For the benefit of new subscribers, every January I depart from my usual screeds about the SEC and corporate governance and indulge in the slightly less nerdy exercise of telling you about my favorite books of the year gone by. As regular readers know, unlike the New York Times and other publications, my favorite books are those I read in 2024, regardless of their publication dates.
Having mentioned the Times, I have to say that the more I read its book reviews and “10 Best” lists, the less I relate to them. I have a theory as to the reasons for that, but I’ll spare you. That said, if you’ve read the 2024 10 Best list in the “Gray Lady,” you’ll see that it has little in common with mine.
Finally, I decided this year that I won’t be bound by the number 10, largely because I usually find myself agonizing over which books to cut, and it’s just not worth it. So this year’s list contains more than 10 books, and my favorites are not evenly divided between fiction and non-fiction.
Here goes.
FICTION
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
I started to read this book twice and just couldn’t get into it, but evidently the third time was the charm. It may just be one of the great American novels of all time, or at least my time. It’s a uniquely Appalachian version of David Copperfield, is eminently readable and engrossing, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. (Note that this was on the Times 10 Best list a year or two ago.)
My Friends by Hisham Matar
I read this in March, but I can’t get it out of my head. It’s about a young man who leaves Libya to attend school in the UK but is never able to return due to Qaddafi’s coup, the people he meets along the way, and aging in a country that is foreign despite the fact that he’s lived there for so many years. It is sad and disturbing and exquisitely written.
Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon
This book is crazy quirky. It’s about two unemployed potters in ancient Sicily who put on two plays in a quarry being used as a prison for captured Spartan soldiers, who are used as the actors. The author is Irish and the writing has an Irish lilt to it. I have no idea how this plot occurred to the author, but perhaps that’s one of many reasons why I’m not an author myself. Not for everyone, perhaps, but I loved it.
James by Percival Everett
This is the one book that appears on both my 2024 list and that of the Times (among many other papers). It’s Huckleberry Finn as told by the enslaved Jim and is reminiscent of looking at life through the wrong end of the telescope – which turns out to be the right end. A truly wonderful book.
Precipice by Robert Harris
One of the blurbs on this book is something to the effect that Harris is incapable of writing a bad book. I think that’s fair statement, but this is one of his best. It’s about British PM Asquith’s affair with a young socialite to whom he reveals state secrets as World War I begins. The historical facts are well known, but Harris plays with them nicely and makes them intriguing.
The Architect’s Apprentice by Elif Shafak
One of the great joys of reading is that a good book can take you to distant places at distant times. This book takes place at the time of Suleiman the Magnificent and involves a young mahout who, while caring for a sentient white elephant, befriends one of Suleiman’s daughters and along the way becomes an apprentice to the sultan’s chief architect. What a trip!
The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
Ms. Zevin – who graduated from Spanish River High School in Boca Raton – is the author of the ginormous blockbuster Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (which was quite good, BTW). Fikry is now 10+ years old, but it’s a lovely book about…books (among many other things).
NONFICTION
Patriot by Alexei Navalny
I was (and remain) truly shocked that this book didn’t make the Times top 10 list – or even its list of 100 notable books of 2024. I cannot for the life of me figure out how or why that happened. I assume that most of us know a bit about Navalny, but this book totally blew me away with his sense of humor, his worldliness and sophistication, and the intensity of his patriotism. From my perspective, if you only read one non-fiction book in 2025, it should be this one.
An Unfinished Love Story by Doris Kearns Goodwin
I’ve never been a huge fan of Ms. Goodwin; I find her constant anecdotes about FDR, LBJ, and others a bit tiring, and some of her books come perilously close to psychohistory, of which I’m not a fan. However, this one is a gem, in part because it recites the history of my youth, including (in my senior year in college) the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and LBJ’s announcement that he would not run for re-election in 1968, which I learned about on a frigid March night in Harvard Square (no, I didn’t go to Harvard; I was there to see a movie). And it’s a good biography of her late husband, whose accomplishments are not as well-known as his name.
A Very Private School by Charles Spencer
This memoir of Earl Spencer, brother of the late Princess Diana, is a scathing condemnation of the British prep school he attended (and the entire British prep school culture in which the sons of wealthy British families were educated in the past). It is very personal, very upsetting, and very well narrated by the Earl himself. This book does double duty, as it was also my favorite audiobook of 2024.
Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert Massie
I rarely re-read books, but I’ve now read this one three times since its original publication in 1967. It is slightly dated in some very minor respects, but it stands the test of time very well indeed – a sweeping panorama of the end of the Romanov dynasty combined with the personal tragedy of the family that Aeschylus or Sophocles might have written if they’d been around at the time. It just never gets old.
Challenger by Adam Higginbotham
Higginbotham does for the Challenger disaster what he did a few years ago for the Chernobyl disaster. Gripping and infuriating.
That’s it. Happy reading!