2024: A Year in Books – Top 6 Reads

In a year marked by both challenges and opportunities, the books I’ve chosen have offered deep insights into the resilience of the human spirit and share a common thread of examining relationships under pressure. 

Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo delves into the nuanced dynamics between brothers processing grief differently, while Hisham Matar’s The Return explores the persistent hope that binds us to absent loved ones. These narratives remind us that our most profound connections often reveal themselves in moments of loss and transformation.

The scope of human difference and resilience particularly resonated with me through Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree, which masterfully illustrates how families navigate extraordinary circumstances with grace and determination. This exploration of difference as a unifying force rather than a dividing one feels especially relevant in our increasingly complex world.

Perhaps most sobering is Applebaum’s Gulag, which serves as a historical document and a cautionary tale. Its inclusion reflects my belief that understanding our darkest chapters is crucial for building a more humane future. The book’s meticulous research and powerful narratives remind us that systems of oppression are built gradually, often through small compromises that accumulate into catastrophic human costs.

Together, these six books represent a journey through different facets of human resilience – whether in healing bodies, building businesses, preserving family bonds, seeking truth, accepting difference, or bearing witness to history. Each work offers its lesson in how we might approach the complexities of our own lives with greater wisdom and compassion.

I include the high-level Goodreads description of each work below, followed by my comments on why I recommend the book. Happy reading! 

1. Cutting Stone

Author:  Abraham Verghese 

Goodreads Description: 

A sweeping, emotionally riveting first novel – an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home.

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Yet it will be love, not politics—their passion for the same woman—that will tear them apart and force Marion, fresh out of medical school, to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him—nearly destroying him—Marion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.

An unforgettable journey into one man’s remarkable life and an epic story about the power, intimacy, and curious beauty of the work of healing others.

Read more here.

Why do I Recommend this Book? 

I recommend this masterful novel for its rich exploration of family bonds, medical dedication, and cultural identity. The author’s medical background brings authenticity to the detailed portrayal of hospital life and the art of healing. It’s a perfect read for those who appreciate multilayered storytelling that combines personal drama with broader historical contexts.

2. Entrepreneurial Acquisitions

Author:  Jan Simon

Goodreads Description: 

In the mid-eighties, a group of enterprising and industrious MBA students at Harvard Business School and Stanford Graduate School of Business pioneered an experiment which today we call “Search Funds.”

Captained and inspired by visionary Leader Irv Grousbeck, they designed a track that allowed them to acquire a company, become its CEO, and, if well executed, also be its largest shareholder. Supported by strong boards and a solid process, it turned an inexperienced entrepreneur into a successful business leader.

In this book, Jan Simon, Managing Partner of Vonzeo Capital and Academic Director of the International Search Fund Center at IESE Business School, presents a best-practices-based roadmap for searchers, acquisition entrepreneurs, investors and board members. Drawing on generous contributions from the search fund community as well as his own experience, he sheds light on how this community converted $1.4 billion of investments into $8.7 billion, with $1.8 billion going to the entrepreneurs.

Read more here.

Why do I Recommend this Book? 

I highly recommend this book to anyone considering participating in Venture for Canada’s Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition program! Simon provides an invaluable practical guide based on decades of real-world success stories, making complex concepts accessible. 

3. Intermezzo

Author:  Sally Rooney 

Goodreads Description: 

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

Read more here.

Why do I Recommend this Book?

I recommend this intimate exploration of grief from Sally Rooney, which feels particularly poignant in our current era, where collective and personal loss touch so many lives. As someone who has read all of Rooney’s works, I find this book resonates most deeply with me – its raw examination of how two brothers navigate devastating loss speaks to the universal yet deeply individual nature of grief. 

Being born the same year as Rooney (1991), I’m continually struck by how precisely she captures our millennial generation’s experience of love, loss, and meaning-making in an increasingly complex world. Her characteristic insight into modern relationships shines through, but she delves even deeper here, examining how we process pain individually and together. The story reminds us that human connection can offer solace and transformation even in our darkest moments. 

4. The Return

Author:  Hisham Matar 

Goodreads Description: 

From Man Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Hisham Matar, a memoir of his journey home to his native Libya in search of answers to his father’s disappearance. In 2012, after the overthrow of Qaddafi, the acclaimed novelist Hisham Matar journeys to his native Libya after an absence of thirty years.     

When he was twelve, Matar and his family went into political exile. Eight years later Matar’s father, a former diplomat and military man turned brave political dissident, was kidnapped from the streets of Cairo by the Libyan government and is believed to have been held in the regime’s most notorious prison.  Now, the prisons are empty and little hope remains that Jaballa Matar will be found alive. Yet, as the author writes, hope is “persistent and cunning”.    

This book is a profoundly moving family memoir, a brilliant and affecting portrait of a country and a people on the cusp of immense change, and a disturbing and timeless depiction of the monstrous nature of absolute power.

Read more here.

Why do I Recommend this Book?

What makes The Return especially valuable is how it moves beyond simple political analysis to show the ripple effects of authoritarianism across generations. His exploration of how his father’s disappearance shaped his own life speaks to how political trauma becomes intergenerational trauma – a pattern we continue to see playing out in many societies today.

5. Far From the Tree

Author:  Andrew Solomon

Goodreads Description: 

Andrew Solomon’s startling proposition in Far from the Tree is that being exceptional is at the core of the human condition—that difference is what unites us. He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down’s syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, or multiple severe disabilities; with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender. While each of these characteristics is potentially isolating, the experience of difference within families is universal, and Solomon documents triumphs of love over prejudice in every chapter.

All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent should parents accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves. Drawing on ten years of research and interviews with more than three hundred families, Solomon mines the eloquence of ordinary people facing extreme challenges.

Elegantly reported by a spectacularly original and compassionate thinker, Far from the Tree explores how people who love each other must struggle to accept each other—a theme in every family’s life.

Read more here.

Why do I Recommend this Book?

For readers seeking to understand better the lived experiences of people with disabilities and their families, this book serves as an invaluable primer, offering deep insights through intimate portraits and thoughtful analysis. It’s vital reading for anyone interested in understanding the complexity of family relationships and the true meaning of unconditional love.

6. Gulag

Author:  Anne Applebaum

Goodreads Description: 

The Gulag entered the world’s historical consciousness in 1972 with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s epic oral history of the Soviet camps, The Gulag Archipelago. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, dozens of memoirs and new studies covering aspects of that system have been published in Russia and the West. Using these new resources as well as her own original historical research, Ann Applebaum has now undertaken, for the first time, a fully documented history of the Soviet camp system, from its origins in the Russian Revolution to its collapse in the era of glasnost.

Anne Applebaum first lays out the chronological history of the camps and the logic behind their creation, enlargement, and maintenance. The Gulag was first put in place in 1918 after the Russian Revolution. In 1929, Stalin personally decided to expand the camp system, both to use forced labor to accelerate Soviet industrialization and to exploit the natural resources of the country’s barely inhabitable far northern regions. By the end of the 1930s, labor camps could be found in all twelve of the Soviet Union’s time zones. The system continued to expand throughout the war years, reaching its height only in the early 1950s. From 1929 until the death of Stalin in 1953, some 18 million people passed through this massive system. Of these 18 million, it is estimated that 4.5 million never returned.

But the Gulag was not just an economic institution. It also became, over time, a country within a country, almost a separate civilization, with its own laws, customs, literature, folklore, slang, and morality. Topic by topic, Anne Applebaum also examines how life was lived within this shadow country: how prisoners worked, how they ate, where they lived, how they died, how they survived. She examines their guards and their jailers, the horrors of transportation in empty cattle cars, the strange nature of Soviet arrests and trials, the impact of World War II, the relations between different national and religious groups, and the escapes, as well as the extraordinary rebellions that took place in the 1950s. She concludes by examining the disturbing question why the Gulag has remained relatively obscure in the historical memory of both the former Soviet Union and the West.

Gulag: A History will immediately be recognized as a landmark work of historical scholarship and an indelible contribution to the complex, ongoing, necessary quest for truth.

Read more here.

Why do I Recommend this Book?

Applebaum’s comprehensive examination goes beyond statistics to reveal the human stories within the Soviet camp system. Her ability to weave together individual testimonies with broader historical analysis creates an essential record of this often-overlooked period. The book also provides crucial insights into understanding modern Russian authoritarianism and its manifestations in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, showing how historical patterns of state repression and control continue to shape current events. It’s crucial reading for anyone seeking to understand totalitarianism’s human cost, the importance of historical memory, and the deep roots of contemporary Russian state violence.

And that’s a wrap on my top book picks for 2024!

Which books made it to your list this year?