In 2024, I read 66 books. This includes fiction and nonfiction in both print and audio form. For several years, I’ve run down my favorite fiction and nonfiction books read each year. You can see my past book run-downs below.
2023 fiction 2023 nonfiction 2022 fiction 2022 nonfiction
Here is my list of top 2024 nonfiction reads in no particular order:
The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us – Rachelle Bergstein
Last year I read Wifey, Blume’s racy book for adults, and I delighted in the sex-laden plotline written by an author I knew primarily from Superfudge and Freckle Juice. So, this biography intrigued me, and it ended up being much more than I could have anticipated.
Blume’s own life and career collided with the second-wave feminist movement in a way that proved both explosive personally and advantageous to her career. Also, Blume became a lightning rod in Reagan-era fights over sexual education and book censorship. Obviously, there are reverberations with what’s happening today, particularly in states where women’s health and education have become wedge issues for right-wing politicians.
Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs – Luis Elizondo
This book is upfront in telling the reader right away that alien craft are real and that our government and others have known this for some time. Luis Elizondo is a career military and intelligence official who ended up knowing more than he ever wanted to about alien craft. How he ended up writing about it is all part of the book.
Before dismissing its premise, you should check out some of the congressional testimony and New York Times coverage. The people who are in positions to know about these things have been consistent in telling us this is real for the past several years. If you want to tell me I’m nuts, read this book first.
The Story of Art Without Men – Katy Hessel
Thanks in no small part to the Guerilla Girls, most of us are aware of the gender discrepancy of artists canonized in museums and textbooks. This book goes through many of the major movements in Western art chronologically and highlights major works of women who were creating right alongside their better-known male counterparts. What I liked most about this book was that it gave me a look at some great works I hadn’t seen before.
Shortly after reading this book, I took an online class from Smithsonian Associates about women artists featuring lecturer Dr. Nancy G. Heller. The class overlapped with Hessel’s book in a satisfying way.
Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland Oregon – Chuck Palahniuk
In the introduction to this book, Palahniuk retells a theory from the writer Katherine Dunn that all people looking for a new life migrate west, and when they do, the cheapest city in which they can live is Portland. The rest of the book tells the story of weird locales, odd misfits, and the city’s sleazy underbelly.
I’ve never been to Portland, and this book is over twenty years old. Still, I loved it for its revelry in the bizarre and for being a tourist book/memoir that only Palahniuk could write. It stands on its own because of its grounding in history and place. Even if the Portland in this book doesn’t exist anymore, it did in a very real way at a formative time for its author.
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma – Claire Dederer
In 2017, at the height of the #MeToo movement, Dederer published “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men.” This book is an extrapolation of that piece. In it, Dederer describes researching filmmaker Roman Polanski, a convicted child rapist and Holocaust survivor currently living as a fugitive in Europe. The more Dederer learned about his personal behavior, the more disgusted she became, and yet, on rewatching his movies, they were every bit as beautiful as she remembered.
For me, this was a fantastic rumination on how and when to separate the art from the artist at a time when so many of the people I found inspirational were falling from grace. Dederer does not provide any hard and fast rules as to what art to consume. I didn’t come to any firm conclusions either, but I will tell you I still play Miles Davis in my third-grade classroom.
