We asked some of our editors and writers to contribute a paragraph about the most memorable books they read this year.
R. R. Reno
I was in a Goodwill in Denver when my eyes fell upon a paperback Penguin edition of Charles Dickens's Bleak House. I bought it, and while on vacation swallowed it whole. Mrs. Jellyby, the misanthropic philanthropist; Jo, the paragon of innocence; Inspector Bucket, man of wisdom; and of course, the Jarndyce lawsuit that casts a deadly pall. Dickens amuses, instructs, moves, and with extraordinary extended metaphors and energetic prose so overwhelms any person with writerly ambition that joy replaces envy.
Perhaps it was the lure of the nineteenth century that caused me to vault from Dickens to Anthony Trollope. As a sometime Anglican who has studied the ecclesiastical contestations that rocked the Church of England after Newman and his friends launched the Tracts for the Times, Barchester Towers and its intra-Anglican intrigues gave me great pleasure.
After Trollope, as the long evenings of summer drew to an end, I took up Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms. I acknowledge the immediacy of his prose, which has become the norm. But I found the novel flat, a now clichéd evocation of the pointlessness of war. I soldiered on to the end.
I'm not a prisoner of the past. I do read books written by people who are still alive, often with great pleasure. (In the past I've commended the novels of Glenn Arbery, a marvelous fusion of Gabriel García Márquez with William Faulkner.) But as I used to tell my students, when in doubt, let time be your editor. That which survives is likely to satisfy.
Dan Hitchens
The more I think about it, the righter Janan Ganesh seems. “Reading is hailed as a mental health salve,” he observes. “But this is only true, or at least much truer, of a book with some decades behind it. ‘This thing pre-dates my troubles,’ is the sentiment the reader ultimately craves, ‘and will see them out too.’” This year I got that from Plutarch’s little biographies—curious about everything, surprised by nothing, and recognizing that what the reader really wants is anecdotes, anecdotes, anecdotes.
Two more recent biographies, which record deeds more magnificent than anything in Plutarch, also lifted my spirits: Karen Hall’s new book (reviewed here) on Fr. Paul Mankowski, the holy priest and Mencken-level satirist; and Sr. Kristen Gardner’s pious but mesmerizing Sister Clare Crockett: Alone With Christ Alone. Surely Sr. Clare, who died in 2016 at the age of thirty-three, will be canonized before the century is out.
My favorite paragraph of a year’s reading came on pages 259–60 of Walter McDougall’s Freedom Just Around the Corner, where he casually draws together geopolitics, military strategy, military psychology, biography, autobiography, and a quietly forceful restatement of his book’s central thesis about the American character. Look, no hands.
Mark Bauerlein
When the first plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center twenty-three years ago, Scott Freidheim was in his office in a building connected to the tower by a pedestrian bridge. In Code of Conduct: Tales of the Roller Coaster of Life, he describes in twenty mesmerizing pages what happened during the next thirty minutes. It’s just one episode in the book, which tells the story of his life in brief scenes with a moral attached. In another one, he’s the target of an attempted murder. Those are the shocking tales; others are heartwarming, and all of them are a good read.
Cardinal George Pell spent four hundred days in jail before Australia’s High Court overturned his convictions for child abuse and rape in a seven-to-zero decision. George Weigel wrote about it for First Things, and has authored a foreword to a new biography of the cardinal. Tess Livingstone’s George Cardinal Pell: Pax Invictis covers Pell’s life from his birth in Victoria, 1941, to his funeral in Sydney, 2023; his writings from his dissertation forward; and his administrative struggles in Australia and in Rome. (In 2014, one week after taking over Vatican finances, Pell’s office was burglarized.) Livingstone devotes seventy pages to the abuse affair, which interrupted Pell’s investigations of financial corruption in the Vatican bureaucracy. For anyone interested in either scandal, this book is an authoritative resource.
When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, René Girard was known as a leading literary theorist, until identity politics corrupted literary studies in the 1990s. From what I’ve seen while at First Things, however, Girard’s reputation is growing. I Came to Cast Fire: An Introduction to René Girard, by Fr. Elias Carr, is ideal for graduate students and laymen who are fascinated by Girard’s writings but struggle to absorb the grand theory of culture that he devised. This book offers nice summations of mimetic rivalry, the scapegoat mechanism, and other concepts, not to replace Girard’s handling of them but to send readers back to the original, better prepared for its far-reaching insights.
Valerie Stivers
Anyone who has clutched his head at the past ten-plus years of American culture, unable to understand how people believe the absurd things being foisted upon us by liberal and media elites, will find sociologist and Stony Brook University assistant professor Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite to be essential reading. Why are elite white young people demanding policing reforms that will obviously hurt the black and brown low-income communities they sincerely and passionately think they care about? Why are the least radical people among us—well-heeled corporate office girls—suddenly including “she/hers” in their signatures, ushering in the climate that allows radical gender experimentation on their own children? Can’t rich-kid student activists see how hypocritical they are, and so on?
It’s one thing to believe it’s all virtue-signaling for personal gain, conscious or not, but it’s quite another—and very satisfying, too—to have someone prove it. Al-Gharbi does this, in a highly readable work for a general audience, through data analysis of how elite behavior contrasts with elite rhetoric, and through careful examination of whom such rhetoric benefits and how. The hypocrisy knife cuts both ways, however. In Al-Gharbi’s telling, those of us battling wokeness are simply another flavor of the same elite, seeking mostly the same thing. His usage of the term “symbolic capitalist,” which means a person whose “capital” is prestige, access, and education, neatly corrals us (me, as I’m writing this, and you as you’re reading it too), and explains all too clearly how we contribute to social trends that most of us claim to lament. I have never been woke, but this book was a wake-up call.
Carl R. Trueman
Focusing on strictly theological volumes for this list, my books of the year have to include Anthony Esolen’s new translation (in a beautifully produced edition) of Augustine’s Confessions. I read every translation I find of this work. It is a book that repays repeated reading, probing both the deep things of theology and of the human condition. It is also suffused with references to the Psalms and has inspired me to commit next year to reading through the whole of Augustine’s Expositions of the Psalms.
The most entertaining modern theological autobiography I read in 2024 was philosopher Ralph McInerny’s delightfully entitled memoir, I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You: My Life and Pastimes. By turns highly amusing and deeply moving, McInerny’s was an intellectual life lived to the full, including his interesting sideline in writing detective fiction. His description of the changes at Notre Dame University during his time are particularly insightful as a commentary on trends in elite American higher education over the last fifty years. Particularly memorable, perhaps even haunting, is his comment that no college football coach should ever earn more than the highest paid professor on campus. That such a comment will sound outrageous to so many is an eloquent testimony to much that has recently gone wrong in academia in terms of its priorities.
Finally, the best new theological book I read was Patrick Schreiner’s The Transfiguration of Christ. A much-neglected topic in Protestantism, this book is an important evangelical contribution not only to the growing fruitful relationship between theology and exegesis in general but to the vital importance of the Transfiguration to Christology. This is a book that both informs understanding and encourages devotion. Heart and mind in harmony—a fine Augustinian idea, to return to where I started this list.
John Byron Kuhner
2024 turned out to be the year of the Bible in our bookstore. I ordered nine copies of the new Ignatius Catholic Study Bible at first and sold them within two hours; I put in a second order for twenty-five more and sold them in two days. Its combination of modern biblical scholarship with traditional Catholic interpretations from the Church Fathers and Doctors feels like a return to common sense.
I also enjoyed Ryan Budd’s new Salvation Stories, an examination of the life of families in Scripture. Budd is sagely critical of the Old Testament exemplars, wisely searching for the qualities of the patriarchs that are actually exemplary and deriving comfort from their many failings.
I am currently reading Jordan Peterson’s We Who Wrestle With God, an extended meditation on biblical stories. Meatier is Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses, available in a nice Harper Christian Classics edition. Most patristic readings put me to sleep; Gregory is different. His readings are strikingly free, and it’s from this book that we have the highly influential “gold of the Egyptians” interpretation: Gregory asserted that we should preserve ancient pagan wisdom and literature just as the Hebrews took Egyptian gold. It serves as an inspiration for our store in general, where we read and promote the Great Books, wherever they might come from. There is demand for them too: We sold 132 copies of A Christmas Carol this year, an astonishing number for a little bookstore. We were helped by online sales, but the lesson is: In our shop, quality outperforms novelty.
Peter J. Leithart
“Something is coming” is the haunting refrain that resounds through Paul Kingsnorth’s Buccmaster Trilogy. In The Wake (2014), set in the fenland of eleventh-century Britain and written entirely in a dialect of Kingsnorth’s invention, what’s coming is William the Bastard from the east and marauding Vikings from the north. In the final volume, Alexandria (2020), it’s “Wayland,” part demon and part machine, who dispatches his mouthpiece “K.” to tempt the members of a small quasi-monastic community to abandon their commitment to body, flesh, heart, and blood. “Biology means ignorance, stasis, division, injustice. Embodiment is a stain on your potential” is K.’s transhumanist gospel. Readers who appreciate Kingsnorth’s prophetic essays will find his fiction equally compelling.
On a recent trip, I ran out of things to read and grabbed Paul Lynch’s 2023 Prophet Song at an airport bookstall. When the Irish state imposes an Emergency Powers Act to battle sedition, members of Eilish Stack’s family start disappearing—her unionist husband Larry, her oldest son Mark, and finally her second son Bailey, who goes missing in the hospital system. Lynch’s controlled, poignant prose and long paragraphs trap his characters in bureaucratic inhumanity that descends into street warfare. Nineteen Eighty-Four and That Hideous Strength have always felt cartoonish. Not Prophet Song; it’s utterly credible, utterly terrifying. It could happen anywhere.
Greenville Presbyterian Seminary’s L. Michael Morales has established himself as one of today’s best Old Testament scholars, with The Tabernacle Pre-Figured (2012) and illuminating shorter commentaries on Exodus and Leviticus. The first of a two-volume Numbers commentary was released in 2024, and it’s splendid. If the book of Numbers doesn’t speed your heart rate, consider this: By exploring analogies between Israel’s war camp and the faces of the cherubim, Morales shows that the Israel of Numbers is an angelic, heavenly Israel. You won’t find that in your average commentary.
Germán Saucedo
Although one of the main reasons I wanted to work at First Things was so that I could get a job that involved reading longer, non-legal texts, I have done less reading of actual books this year than I would care to admit. Even so, I did have time to squeeze in a few noteworthy novels. Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask is a semi-autobiographical novel about Kochan, a young man living in mid-twentieth-century Japan. Kochan, in an attempt to break free from his homosexuality, tries to fall in love with one of his friend’s sisters. Through excruciatingly detailed passages of introspection, Mishima depicts the homosexual as a whole, complex person while never veering into self-indulgence.
It’s often been said that to truly understand Pedro Páramo—Juan Rulfo’s masterpiece of literary fiction—one must read it six times. As of this year, I’m up to my fourth re-read. To say that it is Mexico’s greatest novel would be an understatement. The novel is exemplary in its non-linear structure and masterful study of human nature. It’s unfortunate that progressive academics have reduced Pedro Páramo and most Latin American fiction to mere criticism of class structures and sexual mores, which always yields the most boring literary analysis possible. I am certain that this reading of the book will take precedence in the recently released Netflix movie adaptation, which I refuse to see. Some novels should not be movies.
Jacob Akey
During the three months between graduation and the start of my term as junior fellow, I embarked on something of a reading program. Since the gaps in my education were (are) too big to fill in three months' time, I assembled a greatest hits playlist under the advice of a few of my former professors and advisors.
One, the advisor of my college newspaper, a garrulous old monk, recommended that I read Romano Guardini’s The Lord. “Don’t worry, it’s short. Two hundred pages,” he assured. And so assured, I ordered the book, the introduction of which was written by Pope Benedict XVI. The book has influenced every Catholic worth noting—from Josef Pieper to Pope Francis. Of course, when it arrived, I found that Father had fibbed. Not two hundred pages, but seven hundred. And, to tell the truth, The Lord was a long, painful read. In need of a vicious editor, the series of Christological reflections is a doorstopper. That said, it was an immensely edifying read, well worth recommending. Working through The Lord, one feels like a beachcomber, searching for treasure. And, every few dozen pages, one finds it.
How differently profound Christian life from the life that is merely human! They are poles apart. One of the world's most fearful maneuvres against the Christian is to rob him of his consciousness of this difference. . . . Here lies the fundamental task of spiritual education; one in which both the man of the intellect and the man of action must share: the reinstatement of the polarity of genuine Christianity in the consciousness, sensibility, and will of the believer.
Claire Giuntini
A few months ago, I began making a mental list of what my fellow passengers have been reading on the subway. You don’t see folks reading every ride. Or even every other ride. But those who do read come from all ages and situations, and they read all sorts of things. Here’s a list of all the titles I’ve managed to nab.
I’ve spotted works by self-help Steves: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey, and Do the New You, by Steven Furtick. Not by a Steve, but similar in genre, was El arte de no amargarse la vida (“The Art of Not Embittering Life”).
The genre of Greek mythological villainess stories, whose plots run along the lines of “they only hated her because she was a woman who was better than all the men,” also has its representatives: Circe and The Witch of Colchis. I spied a young woman reading Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo. Another romance novel was Alain de Botton’s On Love. Also by a French author, but very different, was the comic book Toto: L’Ornithorynque et L’Arbre Magique, which Google Translate tells me means “Toto: The Platypus and the Magic Tree.” Intriguing.
Books on dystopian situations, real and fictional, include Han Kang’s Human Acts, about the 1980 uprising in Gwangju, South Korea, and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Other politically minded reads include Isaiah Berlin’s The Crooked Timber of Humanity and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. One young man was reading the Qu’ran. A youngish professorial-looking gent was seen with The Canterbury Tales. There was also a young lady reading Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, and I saw another youngish woman with a collection of American short stories.
The crown jewel is the man I encountered in the elevator of my apartment building, and though he was neither on a train nor actively reading, I simply must include him on my list. He sported a leather trench coat, neck tattoos, a nose ring, and—most importantly—a fancy-looking hardcover edition of Plato’s Republic, the one that bears the subtitle “The Heaviest Penalty for Declining to Rule Is to Be Ruled by Someone Inferior to Yourself.”
Though I can’t recommend every book I saw, perhaps New York City is not such a den of insuperable iniquity as folks think it is.
