Friday Five: my year in books

In addition to wanting to reboot my creative writing in 2024, I wanted to increase my consumption of literary fiction. (I say “consumption” because I listen to audiobooks about as much as I read books in print or e-books. And some ableist book snobs people don’t consider audiobooks to be on par with their printed counterparts. So consumption it is.)

I’ve been an avid, but by no means voracious, reader since college. Over the past decade or so, however, I’ve gravitated toward more “practical” and career-oriented reading. I focused mainly on books about leadership, marketing, productivity, organizational dynamics, and such. That focus left little time or energy for more creative, recreational reading.

This year, my reading took a much-needed turn. I read (consumed) a lot of fiction, literary and otherwise, in 2024, as well as some good non-fiction works including history, spirituality, and books about the writing craft. I also re-read some dust-gatherers in my home library, or listened to them. All told, I consumed over 70 titles. You can find them listed on my reading log. My to-be-read (TBR) list continues to expand, and my home-office bookshelves, which I’d purged soon after retiring (three big paper boxes’ worth went to the local library), are beginning to regain a semblance of cozy clutter, even as my Kindle app fills to the brim with digital reads. Audiobooks allowed me to be a more efficient consumer of writing, as I could listen to a book while cleaning, cooking, working out, and driving.

On to my selections:

Note that each of my selections is a “favorite” book, not the “best” book. We can argue about what makes a book the best, but everyone has their own tastes and interests, and my tastes and interests is what this list reflects.

1 – Favorite novel of 2024

James, by Percival Everett.

This retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck’s slave companion has received a slew of honors, including the National Book Award. And for good reason. The novel explores the issues of race and racism through masterful writing by one of the greatest American novels out there.

This is one of the unputdownable books, and one I’m sure I’ll return to in the future.

Honorable mentions:

• Wandering Stars, by Tommy Orange
• The Mighty Red, by Louise Erdrich
• Orbital, by Samantha Harvey
• Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar

2 – Favorite non-fiction book of 2024

Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age, by Kathleen Sheppard.

Who doesn’t love learning more about the mysteries of ancient Egypt? In this book, Sheppard, an Egyptologist and historian of science, shines a light on the neglected stories of several women who toiled alongside men on some of the great discoveries that captured the public imagination during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

(Full disclosure: Kathleen Sheppard is a good friend and is a professor at my former employer, Missouri University of Science and Technology. I also wrote a review about her book for our local newspaper, and I’m thrilled that Women in the Valley of the Kings has garnered national attention, including a review in The New York Times.)

Honorable mentions:

• Mailed It!, by Ashley Budd and Dayana Kibilds
• Latinoland, Marie Aruna

3 – Favorite short story collection of 2024

Coolest American Stories 2024, Mark Wish and Elizabeth Coffey, editors.

“What makes a short story cool? Interesting writing.” So says the blurb on the cover of this anthology, the third annual edition.

I enjoy reading literary anthologies, like Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Collection, and the Pushcart Prize series, and every year I try to read at least one of them. This year, I took a different path and chose Coolest American Stories.

What makes Coolest stand out from the pack is its editors’ commitment to finding the best stories regardless of where or when they’ve been published, or even if they’d ever been published before landing in this anthology. A couple of my favorite stories in this edition were published years earlier (“Pass the Baby,” by Therese Eiben, and Cynthia Weiner’s “A Castle in Outer Space“). The 2025 edition is now out, and I’m looking forward to reading it soon. If you love short stories, I encourage you to consider one or more of the Coolest editions. You can find them, and read more about the project, at CoolestAmericanStories.com.

Honorable mentions:

• My Bohemian Baptism and Then Some, by Doug Brown
• There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven, by Ruben Reyes

4 – Favorite writing book of 2024

Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories, by Steve Almond.

I’m a sucker for a good book about writing, and Almond has written a great one. I didn’t know anything about him until I started seeing rave review Twitter posts about this book, so I decided to get my own copy. Almond has written as a journalist, an essayist, and a novelist, and he also teaches creative writing, so he has loads of experience and the chops to write a book like this.

I reviewed this book in a previous Friday Five, so if you want to learn more about it, head over to that post.

Honorable mentions:

• 1000 Words, by Jami Attenberg
• Writing with Style: The Economist Guide, by Lane Greene, ed. (Technically, this is a style guide, but it contains enough writing advice to merit a mention here.)

5 – Favorite audiobook of 2024

Here Goes Nothing, by Eamon McGrath.

Unlike every other book on this list so far, this is not a new book. The print version came out in 2020. But the creative approach of the audio version, which came out in April 2021, makes Here Goes Nothing a standout to me.

Here Goes Nothing is about a 1990s-era indie band and their tour in western Europe as well as the band’s, and main character’s, experiences in North America. The novel is told in interweaving narratives from present and past to present again, and takes the reader on a road trip across Portugal, Spain and other parts of western Europe, into the northern U.S., and to the main character’s home country of Canada.

The audiobook version is read by the author, as so many are, but what makes it stand out is the musical score that accompanies McGrath’s read. McGrath, who is also a musician, created the score for the audiobook, and it adds another dimension to the road trip narrative. The musical style reinforces the feelings of being on tour — the claustrophobia of the touring van, the petty arguments among musicians, the weariness of long nights on the road, the blurring of past and present, the excesses and debauchery that accompany the club gigs, and the crash that comes in their wake.

Honorable mentions:

• So Many Steves: Afternoons with Steve Martin, Steve Martin and Adam Gopnik (an audiobook-only product)
• One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories, B.J. Novak (read by the author with cameos from other members of The Office cast)

Bonus: Most serendipitous read of 2024

The Groves of Academe, by Mary McCarthy

The story of how I came to read this 1952 novel begins with a letter from a friend who sent me a newspaper clipping from The New York Times. (Yes, dear reader, there are still people who read print editions of newspapers and mail letters.) The clipping was of an article by Times‘ literary critic A.O. Scott titled “There’s Always Been Trouble in the Groves of Academe” (gift link). My friend, aware of my then-recent retirement from nearly 33 years of toil in those groves, thought I might enjoy Scott’s take on this ancient text.

And enjoy it I did. For Scott’s essay is not just about McCarthy’s novel, but about the genre of the “campus novel.” The mood of these works “is overwhelmingly comic,” Scott writes. “I would go so far as to claim that the modern university campus — in actuality one of the most systematically humorless habitats ever devised by human beings — is the only reliably funny place in contemporary literature.”

Fast forward to last June and my hometown public library’s book sale. Perusing the stacks in the musty basement where hundreds of used books wait to be purchased, I stumble across a worn but still quite readable copy of The Groves of Academe in the 50-cent racks. Shut up and take my money, library. I snapped a picture of the cover, texted it to my friend so she could share in my serendipitous find, then took my treasure home and devoured it over a few days, stifling guffaws every other page.

This wonderful farce of the higher education world is set in Jocelyn College, a fictitious liberal arts school in Pennsylvania, the novel centers on literature instructor Henry Mulcahy’s quest to retain his job after being denied reappointment by the college president. He recruits his academic colleagues to support his cause and in the process creates havoc for the campus.

The Groves of Academe is so great because, even 72 years after its publication, it is so relatable. In some ways, the book is timeless. The cast of characters could have been pulled from any university today. Their petty bickering over the minutia of strategizing Mulcahy’s approach, the surreptitious backbiting, the shifting of alliances, all reminded me of similar experiences I had witnessed throughout my career.

The kicker for me, after finishing the book, was recognizing the name of its original owner, who had inscribed it in pencil on the inside first page. It was a long-retired, now-deceased math professor who, in his retirement years, occupied himself with letters to the editor of our local newspaper, in which he complained about administrative bloat at the university. When I saw that name, I had to smile and shake my head. No doubt, this professor was inspired, at least in part, by McCarthy’s novel.

Image by Marisa Sias from Pixabay