What do I mean by “best” books of 2024? Certainly not the best books I read published in 2024, because we all know I don’t read that many recent books. Indeed, one of the most challenging parts of compiling this list each year is that I am often forced to choose between a dozen texts that could vie for prominence on a best books of all time list. My process involves looking back through the reviews of all the books I read in the past year, making a list of the titles, and slowly whittling them down.
Is there a deeper logic to how I whittle down the options? Not really. I considered, when I put together this year’s list, creating a decision matrix and using that to do the winnowing, but that whim passed after a few minutes, as did the thought that I should try to choose a top book from each major category from which I tend to read and let those fill out the list (that tends to happen naturally, anyway, more or less). No, last year’s Best Books post said it best: these are the best books as determined, arbitrarily, capriciously, and subjectively, by me. I might even have given you a different list if I wrote this post on a different day.
The point of all this is to say that you shouldn’t limit yourself to these five books. Many truly excellent books didn’t make the cut, and it would be a shame for them to go unread as a result. I encourage you to go back through our extensive catalogue of reviews, or maybe through my to-be-read list, if you’re feeling adventurous. Now, without further ado, I present my top 5 books of 2024.
5. Five and Twenty Tales of the Genie
Reviewed on November 28th, 2024
I have been neglectful of India in my continued explorations of ancient world literature, but that alone would not earn Five and Twenty Tales of the Genie a place on this list. It earns its place with a fascinating immersion into the ideas of kingship and morality in ancient India, combined with a compelling, fairy tale-like cyclic structure. In truth, this book checks so many of the boxes I tend to find interesting – history, historical, myths and legends, storytelling, ancient cultures – that it would be difficult to leave it off the list.
4. The Cutting-Off Way
Reviewed on May 23rd, 2024
Ancient warfare is fascinating to most historians and authors, and there are few specializations of warfare more mysterious than that practiced by the indigenous peoples of the Americas prior to European contact. There is a dearth of evidence and information to adequately address that topic, and trying to fit it all into one volume would be preposterous, but Lee does a fantastic job of analyzing a particular regions habits. This book presents a clear-eyed view of American warfare, depicting the indigenes as neither amoral savages nor nature-loving pacifists, but as human beings with a complex and fully developed culture, including a culture of conflict.
3. The Great Hunt
Reviewed on September 12th, 2024
As I say every year, it’s a challenge for modern speculative fiction to make it on this list, although I do keep the goal of having at least one fictional entry. The Great Hunt might seem an odd choice, being the second book in a series, but I do think it’s stronger than Eye of the World, and given my reread of Wheel of Time starting in 2024, it was almost inevitable that one installment or another would appear on this list. Is The Great Hunt the best book in the series? No, but we haven’t reviewed Towers of Midnight yet…
2. Nicomachean Ethics
Reviewed on October 31st, 2024
Books like this are part of why making this list is such a challenge. How could I not include one of the foundational pieces of moral philosophy, the book that includes the famous “virtue is the mean between two vices?” Then again, how could I not include Organon, or half a dozen other core texts of world literature and thought? Few can boast such lasting relevance as Nicomachean Ethics, though. If you have any interest at all in the fundamentals of morality, this book is a must-read.
1. Charge: Why Does Gravity Rule?
Reviewed on November 21st, 2024
Also, why does this book rule the 2024 best books list? Probably because it is so rare to find such a cogent treatment of a highly complex topic in theoretical and experimental physics, deeply probed and accessibly explored by a practicing physicists (and not by a science journalist intent on providing a sociopolitical commentary and condescending to the “lay readers”). Charge might be the best science book I’ve read, of any kind, since I first read Fabric of the Cosmos in the eighth grade, and that is, believe me, a high bar to clear.
Those are my top 5 books for 2024, but because it’s such a challenge to choose, some of the top contenders included The Fountainhead, Landscape and Memory, Sack’s Haggadah, and Philip and Alexander (just to name a few). What were your top 5 books for 2024? Share in the comments below. More importantly, perhaps, what do you think your top 5 books for 2025 will be? You’ll find out what mine are…in January 2026. Until then, happy reading.
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