A Year of Reading: 2024

A year ago, after a series of annual lists that grew longer and longer, I changed the format of this feature, making it much more manageable in size and focusing on “nonfiction” (an incongruous label, when you think about it). I’m continuing in that vein for 2024, with a list of ten titles plus my choice for “Book of the Year.” I hope you find something of interest here (and if you do, I’d love to hear from you).

Agatha Christie’s Marple:
Expert on Wickedness
by mark aldridge
harpercollins

Aldridge has already given us Agatha Christie’s Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World, plus an earlier book about Christie’s fiction onscreen. Now he has turned his focus to Miss Marple. Chatty, encyclopedic but never dull, and loaded with black-and-white illustrations (many of them featuring book covers, much to my delight), Aldridge’s breezy survey should appeal to anyone who treasures this remarkable character. (Wendy and I have spent countless happy hours watching and rewatching Joan Hickson as Miss Marple for the BBC series.) It’s a book to be dipped into as the spirit moves.

Beyond the Devil’s Road:
Francisco Garcés and the Spanish Encounter with the American Southwest
by jeremy beer
university of oklahoma press

I read a lot about Native Americans; I’m also interested in the history of missions. And—as you know if you have followed this column for a while—I routinely devour books on walking. All of these elements are present in Jeremy Beer’s splendid account of the intrepid Francisco Garcés (1738–1781), a Franciscan priest sent from his native Spain in 1768 as a missionary to “New Spain.” From his post at San Xavier del Bac, a mission in the Sonoran Desert, he ranged widely, encountering a variety of Native peoples (including the ones who killed him). This is a book that deserves to find the widest possible readership. Devour it yourself and spread the word.

The Burden of Rhyme:
Victorian Poetry, Formalism, and the Feeling of Literary History
by naomi levine
university of chicago press

This is one of a surprising number of recent studies of rhyme from fresh angles (an interesting trend that hasn’t received sufficient attention). I’d love to see a big essay-review that included several of them, including Naomi Levine’s book. This is primarily intended for Levine’s fellow academics (she is an assistant professor of English at Yale), but non-academic readers of poetry with an interest in rhyme (and some poets too, I think) will find plenty here to chew on.

The Empire of Climate:
A History of an Idea
by david n. livingstone
princeton university press

I don’t think I’ve read every single one of David Livingstone’s books, but I have read most of them (and still pull them down from the shelves now and then), much to my profit. (Try his 2008 book Adam's Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins, for instance.) His new book, The Empire of Climate (the title, he tells us, is borrowed from Montesquieu), shows how, from antiquity to the present, “climate” has been endowed with extraordinary explanatory power. To be aware of the distorting effects of “climate reductionism,” Livingstone has emphasized, “is not to diminish the tremendous challenge that climate change is posing to our own society. It is rather to elucidate how climate’s effects are filtered through cultural particularities and take their place alongside a myriad of other formative factors.”

The Journal I Did Not Keep:
New and Selected Writing
by lore segal
melville house

This collection, first published in 2019, was reissued this fall, right around the time that Lore Segal died at the age of ninety-six. From the time I first read her (in the New Yorker, I think), she was among my favorites, with an utterly distinctive voice. She wrote novels (excellent ones; short stories too), but she wasn’t “a novelist.” She wrote children’s books (delightful), but she couldn’t be pigeonholed thus. She was echt Jewish (born in Vienna); she was also sui generis. How Wendy and I loved her translation of stories from the Brothers Grimm, in a lovely little edition with illustrations by Maurice Sendak! This miscellany (including both fiction and nonfiction) provides a generous sampling of her work. My favorite piece is “The Gardners’ Habitats,” on the novelist John Gardner and his family. 

The Making of Sylvia Plath
by carl e. rollyson
university press of mississippi

I refer to Carl Rollyson as “Mr. Biography”; his range and expertise as a biographer and his unmatched knowledge of biography (both the history of the genre and the current practice thereof) are unparalleled. One of his special subjects is Sylvia Plath, about whom he knows more than anyone else does, period. His new book, grounded in that unparalleled knowledge but also bracingly down-to-earth, focuses on the influences on her life and work—an “intricate web of literature, cinema, spirituality, psychology, and popular culture”—and what she made of them.

Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic:
Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity
by nadya williams
ivp academic

I devoted a column to this book at the beginning of October. Williams’s “experience as a historian of the classical world,” I wrote then

gives her a distinctive perspective on the much-debated subjects outlined in her title, as does her choice to become a “stay-at-home mom” (and a homeschooler to boot: the horror!). She moves without strain from the plight of widows in fourth-century B.C. Athens (she focuses on one in particular, a foreigner, lacking protectors) to our own time: “Modern America,” she observes, “has become a land of uprooted people.” 

I found it very encouraging to see how this historian is following her vocation, both as a Christian and as a scholar.

Operation Biting:
The 1942 Parachute Assault to Capture Hitler’s Radar
by max hastings
harper

My brother, Rick, and I enjoyed reading this book at the same time—he in a tiny town in Northern California while I was here in Wheaton, Illinois, both of us absorbed in the now-obscure World War II episode that Hastings recounts with his customary panache. (We’ve read and enjoyed a number of Hastings’s books.) At a time when the British and their allies badly needed a boost, this improbable raid delivered the goods, despite the fact that—for all the meticulous planning and training—much went awry with the mission! As usual, Hastings excels not only in recounting “what happened” but also in bringing to life a remarkable cast of characters, from the famous to the obscure. If you know someone who loves military history, this would make a splendid gift.

Paris 1935
by jean follain
translated by kathleen shields
cb editions

Jean Follain (1903–1971) is best known as a poet. This book consists of a series of brief prose sketches (“Two Paris Bistros”; “Priests”; “Trades”; “Visions,” and so on). I love “miscellany”; I also love the physical form of this little book. Reading it, I imagined a similar book written this year, here in Wheaton, and translated from English into other tongues, roughly ninety years from now. Will people (everyday people, not a handful of antiquarians, scholars, and so on) be reading books like this (as opposed to reading “on-screen”) in the second decade of the next century? That’s an unsettling thought!

Some New World:
Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age
by peter harrison
cambridge university press

What is the difference between “personal trust,” on the one hand, as the basis for religious belief and “rational assent,” on the other? That question is at the heart of Peter Harrison’s massive and extraordinarily wide-ranging book. I was Zooming recently with a dear friend, a retired professor of philosophy who hasn’t “retired” at all from reading and thinking and writing. He mentioned that he’d just finished Harrison’s book. I was delighted; I told him it was going to be included on this year-end list. Then he was delighted; we were delighted together.

BOOK OF THE YEAR 

Dark-Land:
Memoir of a Secret Childhood
by kevin hart
paul dry books

When I reviewed Kevin Hart’s book for the Washington Examiner in July, I wrote, 

Of all the memoirs and autobiographies I’ve ever read—literary or otherwise—Dark-Land is among the very best. The currency of praise is debased these days. I loathe the endless hype that has taken over so much writing about books, as if that were the only way to get readers’ attention. But not to acknowledge a genuinely astonishing achievement, out of a fastidious fear of being mistaken for one of the shameless boosters, would be a crime.

I hope this will be sufficient to induce you to investigate further.

John Wilson is a contributing editor for the Englewood Review of Books and senior editor at the Marginalia Review of Books.