Elizabeth Kennedy, White House editor
I don’t know why I picked up LOVED AND MISSED. It must have caught my eye through some sort of bookstore magic, because I had never seen it before and I didn’t recognize the author’s name. I had a professor in college who said novels remind us of what it means to be human. This is a book that does exactly that. It’s about a woman named Ruth who takes in her granddaughter because her daughter is hopelessly addicted to drugs. Actually, she doesn’t just take her in. Ruth hands over an envelope of cash to her addled daughter and backs away fast with the baby in her pram.
If you think that sounds sad, you’re right. But Ruth carries on, warmly and often hilariously. I have never read a better account of loving an imperfect, damaged person. The years roll by and normal things happen, but there is always an undercurrent of “nerves pulsating; love and anxiety plaited with fright.” Life plows relentlessly on, whether we are sad or not.
Some of my favorite scenes in the book involve food: jam tarts, roasted potatoes, flapjacks with raisins, steamed clams, a perfect little roast turkey. Those scenes — and this book —- remind me of what it means to be human, like my college professor said. Whether in the face of calamity or continuity, everyone still has to eat.
Carolyn Ryan, managing editor
I found CHASING BEAUTY captivating. Isabella Stewart Gardner lived a dramatic, almost revolutionary life. She shocked 19th-century Boston society with her eccentricities, infidelities and fierce intellectual spirit.
But after suffering a series of losses in her 20s, including the death of her toddler son, she threw herself into the world of art: seeing it, collecting it and eventually sharing it with the public. This biography sweeps you into her world. Some of it is exhilarating. Some of it is troubling, such as Gardner’s apparent indifference to major social issues of her time, including the Civil War.
But all of it is revealing, and the artists and writers who enter her orbit — Edith Wharton and John Singer Sargent among them — add color and texture to this story of an extraordinary life.
Monica Drake, deputy managing editor
In HOW TO SAY BABYLON, Safiya Sinclair tells a singular story of her coming-of-age in a Rastafarian family using rich, evocative language that reads like poetry. She sculpts such tangible scenes with her words that, months after I finished the book, I occasionally remembered a moment in Jamaica as if I’d lived it myself. She wrestles with the idea of victimhood, redemption and her complicated family history by drafting multifaceted portraits of her ancestors and her contemporaries, too. The result is a family saga that is nuanced and ultimately filled with hope.
Veronica Chambers, editor, Projects & Collaborations
When I first began to read about the term “death doula” I let my eyes glaze over it, the same way I do when I read the words “slasher film.”
But last April, the term became almost impossible to avoid because Alua Arthur published an exceedingly popular book called BRIEFLY PERFECTLY HUMAN. There she was on CBS, talking about her work as a death doula with Gayle King. And again on NPR’s Fresh Air with Tonya Mosley. I was intrigued by the interviews, but I still wasn’t sure a book about dying people was my next spring read. So I watched her TED Talk and then finally purchased the book on Audible.
Listening to the book was wonderful. It is part the author’s memoir of how she came to be a death doula, and also the stories of all the people she has helped at the end of their lives. It was warm, thoughtful and often funny (the gallows humor!). It is the most important book I read in 2024 because it taught me, deeply, that thinking about death can be an opportunity to more fully embrace life.
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent
Lots of books are written about Washington, but few capture how the city really works when the cameras are off. One of the best I’ve read in years is THE WOLVES OF K STREET, by the brother journalists Brody Mullins and Luke Mullins, which is up there with capital classics like “The Wise Men,” by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, and “The Power Game,” by Hedrick Smith.
The Mullins brothers have crafted a riveting account of the evolution of lobbying that truly gets at the intersection of money and power in the modern era, featuring a bipartisan rogue’s gallery of characters like Tommy Boggs, Tony Podesta, Roger Stone and — of course — Paul Manafort, the longtime fixer for dark figures in the old Soviet Union who became Donald Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016 before going to prison for an array of financial crimes. Trump was not wrong about a swamp in Washington, but rather than drain it, as he promised he would, he pardoned the likes of Manafort and Stone, while a whole new generation of swamp creatures began cashing in.
Deb Amlen, Games columnist
“What are you looking for?”
That’s the question Sayuri Komachi — the mysterious librarian at a neighborhood community center in Tokyo — asks her patrons, who are often searching for purpose or a new direction in their lives. Her book recommendations, which often seem confusing to people at first, ultimately lead them to a much deeper understanding of how to move forward.
I loved the message that it’s never too late to start over. Readers may finish WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR IS IN THE LIBRARY wishing that they had a Ms. Komachi in their lives.
Sam Dolnick, deputy managing editor
You probably think that everyone goes to work, comes home, watches TV and goes to bed. Emily Witt’s memoir, HEALTH AND SAFETY, is a searing reminder that some people are much more interesting than that. Witt goes deep into her journey into New York’s underground rave scene; her book is taboo-busting, uncomfortable and can’t-look-away voyeuristic. It’s also brilliantly written and filled with sharp-as-broken-glass observations. That it doubles as an account of the Trump era (the first Trump era, anyway) makes it all the more memorable.
Andrew LaVallee, editor of Arts & Leisure
Earlier this year, I fell down an internet rabbit hole involving the word “community” and emerged in a revelatory, sometimes contrarian essay on the subject by Carl Phillips, part of his book MY TRADE IS MYSTERY. I’ve admired his poetry for years, but reading this Pulitzer winner operating in another genre amplified, for me, the subtlety, brilliance and humility (“I’ve no idea how I do this thing, ultimately. Nor do I want to know.”) of his work.
Melissa Kirsch, deputy editor of Culture & Lifestyle
I can’t stop thinking about Herschel Caine, the flawed, desperate, morally compromised, repellent and still somehow irresistible striver from Andrew Lipstein’s 2023 novel THE VEGAN. Herschel, who works for a hedge fund, lives in a well-appointed Cobble Hill brownstone with his wife. He does a bad thing early in the book, after which his carefully scripted life derails in ways that are weird and delightful and scary. “The Vegan” is a plot-rich thriller, but it’s also a novel of ideas and a moving morality tale. I loved it, and since finishing can’t stop looking into the eyes of all the would-be Herschels I see on my morning subway commute, clad in their armor of expensive orthodontia and business-casual sneakers. What dark, unutterable secrets are these young, shiny men concealing?
Anna Dubenko, newsroom audience editor
I never expected that one of my favorite books of the year would be a nearly 900-page western about, among other things, a cattle drive from Texas to Montana. So how did Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning LONESOME DOVE land on my list? The answer is Gus, and Captain Woodrow Call. But also Soupy, Lippy, Pea Eye Parker, Dishwater Boggett and poor sweet Newt. Characters whose names belie how three-dimensional they are and how much emotional complexity McMurtry was able to imbue in even the most peripheral of cowboys.
And boy, do I marvel at the women of this book. I’m still thinking about the fear I felt when the beautiful and tough Lorena Wood got abducted by the outlaw Blue Duck, and the despair of her resulting trauma. I’m also still thinking about the singular Elmira Johnson, another “sporting woman” who’d rather her well-meaning husband just shut up, or better yet, leave town altogether. If you haven’t already read the novel (and I’m sure many of you have), drop everything and settle down with it over the holidays.
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