"I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble." – Helen Keller
When I was nine, I wanted to be a mystery writer. I had read every Nancy Drew mystery and many Agatha Christies. I knew I loved to write, but despite giving it my best shot, I was never able to come up with a plausible plot—an essential element in mystery writing. So I never wrote mysteries. But for the past five decades, I’ve kept reading them.
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I love all of the “favorite books” lists that abound at the end of each year. I’ll look at lists from just about anyone, no matter how much our reading tastes might (or might not) overlap, just because it’s interesting to me what people like to read.
I read a total of 25 fiction and 16 nonfiction books this year, with five abandoned (DNF) and a couple I merely skimmed. I hope you can find some new reading ideas among these favorite books I read in 2024. All books are listed simply in the order I read them during the year.
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“Hey, God, you should have made me born 100 years earlier!” —me, age 8
The first time I can ever remember telling God what he ought to have done in my life was while I was reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. I was given the complete boxed set for my birthday, and I devoured them one after the other, immersing myself in the world of late-19th century U.S. pioneer life. I felt deep in my heart that I ought to have been a child of the 1870s rather than the 1970s.
I trust God’s judgment and plan for my life more now than I did as a child, so I’m no longer upset about not being born into the 19th-century American west (which in the 1800s would have been anything west of the Appalachian mountains). But I still love reading about this time period, and more specifically, about women during this time period, especially pioneer women who traveled west and often stayed there to create a home.
So here’s a list of my personal favorite books in this area for those who, like me, are pioneers at heart—or who just like to read about them.
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What comes to mind when you hear the name Henry VIII?
When author Margaret George asked people this question, here’s a summary of the answer she got: “Henry VIII was a huge, fat, oversexed man with gross table manners who had eight wives, killed them all, and then died of syphilis.” She found out during the course of extensive research that not one of these things about Henry was true, or at least, not entirely true.
So she wrote a 900-page novel about him, making the daring decision to tell his story in first person: The Autobiography of Henry VIII. It’s fiction, but it’s based on solid research, and it provides a fascinating look at the entire character of this complex and important historical figure.
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Fellow readers, why do we love so much to read books about books and reading? This category of books is so large that you could probably devote an entire year to it and never run out of reading material.
Just recently, I read three fairly short books back-to-back about books and reading—not intentionally, though. One was a book my son was reading for his high school English class (and I’m his teacher, so I read it, too). One was a mostly-forgotten classic that I was lucky to find even one copy of in my library’s catalog of nearly 5 million items. And one was an Amazon suggestion that I had first read 30 years ago.
Two are fiction; one is nonfiction. Two are delightful and charming (even laugh-out-loud funny); one is chillingly prescient. Their publication dates span fifty-three years, and reflect the tremendous changes of the early to mid-twentieth century. Here’s my take on each of these very different books, followed by a list of other books about books that I’ve loved … and a few that I haven’t.
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I love year-end “best of” reading lists. I love the ones from people whose reading tastes I mostly share (for obvious reasons), but I’m also interested in lists from people who I’m pretty sure I have very little in common with. Because a reader is a reader, and even if we are not alike in other ways, we both love books. If someone loves them enough to make public their honest year-end favorite book list, then more likely than not, I’m happy to look at it.
I only started keeping an actual “books I’ve read” list in 2018. Why it took me so long, I’ll never know. What I would give today if I had a list like this for every year of my life. If you’re not already keeping a list, I encourage you to start in 2024!
That said, here are my favorite books that I read in 2023:
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The other day, my daughter referred to her immense Brandon Sanderson paperback (does the man write anything under 1000 pages?) as her emotional support brick. I had just finished rereading a “brick” of my own—Kristin Lavransdatter. Which made me realize that some of my favorite books of all time weigh in at more than 500 pages, and several are over 1000.
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Is there a name for a genre of books where a secondary character in a beloved classic takes the starring role in their own story? If there is, sign me up to read them—when they’re as well-written and engaging as the four below.
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What is it about adolescence—that time between childhood and adulthood—that is so endlessly fascinating to us? Why is it that the music of those years stays with us as “the best” music of all time? Why do we remember, with sharp poignancy, the dreams, passions, and preoccupations of our teen years, decades after we experienced them?
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I had high hopes that my first “what I’m reading” post would be something really special … an impressive title that showed my discerning taste in reading material (I’m joking—I’m a fairly nondiscriminatory reader and always have been). But instead, my entire household got hit with our first case of COVID and my reading for the past two weeks was whatever I could manage while dealing with frequent fatigue and occasional brain fog.
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Great and Noble Tasks 