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. Today, a first, as two Chefs chose the same book, and you can see their different views on it below. 

Here’s Part 1 of our list, and Part 2.

Joe Esposito

Fans of Big History are already familiar with Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind which became an international bestseller and made the author into a public intellectual. His next book in this genre was Homo Deus: A Brief History of the Future, his best book, in my opinion. In Homo Deus, Harari  charts a course for humanity as it begins to evolve in conjunction with machines — it is, in other words, about the species that succeeds Homo sapiens. Now Harari has offered a new Big History title: Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. It is a marvelous synthesis and very much a foundational text for people working in scholarly communications.

A key point of Harari’s work is that information requires a connection between at least two points; hence information is inherently organized into networks, and some networks become larger and more dominant. Ultimately they lead to the development of machine intelligence and AI, about which Harari is both awestruck and fearful. I have been reading in this area for the past two years, and have not found a better set of observations of what the evolution of AI means to human society and the peculiar threats it poses. Harari is not a doom-sayer; rather his argument is that by becoming aware of how AI works — the physics of AI, as it were — we can develop beneficial applications and avoid what would indeed be a dystopian future. In other words, the HAL computer of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey can be anticipated and avoided by enlightened humans working thoughtfully together. It is important to recognize that when Harari uses a word like “evolution,” it always carries a Darwinian ring, that is, Harari, with his long view of history, is thinking beyond  the current headlines and looking instead to the alteration or supercession of species.

I recommend this book heartily, but I would be remiss if I did not remark that I don’t agree with Harari’s conclusion. I think he makes too much of human agency. AI potentially has military applications, and if a technology has military applications, it will sooner or later come into being. But forestalling that eventuality, or winning the battle, will be made more possible if we understand exactly what is the nature of the new tools and where they came from.

Todd Carpenter

I’ve been tearing through a lot of books this year as I am researching for my own book. One book this year that has stood out amongst the many books I’ve read was the latest and is perhaps the best. That book is Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari. In Nexus, Harari explorers information networks, how they have grown and developed over time throughout history, and how they are being transformed by AI. It is an extremely compelling analysis of how we came to our current media ecosystem, and how that information environment is being rapidly impacted by the introduction of machines as autonomous actors in content creation and distribution.

He begins the journey by describing his theory that the first information technology created by humans was the story. While I dispute this definition of ‘technology’, I found the idea compelling. He theorized that stories and humans’ ability to share them provided a genetic advantage. In his theory, not only do stories allow us to communicate information and assist humans in creating ever greater advances, but they also help us succeed at a family level, at a tribal level, and a species. Our ability to communicate, the stories and their power to motivate us are what most distinguish humans, making us the most advanced and dominant species on the planet. To illustrate this, he imagines how a human or a band of humans might successfully defeat a much stronger much more powerful animal, say a mammoth. Humans were able to do this through stories. Stories allowed for coordination among the tribe. Collaboration through stories allowed humans information on how to create tools, how to work in partnership, how to strategize, how to build traps. Stories provided another strategy for the tribes’ success through narrative and belief about what happens to those who give their lives in support of the success of the tribe. In this way, the belief in religion and an afterlife where one is rewarded for their honor, bravery, or sacrifices to the community to help the tribe (and more broadly the species) to survive. We are driven by stories and in his theory, this is embedded in what makes us human. Because of this, stories and how we communicate them have a more powerful pull on our lives than facts.

Building upon this, Harari then explores other technologies, from writing to publishing to the Internet, and how these interconnected systems build each other, and how they accelerate the ability of humans to communicate stories. He draws an important distinction between stories and facts, and how facts are not nearly as powerful stories — we humans can process facts, but we can process a lot of stories. A person can memorize the entire Quran, the entire Bible, the entire Iliad — thousands of pages — but generally people cannot memorize even a couple of pages of tables from an accounting report or census. Here he describes a bureaucratic — again I have quibbles with his word choice — process and power, that is essentially information processing. This process began with marks on tablets that has since grown into the domain of the computer. Computers are much more successful than humans tracking and calculating to find patterns among millions, billions, trillions of data points.

Harari  then moves previous information structure to the new world in artificial intelligence. Harari posits that generative AI systems are full-fledged participants in this system, not simply passive vehicles for human communication, distinct from previous technologies such as print. Previously, the only way to connect a document to another document had to be managed through a human.  Today, with Generative AI systems, that is no longer the case, Harari contends with machines being able to create content, ingest it, and react to it. He then extends this idea into the domain of discussions about politics and society. The potential implications for media, governance, and society more broadly are fascinating.

Harari specifically stated that his focus wasn’t on the positive potential of AI systems, noting that there are many cheerleaders focused on the benefits. Because of this, I’m not certain Nexus is the most uplifting read, however, it is critical as we explore new areas of information distribution and human understanding which is fundamentally what we as a community are trying to achieve. One example of the many challenges he notes is that within the ecosystem of public dialogue, the power of stories have the capacity to overcome rationality and fact-seeking exploration. This issue is particularly pertinent today as we see the impacts of popular movements around the world, the rejection of science exploration and truth generally. The power of AI systems to create seemingly reasonable, but fact-free content offers impacts that would be widespread and significant, as we move forward.

Reflecting on how the framing of information in Nexus will impact the STM community of scholarly publishers in an era of machine-intermediated content, I see several connecting threads. What distinguishes scholarly publishing from other domains is its pursuit of a factual record based upon the scientific method. Scholarly publishing explores and disseminates new ideas, and much like science itself, seeks to build upon an inherently self-correcting method. This is exemplified in our own community by the work of COPE, STM, NISO and others to improve the retractions process to maintain scholarly integrity. Harari makes his strongest point in the book that human curation and reflection, then adjusting course in recognition of errors is humanities’ strongest capacity. In his framing, the ability for self-correction is the one thing that has prevented and will continue to prevent disaster.

Dianndra Roberts

I think we can all say that it has been quite a year…again (how many times can we say we are living in unprecedented times?) Love in Color: Mythical Tales from Around the World, Retold by Bolu Babalola was recommended to me during a book club discussion about feel-good light-reads. Each story is a standalone with the reader able to decide where they want to start and go at their own pace, initially I picked stories at random. Consciously making more effort this year to pour back into myself, in a world that keeps taking, I thought this would be a nice quick read. Little did I know that this anthology would be something that I would revisit throughout the year; going back to my favorites during coffee breaks, commutes, and moments of calm. As someone who reads multiple books at once, I liked revisiting some of these tales as a break between heavier reads. 

A retelling of mythological and folktales as well as stories anew, the modernizing of stories like Psyche and Eros or Nefertiti give us a multiverse-like idea of what could have been. As with all tales of love, there is heartbreak and even scandal, but every story takes us through something different in terms of love – romantic, community, self – at its core. This one is for romcom revelers and escapism enthusiasts. We are invited into spaces of love, friendship, kindness, and ultimately, experiences of what it means to be truly seen for who we are.

Alice Meadows

My book of the year for 2024 is a very personal choice – the author of Flavorama is my daughter-in-law, the food scientist and writer, Arielle Johnson. To be honest, it’s not necessarily a book I would have thought to read if it hadn’t been for the personal connection — I’m a keen (if not especially good!) amateur baker, and I enjoy a good cookbook, but I’m not sure I would have been drawn to a book specifically about flavor. Especially — as a non-scientist — one written by a scientist (Arielle literally has a PhD in flavor science!).

Flavorama is, indeed, science-y, but in a very entertaining and easy-to-understand way – so much so that I have actually read it cover to cover. It’s organized into five “laws” of flavor: Flavor is molecules; Flavor is taste and smell; Flavor follows predictable patterns; Flavor can be concentrated, extracted, and infused; and Flavor can be created and transformed. As well as explaining each “law” the book includes recipes that demonstrate the concepts being covered — about 100 in total (I tried out the one for “underappreciated fragrant spice pumpkin pie” for Thanksgiving and we all agreed that it was delicious).

The whole book is underpinned by the idea that understanding flavor helps us to think about food and cooking differently — that learning to spot patterns in what we eat enables us to make interesting connections and substitutions. As Arielle puts it: “palm sugar and orange marmalade are both sweet; sumac and rice vinegar are both sour … Rather than being perfectly interchangeable … they speak the same flavor language but in different accents.”

The writing throughout the book is clear without being condescending, with lots of fun analogies (a somewhat timely example: “Like nineteenth-century political-machine-style voting, salting while cooking is best done early and often.”). And the hand-drawn illustrations (also by Arielle) are a delight. They bridge the gap between scientific diagrams of molecules and photographs of them, both of which I find pretty much incomprehensible.

I obviously can’t claim that this is an unbiased review but, having followed Flavorama’s journey from ideation to publication via a LOT of experimentation (much of it conducted in Arielle and Tom’s tiny kitchen), I can vouch for how well researched it is. And I can also honestly say that it has changed the way I personally think about flavor and cooking — so if that’s something you’re interested in then I highly recommend checking Flavorama out yourself.

Karin Wulf

Every year, this is my favorite Scholarly Kitchen post to write. It’s a reminder that when we are writers, we are always readers first. That reading is an extraordinary thing, that it is a gift to ourselves and the communities we inhabit when we have the ability to read and to think and to take pleasure from work, whether fiction and nonfiction, that teaches us from the moment we turn the page (or click, or scroll). I read at least 2 books a week. I read books for work, so maybe no surprise there, but this year I kept careful count of fiction and nonfiction, and excluding what I read for work, even if it was sheer joy of learning for work, it’s still 2 books a week. And despite this, I can never remember a time when I didn’t wish for more time for reading. I recently came across a poem my dad wrote for maybe my 10th birthday and it has a line about “her nose in a book.” I know many of you reading this post, and many of my fellow Chefs, are the same. What a wonderful thing is a book, and how fun to review a year of reading.

It’s hard to pick even a handful of best among them! I’m excluding Taylor Swift books (though really enjoyed the very thorough and thoroughly researched Taylor Swift Style:  Fashion Through the Eras, accidentally bought two copies of Rob Sheffield’s Heartbreak is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music and have it slated for an upcoming reading vacation, and am currently awaiting delivery of TS’s own The Eras Tour Book). I’m also excluding historical fiction, which is my favorite genre and even though I read some amazing work this year (with one potent exception I wrote about for The Scholarly Kitchen). Also excluding books I read or am reading for prizes, though wow what incredible scholarship –  almost all of it well written as well as solidly-evidence-based, and several of those books I bought for family to enjoy, too.

So. This year I read three terrific books in early American history in advance copies, and I’ve just got to say something about all three. The first will change what you think you know about the American economy and slavery – no matter how much you know. Seth Rockman’s Plantation Goods: A Material History of Slavery (2024) is beautifully written, incredibly researched, and shows us a single, entwined economy north and south – through the lives and work of men and women in New England who produced goods like shoes and clothing and tools for people enslaved on southern plantations, and the people who were their enforced consumers. It will make you think differently about how objects take on and then promote meanings, including multifaceted racism. And you’ll be glad for what you learned through the brogans made in North Brookfield, Massachusetts.

Judy Giesberg’s Last Seen: the Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find their Lost Families (2025) is gutting. It’s based on the detailed study of the newspaper ads that men and women placed after the Civil War, trying to find their children, their siblings, their parents, and more. It reminds us that family separation is not a new tactic. And that one of the most egregious features of antebellum slavery was the aggressive sale of people away from their families, typically in the mid-Atlantic, into the voracious machine that was the emerging cotton plantations of the deep south. I read it after a second read of Rachel Swarns’s The 272: The Families who were Enslaves and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church (2023), which I could have sworn I wrote about here last year! Another incredible account of this phenomenon.

And then there’s Joyce Chaplin’s The Franklin Stove:  An Unintended American Revolution (2025). Okay, you will think between all the books (including some of Joyce’s!) about Franklin as diplomat, politician, printer, and scientist, not to mention the documentaries and on and on, that you know something about the man. Certainly I thought I did. But did I understand his pursuits as climate science? I did not. Did I understand how his experiments and technological innovation were responding to climate change and resource depletion?  Reader, I am a historian of the eighteenth century; in theory I know about colonial clear cutting and the little ice age. But again, I did not. This book is so good. Okay, I’m stopping now but only because I can already hear David Crotty wondering if he needs to start imposing word limits on our annual best book post.