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      The 10 Best Books of 2024

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      Here they are — the 10 Best Books of 2024.At the Book Review, we spend all year getting ready for this moment. We begin debating our annual best-of list in the spring, going to the mat for what we love. By fall, we’re preparing for rhetorical slugfests.Ultimately, we aim to pick the books that made lasting impressions: the stories that imprinted on our hearts and psyches, the examining of lives that deepened what we thought we already knew.We break down three of these picks in a handy video. For even more great books, take a spin through all 100 Notable Books of 2024, or even this list, which features every book we’ve anointed the best since 2000.FictionAll FoursBy Miranda JulyJuly’s second novel, which follows a married mother and artist who derails a solo cross-country road trip by checking into a motel close to home and starting an affair with a younger rental-car worker, was the year’s literary conversation piece, dubbed “the talk of every group text — at least every group text composed of women over 40” and “the first great perimenopause novel” in just two of many articles that wrestled with its themes. Sexually frank and laced with the novelist’s loopy humor, the book ends up posing that most universal question: What would you risk to change your life? Read our review.Local bookstores | Barnes and Noble | Amazon | AppleWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Test Yourself on These Young Adult Novels Adapted Into Films

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      Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions, video games and more. This week’s challenge is focused on tween and teen novels that made the leap from the page to the screen — and some of them more than once.Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their movie versions.3 of 5This 1972 middle-grade novel by Mary Rodgers has been adapted for the screen in 1976, 1995, 2003 and 2018, and its various productions over the years have starred Lindsay Lohan, Jamie Lee Curtis, Heidi Blickenstaff and Jodie Foster, among others. What is the title of the book? More

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      Hal Lindsey, Author of ‘The Late, Great Planet Earth,’ Dies at 95

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      In that 1970 book and others he wrote of history and apocalyptic predictions based on biblical interpretations and actual events of the time.Hal Lindsey, a onetime Mississippi Delta tugboat captain who became a campus preacher and improbably vaulted to fame and riches by writing that the world would soon end with natural catastrophes and ruinous wars, followed by the return of Jesus Christ, died on Monday at his home. He was 95.His death was announced on his website. The announcement did not specify where he lived.Mr. Lindsey took the book world by storm with “The Late, Great Planet Earth,” released in 1970 by Zondervan, a small religious publisher in Grand Rapids, Mich. Written with C.C. Carlson (some Lindsey followers said it was ghostwritten by her), the book is a breezy blend of history and apocalyptic predictions based on biblical interpretations and actual events of the time.An editor at Bantam Books thought the book, Mr. Lindsey’s first, had sales potential, so she acquired the mass-market paperback rights. “The Late, Great Planet Earth” became the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s. By some estimates, it sold around 35 million copies by 1999, and was translated into about 50 languages.If you are reading this, Mr. Lindsey’s doomsday predictions have not come true, and his prophesies of imminent end-of-the-world events seem less credible with each passing day. Yet Mr. Lindsey was indeed a harbinger — of a movement he helped create.“Hal Lindsey is one of the most fascinating figures in the whole history of contemporary prophecy belief,” Paul S. Boyer, a historian who specialized in the role of religion in American life, wrote several years before his own death in 2012. While Mr. Boyer saw the book as neither profound nor truly avant-garde, he wrote that its author “represents another one of those moments of breakthrough, when interest in Bible prophecy spills out beyond just the ranks of the true believers and becomes a broader cultural phenomenon.”The Middle East, and Israel in particular, were central to Mr. Lindsey’s predictions. “The Late, Great Planet Earth” was published just three years after Israel’s triumph in the Six-Day War of June 1967. Mr. Lindsey was on safe ground in predicting that Israel’s victory would not bring peace, but he envisioned events far worse than the violence and tensions that plague the region.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      J. Stanley Pottinger, 84, Dies; Official Figured Out Identity of ‘Deep Throat’

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      A former Nixon official (and later a novelist), he led an investigation in which a shadowy Watergate figure squirmed when asked if he had been an anonymous whistle blower.J. Stanley Pottinger, who as a high-ranking figure in the Department of Justice during the 1970s was probably the only person in government to figure out the identity of Deep Throat, the pseudonymous man who provided critical information to reporters in the Watergate scandal, died on Wednesday in Princeton, N.J. He was 84.His son Matt said the death, at a hospital, was from cancer. Mr. Pottinger, who went on to become a best-selling novelist, lived in South Salem, N.Y., but was in Princeton to be near the home of his daughter, Katie Pottinger.Mr. Pottinger (pronounced POT-in-jer) served as the top civil-rights official in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and in the Department of Justice under Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford. In early 1977, Jimmy Carter, the incoming president, asked him to stay on to lead a grand jury investigation into illegal break-ins by the F.B.I.During the testimony of W. Mark Felt, who had been the bureau’s deputy director under Nixon, a juror asked him, offhand, if he was the one who had guided the journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their investigation into White House ties to a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington.Mr. Pottinger was standing next to Mr. Felt, and saw his face go pale.Mr. Felt asked him to repeat the question.Mr. Pottinger asked if he was Deep Throat.Mr. Felt said no, but haltingly.“I knew right away from his demeanor that he was Deep Throat,” Mr. Pottinger told The New York Observer in 2005.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ Author Wants Us to Give Thanks Every Day

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      The world is a gift, not a giant Amazon warehouse, Robin Wall Kimmerer said. In her new book, “The Serviceberry,” she proposes gratitude as an antidote to prevailing views of nature as a commodity.Every summer, the botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer takes a group of students on a two-week field trip deep into the woods and bogs of the Adirondacks.For their final exam, students prepare a feast from foraged plants, dining on a wild menu of boiled cattail kebabs, roasted rhizomes, stir-fried day lily buds, lichen noodles in a gelatinous broth of boiled rock tripe. For dessert there are serviceberry and cattail pollen pancakes, smothered in pine-scented spruce needle syrup.Before digging in, the group recites the Thanksgiving address — an invocation within Indigenous Haudenosaunee communities that gives thanks to the earth and its abundance.“We start the class with a Thanksgiving address to share our sense of gratitude for the plants, and we end the same way,” said Kimmerer, a professor of environmental biology at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, who is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. “So we learn about the gifts of plants and how to receive them.”Kimmerer often says that plants have been her teachers throughout her life. As a little girl, she stashed shoe boxes of pressed leaves and seeds under her bed. Later, as a young botanist, she studied the mysteries of moss reproduction. Throughout her decades of research and environmental advocacy, as she’s pushed to bring Indigenous knowledge into ecological conservation work, she’s learned about the delicate web of relationships between plants and their surroundings.Now, as a renowned plant ecologist and best-selling author, Kimmerer is teaching millions of people how to learn from plants.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Books About Everyone, for Everyone

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      This is part of an Opinion series on The New York Times Communities Fund, which assists nonprofits that provide direct support to people and communities facing hardship. Donate to the fund here. .g-goldbergseriesinfo a { text-decoration: underline; color: inherit; text-decoration-thickness: 1px; text-underline-offset: 2px; } .g-goldbergseriesinfo{ position: relative; display: flex; overflow: hidden; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 1.125rem […] More

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      100 Notable Books of 2024

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      If you read Ferris’s original 2017 graphic novel, you can’t forget it: a beguiling, haunted hybrid of personal memoir, murder mystery and 20th-century time portal. This surreal and densely referential follow-up, drawn in Ferris’s signature cross-hatched style, continues to follow 10-year-old Karen Reyes in circa-1968 Chicago as she wrestles with loss, sexual identity and a […] More

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      Find the 13 Book Titles Hidden in This Text Puzzle

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      Veronica woke up early Saturday afternoon in her mother’s rowhouse basement as heavy snow fell outside. Feeling hungry, she threw on some clothes and headed out, pausing to relatch a gate at the stairs meant to corral the cat. As she prepared to cross the narrow brick lane between the house and the family diner, wind gusts slammed her. She entered the restaurant shivering.“Normally you’d be a day late and a dollar short because the good stuff is usually gone by now,” said her mother as she sat marking the corrections on the printer’s proof of her new menu.“Well, the storm’s a mercy then,” said Veronica as she closed the door. “I’d hate to be at risk of missing out.”“You need some proper New England white clam chowder and not that red New York stuff. Hang on.”“There’s no place like home, Ma,” said Veronica.Veronica woke up early Saturday afternoon in her mother’s rowhouse basement as heavy snow fell outside. Feeling hungry, she threw on some clothes and headed out, pausing to relatch a gate at the stairs meant to corral the cat. As she prepared to cross the narrow brick lane between the house and the family diner, wind gusts slammed her. She entered the restaurant shivering.“Normally you’d be a day late and a dollar short because the good stuff is usually gone by now,” said her mother as she sat marking the corrections on the printer’s proof of her new menu.“Well, the storm’s a mercy then,” said Veronica as she closed the door. “I’d hate to be at risk of missing out.”“You need some proper New England white clam chowder and not that red New York stuff. Hang on.”“There’s no place like home, Ma,” said Veronica.Veronica woke up early Saturday afternoon in her mother’s rowhouse basement as heavy snow fell outside. Feeling hungry, she threw on some clothes and headed out, pausing to relatch a gate at the stairs meant to corral the cat. As she prepared to cross the narrow brick lane between the house and the family diner, wind gusts slammed her. She entered the restaurant shivering.“Normally you’d be a day late and a dollar short because the good stuff is usually gone by now,” said her mother as she sat marking the corrections on the printer’s proof of her new menu.“Well, the storm’s a mercy then,” said Veronica as she closed the door. “I’d hate to be at risk of missing out.”“You need some proper New England white clam chowder and not that red New York stuff. Hang on.”“There’s no place like home, Ma,” said Veronica. More