Editor’s Note: Every year as we enter the holiday season, we take a moment to pause and look back on the best books we encountered (not a “best books of 2024″ list, but a list of the best books the Chefs read during 2024 — the books might be classics, a few years old, or brand new). In recent years we expanded our list to include any sort of cultural creation or experience our Chefs wanted to share. 

Here’s Part 1 of our list, Part 2 can be found here, and Part 3 is here.

Jill O’Neill

Edith Holler by Edward Carey is excellent literary fiction, if one is looking for something dark and unsettling to read. It has everything one seeks out in a Gothic tale – a decrepit theater building, mysterious corridors, dungeons, and tunnels. It has theater sets, props, stage dummies, and mysterious disappearances. There is the usual insanity of the theater but some active participants experience not-so-usual mental breaks. One has to deal with the front-of-house staff as much as with the backstage crew. All seem slightly disconnected from reality.

Managing the macabre mixed in with 1903 Edwardian theater, Edward Carey offers a fascinating combination of folklore (the beetles!) and history associated with England’s Old City of Norwich where the novel’s action takes place. Being both an illustrator as well as a novelist, Carey includes his own drawings throughout the novel and even offers a paper toy theater, downloadable from his site.

NPR named Edith Holler as its best book of 2023. I encountered it this fall when the Folgers Shakespeare Library included it in 2024 as a book club selection. Even with those stage lights trained on it, I doubt that enough readers have discovered this marvelous novel. If you enjoy the spirit of live theater, Edith Holler offers a wonderful reading experience with a satisfying end.

David Crotty

Sometimes a book finds you at the right time. Like many, I was taken aback by the results of the recent US election, and needed some time and space to arrange my thoughts. I abandoned social media (and traditional media) nearly entirely and instead dove into the stack of books on my nightstand, starting with I’m Starting To Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin. Pargin is best known for absurdist comic horror and science fiction novels, some written under a pseudonym. His latest novel is more grounded, taking place in the current day US. The book tells the story of Abott and Ether, two strangers tasked with transporting a mysterious black box across the country. At some point, the denizens of Reddit catch wind of what they’re doing and spin off into a wild series of conspiracy theories about what’s in the box and why it is headed for Washington DC on the 4^th of July, prompting intervention by everyone from the FBI to internet randos who take it upon themselves to become part of the story.

The plot is engaging, but largely serves as a macguffin to take a hard look at what social media (the real Black Box of Doom) is doing to us, both as individuals and a society. The book makes a convincing argument that we are living in miraculous times, and that humanity has ready access to things like food, shelter, medicine, and hygiene in ways that were unthinkable for most of our species’ existence. And yet we are increasingly unhappy, and convinced that we are living on the edge of doom. That’s the one trick of the Black Box, convincing people that things used to be better (they weren’t) and that “the world is falling apart, and we have to get back what they took from us.” The “they” in that sentence is just a matter of deciding which vulnerable group to pin blame on.

Two other passages that might sound strike a chord:

There’s an old saying that a child not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. I’d update it to say the child not sufficiently entertained by the village will burn it down for the spectacle.

And

What the people really want is a cruel, all-powerful being that they can simultaneously obey and endlessly complain about.

While this might all seem cynical, Black Box is at heart a wildly optimistic book, making clear how insanely lucky we all are to have been born at this time in human existence, and offering hope that what we’re facing now will eventually be tamed by real connection and human interaction. While providing a fun romp of an adventure, Pargin also helped me find much needed perspective and a personal path forward.

Charlie Rapple

The book I most enjoyed this year is so ridiculously niche that I’m not going to recommend a book so much as a genre. I was holidaying in western Canada and enjoying immersing myself in local landscapes and knowledge. I bought a few of those slim local history volumes you see in museum gift shops. My favorite was Bernard McKay’s Crooked River Rats, published by Hancock House. It’s about the teams of people (mostly men, but some women) who ‘poled’ their way up and down the rapids to deliver goods and services from the 1920s to ’50s. It’s evocative, eye-opening, inspiring, and puts many of our 21st century woes into perspective (brisk descriptions of people cutting off their own extremities to survive frostbite, etc). I’m not recommending each and every one of you rush out to buy this particular book (though I think anyone would enjoy it) — but I’m recommending that next time you’re on holiday (or even just a weekend away), take a closer look at that ‘paperback spinner’ in the local gift shop or museum, and treat yourself to a glimpse into how the place you are enjoying came to be. Those slim, unassuming and easily read books capture the every day realities of a place and its people in ways that travel guides can’t get so deeply into. Their window into other ways of life actually makes a trip more memorable – for me, the tales of the Crooked River Rats (and, from Heritage House, the Rebel Women of the West Coast) made the towns we drove through more interesting and more astonishing (how did a town grown up here?) and the stories from the past have been wonderfully woven into my memories of a present-day holiday.

Roy Kaufman

I do not like picking favorites, so I will call out two of my best reads from 2024: The Wealth of Shadows by Graham Moore and Tom Lake by Ann Patchett.

As an attorney active in government relations, with a penchant for economics and a role as a trade advisor to the Federal Government, I was thrilled and enthralled by The Wealth of Shadows. Economics is possibly the most important driver of foreign policy. Wasn’t it taxation and blockades of trade routes that caused all the problems in Star Wars? How could I not love a spy book whose hero is a tax lawyer?

The Wealth of Shadows is WWII historical fiction, combining true circumstances and historical figures in a manner that seems more than simply plausible. Working with Harry Dexter White, a US economist who in real life worked with Treasury Secretary Morgenthau on US economic policy, mid-western tax lawyer Ansel Luxford joins a secret group within Treasury designed to wage economic war against the Nazis and support the Allied cause. In 1939, however, official US policy is neutrality. Luxford and team need to avoid agents both foreign and domestic, including the FBI and factions within the US establishment. Economic policy is not only about defeating our enemies, but also outsmarting our friends.

If The Wealth of Shadows is a novel about geopolitics and the arc of history, Tom Lake is a decidedly domestic story. In 2020, during the early days of the pandemic (was it really so recent, and yet so distant?), three 20-something daughters return home for safety and to help their parents pick cherries at the family farm, which is now devoid of workers. The matriarch – Lara — has an interesting personal story, starting with a role in a high school production of Our Town and leading to a relationship with a Hollywood icon. Over the course of the novel, she shares the story with her eager daughters, and we experience their interactions as Lara’s past reverberates in the present.

Patchett’s prose and storytelling are incomparable (Bel Canto, anyone?). What I liked best though was how Lara’s experience mirrored my own in 2020. Like her, my 20-something sons moved in with us. We relocated to a rural area where social distancing was the norm before the pandemic. We had an unexpected, unwelcome, and completely-amazing-wouldn’t-trade-it-for-anything-opportunity to spend time with our adult children as equals. It may have only been four years ago, but I cannot help revisit the seeming end-times with a tinge of nostalgia. When the world feels like it is collapsing, there is still plenty of joy to be found.

More recommendations in Parts 2 and 3 to follow.