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Ho Ho Ho: John’s Top Ten Book List 2024

John Wood

Updated: Dec 19, 2024





Dear Friends around the World:


While my annual holiday gifting/reading list is not going to win any awards for timeliness, I hope to make up for it with quality recommendations.  I’ve read 46 books so far this year, am pushing for 50 (OCD Alert!) and share below an early preview of my annual Top Ten list.  This is the 10th year in a row that Amy has kept me on track to publish this list – previous years can all be found at www.johnjwood.com.


Top Ten Reads of 2024


PatriotAlexei Navalny

Navalny’s memoir is no doubt one of the most important books I have read this decade.  I have long been in awe of the courage he and his wife Yulia have shown in standing up to Putin and his thugs. Like millions, I held my breath as he survived poisoning (thanks in part to the principled stance taken by Angela Merkel) and voluntarily returned to an almost-certain death sentence.  Like Mandela and Solzhenitsyn, Navalny never allowed those lesser souls to break his devotion to core principles. Much of this memoir was smuggled out of his jail cell. Through it all, he never loses his faith that we can and must create a better future for our children, and he also never loses his sense of humor. One reads this memoir in tears, wishing that a man of his immense talents could still be with us, fixing some part of this broken world we live in.


KairosJenny Erpenbeck

Go, Went, Gone made both Amy’s and my Top Ten lists in 2019, so we were eager to dive into Erpenbeck’s most recent novel. Set in East Berlin at the time that the wall dominated both sight lines and psyches, the reader follows a horribly dysfunctional and manipulative relationship from the very moment it begins (Spoiler alert:  the guy is kind of a creep).  The best novels bring to life a universe we, the grateful reader, could never otherwise have imagined. Few are as skilled at this as Erpenbeck. She transports us to a time and place that are now thankfully in the dust bin of history.


An Unfinished Love Story - Doris Kearns Goodwin

I won’t win any awards for telling you that DKG is a brilliant writer.  While best known for Team of Rivals, I believe No Ordinary Time (chronicling the marriage and partnership between FDR and Eleonor) was even better.  And then comes this gem – also focused on an inspiring couple.  As DKG’s husband Dick entered his sunset years, the couple realized that they had dozens of boxes over-stuffed with his life’s work, and those boxes were complete chaos. This was no ordinary ephemera – Dick had been a speechwriter for JFK back when he was a presidential candidate, later for LBJ and then for RFK. As the couple go through the boxes in chronological order, the reader is treated not just to an inside view of three of America’s most famous leaders, but also to a tender peek into a long marriage that was also an intellectual partnership. Any history buff will not be able to put this book down, even though at times you want to in order to savor each anecdote and insight.


Thank you Rebecca Brosnan for this incredible birthday gift (subtle hint – January 29 ).  I had not heard of Rash, a professor at the University of West Carolina, and was a bit intimidated by both the length of the book (430 pages) and the number of stories (34).  If you’re a math whiz, you notice that the average story is quite short, and yet Rash’s descriptive skills somehow manages to fill such a small space with a vast sweep of pathos, meaning and emotion. From the first story I was sucked in, and over the course of a month I treated myself to 3 stories per night. I will soon be hunting for my next short story collection by this talented author.


Knife - Salman Rushdie

This is the sequel we all hoped would never have to be written. After the fatwa was issued in 1989, Rushdie went into hiding with the assistance of British intelligence.  He chose his code name as Joseph Anton, in tribute to two of his favorite authors – Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov. Joseph Anton was a brilliant read, and now four decades later Rushdie has done it again with Knife, sharing the story of the near-fatal attack that came out of the blue at a book event in Chautauqua in the summer of 2022. Rushdie writes without veering into emotion, anger or hatred, and the book moves at a very fast pace. I salute him for being able to turn tragedy into a compelling read.


Burma Sahib - Paul Theroux

Two of my other obsessions are George Orwell and Burma. So when Amy told me that Brad Liski had interviewed Paul Theroux upon publication of Burma Sahib, I immediately grabbed my headphones and went for a long barefoot beach walk at low tide. I ordered the book that evening. Orwell famously went to Burma back when his name was still Eric Blair, serving as a 19 year old police officer who was clearly in over his head. He very quickly grew to hate colonialism, his fellow officers and the entire British misadventure in south Asia.  Theroux admits that this is a novel, not a biography, as he felt that Orwell had told us a lot about the system but not about himself as a young man. This brilliant book moves at the speed of a bullet train. Despite its length I finished it in five joyful nights.


The Forbidden Notebook – Alba de Cespedes

Valeria Cossati is living the only life that seemed to be available to women in Italy in the late 1940’s. She’s treated like a dunce by her husband and like a servant by her ungrateful children. Confined mostly to the house for domestic duties and with few social outlets, she one day makes a brave decision. While visiting her local tobacconist, she spontaneously buys a journal. If nobody else will share intelligent conversation with her, perhaps she will engage with herself. During stolen late-night sessions while her family is sleeping or daytime hours when the house is empty, she pours out her heart and records her life on paper. Only to then hide the journal for fear of the humiliation that would ensue should any family member trip across this private chronicle whose confidentiality they’d be certain to violate.


Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys

Remember that “madwoman in the attic” in Jane Eyre? Charlotte Bronte told us very little about her in the novel.  We know of her heritage (Creole, from the Caribbean) and that she endured an unhappy marriage to Mr. Rochester, who makes good on his “’til death do us part” vow by declaring her to be crazy. Jean Rhys was an obscure Dominican-British author who one day decided that Antoinette Cosway deserved to have her story told, so she wrote a prequel and brought the character fully to life. Like many authors, Rhys endured numerous rejections for such an unconventional narrative, and was living in penury in a cold and water-logged flat in the UK when it was finally published while she was in her 70’s.  The book won the WH Smith Literary Award in 1967, which brought Rhys to public attention after decades of obscurity.


White Cat, Black Dog - Kelly Link

Kelly Link is “a writer whose work is easy to revere and difficult to explain” (New Yorker), but it’s strong enough to have been a Pulitzer Prize finalist (for Get in Trouble) and to have earned her a MacArthur Genius Grant. Her most recent collection, published in 2023, is what I’d describe as modern fairy tales that are tinged with humor, magical realism and a bit of the bizarre. For example, the opening story (which is brilliant) involves stranded motorists looking for shelter on a snowy Colorado night, and finding salvation when they trip across a greenhouse that is actually a marijuana farm run by cats. And the cats talk.  Need I say more? For anyone in your life who loves inventive short fiction, this book is a must. Amy and I also highly recommend one of her other collections, Get in Trouble.


Hangman - Maya Binyam

This is one of the most compelling novels I’ve read in the last year.  Binyam, a first-time novelist, sucks the reader in from the opening page as a black man with no name begins a journey whose purpose is not clear to him or to the reader.


In the morning, I received a phone call and was told to board a flight. The arrangements had been made on my behalf. I packed no clothes, because my clothes had been packed for me. A car arrived to pick me up.

On his flight to an unnamed African country (I guessed Ethiopia, Eretria, or South Africa, but it’s never revealed), some truly bizarre things happen, including the man next to him dying and being stuffed into a body bag that is then placed back in the original seat for the duration of the 11-hour flight. His internal monologue – that of an apparently troubled mind - reveals small clues, such as his need to visit a sick brother upon arrival. Our narrator is not someone whose words we can ever fully trust, which kept this reader on his toes. His journey has him intersecting with all kinds of interesting characters, including a cousin who tries to sell him “shares” in his house. This is very inventive fiction of the best kind and can be read in one sitting on a cross-country flight. It’s the kind of short novel I will read again, and I cannot stop recommending it to friends.


Honorable Mentions

Gabriel’s Moon – William Boyd. Boyd does it again. This man seems incapable of writing a novel that is not gripping from page one.



Chasing Hope – Nick Kristof.  The long-overdue and eagerly anticipated memoir from the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times journalist, and one of my personal heroes.Wishing you a festive and book-laden holiday season, and some fun goal setting for 2025.

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