GMGReads: My Best of 2024

Books are, to a certain extent, how I mark time. This is the twentieth year I’ve compiled a “Best of the Year” list, dating back to my first year out of college and the very start of my blogging days, and I stuff books I read with trinkets from daily life at that moment — plane tickets, receipts, or tourist paraphernalia — so that when I pull a book off my shelves I can remember where and when I read it.

As some of you may remember, in the first weeks of the pandemic I did a nightly Twitter thread called #GMGReads, where I offered lists of my favorite books on a particular subject or theme. I started it in that odd halcyon period of the “novel coronavirus,” when we thought the upending of our lives would be a matter of weeks, not months or years. I ended up doing 101 nights of #GMGReads before both admitting the pandemic was not ending anytime soon and getting simply tired of the exercise. (The whole list and all the categories are memorialized on my website, if you find yourself hunting for recommendations.)

Looking back on what I read this year was a real joy. This was one of the best years of reading I’ve had in a while — in part because I had a couple months in the middle where I wasn’t actively working on a research project and thus was able to read more widely and indulge more catholic interests than I do normally. I read a lot more fiction than I normally do and read nonfiction much more widely than I normally do.

It was a year of reading riches — there are plenty of books I read this year, like Ilyon Woo’s MASTER SLAVE HUSBAND WIFE, Robert Kagan’s THE GHOST AT THE FEAST, and Matthew Desmond’s POVERTY, BY AMERICA that fascinated me that I don’t mention here — but it was easy to pull out a tier of books this year that evoked, as the parent in me says, “Big Feelings,” works that truly wowed me in one way or another.

Here are my top #GMGReads of 2024, in no particular order:

1) THE POWER BROKER by Robert Caro :: I’m almost embarrassed, given my career and interests, to admit that I had never read Caro’s original masterpiece about New York builder Robert Moses until now. But who has time for a 1,200-page book about urban planning? This spring, in that brief window between book projects, I realized I had two trips to the west coast in consecutive weeks and two all-day transcontinental flights seemed like the perfect chance to make a big dent in Caro’s masterwork. Not surprisingly, this book is as incredible as everyone has said for fifty years. It’s obviously a master lesson in power and politics, but even the parts about urban planning and policy in the mid-20th century resonate strongly today. It’s hard not to come away from the book with a mix of sheer awe — there’s almost no one who left more of a physical mark on the 20th century than Moses — but also anger, as you page past these big decisions and Mose’s personal prejudices that seemingly all-but doomed America to a prison of automobiles instead of functioning mass transit.

2) PARTISANS by Nicole Hemmer :: I wrote earlier this fall about my experience reading Nicole’s book about the rise of a particular breed of conservatives in the 1990s, partisans more interested in purity and profit than policy. Probably more than anything else I read this year, this book helped me make sense of this year’s election and the slow-spreading poison that has destroyed the party of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and John McCain.

3) MR. TEXAS by Lawrence Wright :: I keep a list of about a half-dozen career attributes of various writers and historians that I hope to achieve one day and one of them is “the eclecticness of Lawrence Wright,” who has written at a masterful level about al-Qaeda and Scientology, as well as a play about the Camp David Accords, and a prophetic novel about a pandemic. His latest novel, which came out last year, is a rollicking Christopher-Buckley-esque look at Texas politics, and is packed with the inside details he knows as an Austinite.

4) BROTHERLESS NIGHT by V.V. Ganeshananthan :: This novel, about a young girl finding her way through Sri Lanka’s long devastating, society-destroying civil war, wouldn’t normally be something that I picked up—it’s pretty far afield from my normal reading— except it was written by a longtime friend and my one-time editor on the college newspaper. I’m so so so glad I read it—the characters are fascinating, the settings deeply developed and evocative, and the story so important. It’s a window too in the people just living their lives amid horrific war, an experience that helps you imagine the humanity wrapped up in Ukraine, the Middle East, and more elsewhere right now. But you don’t have to take my word for it simply because it’s my friend who authored it: BROTHERLESS NIGHT has had a perhaps unprecedented run of literary awards this year, winning three giant awards across three continents—including the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, the Women’s Prize for Fiction (what was formerly the Orange Prize), and, just in the last few days, the Asian Prize for Fiction.

5) DARK WIRE by Joseph Cox :: The FBI sting on Anom, when the bureau ran its own encrypted cell phone network for criminals—exposing and uncovering thousands of drug dealers, money launderers, human traffickers, and mafioso—is a story I actually tried to report out myself about two years ago when it broke. Joseph did this story so much better than I ever could have. He wrote an instant true-crime classic, the inside—very very very inside it turns out—story of the largest global crime sting in history, a fascinating portrait not just of the frontiers of technology but also how organized crime operates in the 21st century. Filled with stranger-than-fiction gangsters and smugglers, this book is part-Miami Vice, part-Sneakers, and part-Ocean's Eleven. Your eyebrows will be raised in amazement page after page.

6) MARTYR by Kaveh Akbar :: Staci Thomas, of The Stacks books podcast, celebrated this book all year and I picked it up after seeing Kaveh speak at the Mississippi Book Festival. Reader, let me tell you, that I was so captivated by this book that I live-texted Staci in the middle of the night as I read it, which I’m sure was highly annoying to her but it so amazed me that I just had to talk about it real-time as I read — including, after literally gasping out loud at the book’s central twist, sending her a series of exclamation points. And she knew without me even saying what precise page of the book I was on at that moment. Every single person who I have gotten to read this book has been blown away by it, too, and it’s no surprise that it was a finalist for the National Book Award and been on all the best-of-the-year lists this month.

7) THE BARN by Wright Thompson :: This was one of the most technically challenging reads I’ve experienced in a long time. It’s a masterpiece of research and writing, and I wanted to really really love it, but I think I only kind of loved it — or maybe I did love love it!? I’m still trying to figure out exactly what I think about this one. This book traces Emmett Till’s life and death in Mississippi, written by one of the era’s most talented writers, who himself has Mississippi blood, told with the barn where he died as its central character. (It’s a super interesting choice, by the way, that you have no sense that it's Till’s story from the cover, title, or even its enigmatic subtitle: “The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.”) The book is divided into four sections, and Wright Thompson’s winding nonlinear storytelling is at first a real treat and incredibly fun, and then gets kind of exhausting. (Chapter breaks exist for a reason! Readers need to come up for air!) It feels at times there are just too many names—too many times I was reading and rereading the same paragraph or page to try to re-decipher who’s who—but about midway through the second part, I found myself warming up to the book, felt like I hit a stride, and saw it all coming together — the layers of history, the generations of hate and struggle, the inevitability! — and then the third section, about 1955, was just fantastic, as dramatic and propellant a narrative as I’ve ever encountered, and the final section about everything since and today and tomorrow finished really strong. It's certainly a big, important book, and I'm awed by the research involved—entire pages and chapters of the book are exquisitely researched in ways that feel almost impossible to recreate. I’m not surprised it’s made a lot of end-of-year best lists, but it’s definitely a book that requires real concentration.

8) IN MY TIME OF DYING by Sebastian Junger :: I was totally unprepared for what a profound, emotional experience this book turned out to be. Sebastian Junger is one of the greatest war correspondents of our time — his book THE PERFECT STORM is as close to a narrative nonfiction icon as any, responsible into injecting into our lexicon the most misused metaphor of modern time — but this book is about a close call he experienced right at home: A medical episode in his Massachusetts that delivered him a genuine Near-Death Experience. The resulting book is a deep meditation about death, life, and exploration of the oddly-unified memories of so-called “NDEs” that appear to exist across religions, culture, language, and time in human history. (He argues, in fact, that it’s possible that all of human religion stems from early people recounting NDEs.)In an odd way, this book is a companion to my own book on UFOs. In my book talks, I explain about how much of our cultural fascination with UFOs stems from how the question of “Are we alone?” has long been one of the three most basic questions that have fascinated humans since the first caveman gazed at the sky—the other two most-profound-of-all questions, of course are “What happens after death?” and “Is there a God?” I often wonder whether, depending on how and if we ever determine the answers, we may find all three more closely related than we imagine. I’ve never been a particular believer in any sort of afterlife, but listening to this short, well-read-by-Junger-himself audiobook—it’s just a little over four hours—made me both tear up at points and also left me wondering if we just completely misunderstand the depths of complexity of our own human consciousness and our connection to larger forces in the universe beyond.

9) JAMES by Percival Everett :: This was another book I read after seeing Staci Thomas rave repeatedly and, after reading it, was hardly surprised when it won the National Book Award a few weeks ago. Percival retells the familiar story of THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN from the point of view of their enslaved companion, Jim. It’s a tremendous achievement, a classic that you know will be read for decades to come. I read it this spring, coincidentally, just before picking up Ilyon Woo’s MASTER SLAVE HUSBAND WIFE and the two books together offer a powerful fictional and nonfiction view of the tough, racist reality of America in the mid-1800s that history has long obscured.

10) TICKET TO OBLIVION by Robert Parker :: I am a sucker for a great classic noir thriller. I’m a Graham Greene completist, love a good Mickey Spillane, and I’ve searched for years for a reading experience as enjoyable as James Kestrel’s FIVE DECEMBERS, which made my 2022 list. Somewhere, at some used bookstore who knows where, I had purchased TICKET TO OBLIVION, and then grabbed it off my bedside shelf this fall looking for a nice escape. Unexpectedly, I found myself devouring it in a single 24-hour marathon. This 1950 spy thriller, written by a postwar newspaper correspondent, is set in Paris and captures the tenuous moment when Europe hung in the balance between democracy and Communism after the war. Parker evidently only wrote one other novel, called PASSPORT TO PERIL, and it’ll be under my Christmas tree waiting for me this week. I’m so excited.

On the subject of small thrillers, I should also mention that I got this year into reading William F. Buckley’s series starring CIA officer Blackford Oakes. I loved SAVING THE QUEEN, found the second one, STAINED GLASS, a bit plodding, and then the third, WHO’S ON FIRST, a delight. If you’re looking for quick reads, they’re worth a look.

11) CHALLENGER by Adam Higginbotham :: Rarely have I so eagerly looked forward to reading a book as this one. Adam shares my publisher, so I had been anticipating it since inception—the marriage of this subject with Adam’s talent as a writer really had me hyped up. Man, oh man, did he deliver. What an astonishingly good read, every bit as evocative and emotional as his other MIDNIGHT IN CHERNOBYL, CHALLENGER has been on basically ever best-of-the-year book list. Adam wrote a gripping, eye-opening, moving, and finely detailed history of not just an infamous disaster but a whole generation of the Space Age. Picking up where Tom Wolfe left off, this book stands as the fascinating sequel to THE RIGHT STUFF, mixing together science, politics, and space exploration and providing a unique window into the lives of those Americans who have reached for the stars. Even though you know how the story ends, you'll eagerly turn the beautifully written pages wondering what comes next. CHALLENGER is one of the generation's best nonfiction writers working at the top of his game.

12) KING by Jonathan Eig :: I also wrote earlier this fall, after the election, about this triumphal biography of Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and if you dive into it, you’ll never write his name informally again, as you come to understanding how each part of that — the Dr., the Rev., and the Jr., are all central to the person he became. This is the book I read on election day rather than following the minute-to-minute results, and it argues that we really misunderstood King today, that we’ve sanded off the hard edges and mythologized him beyond recognition. King, as he lived, was more radical and far-reaching than we remember — we’ve forgotten his arguments against poverty and the Vietnam War — and, also, more rejected and isolated by America and even the civil rights movement he helped birth.

13) AN UNFINISHED LOVE STORY by Doris Kearns Goodwin :: This book is basically history buff catnip, Doris Kearns Goodwin look back at the 1960s experiences of her husband and herself amid the swirl of the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson, who came to shape both of their lives in fundamental ways. My only complaint about this excruciatingly lovely, rich story is that she gives her own story short-shrift in comparison to her husband’s.

14) AN ORDINARY MAN by Richard Norton Smith :: I’m sure there is no part of you that thinks you want to read a 700-page biography of Gerald Ford. You probably don’t even think you want to read a short magazine article about Gerald Ford. But if you do dive into Richard Norton Smith’s definitive never-to-be-beaten biography of the only president never to be elected either vice president or president, you’ll be surprised by how enjoyable the books is. Richard, who is a legend in the world of presidential historians, spent years mining the Ford archives and tells the story dramatically of a whole host of turning points Ford participated in, from Watergate to the fall of Saigon to the Mayaguez incident.

15) THE LUMUMBA PLOT by Stuart Reid :: Using a host of new sources and declassified documents, Stuart pieced together a remarkable tale of one of the darkest chapters of US foreign policy— the Cold War battle over the Congo and the series of choices, mostly mistaken, that the US took to isolate the former Belgian colony as it tried to establish itself as an independent country and its first leader, Patrice Lumumba, who the US plotted to assassinate. It’s like a Graham Greene novel come to life.

16) THE LAST HONEST MAN by James Risen :: Speaking of the corrupt Cold War politics of the CIA, I knew almost nothing about Frank Church, the senator behind the famous Church Committee until picking up Risen’s biography. He mixes both Church’s life and political career with the dark deeds he uncovered amid the post-Watergate backlash and investigation into the excesses of US intelligence. Although Risen, who spent much of his career covering the worst excesses of the post-9/11 era, didn’t necessarily anticipate this year’s election and the dangers that lie ahead, the book also serves as an important warning, as we enter next year, about how the tools and trade of US intelligence can be weaponized in the wrong hands to do damage to the fabric of our democratic society. I hope this is a book that remains merely history and not prophecy.

Anyway, that’s my list. I’ve been buried in research these last two months for my next book and didn’t make it to a whole host of books on my shelves that I’m excited to read in 2025 and hope may make an appearance on a future iteration of this annual list.

What’s the best book you read this year? Remember: You can always reply to these newsletters and they go straight to me.

GMG

PS: If you want even more reading suggestions, here are my best reads of 2022 and 2021. I also realized, in writing this, that I never did a best of 2023 list, so you’re going to get that as a random bonus set of recommendations before the end of the year too.