My 2024 in Books

Here are some of my favorites this year. Note that I didn’t say “best.” That’s subjective, and I am trying to at least be polite.

Barcelona? Sydney? Istanbul? Edinburgh? Sure, I’ve seen those places. They were very nice. But I can say with authority that my favorite place on earth is my living room couch, on a cold, gray New England day, with a blanket and a dog in my lap, a cup of coffee on the side table.

I read less this year than I did last, but that’s because I allowed myself to stop reading if a book wasn’t working for me. I have always been the kind of person who finishes a book and never walks out of a movie, but as I get older, I get impatient, because I am coming to terms with the fact that there is not enough time left to read all the books, see all the movies, and experience all the art. I’m on something of a mission. Most of what I read was published in 2024, and with a couple of intentional exceptions, I don’t think any was published before 2023. Re-reading the classics is on my list, but it will have to be when I retire, which, according to my financial guy, will be never. I was very intentional about trying to read more work by women, and I did. Of the 50 or so books I finished, 30 were by women if my assumptions about gender are correct.

I generally read fiction and listen to non-fiction. This means that if the latter is read by someone whose voice doesn’t appeal to me, I stop listening. This happens fairly often. Sometimes I find my way to the text, and sometimes I don’t. I find that with fiction, the loss of the easy ability to go back and re-read a particularly beautiful sentence or paragraph is something I miss too much. As for the argument about whether it is fair to say you have read a book if you listened to it – I will settle that right here. The answer is YES. Nothing about the consumption of audiobooks is passive, which seems to be at the heart of the purist argument. (If it is, you’re doing it wrong and will have to rewind anyway.) I think the people who will tell you that the way you experience books is wrong are likely the same people who haven’t seen the new Bob Dylan biopic but really don’t like it.

There are books I WANTED to read that I didn’t get to because I am a library book e-reader, and the system we use for those kinds of loans is not working for librarians or for people. I borrow e-books and audiobooks from The Boston Public Library and the Fairfax Country (Virginia) Public Library. I added the latter (for the reasonable sum of $24 per year for out-of-state borrowers), because BPL allows only 10 books in a queue, and allows only a two-week borrowing period. I generally read faster than that, but there have been times when I am in the middle of a book, and it is taken from me. Feels like a violent theft, and I take it personally. The Fairfax Library allows for a 15-book queue and a three-week borrowing period. At this moment, I have a 25-book queue, and I don’t have a book. The shortest wait time in my queue is about three weeks, and the books in the second half of my list have waits that range from 14 weeks to “several months.” That’s insane.

Anyway, I LOVE e-books. I can look up words, and I can make notes, and I can make the words bigger. Most importantly, I am not like one of my friends who is always carrying a 45-pound bag and complaining that his back hurts.

Here are some of my favorites this year. Note that I didn’t say “best.” That’s subjective, and I am trying to at least be polite.

FICTION

My favorite works of fiction this year worked as beautiful bookends.

I almost hesitate to recommend it to those who have not already read Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, a beautifully-written and terrifyingly relevant story of an ostensibly democratic country’s descent into fascism. I read it in January 2024, which was a very different time, and in January 2025, it might be a little bit TOO relevant. I have no doubt that the book shaped my panic over what many of my fellow Americans don’t seem to see, and excuse me while I crawl back into bed.

My final book of the year, finished moments ago, was Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, a dazzlingly beautiful ballet of words, full of hope, despair, and paradoxes. It’s more-or-less plot-free, employing a structure – six astronauts circling the earth for one day – that allows for the telling of a story that is both personal and universal. Actually, it’s not “a” story so much as it’s “the” story. It’s frenetic. It’s calm. It’s sublime. Also, it turns out my bookends are Booker Prize winners.

In between, I really liked Taffy Brodesser-Aker’s Long Island Compromise, a very funny tragedy about very rich people with a satisfyingly unsatisfying ending. Clear, by the Welsh writer Carys Davies was a beautiful tale of lost cultures and languages, as well as a searing indictment of colonialism. I also really loved Adelle Waldman’s Help Wanted. I read a review of it on Goodreads (I know, I know, but sometimes I can’t help myself.) that said something like, “This is the stupidest book ever. Nothing happens,” which is of course the point of a book about being stuck in a dead-end retail job.

Oh, and Percival Everett’s James IS everything everyone says it is, but you already know that because I am pretty sure I was the last person in the world to read it (see above complaints about library e-books). Can’t wait until it gets banned.

Here’s my list of ten works of fiction that I recommend you read if you haven’t read them already.

NON-FICTION

In non-fiction, I just finished Alexei Navalny’s Patriot. It is a remarkable book. He was a remarkable man. And, it seems, his wife is a remarkable woman. Part memoir, part prison diary, it is made even more powerful by the fact that we know how it ends. So much of what he writes about Russia seems prescient in relation to what’s going on in my country as I am reading. It makes me wonder when our Navalny will emerge. In a book full of chilling foreshadowing, the quote that got me was this, which he wrote in his prison journal just weeks before he died: “The most foolish thing I could do is pay attention to people who say, ‘Lyosha, Sure the regime is going to last at least another year, but the year after that, two at most, it will fall apart, and you will be a free man.’”

I also spent a lot of time this year reading the brilliant Yale historian Timothy Snyder. His 2017 book, On Tyranny has become for me something of a sacred text. In my front hall, I keep a basket full of them for guests to take. I estimate that I have purchased about 50 copies of it, and I hope in my heart of hearts those 50 copies have reached 250 people.

His 2024 book On Freedom is comforting and terrifying in different ways. It’s a meditation on the difference between negative freedom (absence of restraint) and positive freedom (a concept requiring collective action). It’s not freedom from; it’s freedom to. His clear-eyed vision of what we are facing is so valuable that I want to do all I can to see that people read it. There is also a small part of the book devoted to the defense of teaching the humanities in higher ed, which is definitely my jam. In an interview at a book talk he said, “We think everything needs to be practical, but not everything is about solving technical problems. We need to think about the ‘whys’ and the moral issues, too. The fall of humanities at universities leads to the fall of freedom.” He says businesses have been allowed to abandon their obligation to train people for jobs, leaving it to higher ed to become workforce development factories instead of places of learning. I could go on and on, but you should just read it.

One of my favorite books of 2017 was Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, which was a history of housing policy in the United States. It was a revelation. Ryann Liebenthal’s Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis is like it, in that it’s a policy history that deftly illuminates the current problem. There are many bad guys, from the people who designed the GI Bill (a force for good made exclusionary, which is kind of America’s signature move), to bankers, Ronald Reagan (what bad thing DOESN’T lead back to that guy?), William Bennett, for-profit colleges (which should be outlawed), and Delaware Senator Joe Biden, whose heroic efforts to cancel student debt is surely penance for his early years of favoring the financial institutions that found shelter in his home state. There are heroes too, like Rep. Maxine Waters, who saw it coming as early as 1989, and knew it was bad for Black people; Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has been fighting for loan forgiveness for a very long time; and President Joe Biden, who has fundamentally changed thousands of lives by relieving the burdens of thousands of people, many of them civil servants. One of my favorite data points is that women hold more student debt than men. As of this year, they hold 64% of all student loan debt, despite being only about 58% of the college population. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a conversation with a working-class middle-aged person or elder who has had that albatross banished, but I HIGHLY recommend it. It will give you hope. The book is an eye opener, and as is often the case, knowing the history unveils the complexity to be dismantled.

I also really loved Doris Kearns Goodwin’s latest, an Unfinished Love Story, which, aside from being a great story, held two particular points of interest for me personally. The first was the peek into how close we came, with the Kennedy administration, to having a cohesive cultural policy in the United States. I didn’t know the extent of what was in the works when JFK was assassinated, and Dick Goodwin was at the heart of it. The second thing was the notion woven throughout the book of the art of speechwriting, and the concept of policy-by-speech. I experienced this phenomenon when I worked in the Mayor’s office in Boston. My colleagues and I would work feverishly as we crafted his four major speeches each year (State of the City, annual addresses to the Chamber of Commerce and the Municipal Research Bureau, and Labor Day address) to get him to announce something we wanted to drive. We did this no matter how fully baked it was, and there was a lot of jockeying to get AROUND senior advisors who had their (our) own things to get into a speech. Without the deadline of a speech in which something was announced, policy development could languish for years. If I ever wanted to write an account of my own time in the Mayor’s office, I would start with the book of speeches I kept, because that’s where the real work happened. Anyway, it turns out that we did not invent policy-by-speech.

I of course had to include this book, because see below. If you want YOUR book on this list next year, just write me in. Someone told me recently I should be more transactional.

Here's my list of ten works of non-fiction I got a lot out of this year.

I did want to spend a little time this year re-reading the classics, and I succeeded. My obsession with Elvis Presley continues unabated, so I revisited Peter Guralnick’s Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love. As I have said before, I think he is so overrated that he’s underrated, and late 60’s/early 70’s Elvis music is what should be played at my wake, which should probably include a Elvis 1968 hologram if it’s in the budget. Regardless, I want to be ready for when this comes out! (Also, if you didn’t see this new documentary, I recommend it.)

There are a few things I am looking forward to in the coming months, including Rebecca Brenner Graham’s new one on how Frances Perkins saved many Jews from the Nazis; Stephanie Gorton’s examination of the rivalry that shaped the history of reproductive rights; and Liz Pelly’s indictment of the payola-like practices of streaming giant Spotify. I am hosting talks in February and March with all three of these women, and if you are a Boston local, you are welcome to come. You’ll find invitation links in the postscript below.

Thanks for reading. I wish you the happiest of New Years. I don’t have a book. (Well I do technically, but it was very of a moment, and it’s out-of-print. AND I hesitate to call it a book.) I DO have a Substack in addition to this one you are currently reading. It’s here, and I recommend it if you have always wanted to read extemporaneous essays by an aging female secular Catholic punk rocker who sometimes fancies herself a DJ. There’s a free version, and a paid version. I am grateful to all of the subscribers, but especially grateful to the paid subscribers, who enable my lifestyle of excess by helping me to buy the organic half-and-half that doesn’t have the chemical taste.

That’s it for now. I need to go start next year’s reading. If you loved some of these, let me know what else you loved so I can add it to my queue, even though I will never get to all of it.

Joyce

P.S. Boston-area friends, please consider yourself invited to the events below. Details in the links.

Feb. 9 Rebecca Brenner Graham

Feb. 21 Liz Pelly

March 19 Stephanie Gorton

Disclosure: I have linked to Bookshop.org above, and if you buy any of these books from them, I get a tiny credit. That’s not important though. What’s important is that you support local bookstores and don’t buy books from Amazon!