The Best Books I Finished in 2024
Reading suggestions for a new year
Here are the best books I finished in 2024. May we all read more in 2025, and may one of these titles strike your fancy in the coming year.
10. Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles (2002)
This little book, a collection of writing axioms by the author of Gates of Fire, a novel about the battle of Thermopylae, is a little more rah-rah than what I usually read. Some parts were bizarre or misleading. But I did find a lot of encouragement in Pressfield’s admonitions to face “Resistance” – an inner aversion to doing our work – by persevering even when our efforts seem fruitless.
9. Robert Boice, How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency: A Psychological Adventure (1994)
Another weird but helpful book also targeted to writers. Psychologist Robert Boice advises writers by chronicling one of his writing seminars. The long quotations from writers he coached are mostly useless, but this book is also full of wisdom. As a researcher, I have too often read slowly and taken copious notes when I should have read faster and jotted less down. Boice offers an alternative approach to research and good advice about how to constantly percolate one’s thinking about all that information. Another of Boice’s maxims provides ample motivation not to be thin-skinned: “The worse the writer, the greater the attachment to the writing.” Above all, this book provides gracious advice about persevering. Boice advises writers to avoid mania – which leads to depression – by writing in “brief daily sessions.” Work faithfully but only for a limited amount of time and have a life outside of work, and you will finish the project.
8. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (1990)
Martha Ballard, a Maine midwife who lived from 1735 to 1812, provided historians an unusually generous glimpse of the life of an American woman living two centuries ago by meticulously keeping a diary that recorded the results of 814 births on which she assisted. Ulrich took advantage by writing this “exegesis” of Ballard’s diary, portraying Ballard’s life and times. Ulrich’s biography considers big subjects – the differences between men’s and women’s work, changes in medical norms, class conflict, and religion – but is also full of revealing details, major and minor. One out of every 199 births Ballard assisted with ended in the mother’s death. The fate of women under her care was better than the maternal death rate as late as 1930 – 1 in 150. But giving birth was far more precarious two hundred years ago than in the late twentieth century, when 1 in 10,000 mothers died. Midwives were usually paid not in cash but in goods, including piglets, snuff, and cod. The Ballards dined on moose steaks on March 19, 1809.
7. C. S. Lewis, On Stories (1966)
This collection of essays offers a window into C. S. Lewis’s taste and enlightens readers about how to improve at writing, teaching, reading, and book reviewing. The maxim Lewis presses most strongly is that good readers re-read. I particularly enjoyed Lewis’s defense of what he was trying to do in That Hideous Strength in which he reflects on the role of science in the modern world. Baked into the story is the idea that “under modern conditions any effective invitation to Hell will certainly appear in the guise of scientific planning,” Lewis writes. Another particularly strong essay is about how words lose meaning over time. “Words in their last decay,” writes Lewis, “go to swell the enormous list of synonyms for good and bad.” The funniest part of the book is the transcript of Lewis’s conversation with authors Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss while they all drink and smoke. “Are you looking for an ashtray?” says Lewis. “Use the carpet.” “I was looking for the Scotch, actually,” says Amis.
6. David S. Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times (2020)
Reynolds takes an innovative approach to writing a Lincoln biography, studying not just Lincoln himself but also looking extensively at connections between Lincoln’s life and features of the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. He covers subjects from violent political rhetoric to the laws and norms of war to how Christmas was once celebrated.
5. Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels (1974)
I followed Lewis’s advice and did some re-reading this year. This book is one of my all-time favorites – but I’ve put it down the list because I think placing a re-read at the top of the list would be boring. The Killer Angels is a novel about the Battle of Gettysburg from the perspective of some of the officers who fought there. I pulled it out for another look because we had a new baby, and I thought I thought I might find a little overlap between the intensity of being a new parent and being a general on campaign. This year was also the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s publication (something I wrote about here). The taut dialogue and restrained but dramatic narration had lost none of its magic. I still remember reading Ernest Hemingway in high school for the first time and thinking, “That reminds me of The Killer Angels.”
4. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (1955)
This is another old favorite I re-read in 2024. It’s not at number one for the same reason The Killer Angels isn’t higher. This is the last volume of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. There may be no work of fiction with a better ending than this. Evil is defeated not just in battle but through self-sacrifice. An easily overlooked prophecy is crucial to the story. Much good is saved, but an old world is lost.
3. David Halberstam, The Breaks of the Game (1981)
I pulled this out when Hall of Fame basketball player Bill Walton – a critical figure in this book – died earlier this year. I did not expect much, but I got sucked in. The Breaks of the Game is the story of the 1979-1980 Portland Trail Blazers. Never was a mediocre basketball team so interesting. I cared because Halberstam chronicled the team in such detail. I marveled at the reporting that went into the book. It reads like a novel. I also cared about the players and coaches, men who were striving – sometimes destructively, sometimes skillfully – for success, redemption, and victory over old age. Walton was not even a part of this team, but he overshadowed it. Just two years earlier, he had led the Trail Blazers to a championship, but then he suffered a major injury and left the team in anger. Halberstam also shines light on major national transformations in the economy, race relations, the role of television, and the popularity of the National Basketball Association. (I wrote more about this book here.)
2. Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (2020)
The Age of Entitlement is a dark interpretation of the last half-century. Caldwell, a commentator who writes for the New York Times, argues that the 1960s brought to power a “civil rights ideology” requiring more action on behalf of “justice and humanity.” These reforms were often beneficial, but they also brought about the rise of “elite power” and a “poisonous conflict” between supporters of the original Constitution and “the de facto constitution” that arose in the 1960s. Ronald Reagan was less a counterrevolutionary and more a president who made the new system palatable. One area of drastic change was mass immigration allowed by reforms in 1965 and 1986. More people immigrated to the United States and the colonies that predated it between 1965 and 2020 than between 1607 and 1965. Immigrants allowed Americans to enjoy new restaurants and better landscaping but also led to “an extraordinary transfer of income and wealth.” In 2015 the result was: “Native capitalists gain $566 billion. Native workers lose $516 billion.” Anger over economic and social transformation paved the way for the rise of Donald Trump, Caldwell concludes.
1. Elliot West, Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion (2023)
West’s overview of the history of the American West between the discovery of gold in California in 1848 and the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890 held me spellbound. Key themes of themes of this history are economic, environmental, technological, and scientific changes and the great importance of the American West for United States and even world history. Within this framework, West chronicles and analyzes a vast array of subjects: stagecoaches, the rise and fall of mounted nomadic peoples, how the lives of men – such as the outwardly respectable Alfred Doten who in reality spent much of his time in the demimonde – and women differed, military strategy, cattle ranching, climatology, travel, violent crime, the use of camels as beasts of burden, battling the Rocky Mountain locust and tick-borne illness. He not only ties together the best work historians have done so far but also draws on harder-to-access archival and government documents. I was far from the only person who thoroughly enjoyed this book. It won the Bancroft Prize and entertained my whole family. I read much of this book aloud to our baby while she sat on my lap. My wife overheard much of my reading and also gave her approval.
Article recommendations
6. Peggy Noonan’s proverbs for a new year.
They include: “Reading deepens. Social media keeps you where you are. Reading makes your mind do work. You have to follow the plot, imagine what the ballroom looked like, figure the motivations of the characters – I understand what Gatsby wants! All this makes your brain and soul develop the habit of generous and imaginative thinking. Social media is passive. The pictures, reels and comments demand nothing, develop nothing.”
Another is: “A century ago in a short story, F. Scott Fitzgerald said the rich are different from you and me. . . . Fitzgerald's point wasn’t a romantic one. He said that something in the experience of the rich ‘makes them soft where we are hard’ and hard where we are soft. That’s true, can be unpacked forever, and applies even to our politics. On crime and illegal immigration, the private-school-educated bail-reform scholar or the wealthy donor to nonprofits is soft where we are hard. Crime and chaos can’t hurt the rich the way they hurt others. Money changes people because it changes experience.”
5. Stimulating one’s mental maps might help ward off Alzheimer’s. The Wall Street Journal writes: “A new study found that U.S. taxi and ambulance drivers had the lowest percentage of deaths attributed to Alzheimer’s disease among more than 400 occupations. . . . The researchers hypothesize that taxi and ambulance drivers could have a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s because they are constantly using navigational and spatial processing.”
4. Statistics on the large number of self-described Evangelical Christians who rarely attend church.
3. Advice for reading well in the new year. (I’m sure if you listen to the audio version of this there will be lots of obnoxious NPR voice, so stick to the transcript.)
2. How to stop wasting time and invest it in books instead.
And now, the best article I’ve read recently: how one mother battles today’s parenting culture of fear and perfectionism.