The Best Books I Read in 2024

I read 31 books in 2024. I reviewed all of them on this blog. Most of them were really excellent. Here’s a little bit about the books I enjoyed the most. Clicking on the titles will take you to my full review of each book.

The Garden Party and Other Stories, by Katherine Mansfield, 1922. The final collection of Mansfield’s stories published during her short lifetime; these are fascinating portraits told in an excellent prose style.  

A Bakeable Feast: Bread. Sex. Honor. Poems by Klecko, 2023. Klecko’s poetry will stick with you. This collection of 211 poems offers insightful glimpses into humanity. Klecko’s poems are sometimes sweet, sometimes crusty, but they are always bursting with the flavor of real life. 

Ex-Wife, a novel by Ursula Parrott, 1929. Even though it’s now 95 years old, Ex-Wife is a powerful book that asks deep questions about marriage and women’s roles in society. Parrott’s writing feels modern and vibrant, and she creates interesting characters to tell the story of Patricia and Peter, and the breakdown of their marriage. This is a terrific novel from the Jazz Age. Highly recommended.  

Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott, by Marsha Gordon, 2023. I actually read this biography of Ursula Parrott before I read Parrott’s novel Ex-Wife. Gordon’s biography is a terrific companion to Ex-Wife, and hopefully more of Parrott’s novels will be republished.  

Scribners Five Generations in Publishing, by Charles Scribner III, 2023. This is a fascinating history of the Scribners publishing house, home to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and many more authors. Charles Scribner’s engaging prose makes this a fun read, and you’ll learn how his piano-playing skills may have played a role in keeping Fitzgerald’s works with Scribners.  

F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Composite Biography, Niklas Salmose and David Rennie, editors, 2024. An unusual new biography, the book splits Fitzgerald’s 44-year lifespan into two-year periods. Salmose and Rennie assembled an all-star roster of 23 Fitzgerald scholars to each write a chapter, with the twenty-third chapter covering 1940, the last year of Fitzgerald’s life. It’s a fascinating concept for a biography, and one that works surprisingly well. I wrote a review for the Ramsey County Historical Society, which you can find online here.  

1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left: A Memoir by Robyn Hitchcock, 2024. The British musician Robyn Hitchcock turned 14 years old in March of 1967, and the music of that year has profoundly influenced his life and career. This book is an engaging look at that time in adolescence when, for some of us, music takes on an almost mystical import, and each passing month seems to bring about a further evolution of our personalities into a different self.   

Milkweed, a novel by Jerry Spinelli, 2003. Set in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II, the narrator is a young Gypsy (Roma) boy who thinks his name is “Stopthief,” since that is what people yell after him. A beautiful and haunting novel about a sad and difficult subject.  

Fitzgerald and the War Between the Sexes, essays by Scott Donaldson, 2022. Donaldson was a literary biographer, and an astute chronicler of Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Donaldson passed away in 2020, and this, his final book, stands as a tribute to Donaldson’s probing intelligence and his lifelong study of Fitzgerald.  

Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad, 1904. Long. Dense. Complicated. Brilliant. Nostromo will reward your attention with beautiful, haunting prose. A sample: “Solitude from mere outward condition of existence becomes very swiftly a state of soul in which the affectations of irony and skepticism have no place...In our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion of an independent existence as against the whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part.” (p.393)   

Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad, 1900. “The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world.” (p.251) Lord Jim is a compelling novel, largely narrated by Charles Marlow, who also narrates Conrad’s novella “Heart of Darkness.” The novel tells the story of the titular character, a British sailor who abandoned a ship he thought was sinking. The only problem was the ship didn’t actually sink. Full of Conrad’s beautiful prose and insights into the human condition.  

Book Review: Milkweed, a novel by Jerry Spinelli (2003)

The cover of  Milkweed, a novel by Jerry Spinelli, 2003.

Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli might seem to have an unlikely plot for a young adult novel. It is set in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. The narrator is a young Gypsy (Roma) boy who thinks his name is “Stopthief,” since that is what people yell after him. Eventually his friend Uri gives him the name of Misha.  

Misha is an orphan and doesn’t remember much about his family. He lives with other orphan boys, who are all Jewish, and they steal whatever they need to survive. At the beginning of the novel, World War II has begun, but the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw has not been established yet.  

Misha is ignorant of the political situation brewing around him, and he swings from admiring the Nazis, whom he calls Jackboots, to wanting to be Jewish, and eventually he voluntarily enters the ghetto. Misha befriends a Jewish girl named Janina, and once he finds a place where he can sneak under the ghetto wall, his thievery of food helps her family survive.  

The novel succeeds in large part because of Spinelli’s ability to channel Misha’s voice. Every new experience stirs wonder in Misha, and Spinelli communicates this very well. Although the reader knows what the terrible fate of the Warsaw Ghetto will be, Misha has no idea. The mounting tension and dread are supplied not by the narrative itself, but by the reader’s own engagement with the text.  

Milkweed is a beautiful and haunting novel about a sad and difficult subject. Spinelli ably conjures up a bleak world where the most pressing concern is where your next meal is coming from.