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