My 12 Best Reads of 2024
PLUS --- > 5 2025 new releases to get jazzed up!
While I’m highly competitive in most areas of my life- my head lusts after a good sales goal, a close leader board always keeps me coming back - I don’t set reading goals.
Reading, for me, is more about sucking the marrow out of The Very Best Books than it is about a total number. The Very Best means I also put down A LOT of books. But maybe it’s more that I read almost all the time, without thinking about it most of the time. There are books in my backpack, on my bedside table, on my desk and on a table in the living room. I’ll pick one up, read a few pages and set it back down. Or choose an old favorite to re-read while I’m soaking in a hot tub. I listen to my current Libby read for fifteen minutes before I nap. A reading goal feels like making a process out of something that’s flowing organically. No need.
But in January of last year, I started a reading journal to track the books I did read, record the DNF ones and write some notes about my favorites. Below are the very best from that very good stack. Note: the title next to the month is hyperlinked, leading you to Bookshop.org, where every purchase supports indy bookstores..and will earn me a few pennies in commission.
January: Foster (fiction) by Claire Keegan.
Unlike most of the music I listen to, I don’t usually find new authors from people I know IRL. But Christa W suggested Claire Keegan to me. I am now a completist when it comes to Claire Keegan’s extraordinary writing. Spare, clear writing, tender characters, simple plots that are unexpectedly gripping. There’s nothing she can’t do. Claire Keegan has a way of putting words to the indescribable that makes the reader hum with appreciation.
“I try to remember another time when I felt like this and am sad
because I can’t remember a time
and happy too because I cannot.”
Mmmm….that’s it, I purred.
A young Irish girl is sent (permanently? for a short stay?) to live with relatives and learns plenty about family, the larger world and herself. Foster is a perfect miracle.
February: Beautyland (fiction) by Marie-Helene Bertino.
Adina Giorno is not from this world but somehow she’s here and everyone who meets her is the better for it. Through Adina’s experiences, the reader sees everyday humanity with new eyes. This book is as unexpected as you might imagine (she’s an alien?!) but also wildly original and lovely in the gentlest of ways.
March: Demon Copperhead (fiction) by Barbara Kingsolver.
Maybe all you need to know is that I’ve DNF every Kingsolver I’ve ever picked up except for this one. But if you want a little more: for scrappy Demon, life catapults from precarity to outright danger as he is pushed through a life threaded with poverty, addiction and violence in rural Appalachia. This is the book that should be/ will be on students summer reading lists.
April: James (fiction) by Percival Everett.
If you’re new here, you might not have heard me talk up James. Everyone else…well, they’ve had an earful. James, 2024 National Book Award for Fiction winner, is the telling of the Huck Finn story from the perspective of the enslaved character, Jim. This book is thumbtack sharp, misses no steps and portrays love, race and family in ways that we haven’t seen enough of.
May: Wandering Stars (fiction) by Tommy Orange.
I’m not sure if it’s fair to include Wandering Stars because it is a sequel. BUT- here it is: a native American family escapes boarding schools, massacre, family separation, addiction, mental illness and more in this saga which takes place over 150 years, spanning time in Oklahoma, Florida and Oakland.
Tommy Orange is doing God’s work by telling stories to the larger world about what really happened and is happening to Native Americans in the US. His writing is necessary, urgent and meaty. If you haven’t read his first book, There, There, read that first. Wandering Stars picks up that family’s thread.
June: Martyr! (fiction) by Kaveh Ackbar. The ! had me dubious but I was won over by page two! Cyrus is a newly sober, newly orphaned poet who’s at a crossroads in life when a friend suggests he travel to New York to see an artist, Orkideh, whose final installation is herself, dying. Something clicks. Like Cyrus, Akbar is a poet which accounts for the glossy prose on every.single.page.
“I think maybe you’ll find your real ending once you stop looking for it,” Orkideh said. “I think real endings tend to work their way in from the outside.”
But the Atlas strong character development linked with an impeccable story made this a very hard book to put down!
July: Cutting for Stone (fiction) by Abraham Verghese.
I’m late to Verghese. I read both The Covenant of Water and Cutting for Stone this year. Honestly, The Covenant of Water is a shoo-in for this list but I read it in February and I couldn’t choose it over Beautyland. Both Water and Stone are sagas set in India. I LOVE a good saga! I also relish a novel where I have a hard time knowing who to cheer for, even if my favorites are on opposing teams. We get that with Verghese. So if any of that resonates, check out either.
August: The Ministry of Time (fiction) by Kaliane Bradley.
Spy thriller meets romance meets historical fiction. Any guesses which genre pulls me in hardest?
Historical fiction! I care not a whit for romance or spies! In brief: a newly promoted civil servant becomes the handler for one of a handful of historical figures who are taken from the past and placed in the “care” of the British government in today’s world. So be ready for some post-colonial issues, male/female tensions and some newly liberated queer characters all in a low buzz of mystery and tense tech. Great pacing and thoroughly engaging characters.
September: Behind the Beautiful Forevers (non-fiction) by Katherine O’Hara.
I read this book as fiction! I didn’t realize it was true until I was fishing around for the publication date (2012). Journalist O’Hara grew to know the slum city of Annawadi and the inherent chaos, poverty and unpredictability of a community precariously established on the land of the Mumbai airport over a period of many visits to the area. The hardscrabble life of O’Hara’s characters, mainly children, is heart-wrenching but somehow, still rinsed through with hope.
October: Sociopath (memoir) by Patric Gagne.
Sociopath may be the memoir for people who “never read memoir”. A charming, eight year old doesn’t think twice leaving a sleepover at 1:00 am and walking home (with a detour or two) through deserted San Francisco streets. It’s an impulse and little Patric follows it. But why, she wonders? And what’s different about her? A visit to a Florida prison a few years later clues her in. This story is equal parts funny and brilliant with some very Gen X vibes.
November: Bone Black (memoir) by bell hooks.
hooks tells the story of her girlhood growing up Black and poor in rural Kentucky. There’s a quiet, desperate loneliness that saturates hooks’ childhood and marks her as different even in her own family. An important read because there aren’t enough books about young Black girls but Bone Black is a sad one too. The indifference to little Gloria and the way that she is sabotaged, abused and pilloried in her family is really hard to read. But Bone Black is also classic hooks: always accessible and beautiful, even amidst the ruins of despair.
December: The Heart’s Invisible Furies (fiction) by John Boyne.
Maybe I don’t read the right books or maybe my sense of humor is a little different (probably both), but I don’t often laugh out loud when I’m reading a novel. Until now.
“What you know about women,” replied Maude, “could be written in large font on the back of a postage stamp and there’d still be room for the Lord’s Prayer.”
Cyril, our main character who we follow through his entire life and a bit before, is not naturally funny but some of the comments made to and around him are just hysterical. The dialogue is always snappy but being adopted, gay and not consistently Catholic in Ireland in the later half of the 20th century is not always amusing. Fortunately, there’s plenty to laugh at along the way.
What was one of your favorite reads of 2024? I’d love to know.
Recommended Links:
Please consider supporting any of the incredible organizations doing good work for people affected by the fires in Southern California. Here are a few:
This whole post includes options to: donate via Venmo, donate meals, buy a firefighter a meal, send money for gift cards and more.
Rachel Aviv’s piece in The New Yorker on the sexual abuse of Alice Munro’s youngest daughter, Andrea, by Munro’s long-time partner, Gerry, is as insightful on the dynamics of power and control as it is on the legacy of childhood trauma. This article is the best you’ll read on the “complicated” legacy of multi-award winning (including the Man Booker and Nobel prizes) Canadian “national treasure” Munro whose work, as Aviv explores through her exemplary reporting work, often incorporated a through line of sexual abuse —leading her Andrea to think she was “working through it” — while actually remaining silent about the abuse and standing firmly by Gerry. If you read one thing this month/week/day, make it Aviv’s genius piece.
Five 2025 new releases I’m excited for:
Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford. A summer party in 1989 in New England and adults are too busy to notice one of the littles has vanished. But the cousins do. Despite an eerie glint in the forest, the kids decide to take matters into their own hands. February 11.
City Summer, Country Summer by Kiese Laymon and Alexis Franklin. A picture book about three boys spending the summer with their grandma in Mississippi. I pre-ordered a copy for a friend’s kiddo! April 13
Exit Zero by Marie-Helene Bertino. A collection of twelve stories. April 22.
The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong. Vuong weaves in Connecticut (where he grew up), chosen family and community in this, his second, novel. May 13.
The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis. Historical novel with a twist! 17th c. Oxford, 5 weird sisters and small town hysteria. Sometimes I buy the book because the cover is remarkable. This will be one of these books. August 23.
The US cover of this book! Gah!!!! Greyhounds!!! (Or maybe Galgos.)
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Love this list!!