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My 2024 Reading, Part Two: Nonfiction

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This year’s list of my favorite nonfiction contains two more books than last year. (I gave seven nonfiction books five stars on Good Reads in 2024 and five in 2023.) But like last year, I am also including a bonus section of books that I liked.

Biographies dominated these seven favorites of 2024. (Unlike last year, I read very few memoirs in 2024.) Most of the biographies were about women, though one, a family biography, features both men and women. Another, which also was not a biography (or at least a traditional biography), centers on a man but has a couple of strong female secondary characters. Its author is the only man to appear on this list of seven. Make of this what you will. (Mostly that there are a lot of women’s stories out there to explore and lots of women writers to do so.) Here are the books, roughly in the order in which I read them.

1. Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming by Ava Chin. I remember being totally drawn into this book at the beginning of 2024, as I was getting ready to make my first trip to New York City. It is wonderfully written, with a delicate balance of history and family stories. Chin has produced an emotional yet not overly sentimental family biography.

2. The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel. I was a bit late to this book mostly because it is not the kind of thing I usually read. But I was convinced by the title and the cover design to pick it up from the library and never regretted the decision. Finkel briskly tells the wild story of Stéphane Bréitwieser, who stole about $2 billion worth of art from various European museums. Then there is the revelation of what happened to some of the pieces. Yikes.

3. The Dress Diary: Secrets From a Victorian Woman’s Wardrobe by Kate Strasdin. Using surviving clothing fragments belonging to Anne Sykes, Strasdin skillfully recreates the world of this nineteenth-century Englishwoman. The author’s expertise as a fashion historian and museum curator really shines through in this creative history.

4. The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime by Sara Fitzgerald. Emily Hale has appeared as a minor character in previous books about the poet Eliot, but Fitzgerald flips the relationship, investigating it from Hale’s perspective. (This does not end well for Eliot’s reputation as a human being.) Hale emerges as a fully formed character with a fascinating life.

5. Portrait of a Woman:Art, Rivalry, and Revolution in the Life of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard by Bridget Quinn. Adélaïde Labille-Guiard was a well-known and well-regarded painter in France during the 1700s, at least up until the French Revolution. Quinn makes good use of the scant information available on the artist’s life to restore her to her proper place in the historical record. And Quinn’s breezy writing style makes this biography a delight to read.

6. The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker by Amy Reading. The long-time fiction editor of The New Yorker magazine, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, receives a well-deserved biography that focuses on White’s ability to recognize talented writers and get their work published in the magazine. It is a fascinating portrait of an important literary life.

7. Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation by Emily Van Duyne. Ted Hughes (like T.S. Eliot above) does not come off well in Van Duyne’s trenchant probing of not just Plath’s life, but how others have written about that life. Van Duyne makes a convincing—and haunting—case for Hughes as the ultimate in unreliable narrators. Reclamation, indeed.

Of the two bonus books from my 2024 reading, one is very much in line with most of the favorites listed above. Drew Gilpin Faust’s memoir, Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury is an engaging account of the prominent historian’s involvement with the various social and political movements of the 1960s.

The other, Leave While the Party’s Good: The Life and Legacy of Baseball Executive Harry Dalton by Lee Kluck, is a book that anyone who knows me would not believe that I ever picked up. I am not a sports person. I don’t watch games or watch movies or shows about sports. (Well, okay, I did like Bend It Like Beckham and Bull Durham, and I have watched Field of Dreams. But otherwise, no.) (And actually, growing up at 2912, baseball was ubiquitous during the spring and summer. I knew spring had arrived when my mom set up her ironing board in front of the television in the family room so she could watch the Cubs while she ironed. I still know a lot about baseball.)

Lee Kluck was, many years ago, a student of mine, and I followed his writing journey with great interest. He has produced a nicely researched and crisply written biography of an important figure in major league baseball. The University of Nebraska Press, known for its sports series, published his book. So, yay for Lee and for Harry Dalton. If you or anyone you know is into sports biographies, do not miss this one.

That is a wrap on my favorites of 2024. Up next: some thoughts on a very good book I started reading in 2024 but have yet to finish.

May all the books you read in 2025 be good ones.

My 2024 Reading, Part One: Fiction

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Welcome to my annual reading round-up, in which I share my favorite books, both fiction (in this post) and nonfiction (in the next post). I prefer to stay away from the term “best” because of how subjective that is. These are the books I enjoyed in 2024, though a few may have been published earlier. Sometimes I don’t get around quickly to ones I want to read because of lengthy hold lists at the public library. Sometimes I’m interested in a book and know I’m not in the right mood to read it. So, reasons.

According to Goodreads, where I keep track of such things, I read five more books in 2024 than I did in 2023—from 46 to 51. (Yet for some reason it seems like I did not read much. I’m not sure why—it may have to do with the time I have been spending on my new book project.)

Of the novels I read in 2024, I marked five with five stars. Because there are so few, I find it impossible to rank them. Instead, these are listed in roughly the chronological order I read them. (Not surprisingly, they are all historical.)

1. The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan. Set in World War II Malaya, this riveting historical drama depicts the heartbreaking choices people make during an enemy occupation. Cecily Alcantara, a devoted wife and mother, finds herself in increasingly impossible situations.

2. The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright. Nell McDaragh, granddaughter of a famous Irish poet, and her mother Carmel, the poet’s daughter, both struggle with his legacy. Sensitive and beautifully written.

3. The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff. This novel is utterly and admirably void of any romancing of the early years of the English colonization of North America. Propelled by a pervasive sense of dread and entranced by the brutal beauty of the story, I could not stop reading.

4. The Road from Belhaven by Margot Livesey. Character and setting are pitch perfect in this historical drama set in rural Scotland during the nineteenth century. A young woman can see some glimpses of the future but has to figure out what to make of the information.

5. Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor. Just before the beginning of World War II, a young woman living on a small Welsh island is unexpectedly confronted with the opportunity to change the anticipated course of her future. Delicate and lovely.

Additional recommendations (very close to five stars):

Two of my favorite mystery writers published new additions to their long-running series. Jacqueline Winspear drew her excellent Maisie Dobbs series to a close with The Comfort of Ghosts, which provided a satisfying ending. With Pay Dirt, Sara Paretsky delivered another powerful installment of her V.I. Warshawski investigations.

Alice McDermott’s Absolution depicts U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s from the perspective of white American women living there with their husbands. Very thought-provoking.

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore is a well-crafted mystery that made me glad I never went away to summer camp.

And the biggest surprise of my 2024 reading was Elizabeth Crook’s The Madstone, which I pulled off the library’s Westerns shelf on a whim and got helplessly drawn into the story.

Up next: My favorite nonfiction books of 2024.

My 2023 Reading, Part Two: Nonfiction (Plus a Bonus)

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The best narrative nonfiction books I read in 2023 comprise an unusually short list. I think there was something about my reading mood last year that affected my reactions to books. “Best” and “favorite” are subjective, anyway, so I’m sticking to that as an explanation.

All of these books deal with the past, and all but one are biographies. The outlier of the group, though, could be described as a collection of mini-biographies. Here they are, roughly in the order of my admiration.

In Master Slave Husband Wife, Ilyon Woo traces the perilous journey from enslavement to freedom of Ellen and William Craft. The Crafts fled Georgia with Ellen disguised as an invalided white man and William posing as her “servant.” Their life in the “free” North was dangerous because of the Fugitive Slave Law, yet the couple became part of the great abolitionist movement in the years prior to the Civil War. It’s an unforgettable story of moral and physical courage.

Catherine McNeur introduces readers to Margaretta and Elizabeth Morris in the dual biography Mischievous Creatures. The historian makes a convincing case that the largely self-taught sisters, one an entomologist, the other a botanist, made significant contributions to scientific knowledge in the decades before the Civil War. Margaretta and Elizabeth are fascinating women, and McNeur expertly weaves in the science without slowing down the story of the women’s accomplishments and the barriers they faced because of their gender.

Leaning heavily on literary analysis and historical context, David Waldstreicher recreates the life of an eighteenth-century Black poet in The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley. Kidnapped and enslaved as a child, Wheatley learned how to read and write while living in Boston and began turning out poetry as a teenager. This is a finely detailed story that took me some time to read, but I thought it was wonderful.

I learned a lot about South Africa from Jonny Steinberg’s dual biography, Winnie and Nelson. Steinberg traces apartheid through the lens of the Mandela marriage, focusing on Nelson’s long imprisonment and Winnie’s increasing political influence. It’s a riveting and important book.

Emma Southon’s lively voice adds an extra layer of enjoyment to A Rome of One’s Own, which reveals the history of the Roman empire through the lives of twenty-one mostly-forgotten women. This serves as a nice reminder that there was more to Rome than gladiators and pontificating politicians.

There were also a couple of other books I liked, both biographies. I appreciated learning more about the Queen of Crime in Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley, and it was interesting to find out about the intrepid twentieth-century journalist Elsie Robinson through Julia Sheeres and Allison Gilbert’s Listen, World!

Now for the bonus: memoirs. Last year, I included them in with the other nonfiction I read, but this time I decided it was more appropriate to give them their own category. While it’s true they are nonfiction, memoirs are very different from the historical, fact-based nonfiction that I usually read.

There are three memoirs I read in 2023 that I keep thinking about.

I’m certainly not the first person to rave about poet Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful, but I may be among the last to have never run across her poem “Good Bones.” Its last line was turned into the title of her lyrical story of the unraveling of her marriage and her enduring love for her children.

Love for her children is a strong undercurrent in Life B, author and book critic (known in online circles as The Book Maven) Bethanne Patrick’s clear-eyed account of her decades-long struggle with double depression. She hits and maintains a sweet spot of narrative voice that is neither too bleak nor too Pollyanna-ish. I rooted for her all the way through.

Marsha Jacobson rounds out this trio of devoted mothers. In The Wrong Calamity she describes how she survived an abusive marriage, established herself as a successful businesswoman (even earning a Harvard MBA) and as a role model to her daughters, then suffered a shattering disappointment with her second marriage. Like both Smith and Patrick, Jacobson shows restraint in parceling out the gritty, personal details of these relationships, giving readers just what they need but never tipping into a salacious tell-all.

That’s it for my 2023 reading recap. I’m delighted (and slightly relieved) to report that 2024 is off to a blazing start. I could hardly bear to put down Vanessa Chan’s The Storm We Made and Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren, plus I’m swiftly moving through Mott Street by Ava Chin.

Up next: some pieces that are more or less connected to my new book project.

My 2023 Reading, Part One: Fiction

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In 2023, I read at least 46 books. As in previous years, I can’t provide an exact number. Sometimes I forget to add a book to Goodreads, and I usually don’t count the books I read for Publishers Weekly reviewing, a gig I finally ended in the fall after ten years.And I normally don’t include books I read as background material for my own writing projects. So, about 46 for 2023. Not bad. Not great.

In terms of quality over quantity, though, well, even that seemed to fall a bit short. I rarely deliver a tidy top ten list—usually going a bit over that number because of the many books I loved. For the fiction I read in 2023 (which included books published in other years), I gave five stars to eight novels. But I liked many others without feeling wowed by them. This is totally subjective, of course.

Of those eight five-starred novels that I read in 2023, I’ve already identified three for www.shepherd.com , which I posted about on January 1, 2024.

These represent the kind of novel I’m most drawn to: historical fiction written by women with plots heavily centered on women. I loved the expansiveness of Quinn’s story, which ranges over the two world wars of the twentieth century. (A t.v. series is purportedly in the works. Yay!) I loved how Jiles and Moustakis contained their poetic narratives in a briefer time frame. All three authors excelled at both character and place. I still think about these books often.

I consider Paulette Jiles’s novel an example of a new style of Western, and I would put Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens in the same category. It’s a delectable romp about a plucky teenaged orphan, Bridget, who must support herself in Dodge City. Prostitutes and gunslingers populate this entertaining, thrillerish, action-packed coming out story.

Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X is a compelling mash-up of alternative history and love story, with the widowed C.M. Lucca gathering information about her deceased wife, an artist known as X, to write a “true” biography of her life. A stunning riff on how we create ourselves and how much we can ever really know another person.

Leila Mottley’s debut, Nightcrawling, was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and was an Oprah Book Club selection. It features a teenaged main character, Kiara, who turns to sex work to support herself, her brother, and an abandoned neighbor boy in Oakland, California. It was a tough story to read but beautifully done.

The same can be said of Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshanathan, set during Sri Lanka’s civil war. As Sashi studies to become a doctor, her family unravels, and she loses her four brothers in different ways. It’s a moving meditation on what it means to be a patriot and/or a terrorist during times of great political upheaval.

I was very late to Amor Towles’s debut, Rules of Civility. I’d really liked A Gentleman in Moscow, so when I found a used copy of his first novel, I decided to give it a try. It takes place in the Depression-era United States, following a young woman named Katey as she struggles to carve out a career and develop a relationship with the enigmatic Tinker Grey, who has links to the wealthy and powerful of New York City. It’s a fascinating story that surprised me in several places.

In addition to these eight, there were seven others that I enjoyed reading in 2023. Most centered on families. For some reason I’d left off reading Anne Tyler, so it was nice to return to her with French Braid, a solid example of her signature quirky family drama. Tom Lake by Ann Patchett is a nicely structured path-not-taken story with a lot of heart. Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts is a chilling parent-and-child tale set in an alternate (but scarily plausible) United States. Day by Michael Cunningham is a heart-pulling piece about the affects wrought by the Covid pandemic. And Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver’s updated, reimagining of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, is a sad—and at times grim—story of a young boy’s search for family.

Rebecca Makkai’s sophisticated mystery I Have Some Questions for You takes place at a boarding high school. Bodie Kane, a former student, has returned to teach a short winter session, and in her spare time digs into the decades-old murder of her roommate there.

The only historical of the bunch is The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann by Virginia Pye. (I posted a review of it in 2023.) I was especially fond of the titular character, a talented Gilded Age writer determined to control her career.

And finally, I read Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. I would describe it as a plus-one to the seven enjoyable books. It’s one of those novels that I always thought I should read, and last year the nonfiction author Laurie Gwen Shapiro, organized an online book discussion of it so I decided to join in. I have to admit that it took some dogged dedication to get through the novel. It has a lot of plot. There are dozens of characters whose names spawn nicknames. There are big political and philosophical discussions. It is a big, big book.

Next up is Part Two: Nonfiction

A Review of The Disquieting Death of Emma Gill by Marcia Biederman

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“The experts said a woman couldn’t have done it alone, and they were right. The family had done it together, as they’d always done things. They’d jointly made a mess of it. All their efforts at concealment were undone in a moment. It might have been comical if it hadn’t been criminal.”

So opens Marcia Biederman’s new book, The Disquieting Death of Emma Gill, out from Chicago Review Press this week. It is a page-turning historical true crime drama set in nineteenth-century New England that follows the lives of Nancy and Henry Guilford, husband-and-wife medical specialists in “complaints peculiar to females.” Women of that time knew exactly what those peculiar complaints referred to: unwanted pregnancies. And the Guilfords knew how to help them.

After describing how the evidence of a gruesome crime had been uncovered in 1898 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Marcia Biederman pulls the story back, building suspense through a careful construction of Nancy and Henry’s activities, showing how and why they became engaged in the abortion trade when most states had outlawed the practice. The tension increases as Marcia weaves in the stories of the desperate patients who sought their services. It’s an intriguing look at a small slice of reproductive history that speaks volumes about women’s ongoing struggles to retain control of their own bodies.    

I’ve known Marcia Biederman for a few years through an online group of authors who write women’s biographies. (And very recently we met for the first time in real life in New York City.) Her last book, A Mighty Force, chronicled the efforts of Dr. Elizabeth Hayes to bring quality medical care and healthy living conditions to Pennsylvania coal miners in the 1940s.

Marcia has a keen eye for unusual tales about women who have fallen off history’s radar. Returning their stories to the larger historical narrative is a goal we share, and I was delighted when I was asked to provide a blurb for The Disquieting Death of Emma Gill. It will keep you riveted from start to finish.

https://www.chicagoreviewpress.com/the-disquieting-death-of-emma-gill-products-9781641608565.php?page_id=30

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/marcia-biederman/the-disquieting-death-of-emma-gill/