Littwin: The best books I read in 2024, when books were my best refuge

I know that many of you have been patiently waiting — I’ve heard from at least three readers, at last count — for my annual Best Books Mike Littwin Has Read column so that you can complete your holiday shopping.

I hope I’m not offending anyone by saying “holiday,” but it seems that Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa all come out at the same time this year, as if some higher power somewhere is insisting that, despite everything, we must still find ways to celebrate the end of this disastrous year that has been 2024.

A proper celebration, I believe, calls for a goose dinner —that’s what Dickens said, anyway — while at least temporarily ignoring all the terrible news. 

We can start — or not start — with the fact that, as of Friday morning, Co-Presidents Elon Musk and Donald Trump  were still bullying congressional Republicans into shutting down the government. That  the killings in Gaza and Ukraine continue apace while we wait to hear the Musk/Trump solution. That anti-vaxxer-and-Jared-Polis-buddy, RFK Jr., might get the needed Senate votes to run our healthcare system and bring back the measles, and maybe even polio while he’s at it. 

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That in the coming year, you might see your migrant neighbors’ families torn apart because migrant gangs have apparently conquered our cities, including Aurora. That Pete Hegseth and his enablers might personally put an end to the #MeToo movement. That New Jersey has drones, possibly for use by secular humanists in the annual War Against Christmas. That Marjorie Taylor Greene might shoot down the possibly elf-hunting drones with a Jewish space laser. That Trump’s anti-democracy plan includes having Kash Patel put Liz Cheney in prison … and, OK, I’m starting to lose hope, so I’ll just stop.

Instead, we can concentrate on the fact that the Broncos, despite the Thursday night meltdown, still might make the playoffs for the first time in a decade. That CU’s Travis Hunter won the Heisman. That the Nuggets may be a little wobbly but that Nikola Jokić is as solid as three boulders. That, alas, the Rockies are still the Rockies and will be so forevermore, meaning we must learn the lesson of accepting the good with the bad.

Except in my book recommendations. They’re all good, some of them even great. And so we dive right in. Buckle up, it’s gonna be a long ride.

“James”

By Percival Everett

This book is everything you could want from a piece of literature. It is subversive. It is filled with inventive takes on old ideas. It is brilliantly written. It changes your perspective.

It is a pre-Civil-War novel, and yet mostly a novel of our time.

“James” is a revisionist take on “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the 19th-century novel that has been controversial from the day it was published and of which Hemingway famously said that it gave birth to all modern American literature.

You know the original story — Huck adrift on the raft hoping to escape from being “sivilized,” runaway slave Jim on the same raft hoping to escape from slavery, Tom Sawyer, Pap, the King and the Duke, the Widow Douglas, Twain’s prolific use of the “n-word”  in what is a powerful anti-slavery statement.

You may not know Everett — the acclaimed movie “American Fiction”  was based on his novel “Erasure” — but he’s been writing well-received novels for 40 years.

In this take, we don’t see the world through Huck’s innocent eyes. We see it through the eyes of James, who isn’t the uneducated, sometimes overwhelmed slave that Mark Twain envisioned. James is an intellectual who, like most of the Black characters in the book, code switches. When talking to white people, it’s all dems and dats and yassirs and sho’nuff. Among Blacks, Jim and the other slaves speak perfect English and discuss the great moral issues of their time, including slavery and the unanswerable question of why white people are the way they are. And James does all this while citing Kierkegaard and Voltaire.

Huck drifted along the Mississippi, trying to find himself in the chaos of the times. James, who knows too well the chaos and torment of the times and the lash, reclaims that dangerous, world-shifting rafting trip — in which he is trying desperately to save his family from the horror of slavery — for his own.

“Colored Television”

By Danzy Senna

Senna happens to be Percival Everett’s wife and a novelist in her own right. In “Colored Television,” she writes of Jane — a biracial writer and untenured academic who spent 10 years writing a failed second novel and is now ready to sell out to TV — and her husband Lenny,  a Black painter whose work, while possibly brilliant, is purposely designed not to sell at all, but meanwhile he’s learning Japanese and wants to move to Japan.

They can’t afford the middle-class life they live with their two children in a borrowed house in L.A. and are either (Jane) desperate for security or (Lenny) not really worried about it all. 

Senna, who is biracial, presents Jane as one whose work centers on the mulatto — an outdated word that she uses both ironically and as yet one more identity marker — and after her novel has been roundly rejected, steals an idea to create a TV comedy series about mulattos, who she says are an overlooked market. But she can’t tell Lenny because Lenny thinks her novel is a mulatto “War and Peace” and also that they are artists and TV is beneath them.

If it sounds like a Hollywood premise, it is. If it sounds like a hilarious novel that sends up identity, Hollywood, middle-class culture, academia, the publishing industry and anything else Senna gets her hands on, it is.

It was one of the hot literary books of the summer, but is still funny and touching and sharp and bracing in any season.

“Demon Copperhead”

By Barbara Kingsolver

I’m not a big Kingsolver fan, though I know that millions are. But I had to read this book, a modern take on Dickens’ David Copperfield, an orphan living in 19th century Britain and his operatic life. Kingsolver sets her orphan hero in modern Appalachia, and like Dickens, she gives us a memorably hilarious but tortured life while shining a bruising light on poverty and child hunger living in nations that, in their time, are the richest in the world.

This book isn’t quite the success that “James” is — although it did win a Pulitzer — but Kingsolver, like Dickens, is both unabashedly political and unabashedly liberal, in the modern sense. And Demon, like David, is a character whose essential truth is guaranteed to stay with you.

In any case, Kingsolver, who lives in Appalachia, reads truer to her subject and to her element than JD Vance’s memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” I’m waiting to see what Kingsolver and Vance come up with next. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them writes a book called “Eating the Rich.” The other, with the title “Eating the Pets.”

“Martyr!”

By Kaveh Akbar

The exclamation point in the title may be played for laughs — and the book is often funny—but “Martyr!” is also Akbar’s very serious look at life and death, martyred or otherwise.

Cyrus Shams, a struggling Iranian-American poet who makes a living by playing patients with terminal illnesses for aspiring doctors to treat, is also a recovering drug addict and alcoholic who can’t seem to quite find his way in the world. He isn’t sure he belongs anywhere, and he’s not sure where anyone else belongs, either. It’s a writer’s conundrum, but Cyrus is a long way from solving it.

As Akbar describes it, Cyrus is “neither Iranian nor American, neither Muslim nor not-Muslim, neither drunk or in meaningful recovery, neither gay nor straight. Each camp thought he was too much the other thing. That there were camps at all made his head swim.”

But Cyrus comes by the word “martyr” honestly. His mother was killed when an Iranian plane was mistakenly shot down by the U.S. Navy. The event is based on the real-life destruction of Iran Air Flight 655 by the U.S.S. Vincennes in 1988 — an event, as Akbar said in an interview, that nobody in America even remembers.

Cyrus tells us both of the Iranian rage that lingers today and the American view, he writes, that his mother’s death was “actuarial” and “a rounding error.”

In the book, Cyrus meets up with and is fascinated by an Iranian-American painter of some note, Orkideh. She has terminal breast cancer — unlike Cyrus, Orkideh isn’t acting — who has made her death journey into a Brooklyn Museum exhibit. While she sits in a chair, museum-goers ask her about dying. Orkideh and Cyrus become friends of a kind, and, yes, there’s a mystery of a kind to be solved. 

“Martyr!” Is smart and beautifully written and depressingly funny and finally questions whether Art! is the answer, or even the question.

“All Fours”

By Miranda July

An unnamed artist whose brand of art is also unarmed, but only hinted at, decides to treat herself to a three-week solo birthday trip to a fancy hotel in New York upon receiving a $20,000 check from a whiskey company as payment for a single phrase that she wrote.

And so she sets off on a road trip from her home in L.A., leaving her nonbinary child with her supportive, music-producer husband. But she gets only as far as the near suburbs in a place called Monrovia when she sees a much younger, attractive Avis rental car agent. Their eyes meet. Romance — actually wild graphic sex that isn’t quite the sex you’d expect, leading to obsession — ensues. Oh, and there’s a lot of dancing, too. 

It’s the ultimate meet-cute. But it’s not. It’s a hilarious search for satisfaction in what some are calling the first great “premenopausal” novel. Instead of going to New York, she stays in Monrovia in a depressing roadside motel, and she blows the $20,000 hiring a decorator to turn her room into some kind of European fantasy of a motel room.

What goes on in that room for three weeks doesn’t stay in that room. But the room is the key to it all. As the narrator says, “I could always be how I was in the room. Imperfect, ungendered, game, unashamed. I had everything I needed in my pockets, a full soul.”

“Creation Lake”

By Rachel Kushner

Kushner has written a spy novel. But it’s not a LeCarré spy novel. Sadie Smith — not her real name, of course — doesn’t want to come in from the cold. She’s been kicked out of the U.S. intelligence services and is now a cold-blooded spy for hire.

But it is definitely a Kushner novel — endlessly curious about all things, with startling digressions that grab you and won’t let go, a sendup of those who practice radical politics while never quite denying the truth in their cause.

If you’ve read “The Flamethrowers,” a brilliant novel about radical Italians, avant-garde art and motorcycles, you know what I mean. If you’ve read her memoir-like “Hard Times” — Kushner grew up in Eugene, Oregon, and San Francisco with her straight-from-the-’60s parents — you know what I mean.

In “Creation Lake,” Sadie has infiltrated a radical eco-terrorist group that is trying to stop Big French Ag from destroying the ecology of a non-touristy part of southwest France. She has hacked the emails of the group’s intellectual founder, and it’s here we are launched into discursives on, yes, the Neanderthals, who are not, we’re told,  the knuckle-dragging mouth breathers of legend, but rather a congenial human species that created “abstract codes of great mystery and transcendent beauty.” 

The founder, Bruno, now lives in a cave and believes that to live like the Neanderthal — or the one he imagines, anyway — is the key to man’s survival.

Meanwhile, Kushner becomes part of the commune, where she breaks all the rules, starting with the one that women there do most of the work and men do the theorizing. Sadie Smith didn’t become a spy to wash dishes, just as Kushner didn’t become a spy novelist in order to write a book like Ian Fleming.

“Someone Like Us”

By Dinaw Mengestu

Mamush, an Ethiopian-American who is an international reporter writing from Paris, comes to America where he learns that the man, Samuel, he’s always known to be his father but who, in life, was more like a wise uncle and mentor, has killed himself, two days before Christmas.

Mamush and his wife and their 2-year-old son had been planning to visit Virginia for the holidays, but life intruded, and then intruded again, so Mamush went on his own, but not before canceling his flight to Virginia and going to Chicago. He had lived there with Samuel and his mother, and it was where he had gone to learn more about Samuel’s mysterious life. When he was in Chicago, before he could get to Virginia, he learned about Samuel’s death.

As many critics have written, you shouldn’t come to Mengestu’s novels unless you enjoy sitting for days with clues that are increasingly opaque. As in W.G. Sebald’s books, Megentsu uses black and white photos, of undetermined provenance, scattered throughout the book to both reveal and deepen the mystery.

Eventually we learn that Samuel drove a cab in Chicago, where the job led to addiction and depression. But — at the risk of giving away too much, it is in Samuel’s cab where we find the truth of his life as a migrant and a path toward a life that just might be better.

“Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here”

By Jonathan Blitzer

Now for a little nonfiction. I wisely stayed away from Trump books all year. Just reading the news was bad enough. But anyone who cares about the migrant issue in America and how we find ourselves in crisis mode today should read this book. It’s that good.

Blitzer is a reporter for the New Yorker who has covered the immigration issue for years. He has used that reporting to make human the stories of migrants and those who stayed behind, of activists and politicians and the push-pull of their fight for and against immigration.

He tells the story in the way you may never have heard it, one that began a half-century ago in the time of cold-war politics, featuring Ronald Reagan and Oliver North and the contras in Nicaragua and the deadly U.S.-backed suppression in El Salvador. He tells how the counterinsurgencies, which have lasted for decades, led to millions eventually crossing the border into Mexico. It was also the starting point for the most dangerous gangs in Central America, some of whose members are now in America and, yes, even in Aurora. And lately, it has also led to the asylum movement against which Trump, who broke up migrant families in his first term and vows to do so again, brings us the return of Stephen Miller, who plans to lead a mass deportation.

The central story in the book belongs to a leftist medical student who was tortured in El Salvador, finally made his way to Mexico, where he stayed for years treating migrants, before moving to the United States and playing a key role in helping those who have escaped their country find a new one.

The stories can be heartbreaking, they can be uplifting, but they all help explain why the problem of migration is so intractable and how the promise of an easy solution is no promise at all.

“The Demon of Unrest”

By Erik Larson

I’m usually interested in anything written by Larson, the popular historian — “Isaac’s Storm,” “The Devil in the White City,” “In the Garden of Beasts” — and almost always interested in a fresh take on the Civil War. Larson has brought his focus this time to Fort Sumter and to the mostly unknown story of how the assault that led to the disastrous war, with its 600,000 dead, actually began. 

Not surprisingly, it started with hubris and white pride and a country that was hyperpolarized, much as it is today. In fact, Larson wrote in the book how “appalled” he was by the assault on the Capitol on January 6 and by “today’s political discord, which, incredibly, has led some benighted Americans to whisper of secession and Civil War.”

You may remember that some of those who assaulted the Capitol were carrying Confederate flags. 

Larson remembers and searches for parallels, which can be quite striking.

The central, and deserved, criticism of the book is that it settles on elite white people — like Major Robert Anderson, the former enslaver from Kentucky who held the fort for half a year while secessionist forces became increasingly threatening — who played the central roles in determining the fate of Sumter, the last federal stronghold in the South. 

There are no strongly drawn Black characters, no role for abolitionists, barely a mention of Frederick Douglass. We do learn, though, of Buchanan’s fatal passivity and Lincoln’s vain attempts to stop the war and the racist South Carolinians who believed that leaving Sumter as a federal fort even as they had seceded was, well, an affront to their Southern pride. How many paid the price for that pride?

“Hitler’s People”

By Richard J. Evans

Evans is one of the foremost historians of Nazi Germany, who, in this case, offers a different take on history, one involving biography, to help settle the question he asks in the first sentence of his preface:

”Who were the Nazis?”

The standard answer is that they were thugs and psychopaths that led a formerly civilized country into a group hysteria that brought us genocide on a scale never seen and leading to an unprecedented number of war dead.

Evans explains that trying to understand individual Nazis was, to most modern historians, an “unfashionable” quest that only led back to Hitler and the cult of personality and allowed the greatest mass of Germans who unblinkingly followed Hitler to get a pass.

But Evans has changed his mind. To understand the Third Reich, he now says, you must understand the Nazis as humans, who, as one reviewer put it, were disturbingly like us.

He divides all Nazi Germany into four parts, starting with long section on Hitler himself before offering shorter biographies of “Paladins,” those in Hitler’s inner circle; of “Enforcers,” those enablers who stood in the next tier; and finally the “Instruments,” regular Germans who carried out the day-to-day work that made the Third Reich possible.

We get Göring, Goebbels and Himmler, of course. We get Eichmann and Hendrich. Streicher and Riefenstahl. Less well known, but chillingly key players on a lower level, like Irma Grese, and a look at those we might call fellow travelers. The biographies are short and sharp and, mostly, chilling.

And Evans tells us that he came to write this book as a way of bringing light to the “emergence in our own time of a class of unscrupulous populist politicians.”

Et cetera

My editors advise me once again that it’s possible to run out of room even in cyberspace. And so I’ll leave you with a few more books I read. Using material from her own life, the wonderful Claire Messud writes “The Strange Eventful History,” a multigenerational novel, spanning 70 years and two wars, of a French-Algerian family torn between the two countries. I highly recommend it. And then there’s “Empusium,” a novel by Nobelist Olga Tokarczuk, a “horror” story that takes place at a health resort in 1913, inspired, it seems, by Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain.” Most of the horror is easily explained, except the misogyny of the men who live, and sometimes die, at the sanitarium.  Another top recommendation.

And if you have book recommendations for me, just email me at milittwin@gmail.com.