My Year in Books: 2024
A look back over the year's reading
Comparing notes with my Goodreads shelves and my book diary, I find I read 84 books in 2024, 15 of them re-reads. The actual total is probably slightly higher, as there is always some re-reading that I don’t take the trouble to record anywhere.
If you’re new here, some years back I fell into the habit of doing an end-of-year roundup post covering the highlights (and a few lowlights) of what I read during the year, and enjoyed it so much that it’s become an informal tradition. These days I include the titles that made my top ten books of the year, marked with an asterisk*, and links go to my review where there is one. (If you’re interested in seeing the full list of what I read—including re-reads—find it here on Goodreads.)
I read quite a bit of solid nonfiction this year, and as usual it fell mainly into the categories of history, memoir with a history connection, or nonfiction and memoir related to literature and film. Some of the standouts were Cowboys and Cattle Kings: Life on the Range Today* by C.L. Sonnichsen, Performing Flea* by P.G. Wodehouse, George Horace Lorimer and the Saturday Evening Post* by John Tebbel, Country Editor’s Boy* by Hal Borland, and The Cavalry Trilogy: John Ford, John Wayne and the Making of Three Classic Westerns* by Michael F. Blake.
I also enjoyed Q’s Legacy by Helene Hanff (finishing up her informal ‘trilogy’ of books-about-books), while The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler was slightly disappointing. The Last Outlaws: The Desperate Final Days of the Dalton Gang by Tom Clavin was moderately good, though it seemed to suffer from a curious combination of overabundant detail not directly related to the Daltons themselves, and less dealing with the actual events at Coffeyville than I expected. Also of moderate interest were The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married Into the British Aristocracy by Anne de Courcy, and Poirot and Me by David Suchet.
Although a lot of those titles had a Western connection, surprisingly I didn’t read much straight-up Western fiction, and what there was of it was not remarkable. Snow-Bound at Eagle’s by Bret Harte was…rather baffling, and Cimarron by Edna Ferber I simply disliked. I wanted to like it, but I didn’t. I meant to write a detailed review articulating why, but the moment got away from me; perhaps one day I’ll manage it if re-reading the novel for that purpose seems worth the effort.
Classics were represented by Miss Mackenzie and Phineas Finn by Anthony Trollope, both of which I enjoyed; and I finally got around to reading Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and…was not terrifically impressed? Maybe it’s just me. Maybe not. But all I could think through most of it was that you could play it as a comic parody of a tragic romance without changing a word.
Never any shortage of mysteries in these highlights. Death of An Author* by E.C.R. Lorac, Smallbone Deceased by Michael Gilbert, and Crossed Skis by Carol Carnac were among the standouts. Fly Country by Anthony Lang was not bad either. And with The Rubber Band by Rex Stout I finally read a Nero Wolfe mystery that I actually…liked! I think it was because this one actually had a story that I liked, and a cast of characters that weren't bizarre or unlikable. The next in the series, The Red Box, was also not too bad, though not my favorite. On the other hand, Look to the Lady and Dancers in Mourning by Margery Allingham were not the greatest entries from an author whose books are hit-or-miss for me—as in, when they hit they really hit, and when they miss, they really miss.
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I was also pleasantly surprised by several current indie mystery series! A Case of Blackmail in Belgravia by Clara Benson, the first book in the Freddy Pilkington-Soames series, was quite fun, and the first two Anty Boisjoly Mysteries by P.J. Fitzsimmons, The Case of the Canterfell Codicil and The Case of the Ghost of Christmas Morning, delighted me by living up to the “what if Bertie Wooster solved mysteries?” series pitch. I don’t dole out Wodehouse comparisons lightly, but the stylish and funny writing of these basically tongue-in-cheek whodunits deserves a round of applause. Death of a Christmas Tree Salesman by Patricia Meredith, another tongue-in-cheek whodunit that mashes up 1940s film noir with classic Christmas movies and specials (the action is set at the North Pole and our detective is a snowman named Sam Shovel), was also cute.
Worst book of the year? There were a few contenders, but in the end it had to be The Man Who Was London by Anthony Gilbert, probably with Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene as runner-up.
Among the books that don’t fit tidily into a particular genre was one landmark event for me: I finally got hold of Baker’s Dozen by Kathleen Thompson Norris. I had wanted to read it for years, since her earlier collection Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories is one of my very favorite books, and so by the time I found Baker’s Dozen on Internet Archive I was willing to put myself through the headache (sometimes literally) of reading it off my phone. I had feelings both pro and con: Norris’ technical writing skills definitely became even more polished with the years, with beautiful phrasing and descriptions, but some of the stories felt a little more melodramatic and overwrought in comparison with the heartfelt simplicity of Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby &c. There were definitely some good ones, though, and “Prisoner’s Base” in particular blew me away.
As it did last year, the catch-all basket of “various genres” held some real standouts: Song of Years* by Bess Streeter Aldrich, Fanny Herself* by Edna Ferber, and Rhododendron Pie* by Margery Sharp. Also worthy of remark was a charming middle-grade, Family Grandstand by Carol Ryrie Brink (its sequel Family Sabbatical is also good), and Pearl S. Buck’s strange, beautifully-written, pretty much unclassifiable Death in the Castle. And to round off the year there was what I can only call the Experience of volumes 1 - 8 of The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion* by Beth Brower, unique and delightful and also almost impossible to define, though I made a feeble stab at it in my top-ten post.
Previous years' reading roundups: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.