Books of 2024: The Book(s) of the Year

To conclude this year's reviews, I continue my cheating by awarding not one but two books of the year.  Unlike last year's undisputed champion (George Saunders's A Swim in a Pond in the Rain), I found it difficult to narrow the pinnacle just as I failed to narrow the category reviews.  This constitutes good news if you want more titles to add to your to-read list.

The novel here was published closer to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, and the collection of essays would look quite different without Covid-19.  I read the novel for a random reason and the collection of essays because I'm a completist, and Ann Patchett published another book.

Wishing you a happy reading in 2025!

The Books of the Year

How Green was my Valley, Richard Llewellyn, 1939

Wow.  Wow wow wow.  This book landed on my to-read list when a first draft of our 2022 trip to visit Charlie on his semester abroad in Bath, England included a visit to Cardiff in Wales.  Two reader neighbors recommended reading it to get a sense of Welsh history.  When we edited Cardiff out of our itinerary, How Green dropped in priority.  I'm so glad I returned to it now.  Llewellyn writes in a lyrically beautiful style.  It's difficult to separate the story - three generations of the Morgan family in Victorian era Wales, their valley, the colliery (coal mine) that feeds them and brings them such danger - and the writing.  One might not expect heart-string-pulling poetic prose to tell this story, but one gets it anyway.  Llewellyn describes the characters' hopes, heartaches, triumphs, and moral lessons in simple, gorgeous sentences and paragraphs, all through the voice of youngest son Huw Morgan as he grows up with his parents, brothers, pastor, and community mentors and antagonists.  The people of the valley - and especially Huw's father Gwilym - live by a simple and strong moral code.  That strength comes not from immutable stubbornness but from grafting into its core new input and ideas.  I loved this book, and I'm so grateful to my neighbors Peg and author Janet Roberts for recommending it.  I listened to this book read by the now-deceased English actor Ralph Cosham; he nailed it.

These Precious Days, Ann Patchett, 2021

When Harper's published the title essay of this collection, I photocopied it and mailed it to several friends.  Patchett's long story of an extraordinary experience of new friendship during the pandemic moved me so deeply that I felt the need to share it.  (And yes, I have grandparent tendencies already, mailing published items to friends on paper.)  There may not be a better essay than this one (although that would be a fun debate).  When my summer podcast lull deepened, I requested a bunch of downloadable audio books, and this one came up first.  Patchett does not disappoint.  These essays cover deeply personal topics - relationships in her fascinating family, her penchant for deep, long-standing, female friendships, coping with the world-altering pandemic.  In one essay, she collects the many instances in which people have spoken rudely and frankly to her about not having children.  In another essay, she recounts her encounters with the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  I love her, and I loved this collection.

Books of 2024: Fiction

Despite efforts to maintain a balanced diet of fiction and non-fiction this year, the vagaries of library availability offered up more of the latter when I got to my next book on my to-read list.  I made a special effort to focus on books that had lingered in to-read for a while rather than adding more.  Not easy!

In the end, I read 55% non-fiction in 2024.  Still, that 45% contained gems.  Don't let the number of titles fool you.  I recommend all of these - even the honorable mentions - as strongly as I can.

Books of the Year: Fiction

Tom Lake, Ann Patchett, 2023

This book came within a gnat's eyelash of being my book of the year.  In Tom Lake, Ann Patchett tells two versions of her favorite story: throw a group of people together unexpectedly, and see what happens.  In the present, Lara, her husband Joe, and their three daughters have been thrown back together by the Covid-19 pandemic on their Michigan cherry farm.  Their typical picker helpers can't get there, and they have no choice but to harvest relentlessly together.  To pass the time and satisfy her young adult daughters' obsession with the story, Lara tells them about the summer stock company at Tom Lake in which she was cast as Emily in Our Town and May in Fool for Love during a long-ago summer before they were born.  It's perfect Patchett, mixing the heart-warming with the heartbreaking.  The characters in both timelines prove complex and unpredictable.  In what I've come to consider familiar, I had to remind myself that I could not Google and find out more about the people and places Patchett has invented here.  Patchett uses Our Town as an especially strong thread through the story.  You could call Tom Lake a love letter to that play, in fact.  Patchett manages the flashback and the present deftly, giving neither short shrift.  I am glad that I chose to read this when I needed a diversion.  It went beyond satisfying.  It delighted!

Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, James McBride, 2023

Graham and Laura Hennessey gave Paige and me this book for Christmas 2023.  My competent wife got to it first.  When I got my hands on it, I got excited a few pages in.  This is the first McBride novel I've read.  He tells a wild tale extremely vividly.  McBride's gift for layering characters and plotlines on top of each other impressed me.  Throughout the book, when I thought I knew whose story and which story he was telling, he would introduce someone new, and that someone would have his or her own motivations and ideas.  The new character would bring new action.  Not to telegraph too much, but, of course, those plot lines intersect.  Sometimes, the plotting was complicated enough that I didn't totally follow it.  But I grokked enough, and I was happy to go on the cinematic ride McBride captains.  The eponymous grocery store is in Pottstown, PA in the 1930s.  We see some flashes forward and back, and nearby Reading and more distant Philadelphia figure into the story.  There are two leaps into present-day cultural analysis that jarred so supremely against the story that I had to question McBride's sanity.  Even if he was trying to evoke certain contemporary themes with a 90-year-old story, it's either artless or foolish to make it so explicit.  Or maybe he's working on a genius level I do not understand.

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, Tom Hanks, 2023

I'm grateful to my friend Cassie Christopher for recommending this delightful novel.  From the overlong title, you get the idea: the book tells the story of the making of a movie.  If it's set on a movie set, it takes competence as its theme.  Competence recognized and rewarded.  This feel-good theme makes it a breath of fresh air (especially during an election season that has re-elected the most feel-bad, incompetent candidate imaginable).  We meet the writer/director, the crew, and the actors.  The movie in question is a Marvel movie for Netflix (all by different names).  We get the background material for a comic book that eventually gets written and later optioned into a movie.  While at points it feels like maybe a few too many strands of story are being told, Hanks inspires confidence as an author that he will weave all this together.  I would describe the omniscient narrator's voice as Hanks-ian, which is as welcoming as a warm sweater.  Although the book may be 20% longer than it needs to be, I only felt that in the last march to its conclusion.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin, 2022

A Cassie Christopher repeat: she read this book in 2023 and recommended it to me.  Then, at a moment when my competent wife found herself low on books, she read it first out of my under-nightstand pile.  Cassie didn't say much about it, but she did feature it in a short list of non-romance fiction books that she recommended. (She has learned that my spy novel habit and her romance novel habit don't need to cross over into our recommendations for each other.) My competent wife then compared it favorably to Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings, and them's salivating words for me.  I brought high expectations to a novel with a setting as weird as the fake Microsoft in Douglas Coupland's Microserfs: video game developers.  Since I'm too old to believe in spending a lot of time playing video games (I'd rather be reading!), I wasn't sure I could get into this world.  To be honest, there were moments when I feared I would start to dislike this book.  That didn't happen though because Zevin writes deftly and from a sweet, good core.  Don't get me wrong; plenty of challenging things happen to characters here.  The most realistic depictions of the messiness of friendship come against those backdrops.  A zag late in the book was one of those times when I thought Zevin would lose me.  Instead, she spurred me to turn page after page with lyrical heights of...writing about (or within) video games.  Gamer or not, read this book.

Honorable Mention

Small Thinks Like These, Claire Keegan, 2021

The Thursday Murder Club, Richard Osman, 2020

Books of 2024: Non-Fiction

I'm making up new categories for Books of the Year this year, and it feels like cheating.  Having already touted memoir and history, I'm now deploying the broader label of non-fiction.  Then again, in a record-breaking year for volume, I want to cheat so I can tell you, dear reader, about more books.

This category features two books that felt in dialog with each other about the topic of attention and its deterioration.  Gloria Mark and Sherry Turkle come to different conclusions, but I found each point of view valuable.  I wonder if the passage of eight years between their books explains the differences or if Turkle would say the same thing now that she said in 2015.  Is Turkle the stern, 1900s disciplinarian while Mark embodies the gentle parent?  If so, I kind of like the combination more than abiding by one alone.

Then, how does one categorize a large collection of essays when one is going to (foreshadowing alert) crown a collection of essays as The Book of 2024 later this week?  Well, I put it here.  It's that Sedaris brand of non-fiction where I can't always discern the line between truth and his imagination.

Books of the Year: Non-fiction

Attention Span; A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity, Gloria Mark, 2023

Who in the 2020s does not worry that our devices and media steadily make us less focused,dumber, and unhappy?  My concern for those things made Gloria Marks's research on attention appealing.  In the field of human computer interaction, she has focused her career on experiments - many of them in workplaces - to understand how attention functions day to day for ordinary people.  Not to spoil the book, but she principally concludes that we should not beat ourselves up about our lack of focus or the small distractions we might engage in on our phones.  While not denying the idea of too much of a good thing (TikTok), Marks reinterprets small digital breaks as serving a similar function to a walk or a conversation with a friend of colleague.  She sees a hierarchy, placing those off-screen breaks higher in value and effectiveness than the screen ones, but she doesn't dismiss a little digital rote activity out of hand.  After we've focused for a period of time - and our digital tools allow that focus as much as they enable distraction - we may do well to virtually step away in order to recharge that focus battery.  She also points out that a "flow state" happens far less often than we think it should and encourages releasing that expectation.  None of this is to say that there's not a crisis: average sustained attention on any one thing has fallen to 47 seconds in the iPhone era.  But Marks would have us be aware of our attention rhythm almost like a sleep cycle and work with it rather than try to white-knuckle our way to a different rhythm.

Reclaiming Conversation; the Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Sherry Turkle, 2015

In what now reads as a recent ancient history text, pre-President-Trump, pre-Covid Sherry
Turkle takes on the sociology of what all of these screens, devices, and "social networks" have done to that basic form of human connection, conversation.  In 2015, when she did her most recent research featured in this volume, college students still used Facebook.  Media has moved on in the intervening years, but her general finding that people converse less and worse now than they did even pre-iPhone remains relevant.  Turkle structures her book with the metaphor of chairs like the two featured on the cover.  Her "One Chair" section covers self-awareness and solitude.  Two Chairs covers family, friendship, and romantic relationships.  Three Chairs examines education, and work, and then she rounds out the book with ideas for a way forward.  This text stands in contrast - actually, outright opposition - to Gloria Mark's Attention Span.  Where Mark would have us forgive ourselves for our market-degraded attention span, Turkle would have us put down our screens and look each other in the eye or at least take a walk outside.  I found value in both approaches.  For what it's worth, I "read" this book in my new hybrid hard copy/audio habit, and I found it easier to consume this one as an audio book.

The Best of Me, David Sedaris, 2020

Having seen David Sedaris read from new and old work in Pasadena in November 2023, I found myself wandering the stacks at the main library.  Sedaris so consistently entertains by mixing poignant family memories with laugh-out-loud surprise jokes.  This collection of old and new work meets that standard.  I partially read it and partly listened to the author read it on audio book.  The latter format, interestingly, included recordings of live readings.  In the middle of a long chapter of studio reading, the listener would then hear one of these recordings in front of an audience.  Sedaris curates his stories and essays masterfully, putting them in dialog with each other.  This long book provided everything I want from Sedaris.

Books of 2024: Stay Away

I always like to share books that I disliked so that other readers might be spared a bad experience.  This year, I disliked more than one book that someone had recommended strongly.  Taste in books is, of course, subjective.  One man's trash and so forth.  Even though it feels funny that someone I know would love a book that I dislike, it's perfectly natural.  

For example, this year, I have a John Le Carré book on both my books of the year and this worst books post.  Also, Arrowsmith won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1926, and Stay True won the Pulitzer for Memoir/Autobiography in 2023.

Books of the Year: Stay Away

Our Kind of Traitor, John Le Carré, 2010

It sounds right to say that a John Le Carre spy novel always hits the spot for me. Our Kind of 

Traitor puts the lie to that statement. I have to wonder if listening to the book - rather than reading it - made it more difficult for me to follow. Sadly, that's true, though. We meet a lot of characters here and flash forward and back in time, especially early on. Around the 65% mark, the action got gripping, and I enjoyed the climax and falling action until the ending plopped pointlessly with no chance at redemption. Come to think of it, the later Cornwall (Le Carre) got in his career, the less I liked the books. Perhaps he suffered the plot-eroding effects of the smart phone era. Perhaps the further he got from his heyday, he started mailing them in. So, while I can mostly rely on him, no author is perfect.

Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis, 1925

My adulthood-long project of reading all of the Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction has led me to fantastic books that I may or may not have discovered through other means. Also, it led me to Arrowsmith, a long novel that seems like contemporary readers may have found quite funny at points. Perhaps they would have considered its 1920s city and countryside cultural comment spot on. Nearly 100 years on, Arrowsmith comes across as a bloated drudgery about a mercurial, unlikable, pompous medical researcher. Lewis must have been doing a thing. I just can't quite fathom what it was. Martin Arrowsmith takes himself plenty seriously and can't see his faults. Correction: at the beginning of hundreds of paragraphs, he can't see his faults. Miraculously, by the end of the paragraph, self insight guides him to the right word or action. I hated this book and am unhappy I read it. Happily, it's nearly out of print.

Stay True, Has Hsu, 2022

Based on Hua Hsu's close age to mine (he's 4 years younger) and based on both of my siblings loving this book, it would seem like I should love it. I'd also heard him interviewed on NPR and heard about the period when he and his father corresponded by fax because his dad had returned to his native Taiwan for significantly more pay and responsibility than he could find in US jobs. And yet. And yet, I pretty much hated this book from start to finish. Its hard to state why, but it may be that four-year age difference. It may be that Hsu liked different bands and pop culture than I did. It seems, though, like the main reason is that Hsu is a self-contradicting condescending jerk. Some would say that it takes one to know one. In the first half of the book, he goes on and on about how anti-capitalist he is while documenting an endless stream of purchases. He waxes entirely too poetically about stuff that never mattered. You made mix tapes and looked down on CD burners? Congratulations. After a terrible thing happens to a friend - a plot turn I credit myself with seeing coming even if I couldn't fully articulate it while reading his descriptions of said friend - Hsu spends most of the remainder of the book gazing at his own navel about whether he had been as good a friend as he thought he was. Then, late in the book, he discovers drugs. Sorry. Meh. Never interested.

Books of 2024: History/Social Science

As you might observe, I found it difficult to identify this cluster of books.  They both compile history, but they also layer social analysis and - in one case - economics in with the facts and dates.  My competent wife loves it when I read non-fiction like this due to all of the side-stream facts she gets to hear.  

More surprising than the above similarities, these books both broke my heart in their own way.  Scientology continues to ruin lives every day.  American parking laws still ruin communities.  Those laws seem more likely to change than the chances that Scientology will lose its grip on its adherents.  Finally, America, itself, is kind of gross especially in the way it exploits its territories and off-shore holdings.

Books of the Year: History and Social Science

Going Clear; Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief, Lawrence Wright, 2013

This book had been on my booklist for so long that I forgot where I first heard about it. Likely an interview, possibly on Marc Maron's podcast. Wright, a chronicler of religious sects including the Amish and Al Quaeda takes on the violent cult of Scientology, exposing many things the "church" wishes weren't public. In Wright's carefully-researched telling, the organization comes off as a secretive, brutal human trafficking organization chiefly organized to financially benefit its founder and his successor, who basically performed a coup at age 21 in L. Ron Hubbard's last days. I'm delighted to be finished with this book because the story of the cult made me really sad. It's hard to believe that people want so badly to have something larger than themselves to believe in that they will give up everything - family connections, education, freedom, their self-respect - to follow a bunch of claptrap authored mainly in the 50s by a madman loser. He must have been the most charismatic person born in that century because lacking all evidence to his claims that Scientology helped him or anyone else, people flocked to him and the religion. That held true even when the group had become persona non grata in so many countries that it functioned entirely from three decrepit ships. In its current incarnation, the group regularly imprisons its members for arbitrary offenses and has gotten away with the deaths of mutliplle members due to neglect and fear of healthcare, especially mental health care. 

The book's footnotes chiefly document how the church denies behaviors and events that Wright backs up with reports on the record from multiple people. Without those who have left Scientology, Wright would not have been able to compile this book. Everyone who's still in comes across just as deluded as you might think. Still, my heart goes out to them. At the top of that pyramid, of course, stands Tom Cruise. Having read this, I may never watch a movie featuring him again. 

Although I can't try to convince anyone that reading the book will be fun, I do believe that everyone should know about these criminals.

Paved Paradise; How Parking Explains the World, Henry Grabar, 2023

The Atlantic reviewed this book in a summer 2023 issue. I can think of one omnibus book about a topic that I've enjoyed before - about ocean shipping - but I feel like there have been others. When I read one, I derive pleasure from the whole "what you don't know about x"-ness of it all. Grabar has written a highly readable example of the genre. Much of the book covers the destructive power of parking minimums in building codes. Space for cars drives up the price for human space. Car space can also eat into space for humans, making less of it. He tells tales of woe in which developers try for literally years to build affordable or even middle-class housing only to end up trapped between erecting a luxury building or abandoning the project. Often, they choose the latter. So parking ends up contributing to the general housing crisis. A funny thing happened to Grabar's book project, however: a global pandemic that made a lot of people rethink devoting quite all of our curb space to parking. He points out the outdoor dining, parklets, bike storage and other uses to which this linear space got put to use when cars didn't dominate for a brief window of time. Parking, he argues in the end, is just long-term storage of cars, which get driven less than we think. Americans worst of all, but societies in general have given parking more of a right to space than other equally valuable or more valuable uses.

How to Hide an Empire; A History of the Greater United States, Daniel Immerwahr, 2019

My friend Jason Hansen recommended this book to me a few years ago.  Despite my interest in it, it felt like a project to take on.  That turned out to be true.  Immerwahr has written a comprehensive history of the American empire (which refuses to call itself that). He asserts that as fraught as the US's relationship is with places beyond the 48-state "logo map," the one-time rebel colonies have long held and exploited other territory.  He identifies so many interesting chapters, and almost all of them made me sad or angry.  As much as racism defines America's ongoing history, Immerwahr tells a long-silent story of dominion over people in places that didn't ask for it.  I learned tons about Alaska, Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and lots of other holdings.  All Filipinos should hate the United States, full stop.  That they don't necessarily is just one part of this complicated and surprising history.  On the one hand, I don't like to recommend that readers find more to dislike about America.  On the other hand, Immerwahr would argue that knowing it could make us better Americans and make America better.

Books of 2024: Memoir

Whatever else may be said about 2024, it turned out to be a grand year of reading for me.  A record-breaking year.  I read 40 books this year, a more than 40% increase over my previous high of 28 during Covid.

Although I might like to attribute the higher number to the life circumstance of the transition into what we're calling our "emptying nest" phase, we've had at least one of our sons living with us throughout the year.  Charlie graduated in May and moved back in.  He will move into his own apartment (happily, just a half-mile from us) in January.  Teddy graduated from high school in June and want off to trade school in late September.  Although the nest may be depopulating, the year itself held many events and decisions.  I was too busy for time alone to have created more space for reading.  The coming year may feature that.

The big shift came in the summer when my podcasts dried up.  As that industry has matured, its seasons have come to resemble traditional media.  Audio producers go vacation in the summer just like the rest of us!  This time, when I had few new episodes to download, I decided not to follow my prior pattern of finding more podcasts.  As a completist, discovering a new podcast with a back catalog introduces both joy and burden.  After all, my subscribed podcasts come back strong in the fall.  

So, in an effort to attack my to-read list. I took up what I call hybrid reading.  For dozens of books this year, I have borrowed both the audio book and the physical copy from the library either simultaneously or in sequence.  The most common pattern is starting the book on audio and then finishing by reading the "book book," because lower competition yields longer borrowing periods.  This steroidal boost lets me "read" while getting chores done.  That's the magic that has added to the number of books I can read.

Personally, I find fiction harder to listen to.  Maybe I've trained my brain to take in thought, analysis, and opinion via podcasts.  I find it more satisfying and attention-holding to listen to non-fiction.

With that preamble to this year's series of book posts behind us, I bring you my memoir recommendations.  Most years, I start with bad books I warn you not to read.  But that seems like a buzz kill, so I'll tuck those in later in the series.

Books of the Year: Memoir

The Pigeon Tunnel; Stories of my Life, John LeCarré, 2016

Having read 7 of John Le Carré's novels (including one the month before reading this one), I turned to this benedictory memoir, published four years after his death. It had been on my list since around the time it was first published. David Cornwell (his real name) applies his considerable gifts as a storyteller in telling his own stories here. They offer a peek behind the curtain at his method of gathering authentic details for his settings and his characters' jobs and avocations. Although he started building from his relatively short career in the British Intelligence services, he continued to get inside international milieux to keep finding people to base his characters on and in order to depict cities around the world accurately. He also shares how fame changed his life - the new assumptions people made about him and the burdens and opportunities created by his fame and considerable income from publishing deals and movie rights. Especially late in the book, he tells the unhappy story of his family. His mother abandons them.  His father the con man leaves a trail of destruction behind him and occasionally intrudes on his son's life well into his period of career success. While reading the book, I discovered from a different source that Le Carré admitted to serial infidelity in what he termed a quest for the love he didn't get at home. He comes out sounding problematically manipulative in a way that will force readers (including this one) to reckon with an artist who made great art while being on a deep-ish end of the horrible scale. I read parts and listened to parts of this book, and Le Carre's voice enhanced the latter format significantly. It's not for everybody, but his fans will enjoy it (even as they may squirm at times).

I Must Say; my Life as a Humble Comedy Legend, Martin Short, 2014

This title lingered on my to-read list for a long time. What a delight! Short's brilliance comes across throughout this memoir of growing up comedy obsessed in a raucous Canadian family and wending his way through a Hollywood career that has produced more reverence than vast wealth. Over and over, he chronicles sliding doors moments that might have made him a wealthier man. Woven through and more interesting than his career on the large and small screen and the stage is his vast web of friendships. From the enduring crew of the famous Canadian Godspell to SCTV, Saturday Night Live, the movies, and several television shows and appearances, Martin Short and his wife Nancy collected friends. The book shares many beautiful fun stories as well as some heartbreaking ones. If you don't tear up in the chapter called Kathy Lee was Right, you have a heart of stone. I conclude that Martin Short as is as smart and funny as I thought and far nicer. He also has great taste in people - Steve Martin, Paul Schaeffer, Nora Ephron, and Kurt Russell. His friendships stand him in better stead than being a millionaire would have. He's probably a millionaire too, now, I must say. I listened to the author read this as an audio book, which delighted me more than reading it on the page might have. I'll never know.