The best books I read in 2024

very long but very worth it

This was an INCREDIBLE year of reading for me. Way more favs than usual, so I’m just gonna let this list get long rather than miss out on recommending some truly fantastic books to you.

Deep dreamy thoughtful novels

• The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert - The life of a 19th century autistic-coded female botanist. Explores the ways we show up for each other and fail each other on various timescales. Parenting (biological and adoptive and metaphorical), desire and its struggles, learning to appreciate a life lived in miniature but so deeply.

• Elmet by Fiona Mozley - Two siblings and their father live in middle-of-nowhere Yorkshire. Very entitled father built a house on land whose owner is violent and vengeful about it. Kids (especially the daughter) absorb the father’s entitlement and resentment. Lyrical language and slightly dreamy rhythm which reminded me a bit of Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley. Echoing exploration of abandonment, the way we’re bound so tightly to and idolize unreliable others and the stories we tell ourselves to make it seem okay.

• The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry - Sanctity, the lies we tell ourselves, and how we navigate so very many different forms of loss. Ambiguous loss to disease that affects the mind. Loss of an abusive husband. Loss of faith, loss of bodily health, loss of dazzling career aspirations. Loss of friendship. Loss of identity, history, faithfulness, our belief in ourselves. Sometimes even loss of fear. And sometimes, what we get in return - the terrible joy that comes with giving in to disease, the truths and ambitions that outweigh the friendships they can cost us, the freedom we gain from a death.

• The Little Animals by Sarah Tolmie - Beautiful magical realism novel about Van Leeuwenhoek, and a meditation on what it means to see and the limitations of visibility - I wrote way more about this one in little animals & imprecise ontological taint

Bildungsroman

• Scapegracers trilogy: The Scratch Daughters and The Feast Makers by H.A. Clarke - As I was saying earlier in Scapegracers; Questlove; deejaying books, this witchy trilogy gets the sharp awful loyal powerful absurd gross feeling of being a certain kind of teenage girl uncanningly right

• All Fours by Miranda July - Peri-menopausal midlife crisis, sort of. Bildungsroman for older women? Viscerally, fleshily written. This book lives in its body.

• Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson - Middle-grade[ish?] fantasy adventure where a clever girl takes to piracy to rescue the boy she grew up with

Other fiction with neurodivergent protagonists

• The Earl Who Isn't by Courtney Milan - Historical romance with Asian protagonists in 19th century England, with a heavily (though I think unintentionally?) autistic-coded FL

• Beard in Mind by Penny Reid - Romance between auto mechanics; FL has OCD

• Neanderthal Seeks Human by Penny Reid - Autistic-coded FL who spouts trivia a lot, especially when nervous. I loved getting all the bonus unrelated facts with my cute story!

• Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White - Small town Appalachian horror, entrails from chandeliers¹ levels of gore, bit of magical realism, autistic trans protagonist, but so much also about labor rights and collective action

• Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell - Monster falls in love with human woman. Monster is very much portrayed as an autistic woman herself. So romantic! Also helping each other recover from their childhood abuse.

Wilderness

• Wildlife Spectacles: Mass Migrations, Mating Rituals, and Other Fascinating Animal Behaviors by Vladimir Dinets

• Planet of the Ants: The Hidden Worlds and Extraordinary Lives of Earth’s Tiny Conquerors by Susanne Foitzik and Olaf Fritsche

• The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature by David George Haskell - Annoyingly woo tone at times, but so many great nature facts!

• H Is For Hawk by Helen Macdonald - A lot of musing on complicated grief and what we project of ourselves into and how we lose ourselves in the wilds.

• The Goshawk by T.H. White - to acquire a goshawk is a major decision

Self-harm

• Big Swiss by Jen Beagin - Pathological liar hot mess hooking up with coldly analytical psych patient, they're both so messed up and disassociated and lurching through hurting themselves via each other

• Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm by Emmeline Clein

• The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle - holy shit blood doping

• Brutalities: A Love Story by Margo Steines - Eating disorders and mental health, but in the broader context of control issues and various forms of violence and pain-seeking. (A bit reminiscent of the spectacular Hurts So Good: The Science & Culture of Pain on Purpose by Leigh Cowart, actually)

• Hungry Ghost by Victoria Ying - YA graphic novel about struggling with an eating disorder very much encouraged by her mother

Feeling trapped

• A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher - I've loved Kingfisher (aka Ursula Vernon) ever since way back when Digger was a webcomic, and A Sorceress Comes To Call is her best book yet. A powerful story of growing up with narcissistic abuse, agonizingly painfully true to life. Oh, and yeah, there's also magic and geese and absolutely heroic regular non-magical non-sword-wielding perfectly normal women in their 50s. I'm absolutely queasy with how good this book is.

• The Lily of Ludgate Hill by Mimi Matthews - The best book of a great romance series overall. FL here struggles with a lifetime of sacrificing too much for her mother.

• House Woman by Adorah Nworah - Nigerian woman kidnapped and kept prisoner to be a kinda mail-order bride in the US, husband is a sort-of potential savior but of course horrifyingly toxic as well. Evil in both its lazy and active forms. Language is deftly grotesque, especially when we're in the husband's head thinking about the protagonist.

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Found Family

• The Council of Frogs by Matt Emmons - Adorable graphic novel where a sweet old swamp lich (dead wizard) discovers a bunch of frogs who were infected by the bog magic leaking out of his corpse and feels a sense of parental responsibility towards them, so he helps one little frog go on a quest to send a message to another warlock to come save all the frogs! Ugfh it’s just too cute and loving for words. (In fact, our protagonist doesn’t speak at all.) Actually, y’know what - just go read this review

• Thirsty Mermaids by Kat Leyh - Adorable graphic novel about mermaids trapped as humans, super extra cute and cheerfully dirty, queerness and found family

Family (siblings)

• Yolk by Mary H.K. Choi - Sisters - one with cancer, the other with an eating disorder. I especially appreciated the way the narrator was increasingly exposed in a way that really shifted my perspective.

• The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson - You can travel between multiverses if your self on the other world is dead. Bit of a Mad Max vibe plus gated city thing. Echoing around exploring sibling relationships (villain/antihero brothers, protagonist and her sister, interactions between other selves almost feeling sibling-like)

• Dixon, Descending by Karen Outen - First Black American man to reach the peak of Everest, but with focus on the aftermath and relationships between literal and symbolic brothers. The boxes we're trapped in, how we look out for and fail each other.

• East of Eden by John Steinbeck - Cain and Abel, natch. The mother is set up to be seen as so villainous, and yet you can still see through the author's biases and feel how trapped she was, too.

Family (healthy)

• Spy x Family: Volumes 1-5ish by Tatsuya Endo - Adorable funny manga about an undercover spy who fake-marries an undercover assassin and adopts a secretly telepathic little kid

• The Summer Book by Tove Jansson - Little girl and her grandmother living on an island. Gets both perspectives at once, no big plot but just such perfectly drawn vignettes and character studies and interactions that I love it despite it being vibes-based.

• Mexikid by Pedro Martín - (graphic memoir) Gets at that confused feeling of being a child of immigrants - who are we, with varying levels of connectedness and divergence of culture, but in an overall sweet loving way

Family (other)

• Pretty Things by Janelle Brown - Con woman with a toxic con woman mother

• Ghost Forest by Pik-Shuen Fung - Short novel that reads like a memoir grieving the loss of a father who was barely around in the first place, in a family where feelings aren’t able to be openly discussed.

• My Father, the Panda Killer by Jamie Jo Hoang - (YA) Daughter of Vietnamese immigrant deals with her father's anger and trickle-down ptsd

• Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls - (graphic memoir) Very personal and intense for me - except here it was the cultural revolution instead of the holocaust. Generational trauma, plus implied neurodiversity

• Good Talk by Mira Jacob - (graphic memoir) How do you talk to your kid about this fucked up world

• Do a Powerbomb! by Daniel Warren Johnson and Mike Spicer - (graphic novel) Mom is a pro wrestler who dies in an accident in the ring. Dad and daughter team up to wrestle against aliens to bring her back to life!

• Stone Fruit by Lee Lai - Gorgeous graphic novel about a queer couple helping care for their niece, dealing with rejection from and clinging to family of origin, ricocheting between openness and shutting down

Capitalism

• Crowded by Christopher Sebela, Ro Stein, Ted Brandt, Triona Farrell, and Cardinal Rae - (graphic novels) A crowdfunded hit is put out on one protagonist, and the other protagonist is a freelancer hired to protect her. Hilarious gig economy sapphic thriller

• Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky - Post-apocalyptic world, robot protagonist who’s at least sort of sentient, basically a musing on the despair and decay of our civilization as seen through the eyes of what one desperately hopes is our successor

• The Dragon's Banker by Scott Warren - Addresses the age-old question: how do you help a dragon retain his wealth while simultaneously rolling out fiat currency?

More romance

• Trouble by Lex Croucher - FL pretends to be a nanny to get money to save her sick sister. ML is the single dad, also he's a retired sailor and he's bi?! And one of the kids is trans?!! And none of that is the whole point of the story!! And it had big themes of chronic illness without that having to be the whole point of the story either!!!

• Something Spectacular by Alexis Hall - Wonderful queer genderfuckery romance

• Grand Slam Romance: Books 1-2 by Ollie Hicks and Emma Oosterhous - (graphic novels) Omg omg omg so gay and hilarious and amazing, I want ND Stevenson to make an animated series out of this, I love these so fucking much

• Just For The Summer by Abby Jiminez - Protagonists are both 'cursed' in that all their exes find their soulmates immediately after breaking up with them, so they decide to date each other temporarily to break the curse. Okay. But FL's mother is abusive, FL is a traveling nurse, ML has to parent his siblings and face his own trauma, the characters are so vivid and real, with so much chewy family stuff along a romance that isn't too glib - this was just a really solidly good novel.

• That Time I Got Drunk And Saved A Human and That Time I Got Drunk and Yeeted A Love Potion At A Werewolf by Kimberly Lemming - pure adorable hilarious goofy yet earnest paranormal romances wtf

• A Shore Thing by Joanna Lowell - Victorian romance with a bicycle race, trans ML, botanist FL

• The Marquis Who Mustn't by Courtney Milan - Historical romance with Asian protagonists in 19th century England. FL wants to study medicine, ML wants to make up for his father’s fraud. Fake fiancé trope without it being too tropeish.

Mystery

• The Last Six Million Seconds by John Burdett - Murder mystery right before China was supposed to reclaim Hong Kong from the British

• The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino - Math teacher disposes of a body and plans a clever, complicated cover-up for the sake of the single mom living next door.

• Now You See Us by Balli Kaur Jaswal - Murder mystery with Filipinx domestic helpers in Singapore

• Murder By Degrees by Ritu Mukerji - Female doctor solves murder mystery in 1875 Philly, lots of interesting historical medical education details

• Blanche Passes Go by Barbara Neely - Older black working-class woman solves mysteries while dealing with her own past, dating as an adult who has adult children, starting up a business, racism in the south, benevolent (and malevolent) sexism, &c &c. I enjoyed how Blanche was so almost out of fucks left to give

Thriller

• Non-Stop Till Tokyo by KJ Charles - Tokyo bar hostess with excellent language skills gets in trouble with yakuza, former sumo wrestler steps up to protect her

• A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes - Supposedly this is the start of a detective series, but I read it as a beautifully written super gory thriller with very real characters and a vivid sense of place. Plot itself was meh but who cares

• The Night of Baba Yaga by Akira Otani (translated by Sam Bett) - Gruff violent butch gets forced to bodyguard demure-seeming yakuza princess. Gender stuff and fighting for freedom. I’d love to see a movie adaptation of this one.

Work

• Platform Engineering by Camille Fournier and Ian Nowland

• High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove

• The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford

• Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manual Pais

More wildly hilarious fiction

• Exordia by Seth Dickinson - Aliens and genocide - philosophical and funny and goofy and gory and emotionally insightful and resonant. What does it mean to be fully yourself? Do we have choices? Fuckin hilarious

• Lady Eve's Last Con by Rebecca Fraimow - Queer sapphic funny Jewish con artist romp!

• The Husbands by Holly Gramazio - I'm so excited Holly finally wrote a book! This was funny and fun and Dave was in it! (I really enjoyed getting to poke Holly about how she put my husband in her Husbands)

• Battle of the Linguist Mages by Scotto Moore - A little bit reminiscent of Snow Crash but possibly even funnier, with a linguistics-based magic system and real life blurring with video game, I was cackling all the way through

Other Fiction

• Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan - Isekai: terminal cancer patient transported into body of fantasy novel villainess. Chronic pain and illness and learning to see people as people, plus a hot loyal dangerous killer dude

• James by Percival Everett

• Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman - Jewish vampire trans man archivist and genderqueer widow (of the person whose archive he's working on) fall in love. This book was an absolute love letter to internet fan culture of the 90s and early 00s and I was very much its target audience

• We're Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2022 by Naomi Kanakia and Charles Payseur

• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky - Post-apocalyptic and deeply flawed remnants of humanity looking for a home, but also an uplift novel where we accidentally uplifted spiders instead of monkeys

• Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky - Okay but what if instead of spiders or robots, our successors were octopuses and slime molds?

• Fire Watch by Connie Willis - Includes a couple of my favorite short stories - "All My Darling Daughters" (rapey) and "And Come From Miles Around" (sweet)

Other Non-Fiction

• Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future by Oliver Franklin-Wallis

• Never Let Go: A Philosophy of Lifting, Living and Learning by Dan John - My biggest takeaway: if it's important, do it every day. If it's not important, don't do it at all.

• The Russian Kettlebell Challenge: Xtreme Fitness for Hard Living Comrades by Pavel Tsatsouline

• Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves by Nicola Twilley

• Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World by John Vaillant - First half was spectacular on fire and firefighting and the surreality of dramatic tragedy, second half was more prosaic climate tragedy sadness

Fiction that missed the landing but was otherwise pretty great

• One's Company by Ashley Hutson - Protagonist wins the lottery and builds a fake Three's Company town to live in alone. Squeamishingly uncomfortable psychological disaster, but I would’ve appreciated a bit more plot, and it fizzled out at the end.

• Five-Star Stranger by Kat Tang - Gig economy worker pretends to be whatever you need, for a price - not just a fake mourner, but a fake ex or brother or whatever. Really horrifyingly, his longest-running gig has him pretending to a child that he's her father.

Honorable Mentions

• The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui - Another immigrant parent graphic memoir

• Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel - Women's youth boxing tournament, mostly a series of really good character studies, very physical embodied intimate writing

• Stone Cold Fox by Rachel Koller Croft - Another fun con woman story

• The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff - Way too christian for me, but I liked the survivalist aspect

• Snapdragon by Kat Leyh - (graphic novel)

• The Deep Dark by Molly Knox Ostertag (graphic novel)

• I'd Rather Burn Than Bloom by Shannon C.F. Rogers - (YA) Filipina teenager trying to figure her shit out after her mother dies.

• The Phoenix Bride by Natasha Siegel - Jewish bi male doctor protagonist!

• The Dueling Duchess by Minerva Spencer

• The Worst Ronin by Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Faith Schaffer (graphic novel)

• A Study in Scarlet Women by Sherry Thomas - I initially expected just yet another Sherlock Holmes retelling, but after a bit I realized that this book is about a group of autistic sisters finding their way in the world, and liked it much better

• Women of Good Fortune by Sophie Wan

• How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler

• The Ping-Pong Queen of Chinatown by Andrew Yang - (YA) Parental pressure and using friends as symbols rather than ends in themselves.

Books that I heard hyped up but which ultimately disappointed me (NOT recommended)

• The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye by Briony Cameron

• The Keeper's Six by Kate Elliott - Jewish mom adventuring to rescue her adult son who was kidnapped by a dragon, but somehow it was just kinda only okay.

• The Lost City of Z by David Grann

• Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine by Gail Honeyman

• Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang

• The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei - Just go read Species Imperative by Julie Czerneda instead.

• Exhibit by R.O. Kwon - 95% boring, 5% spectacular

• The Pairing and I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston - I should finally accept that I just don’t love any of McQuiston’s work.

• Model Home by Rivers Solomon

• Lumberjanes by ND Stevenson &c

• Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart - Queer son devoted to alcoholic mother. Best moment is when she briefly cleans up her act after getting a new boyfriend, and he's shaken by the thought that she could do it for the boyfriend but not for him.

Total number of books read in 2024: 231 (to be fair, 14 of those were manga and 40 were graphic novels)

(Previous years’ lists are archived here.)

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1. hi Molly!