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 100^th 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.