Books We Loved Reading in 2024
Some holiday season selections from the Persuasion team that you might enjoy in 2025.
Hi Everyone,
To round out our 2024 coverage, we thought we’d let our team—the people who work so hard to bring our content to you, but usually remain behind the scenes—share a book they loved reading in the past twelve months. Perhaps you’ll enjoy one of them, too.
Happy holidays,
Yascha and the Persuasion team
The Doomed City by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (1972)
The Doomed City by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky is an absolutely unique, unaccountably under-rated gem: soviet-era Science Fiction written "for the drawer"—in the assumption that nothing so daring could be published in the USSR—by a wildly inventive pair of brothers who claim they wrote every single sentence collaboratively. In a dreamscape parallel reality that reeks of sweat and rotting garbage, the Strugatsky brothers start out questioning technocratic utopianism and end up dissecting the human condition as such. You'll want to read it twice.
Francisco Toro is a contributing editor at Persuasion.
Zero K by Don DeLillo (2016)
DeLillo is best known for his sprawling cold war epic Underworld (1997), but this shorter novel, Zero K (2016), feels more eerily relevant today. An emotionally stunted billionaire and his wife have locked themselves away in a state-of-the-art facility beneath Kyrgyzstan. Their goal is to be cryogenically frozen until technology has developed enough to enable them to forestall death. Nobody does philosophical novels like DeLillo, and reading this one I felt simultaneously discouraged and enlightened about the desire of today's ultra-rich to defeat the aging process through biohacking or transhumanism, or to sit out the end of the world in some far-flung country. Highly recommended for the quality of the writing, as long as you don't mind a fairly impressionistic plot.
Luke Hallam is senior editor at Persuasion.
How To Be A Renaissance Woman by Jill Burke (2023)
Surprisingly, Renaissance women (and men) were more committed to personal hygiene than is commonly supposed. In this book, Burke uses the history of beauty to spotlight the lives of individual women, including famous painter Artemisia Gentileschi and Guilia Bigolina, the first woman to write prose romance. I was fascinated to learn how beauty practices brought women together, as they tackled issues such as how to find (or poison) a husband or how to keep one’s allure as a famous actress. The book includes a selection of recipes so the reader can try making Renaissance cosmetics at home—though without any of the original and toxic ingredients such as quicklime and white lead.
Leonora Barclay is president of the Persuasion London community chapter.
The Restless Wave: A Novel of the United States Navy by James Stavridis (2024)
Of the many fine books we featured on Bookstack this year, Admiral James Stavridis’s World War II novel, The Restless Wave, was a double pleasure. First, the book itself conveys a rare kind of authenticity about life in the U.S. Navy. The author, a former midshipman-turned-admiral and NATO Supreme Allied Commander, tells the story of life on a warship as an insider. There are revealing moments of moral ambiguity about the viciousness required in war, even a “good” one, as well as insight into the pettiness and insecurities that afflict even the heroic. And in Admiral Nimitz, clearly a hero for Stavridis, we see what nerveless leadership under pressure looks like. The second pleasure was that the novel sent me back to reread one of its inspirations: the brilliant series of books by C.S. Forester about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, when a similarly conflicted hero, Horatio Hornblower, provides a study in the struggle for self-mastery. Forester wrote eleven Hornblower novels, so Stavridis will have to go some to match him. But The Restless Wave gets him off to a great start.
Richard Aldous is host of the Bookstack podcast at Persuasion.
The Kingmaker: Pamela Churchill Harriman's Astonishing Life of Seduction, Intrigue, and Power by Sonia Purnell (2024)
In Kingmaker, Sonia Purnell tracks the mind-boggling life of Pamela Harriman, daughter-in-law to Winston Churchill. My favorite genre is that of the "gossipy history book" and Kingmaker is the best of the best in this regard. But not only do you learn of delicious tidbits from Pamela's life, Purnell also offers one of the best cultural histories of post-war London and Washington, DC. The variety and intrigue of Harriman’s life make her a hard figure to capture—but Purnell does so masterfully, rejecting the reductiveness of a one-note portrayal presented by many of Harriman’s contemporaries.
Beatrice Frum, a senior at Occidental College, was previously Persuasion’s community manager.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt (2005)
This year, I finally got around to reading this deservedly famous history of Europe, East and West, since 1945. I knew many of the pieces of the story, of course, and yet the book was revelatory. It taught me about fascinating details I did not know, from the gritty details of the communist colonization of the continent’s east to the role that brutalist architecture played in radicalizing students in the continent’s west. More importantly, it helped me connect the dots between stories that in my mind had until then felt only loosely connected.
Yascha Mounk is founder and editor-in-chief of Persuasion.
An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland by Kenneth Moss (2021)
In the years after the First World War, Jews made up ten percent of the Polish population. An ascendant civic culture carried with it the promise of equality and the prospect of inclusion in the national project. Yet by the mid-1930s, what had seemed a moment of opportunity was already giving way to a prescient foreboding.
Moss’ deeply-researched study charts Jewish responses to this transition, as a range of ideological communities—from the socialist to the liberal and the religious—turned to a growing pragmatism about the limits of a Jewish future in Eastern Europe. For its fascinating history of this shift alone, An Unchosen People deserves a careful read. But as a chronicle of how an embedded minority, buffeted by strengthening winds beyond its control, is forced to confront questions of belonging, identity, and illiberalism, the book has a disturbingly acute relevance for our current moment.
David Hamburger is executive director at Persuasion.
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe (2018)
Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing is easily the most compulsively readable entryway onto Northern Ireland’s “Troubles”—an endlessly fascinating, and surpassingly terrible, episode in 20th century conflict. I’d put off reading Keefe’s book for a long time, though I had already read other books on the northern conflict, because the acclaim around it was so immense (Obama included it in his 2019 “favorites” list). Since Hulu has just released what appears to be a very good adaptation of Keefe’s book, there may be no better time to jump in, and I suggest you use the book and series as a springboard for further, deep reading on a modern crisis which yields many lessons for understanding the roots of political violence.
Brendan Ruberry is production editor and podcast producer at Persuasion.
And, finally, an assortment of recent releases…
From Sydnee Lipset, arts and culture editor at American Purpose, comes a recommendation for Maira Kalman’s new work Still Life with Remorse, an autobiographical collection of stories and paintings that doubles as a meditation on family, heritage, and place.
And Sam Kahn, associate editor at Persuasion, writes:
It was a really terrible year for book-reading! And I ended up loathing just about every novel I read put out by a major publisher. Non-fiction was a bit better. In ascending order of things to be upset about, I’d nominate: Nellie Bowles’ Morning After The Revolution on woke extremism; Alexandre Lefebvre’s Liberalism as a Way of Life on the shortcomings of “liberaldom”; Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean’s The Big Fail on the botched Covid response; and Vanis Yaroufakis’ Technofeudalism on how “cloud capitalism” is destroying society as we know it. These are all strong, depressing books. Pick your poison!
Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.
And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below:
Gene Roddenberry said that Horatio Hornblower was one of his models for Captain Kirk.