The (Very) Best Books I Read In 2024
Another year and what do I have to show for it? A big stack of books read and ruminated on is not a bad answer. I know some people assiduously track how many books they read, but I do not (Do you count books you made halfway through? Re-reads? Books you read to your kids? Favorites you took off the shelf to find a favorite passage?) because I don’t think it’s a contest. Epictetus was right when he said it’s not that you read but what you read. So I do track my favorites. And boy, there were some books I loved this year. Books that I got a ton out of. Books that in some cases, have already changed my life.
Here, at the end of the year, I try to narrow down all the books I read and recommended in this email list to just a handful of the best. The kind of books where if they were the only books I’d read that year, I’d still feel like it was an awesome year of reading. You can check out the best of lists from 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011… I can’t believe it’s been 14 years of these roundups!
My reading list is now ~315,000 people and between that and meeting folks who come into my bookstore every day, I hear pretty quickly when a recommendation has landed well. I promise you—you can’t go wrong with any of these.
Tunnel 29: The True Story of an Extraordinary Escape Beneath the Berlin Wall by Helena Merriman and Night of the Grizzlies by Jack Olsen It’s almost a problem how many amazing books my wife recommended to me this year. It’s not a problem that the books were good, it’s that I sat on them for too long. I’m pretty sure she didn’t even recommend Tunnel 29 to me this year. What an idiot I am for taking my time getting around to reading this because it’s incredible. Like, so good that I sometimes had trouble reading more than a few pages at a time–I would have to get up and walk around or just snack on something to calm down. It’s the story of a German graduate student who escapes into West Berlin…and then despite having no family or loved ones on the other side, spends thousands of hours–at great risk to himself–digging a 442-foot tunnel back to East Berlin to help others escape. So much good Cold War history here, but more than that, just a riveting story. I love narrative nonfiction, as you know, but this one is written by a TV journalist so it has a very unique feel to it. I don’t think I’ve read anything like it before. Just LOVED it. I’m sorry, Samantha, you were right. I should have listened.
And yet…she’s guilty of it too. Because I have been raving about The Tiger for close to a decade and she read it…this year. Now is Night of the Grizzlies (one of my favorites this year) as good as The Tiger? Of course not, because The Tiger is the greatest man vs animal (or animal vs man) book ever written. What I am saying is that this book is also great. I found it mentioned in another book and tracked down a used copy. I’m glad I did because it’s a riveting story of how two grizzlies killed two women in two different areas of Glacier National Park after never having killed a person in the park’s 57-year existence. The book reminded me a lot of Erik Larson’s Dead Wake, too (and I suppose Walter Lord’s A Night To Remember) where your dread increases as the book goes on, as each warning is ignored, each chance to prevent the tragedy is missed, and each page brings you closer to what you know will be the gruesome, violent, and now unavoidable action. This book deserves to be much more well-known. It was a lot of work, but we tracked down the publisher and got a bunch of new copies for The Painted Porch…which we have repeatedly sold out this year. Very excited that this amazing book is getting a second life. It deserves it. Also if you want another great story, The Revenant is not just a good movie but an even better book.
James: A Novel by Percival Everett My wife grabbed this for me at First Lights Books in Austin, TX for my birthday. What a wonderful idea for a novel–to tell the story of Huckleberry Finn and Jim from Jim’s perspective! That Everett is able to take this much darker and tragic perspective and still make it funny? That’s a task worthy of Mark Twain. It’s also deeply moving and I think an important look at how slavery actually was (Twelve Years a Slave is one of the greatest memoirs ever written). I spent my birthday reading James and I consider that a great gift. Also, it reminded me of two other books I loved: Wicked River by Lee Sandlin (an absolutely incredible book about the history of the river) and another book I read and loved this year, Life on the Mississippi by Rinker Buck (about a guy who recently traveled the river on his own raft, not too dissimilar to the one Huck and Jim were on). And of course, the other book I thought of when I read James was Wright Thompson’s The Barn (which I took in on a flight to Brazil and back this year), because The Barn is about Emmett Till and Emmett Till and Huck Finn were the same age. Both books are the story of America–its hope and its evil, its land and its people, its potential and its horrific past. Wright is one of my favorite writers and thinkers (here’s his episode on The Daily Stoic Podcast about the book) but this book is an essential contribution to American history. I think everyone needs to read James and The Barn this year.
Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World by Irene Vallejo and The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen I am in awe of artists who can make something you didn’t think would be interesting, just utterly fascinating. And oh my god, Papyrus is one of the most impressive examples of that I can recall (the invention and the impact of paper???). Last year, I swooned over Ann Wroe’s Pontius Pilate for similar reasons–it’s a beautiful and insightful study of ancient thought and how we’ve been shaped by it. I just love when you get to read an author who not only has complete mastery of their subject, but complete mastery of story and language, too. The only downside to this book was how many pages I folded for notes that I now need to transfer to my commonplace book…and that brings me to The Notebook. My British publisher sent me this which I’m glad about because I haven’t heard anyone talking about Roland Allen’s lovely book about one of the most transformative pieces of technology ever invented. We don’t really think of notebooks and journals as a piece of technology, but of course, they are–there were dark days before such wonderful things existed. My life is built around my notebooks. I journal before bed (there’s even a Daily Stoic Journal). I have kept a “One Line a Day” journal (my favorite) for the last 8 years. I have been keeping a “commonplace book” for even longer–none of my writing would be possible without it. (I learned this from Robert Greene). Have you heard the phrase “keeping a second brain”? That’s what my notebooks are. Anyway, one of the things that struck me in this book is how late the invention of the notebook was. Of course, people were taking notes in Greece and Rome (ahem, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations), but the more modern notebook as we understand it today dates to roughly the 1400s in Florence. And who was one of the first great minds to see them for all their potential? Da Vinci! Here’s my pod with Roly, which you might enjoy.
And a few more… Of course, I couldn’t just pick those few titles. I was blown away by Gary Will’s Lincoln at Gettysburg. I read 3,000 or so pages on Lincoln this year–and many more before that–and this is probably the best. I’ve given something like 30 copies of Brent Underwood’s Ghost Town Living out to friends at the bookstore this year. And I sent another friend a copy of Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity (something I’m working to get better at). My in-laws are big Sharon McMahon fans (one of the only podcast guests they wanted to meet), as a family we all really liked her new book The Small and the Mighty. It’s a book that’s even more important after this election. You can listen to my interview with her here. You can also listen to my interview with Julia Baird, who has two other important books for where the world is right now, Phosphorescence (about resilience and adversity) and her new one Bright Shining (about grace, which we could all use more of). Another recommendation my wife raved about was Charles Duhigg’s Supercommunicators (our chat here). I got to work on lacrosse great Paul Rabil’s The Way of the Champion, which I think you’ll like, too (and here’s our chat). And lastly, I’ve been hoping for a good biography of Marcus Aurelius for a long time and we finally got one–a great one actually–in Donald Robertson’s book, Marcus Aurelius: The Stoic Emperor (here’s our chat about that one). Definitely read.
Kid books: My oldest became madly obsessed with Greek myths this year, mostly The Odyssey. We’ve been reading Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey together as well as this graphic novel. My Spotify Wrapped tells me that we spent an almost alarming amount of hours listening to the Greeking Out podcast, which I can’t recommend highly enough to parents with elementary school kids. There are also two great books, Greeking Out: Epic Retellings of Classic Greek Myths and Greeking Out Heroes and Olympians. As a parent of two boys, I got a lot out of Richard Reeves’ Of Boys and Men (here’s our chat). We read Adam Rubin’s High Five book many times this year, so much so that our copy is starting to fall apart (the kids love reading it because they get to hit it as hard as they can). We had to put down our 16-year-old dachshund last year, so I loved reading Doug Salati’s Hot Dog. It’s a very sweet book. My youngest is just learning to read and I’m proud to say that he read his first book by himself this year! It was Bob Books. We’re very excited. We also loved Jon Klassen’s The Rock From The Sky and trolled each other around the house with lines from the book after reading it. Matthew McConaughey came out to the bookstore last week to do a live event and podcast (coming soon), and he signed a bunch of copies of his children’s book Just Because.
