At my age, I’ve given up on the fantasy of “keeping up.” Much of my reading is now narrowly focused, research-reading in service of writing projects. If you want bibliography on the ontology of artifacts in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas (which you don’t), or the purity laws of Leviticus, or nationalism, I’ve got suggestions. If you want to know my selections for “Best Books of 2024,” I’ll look at my toes and fall into a stupefied silence.

Still, I can talk about books. Books is what I do for a living. As 2024 winds down, I’ve been working through Felix Ó Murchadha’s remarkable Phenomenology of Christian Life (2021), a dense and illuminating investigation of the philosophical earthquake Christianity detonates. Marshall Sahlins’s New Science of the Enchanted Universe (2022) is both a gauntlet thrown down to his fellow anthropologists, whose imaginations remain unintentionally but persistently Christian, and a luxuriantly detailed portrait of the cosmopoliteia of “immanent cultures,” populated by humans, animals, plants, and metahumans – spirits, gods, ghosts, demons, and ancestors. It’ll make you think twice about nostalgia for an enchanted universe. Peter Harrison’s latest, Some New World (2024!), covers similar ground as it traces the formation of the modern split between “natural” and “supernatural.” Early in the year, I devoured D.C. Schindler’s slim, potent God and the City. Alice Parker’s books on music (The Answering Voice, The Anatomy of Melody) are excellent, and deceptively simple. János Czák’s Genius of America is a searingly Augustinian paean to America, written by the Hungarian Minister of Culture. Alan McFarlane’s 1978 Origins of English Individualism explodes the idea that Brits became individualists after industrialization: Individualism has been written into English psychology, society, and law since the late Middle Ages.

Michael Crummey’s 2024 novel, The Adversary, is going to haunt me for a long time. Paul Kingnorth’s The Wake, the first volume of his Buccmaster Trilogy, is written entirely in a faux middle English dialect that Kingsnorth invented for the book, earning it my James Joyce Award for Obscure But Compelling Prose. I read several sad Japanese novels, of which Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro was the saddest. Cyril Hare’s murder mysteries (An English Murder, Untimely Death) are diverting. If you’re looking for more serious thriller fare, check out Giuliano da Empoli’s chilling Wizard of the Kremlin, a fictionalized account of the Putin regime. With a son living in Albania, I’ve picked up several novels by Ismail Kadare, including his ghostly fairy tale, Doruntine. Joseph Massey’s poetry collection, Decades, is delightful. For those who prefer the critics to the original texts, Julia Yost’s slim Jane Austen’s Darkness is superb, and Dana Gioia’s collection, Poetry as Enchantment, has many wonderful essays.

If I had to pick a single Book of the Year, it would be L. Michael Morales’s two-volume commentary on Numbers. Though I’m only partway through the first volume, I can already tell this is among the best biblical commentaries I’ve ever encountered. My close second place would be Jason Staples’s Paul and the Resurrection of Israel, the most stimulating work on Paul I’ve read in a long time. Asked to pick the awfullest book of the year, I have no hesitation: it’s Richard and Christopher Hays, The Widening of God’s Mercy.

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