A Few of My Favorite Books in 2024
My daughters and I started tracking what we read each year in Notes on our phones.
At the end of the year 2022, we made a Christmas ornament that held tiny copies of the book covers. We had to make these representations small enough to fit through the top of a clear, plastic ornament.
Numbers of books read, I always finish last. I’m not a fast reader, but I am a careful reader. (Unless counting Audible books. Listening to a book does not aid retention.) Nine times out of ten, I end up buying a hardcopy of a book I liked on Audible.
I write in my books. I revisit my favorites. I’m trying to date when I start and finish reading.
Read and/or listen. The limits on what I can learn expand through reading.
I read 34 books in 2024, up from 23 in 2023. I don’t set a goal, nor do I keep a checklist.
Books come to me. Is it like the saying, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear?” Well, for me, books do that.
And a book is only as good as it is timely.
My Top Ten of 2024
10.
I had never read a book by Agatha Christie! To remedy this omission, I chose one of the top-selling novels of all time––100 million+ sold––and voted fan favorite, original title Ten Little Indians.
I love a good mystery and crime procedural so it was about time to discover why in the world Agatha Christie is known as “the queen of mystery.” Now I can see how her writing has influenced other “whodunit” authors. Tricky. Author, keep the clues to yourself. She does.
Christie wrote 66 books and 14 short story collections. I also read The Harlequin Tea Set this year, dipping my nose into her short stories.
9. I’ve invested years reading Louise Penny’s books. Number 19 in her series about Inspector Armand Gamache. As head of homicide at the Süreté, he solves crimes and tries to prevent them. Set in the tiny village of Three Pines, Quebec–– a mythical a place as imaginary as enchanted Brigadoon––Three Pines seems real to readers who have situated its characters and stories on their own mind maps.
True to form in The Grey Wolf, a crime of enormous magnitude threatens Gamache’s world. Who can he trust? Can he even trust himself? What can he do before tragedy strikes?
I don’t know. This book is part one, with # 20, The Black Wolf, published October 28, 2025. Initially, I felt letdown. But now, I expect Penny’s next book will be worth the wait.
8. So many memoirs I’ve read reveal their writer’s stories are shaped by a difficult childhood. The obvious success of Ina Garten belies the difficulties she has overcome on her journey to make a life that shows her own hard work and values more than luck. She learned in a college business class this method: “‘observe, test, evaluate effectiveness and results’ . . . experimenting over and over again . . .” which she applied until she found just what she wanted.
How Easy Is That? (one of Ina’s cookbook titles)
7. In this memoir, the author survived more than a difficult childhood. At age 15, he was torn from his home in Czechoslovakia to experience the horrors of Auschwitz concentration camp, separated from his family and their executions by the Nazis. Martin was among those prisoners liberated as the war ended by then General Dwight Eisenhower. After the war ended, he became an American citizen, and opportunities came as a result of his own dedication to excellence and the quality of his workmanship, As a tailor, he made custom suits for some of the most prominent men in America.
An inspiring story of forgiveness amidst unforgivable atrocities makes his story unforgettable. Martin Greenfield died at age 95.
6. Historical fiction about an actual racehorse comes to life when a lost painting comes to light. The painting and the bones identified as the greatest racehorse of all time––Lexington––reaches back to mid-1800s and merges with contemporary studies of art, a search for the artist who painted a picture of Lexington, and an expert who identifies the horse’s bones. Centered around a black slave who bonds with the horse at birth, a “woke” ending seemed forced. I met Geraldine Brooks years ago and consider her a great literary writer. Have appreciated her other books.
5. The title of Amor Towles debut novel (2011) comes from “The Young George Washington’s Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.”These rules are listed at the back of this book, forming an interesting spine for a complex character-driven story that begins in New York City, New Year’s Eve 1938. A car accident that night starts the lives of the three main characters spinning.
Amor Towles other books A Gentleman In Moscow––a huge bestseller––and The Lincoln Highway, in which a character from this book played an important role, set him apart as one of the best writers today.
“I read a lot of Agatha Christie that fall . . . tremendously satisfying.”
Passage from Rules of Civility, Chapter Twenty: “Hell Hath No Fury.”
“I read a lot of Agatha Christie that fall of 1938––maybe all of them . . . her books are tremendously satisfying. Yes, they are formulaic. But that’s one of the reasons they are so satisfying . . . Mrs. Christie doles out her little surprises at the carefully calibrated pace of a nanny dispensing sweets to the children in her care. But I think there is another reason that is at least as important, if not more so––and that is that in Agatha Christie’s universe everyone eventually gets what they deserve. . . men and women . . . are ultimately brought face-to-face with a destiny that suits them [in] and intricate moral equilibrium that was established by the Primary Mover at the dawn of time. For the most part, in the course of our daily lives we abide the abundant evidence that no such universal judgment exist . . . But there are certain times when chance suddenly provides the justice that Agatha Christies promise. We look around at the characters cast in our own lives . . . [people] who are not exactly what they seem–– and discover that before the end of the weekend all assembled will get their just desserts.
But when we do so, we rarely remember to count ourselves among their company.”
Amazing how writers embed biblical principles in their stories.
An oblique reference to Matthew 7:1–2? “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” OUCH!
4. Barbara Kingsolver won the Pulitzer for this modern retelling of David Copperfield, displaying the genius of her writing. She took a Dickens novel, overlaid contemporary problems––institutional poverty, drug abuse, parental neglect, educational system failings, child abuse within foster care, and the opioid epidemic––to expose society’s detachment through a poignant story of one boy’s against all odds survival. The boy nobody wanted emerges from a pile of poop as a lovable hero.
3. Can women be heroes? A young nurse with a military heritage volunteers to serve in Vietnam, leaving a life of privilege in sun-drenched Southern California. Convinced she will make her family proud, she enlisted after her brother was killed in Vietnam. But she finds herself on the other side of the world in a jungle war no one understood. Coming home after the war, the women who had survived faced dismissive treatment and disbelief that women even served. How do the women who had risked their lives fight another kind of war at home?
2. After listening to the Audible version first, read by the author, I heard Abraham Veghese interviewed about his book. He said, “I did something. I didn’t do the whole thing . . . it’s bigger than me.” Brilliant and humble, he remains astounded by the book’s reception worldwide.
And after reading the 715 page novel, I remain captivated by this story––a generational saga that represents God and Christianity favorably. Verghese has written perhaps the most humane and compassionate story of being human since Doestevesky’s The Brothers Karamozov.
My #1 “read” this year: all 33 hours and 45 minutes of The Chronicles of Narnia Complete Audio Collection on Audible. Walking my dog Kona, listening to Kenneth Branagh, Michael York, Lynn Redgrave, Patrick Stewart and 2 other Englishmen whose names I don’t know each read a book. This one story is delightful. Almost as if I hadn’t read the books years ago or knew the story at all, I marveled at the genius of C.S. Lewis to thread biblical principles throughout these 6 books. I guess in a way listening made the books come alive, reminding me of lessons I thought I already knew.
“If only one had time to read a little more: we either get shallow and broad or narrow and deep.” C.S. Lewis, from Letters to Arthur Greaves
My reading in 2024 took me through historical fiction, fantasy, travels to Vietnam and India, Appalachia, Kentucky, and introduced me to real people as well as characters who become real on pages in books.
Don’t leave home without a book. Books can take you anywhere.
