2024 reading sprawled all over my study. One stack held sources for the book about my father’s time as a mortar crewman in World War II, another wrap-up reading for my novel about Richmond’s notorious grave robber Chris Baker. The “reading for fun” stacks ranged from poetry to graphic novels to personal testimonials to best sellers. As usual, this is not a list of books published only this year; it’s my favorite books read this year, no matter when they were published, listed alphabetically by author. Please share you own list in the comments, if you will.
James Baldwin – Going to Meet the Man (stories) and The Devil Finds Work (film criticism).
If you haven’t read Baldwin yet, I’d recommend starting with his essays, which are essential to understanding American culture and the beleaguered hearts of we the people. I’ve been imbibing all of his writing, and this year especially appreciated the heart-rending stories in this collection. There’s a passage about jazz that can reshape how you think about music and art, and the title story rivals Eudora Welty’s famous Where is the Voice Coming From? in imagining race murder through the eyes of the culprits. Baldwin’s film criticism can be knee-slappingly funny in its takedown of Hollywood stereotypes, and quite touching in its attention to minor characters and canny directorial choices. His dissection of Lady Sings the Blues got me to buy Billie Holiday’s memoir of the same title, and boy what a book that is!
John Barth – The Development (stories).
Chesapeake Bay post-modernist Barth died this year. His pretzel-logic fiction experiments are an acquired taste, but this book is his most conventional (and touching). It’s a sequence of wry, funny stories that capture successive episodes in the lives of one retired couple, living in a senior’s only community on the Bay, and as they age and the earlier episodes fade into memory, the richness of their everyday lives deepens into reflections on the nature of experience, love, and farewells. (See below for another favorite retirement community tale.)
Lydia Davis – Our Strangers: Stories.
In all the best ways, this is an original and one might say peculiar book. Are these even stories? Some are poems, others a single paragraph, others long digressions about what someone saw on a train or had for dinner, but all demonstrate Davis’ microscopically acute view of the present moment, as both miraculous and mundane. Taken together, her “stories” read like a scrapbook memoir, or like shuffling intently through a shoebox of family photos. I may steal this model and attempt a similarly shaped memoir of my own.
Percival Everett – James.
This wasn’t really a favorite book of the year, or even my favorite Everett novel (that would be his brief hammer blow to the forehead The Book of Training (a handbook for managing slaves)), but James led me back to Huckleberry Finn, and it was fascinating to read the books side-by-side. This was my third time through Huck (first read it in elementary school and still have that edition, illustrated by Norman Rockwell!), taken again by its (oh boy, was he right about that!) portrayal of America as a nation of scammers and thieves, but also by the evolving bond between Huck and Jim on and off their raft.
Everett’s retelling in Jim’s voice focuses primarily on the signifying scam his Black characters put over on whites through language, pretending via slang and patois to stupidity, while speaking in a scholarly voice to each other when white folks aren’t around. This deception necessary in order to survive in the slave-day South, where appearing “uppity” can bring the noose. You grasp that point early on, and after a while you wish Everett would let it go. There’s a revelation at book’s end, stiflingly clarifying Huck and James’ relationship, that made me want to toss the book across the room, too. But I must admit that interleaving the two books was fun. Recommend you do the same if you pick up James.
One other note here. My brother-from-another-mother Paul Witcover’s Huck and Jim novel Lincolnstein (have blogged about it before) dissects American racism more tellingly than James. I believe it’s a stronger tale than this year’s National Book Award winner. Can even imagine Everett picking it up and musing, “Hmm, wish I’d thought of that!”
Emil Ferris – My Favorite Thing is Monsters: Book Two.
This Manhattan telephone book*-sized graphic novel -- each gorgeously detailed colored pencil sketch laid out on lined notebook paper – is the long-awaited sequel to a favorite book of 2017 (Book One), about a girl in 1960s Chicago who imagines herself a cartoon monster, while investigating the mysterious death of a neighbor, falling in love, and trying to keep her only living relative out of the Vietnam draft. As the great graphic novelist Chris Ware said of it, “Absolutely Astonishing.”
Btw, here’s the protagonist:
*This comparison for readers of a certain age who may remember telephone books.
Robert Gray – Shoring Up Ourselves.
My friend author Rosemary Rawlins recommended this new memoir, and when Gray visited her in the Outer Banks this fall, I was fortunate to attend his reading there. A fire captain on the scene at the Pentagon on 9-11, his description of shoring up the structure, unearthing bodies, and coping with that horror is riveting. But then he suffers a traumatic brain injury in a fall at home, and the second half of the book movingly details the two steps forward/one step back path of his recovery. That Gray has found a new career in helping first responders cope with PTSD is wonderful. That he writes so well about so much is, too.
Ethelbert Miller – Fathering Words.
Ashamed to admit that until I attended a book shop interview between Miller and my friend Randy Fertel last spring, I’d never heard of Washington, DC’s noted poet and self-professed literary activist. When Miller invited me to do a radio interview, I tried to remedy my ignorance by picking up a volume of his sweet, yearnful poetry, and this book, his first memoir, a touching reflection on his childhood in the Bronx and the soul-shaking changes college at Howard offered. Miller’s narrative is also a formal investigation of the way that memory works (and fails to work), his recollections circling back on themselves, deepening meanings and connections, as this young poet strives to shape an identity amidst the swirl of 1960s-70s America.
By the way, Miller interviews writers every Thursday on WPFW-FM. You can stream his “On the Margin” shows or catch up later on the podcasts. He’s a warm and insightful interviewer, a joyful literary activist indeed.
Katy Munger – Too Old to Die.
The new Ted Danson tv series A Man on the Inside (Netflix) is funny and profound in its exploration of life in a retirement community. Munger’s novel, the latest in her Hubbert & Lil series of cozy mysteries, is just as good. Set in a North Carolina senior community that the two amateur sleuths turn upside down in their pursuit of a killer, Munger’s tale hilariously nails aging Barbie’s, toupeed Lothario’s, wizened staff, and wary townies, not to mention Southern cuisine, golf cart etiquette, and inheritance scams. Though her books are not on airport racks (yet), Munger is a every bit the peer of Southern crime fiction masters Barry Hannah and Carl Hiassen. Hope Ted Dansen reads this one and options it!
(Okay, so yes, Katy’s a longtime dear friend, but her writing is such an inspiration! Check out her website here.)
Yoko Ogawa – The Housekeeper and the Professor
Some of my favorite books have turned up by accident (have not forgotten finding a worn paperback of Richard Price’s brilliant The Wanderers atop a garbage can in New York’s East Village long ago); plucked this one from the Little Free Library at Elwood Thompson’s grocery store. One of those books where not much happens, but where the details of everyday life shared by these two mismatched characters somehow say everything.
John O’Hara – Appointment at Samarra; Butterfield 8; Sermons and Soda Water.
Another serendipitous Little Free Library find, a worn boxed set of the novella sequence Sermons and Soda Water sent me on a John O’Hara binge. How had I not read this essential American novelist before? Especially since writers I love so much – Chandler, Hammett, the two MacDonald’s – learned their hard-bitten styles from him, and wow, no one else writes dialogue this well. The protagonists of these three books struggle and fail against class structures they only think they know how to negotiate. A hundred years later, their stories still ring (heart-breakingly) true.
So there you have it, my favorite reads of the year. Tag, you're it. Please add yours in the comments; wishing you a joyful holiday season!
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