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: The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, by Maya Jasanoff (2017)

The paperback cover of The Dawn Watch, by Maya Jasanoff. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Maya Jasanoff’s 2017 book The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, is a fascinating examination of Conrad’s major writings. Focusing on Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, Lord Jim, and The Secret Agent, Jasanoff makes the argument that Conrad’s writings contain themes that speak deeply to our own era, as well as Conrad’s.  

Joseph Conrad had a fascinating life: born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski to Polish parents in Berdychiv, in what was then the Russian Empire, and is now part of Ukraine. His parents were staunch Polish nationalists and were sent into exile by the Russian government. Jozef was 7 when his mother died, and just 11 when his father died. Sent to live with his uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski, Jozef dreamed of becoming a sailor, and he joined the French merchant marine at age 16.  

Korzeniowski eventually moved to England and joined the British merchant marine, becoming a British citizen and passing the master mariner examination—the highest examination level—in 1886. It would be nine more years before he published his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, written in English, his third language. It was not much of a change to go from Jozef Konrad to the Anglicized pen name Joseph Conrad.  

Conrad had a unique viewpoint through which to view the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His career in the merchant marine had taken him to Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Congo, to name just a few of his journeys. Conrad was better traveled than perhaps any other writer of his era, and his novels were set throughout the world.  

During his lifetime, Conrad’s world was becoming more interconnected. One of the major concerns of his fiction is what happens when different societies and cultures comes into contact with each other. You could argue that Conrad was not sufficiently attuned to indigenous peoples, but it’s clear that he was critical of European imperialism and colonialism.  

The Dawn Watch is a good book, but it’s a little odd. It’s part biography, part literary examination, but it might not be enough of either part to satisfy readers. You’d better make sure you’ve read all four of the major works that Jasanoff discusses, as she will take you through painstakingly detailed plot summaries. Jasanoff spends too much time detailing the plot points, and not enough time analyzing what makes Conrad’s writing great. I suppose that I am the target audience for The Dawn Watch: I’ve read the four books by Conrad, but I haven’t read any biographies of him.  

The narrative is not chronological, which fits with Conrad’s own writings, as they often jump forwards and backwards in time, but in a biography, the non-linear approach is tricky. For example, The Secret Agent is discussed first in the book, when it actually comes last in the chronology of the four major works that Jasanoff discusses.  

Conrad did not write much about his own childhood, which makes sense, given how painful the losses of his parents must have been. While I was reading The Dawn Watch, I happened to page through a novel by Dick Francis, the British mystery writer. Francis wrote in the foreword to the novel that people often speculated about his relationship with his parents, because so often his characters had difficult family lives. Francis wrote that he had a good relationship with his parents and enjoyed a good relationship with his two sons. He wrote, and I’m paraphrasing here, that because he had such good family relationships, he was able to write about dysfunctional families in his fiction. If he would have had bad family relationships, it would have been too painful to write about. That made me think of Conrad: he probably didn’t write about his parents because it would have been difficult.  

Conrad’s sailing career bridged the time between sail and steam, and he clearly preferred the former, which was quickly becoming a relic of the past. Conrad lived his life in a middle zone: the Polish side of him pined for a country that did not exist, and the English part of him perhaps sensed that he would never be “truly” English. Perhaps it was this push and pull that made Conrad such a great writer—he understood the displacement that all of his characters in Nostromo felt, for example.  

Conrad’s trip as a captain up the Congo River in 1890 was awful, and it provided much of the inspiration for Heart of Darkness. After his return to England, Conrad was still plagued by nightmares and poor health. He wrote in a letter: “I am still plunged in densest night and my dreams are only nightmares.” (p.215)  

Jasanoff pinpoints Conrad’s clear vision about the horrors of colonialism and imperialism in this passage: “What made the difference between savagery and civilization, Conrad was saying, transcended skin color; it even transcended place. The issue for Conrad wasn’t that ‘savages’ were inhuman. It was that any human could be a savage.” (p.224-5) This is exactly the point of Heart of Darkness: that Kurtz has been corrupted, not by the Africans, but by power, by the whole corrupt system of colonialism and imperialism.   

The Dawn Watch is a fascinating glimpse into the life and times of Joseph Conrad. After I finished reading The Dawn Watch, I pulled out my old Encyclopedia Britannica to read the entry on Conrad. The end of the first paragraph struck me as a wonderful summation of his talents: “A writer of complex skill and striking insight, but above all of an intensely personal vision, he has been increasingly regarded as one of the greatest English novelists.”