It is always a weird feeling to look back at all the books I read in any given year. Some books I loved, some books I remember strongly and evoke a specific emotion, and honestly there are some in here that I have to look up to remember the slightest thing about them.
Fire Weather was both an important read and a total page turner, and it was one of the best books I read this year. Say Nothing was also outstanding, as was this year’s excellent Hulu limited series based on this book.
There was some very fun diversions, like Our Band Could Be Your Life about the American punk scene, and Goth about, well, the Goth scene written by one of it’s pioneers.
Some others that really jump at my as I reflect on this list are Knife, 1Q84, How the World Ran Out of Everything, and the fantastically well-written Zeitoun.
Here are all the books I read in 2024 in the order I read them…
- Why We Sleep — Matthew Walker
- The Sympathizer — Viet Thanh Nguyen
- The Zone of Interest — Martin Amis
- Firewater — Harold R. Johnson
- World Within a Song — Jeff Tweedy
- Eve — Cat Bohannon
- The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry — Gabrielle Zevin
- Our Band Could Be Your Life — Michael Azerrad
- Trust — Hernan Diaz
- The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine — Rashid Khalidi
- Burn Book — Kara Swisher
- How to Know a Person — David Brooks
- Goth — Lol Tolhurst
- All the Light We Cannot See — Anthony Doerr
- Erasure — Perceval Everett
- Great Expectations — Vinson Cunningham
- Fire Weather — John Vaillant
- Say Nothing — Patrick Radden Keefe
- I Shall Not Hate — Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish
- Rogues — Patrick Radden Keefe
- Kitchen Confidential — Anthony Bourdain
- The Deluge — Stephen Markley
- Knife — Salman Rushdie
- The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo — Taylor Jenkins Reid
- In My Time of Dying — Sebastian Junger
- Limitarianism — Ingrid Robeyns
- A Children’s Bible — Lydia Millet
- The Talented Mr. Ripley — Patricia Highsmith
- Justin Trudeau on the Ropes — Paul Wells
- Becoming Earth — Ferris Jabr
- Comedy Book — Jesse David Fox
- Darth Plagueis — James Luceno
- Aurora — Kim Stanley Robinson
- Crooked Teeth — Danny Ramadan
- The Marrow Thieves — Cherie Dimaline
- 1Q84 — Haruki Murakami
- The Will To Change — bell hooks
- The Undoing Project — Michael Lewis
- Rest is Resistance — Tricia Hersey
- Misfit — Gary Gulman
- Ripley Under Ground — Patricia Highsmith
- Our Crumbling Foundation — Gregor Craigie
- Age of Revolutions — Fareed Zakaria
- The Message — Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Nexus — Yuval Noah Harari
- Revenge of the Tipping Point — Malcolm Gladwell
- Reconciling History — Jody Wilson-Raybould
- Hunting by Stars — Cherie Dimaline
- Red Mars — Kim Stanley Robinson
- How the World Ran Out of Everything — Peter S. Goodman
- The Spamalot Diaries — Eric Idle
- Zeitoun — Dave Eggers
- At a Loss for Words — Carol Off
- I Heard There Was a Secret Chord — Daniel J. Levitin
I also saw lots of great films and many amazing shows in 2024.