My Favorite Books from 2024 and What’s Coming in 2025

Including Details about My Upcoming Book and My Classic Novel Goal

Reading was good to me in 2024, and I thought I’d share my favorite books from the year. But how to narrow down the roster?

My Big List

I finished 88 books in 2024. I read portions of dozens more while researching and writing my book, The Idea Machine—about which more in a moment. But for the list below, these are the books I read cover to cover, excluding all but two of the kids’ books I read my daughter before bed (we read The Wizard of Oz and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which I figured warranted inclusion). The books I wrote about are linked; I wish I could have written about them all.

1. Naoise Mac Sweeney, The West

2. Kate Cooper, Queens of a Fallen World

3. Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

4. Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem

5. Joan Didion, The White Album

6. Joan Didion, Where I Was From

7. Joan Didion, South and West

8. Edel Rodriguez, Worm

9. Yan Lianke, The Day the Sun Died

10. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

11. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

12. Joanna Biggs, A Life of One’s Own

13. C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

14. Helen DeWitt, The English Understand Wool

15. Cesar Aira, The Famous Magician

16. Joan Didion, The Last Interview

17. Alice Walker, The Color Purple

18. Joan Didion, Let Me Tell You What I Mean

19. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

20. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

21. Jonathan Eig, King: A Life

22. Richard Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger)

23. John Cassian, How to Focus

24. Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

25. Ed Conway, Material World

26. Yan Lianke, Heart Sutra

27. Mark Noll, C.S. Lewis in America

28. Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

29. Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

30. Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain

31. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

32. Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha

33. John Wyndham, The Chrysalids

34. John Wyndham, Chocky

35. P.D. James, The Children of Men

36. Salman Rushdie, Knife

37. David Waldstreicher, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley

38. Nancy French, Ghosted

39. José María Pérez Fernández and Edward Wilson-Lee, Hernando Colón’s New World of Books

40. Tété-Michel Kpomassie, Michel the Giant: An African in Greenland

41. Alec Nevala-Lee, Inventor of the Future

42. Jennifer Burns, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative

43. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

44. Percival Everett, James

45. Walter W. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz

46. Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

47. Chuang Hua, Crossings

48. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

49. Henry Oliver, Second Act

50. Willa Cather, My Antonia

51. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

52. Cal Newport, Slow Productivity

53. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

54. Yoko Agawa, The Memory Police

55. Stephen King, On Writing

56. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

57. Adam Savage, Every Tool Is a Hammer

58. Steven Johnson, The Infernal Machine

59. Amanda Podany, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings

60. L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz

61. Christopher L. Webber, American to the Backbone

62. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat

63. Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

64. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

65. Evan Friss, The Bookshop

66. Lewis Carrol, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

67. David S. Reynolds, Mightier Than the Sword

68. Robin Sloan, Moonbound

69. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

70. Jeff Jarvis, The Gutenberg Parenthesis

71. Gabor Mate, Scattered Minds

72. Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

73. Bruce Gordon, The Bible

74. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

75. George Eliot, Middlemarch

76. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography

77. Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point

78. Tony Woodlief, We Shall Not All Sleep

79. C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

80. Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

81. W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

82. Stephen De Young, Saint Paul the Pharisee

83. Sono Akayo, Miracles

84. Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying

85. Beryl Markham, West with the Night

86. Christine Rosen, The Extinction of Experience

87. Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find

88. Shirley Jackson, The Lottery and Other Stories

I intended to review a few more of these as part of my classic novel and memoir goal—and many others besides—but ran out of time and bandwidth while I focused on finishing my book. I will hopefully still get to Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, Markham’s West with the Night, Mill’s Autobiography, and Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying sometime early in 2025. I’d also like to write about several others here, including Akayo’s Miracles, Jackson’s two, and O’Connor’s A Good Man (plus Everything that Rises Must Converge, which I’m reading now).

My 10 Favorites

Out of all of those, here are ten I loved most. I reread a few books last year, such as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. I’ve excluded any repeats from the list below. For what’s worth, this ranking is a bit wobbly and any book could slip up or down the list based on my mood.

1. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

2. Joan Didion, Where I Was From

3. Henry Oliver, Second Act

4. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

5. George Eliot, Middlemarch

6. John Wyndham, The Chrysalids

7. Steven Johnson, The Infernal Machine

8. Beryl Markham, West with the Night

9. Percival Everett, James

10. Edel Rodriguez, Worm

The Idea Machine: My Upcoming Book about Books!

Amazingly, I’m almost done. I completed seventeen out of seventeen chapters in the wee hours this morning, January 1. All that’s left: writing two short sidebars, cleaning up the endnotes, finalizing the bibliography, and selecting a few more images.

My due date is in two weeks, so that’s plenty of time to finish up the work and give it one last read-through. A decade of work is nearly at an end.

Of course, it still has to go through editing. But regardless: Hallelujah! I can hardly believe it. Prometheus is planning to publish in the fall. I’ll keep you all posted about what comes next, including sharing the cover and promotional plans. I’d love to see who’s interested in helping me launch this sucker.

Finishing and launching The Idea Machine is definitely the biggest thing happening in 2025 for me personally, but it’s not the only thing.

My Classic Novel Goal for 2025

I’ve set a reading goal for the last two years, something I’d never done before. I wanted to read more classic fiction and succeeded in that. In fact, it’s been a joy, and I can’t wait for what’s in store this year.

I’ve changed the goal a little bit each year so far. I’m doing so this year as well. I ended up with so many suggestions from you all and others that I couldn’t pare my initial list down to 12 for the year. Instead, I expanded it to 24! How’s that going to work?

I plan to read two novels each month. Knowing I have a very busy year ahead of me, I tried to keep most of these to modest length; for instance, I wanted to read some Dickens this year but selected one of his shorter offerings.

Given the schedule, I’m committing to reviewing one of these each month, likely the primary novel. If I have time, I’ll write about the secondary novel as well. I intentionally paired the novels each month so they’re stylistic or thematic cousins, which should facilitate some interesting interplay in joint reviews. Here’s the list:

January

• Primary: Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

• Secondary: Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

February

• Primary: Nella Larsen, Passing

• Secondary: George Schuyler, Black No More

March

• Primary: Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

• Secondary: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

April

• Primary: Pär Lagerkvist, Barabbas

• Secondary: J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

May

• Primary: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

• Secondary: William Golding, Lord of the Flies

June

• Primary: Henry James, The Ambassadors

• Secondary: Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

July

• Primary: Ernest J. Gaines, A Gathering of Old Men

• Secondary: Chester Himes, A Rage in Harlem

August

• Primary: Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet

• Secondary: Charles Dickens, Hard Times

September

• Primary: Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

• Secondary: Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman

October

• Primary: Bram Stoker, Dracula

• Secondary: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

November

• Primary: Octavia Butler, Kindred

• Secondary: Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

December

• Primary: Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

• Secondary: Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop

So many of you made such thoughtful and fascinating suggestions, I wish I could read four times this number. Of course, I will be reading plenty more; my guess is my usual: somewhere north of 50 and somewhere south of 100. But I’m limiting my reading goal to these 24 classic novels. I hope you’ll read at least few along with me.

My guess is I’ll still be posting very little until the middle of the month. Once the book is off my plate and sitting with the editor, I’ll have more time to read and review. In the meantime, let me know if you have any thoughts about the reading goal or any ideas about launching The Idea Machine.

And if you want to stay up on my progress through these classic novels, make sure you subscribe if you haven’t already. It’s free. And more fun than you can have in at least fourteen states.