10 Books I Loved in 2024
This is not a “best of the year” or a “top ten” list; it’s simply a list of books I read in the past year1 that I loved, one way or another. It includes books I read for work, for my book club, and on my own. I hope you find something on it that you’ll love too!
There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib 💙
Hanif Abdurraqib’s latest is about growing up in Columbus, Ohio in the 90s, where basketball was essential and LeBron James was on the rise. I have no knowledge or interest in basketball, but his writing is so beautiful (he’s an accomplished poet in addition to an essayist and critic) and his observations about opportunity, success, community, and shared culture are so personal and wise that it didn’t matter. I listened to him read the audiobook, which is wonderful, but his prose is so rich that I’m tempted to reread on paper at some point.
For: anyone who followed basketball in the 90s, but really any fans of smart, wide-ranging cultural criticism
Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett
I listened to the audio version of this, on the recommendation of one of the booksellers I work with, and was so glad I didn’t try to read it on paper first. It’s a discursive novel about a woman who finds meaning in books and in writing stories. I think I would have struggled with her verbal tics if I were reading it on the page, but read in the author’s voice, they really become a natural part of her speech, and I ended up loving it.
For: fans of novels about the life of the mind and formally inventive fiction
Endless Night by Agatha Christie
I picked this up because it was featured on an episode of one of my favorite podcasts: Backlisted. It’s one of Christie’s latest novels, and a real departure from the Golden Age mysteries I was familiar with. Centered around a plot of land in the English countryside—known locally as Gypsy’s Acre—and the young couple who dream of building a home there, it’s gothic, eerie, unsettling, atmospheric, and wholly unexpected (at least by me).
For: fans of Agatha Christie who want to branch out beyond the Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple stories
Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez
I loved Xochitl Gonzalez’s first novel, Olga Dies Dreaming, and was eager to follow her career. This second novel is even better, and now she’s officially one of my not-to-miss authors. It focuses on two women in slightly different timelines, both talented Latine women making their way in the upper echelons of the art world: one an innovative artist who died under suspicious circumstances, the other an art history student at Brown deciding where to focus her research. Anita de Monte Laughs Last asks big questions about power, connections, and the motivations of the academy, and it’s also just a really fun ride, with a central mystery and formal device that I didn’t see coming and really made the novel sing.
For: fans of complex novels that are both entertaining and thought-provoking; anyone looking for a new favorite author (with only two books, it’s easy to catch up!)
Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio 💙2
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was longlisted for the National Book Award for her nonfiction book Undocumented Americans and this is her fiction debut. It follows a young undocumented immigrant as she navigates her senior year at Harvard (it’s based on Cornejo Villavicencio’s own college experience). Told in the first person, it’s Catalina’s voice that really makes this novel: fresh, funny, cynical, obsessed with her past and her future, politically engaged and entirely self-absorbed. I will read whatever Cornejo Villavicencio decides to write next.
With very different vibes, but similar thematic interests, Catalina would pair well with Anita de Monte Laughs Last.
For: anyone interested in voice-driven fiction or a fresh take on the campus/coming-of-age novel
This is a novel about motherhood, art, and a failing marriage. Sarah Manguso’s short, almost aphoristic paragraphs are propulsive even in the absence of a driving plot, and her observations about marriage, motherhood, responsibility, and loneliness often stopped me in my tracks.
For: fans of essayistic fiction, modern domestic drama, Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff, and Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder
North Woods tells the story of a single plot of land in western Massachusetts over the course of several hundred years. Each chapter is a snapshot in time, and the lives of the people who inhabit the land overlap in ways both direct and indirect. Mason’s writing is beautiful and versatile, hitting different registers in different sections, and it’s another that I’m eager to reread.
For: anyone looking for an excellent piece of fiction, particularly lifelong New Englanders
Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Susan Bernofsky)
Visitation is also a novel across time, following a single home outside Berlin through many owners and inhabitants. The history here, focused on the late 19th through the 20th Century, is violent and raw, laying bare the ways that the land itself has borne witness. The similar conceit makes it a good pair with North Woods, although I’ll admit that the scope and ambition of this book is much more modest.
For: fans of slim but impactful fiction and anyone interested in Germany’s reckoning with its modern history
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
I was late to the party on Richard Osman’s mystery series set in a retirement community in a fictional village in Kent, but it was well worth the wait. It fits squarely in the cozy mystery category, but with a depth of character, wry sense of humor, and inventive plot that rise above a lot of the genre. It’s very British, very fun, and a pure delight. Oh, and there are also at least four more books in the series, plus a movie coming (Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley, Celia Imrie! I mean…)!
For: anyone in the mood for a charming, fun British mystery
My book club read this in the fall as a cozy read (timed around the election, we knew we’d want something not very taxing). Inspired by Patchett’s lifelong love of the Thornton Wilder play Our Town, it’s the story of a mother telling her adult daughters about a summer she spent playing Emily in a summer stock production, with all of them imagining another life that might have been. It is nostalgic and sentimental without being trite or shallow and I loved it more than I expected.
For: anyone who performed in a high school production of Our Town3 or anyone who finds themself thinking about another version of their life not lived
Books marked with a 💙 are published by the division of Penguin Random House that I sell to independent bookstores.
Note that since a lot of my reading for work is done well in advance, I read a lot of books in 2024 that will be published in 2025. I haven’t included any of those here, but I’ll be posting about them as they come out.
I technically read this book in 2023, but it came out in July 2024, so I’m counting it here.
Fun fact: I grew up in Peterborough, NH, which lays claim to being the inspiration for Grover’s Corners. I played a small part in a high school production and saw a wonderful summer stock production in my home town as a teenager. I’d forgotten until I read Tom Lake how much it feels a part of my DNA (which is also one of the themes of the book).