When I asked my colleagues here at NR to tell me their favorite book of the year — old, recent, any book at all — I didn’t know whether to expect mostly fiction or nonfiction, classics or hot new titles. In fact, the responses compiled below travel far and wide in time, geography, subject, and genre. Several people replied with works they’d revisited; others told of discoveries. (Some could not resist mentioning two or even three titles.) For all of us writers and editors, daily immersed in words — the words you read in the print magazine and on this site, day after day — there is always the allure of yet more words living inside books, just waiting for us to take them in.
We hope you’ll enjoy learning which books graced our bedside tables, carry-ons, desks, and beach blankets, and we wish all our readers a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year.
Luther Ray Abel, nights & weekends editor
Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea. Its depiction of life afloat, with the competing loyalties and flashpoints of crew life playing out amidst the great drama of WWII naval combat, is a treat for the imagination as well as a sobering reminder of what the merchant mariners and their escorts endured to keep Russia supplied sufficiently to crush Hitler’s regime.
Brian Allen, art critic
Isabella Stewart Gardner was called “the Sphinx of Fenway Court” for her Boston Brahmin reserve. In Chasing Beauty, Natalie Dykstra tells Gardner’s story, finally, through revelatory letters, the art she collected, and the visionary ambiance of her Venetian-style palace, now one of America’s great museums.
What’s new to say about Impressionism? Plenty. Paris 1874, edited by Sylvie Patry and Anne Robbins, is the catalogue for the National Gallery exhibition marking Impressionism’s 150th anniversary. It’s readable, scholarly, and fascinating. A German invasion, an art market monopoly, Paris’s new boulevards, and a ragtag cadre of pushy artists all play a part.
I don’t only read about art. Luke Nichter’s The Year That Broke Politics gets to the bottom of our 1968 presidential election. As a child member in that chaotic year of my local Nixon Now Club, I’m delighted to see I have one thing in common with LBJ. Turns out, thanks to Nichter’s impeccable research, we were both glad Nixon won.
Judson Berger, managing editor, NRO
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez. The classic novel, which I’m finally getting around to reading (and is now a Netflix series), well deserves its acclaim. The book is heavy with blood and passion and war. Márquez’s storytelling retains its beauty in translation, and rewards and challenges: primarily, by requiring the reader to keep close track of almost identically named family members. Imagine Encanto, but everyone is named Mirabel. If you visit or revisit this novel, bookmark the family tree that precedes the first chapter.
Jeff Blehar, staff writer
I’ll recommend a novel I reread for the first time in a quarter century, because I consider it the finest work of 20th-century Russian literature: Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, an aching cry from the soul of old Russia written during the Stalinist terror, and hidden away in a drawer until long after the author’s death. It asks how people can possibly retain their integrity — whether creative, intellectual, or spiritual — in the face of oppression the likes of which no native-born American will ever know, and answers with a uniquely mystical, deeply Christian, and profoundly Russian epic of spiritual redemption. Proof the word can be as important to posterity as the deed. In Bulgakov’s case, the word was the deed.
Stacey Brody, assistant to the editor in chief
I read these once every year, and they always continue to go straight to my heart: In My Father’s Court, by Isaac Bashevis Singer, and A Grief Observed, by C. S. Lewis.
Richard Brookhiser, senior editor
Auguste Levasseur’s Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825, or Journal of a Voyage to the United States (2 vols.), is charming, fascinating, and, net, inspiring. As the title says, the old hero came to this country in his late sixties, 40 years after he had last been here, to see what the people he had helped during their revolution had accomplished. Auguste Levasseur was the young secretary who accompanied him, and wrote up the trip in 1829. There were two English translations in America that year. Delightful vignettes, interesting info on how one got around (horsepower and steamboats), and pre-Tocquevillian insights, sometimes more comprehensive than Tocqueville’s, especially re slavery, Indians, and the South. For history nerds, Francophiles, and lovers of Lafayette, which should be everybody.
Jack Butler, submissions editor
I’m not sure if I fully understood Shadow & Claw, the first half of Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun; I’m not sure if I was meant to (Severian, its protagonist, doesn’t seem to understand fully what’s happening to him, either). But I enjoyed letting its rich, literary prose, not at all compromised by its placement in the science fantasy genre, and its dense worldbuilding of a dystopian, high-tech, yet quasi-medieval future Earth (or “Urth”) wash over me all the same.
Michael Brendan Dougherty, senior writer
Nam Le’s collection of short stories, The Boat, is almost two decades old now, and yet each of his stories remains fresh as ever. The title story anticipated and transcended the era of wokeness and the cult of authenticity. Each story has the authorial assurance of a master prose stylist.
Robert W. Merry’s A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent is a thrilling trip into another era of populism, where Jackson’s man Polk makes his improbable rise to the top of his party to triumph over his rivals.
Jessica Hornik Evans, managing editor, NR magazine
Rereading can be perilous. Sometimes the book you stayed up all night to finish when you were younger is now naked of its former charms. But some books have many lives within our one life. This year I reread and was grateful once again for Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. A novel of lyric beauty and dream-tinted landscapes, exterior and interior, it contains one of the great moments in literature — a gesture of profound human kindness involving two mules, Angelica and Contento.
Emma Foley, content manager
In early 2024 I set out to determine which classic dystopian novelist aptly foretells first-world cultural decline. Between Orwell, Atwood, and Huxley, I found that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World best depicts the hedonistic path which conservatives ought to resist.
Nicholas Frankovich, deputy managing editor
“The prospect of joining Europe’s liberal empire, instead of Russia’s anti-liberal one,” inspires Ukrainians and their supporters but meets resistance from the rise of a Putin-friendly far right across the continent and its peripheries only 35 years after the collapse of the Iron Curtain, and 80 years after the end of the Second World War, as Timothy Garton Ash observes in rich detail in Homelands (2023). Subtitled “A Personal History of Europe,” this astute marriage of memoir and political history is a wide-ranging celebration, but also defense, of what the U.K. and the U.S. represented in Europe in the Second World War and of what, during the Cold War, was the hope and the example that the many liberal democracies of the postwar West offered to dissidents in authoritarian regimes around the world.
Jim Geraghty, senior political correspondent
The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un, by Anna Fifield. It’s from 2019, but if you want to get a sense of the omnipresent paranoia in North Korea and the predictable unpredictability of the world’s most dangerous man-child, this is a great place to start.
Go to Hell: A Traveler’s Guide to Earth’s Most Otherworldly Destinations, by Erika Engelhaupt. Creepy and otherworldly real-life locations are a hallmark of the Dangerous Clique series, and I’m always looking for more. This is a comprehensive list of places associated with hell and the underworld.
Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War, by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff. I bought this wanting to learn more about cutting-edge U.S. military technology, and found a nonfiction sequel to The Weed Agency, a fight against Pentagon bureaucracy that impedes our country’s ability to adapt to emerging threats.
Katherine Howell, literary editor
Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori (1959) is a delightfully dark comedy — a fast-paced metaphysical whodunit about a group of elderly people in and around London who mysteriously receive phone calls from a man who intones “Remember you must die” before hanging up. The book is ingenious and slyly funny, and its theme — our fruitless attempts to evade mortality — feels more timely than ever.
Andy McCarthy, contributing editor
This year I got through volume 1 of Niall Ferguson’s amazing biography of Henry Kissinger, Kissinger — 1923–1968: The Idealist, so my decks are clear for volume 2 whenever it comes out. The most worthwhile nonfiction policy book I read this year was H. R. McMaster’s At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, which is not merely timely and wise but makes me hope against hope that the new administration has an H. R. or two, who try to make POTUS effective whether he likes it or not. I didn’t have as much time for fiction as I’d have liked in the Year of Lawfare, but I did read and love Mark Helprin’s novel The Oceans and the Stars: A Sea Story, a War Story, a Love Story.
Dan McLaughlin, senior writer
The best book I read in 2024 was David Potter’s 1976 masterpiece The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848–1861. Even if you’ve read a lot of histories on the march to the American Civil War, as I have, the book is packed with distinct insights and concise facts, data, and anecdotes to back them up.
John Miller, national correspondent
I finally got around to Saving the Queen, the first spy novel by William F. Buckley Jr. As a fan of the genre, I don’t know what took me so long. It sat on my shelf for ages, ever since I bought a copy in Alaska on a reporting trip for National Review. It’s excellent: fun to read, smart about espionage, and pleasingly outrageous at its climax. It’s also pure Buckley, who winks at us when a character calls something “etiolated” and asks: “Do you know that word, Perry? Very useful word.”
Vahaken Mouradian, associate editor
“Of all my novels this bright brute is the gayest,” says Vladimir Nabokov in a foreword to King, Queen, Knave. It’s not his best. But it’s the best use of the stock plot of the love triangle. It’s what the romance genre would be if it were good: aware that its characters are flighty, iffy, not entirely free, and not very serious.
Jay Nordlinger, senior editor
Shakespeare, by Mark Van Doren, and Dante, by Erich Auerbach. You may not be able to sit in a classroom with either of these great professors, but you can be their student, in a way. An immense privilege.
Dominic Pino, Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow
India after Gandhi, by Ramachandra Guha. It took me almost the entire year to read but was never unpleasant. The history of independent India has similarities with histories of other former colonies, but it is unique in its size and its successful development of multiparty democracy without ever having had a military dictatorship. A theme of the book is that foreign observers are always predicting the death of Indian democracy, often for understandable reasons, but the Indian people persist in proving them wrong.
Ramesh Ponnuru, editor, NR magazine
Everything I have read by Clive James has been delightful, and the two books of his I read this year — Play All and The Fire of Joy, about television shows and poetry, respectively — met my expectations. I also had high expectations for Yuval Levin’s American Covenant, which were exceeded. It changed the way I think about our Constitution.
Molly Powell, associate editor
Dostoevsky’s Devils (1871), for its shocking prescience and psychological insight into the origins of political violence. What a witches’ brew of blood, fire, and mass psychosis Dostoevsky dares to dive into. As balm, I had to sit in a bubble bath and reread the soul-healing The Hobbit, by a man who, in the trenches of WWI, knew blood and enemy fire at very close range but emerged with his faith in God — and deep delight at His creation — intact.
Noah Rothman, senior writer
Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War (2024) presents a detailed look at a two-hour event that begins with a rogue ICBM launch by North Korea at a target in the continental United States and culminates in a civilization-ending global thermonuclear exchange. The author takes some dramatic license, but the sequence of events Jacobsen details aligns with experts’ expectations of how a chaotic crisis culminating in a worldwide conflagration could unfold. Nuclear War is a bleak reminder of why maintaining a credible deterrent posture is so critical.
Sarah Schutte, associate editor
Rumer Godden had a gift for creating characters who come alive — who are so truly human, full of sorrows, quirks, and contradictions of the sort that we ourselves know only too well. In Thursday’s Children, Godden draws on her dance background to spin the story of Doone Penny, an incredibly talented little boy who dreams of becoming a professional ballet dancer. Of all Godden’s books I’ve read so far, this one contained the hardest characters to make allowances for, but despite its difficult moments, this book is a powerful testament to positive mentorship. In a world where everyone wants to be so self-reliant, Godden shows us through her novels the life-giving beauty of strong personal connection, particularly from parents and teachers.
Haley Strack, Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism
Amor Towles’s Table for Two, a book of six short stories and a novella, was inspired by a conviction in the author’s subconscious, he said, that “our lives can often change materially due to a single conversation at a table for two.” Towles’s classic style takes dreamers and lovers on journeys through the glittering streets of New York, the Beverly Hills Hotel in the 1930s, communist Russia, and more. His brilliant prose and romantic imagination have created another novel that is easy to devour (Rules of Civility and A Gentleman in Moscow are also almost perfect).
Andrew Stuttaford, editor of NR’s Capital Matters
The miserable, abbreviated, but mercifully fictitious life of a (deservedly) failed Norwegian writer told mainly through the copious endnotes to a collection of his startlingly short detective novels does not sound promising, but Johan Harstad’s The Red Handler is a bizarre, bone-dry, brutally funny exercise in, well, it’s not quite clear. I laughed.
Armond White, culture critic
Bryan Ferry’s Lyrics compilation (published by Chatto & Windus) was a gift in more ways than one. His songcraft for the band Roxy Music is presented as poetry. Among the treasures, “Editions of You” (minus the sax, synth, guitar and organ solos), reads as mythic and worldly-wise as Rudyard Kipling’s “If.” They belong on the same shelf.
Mark Antonio Wright, executive editor
I don’t know how I managed to spend a decade in journalism without ever having read Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, which may very well be the funniest, zaniest book that I’ve read since Catch-22. Waugh’s gonzo satire of the racket that is Big-J journalism — a case of mistaken identity sends the wrong Mr. Boot out from England as a war correspondent to the country of Ishmaelia to cover what could turn out to be (for the press barons) a very promising war — is simply genius. No, the words “fake news” do not appear in the book. But I think Waugh would have understood the phrase. He was writing in a time before the Web and, indeed, before Fox News prime time, but anyone who has spent a moment perusing Twitter or CNN.com can see that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Sensationalism is the press’s lodestar, which means that sometimes a story is too good to check. Scoop, dear friends, is too good a novel to miss.
Craig Young, associate editor
From start to finish, Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health, by Dr. Marty Makary, had me saying to anyone who would listen, “Can you believe what the medical establishment did?” The revelations in this book by Trump’s choice to lead the Food and Drug Administration are eye-opening, from the half-century-long demonization of animal fats and cholesterol to the literal creation of peanut allergies in this country.