People who watch publishing can often do so without any need to read the books it produces. That’s because, like any industry, publishing is filled with narratives, drama, and mysteries, many of which are fueled by gossip and often contradict each other. As such, those engaged in the publishing business were caught up this year in stories about the major houses becoming even more major through acquisitions and small press distributors closing. At the same time, independent bookstores kept opening, and new (or at least invigorated) readers seemed to be flooding into the market (thank you, romantasy).
Industry consolidation or not, publishers of all sizes and tastes kept publishing more fascinating books than anybody could come close to reading in a year. However, the indomitable critics here at PopMatters did our level best throughout 2024 to keep up. As usual, we paid special attention to the exhilarating number of books on music that came our way. Questlove just keeps knocking out books along with 50 quintillion other projects (is that workaholism or just passion?). There were also new volumes on R.E.M., the black roots of country, Jesus and Mary Chain, 2 Tone Records, Beatlemania, and more. Here and there, generalists that we are, we dipped into a broad range of nonfictional reading, from Greil Marcus on creativity to Steve Coll on why the Iraq War happened.
We also looked at the short fiction of Naomi Novik (she of the spectacular dragon alternate history Temeraire series) and a novel that turns a Mark Twain classic inside out. Read on to find out what else you should be reading now so that you can be ready for the books coming in 2025. – Chris Barsanti
PopMatters Best Books of 2024 are presented alphabetically by title.
1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left by Robyn Hitchcock (Akashic)
Robyn Hitchcock‘s memoir begins with a paragraph that brings to mind the great Italian novelist Italo Calvino’s 1979 novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. He observes that although he shares the same body and memories as the subject of this book, it feels like it is a life lived by someone else. 1967 taps into the music high that untethered the restraints of boarding school and shaped his life and music for eternity.
In February 1967, his life course was set when his parents gave him his first guitar. More revelations will come when he hears Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” for the first time while visiting a literal pig pen on his family’s property. In the spring of 1967, he meets a truly forward-thinking hipster, a young Brian Eno. Indeed, 1967 makes Hitchcock “the me I’ll be for the rest of my life.” He provides a quick epilogue when he catches up with some of his classmates decades later and how he loses his “psychic virginity” when he first gets stoned in 1968.
Hitchcock concludes, “That stopped clock of 1967 ticks on in me. And it’s given me a job for life.” – Sal Cataldi
The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq by Steve Coll (Penguin Press)
Relatively few writers have tried answering the question so many have and will continue to ask about the Iraq War: “Why?” The latest deep dive from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Steve Coll is as masterful at illuminating the layers of bafflement, arrogance, poor decision-making, and downright bad luck leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq as Ghost Wars, his 2004 history of the Afghanistan shadow conflict.
With The Achilles Trap, Coll marshals all his reportorial and research skills to paint a picture of Saddam Hussein and how he got that way. The picture is both more complex than the cartoonish dictator figure presented in pro-war propaganda and more harrowing in its depiction of his cold-blooded homicidal calculations. Though the West kept making the wrong calls by relying on bad intelligence from dicey figures, Hussein answered in kind. He obsessed over Israel and real and imagined enemies before withdrawing into a late mad emperor phase where he wrote novels instead of preparing for the coming war. Not long before America’s invasion, Hussein asked his deputy prime minister if they even had any weapons of mass destruction. The farcical quality of Coll’s writing about Iraq and America’s leaders shouting past each other could serve as a black comedy ala filmmaker Adam McKay. – Chris Barsanti
And the Roots of Rhythm Remain by Joe Boyd (Ze Books)
Music, like food, brings people together. It makes the artificial borders drawn on maps all too obvious. In reality, we’re all in this together, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the throbbing beats and howling horns of jazz, blues, hip-hop, and thousands of other fascinating hybrids.
And The Roots of Rhythm Remain by producer and music historian Joe Boyd is a guidebook to this intangible, shifting realm. At nearly 1,000 pages, it’s equal parts encyclopedia and biography, music history and memoir. Boyd travels through South Africa, Cuba, Brazil, and Bulgaria within its sprawling, spiraling chapters. Along the way, he meanders through topics as wide-ranging as African apartheid to Soviet history. While Boyd is passionate and optimistic about music’s ability to unite us, he doesn’t shy away from complex topics like cultural appropriation.
Most impressively of all, thanks to Boyd’s scoping, awe-inspiring depth of knowledge paired with a light, breezy, genuinely entertaining writing style, And The Roots Of Rhythm Remain is delightfully entertaining and readable. Whether you’re a fan of African, Cuban, or Brazilian music or any of the countless other styles that get unfairly lumped under the banner “World Music”, a fan of Boyd’s production or last book, the excellent White Bicycles (2006), or just a believer in the communal power of music, And the Roots of Rhythm Remain is an absolute must-read. – J Simpson
Autonomy: Portrait of a Buzzcock by Steve Diggle (Omnibus)
Buzzcocks’ original bassist, later guitarist, Steve Diggle, is justifiably proud of his band’s role in spearheading the punk movement. His new autobiography, Autonomy: Portrait of a Buzzcock, has all the fury and filth of a tell-all punk memoir. It also provides a wider account of the punk scene from a first-hand observer with a keen eye for drama and detail.
Indeed, Diggle’s natural gift for storytelling is evident throughout Autonomy. Although he doesn’t shy away from sordid details – his struggles with addiction and regrettable behaviour in domestic life – he keeps the narrative lively with funny anecdotes from the world of punk. His tribute to Pete Shelley’s quiet genius is poignant and unpretentious. Beyond any interest readers may have in Buzzcocks themselves, Autonomy provides stimulating insight into the bedraggled ups and downs of a hard-working rock band. It’s a refreshing take in an era when punk’s political and social consequences tend to be over-analyzed. – Peter Thomas Webb
The Avian Hourglass by Lindsey Drager (Dzanc)
Author and professor Lindsey Drager’s The Avian Hourglass presents a deeply engaging journey through dreamlike terrain. It is intellectually even more challenging and weird than her excellent 2019 novel, The Archive of Alternate Endings.
In the aftermath of a solar eclipse, all birds have disappeared (although bird-less, human-sized nests mysteriously pop up all around town). The ghost of the missing birds plays an ever-present if low-key role throughout The Avian Hourglass, including “narrating” an important local folktale, “Girl in Glass Vessel”, which mirrors Drager’s narrative. While navigating many odd circumstances, The Avian Hourglass provides a continuous stream of consciousness; scientific, literary, and philosophical. Drager ruminates on fiction’s paradoxical function: “to illuminate a truth”, noting that “the ending must be inevitable but also surprising so that it both fulfills … expectations and also subverts them.” Constituting something of a trope in creative writing circles, this insightful maxim will also be true of The Avian Hourglass‘ ending. – R.P. Finch
Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons by Benjamin Barson (Wesleyan University Press)
A Nazi march in Columbus, Ohio. Flyers plastered in Northwest Indiana from the local chapter of the KKK. A policy mandate to infuse Christian nationalism into the federal government. These are not the headlines of old, but national news from November 2024. As we brace for the onslaught of the second Donald Trump administration, we are reminded of more troubling moments in American history when white nationalism was the accepted order of the day and dominated all aspects of political and social life. From that horrific savagery came a movement that created a musical language for capturing resistance.
That music is jazz, and its story frames Benjamin Barson’s outstanding Brassroots Democracy, which inspires hope about what is possible under the bleakest conditions. If a music built on solidarity with multicultural roots was a vehicle for change, could it happen again? Could another “Afro-Indigenous alliance” as “vibrant cradles of cultural creation” create a new music (and therefore a new politics) to support the needs of those New Americans who may be marginalized, targeted, and possibly denaturalized in the next Trump administration? Brassroots Democracy details the beautiful and bleak ways that jazz music created the soundtrack of an emancipatory movement that lasts to this day. –Shyam K. Sriram
Buried Deep by Naomi Novik (Del Rey)
Buried Deep collects almost 20 years of award-winning Naomi Novik’s acclaimed short stories. It is a treasure trove for fans who no longer need to hunt through a dozen anthologies to find them individually. Some stories have already achieved legendary status, such as her retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice—with dragons! Novik’s fans from her nine-book Temeraire series will delight in the abundance of dragons in this collection, including in the tale of “Vici”, which traces the militarization of dragons back to Rome and Antony.
Buried Deep is an excellent way to familiarize oneself with Naomi Novik’s work if her award-winning contributions to American speculative fiction have somehow been missed over the past two decades. Her ability to blend rich, imaginative worlds with profound character development and thematic depth ensures that Buried Deep will captivate long-time fans and new readers, solidifying her status as a master storyteller. – Megan Volpert
Dancing on My Own: Essays on Art, Collectivity, and Joy by Simon Wu (Harper)
Art curator Simon Wu’s sharp essay collection, Dancing on My Own: Essays on Art, Collectivity, and Joy, is full of delightful surprises, not the least of which is its readings of music, art, and fashion in terms of the social and collective, rather than the merely individual. The thread of music, including Robyn’s song that provided the book’s title, intriguingly reinforces that idea of collectivity, while Wu explores the legacies of fellow queer Asian American artists and their work.
Even considering the problems of our world in these times, Wu finds much room for sincere celebration amidst grief, which makes Dancing on My Own all the more important. – Joshua Friedberg
Drums & Demons: The Tragic Story of Jim Gordon by Joel Selvin (Diversion)
With more than a dozen excellent books about music under his belt and 30+ years as rock music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, each of Joel Selvin’s books is definitive – the first and last you need to read on any subject he gets his teeth into. With Drums & Demons, he chronicles the star-crossed life of the greatest rock drummer most people haven’t heard of for a good reason: Jim Gordon.
Jim came of age as one of the go-to drummers in the legendary LA band the Wrecking Crew. He is the person who kept the beat and added memorable percussive hooks to the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” and “Heroes and Villains”, Sonny & Cher’s “The Beat Goes On”, Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman” and “Gentle on My Mind,” Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poney’s “Different Drum,” Harry Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin’,” “Mason Williams’ “Classical Gas”, CSN’s “Marrakesh Express”, Tiny Tim’s “Tiptoe Thru the Tulips” and dozens more.
He left the studio for the road, joining Delaney & Bonnie, Leon Russell and Joe Cocker, and Eric Clapton’s Derek and the Dominoes. However, Gordon was plagued by mental illness, which ultimately led to him losing his skills and taking the life of his mother. Selvin navigates the highs and lows in this essential text with great empathy for one of rock’s most tragic talents. – Sal Cataldi
Giant Robot: Thirty Years of Defining Asian American Pop Culture ed. Eric Nakamura (Drawn & Quarterly)
Over 13 years since it ceased publication, the magazine Giant Robot stands as an indelible force in the American melting pot of popular culture. Media wasn’t always this diverse. Giant Robot was created during a time in US history when representation of Asian Americans was problematic, if not scant, in American media. When there was representation outside of Bruce Lee and a few others, it was relegated to Asian stereotypes. Giant Robot was created by Eric Nakamura and Martin Wong in Los Angeles in 1994. Driven by a punk ethos and according to Nakamura, the small zine “encapsulated the passion and energy of what excited my small world of friends”.
Giant Robot: Thirty Years of Defining Asian American Pop Culture is a celebration. This volume preserves much of what made it special. It doesn’t include all the magazine’s articles. However, the new material included in this massive book—the interviews, archival photographs, and reflections—combined with its curation of older material makes it a must for fans of Giant Robot and pop culture aficionados. – Luis Aguiasvivas
The Half-Life of Guilt by Lynn Stegner (High Road)
The Half-Life of Guilt‘s plot is a simple story about a couple on a difficult ten-day road trip from the Bay Area down the length of California and into Baja. It is an engaging tale in and of itself, but it floats above turbulent currents. In a family-owned Napa Valley winery and vineyard, Clair grew up dominated by her twin, Nina, a childhood that informs Clair’s adult relationships. Central to this elaborate flashback is a gruesome childhood event infused with guilt that is a permanent inflection point in their lives.
The Half-Life of Guilt embodies a modern form of the traditional journey motif, in this case, a quest with two goals: protecting nature and definitively determining the contours of the travelers’ relationship. It’s an engrossing story with vivid detail, fully dimensional characters, and the unmediated interiority of the protagonist’s mind. Lynn Stegner’s extraordinary crafting of language throughout makes for a truly outstanding novel. There is no guilty pleasure in reading The Half-Life of Guilt. There is only pleasure.
– R.P. Finch
Hip-Hop Is History by Questlove (AUWA)
Since Questlove has been immersed in music and hip-hop in every way possible, what he conveys in Hip-Hop Is History is inseparable from his personal life and experiences. Questlove is many things, though not your typical historian. In Hip-Hop is History, he uses his knowledge and experience to his advantage in every way, bringing unique and fresh perspectives. His well-honed instincts are spot-on. This makes for an immensely entertaining, if not indispensable, history of the most important musical genre of the last half-century.
Questlove notes that this is not an encyclopedia because it would have to be “fifty years long.” Instead, his way of keeping things focused is “less omission than mission”. He has a knack for navigating seemingly all of the most critical artists’ threads and trends, along with his many asides and excursions, across half a century. Questlove obviously had fun writing this book. With its deft layering of words, its samples, and how it articulates sound, reading Questlove’s Hip-Hop Is History is like listening to De La Soul’s excellent album 3 Feet High and Rising. – James A. Cosby
A Hitch in Time: Reflections Ready for Reconsideration by Christopher Hitchens (Twelve)
A Hitch in Time is an anthology of the writings of gleefully pugilistic posthumous Christopher Hitchens. A columnist of the old breed, Hitchens didn’t narrow his remit. He darted across culture, politics, and history. He expounded on P.G. Wodehouse with the same authority he used to break down the fascist underpinnings of America’s militia movement, socialist factions in the pre-and postwar years, or the internecine power plays of Kurdistan. There were no dry, serious essays or lighthearted, fun ones. Each piece was just as compelling, pellucid, and witty.
The figures Hitchens focuses his ire on are almost always well-chosen. Yet, the dark is frequently leavened with the light in this fierce yet often wonderfully waggish collection. That spirit of louche sauciness extends through this collection. The closest thing most of us will get to having been in Hitchens’ orbit, A Hitch in Time positively reeks of cigarette smoke, loud schismatic arguments, emptied liters of Johnnie Walker Black, unprintable humor, and dauntingly fierce erudition. – Chris Barsanti
I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays about the Women Singers Who’ve Made Me Who I Am by Zachary Pace (Two Dollar Radio)
Poet Zachary Pace’s debut essay collection, I Sing to Use the Waiting, reflects on some of the female singers that have influenced their queer identity. Pace engages with issues such as Madonna’s spirituality, Cat Power’s bootleg performances, Cher’s movie roles, Rihanna’s relationship to the colonial history of Barbados, and Joanna Newsom’s vocabulary to create a book that is wide in scope yet highly personal and lyrical. They incorporate queer theory and psychoanalytic theory to inform readings of different voices, and some of the most devastating essays focus on Whitney Houston, Pocahontas (the person and the 1995 Disney movie), and Pace’s familial relations. Though less ambitious than the other books on this list, I Sing to Use the Waiting deserves special recognition for the quality of its prose and the sharpness of its ideas. – Joshua Friedberg
James by Percival Everett (Doubleday)
Written from the perspective of Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Percival Everett’s novel is as subversive as some of his best work and occasionally as playful, but ultimately far more straightforward and powerful for it. James doesn’t try to “reimagine” or “reclaim” Mark Twain’s classic tale, existing instead in a kind of parallel universe where Everett is filling in the things Twain left out or could not imagine (the inner lives of black people, for one) and creating a complementary story for Jim that expands and enriches his relationship with Huck.
Like in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the action in James is largely river-bound, as Jim and Huck steal down the Mississippi, the former escaping an attempt to sell him off and the latter wanting an adventure and to escape his drunken father. Everett’s language games are threaded throughout, especially in the book’s conceit that when no white people are around, enslaved people speak without the minstrel-type dialect that Twain used. However, unlike in a novel like 2001’s Erasure, where the protagonist’s intellectualism gets the better of him, Jim’s secret bookishness is a point of pride and a root of his strength.
Written in a clean, propulsive style, James is an adventure story told with a tart satirical voice Twain would have appreciated, and a raw emotional pull Twain never could deliver. – Chris Barsanti
Lazarus Man by Richard Price (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Though it starts with an explosion—or an implosion, really, when a five-story tenement building in East Harlem suddenly collapses – as poorly-maintained century-ish-old buildings in New York do at times—the latest novel from Richard Price is not in much of a hurry to thrill readers. It’s all the better for it. Setting Lazarus Man in 2008, Price uses the building collapse as an X-ray to examine the lives of neighbors and others (a crusty funeral-home director, a naïve new-to-the-city photographer, a burned-out NYPD detective) around the incident, none less than the man who somehow survives the collapse.
The joys of this spectacular fiction come in the hinges between the action, such as it is, with Price using his gimlet eye for detail and psychological clarity to bring each character to life with an intoxicating richness. Lazarus Man doesn’t have the masterfully racing plot of his last crime novel, 2015’s The Whites, but is somehow no less a page-turner. – Chris Barsanti
The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason by Don Armstrong (Bloomsbury Academic)
Rolling Stone co-founder Ralph J. Gleason predates that golden era of music journalism when Lester Bangs and Robert Christgau thrived. Gleason and businessman Jann Wenner began working together in 1966 when Wenner was hired as a staff writer for the leftist magazine Ramparts, a publication that also featured Gleason’s work. The two launched Rolling Stone the following year, covering the current music scene, counterculture, and politics. Gleason went from discovering Duke Ellington as a teenager on his bedroom radio to writing scathing indictments of President Nixon during the Watergate scandal.
What set Ralph J. Gleason apart from other music journalists was his indifference to genre labels and generation gaps and his genuine love of the music. “Gleason’s writings model the type of criticism [Ted] Gioia yearns for,” Don Armstrong writes in The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason. “Gleason eschewed lifestyle reporting and celebrityism and raised his children to see great musicians as everyday people.
Armstrong’s incisive writing chronicles the life of this legend, who passed away in 1975 at 58. Gleason’s legacy as Rolling Stone’s cofounder is secure, as his name remains on the masthead to this day. – Chris Ingalls
Muzzle for Witches by Dubravka Ugrešić (Open Letter)
Sit down and pour yourself a glass, stein, or cup of whatever you like to drink from. Before you sip, chug, or quaff, raise the vessel to Dubravka Ugrešić and thank her for being among our time’s best independent, iconoclastic, and undersung authors.
Ugrešić is no longer with us, but she left many valuable guideposts to help us negotiate the darkness, including the defiant Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (2011), the tragic tales in 2007’s The Ministry of Pain and The Museum of Unconditional Surrender from 1977 (RIP Roland the walrus), and the justly celebrated Fording the Stream of Consciousness (1988). Ugrešić also wrote many essays taking on the increasing nationalism, violent rhetoric, and intolerance in what used to be Yugoslavia; the new Croatian government and its literary establishment branded her as a traitor and a witch. Still, she continued to fight the good fight against fascism and sexism even after her self-exile to Amsterdam and working teaching gigs around the world. Dubravka Ugrešić was a real one, and she deserves all the praise we can sing to her.
If you have read any of her works, you will salivate over Muzzle for Witches. It is a collection of her conversations with literary critic Merima Omeragić, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać. If you don’t know Dubravka Ugrešić’s works, this current volume will serve as a worthy introduction to “Ugresiciana”. In this grimly funny collection of conversations, Dubravka Ugrešić bites the hand that muzzles women. – Matt Cibula
My Black Country: A Journey through Country Music’s Black Past, Present, and Future by Alice Randall (Atria/Black Privilege Publishing)
Alice Randall, the first Black woman to co-write a #1 country hit, Trisha Yearwood’s “XXX’s and OOO’s (An American Girl),” has written a fantastic, moving memoir with a strong integration of music history and personal narrative. Her prose in My Black Country is elegant and evocative, rich in place and atmosphere, with exceptional insight into the history of country music and Black participation therein.
Randall writes passionately about her First Family of Black Country, including early figures like Lil Hardin and later superstars like Charley Pride. She recounts her journey in the country music industry, facing racism and sexism. Her recuperative work, discovering and highlighting erased Black country figures, makes clear the indisputable significance of Black people in country music. – Joshua Friedberg