The Best Books I Read in 2024

I haven’t been writing here recently. I’ve been working a lot on my senior thesis, and I haven’t had so much to say. But I wanted to put something up, to show I am alive and in good health, and I’ve been enjoying the years-in-review I’ve been seeing, so I thought I’d add mine into the mix.

Fran Ross, Oreo (1974)

I know I read Oreo in a lot of locales, but my memory of reading it, almost exactly a year ago now, is on the subway; specifically, on the B train, while I intermittently stopped to text the woman who is now my girlfriend.

I have loved Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (2015) since I read it, and Oreo helped me connect some dots. Not for nothing does the front cover of New Directions’s recent re-release of Oreo quote Beatty in its favor: The Sellout is an entry in a tradition of Afro-American novel-writing of which Oreo is perhaps the pioneering example but which goes further back. A proposed account: This strain has its roots in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), which in turn picks up from the comic sensibilities of James Joyce and Herman Melville. Right now I’m reading Tristram Shandy (1759–67), and it’s obvious—because they tell you—that Joyce and Melville are both picking up on what Laurence Sterne is doing there. What characterizes this tradition is a kind of willful outrageousness, a bombast that marries vulgarity to sophistication, enjoying the first from the second’s ironical standpoint while also reveling in it quite earnestly. This bombast is not merely content-based but formal: the tradition involves playful experimentation with form. The novel is always cannibalistic of other forms, but in this tradition that cannibalizing has a strong parodic quality that is, however, dialogic: the object of parody is not merely an object of parody, that is, of unidirectional mockery, but has a kind of existence of its own in the text. Parody, then, becomes a means of aesthetic expansion in such novels. Nonetheless, there is a strong sense of lampooning—because of its dialogic nature all in good fun, and not un–self-critical, but nonetheless genuinely intended—in this tradition. In Sterne and Melville, that lampooning is directed, Emperor’s-New-Clothes–style, at various social pretentions. In Joyce, it is directed specifically at the myth of ethnicity. When it’s picked up in the black tradition, it becomes a way of illustrating the ludicrousness of race and its attendant mythologies.

On the first two pages of Oreo, the parents of a white Jewish man and a black woman who have announced their engagement all freak out, and the woman’s father, who is seated, has some kind of seizure that paralyzes him into what Ross calls “a rigid half-swastika, discounting, of course, head hands and feet.”¹ Ross, Sterne-like, illustrates it:

It’s so funny, and so smart, and so silly, and it knows it’s all of these things and has a rollicking good time of it. Well, I had a rollicking good time of it, too. Burp!

Jason Schneiderman, Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire (2024) and Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture (2025)

… I got to copy-edit two of my uncle’s books, his fifth poetry collection (Self Portrait) and his début essay collection (Nothingism). Look, I’m obviously biased; also, he is one of the smartest people I have ever met, and his poetry is a wonderful combination of lucid and emotionally devastating. Check out his “Dramaturgy,” which is in the Self Portrait.

Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950)

AUDREY: You really like Trilling?

TOM: Yes.

(WS, M)²

Gayl Jones, Corregidora (1975)

I was assigned Corregidora alongside Ishmael Reed’s much more famous Mumbo Jumbo (1972), which I found more galling—and eventually tedious, though Reed is definitely in the Johnson-Ellison-Ross-Everett-Beatty tradition, and I want to read more of his work—than enjoyable. Corregidora is magnificent, and I was a little scandalized I had not previously heard of it.

There were a bunch of really formally exciting African American novelists who burst onto the scene in the nineteen-seventies. The most famous of these is Toni Morrison, but Reed, Jones, and Leon Forrest were also in the group. This wasn’t a coincidence: in that decade, a number of publishers made an effort to hire young black editors to scout and edit undiscovered black talent. One of those editors was Morrison, who brought both Forrest and Jones to the reading public. Here’s how Imani Perry describes it:

In 1974, [Michael] Harper[, a poet and one of Jones’s mentors at Brown,] sent a box of Jones’s writing to his friend Toni Morrison, who was then an editor at Random House. Morrison wasn’t delighted. “Every time I looked at it, my heart sank, and I wondered who would be so callous as to send me ‘all’ of the literary output of a student and expect a reasonable response. … The presence of this box intimidated me and finally it threatened me.” One Saturday morning, however, Morrison had a few hours before taking her sons to some afternoon activity. She opened the box, planning to make a quick assessment of what was wrong with the writing. Several editors had already passed on Jones’s work.

But once Morrison began reading one of the short novels inside, Corregidora, she was transfixed. She described the experience in an essay about Jones written for Mademoiselle magazine: “This girl had changed the terms, the definitions of the whole enterprise. So deeply impressed was I that I hadn’t time to be offended by the fact that she was 24 and had no right to know so much so well. She had written a story that thought the unthinkable: that talked about the female requirement to make generations as an active, even violent political act.” [Ellipsis Perry’s.]

I wasn’t there in the seventies, so I’m not actually qualified to say that Corregidora feels just as exciting now as it did then. All I can say is that Morrison’s words resonate with my experience of reading the book. It is a phenomenal novel. The prose, the characters, the ideas, the narrative structure: all brilliantly executed, all just gripping to read.

Martin Buber, I and Thou (1923, trans. Walter Kaufmann 1970)

A gorgeous reflection on what morality is for. Totally imprecise, but that’s okay. Golden means, fine; categorical imperatives, sure. But what, after all that, do you see when you look at a person? What do you see when you look at a tree? How do you go through the world?

C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953)

I read this for my thesis, the first chapter of which is about Moby-Dick (1851). As a reading of Moby-Dick, it is powerful but not entirely convincing. As a manifesto on the meaning of American and world citizenship, it is exceptional and essential. I’ve got to read more James; few writers I’ve read have given better voice to how I feel about the intersection of humanism and politics, and Mariners changed my thinking about the role of labor in human experience.

Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto (2023), Sag Harbor (2009), and The Nickel Boys (2019)

Whitehead is also in the Johnson-Ellison-Reed-Ross-Everett-Beatty tradition, and that side of him is in full swing in Sag Harbor, his bildungsroman about rich black kids in the nineteen-eighties. But one of the things that’s great about Whitehead (and this goes for Beatty, too, but perhaps to a lesser extent) is that the humorous bombast is interspersed with sincerities that work seemingly miraculously, in that I cannot figure out why they work. They seem to have all the ingredients for overearnest sentimental poshlost. And yet:

As I begin to describe the kind of work I used to do in Sag Harbor, the scooper’s trade [the narrator works at an ice cream shop], I try to picture what things were like one-hundred-fifty years earlier, and of course it’s dim. All I can muster, truly, is an image of the black sailors trudging home at the end of the day to Eastville, the direction I had just come from. I tipped my hat to ghosts as we passed each other.³

So I liked Sag Harbor a lot. It has no real plot, and Whitehead is willing to spend several pages just describing the kinds of people who patronize the ice cream shop where his protagonist works. It’s a patiently, lovingly narrated tale.

But of the Whitehead books I’ve read, I think my favorites are Harlem Shuffle (2021) and Crook Manifesto, the first of which I read in the summer of 2023 and the second of which I read this past summer. I think of them together for good reason: they’re the first two-thirds of a trilogy, what is shaping up to be a kind of noir historical epic. You can already see the single-volume version from the Library of America. Whitehead: The Carney Trilogy. These books are a great deal of fun, and they also depict in a way that feels very sensitive and real the changing world of New York and specifically of Harlem over the middle of the twentieth century. I grew up in Harlem (I know, I know), and it means a lot to me to see this history unfold on the page.

The Nickel Boys, which I made a last-minute decision to read in advance of seeing RaMell Ross’s adaptation, represents Whitehead in a very different mode: heavy. It’s about a based-on-a-true-story novel about a Florida “reform school” that systematically abused, and sometimes murdered, its wards, and especially its black wards, during the last century. For most of the book, I didn’t like it as much as Whitehead in J-E-R-R-E-B mode, and I was planning just not to mention on this list that I’d read it. But the ending turns the novel into a different fable than it has hitherto seemed; in its last pages, the whole thing becomes both more devastating and more optimistic than you’ve thought, a tricky and beautiful maneuver on Whitehead’s part.

(The movie, by the way, is phenomenal. I recommend reading the book first to have a good grasp of what’s going on, since the film is really not interested in making its own plot easily understood. I think it might be one of the great films of the century.)

Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964)

My girlfriend has made me a skeptic of “studies” fields: American studies, African American studies, ethnic studies, women and gender studies, and so forth. I’m all for studying America, or African America, or ethnicity, or gender. So is she. But she’s argued convincingly that one has got to learn the methods of some methods-based field and study American literature, or African American history, or the sociology of ethnicity, or the philosophy of gender, and that if one just studies “America,” etc., one can end up with some pretty impoverished analysis that says less than straight-up literary criticism or history or sociology or philosophy would do. Certainly I have read work that corroborates her argument.

But The Machine in the Garden … I don’t know what purely methods-based field it could belong to. It’s not just literary criticism, though Marx close-reads The Tempest (ca. 1611) and Moby-Dick and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) (Machine was another thesis read; my second chapter is about Huck Finn); and it’s not just intellectual history, though he traces the development of attitudes toward technology and nature throughout the American long nineteenth century. Marx’s entire academic training was in the “studies”: He got an AB in History and Literature and a PhD in American Civilization from Harvard. I was briefly in Hist and Lit, and I was really dissatisfied with it. Plainly, there is more to it than met my eye. What I’m trying to say is that The Machine in the Garden made me believe in American studies again.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)

Girlfriend read The Road for her thesis, on the gothic cultural mythologies of the second Bush administration, and declared that it was the best work of twenty-first section century fiction she had read. I wouldn’t go that far—I’d put it on a par with The Namesake (2003), and below my beloved Sellout—but it is an amazing, moving accomplishment.

It is also, I found, the antidote to McCarthy’s Blood Meridian; or, the Evening Redness in the West. Simply put: the main idea of Blood Meridian is that human evil will always endure; the main idea of The Road is that so will human goodness. I found Blood Meridian gorgeous at points (the Apache brigade, the elegy on the slain buffalo, the last few pages), but brutalizing to the point of banality at others. Perhaps part of this is that The Road is much shorter, but I simply did not find BM’s barrage of awfulness aesthetically compelling, even if McCarthy’s Melville-Faulkner pastiche is well executed. Augustine was right about evil; it is an absence; and at some point, Blood Meridian’s moral barrenness stopped being interesting.

Infamously, McCarthy once declared to the New York Times that, to him, the work of Marcel Proust and Henry James was “not literature” because it does not, like the work of Melville and Faulkner, “deal with issues of life and death.” Nonsense. The first paragraph of The Ambassadors (1903) has more life in it than all 350 pages of Blood Meridian. Life is intellection and complication. Life is not morally neutral, nor is it oversimple notions of Good and Evil writ as large as an author can make them.

If The Road was McCarthy’s apology, I accept it. At one point in the novel, the protagonist, wheeling his son in a shopping cart through a post-apocalyptic landscape, refuses to help a man in need. His son is scandalized, and indicates as much. The protagonist says:

You’re not the one who has to worry about everything.

The boy said something but he couldnt understand him. What? he said.

He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one.

That’s not Melville, it’s Whitman—“I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there”—the Christlike words of the adult transposed for the mouth of the morally watchful child. That’s life.

(By the way, Melville, picking up from Sterne, is often extremely funny. There is no Bakhtinian revelry, no joy in parody in Blood Meridian. I don’t know that there’s any joy at all, except perhaps in sadism.)

Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory (1986)

Another thesis read. (The third chapter is about Invisible Man.) Ellison states his vision of American cultural pluralism in the opening essay, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” and then pretty much repeats it for several hundred pages, but it’s an essential vision, and a complicated one, and it bears repeating to sort itself out little by little. Ellison describes more than any other writer what America means to me.

Jean Toomer, Cane (1923)

I’ve only talked about first-time reads here, but, since all reading is rereading, I’ll end with this: Cane, which I was assigned in the class that assigned Mumbo Jumbo and Corregidora, proved equally astonishing on second read. What made the most impact this time was the poems. “Kabnis” still doesn’t quite hit for me. And I’m excited to read the new material in the Third Norton Critical Edition when it comes out in the Spring.

1. Fran Ross, Oreo (New Directions, 2015), 3–4.

2. Not that I’ve read all of the competition, but I think Trilling may be one of the great thinkers of the last century. He makes a worldview out of Keats’s “negative capability.” If you don’t want to read a whole book of essays and would like specific recommendations, my favorites were “The Princess Casamassima,” “Huckleberry Finn,” “The Sense of the Past,” “The Kinsey Report,” and “The Meaning of a Literary Idea.” I also quite like his essay on Mansfield Park, which is not in The Liberal Imagination.

3. Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor (Anchor Books, 2009), 102.