Books I'm Looking Forward to in 2024

A new year of history, literature, science, and faith.

It’s customary this time of year for ink-stained wretches like myself to participate in a ritual called the year-end book list. I edit one over at CRB, and this year I also contributed to another one in the Federalist. You can take a look at those to find some of the books that most stuck with me from this year.

It’s a lovely tradition, sharing notes from a year’s life in letters. It’s also treacherous, because of course the point is that you haven’t read at least some of the books that your friends and favorite authors have. Which means that lists beget more lists: as in the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, everyone lays out their little offering of titles and comes away with far more than they brought (or indeed bargained for).

And this year it occurred to me that there’s an implicit second list we rarely share, the list of as-yet-unread books that emerges in response to the recommendations as a kind of new year’s resolution. So as we close out the year, here are five books I’m looking forward to reading at some point in 2024. Paid subscribers, I’m eager to learn in the comments whether you’ll join me in any of these, as well as any others on your bedside. And by the way—if you want to become a paid subscriber, you can still do so for 20% off until end of Christmas (January 6):

The New Roman Empire: This one will be first. I always start the year by expending all that January 1 energy on some exhaustive tome. This one showed up under the tree for me after the great Jim Hankins of Harvard sang its praises and I frantically made it a last-minute addition to my wish list. It’s a detailed but engaging narrative about the much-neglected Eastern Roman Empire, more commonly (but incorrectly, it turns out) known as Byzantium. University of Chicago Historian Anthony Kaldellis is the real deal, and as I’ve written elsewhere on this Substack I suspect that the period between antiquity and modernity is only going to become more important as our own post-modern transition wears on.

Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation: The most enthusiastic acolytes of the scientific revolution (I’m thinking here of men like René Descartes and Pierre Simon-Laplace) seemed distinctly convinced that finding the truth about the world meant withdrawing from the world, finding a standpoint from which to observe it with cold dispassion and without exerting any influence on it. Many of the sharpest physicists now working are coming to realize this is impossible, and it seems like science writer George Musser has written an interesting survey of their work.

Meditations on the Tarot: I actually started this one over the past year, but as its title suggests it rewards slow rumination, and I’ve been reading it chapter by chapter with my friend Joe Alto. So far I’ve found that it requires a total paradigm shift—just the fact that Pope John Paul II seems to have loved this series of essays about ostensibly pagan arcana (written anonymously by the mystic Valentin Tomberg) is enough to rewire your brain a little. It’s one of those books that seems to threaten a spiritual explosion on every page—a bit like Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations. Joe and I will be doing a series of discussions about the book in the new year for paid subscribers as we work to finish it.

A Quiet Mind to Suffer With: It may take me a little longer to get to this one, but I’m moved by the subject: a sufferer of extreme mental illness, John Andrew Bryant, writes about how his relationship with Christ endured and changed through his breakdown. Rare that someone in this position would also be in the position to write a book, and it comes highly recommended by readers I respect.

Albion’s Seed: This one falls in the category of “God prepares my reading lists.” I have had several uncanny encounters in which the title of this book, or its subject—the influence of British folkways on early generations of Americans—dropped randomly into my field of vision. The author, David Hackett Fisher, made a splash this year with a new book about black people’s influence on the founding, which I’m also interested to check out. But first, the Brits.

That’s it from me this year. There will be more reading, of course, and more podcasting, and more writing. But for now I can only say what a joy it’s been to know each of you in some small way, to hear your responses to my work and to engage with you here or elsewhere. I hope you’ve had a restorative holiday, and I look forward to charging into the strange and uncertain territory of 2024 with you all. God bless and as always,

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer

Check out the latest from Young Heretics: