During my last several years as the Gazette’s arts and features writer, I compiled a list of my favorite books of the year each December, given that newspapers all do that best-of-the-year thing and I thought it would be fun to get on board myself.

Though I’m no longer at the paper, the Gazette has graciously allowed me to expound on books again, so here are some of my favorite reads of 2024, consisting mostly of titles from the past few years and a few from further back, listed roughly in the order I read them. Hope you find something of interest here.

“The Bee Sting” by Paul Murray

This 2023 title from the Irish novelist Paul Murray was a finalist for the Booker Prize and also ended up on the top-10 book lists of multiple publications. It’s a simultaneously tragic and comedic story of a formerly prosperous family that’s starting to come apart following Ireland’s financial crash of 2008-2009.

Dickie Barnes runs a once-successful car dealership that’s now hemorrhaging money. His wife, Imelda, a legendary local beauty who grew up in poverty, is terrified by the prospect of financial ruin. Meanwhile, their teen daughter, Tess, is desperate to escape to college, and their 12-year-old son, PJ, is being stalked online by someone he thinks is just a cool potential friend in Dublin.

Told from the perspectives of the four characters, all of whom have distinctive voices, “The Bee Sting” effortlessly weaves past and present, revealing how previous deceptions and secrets, combined with the randomness of life, can dismantle what seems a picture-perfect family. It’s 650 pages, but I zipped right through it; there’s a haunting ending that will stay with you.

“Gangsters of Capitalism” by Jonathan M. Katz

Part biography, part reassessment of the creation of the U.S. colonial empire of the first half of the 20th century, “Gangsters of Capitalism” profiles Smedley Butler, a legendary and highly decorated Marine who took part in nearly every U.S. war and military intervention of that era, from Mexico to Nicaragua, Cuba to the Dominican Republic, and the Philippines to China.

Butler, who rose from 16-year-old private in 1898 to become a major-general by the early 1930s, came to believe he’d mostly served as a tool for suppressing the populations of other countries to advance U.S. business interests — “a racketeer for capitalism,” as he put it in a 1935 book he wrote after leaving the Marines, “War is a Racket.”

For this 2023 book, Katz traveled to all the places Smedley served — the author even had a small role in an independent Filipino movie about their 1899-1902 war with American troops — to see what our past decades of gunboat diplomacy have wrought. It’s not a pretty picture, he says, noting that one legacy is the economic and political collapse of many Latin American countries, sending people surging today to the southern U.S. border.

“Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver

I really liked this 2023 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, a reimagining of Dickens’ “David Copperfield,” in which a young boy, Damon Fields, narrates his hard-luck story growing up in poverty in the hills of western Virginia. Born to a single mom in a trailer, Damon must contend with his mother’s drug addiction, an indifferent stepfather, child labor, foster care, second-rate schools and, as a teen, the opioid crisis.

Yet he tackles all of this with humor, pluck and resilience. Like a modern-day Huckleberry Finn or Holden Caulfield, Damon tells his tale in everyday language. There’s tragedy and loss here, and a well-drawn portrait of small-town America bypassed by the rest of the country, but in the end Damon’s voice, and Kingsolver’s empathy for her characters, makes “Demon Copperhead” an inspiring read; it’s storytelling on a grand scale.

“The Searcher” and “The Hunter” by Tana French

French, an Irish-American novelist who was raised partly in Vermont but has lived in Dublin for 30-odd years, has been a big name in crime fiction since 2007, publishing a series of novels set in and around Dublin. But I discovered her this year through her two most recent books, published in 2020 and 2024, respectively.

Both “The Searcher” and “The Hunter” are centered on French’s first American character, Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago cop who leaves behind a failed marriage to settle in a village in western Ireland, where he just wants to fix up his cottage and have a few quiet pints in the local pub. But in “The Searcher,” he’s soon enlisted by a troubled young teen to help find her missing older brother, and in doing so Cal discovers his bucolic new home has an undercurrent of danger and secrets. “The Hunter” expands the story a few years later.

French initially trained as an actor and has worked in theater and film, experience that seems to have enriched the dialogue in her novels; it sparkles with humor and nuance. Her two new books also feature great depictions of the Irish countryside; though she’s tagged as a crime/mystery writer, she is, simply put, a very good writer. (I do need my cell phone handy when I read her books to look up all the Irish slang and cultural references.)

“The Wide Wide Sea” by Hampton Sides

The narrative historian and journalist’s newest book retraces the last voyage of the English explorer and naval commander James Cook, who’d become a celebrated figure following two previous tours in the Pacific Ocean. Cook, an expert cartographer, was also, by 18th-century standards, pretty respectful of the indigenous people he met on his travels.

But something went wrong on the final journey, from 1776-1779, as Cook became increasingly mercurial, lashing out at crew members and the native people the explorers met; he was killed in February 1779 in a clash he provoked with Hawaiian warriors. Sides examines the legacy of these fraught encounters and of colonialism while also presenting a memorable account of the harshness of life aboard 18th-century sailing ships.

“James” by Percival Everett

I read “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” years ago, so I didn’t remember too many details of the story when I dug into Percival’s 2024 National Book Award winning novel, a reboot of Mark Twain’s famous tale, told from the perspective of the enslaved Jim.

That made “James” even fresher, a tale that mixes terror, righteous anger, and comedy in equal measures. With Huck and the other white people he encounters, Jim speaks in the fractured cadence that whites expected of Blacks. Among themselves, the Black characters are eloquent and wry, especially when they consider the best way to deal with whites and stay out of trouble.

“Mumble sometimes so they can have the satisfaction of telling you not to mumble,” James coaches Lizzie, an enslaved woman. “They enjoy the correction and thinking you’re stupid.”

Funny, deadpan dialogue like that, as well as a series of hair-raising adventures James and Huck have as they raft down the Mississippi River in search of freedom, makes “James” a subversive commentary on a classic American novel.

“The Demon of Unrest” by Erik Larson

Larson’s newest book, published this year, also plumbs the topic of slavery with an engrossing look at the runup to the Civil War during the five months that preceded the shelling of Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, and the attack itself. It was a period about which Abraham Lincoln later said the trials the nation faced were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”

With his usual storytelling panache, Larson sketches vivid portraits of people like Sumter’s commander, Major Robert Anderson, a one-time slave owner who nevertheless remained loyal to the union, and Edmund Ruffin, a Southern hothead and secessionist spoiling for war. Then there’s William Seward, Lincoln’s nominee for secretary of state, who seems intent on undercutting the incoming president at every opportunity. A page-turning narrative even if we know where it’s headed.

“Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA” by Tim Weiner

I read this after watching a Netflix documentary series on the Cold War; Weiner, one of the talking heads for the program, is a longtime reporter who won a 2007 National Book Award for this book, and he also received a 1988 Pulitzer Prize (with The Philadelphia Inquirer) for his reporting on the CIA and the Pentagon.

Weiner reviewed 50,000 previously classified documents for this crisply written history, and he paints a despairing picture of CIA operations and post-WWII U.S. foreign policy. It’s a story of both staggering ineptitude and Machiavellian politics, in which the CIA, under Republican and Democratic presidents alike, helped overturn free elections in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile, attempted to assassinate foreign leaders such as Fidel Castro, and interfered in any number of other countries to advance American interests.

And the agency’s “successes” have been far fewer than its failures, Weiner says, from botched early Cold War operations to the inability to anticipate 9/11 to the false claims in 2003 that Sadam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It was President Eisenhower, Weiner writes, who as far back as 1959 said the CIA’s poor leadership and failure to define its mission had handed the nation “a legacy of ashes.”

“The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory” by Tim Alberta

For anyone trying to understand why so many American evangelicals have embraced Donald Trump, Alberta’s 2023 book may be the best guide. Alberta, a staff writer for The Atlantic, knows the terrain well: He’s a practicing Christian, and his father was an evangelical pastor. But Alberta is deeply troubled by a movement that he believes has become more concerned with owning the libs than following the word of God.

Traveling to churches around the country, Alberta works hard to be even-handed, speaking to evangelicals about their fears of a secular America that they believe is hostile to Christians. Yet he also recounts the sex scandals that have plagued a number of churches and the dismissal of pastors and other leaders who speak out against Trump; his portraits of evangelical preachers who rail from the pulpit against COVID vaccines, face masks, and other liberal “evils” are pretty disturbing.

I’d also like to give a nod to some fine books by a number of area writers that I wrote about earlier this year in the Gazette: “Prequel – An American Fight Against Fascism” by Rachel Maddow; “The Book of Love” by Kelly Link; “The Real Gatsby” by Mickey Rathbun; and “Antidemocratic” by David Daley.

Steve Pfarrer, now retired, is a former arts and features reporter for the Gazette.