My Best Books of 2024, Part Deux

Let's finish off with joy

Because the editors of The Economist may have excellent taste, but whenever I post about books, people secretly and not so secretly ask me for the fun books.

PEOPLE, YOU HAVE COME TO THE RIGHT PLACE - part two of my best books of 2024, featuring the higher lamb ratings! Important notes:

• Lamb ratings are a diagnostically protective guide for your tender heart. See HERE

• Part One best books of 2024 can be found HERE

• Even though a book has a high lamb rating, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading. Joy and immersion can also deliver a powerful punch.

• Colored lights are better than white lights on a Christmas tree and hot smoked salmon > lox every time, I can’t explain it but it’s true I will be taking no questions at this time.

So read on for the rest of my 2024 favorites (and the honorable mentions!) And please leave your best books of the year in the comments so we can all start 2025 off RIGHT.

---

Even if you did not grow up in the shadows of Riverfront Stadium, and even if you wouldn’t normally seek out a sports story, this biography? reportage? of Pete Rose’s life, sports brilliance, and self-destruction is excellent. Human, readable and well written, and such a colorful picture of baseball’s past. I really liked Charlie Hustle.

Did I think Long Island Compromise, about a Long Island family devastated in unexpected ways by a kidnapping, was as good as Brodesser-Akner’s first novel, Fleishman is In Trouble? Sure didn’t. Did I like any of the characters or think that she said anything really new about sprawling 80s Jewish suburbia or late stage capitalism? Kind of not. But the author’s voicey voiceyness and empathy are undeniable and irresistable. So it makes the cut.

The Wealth of Shadows is a spy thriller about international monetary policy, and I couldn’t put it down. Based on a true story of a secret department in the US Treasury Department tasked with leveraging monetary policy to stop Germany in WW2, this was both a page-turner and a thought-provoking commentary on power, money, and who leverages both. A great holiday gift for that person in your life who reads a ton of non-fiction but "is willing to give fiction a try.” (A surprisingly large population!)

You guys. I’m late to this one (pub. 2017), I know, but I read it on a vacation and I couldn’t have chosen a better beachside read. The Vanity Fair Diaries are literally the diaries from Tina Brown’s time as publisher of Vanity Fair during the 80’s / 90’s heyday. It’s a heady, delightful, no-holds-barred telling of celebrities, of thoughtful magazine and media strategy, of leadership, of New York, of gossip. If you have any fondness for the magazine era, this is a chummily charming chocolate box of a read. Tina Brown seems like a lot of fun.

And while we’re talking about late to the game, here’s my confession: I didn’t like Shadow and Bone so I didn’t read Six of Crows until this year. (If you don’t read any fantasy, this string of words will mean nothing to you, but somewhere there’s a TikTok community forming around my heresy.)

But I enjoyed this duology! It’s basically a heist, but with a little bit of magic. But there’s also a lot of cunning and misdirection, where the MC is always running multiple games. It was a lot of fun!

I genuinely did not have any expectations for Ruth Reichl’s fiction and it certainly won’t win one single literary award, but The Paris Novel is pure pleasure and I j’adored it. Set in the 1980s about a young woman finding herself, where the solutions are food! fashion! a cast of charming characters! It’s warm, comforting, and sublime from start to finish.

I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t have at least one favorite rom-com every year and this year, The Rom-Commers tops the list. A charming, funny, feel-good story about a young writer who gets called to co-write a rom-com with Hollywood’s top action screenwriter. She teaches him to love and respect the genre. Sparks fly. Repartee is exchanged. Dresses are ruined. The page edges are pink. It’s unapologetically fun and if this kind of book is your jam, you’ll love it.

---

Honorable Mentions

I made a case to the nominating committee (me and the plant near my desk) for each of these, and while they didn’t make it in my top 14, they probably could have. From bitcoin to sociopathy, from time-twisting romance to charming murders to a beautiful meditation on fatherhood, each of these has a lot to like.

All links go to Bookshop.org, where you can find most of my past recommendations. Remember, independent bookstores need your purchases this holiday season too!