My 2024 Two Book Best Books Recommended Reading List.
By Joline Godfrey
I read three of four books at a time, letting them live in the upstairs and downstairs rooms of my house. I always have books tucked into my briefcase as running out of reading material 32,000 feet up because a battery runs out is a special dread. Which is to say my reading experience is steady, eclectic, broad, and deep. When asked what I’m reading that I like, I normally say I have many ‘favorite’ books and go on to describe a half dozen or more.
But this year my recommended book list is austere, pared to the minimum. I hope that by asking less, I may gain more of your attention. Lists of ten or twelve or one hundred “best books" dilute the power of any one book. This year, my Best Books List is just two books.
The two are very different. One is a work of fiction set in the near future; the other is non-fiction, ostensibly about the past. What they have in common is that, though each is set in a different zone of time; both are painfully of our time; relevant in our daily lives right now, existentially critical to our collective futures. Both hurt to read. Both illuminate our times and folly. One is concerned with the existential threat to our planet; the other to our soul.
The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton is set in Key West and begins with the birth of a little girl in a Category 4 hurricane. For anyone who gave birth to a child in the middle of Hurricane Helene, my reference to ’near future' likely misses the mark. But in the book, the extreme weather of a Cat 4 hurricane is just another day in the lives of the die-hards who persist in the Light Pirate’s Florida Keys.
The novel gently, irrevocably, horrifyingly tracks a little girl whose family has ignored all climate threats to their home and lives for years. They soldier on, waiting, not so much with hope or optimism, but with blind faith that things will ‘return to normal’ even as disaster becomes the normal of their daily lives.
For most of my life I've been undaunted by big storms and harrowing hurricanes. Having lived through the Blizzard of ’78 which turned Rte 128 in Massachusetts into a parking lot and my ten stories up apartment into a walk-up for two weeks, I can say I've endured extreme weather. A Mainer by birth I'm pretty tough; cold, ice, snow—just another winter.
But adaptability is a two edged sword: a mark of resilience on the one hand; a dangerous readiness to accept the most terrible circumstances on the other. The Light Pirate paints, in an almost romantic light, the danger of our capacity to deny to adapt.
Science fiction has always served as a kind ‘weak signal from the future’ for me. And I suspect that H. G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and Rod Serling are all having a good laugh about how many of the stories they gave us have morphed from fiction to fact. The Light Pirate is a not so weak signal from the future that we ignore at our peril.
The Warmth Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson was published in 2011. Because reading ‘everything’ is not possible, some great books inevitably get left behind. When it came out, I read reviews and, thinking the story of the Great Migration of Blacks out of the post-Civil War South was something I was familiar with, I let it go.
But for reasons still unclear (perhaps book angels tapped on my shoulder), I started to read it this summer and could not put it down. Written pre-Trump, pre-2016, it is written by an extraordinary historian who no doubt understands that the story she told was NOT just history. Reading now, after eight years of enduring politicians who want nothing more than to resurrect a world of Jim Crow laws (repackaged as Project 2025 laws), the story is an odd kind of metaverse: both ‘ripped from the headlines’ while documenting the past.
And Wilkerson does more than document the story of the Great Migration, she shares meticulously researched evidence of untruths that span decades, that are 2024 untruths.
Deconstructing the Cicero, Il. race riot of 1951, for example, when a mob of 4,000 whites attacked an apartment building that housed a single black family, she shows how ”a downward spiral [in real estate] created a vacuum that speculators could exploit for their own gain.They could scoop up properties in potentially unstable white neighborhoods and extract higher prices from colored people…” Wilkerson quotes historian Arnold Hirsch who sums it up, “The panic peddler and the ‘respectable’ broker earned the greatest profits..from the greatest degree of white desperation.”
What is the extremist element of the GOP, embodied in Trump and Vance but panic peddlers and (not so much) ‘respectable’ brokers? Springfield, Ohio in 2024 is just another iteration of Cicero, Il in 1951. We can be a little heartened that there seems to be greater pushback in Springfield to villainizing Haitians, but we cannot be resigned or optimistic that the peddlers and brokers are giving up. Evil seems tenaciously resilient.
Brooks-Dalton and Wilkerson are not the only writers howling for our attention. But as a short list of writers go, they are not a bad place to begin. Our beautiful blue marble is besieged by the effects of climate change. Our soul is battered by hate and fear. But I am not resigned. Our job is to get up every morning and battle the peddlers of fear and the brokers of desperation. Kamala Harris is on to it with her message of joy. Hope is not enough. Joyful action is what we need now.