My Top 10 Books of 2024

Plus a Few Honorable Mentions

For each the past few years, I have set a personal goal of reading 75 books. I succeeded in 2022 and 2023, and the jury is still out on whether I’ll hit the target in 2024. (I hit 68 yesterday.) I don’t expect to read anything really profound between now and December 31, so I feel comfortable listing my Top 10 Books of 2024 now.

I started one or two of these in 2023, but it’s the year the book was finished that counts. These are in no particular order:

The 2024 Top Ten

Aaron Renn, Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture: I have followed Renn’s writing for a few years and was able to read an early draft of this manuscript. I knew right away it would be an important and influential work. I was not surprised when World magazine recently named it Book of the Year in its Christian nonfiction category. I reviewed the book for the University Bookman earlier this year; you can read that review here.

Jeff Bilbro, ed., The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education: I learned about this book when I met its publisher during my visit to the Bruderhof community in East Tennessee last year. He gave me an advance copy, and I later led a year-long faculty reading group on it at Harding University. I also wrote a series of posts discussing the work chapter by chapter. The first of those posts is here:

Brad Wilcox, Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization: With marriage rates continually in decline, Wilcox’s book, which was published in February, is particularly timely. I led a reading group on this book for Faulkner’s Great Book Honors Fellows in Spring 2024. They wanted to argue with the book’s evidence and conclusions, but in the end they confessed they couldn’t. I reviewed the book for the Journal of Religion, Culture, and Democracy. You can read that review at this link.

Chuck Marohn and Daniel Herriges, Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis: Marohn is the co-founder and president of the Strong Towns organization, which advocates for fiscally sound urban policy. This is his third book and first with coauthor Herriges, who also works for Strong Towns. The authors explain the sequence of policy decisions that led to housing being unaffordable for so many today and propose steps for local governments to take to address the problem. I reviewed the book for Law & Liberty. You can read that review at this link.

Actual picture of me frantically trying to reach 75 books read in 2024.

Tim Carney, Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be: I have been a fan of Carney’s since getting to know him through the Acton Institute and reading his Alienated America (2018). There’s some obvious overlap in this book and Wilcox’s, but Carney’s journalistic style provides an interesting counterpoint to Wilcox’s more scholarly discussion. I was surprised by how long Family Unfriendly is; clearly there is a lot of evidence in support of Carney’s thesis. I reviewed this book for American Reformer. You can read that review at this link.

Carl Trueman, To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse: I just finished this one last week and commented on it in my post on Steven Mintz’s Inside Higher Ed essay. In short: this is a worthwhile book for anyone who wishes to understand critical theory both on its own terms—Trueman is very generous in his discussion to critical theorists’ concerns—and from a Christian perspective that ultimately rejects it. You can read my other comments on the book here:

Chris Rufo, America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything: I also read this book very recently and commented on it in the post linked above. Rufo uses Herbert Marcuse as his starting point and shows how his influence spread through the academy and other institutions. He does this by profiling various activists who were inspired in different ways by Marcuse: Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, etc. I learned quite a bit from this book and added several other books to my reading list as a result of it.

Rusty Reno, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West: This book is probably the most surprising one to make my Top 10 this year because I started it with the expectation that it wouldn’t be as substantive as it turned out to be. I wrote a few paragraphs about it in this post:

John Senior, The Restoration of Christian Culture: Written in the pre-internet age, this book is a gloriously curmudgeonly broadside against mass secular culture. The Roman Catholicism here is over the top, but the reflections on spirituality and the Great Books are wonderful.

Robert Arthur, The Secret of Terror Castle: This book contains no profound ideas, but its republication gave me the opportunity to introduce my sons to the Three Investigators series I enjoyed so much when I was their age. I have since bought all ten volumes in the reissued series, and Son #5 has read them all; I have only read four so far.

Honorable Mentions

Catechism of the Catholic Church: It took me almost two years to listen all the way through the “Catechism in a Year” podcast from Fr. Mike Schmitz, but I finished it shortly after Thanksgiving.

Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered: I try to read at least one book by Kirk every year. I read two this year—America’s British Culture was a reread—and learned a lot about Burke from this one.

David Bahnsen, Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life: I doubt there’s a better exponent of the Protestant ethic than David Bahnsen in public life today. I can’t say that I learned much new information from this book, but I really appreciated Bahnsen’s unapologetic defense of the importance of work as critical to our purpose in life.