Chad Nielsen’s Favorite Reads, 2024 edition

Chad Nielsen

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As I did last year, in case it’s of use to anyone, I’ve prepared a list of my top 10 books that I’ve read this last year. (That can include books that were not published within the last year, though the majority of them were published in 2023 or 2024). Also, since I published 25 book reviews in 2024, I’ll include links to those reviews and relevant excerpts for the books where that is applicable.

Favorite books read in 2024:

  1. American Zion: A New History of Mormonism by Benjamin Park (Liveright, 2024). As I said in my review, “If I were to ever write a single-volume history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I hope that it would turn out like Benjamin E. Park’s American Zion: A New History of Mormonism (Liveright, 2024). It is a very nuanced, insightful, and well-written take on Latter-day Saint history in the United States. It takes into account viewpoints from many different groups that have been a part of the Latter-day Saint movement over the years or who have split from the Church into their own faith communities.”
  2. Annotated Book of Mormon is such a big deal. Ever since discovering the Oxford Annotated Bible, I’ve wanted something like this, and Grant Hardy really delivers across the board. Full of insightful introductions to each of the books in the Book of Mormon, footnotes, and essays, it adds a lot to studying a volume of scripture I’ve read many times. 
  3. Open Canon: Scriptures of the Latter Day Saint Tradition, edited by Christine Elyse Blythe, Christopher James Blythe, and Jay Burton was, as I’ve said before, “a book that I loved reading. It is an anthology of essays focusing on the documents created and used as scripture in the broader tradition of religions that trace their roots to the early Latter Day Saint movement. The focus on the creation and reception of texts, the various branches of the Smith-Rigdon movement, and thoughts about texts that could be considered non-canonical scriptures are all right up my alley, and given the quality of research being presented, I devoured the whole volume.”
  4. Saints, Volume 4 is a big step forward in official institutional history, both for its work to discuss recent history of the Church and in its ability to inspire living the gospel.
  5. Christian Theology: An Introduction is an older textbook that I read this summer. I’ll eventually get around to writing posts to process it, but it was a really insightful read.
  6. This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah by W. Paul Reeve, Christopher B. Rich Jr., and LaJean Purcell Carruth is a fascinating and detailed glimpse into the debates about slavery and race in Utah Territory in the 1850s. Incorporating never-before transcribed accounts of the 1852 legislative session that saw Utah Territory leadership pass a series of laws intended to regulate unfree labor, this volume provides a thorough analysis of those laws, the debates that surrounded them and how they fit into the national context of the United States at the time. In doing so, the book also offers insights into the early development of the priesthood and temple ban against individuals with Black African ancestry in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
  7. Second Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality by Matthew Harris. As I put it in my review, ” I would put Second-Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality by Matthew L. Harris up there with W. Paul Reeve’s Religion of a Different Color and Armand L. Mauss’s All Abraham’s Children as required reading related to the race and priesthood ban in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is an excellent, if painful, look into racism and its effects on the people in the Church that is worth reading.”
  8. A Frontier Life: Jacob Hamblin, Explorer and Indian Missionary by Todd M. Compton was published over a decade ago, but I enjoyed discovering it this summer. Dealing with the explorations of a remarkable man and the interactions of Latter-day Saints and Native Americans in the region, this biography drew together a lot of information in a very readable way.
  9. Temples in the Tops of the Mountains: Sacred Houses of the Lord in Utah by Richard O. Cowan and Clinton D. Christensen (BYU RSC and Deseret Book Company, 2023) was a great contribution to the history of temples in Utah in a beautiful format with lots of illustrations to reinforce the stories being told. I particularly appreciated the coverage of the Ogden Temple, as that was my home temple for many years.
  10. As It Shall Be Given Thee: Reading Doctrine and Covenants 25: Proceedings of the Latter-day Saint Theology Seminar, ed. Joseph M. Spencer and Rosalynde Frandsen Welch was a collection of essays delving into the details of the revelation to Emma Smith and probing theological implications of that document. While a few of the essays went a bit far into philosophical directions that didn’t fit my taste, I loved the vast majority of the collection, especially a chapter by Rachel Cope on ungendering the text and another chapter by Jenny Reeder on atonement. Especially as we’re going into the Doctrine and Covenants year, I recommend picking up a copy and reading through it.

Honorable mentions (in no particular order): 

In addition, I will just mention my own book as an additional honorable mention:

Fragments of Revelation: Exploring the Book of Doctrine and Covenants by Chad Nielsen

Comments

7 responses to “Chad Nielsen’s Favorite Reads, 2024 edition”

  1. Stephen Fleming

    Thanks for all the reviews you’ve shared with the blog!

  2. RL

    I feel like ten years from now #2 will be the one we remember the most from this year and will be the most likely still being read. It’s a new genre for our people.

    As we move into D and C year we have the Joseph Smith papers and the great Church published „Joseph Smiths Revelations“ to supplement with the historical but I’d love it if that was combined with academic literary analysis in a Oxford study D and C.

    Saints volume 4 was good but seemed to have too many voices and not enough time had passed after the 80s.

    I don’t read as much as I used to in Mormon Studies unless the topic is new and/or the writing is great. Seems like some topics just get rehashed a lot without much new besides attitudes. There are some topics IMO that could make great books in the future in LDS studies: finances, organizational development of the institutional church, and global growth in developing nations that I would love to read more about but they require more info, access, and comparative understanding than exists now.

  3. jimbob

    There’s a lot to like about American Zion. It’s well written, it’s well paced, it’s a single volume, it’s well researched. I liked it and I would recommend it. But I think it stumbles in the same way that Turner’s “Brigham Young” does: if I don’t know by the end of the book how a group of six likeminded individuals in upstate New York somehow became a minor world religion 150 years later, there’s a pretty big hole in the narrative. It covers the required controversies, as it should. But why did the Church grow in spite of these controversies? Why did the missionary program work? Not a lot on those topics. As one example, I remember thinking to myself at some point that I’d read significantly more on Sonia Johnson than I did on, say, Thomas A. Monson.

    My other issue was an overreliance on heroes and villains, which was maybe required by doing a single, readable volume. J. Reuben Clark? Mostly a bad guy. Leonard Arrington? Good guy. Not a ton of nuance in that regard. And after a while, it became obvious that most of the good guys were progressives, and most of the bad guys were more conservative. Which is fine, but I think probably suggests more about the author than the subject matter.

    But again, I read it, mostly liked it, and would recommend it.

  4. RL

    Parks last book started out great and then became kind of two dimensional and felt like a PowerPoint presentation by the end.

    Not interested in American Zion much, I don’t think we’re in a robust era of new research or unique things to say in Mormon Studies in general.

  5. Mark Ashurst-McGee

    I’m within a few pages of finishing Joseph Smith’s Uncanonized Revelations. It is a great compilation. The compilers handled the volume very well.

    On a personal note, I was worried when this book came out because there have been some who have basically pilfered the work of the Joseph Smith Papers Project. There are some–you know who you are–who need to review the AHA statement on plagiarism and think hard about the meaning of the word “sufficient” in this phrase: “Plagiarism can also include … limited borrowing, without sufficient attribution.” Joseph Smith’s Uncanonized Revelations is basically a derivative product from the Documents series of the Joseph Smith Papers. However, the compilers give sufficient attribution to the JSP. I’m used to the opposite, so kudos to the compilers.

  6. CHAD NIELSEN

    Mark Ashurst-McGee, hopefully that isn’t me you have in mind. I’ve tried to give attribution whenever I use JSP, but maybe I overlooked something.

  7. Mark Ashur

    Chad, I did not have you in mind.

    P.S. I enjoy your posts.