By Ashly Moore Sheldon • December 30, 2024
As the year draws to a close, it's customary to reflect back. For a fun twist on this tradition, we've gathered a set of classic (both new and old) books that sum up a handful of the events (both serious and not-so-serious) that dominated the headlines this year and got people's attention. Here are ten great reads that capture the essence of some of the biggest stories from 2024.
It's been a big year for women's sports and a potent symbol of that trend comes in the six-foot form of pro basketball player Caitlin Clark. After smashing all kinds of records during the NCAA championships and leading the Iowa Hawkeyes to the national title game, her induction into the WNBA drew scores of new fans to the league and women's basketball in general. Through it all, she has shown a steely determination reminiscent of Willa Cather's tenacious Nebraska settler, Alexandra Bergson.
On April 8, throngs of people flocked to specific locations that spread across North America from Mexico to Canada to witness a total solar eclipse, an event that figures prominently in Mark Twain's entertaining fantasy about an engineer who is transported back in time to the days of Camelot. Initially taken prisoner and sentenced to death, the quick-witted fellow manages to convince his captors that he is a magician by, among other things, predicting a solar eclipse. Twain said his comic masterpiece was inspired by a dream.
Sun Tzu's famous study of strategy has been credited with influencing some of the most legendary military operations. Beyond the battlefield, people far and wide have long turned to this treatise for advice on how to succeed in various competitive situations, like that of the no-holds-barred rap battle that ignited in late March between Drake and Kendrick Lamar in late March. The hip hop artists have been exchanging heated diss tracks and public swipes at each other ever since.
When astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams blasted off in June for the International Space Station (ISS), they expected to return after just one week. But due to technical issues with their spacecraft, they will now not be returning until March or possibly April of 2025! Thankfully, this delay poses no risk to the astronauts who are well supplied with everything they need. For the astronaut stranded on Mars in Andy Weir's brilliant science fiction novel, the situation was decidedly more dire.
On July 19, the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike distributed a faulty update to its software that caused widespread crashes on computers running Microsoft Windows. This resulted in the largest outage in the history of information technology, causing major disruptions in daily life, travel, businesses, and governments around the world. Aldous Huxley's prescient 1932 novel imagines a dystopian society that has become overly dependent on technology and machines. Is that us?
Daniel James Brown's bestselling nonfiction novel offers the irresistible story of a scrappy team of outsiders—nine working-class American boys—who beat the odds and took the gold medal in crew at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. We thought it was a fitting comparison to the crew of trailblazing B-Boys and B-Girls who championed the American-born dancesport of breakdancing (or breaking) at the Paris Olympics this summer.
For a definition of "brat," here's what Charlie XCX had to say: "You’re just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes. Who feels herself but maybe also has a breakdown. But kind of like, parties through it, is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile . . . But it’s brat. You’re brat. That’s brat." Tbh, there were several classic protagonists who came to mind, from Emma Woodhouse to Becky Sharp, but we settled on Edith Wharton's Undine Spragg, a heroine who is as vain, spoiled, and selfish as she is irresistibly fascinating.
Like Brett Ashley and Jake Barnes, the couple at the center of Ernest Hemingway's unforgettable novel, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez have exhibited mad chemistry and a deep longing to be together. Playgirl Brett and journalist Jake live it up in Europe as they try to make it work but in the end they can't go the distance. Similarly, after two high-profile love affairs (nearly twenty years apart), multiple wedding ceremonies and myriad public displays of affection, Bennifer 2.0 came to a sad end in August. We feel for them. Breaking up is hard to do.
She's been dubbed the Champion of Cute. Time magazine called her an Icon. A cosmetics chain advised potential customers to "wear your blush like a baby hippo." She even showed up in an SNL sketch. In September, the two-month-old pygmy hippo whose name means "bouncy pork" became an internet sensation when videos of her frolicking joyfully around her enclosure in a Thailand zoo went viral. Sandra Boynton's 1966 picture book about a raucous hippo party serves as an apt tribute.
We've had this hotly anticipated film on our radar for many years now. (The project was announced more than a decade ago!) The 2021 casting of stars, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, only heightened our collective expectations. Did it live up to the hype? We're glad to report that it did. And then some! Of course, we considered the obvious choice for this classic volume, but instead settled on Jean Rhys's 1966 novel, which offers a sympathetic backstory for Antoinette, aka Bertha, the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. The two works explore similar themes of the power of labels and the pain of alienation.
As always, we love hearing from you. So let us know if you have any thoughts on our 2024 retrospective here in the comments.
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