through the perspective of the slave Jim. Everett reimagines Jim as highly-educated, savvy, and hyper aware of the world around him. When he learns that his wife and child are to be sold off and separated from him, he escapes and hatches a plan to save his family; thus embarking on a Huck Finn-like adventure. Along the way he has to keep his wits about him and to himself in order to not rouse suspicion or contempt. The portrayal of Huck Finn as sidekick is also wonderful as the boy's sense of morality holds even as the world around him gets turned upside down.
2. ​Erasure by Percival Everett. Erasure was the first book I read by Everett, and I'm hooked and want to read more of his work. I picked this up after watching and rewatching American Fiction, one of my favorite recent films. A struggling novelist and professor Thelonious 'Monk' Ellison is frustrated at the expectations placed on black writers by popular culture and the publishing world, so he finally breaks down and gives them what they want as a lark. To his surprise and dismay the new work is wildly successful. It's one of those rare occasions where book and film are equally great.
3. ​The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka contains a magical melding of form and function. It's told in the first person plural about the Japanese 'picture brides' who were bought and brought to San Francisco for their would-be American husbands in the early 20th century. The reader follows the women as one group with the backdrop of American history passing by like the landscape from a moving train. The use of a collective 'we' narration offers a haunting and profound view of humanity. One might think a choice like that would create distance with the reader but in Otsuka's hands it does the opposite.
4. ​When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka follows a young Japanese-American family as Japanese internment slowly unfolds. I've also read The Swimmers by Otsuka which contains one of my favorite short stories about the effects of dementia. All three are slim novella length stories that are a testament to the power of Otsuka's prose and her ability to convey broad-sweeping historical moments in short frames.
5. ​The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride begins with a human skeleton found at the bottom of a well in a town outside Pittsburgh. Before an investigation can begin a hurricane washes away all evidence. This happens in the first few pages and the rest of the book takes place 50 years prior where we learn the story behind the mysterious skeleton. At its heart this book is about community, the difficulty in defining that, and the power of what we're capable of together.
6. ​A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. It's a bold choice setting a near 500-page novel entirely within the walls of a single hotel, but Amor Towles pulls it off masterfully. The conceit and its constraint are what makes the book so engrossing. That and the wonderful prose. A Russian count, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, is sentenced to house arrest in one of Moscow's luxury hotels, where both count and reader only learn about a changing Russia through the subtle and not so subtle shifts in the misadventures that transpire within its walls.
7. ​Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo is arguably Mexico's most iconic novel and the book that launched magical realism into Latin American literature's orbit. As the legend goes, when then-struggling writer Gabriel García Márquez moved to Mexico City in 1961, looking for inspiration for his next book, he was handed a copy of Pedro Páramo by a writer friend. García Márquez read the slim book in two days and then immediately started reading it again. Shortly thereafter he began writing 100 Years of Solitude. The book plays with time, tense, and perspective in highly original ways but is also disorienting like being in the middle of a dream or waking up from one and not knowing exactly where you are. So much of the imagery of the writing is beautiful and highly sensory. It's a book that necessitates time, patience and rereading as García Márquez found out.
8. ​Chasing Bright Medusas by Benjamin Taylor is an excellent biography of the writer Willa Cather. In my reading and writing about the early 20th century, I've become enamored with the many great writers who arrived on the scene in the period leading up to World War I (Taylor also wrote a well-regarded biography of Proust). In addition to Cather, there's of course Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Dos Passos, but also James Joyce, Kafka, Proust, Rebecca West, Thomas Mann, and so many more. Cather's rise came amidst the backdrop of a country where women couldn't vote and their social mobility was severely restricted. She persevered with talent and a singular focus on her desire to become a novelist. She spent years as a journalist in Nebraska and Pittsburgh and later as editor of the great muckraking journal McClure's before finally publishing O Pioneers!, one of the great works of American literature, at the age of 40. She subsequently wrote My Antonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Professor's House among others. She won a Pulitzer for One of Ours, her book about WWI.
9. ​Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick. One of these books is not like the others. It took me awhile to come around, but I'm finally cracking open my learning and practice of AI. This book was a great starting point. I started a few others but found them too dry. Mollick is a professor at Wharton and his book explains a lot about how AI works, but mostly focuses on how it can be used productively and the ways that we should be careful about becoming too reliant on it.

How I want to read in 2025

As I reflected on the books I read, it made me think about the themes, topics, and ways I want to guide my reading in the next year. Here I use reading more liberally and to denote a more general pattern of learning consumption (books, essays, articles, podcasts, films, etc.).

• More Intentionally...The 100 Pages Strategy: Reading 100 pages a day is quite the feat, but I was more intrigued by the system and rules the author developed for accomplishing this. The framing of it also brought to mind something that bothers me about Goodreads, which is that it can gamify reading in a way that sucks out some of the wonder and pleasure of the process. Thinking more specifically about your daily reading habit (as much or more so than what you're reading) strikes me as a good way to build the habit first and then think about how you best want to fill the time that the habit allows for.
• More of the Classics...Catherine Project: I just recently learned about this effort which I believe grew out of the humanities program at St. John's in Annapolis. It's a series of book clubs and reading groups organized around the classics. I signed up with a weekly group to read Melville's Moby Dick starting in February. Similarly one of my longtime writing groups has decided that we should read a handful of classics together this upcoming year. We're diving into Faulkner's Absalom Absalom next.
• ​With More Curiosity and Less Condescension: I'll write more about this idea in a future newsletter, but it's a phrase and idea that's stuck with me following the 2024 election. I want to read more about AI, Autocracy, and Media and be more wary of how my own bias interferes with my ability to listen and learn. While this doesn't fully describe what I mean, I found this quote by Ezra Klein in his end of year Q&A podcast to be enlightening on this front: "I’m not trying to be open-minded about the Trump administration. I’m trying to understand it. Not because I’m not sure where I’ll fall on certain things. In some cases, the things I most need to understand and develop a more-textured picture of are the things I know I hate the most. But feeling in deep opposition to something is not a license to not, certainly in my line of work, to not try to understand it." In the past year there are some things that I felt I had a license to not understand and I want to remedy that going forward. I'm never like that with people I interact with in person, but I found that through the medium of the internet or television or social media, I can develop a tendency to neglect my own curiosity.

​

​
​

Next Sunday

Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for next week. If you aren’t already subscribed, please join my newsletter here. We deliver on Sundays. :)