Throughout December and January, the CAPC team has compiled a list of our favorite pop culture artifacts from the previous year. Unlike most year-end lists, we don’t claim that these are the “best.” Rather, these are the things that brought us the most joy and satisfaction in the last 12 months.
For 2024, our favorite books focused on kids and tech, Christian artistry, small-town mysteries, cheerful apocalypses, manga creators, and more.
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
Overprotection of children in the real world. Underprotection of children in the virtual world. These are the central claims of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. In this alarming exposé, Haidt points out how a phone-based childhood separates our children from the physical world at a time when they are most vulnerable: their later elementary and pre-teen years.
An excessive amount of screen use hurts our children in surprising ways. For example, there’s a “a clear, consistent, and sizable link between heavy social media use and mental illness for girls.” As a high school teacher, I wasn’t surprised by this, but what did surprise me was the virtual world’s effect on dating. Boys who immerse themselves in porn are much less likely to risk themselves socially by asking a girl to a dance just for the privilege of holding her hand. What’s more, Instagram filters, constant notifications, and portable gaming can govern even the lives of children with regulations on their phone. In one of many tocsin-like statements, Haidt reminds us that “as smart-phones accompany adolescents to school, to the bathroom, and to bed, so too can their bullies.” Finally, children who are not allowed to walk to school, to talk to neighbors, or even to play in the front yard learn the negative lesson that the world is a terrifying place, and their problem-solving capabilities are not enough to cope with it.
All parents of young children and pre-teens should read The Anxious Generation. They’ll find themselves both challenged and encouraged. Haidt’s book is not a doomsday treatise: it’s a thoroughly researched, readable work that calls for collective action among adults, then provides practical ways to take that action. As a side note, my favorite section is his discussion of playgrounds; if I ever design a playground, it’ll be an adventure playground filled with “loose parts.”
—Lindsey Scholl
Break, Blow, Burn, & Make: A Writer’s Thoughts on Creation by E. Lily Yu
Being Christian and creative in the modern world can make one feel like an uneasy bedfellow with one’s own passions, especially for those of us who grew up in evangelical circles. Evangelicalism invites an accompanying, usually unavoidable, culture war narrative to the table of most creative work, but doing creative work in the secular world can mean indulging in a self-expressionism that excises God from the narrative entirely. With Christian artistry so often railroaded into reactionary spaces lacking in beauty, depth, and honesty, many Christian creatives of all types find themselves looking for direction and fulfillment in their vocation.
With Break, Blow, Burn, & Make: A Writer’s Thoughts on Creation, award-winning novelist E. Lily Yu offers a way forward for Christian creatives by looking back at the older ways of making. Her work is not just a thoughtful but also a poignant corrective to the culture war narrative that’s so prevalent, calling Christian creatives—writers of fiction, in particular—to fulfill their vocations in truth and love. Part a theology of creativity, part a creative writing manual for Christians, Break, Blow, Burn, & Make speaks to both the heart and the mind: it doesn’t only tell the reader how to co-create faithfully with God, but why we should, and why our works of fiction matter now and into the New Heavens and the New Earth.
As a Christian creative and novelist myself, I would call Break, Blow, Burn, & Make not just one of the best things to come out of 2024, but a foundational work that any Christian writer, reader, or artist should include in their personal library.
—K. B. Hoyle
Disarming Leviathan: Loving Your Christian Nationalist Neighbor by Caleb C. Campbell
I read more than 80 books in 2024; of all of them, I think this one was the most valuable. Campbell has his finger firmly on the pulse of a dangerous and destructive movement, and shows it clearly for what it is. But he writes with both compassion and hope, believing that true Christlikeness will help us to find a way out of the darkness.
—Gina Dalfonzo
Friday by Ed Brubaker and Marcos Martín
I’ve been a fan of Ed Brubaker’s various hard-boiled and noir titles—e.g., The Fade Out, Pulp, Reckless—for several years now. His stories are always compelling, focusing on washed out figures on the margins of society confronting evil and greed, with often gut-wrenching results. Friday, however, eschews Brubaker’s usual noir trappings for something that could best be described as Encyclopedia Brown meets H. P. Lovecraft.
For years, Friday Fitzhugh solved bizarre cases around the sleepy New England town of Spar Creek with her best friend, Lancelot Jones, the world’s smartest boy. But as they’ve grown older, their relationship has grown more fraught and complicated, with Friday seeking to step out from Lancelot’s shadow. When she returns home from college for Christmas vacation, however, Friday is immediately caught up in Lancelot’s latest and deadliest case, one that threatens to reveal Spar Creek’s darkest secrets and destroy their friendship forever.
Friday is a far cry from Brubaker’s usual fare, but it contains the same compelling characters, albeit with a more fantastical setting—one that’s lovingly rendered by Marcos Martín. I haven’t stopped thinking about Friday’s existential plight, as she tries to define who she is as an individual while still remaining faithful to her best friend, or about the town of Spar Creek, which is so much more mysterious and haunting then its quaint nature might suggest.
—Jason Morehead
I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger
How can an apocalypse be cheerful? Only a writer as skilled as Enger could make it believable—but that’s exactly what he does in this endlessly intriguing novel, the story of a man on the run from dangerous forces in a dystopian world. Enger subverts all genre expectations of “worldbuilding,” and instead focuses on creating strong, idealistic characters, making it seem totally realistic that a person could fight an apocalypse with courage and without despair. Grief, yes, but never despair.
—Gina Dalfonzo
Lesser Ruins by Mark Haber
Lesser Ruins is a mess. A mess by intention, a mess on purpose, a mess because that’s the whole point of it. This cacophony of a novel is, roughly speaking, the story of a couple hours and four cups of strong coffee. And what that’ll do with a man steeped in a week’s crescendo to a years-long event of gradually building, gradually consuming grief.
We’re invited into a man’s self-narration of his every thought over a brief pericope following the wake of his wife’s recent death. He’s sat shiva for her (as much as he knows how), and now he’s obsessed, reiterating over and again an almost prerecorded monologue of ideas and dreams and wrongs rehearsed obviously ad infinitum for years in his regular internal monologue.
It’s the coffee that’s the thing. Sort of. He, like Haber’s protagonist in Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, is narrowly obsessed, self-aggrandized, and pedantic before the coffee gets in him. And he’s a man who does not allow time to pass between cups. As he sips his last, he’s already picking out whichever gourmet roast he’s planning to simmer in next. I say this is a four-cup-of-coffee book, but honestly, we have no assurance that the first cup in the book wasn’t his 23rd of the day.
And as this is a book of his thoughts, a narration straight from his mind-hole, things are, well, scattered. Chaotic. Jumbled. Reiterative. A mess. And it’s glorious. A wonder to behold. And it doesn’t make for facile reading.
The book is three paragraphs long, each comprising a single cup of coffee (save for the last which ends just as he’s starting in on Number 4). And sentences? Sometimes they might only be half a page, if they’re on the terse side. The book is one of those formally playful wonders you hear about.
But (importantly) it’s not just scattered scratching from a coffee-addled obsessive. He’s also grieving the wife he lost in a progression over years to dementia and finally, irrevocably, to death in the last couple weeks. It’s about the son who is so like him and about his failure to warn that son of the dangers of what it’s like to be like him. It’s about smartphones and passions and life’s work and failure and not being the genius you believe yourself to be. It’s about your life for which you are both agonizingly self-known and simultaneously agonizingly oblivious. It’s about fearing the world and fearing to get going. And so it’s about hope also, somehow.
I highly recommend you read it, and I highly recommend you read it aloud to yourself and at the fastest clip you can manage. Just imagine you have Ethiopian single origin coursing through your brains instead of blood. That’ll set the mood for your performance.
—Seth T. Hahne
Looking Up: A Birder’s Guide to Hope through Grief by Courtney Ellis
Come for Ellis’s boundless and contagious delight in all kinds of birds; stay for the masterful way she weaves together that delight with the deep pain of her grandfather’s death. Such a juxtaposition may seem hard to understand, but when you read her book, it makes perfect sense. And it makes us look at our imperfect but beautiful world, with all its delight and pain, in a whole new way.
—Gina Dalfonzo
Suffrage Song by Caitlin Cass
I’ve followed Cass through her bi-monthly zines since 2013. Her focus has been on the history of Western Civ with an eye toward folly (which meant she was usually writing about men and the dopey things they’ve done because that’s generally who history has so far recorded) but around 2019, she nudged her focus toward women, and specifically the women aiming to give women a Voice. That began a so far five-year project cataloguing the glories and follies of the women who fought for voting rights. (Much of the folly comes from the white suffragists absolutely throwing women of color under the bus if that meant white women could vote.)
Suffrage Song collects those zines in a beautiful hardbound edition that finally makes her work more readily available. It’s clearly been a lot of work because Cass’s original zines are in all kinds of shapes, sizes, and formats (several were posters)—so here they’ve been cut up and renegotiated in order to fit on the page. Apart from a new prologue and epilogue bookending the collection with Cass’s own personal thoughts on the collection and why looking into the past is powerful in light of current struggles, I’ve read all of this before and can readily recommend it as a tapestry that weaves disparate stories into a vibrant history. I’m also excited to read it again—excited enough that I’ll be assigning it as part of our high school’s “Graphic Novels As Lit” unit. Cass’s book feels particularly fitting as various subcultural strata intersecting with online Christian streams increasingly view the idea of women voting (or voting independent of their husband’s wishes) with skepticism or derision.
—Seth T. Hahne
Tokyo These Days by Taiyo Matsumoto and Saho Tono
Among the foremost comics creators in the world today, Taiyo Matsumoto pairs with his wife Saho Tono to tell the story of Shiozawa, a longtime comics editor who’s retired as penance for the commercial failure of his latest magazine but is inspired to throw his entire severance into one final creative endeavor: a getting the band back together in a commercially immune bid to make what he considers true comics art. Throughout the story, told over three meandering volumes, Shiozawa recruits (sometimes successfully) from among his favorite creators from across his 30-year career. Most of these are forgotten heroes of an age of comics that contemporary readers have moved past. Some are still creating, but are doing more marketable, less visionary work, and Shiozawa offers them the opportunity to blossom again. Others are retired, now plying menial work as grocery store clerks or building custodians. Some are inspired by Shiozawa’s offer while others retreat in fear and self-doubt. All of this is told alongside the rise to stardom of one of Shiozawa’s recent young protégés, a man full of bluster and the veneer of confidence. Matsumoto and Tono have laid out a panoply of human experiences.
Matsumoto’s work spans high octane bluster in Ping Pong and Tekkonkinkreet to surreal masterpieces in GoGo Monster and No 5 to the well-observed explorations of the human experience in Sunny and now in Tokyo These Days. Here in Tokyo These Days, Matsumoto and Tono rejoice in the human impulse to create while also exploring the many many many human obstacles to the realization of that impulse: expectations, fears, commercial concerns, self-sabotage, even the simple brute fact of mortality.
Matsumoto and Tono have created another deeply human work, very observant, and another ode to the experience of living. They’ve again created an optimistic work that navigates a world of hardship, this time luxuriating in the balance between creating true art and being successful and relevant. It is, of course, a book about making comics. But not just comics, true comics! unmarketable comics!—all with the slim tendril of hope that this perfect art artifact will find the readers that will feel rewarded for having found it. It’s a book about selling out, about following trends, about the role of editors for both good and ill. It’s about giving up and persevering, about second chances and about giving second chances the finger. For a series complete in three volumes, it’s robust.
—Seth T. Hahne
Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson
Brandon Sanderson released the fifth installment in his NYT best-selling Stormlight Archive this past November, which functions as a quasi-climax midway through the planned ten-book arc. There’s a lot for series fans to love about Wind and Truth’s lore revelations, deeply memorable characters, and jaw-dropping plot twists. But Christian readers may particularly note its strong defense of moral principles.
Throughout the series, the characters gain magical abilities by swearing oaths that represent their commitment to various moral principles. Without these mini-creeds, they’re unable to progress. In the fifth book, the moral nature of these oaths is further deepened as characters are forced to grapple with their oaths turning into legalism. And in a few pivotal moments, the series takes a strong stance against any kind of utilitarian reasoning. As one mentor states, “The destination must not undermine the journey.”
George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire may still be the highest-selling adult fantasy series by a currently living author. But Sanderson’s rising popularity points to a fantasy readership hungry for replacing moral cynicism with an earnest defense of traditional heroism.
—Josiah DeGraaf
The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke
“A church is a sort of wood. . .A wood is a sort of church. They’re the same thing, really.” Merowdis, the main character of Susanna Clarke’s The Wood at Midwinter, speculates in this way after her sister calls her a saint: after all, Merowdis has visions, she can’t see any difference between animals (or even spiders) and people, and is only really happy in a church or a wood.
The Wood at Midwinter is a tantalizing little tale about a young lady’s desire to be a mother, which is answered in a remarkable way. I can’t tell you much more because the work is only forty-seven pages long, including some page-size illustrations. The story itself is charming and a little mystical; it also has strong Christian elements, such as the assertion that “the child must come in midwinter. A midwinter child in the arms of a Virgin. A child to bring light into the darkness…”
Everyone who loves Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell will enjoy The Wood at Midwinter; it has Clarke’s stamp of esoteric Victorianism. My only critique is that it’s painfully short. Though to be fair, it was originally written for a BBC broadcast entitled Short Works. But the Wood at Midwinter does have a surprise: in her afterword, Clarke reveals some of the influences behind her 2020 novel Piranesi and her regard for the music of Kate Bush.
—Lindsey Scholl
