Favorite Books of 2024
My top ten reads in 2024 + a special discount on supporting subscriptions
Fellow Pilgrims,
I’m a little late, but today I’m sharing my top ten reads of 2024. This year, I’ve divided the books into just two categories, fiction and theology.
I’d love to hear about your favorite reads this past year and what you’re looking forward to reading in 2025; drop your recommendations in the comments!
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Content notes: the books on this list contain a variety of difficult topics and themes. Please check content warnings online.
Theology
Two of my favorite theology reads this year were not new, but somehow I’d missed reading them before: Gustavo Gutiérrez’s On Job: God-talk and the Suffering of the Innocent and Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited. Both books floored me again and again. Gutiérrez reads Job as argument against karma, against punitive justice, and as a book which teaches us to speak rightly of God. Thurman reveals deception and fear at work in the oppression of the “disinherited.”
Neighborliness is nonspatial; it is qualitative. A man must love his neighbor directly, clearly, permitting no barriers between. — Thurman
Two types of language thus emerge as the two closest approximations to a correct language about God: the language of prophecy and the language of contemplation. — Gutiérrez
I adored Karen Kilby’s God, Evil, and the Limits of Theology. Kilby takes a bunch of nonsense and—with clear, reasoned arguments—politely pushes it off the table. She shows us, patiently, that God is good and not evil. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.
Julian shows that a wholly positive, wholly joyful vision of love and of God is genuinely available within the tradition – even from within a moment in the theological tradition when the Black Death is a living memory, and when a pious person can sincerely pray to undergo nearly-mortal illness. It is not merely a bit of fluffy, unserious contemporary optimism. — Kilby
Fiction
Becky by Sarah May: a gritty, witty contemporary retelling of Vanity Fair. I love a good retelling.
The truth changes everything. There's such an awful intimacy to it, a banality even. — May
Hearts and Bones: Love Songs for Late Youth by Niamh Mulvey: a collection of short stories, beautifully written.
Philippa was clever but not wise; she was canny but she lacked insight. She had great taste, excellent connections and went untroubled by any questions to do with what the point of all this was. She was the perfect employee for this sell-out institution. I enjoyed thinking these things about her. — Mulvey
Enlightenment by Sarah Perry: a novel about faith in the contemporary world, complicated and tender. I’ve loved every book I’ve read by Perry, but this one is the best.
Do you think you lose your faith, because your faith does not want you? That would be easy! My life would have been a happier one! But all these years there have been two fires in me and neither puts the other out! — Perry
North Woods by Daniel Mason. My heart starts to buzz when I begin to read writing unlike anything I’ve ever seen words do before. On this list, North Woods and Two-Step Devil did that. The book is an entry into the category of “Great American novel,” written with a light hand and a wry awareness of the unattainable nature of the goal. Mason takes his readers on a journey of centuries set in a single location, giving us a wide variety of rich characters.
“the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.” — Mason
Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez. This is a long, winding piece of political horror, set in Argentina, provoking questions about supernatural and human evil.
“Ghosts are real. And the ones who come aren’t always the one you’ve called.” — Enriquez
The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths. Almost as soon as I started this one, I knew I’d be spacing the series out slowly, as a treat. Cozy mysteries with a middle-aged, professorial cat lady protagonist? Yes, please.
“The past can be a treacherous place, but sometimes it's the only way to find the answers we seek.” — Griffiths
Two-Step Devil by Jamie Quatro. My favorite book of the year, I hardly want to tell you anything, lest I spoil it.
“The Prophet didn’t trust any religious organization. Most kinds of churches didn’t understand his way of seeing, but at least the Pentecostals believed his visions were from the Lord.” — Quatro
Grace & peace,
BFJ
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