What I Read this Year

A life in letters.

“Books are made out of books,” said Cormac McCarthy. I’m coming to feel that lives are made in no small part out of books, too, and maybe even souls. Of course there’s more to us than what we read, but what we read is part of us. One thing I’m always trying to stress on Young Heretics is that what we’re about when we study the canon isn’t a list of titles so much as a way of life, a pattern and a habit of the mind.

You don’t “make your way through” the 100 greatest works and move on. You steep yourself in literature for some amount of time each day, let it carve out new grooves and caverns in your heart. If this way of life has gotten more challenging to maintain in the age of digital distractions, it has not gotten any less rewarding, less noble, less humanizing. If anything, sustained reading becomes more restorative, not less, when the alternative is online brain rot.

But really, a life filled with books is always bought at a high opportunity cost, scrappily and imperfectly defended against the calamitous world and one’s own frailties. We do the best we can.

In 2024 I started a new tradition of giving out year-end awards (“The Inklings”) for the best things I read in a variety of categories: Non-Fiction, Criticism, Fiction, and Theology. As promised, I’m now posting here the full list of books I read this year, with stars next to those that won an Inkling or received honorable mention. This is just the list of things I read purely for their own sake, not for some work project—though everything makes its way into the work one way or another in the end.

It’s startling to consider that a full year of reading is, for me, about a shelf and a half worth of books. I’m no great advocate for reading as much as possible as fast as possible. But there are limited years in a life, and so many books that have to go unread. Choose wisely!

Klavan’s Books of 2024

*David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Inkling award for best non-fiction)

Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

Hannu Rajaniemi, The Quantum Thief

George Musser, Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation: Why Physicists Are Studying Human Consciousness and AI to Unravel the Mysteries of the Universe

Joshua S. Porter, With All Its Teeth: Sex, Violence, Profanity, and the Death of Christian Art

Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide to the American Status System

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World

*Mark Forsyth, The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (Inklings honorable mention, non-fiction)

Mark Forsyth, The Horologicon: A Day’s Jaunt through the Lost Words of the English Language

*Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These (Inklings honorable mention, fiction)

Nigel Biggar, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning

Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier

*(Pseudo-)Dionysius the Areopagite, Complete Works (Inkling award for best theology)

Batya Ungar-Sargon, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women

Cixin Liu, trans. Ken Liu, Death’s End

*T.S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (Inkling award for best criticism)

E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy: A Story of Faith, Tragedy, and Triumph

*James Clavell, Shōgun (Inklings honorable mention, fiction)

Novalis, trans. Charles E. Passage, ed. Michael Martin, Christendom or Europe?

Umberto Eco, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation

Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing

Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language

Oswyn Murray, The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present

Helen DeWitt, The English Understand Wool

Julius Taranto, How I Won a Nobel Prize (Inkling award for best fiction)

Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth

Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. James Hoopes, Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semeiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce

Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Rey

Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess

*Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (Inklings honorable mention, fiction)

David Bentley Hart, All Things are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life

Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of my Ambitious Career

Robert T. Kiyosaki, Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach their Kids about Money—That the Poor and Middle-Class Do Not!

R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

Julie Schumacher, The English Experience

Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

*Anthony Kaldellis, The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (Inklings honorable mention, non-fiction)