BEST OF THE CRACKER STACK: 2024 EDITION

My best reads this year

This has been a great year for reading. I’ve regularly found books to love across different genres and even came across a few that I know I’ll read every few years.

Without any delay, here’s the list, as well as a few sentences on why I loved them. Each link takes you to the Amazon affiliate page, so if you choose to buy one, you’ll hook me up with a small commission. Thanks.

1—VINLAND by Yakoto Mukimura. There are 8 volumes in this saga, I read 1 and 2 this year. When I read others, they might not necessarily make the best-of list, since they’re all part of the same saga. Basically Mukimura writes and illustrates a manga adaptation of the Vikings going from Europe to America. Art, storytelling, all of it is superb.

2—NO SURRENDER by Hiroo Onoda. This guy was in the jungle of some Pacific island and refused to believe World War 2 was over. He stayed hidden and moved constantly for 29 years. True story. Blew my mind.

3—GEORGE LUCAS: A LIFE by Brian Jay Jones. I learned tons about Lucas from this book, especially his love for photography and audio collection. He’s not much of a writer but he loves making visual spectacles, and he nailed that when he made Star Wars.

4—DARK DAYS, BRIGHT NIGHTS by Matthew O’Brien. Non-fiction about homeless people who live in the underground tunnel system in Las Vegas, Nevada. Covers a lot about homelessness in general, while talking about the unique characteristics of the Vegas tunnel system. Heartbreaking book.

5—AN APPROACH TO THE BOOK OF MORMON by Hugh Nibley. BYU professor and historian who has a huge amount of knowledge at his disposal for analyzing the time period in which the Book of Mormon began (600 B.C.), and the components of the ancient world that Lehi’s family took with them into the Americas. Utterly fascinating.

6—MASQUERADE by Alfred F. Young. The definitive book about the life of Deborah Sampson and the myths around her. What’s true, what’s not, and how we got her story through the centuries. She was like the American Mulan, she dressed as a man and fought in the Revolution, where she took a bullet for America.

7—JUNKYARD JOE by Geoff Johns. One of the absolute best comics I’ve read all year, and a delightful Christmas story to boot. A robot soldier in Vietnam is reactivated in 2022 and heads off to find his old Army friend, who has since become a famous cartoonist.

8—ROCK N’ ROLL NINJA by Richard Meyer and Chuck Dixon. You can’t buy this one on Amazon, Meyer does all his projects through Indiegogo and the secondhand market. Between old toy figures of Ninja Turtles you can probably find an issue here and there on eBay. It’s about a group of Vietnam vets who get trained as ninjas, but then escape their ninja outfit and start a rock band together. They use their rock tours to evade capture from the other ninjas. Story is awesome and the art is mind-blowing.

9—GEIGER (deluxe edition) by Geoff Johns. Published at the same time and part of the same continuity as Junkyard Joe, Geiger is a radioactive man surviving in the post-fallout wasteland of the United States, on a quest for…well, we’ll see. But he makes a lot of enemies in this fallen world. Awesome art and I love the story.

10—DREAMER OF DUNE by Brian Herbert. The biography of Frank Herbert, who wrote DUNE. I really enjoyed learning more about the man as well as what life was like for his family while he was writing his key work. I actually wanted to try out the later Dune novels after reading this.

11—TENURE by Blaine L. Pardoe and Mike Baron . This book could have very easily gone off the rails as a bad piece of political Mary Sue self-insert fiction, but instead it truly lived up to the promise of “Punisher goes after the woke.” Written by two guys who have experienced the cancellation machine come after them, so they knew what they were talking about.

12—PROJECT MAYFLOWER by Richard Stone. Back in the 1950s a couple of guys got together and funded a project to build a scale replica of the Mayflower, which they then sailed across the Atlantic to America so they could dock it at Plymouth and donate it to the Pilgrim museum there. One of the better Mayflower books I’ve read, and an incredible feat.

13—THE SILMARILLION by J.R.R. and Christopher Tolkien. If you’re reading this, you probably know I did a whole series on this book over the course of months on the CrackerStack. Just an incredible achievement, to construct something of this scope and this significance. I had never actually read the whole thing before this, just pieces and parts. It was worth every minute of the study. Can’t wait to make videos of it.

Anyway, that’s what did it for me. What were your favorite reads from this year, and why isn’t HOWLING WILDERNESS on this list?

(Because you haven’t read it. But you can remedy that.)