The 10 Best Books I Read in 2024

Ian Angus, The War against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism (2023) and Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice (2022).

I put these two books together in my head not because they are similar, because they are not—the former is a succinct, straightforward, deeply earnest but also very dry Marxist history of the enclosure movement in Great Britain, the latter is a rambling, profoundly personal and discursive and sometime repetitive set of reflections by the author on the legacy of slavery, the devastation of the farming economy, and how American exceptionalism and predatory capitalism ties them both together. I put them together because, as I elaborated here, the excellent analysis of the former helped me find the best, most profound insights of the latter.

Fred Dallmayr, Truth and Politics: Toward a Post-Secular Community (2022)

Fred Dallmayr, a long-time professor of politics and philosophy at the University of Notre Dame who passed away this year, was never one of my teachers—directly, that is. Indirectly, he was an inspiration and, in a very small way, a friend, and on the occasion of his passing I went back and read deeper from his massive corpus. What I found, among many other wise and challenging observations, was a different way to talk about the post-liberal moment, a way that America will almost certainly not be able to make use of, to our great loss.

Grant Hardy, ed., The Annotated Book of Mormon (2023)

Grant Hardy’s decades of work on the Book of Mormon—the central holy scripture of my religious tradition—has resulted in multiple previous works of devotion and scholarship that I’ve learned much from. Last year, he finally was able to achieve something of a magnum opus: a complete critical edition of the text of the Book of Mormon itself. My appreciation of it, as both a believer and a doubter (and how much do those two go together!), is massive, to say the least.

Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens (1989)

In 2023, one of the best books I read was by Stanley Hauerwas, a radical Christian thinker whose essays and ideas I’d long thought about, but whom I’d never really studied before. This year I continued with that new direction by giving Hauerwas’s probably most famous book a read, and I wasn’t disappointed. Co-written with William Willimon, when both of them were young scholars and pastors, this book lays down the fundamentals of Hauerwas’s radically Barthian, church-over-culture, Christianity-over-society, perspective, the one which later came to be called “neo-Anabaptist.” Reading this book at the same time as the 2024 elections, its constant reminders of the uselessness of trying to make Christianity “relevant” to a world of violence, competition, and exploitation, was a deeply persuasive experience, to say the least.

Charles Marohn, Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis (2024)

Chuck Marohn hasn’t yet written a book that I haven’t found bursting with concepts and conclusions worth wrestling with, and his latest is probably the bursting-est yet. This is the first time Marohn has written with a co-author, and perhaps that was necessary; the Strong Towns approach to America’s housing crisis obliges him to weigh in on a huge number of historical, financial, political, and sociological issues, far beyond his earlier works which focused on the comparatively more straight-forward questions of community sustainability and transportation management. I’ve found myself in multiple arguments over this book, and it’s advice is definitely not the final word on figuring out how to both build ourselves out of, and better arrange our financing of, America’s housing problems. But his words are worth listening to all the same.

Eva Piirimäe, Herder and Enlightenment Politics (2023)

When I was in graduate school in the 1990s, I discovered the communitarian-liberalism debates of the 1980s, which in turn led me to Charles Taylor, which in turn led me to German romanticism, and in particular the philosophy and criticism of Johann Gottfried Herder, a late 18^th-century German educator, translator, and Lutheran pastor, one of the truly great—and often frustratingly changeable—intellects of the Enlightenment era. I wrote my dissertation on him, but the days when I thought I would be a true Herder scholar and intellectual historian are long past. Still, every once in a while the blessings of academia allow me to dive once more back into this area of scholarship—and for the first time in a decade, 2024 allowed me that, with the opportunity to review new book that is, in some ways, genuinely path-breaking, at least insofar as English-language scholarship on Herder is concerned. It reminded me of, and perhaps opened up, some old paths for me, and for that I’m grateful for.

George Scialabba, What Are Intellectuals Good For? (2009) and Only a Voice: Essays (2023)

Scialabba is a near-legendary critic and pundit, at least among that small group of writers, publishers, and thinkers that make up America’s tiny-but-not-quite-extinct-yet population of “public intellectuals.” A man who made his name writing sharp, both open-minded but also deeply opinionated essays on important intellectual figures of both the past and present, I’d read several of the pieces in this first collection years ago. Fortunately, the opportunity to write an essay on Scialabba gave me a chance to both re-read them, and peruse this latest collection. Everything in them is brilliant, even if you find his consistently contrary (and, I would argue, in important ways “conservative”) leftism not to your taste.

Paul B. Thompson, The Agrarian Vision: Sustainability and Environmental Ethics (2010)

Returning once again to last year, one of the best books I read in 2023 was the wonderfully dense yet still student-friendly introduction to “sustainability” as a general topic, Sustainability: What Everyone Needs to Know, which Thompson wrote with a co-author, Patricia Norris. This year I finally worked through a book of his published articles and essays--published over a period of 20 years from the late 1980s to the late 2000s--that I’ve had on my shelf for years, and I wasn’t disappointed. While much of what is included here has long since become familiar within the field, he still often surprised me with creative insights (his essay focusing on a reading of The Grapes of Wrath and the John Ford film adaptation of it particularly stands out). Overall, this book is an excellent, thoughtful review of the difficulties and opportunities which thinking seriously about agrarianism, environmentalism, and the differences between them presents.

The 10 Best Movies I Watched in 2024

As always, this is a list of the best films I watched for the first time in 2024, regardless of when they came out. In alphabetical order:

Bright Spark: The Reconciliation of Trevor Southey (2022)

A brilliant, honest, and thoughtful portrait of an artist, his families and communities--both those he remained part of, and those he broke away from--and the way his art and life, in some ways (but not all), affected a reconciliation between both. For Mormons like myself and artists of a certain stripe, this short documentary is one of the best films of its type that anyone is ever likely to make.

Excalibur (1981)

Pulpy, melodramatic, surreal, gorgeous, over-the-top, with gross mud and ugly tortured bodies standing alongside brilliantly shining armor, sumptuous heraldry, and almost-but-not-quite porn-quality nudity--40+ years on, this has to remain the definitive D&D approach to the Arthurian legend. I loved it.

A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

87 minutes of silliness, wit, delightful verbal jousting, fine physical comedy, and of course, awesome music by 4 demigods. Seeing it for the first time in a proper movie theater only made it more of an experience. It's not surprising that Ringo went on to do the most in front of the camera; he may not have ever become a great actor, but the guy was a natural, a delightful comic presence throughout the whole film. Some segments look sharper when you think about them afterward than when you actually watch them (Harrison's encounter with youth-obsessed advertisers has some great darkness to it, but it probably needed to play out a little longer), but overall, this movie is an absolute gem.

Hundreds of Beavers (2022)

An insanely creative, low-budget, goofball, straight-out-of-Looney Tunes comic masterpiece. I laughed, I laughed, and I laughed some more. Its mixing of satiric wit and straight-up cartoony farce was equal to the best of Monty Python. I hope beaver Sherlock and beaver Watson survived for the sequel.

The Iron Claw (2023)

A remarkable, powerful, and believable story of a family that I can, in a few ways, profoundly relate to (I have six brothers, and we're all close), but in most other ways is utterly unfamiliar to me (we weren't athletes in our family in any sense, and the world of professional wrestling, especially the low-rent wrestling world of the 1970s and 1980s, was utterly outside of my experience). The masterful acting, pacing, and cinematography of the movie did what the best sort of movies always do: invite us in to a story which is not our own, which is totally foreign to us, and make us identify with the characters and their fates. This move drew me in, shutting off the critical voice always operating in my head, and made me care for these sad, stupid, doomed, but mostly enormously decent characters. I didn't weep for the Von Erichs, but their story weighed on me, and not in a manipulative way. Truly, this is the best kind of middle-brow movie: find a powerful story, and then tell it well.

The Long Good Friday (1980)

This is a fabled British gangster flick from the very early 1980s that I've missed up until now. The expert plotting of the film makes it a delight, but also puts us, as viewers, into surprising historical and moral waters. Can this bad guy also actually be the beleaguered hero of the story, the toxic yet necessary agent of English masculinity as the Age of Thatcher gives birth to a new Britain? Watch to learn the answer, and see why Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren should have made a dozen films together; what an awesome pair.

Nosferatu (2024)

A brilliant piece of gothic art. Not really a horror movie, though there is much that is horrifying in it; this is Nosteratu with the obsession with foreigners and the plague replaced with a very 19th-century obsession with the dark and mysterious forces of sexuality (particularly of the female kind) and the occult, and the challenges both pose to a rational, patriarchal order. I loved the cinematography, the dialogue, and the interesting twists Eggers took with vampire lore. Maybe not the best straight-up Dracula story I've ever seen on the screen, but absolutely the most stately, most seemingly authentic. Someone online said that if Merchant Ivory had adapted Nosferatu or Dracula back in the 1980s, it would have looked like this, and I fully agree (and consider that high praise as well).

O.J.: Made in America (2016)

A brilliant documentary. The long, slow build through the first four episodes were insightful and often frankly astonishing. The contemporary interviews with lawyers on the defense and the prosecution, with Simpson's friends and enemies (the rueful, unapologetic Mark Fuhrman was particularly fascinating to watch) and hanger-ons and more, all of it was impressive and very well used, but really it was just the amount of revealing footage--from the crime scenes, from Simpson's daily life, and more--which the filmmakers found which really astounded me. I suppose the omnipresence of phones recording everything today had accustomed me--like everyone--to certain assumptions about the quality and character of the surveillance all around us, but watching this I was reminded, in a way I shouldn't have needed to be, of the near-equivalent omnipresence of hand-held video recorders which I can remember from the 1990s and 2000s, and yet had somehow forgotten. Anyway, tremendous story-telling. I initially thought the final episode was a little weak, a little anti-climactic; given the focus on the murder trial, I was bothered that there was comparatively little analysis given to Simpson's civil trial, and why that played out so differently in cultural and popular terms (the reasons aren't hard to guess--the lack of television in the courtroom being an obvious one--but still, it wanted to see those reasons laid out). And I do think they could have done more to continue the interpretation which guided the first four episodes: namely, that Simpson's career and trial reflect the deeply disturbing fruit of how media-saturated and addicted Americans have internalized racial divides, prejudices, and resentments. But with a couple of brilliant sequences, they brought that back in at the very conclusion of the last episode, with Simpson's conviction for robbery in 2008 becoming a troubling coda, making me forgive everything.

Quand tu liras cette lettre [When You Read This Letter] (1953)

This almost impossible to find French classic is both compelling and kind of horrifying, as well as surprising. A marvelous but in some ways opaque drama, the real lesson of which probably is what was said by the old lady on the train near the end: "There is so much [unstated: "which we can never understand"] in every person's heart." I loved the way it closed with exactly the same shots it opened with, only in reverse; perhaps the whole thing is a kind of moral parable, a just-so story--only its message is that people's choices can only ever be observed, never understood.

Uncut Gems (2019)

This movie is incredibly foul and frenetic, the story of an addictive and hyper and undisciplined individual throwing himself into risks that he constantly hypes up, until it collapses messily--but still, everything is right there in the way the story is told, nothing more. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to think that there was something more to the story here, something that Adam Sandler, of all people, manages to key the audience into: his character's confusion and even disbelief at his own sadness, at the emptiness he doesn't know how to deal with, was encapsulated in one moment (when he searches through the empty apartment he shared with his lover) which, in a way, haunts all the rest of the film. The dead, staring, disbelieving form of Sandler at the end, finally at rest, makes us think about how impossible such a life of complete madness, complete addictive activity, truly is--which perhaps makes the visuals of the tiny, eternal, unchanging perfections of the gems which started and ended the film completely appropriate.

A Voice, a Chime, a Chant Sublime

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

One hundred and sixty-one years ago, on Christmas Day 1863, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the poem “Christmas Bells.” This poem, of course, became the basis for the well-known--but not, in my observation, particularly popular--hymn, "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day." It wasn't included in our Christmas program in our Mormon congregation this morning, and I wish it had been. 2024, and specifically those of us who have lived through it and must face its consequences, need it.

The poem that Longfellow wrote is inextricable from the Civil War, and the desperation and despair so many felt during those years. By late 1863, the war had dragged on for over 2 1/2 years, his oldest son had run away to join the Union army without his permission and had been gravely wounded in battle, and the horrors of Gettysburg—Lincoln had delivered his famous Address only a month prior—weighed down the country as a whole. Perhaps it is unsurprising that his reflections that Christmas morning were dark ones, with his final stanza perhaps suggesting more faithful determination than any actual hope:

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
    And wild and sweet
    The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
    Had rolled along
    The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
    A voice, a chime,
    A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
    And with the sound
    The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
    And made forlorn
    The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
    "For hate is strong,
    And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
    The Wrong shall fail,
    The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."

It is not Wadsworth greatest poem, but it is a good one. And in any case, within ten years the poem, in various versions, was being put to music. In the 20^th century, Bing Crosby recorded the song; so did The Carpenters. Both of them, like many other artists, dropped stanzas 3, 4, and 5; they removed the songs explicit invocations of the Civil War, and instead turned the poem into an abiding message of peace and good will—one that is doubted, briefly, in the next-to-last stanza, but is re-emphasized, both “more loud and deep” in the concluding one: “The Wrong shall fail!”

I am grateful that the version which made it into Mormon hymnbooks took a different approach—not an unknown one, but not, I think, the dominant one either. It is not, on the basis of decades of observation, an oft-sung Christmas song in American Mormon congregations, but it deserves better, if only because of the wisdom of the arranger in ordering the stanzas 1, 2, 6, 7, and then, and only then, 3. Far better for all of us—for everyone who lives, as we all must, as Longfellow himself did, through catastrophes large and small, through daily mistakes and passing triumphs, through rain that falls on the just and the unjust alike—to reflect upon the message which the miracle of the Incarnation, of God the Son being born as a human being, communicates…and then experience evil and suffer our doubts that’s God’s good message may ever be realized…and then be reminded that’s God’s love abides and calls to us despite all opposition…and then, finally, gird up our loins and begin again, day after day after day.

The Mormon hymnbook is currently being revamped--and if "I Heard the Bells" survives into the new version, I would wish for only two changes: turn “Till” to “Then,” and “revolved” to “revolves.” Embrace the idea that this hymn no longer, if it ever entirely was, one man’s Christmas determination to keep hoping though his nation’s greatest peril, but is now rather a benediction on the message of Christmas, a summation as well as an invitation. Yes, the wrong shall fail, but the defeat of the wrong is something God does with us, through us, day after day, year after year, lifetime after lifetime. As the man said, the bells still ring—still sing, still chime, still chant on their call, their eternal, abiding reminder of God's grace and peace--for those who believe.

Then, ringing, singing, on its way,
The world revolves from night to day,
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime,
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

 Merry Christmas!