Whether to escape the real world or gain more perspective on it, reading books is an essential part of my mental health and happiness—and I know I'm not alone. My colleagues and I rounded up the 22 books we loved the most this year, and it's quite a list.
New nonfiction titles in 2024 shed light on how abortion went from being a GOP fringe issue to one of its main pillars in just 10 years (The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America, by Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer); how the trajectory of mafioso John Gotti shares eerie parallels to that of our president-elect (When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, by John Ganz); and how 400 helicopters now swarm the floor of the Grand Canyon every day, "one every 90 seconds, to expel rich tourists who sip champagne, snap selfies, and leave 15 minutes later" (A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon, by Kevin Fedarko).
Then, of course, there was a host of excellent new novels that touched down in the past year, including Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino's imaginative interstellar bildungsroman, and Colored Television, a hilarious novel by Danzy Senna which grapples with "race in an America where diversity is often deployed cynically by those already at the top, along with the tension between the written word and the visual mass entertainment that has largely replaced it," as reviewer Noah Lanard observes.
One of the best parts of our list looks back at older novels that our journalists discovered for the first time this year and found immensely relevant despite their age. I reviewed Sarah Thankam Mathews' 2022 novel, All This Could Be Different, one of the best things I've read in five years or so, a gorgeously written story that I found to hold "lessons on how to create community and sustain love in the capitalistic pressure cooker of our times."
And I was touched by my colleague Ruth Murai's review of John Okada's 1957 novel, No-No Boy, about a Japanese American boy, Ichiro, who spends two years in a federal prison for his refusal to serve in the army. "Reading No-No Boy," Murai writes, "I was overcome with grief for my family, for Ichiro, for Okada, and for the millions of immigrants Trump has promised to remove from their communities and detain in camps when he reclaims the White House."
The list also includes poetry, art books, and children's books—a little something for everyone. Happy reading!
—Maddie Oatman
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