My Top Books in 2024

The best books that I read this year.

Welcome back to The Burnett Breakdown! I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and are getting their resolutions ready for the New Year. One resolution that will be easy to keep is to like, subscribe, comment, or share this newsletter with all you think would enjoy it!

I did this same list at the end of last year (which you can read here) and I’m going to follow the same format. As I said last year, my goal in recapping my year in reading is to hopefully spark someone’s interest enough for them to pick one of these books up for themselves. Without further ado, here are my top books from the following year.

Best Fiction: Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

Last year, my must-read book was another Wendell Berry novel - Hannah Coulter. In Jayber Crow, which Berry wrote years before Hannah Coulter, he writes about the same community and characters but this time focusing on Jayber Crow, the barber of Port William, Kentucky.

Orphaned at age 5 and then sent to an orphanage at age 10, Jayber from the beginning has no roots or connections with others. This theme of aimlessness continues throughout the first third, maybe even half, of the book as Jayber is not even in Port William. Instead, he bounces around trying to figure out what the rest of his life is going to look like. He attends a seminary which he leaves after wrestling too much with his faith to believe that he was called to be a preacher. Jayber moves to the big city of Lexington where he works at a horse track and with a local barber.

Unsatisfied by city life, Jayber leaves Lexington with his “home” (he only lived there for a couple of years when he was a child) of Port William as a vague destination. After an Odysseus-like journey, Jayber stumbles into Port William and becomes the town’s barber and gravedigger. This is how Jayber spends the rest of his life.

Over the course of his life, Jayber falls in love with a girl that he cannot be with because she is married. Nonetheless, Jayber’s love for this girl is responsible for transforming Jayber as a person and ultimately his life.

As always with Wendell Berry, this novel is a study on what it means to be a part of a community. Jayber doesn’t live an extravagant or adventurous life, but he commits himself to a particular place and the people in that place. This commitment is the product of a deep love for Port William and its residents, but it also leads Jayber deeper into love.

This theme of love permeates the novel and the reader is left pondering the nature and effect of love on a person. The Christian overtones are unmistakable.

Quotation to Consider: “Young lovers see a vision of the world redeemed by love. That is the truest thing they ever see, for without it life is death.”

Honorable Mention: The Chosen by Chaim Potok

In some sense, this book is unlike any book that I’ve ever read. It’s a deep dive into a culture that I stand completely outside of and don’t know many of the nuisances that one within that culture would know - in this case, Jewish culture.

Potok writes about two Jewish boys who grow up within a few blocks of each other in New York City. Reuven Malter is a traditional Orthodox Jew who is the son of a prominent Jewish scholar. Danny Saunders a Hasidic Jew who is the heir to his Rabbi father’s position within their Hasidic community. The two boys start as mortal enemies only to become best friends and grow up together.

In the background of the story are major world events in the form of World War II, the Holocaust, and the establishment of Israel which all make their way into the narrative. However, the heart of the narrative is really the cultural conflict between Orthodox Jews and Hasidic Jews, a conflict I previously didn’t know existed.

To be frank though, it’s a hard novel to explain so I would just encourage anyone to give it a read if it at all piques your interest.

Quotation to Consider: “You can listen to silence, Reuven. I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it.”

Best Nonfiction: Transubstantiation by Brett Salkeld

As the title makes clear, this book is a study of the doctrine of transubstantiation. Transubstantiation is the belief (summed up very generally) that the bread and wine of communion is transfigured into the real body and blood of Jesus. Dr. Salkeld traces the history of this belief by analyzing what Christians of different eras believed, including Protestants such as Martin Luther and John Calvin, and ultimately how the Catholic Church settled its belief.

In the book, Dr. Salkeld is certainly focused on building bridges between different Christian traditions regarding transubstantiation. His desire is to show the commonality that various Christians have on the subject which does result in some minimization of differences, but it is altogether phenomenal study of the doctrine.

I will say that I would probably recommend having some knowledge about Aristotle’s philosophy going into the book especially his distinction between accidents and substances. This distinction really underlies the whole doctrine of transubstantiation so a lot of the book will go over your head if you don’t know it.

The book, by nature of the subject, also does a good job explaining the sacramental worldview of the early Christians. This sacramental perspective of everything is really different than today I think to our detriment. For this reason, along with the moral obligation of hearing the best arguments not a straw man for an opposing position, I think this book is worth reading whether one is Catholic or not.

Quotation to Consider: “Were God a being in or alongside of the universe, one of the natures in the world, God could not become a creature without ceasing to be God or compromising the ontological integrity of the creature he becomes. In fact, Christian teacher is not simply that Jesus was fully human, but even that he was more fully human than the rest of us. Far from limiting his humanity, his divinity perfects it.”

Honorable Mention: Civil War by Shelby Foote

I hesitate to mention this “book” because it’s really a three-volume series and because I have not finished the series yet, but I felt it was worthy of mention, nonetheless. Shelby Foote was from Mississippi and was a novelist before he started writing on the Civil War. As a result, this historical three-volume set reads very much like a novel instead of the typically dry history book.

It’s also absolutely massive. It’s about 3,000 pages in all with each volume being around 1,000 pages, but it’s massive in the content that it spans as well. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that Foote discusses pretty much every single skirmish and battle that took place over the course of the four-year war.

The best part of the books is Foote does not talk about the Civil War in terms of themes or abstract ideas. Instead, Foote simply tells what happened usually from the perspective of the characters themselves. This focus on events and individuals over themes humanizes the Confederates in ways that the “Union good, Confederate bad” typical way of discussing the Civil War does not. This has led some historians to claim Foote is promoting the “lost cause” narrative of the Civil War, but I don’t think this accusation carries much weight.

These books aren’t for everyone because of their sheer breadth but, for those who are interested, they are certainly worth it.

Quotation to Consider: “The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth - not a different truth: the same truth - only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them.”

Must Read: The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry

I will admit that this is an unusual book to list as my must-read book of the year, but I think this book discusses one of the most pressing issues of our time: our modern sexual ethic (or lack thereof). Louise Perry argues vehemently against the sexual revolution from a feminist perspective. She argues that it has been objectively bad for women.

Here is Amazon’s description of the book which aptly summarizes it:

Although it would be neither possible nor desirable to turn the clock back to a world of pre-60s sexual mores, she argues that the amoral libertinism and callous disenchantment of liberal feminism and our contemporary hypersexualised culture represent more loss than gain. The main winners from a world of rough sex, hook-up culture and ubiquitous porn – where anything goes and only consent matters – are a tiny minority of high-status men, not the women forced to accommodate the excesses of male lust.

The table of contents went viral for laying out what was once common sense. Things such as “Sex must be taken seriously” (Chapter 1), “Men and women are different” (Chapter 2), “Marriage is good” (Chapter 8), etc. In fact, Louise Perry has jokingly said in interviews about the book, and at the end of the book, that she is not saying anything other than repeating the advice that many grandmothers have given before.

I think this book is such a must-read because Louise Perry is not writing from a Christian perspective. From a secular (although she is interested in Christianity) perspective, she is providing a solidly research critique of the sexual revolution that Christians can get on board with. It turns out that when we try to live in the world created by God outside of the way that He designed it to be the consequences are dire. Perry does a wonderful job of demonstrating just how broken a world without a Christian sexual ethic really is.

Quotation to Consider: “We have smoothly transitioned from one form of feminine subservience to another, but we pretend that this one is liberation.”

God Bless,

Hunter Burnett