Favorite books of 2024

 I read a lot of books in 2024, some poorly written, some good enough, and some excellent books that inspired me with their content and made me happy with their wonderful way with words. For me a good book combines both substance (what it says) and form (how it’s written).

It helps to be part of a good book-reading-group. I am. I hesitate to call it a club. We’re too informal for that and have no officers or protocol. We just meet regularly and have lively discussions. But, to be honest, I’d read just as much even if I were not in a group.

The following are some of the year’s favorites, not listed in any priority and being published in any year (not just 2024). I limited the list to ten fiction and ten nonfiction books. It was hard and I eliminated some good books. But, oh well. It’s interesting to see that all but one of the fiction books were written by women. The women also dominated the nonfiction and poetry categories. I wonder what that means.

Fiction

Ann Patchett, Tom Lake (2023): Patchett’s books always please me. This one tells of a mother and her three grown daughters, in the setting of a summer theater camp. It’s about telling stories and keeping secrets. How much do we really know about our parents?

Isabel Allende, The Wind Knows My Name (2023): Story of three children in three different generations, all raised in contexts of violence. Portrays well the trauma of being refugees.

Patti Callahan, Becoming Mrs. Lewis (2020): A fictional portrayal of the romance between CS Lewis and Joy Davidman. Extensive research gives this view of their relationship plausibility.

Geraldine Brooks, Horse (2023): Historical fiction that weaves the narratives of three people living in three different times whose stories eventually intersect. It circles around the sport of horse-racing and the story of one remarkable horse, Lexington. Touches on themes of racism, animal rights, relationships between animals and humans, and the relationship between science and art. Provocative. 

Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry (2022): One of my favorites this year. A funny feminist story of a woman chemist in a world of men. When fired from her job, the protagonist applies her science to the art of cooking and becomes a popular television personality. The book treats serious subjects with humor.

Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979): Combines fantasy, realism, and time travel as a contemporary black girl finds herself back in the era of slavery, trying to understand her family story. Brings to life the suffering caused by racism, both in the past and today.

Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts (2023): A futurist novel about the fight against injustice set in a dystopian, totalitarian society. Again, the theme of racism is strong. Reminds me of Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451.

Kristin Hannah, The Women (2024): Story of the women who served as nurses in Vietnam, the challenges they faced in war, and those faced as they returned back home. An important book.

Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead (2022): This one is a Pulitzer Prize winner and I can see why. It’s hard to read the story of this young man who grows up with everything traumatic, violent, and wrong against him. As he progresses through young adulthood so many horrible things happen to him, it’s hard to read. Yet grace continues to show up in the people here and there who befriend and believe in him. It’s a valuable window into what so many people in our culture go through.

Niall Williams, This Is Happiness (2021): I found a new favorite author in this Irish writer. This coming-of-age story is set in a small Irish village early in the 20th century, and the setting is as much a protagonist as the people in the tale. Beautiful and insightful descriptions, both of the landscape and of human nature.

Non-fiction

David Brooks, How To Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (2023): A good book on being an authentic, other-centered, kind person who helps the ones she’s with become more of themselves. I’m a David Brooks fan.

Judy Meliner, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner (2015): Fascinating memoir of a forensic investigator’s internship in New York City. Goes into detail of all that an autopsy in a criminal cast involves. Especially gripping is the chapter on 9/11.

Sarah McCaman, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living and Leaving the White Evangelical Church (2024): Provocative book documenting the stories of young adults, raised in evangelical churches, who are leaving, disillusioned. I identify with many of the reasons young people leave the church but I don’t agree with the totally black picture she paints. There is still much life in the church.

Barbara Mahany, The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text (2023): Mahany says that God speaks to us in two main ways: through Scripture and through nature. This book focuses on nature and the need to pay attention. Give specific details about different phenomena of nature. To be read slowly and reflectively.

Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me (2023): Memoir of Bringley’s ten years as a guard at this famous museum in New York. He tells stories of the different pieces of art as well as his personal experiences and his gradual becoming an art lover himself. I especially appreciated his reflections on art and how to enjoy art.

Nancy French, Ghosted: An American Story (2024): Fascinating story of a woman who ghost-wrote biographies of political figures, especially Republicans. During the time of Trump, she began to get uneasy as she felt forced to write things she felt were untrue. When she decided to no long write these stories, she was “ghosted” by the party, loosing her career and suffering harassment. Hard to read.

Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford (2013): Memoir of a young Canadian woman who won a scholarship for graduate work in Oxford. It’s a triple love story: Weber’s falling in love with England and Oxford; her relationship with a Christian young man who explained the gospel to her and eventually won her love; and her finding God for herself, the focus of the story.

Barbara Brown Taylor, Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others (2019): Brown, a Christian professor of world religion to undergraduates, tells of her experiences as she takes a positive approach to other religions and brings students to worship services in each of the traditions. She finds so much good that she identifies what she calls “holy envy,” wishing that some of the practices could be incorporated into Christianity. She says that this approach to other faiths has actually strengthened her as a Christian.

Kristin Gault, Gifts of Sight: Discovering God's Love through the Lens of Visual Impairment (2024): Probably one of the best books of the year, and I say this because I believe it, not because the author happens to be my daughter (brag, brag, brag). Kristin combines her own experience as a teacher of the visually impaired with her larger life story, sharing spiritual insights that have risen from her profession and life.

Allen Cheney, Crescendo: The Story of a Genius Who Forever Changed a Southern Town (2019): Inspiring biography of a man who grew up poor and abused, but who discovered music early on and was soon recognized as a musical genius. An amazing rags-to-riches story.

Poetry

Jessica Jacobs, Unalone (2024): Poems based on the book of Genesis by a poet who is also a Hebrew scholar. Many of the poems are wonderful (and I rarely use that word). I wish I’d written this book!

Nancy Thomas, The Language of Light: poems of wit, whimsey, and (maybe) wisdom (2024): Okay, right. It’s my book. But I’m actually pleased with it and invite you to discover it for yourself. Available on Amazon.com.

It’s almost 2025 and I look forward to lots of things in the new year. One of those is, of course, books There’s a world of books I haven’t read. I wonder what treasures I’ll discover.