The Best Pop Culture Books of 2024

Mean Girls, Judy Blume, stand-up comedy, the Blues Brothers, the tabloid 2000s, and Ted Lasso are among the subjects authors tackled this year. Our staff of pop culture authors picks their top reads.

We not only write books about pop culture; we also read them. We read them as colleagues and friends and curious fellow participants in the ritual of writing long and deep about culture, but also just because before we ever started writing these books, we loved reading them first.

With that in mind, we have decided to kick off what we hope will become an annual effort to name the best pop-culture books of the year. It’s increasingly notable that the few remaining publications that cover books pay short shrift to books about popular culture, which rarely make year-end lists. We have decided to step into the breach and honor the best books in our field. Here are the 15 books that expanded our horizons this year.

So Fetch: The Making of Mean Girls (And Why We're Still So Obsessed With It)—Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

I know that Jen would ask me to mention another author's book here — but it feels criminal not to acknowledge So Fetch among the year's best! Did you know that this book is being sold, at this very moment, at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures? That is your cue, if you love cinema (and Lindsay Lohan), to dive into Jen's exploration of how Tina Fey — pop culture's ultimate mean girl — masterminded a teen classic for the ages.—Erin Carlson

The Genius of Judy—Rachelle Bergstein

I can't tell you how quickly I grabbed this book off of my local Barnes & Noble bookshelf when I spotted it a few months back. Judy Blume's work is singular in how deeply formative it was for so many young people — offering a warm, welcoming space throughout the pangs of adolescence. (I'm pretty sure I re-read Just As Long As We're Together so many times that the cover ripped.) I knew very little about Judy's personal life and career before reading Rachelle's book and enjoyed every second of this thoroughly researched, nimbly-written deep dive. This is a nostalgic gem that will make you want to revisit the books that meant so much to you growing up.—Thea Glassman

The Material—Camille Bordas

Starting with a premise that feels funny in and of itself—what if a university began a stand-up comedy program? —Bordas’ surprisingly nuanced and thoughtful novel follows the teachers and students in the course of a single day, as young and old alike wrestle with work, family, jealousy, grief, and much more. Did I mention that this book manages the impossible and creates characters who are good at being funny? Bordas channels the conjoined hope and panic of every aspiring comedian in a manner that will make watching that next Netflix special hit so much harder. – Saul Austerlitz

The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic—Daniel DeVisé

I love improv and, especially, its history, so I devoured Daniel De Visé’s The Blues Brothers, a behind-the-scenes look at this seminal movie and, really, a whole lot more. We meet collaborators Dan Akyroyd and John Belushi, learn about their friendship, witness the dawn of Saturday Night Live, and see its popularity produce this comedy classic. De Visé does not play around here; his account is thorough, narrative, vivid, historic, and eminently readable. I don’t know how else to say this, so I will just say it: I am very picky about behind-the-scenes books, because I write them myself, and this one absolutely blows me away. — Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s—Sarah Ditum

I wrote a book about the movie Mean Girls and its cultural impact that also came out this year amid a flurry of retrospective reconsiderations of the 2000s. Toxic goes deep on the aspect of that era that I find most fascinating and disturbing: the ways that we normalized objectification, sexualization, and demonization of young, beautiful, successful women via the evil twin powers of the paparazzi and the gossip industry. She digs in on the narratives of nine major celebrities at the time—Britney, Paris, Lindsay, Aaliyah, Janet, Amy, Kim, Chyna, and Jen—to tease out the nefarious messages we received about womanhood, sex, substance abuse, mental illness, marriage, and procreation as the tabloids told their stories, or at least twisted fairy-tale versions of those stories. She calculates the damages to these women and to us as a result, an important historic reckoning that informs the feminism of the recent past, present, and future. —JKA

Believe: The Untold Story Behind Ted Lasso, The Show That Kicked Its Way into Our Hearts –Jeremy Egner

When it premiered, Ted Lasso felt like a small miracle. Following its three-season run, Jeremy Egner has reported back to the pitch with this carefully composed study of just how we were graced with the precise balm we needed at the exact moment we needed it most. Talking to dozens of actors, writers, and crew members, Believe is an oral history of the show suffused with expert analysis of the show’s combination of comedy and emotion.—SA

Liberalism as a Way of Life—Alexandre Lefebvre

Yes, this is a pop culture book, because, while making the argument that “liberalism” is not just a political position but a state of being that most Americans share, even the red-state ones, Lefebvre writes something of a shadow book about Parks and Recreation. I’m writing an actual book about Parks and Rec, and the research led me to this lively lesson on politics and philosophy, a shining example of what a book about Important and Heavy topics can be—readable, fascinating, and fun. While Parks and Rec is perhaps his most pervasive pop cultural talisman, he also pulls in examples from The Good Place, Borat, and the comedy of Hannah Gadsby, among others. Along the way, you’ll learn, as the book’s official description says, “why liberalism is all you need to lead a good, fun, worthy, and rewarding life—and how you can become a better and happier person by taking your liberal beliefs more seriously.” As someone who tends to write books about pop cultural phenomena that are secretly about social issues and politics, I love seeing that the opposite is possible, too. —JKA

Dinner With Vampires—Bethany Joy Lenz

Here comes the highest compliment I can ever give a book. I was halfway done with reading Dinner With Vampires when everybody in the house fell asleep so I went into the bathroom, turned on the light and finished the whole thing while sitting on the edge of the bathtub. I could not go to bed without finding out how this story ended. In her New York Times bestselling memoir, Bethany Joy Lenz, who starred in One Tree Hill, recounts her time spent in a religious cult, detailing those years so vividly and with such incredible prose that you will not be able to put the book down. Fair warning: there are multiple points when you will want to SCREAM with fury over what Bethany went through...and then spend several hours obsessively researching the real-life leaders behind this horrifying cult.—TG

The Work of Art—Adam Moss

This lavishly illustrated doorstopper of a book begins with a single question: how do works of art actually get made? Consulting with everyone from novelists to playwrights to painters to sand-castle builders to crossword-puzzle designers, Moss emerges with a series of interviews about creativity. Did you ever want to know how Stephen Sondheim adjusted the lyrics for a gender-flipped production of Company, or how Dean Baquet oversaw the production of a memorable New York Times front page commemorating 100,000 COVID dead? This book is for you.—SA

Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV—Emily Nussbaum

I will admit it: I do not much care for reality television. I do not watch Survivor or The Bachelor, and pretty much the only reality series I love, Couples Therapy, hardly fits the rubric at all. That said, I was excited to read Emily Nussbaum’s book for precisely that reason. What would the greatest television critic of our generation have to tell us about this perpetually belittled form? Cue the Sun! is deeply researched, convincingly argued, and crammed full of telling details. (The entire tangled story of the making of An American Family, as Nussbaum indicated in our interview earlier this year, feels worthy of its own book. Read more here.) Reality television, Nussbaum reminds us, is a form with its own heritage, its own traditions, and its own belief in what makes good television. This book is the best thing yet written about how that came to be.—SA

The Freaks Came Out to Write—Tricia Romano

The oral history format lends itself to juicy debate, and to the collision of imperfect memory—one person’s insistence crashing into another’s entirely different but equally fervid recollections. Romano’s history of the Village Voice, alav hashalom, is crammed full of angry, bemused, jocular, bitter, yearning voices. No one can agree on a blessed thing, other than this one: the Village Voice was a beautiful home for writers, editors, and readers, creating not only the alternative newspaper but the snarky voice of the early internet, and the culture is not the same without it.—SA

Colored Television—Danzy Senna

Any novel that tackles the precarity of novel writing as an occupation automatically wins my heart. In Colored Television, Jane needs a Plan B after her publisher rejects the passion project she devoted herself to for ten years. Married to an artist and with two young children, she is desperate to land a cushy writing job on a TV show for a streaming service that has mandated a need for more "diverse" programming. Jane's thoughts on race, diversity, and Hollywood's treatment of both is hilariously scathing, and this is a fun and fearless take on the creative's eternal struggle between artistic integrity and financial stability.—Kirthana Ramisetti

Disney High: The Untold Story of the Rise and Fall of Disney Channel's Tween Empire— Ashley Spencer

This book explores the Disney Channel's 2000s heyday in a way that feels downright epic. With original reporting and keen insights, Spencer tells the story of how savvy executives transformed an overlooked tween cable channel into an international sensation, thanks in no small part to its stable of talented (and sometimes troubled) young stars: Miley Cyrus. Selena Gomez. Zac Efron. (You might've heard of them.)—EC

The Hitchcock Hotel—

Stephanie Wrobel

I love a novel that incorporates pop culture, especially one about a Hitchcock superfan whose new hotel is themed after Hitch's most popular films. Alfred (yes, that's his name!) invites his friends from college to be his first guests, and they soon find themselves in a twisty whodunnit worthy of the Master of Suspense. A tribute to the iconic director's work that isn't afraid to point out his flaws, The Hitchcock Hotel is inventive, thrilling and a whole lot of fun.—KR