The Best Books I Read in 2024

Nick Felker
6 min readDec 29, 2024

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Like last year, I wanted to write a post that goes into some detail about the top books I read throughout the year. This isn't necessarily books that were published this year, but ones that I have finished.

It’s been a good year for reading. I started getting into audiobooks as a way to help me tackle my to-read list. I’ve gotten it down by a lot since January, and managed to read 156 books in total.

It was not easy to narrow down the entire list to just a handful, but I wanted to share my top picks.

Best Books of 2024

This book is by a journalist who describes in detail the months prior and following the initial strikes by Russia against Kyiv and Ukraine in general. I found the author’s writing to be empathetic and personal. It’s my first pick.

After visiting Korea, and seeing some of the DMZ, I had a lingering curiosity about the Korean War. It’s covered in high school history, but not to a great degree. It’s more of a side note between World War 2 and the Vietnam War. So I decided to pick up this work that covers the events in greater detail. It bounces between domestic and foreign events and is quite long. I found it to be a good, comprehensive work.

My third pick is this history book on Native Americans. I read a few different books on indigenous people this year and was generally dissatisfied by them. The authors usually spend most of their time portraying them as hapless victims who lack agency, often living in a temporal liminal space of unhistory until suddenly Columbus reaches the continent. So I really found this book to be a good look at indigenous nations and how they worked at political and economic levels without fetishizing them or leaning into the “noble savage” trope. Rather, they're portrayed as groups of individuals who made their own decisions and how those decisions affected the world around them, like an honest history book.

I have read a lot of history books this year, including my fourth pick. Vichy France is the government that ruled over much of France during World War 2. They weren’t fascist, but did collaborate with the Nazis. But more generally it was an attempt to reverse the decades of mass urbanism and cultural liberalism with a religious conservative government. (Sound familiar?) This book appears to be the definitive accounting of what happened and why it fell apart. I learned a lot from it.

A more contemporary book was this one, about a Malaysian defense contractor who took tons of military money during the Bush years for services but used much of it for parties and bribery. The book is quite sensational, with sordid details around drugs and prostitutes. This year was also momentous as the legal cases came to a head. It is eye-opening into the navy procurement system and the potential hazards of global military reach.

I had a chance to talk to the author of this book when he was in New York, and he signed it. The book is about Tokyo, with a mix of urban design and history. The impact of World War 2 on the city led to organic reform that is detailed with lots of deeply fascinating pictures and diagrams. Now that I know all of this, I’d love to go back and really enjoy everything the city can offer.

This reminded me a bit of “Hidden Figures”, in that it details an unknown group of women who worked for the federal government to have a significant impact. The book covers several women who were part of the CIA and tried to perform espionage in the purest sense. They were acting covertly towards various aims but were not part of the growing effort to perform coups and politically disruptive actions. It’s a neat look at the organization’s early days.

I read this book back in June about a sort of authoritarian takeover and Civil War in Ireland. It’s not quite about the form of government or even about politics at all. Rather, the book takes the perspective of a family who is affected by it and all the ways they try to work to keep things together. The author gives you a deep emotional connection to the protagonist as they wander through an ever-changing precarious situation.

I read this in a few days and enjoyed it throughout. The novel has a unique setting of Slack, the chat app. The entire plot takes place through the app, with different characters explaining things through the lens of remote work and also includes a lot of fun Slack humor.

My final pick for this year was this fictional book that takes place in the south during the middle of last century. It’s a good look at the concept of identity and race, and the challenges of racial identity in particular. Half the characters are filled with doubt about their identity, while the others cast aside all prejudice and forge a distinct identity. It was something we read in my book club and it led to a good discussion.

Worst Book of 2024

Sometimes a bad book is not about the subject, but the way it’s portrayed. This book is about quantum computing, a topic I’m quite interested in. However, the author just did a bad job with it. Too much time is spent discussing concepts of encryption with an inane amount of detail, to the point where it doesn’t make sense. If you cannot understand prime numbers, then this book is probably not a good fit for you.

Beyond that, the book was published in 2013, long before a number of big advancements in quantum computers. As such, the book’s information was not helpful and was oddly skeptical about quantum computing in general.

Sometimes a book can be good for a moment and then be completely invalidated. Others are timeless. What is a good book can depend a lot on the reader as well.

Looking Ahead

Looking back, I did read a lot of World War 2 books this year. It’s a big war, and it had a big impact. But perhaps it’s time to find lesser known wars to read about.

I really want to close out my to-read list in the next year, freeing me up from the long queue. Right now it stands at 81 books, but I know I’ll be adding more over the course of the year. As such, I expect I’ll read 124 books. This will not be as easy as this year, where I picked up lots of short-page books. Now I’ll be starting to tackle thicker novels like Termination Shock and Crime and Punishment. I can only hope to find the time and be able to relax.

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Nick Felker
Nick Felker

Written by Nick Felker

Social Media Expert -- Rowan University 2017 -- IoT & Assistant @ Google

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