This year arrived for me with a heap of emotions and challenges. After being fired from my bookstore position (yeah, can you believe that? Me. Fired.), I hobbled along to find another job. At the start of the year, we also found this obnoxiously cute and innocent-looking puppy we named Nadja (after Natasha Demetriou’s vampiress in What We Do in The Shadows). Nadja was a welcome distraction and a great excuse for me to listen to more audiobooks while I watched her romp around the dog park.
Leaving the bookstore, the number of books I took home was dramatically reduced, but not the number of books I read. This year I read 66 books, compared to 61 from last year. Like last year, I was not aiming for a specific goal other than to enjoy my books and broaden my horizons.
I found much more solace in series this year, accounting for 14 of my total of 66 books. I finally read A Court of Thorns and Roses, at first a hate-read, until our heroine developed a bit of backbone in the second installment and I *accidentally* read the whole series. The Lunar Chronicles (beginning with Cinder) by Marissa Meyer was a fun space-romp with colorful characters and unexpected twists.
Thanks in part to these, I read a lot more fantasy this year. I finally read The Hobbit, which was both fun and simultaneously disappointing (primarily for its utter lack of female characters). My fantasy tastes also bled into my love of horror. I confirmed my love of T. Kingfisher’s delightful, dark tales. Ninth House lodged itself in my forever-favorites. Keeper of the Night mixed fascinating death folklores I couldn’t stop reading.
Like last year, I read significantly more female authors than male and primarily white-centric stories. For 2025 I want to be more mindful to read diverse authors. However, I did read many perspectives in 2024 that broadened my knowledge. I read The Salt Roads, an unforgettable historical fiction by Nalo Hopkinson that focused on enslaved people in the colonial Carribean. The Mountains Sing was another notable historical fiction set in Vietnam. Our Women on the Ground is a collection of essays written by Arab women journalists on what it is like to be in, and write about, war-torn countries where their own rights were uncertain.
I also learned more about English history as well. I LOVED My Lady Jane on Netflix and immediately listened to the audiobook on Hoopla. I came in knowing pretty much nothing about English history, but enjoyed the story immensely. I didn’t expect it to also help me understand When Women Ruled the World, which I picked up only a few months later. This one focused on four major queens in Europe: Catherine Medici, Mary and Elizabeth Tudor, and Mary Queen of Scots. I love learning through feminist perspectives and this book reframed these queens, not as rivals according to many historians, but as women who supported one another diplomatically and personally. This book, in turn, also helped me understand the tour I took in the Louvre only a few days after finishing it! It was a happy coincidence that gave me more context for the rich history of art I was fortunate enough to see myself.
Here are my 12 favorite reads of 2024, and why they made the cut:
Non-fiction:
1. Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World edited by Zahra Hankir
I’ll start with the first book I picked up in 2024. Our Women is a collection of essays written by Arab women reporters. I am a slow learner and I have been tentative to tackle issues in the Middle East, of which I know little about. But I couldn’t think of a perspective I’d want to learn from more than the women who live there and fight for their freedom of speech.
These essays were beautifully written. As heartbreaking as they are, they are also full of hope. These women work tirelessly to protect their rights and inform the world of what is happening against all odds. This was a great introduction to the issues plaguing the Arab world.
2. Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed by Men by Carmen Criado Perez
And the award for Book I Slept on Far Too Long goes to Invisible Women. This book does so much work. From car safety to medical treatment to smartphones, Perez shows the ways women are willfully ignored and excluded in the modern world.
I was not expecting to be blown away like I was. I am a fairly well-read feminist and yet it still changed the way I think about the world. Everything is built around men. Literally everything. Even though everyone comes from women.
Sci-Fi/Fantasy:
3. Escape Velocity by Victor Manibo
The instant I heard about this book I went to order it off ThriftBooks. This satire of rich assholes in space was a fun romp. Not only is it close in concept to my own writing, but it also inspired another short story (which I’m still working on). I wouldn’t say the writing or the themes are exceptional, but they are done well enough to offer more depth and world-building than I was expecting. Plus, it’s a murder mystery. How fun is that?
4. Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
I was skeptical about how much people loved this book. I loved Circe, but didn’t seriously expect it to be better.
Our narrator is not Achilles but his lover Patroculus, who was a ward in Achilles’ home as a boy. Though Achilles was popular and loved by everybody, he chose Patroculus as a best friend, and then a lover.
I have never been so affected by a love story in my life. Miller took my heart out, stamped on it, shoved it into a wood chipper, and smeared it on toast for breakfast.
5. My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand
Judging this book by its cover, I wrote it off as a teen love story trying to be cool and hip and funny. Well, it was all those things, and more. After watching My Lady Jane on Prime (I’m still bitter that it was canceled), I couldn’t get enough. I needed something to take me back to these characters and their world.
Happily, the book offers more than the series with more perspectives and a longer storyline, which I lost myself in immediately. Hand and her cowriters have sharp wits and a gift for balancing the comedic with the dramatic action. It’s a loose retelling in the vein of The Great where Lady Jane Grey, who was queen for nine days and later beheaded by Mary Tudor, escapes Mary’s wrath and bands together with persecuted magical folk, like her new husband who turns into a horse by day.
The whole thing is hilarious and joyous and far more clever than I would have expected.
6. Ninth House and Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo
Alex Stern is not an ordinary girl. Nor is she an ordinary student of magic. Taken from a tragic scene from her old life for her unusual capacity to see ghosts, Alex is learning the arts of magic when her friend and mentor is tragicaly disappeared. The mystery of what happened starts to unravel, along with Alex’s talent to break rules and push the limits.
What makes this story so incredible is Alex’s grit. She is no one-dimensional bad girl. Her tragic back story informs her suspicions of the institution that took her in: that power protects its own. Both books are electric with possibility and rich with friendship, suspicion, and dark forces. I’m on my toes waiting for the third installment.
Historical Fiction:
7. The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai
This beautiful generational epic spans WWII, the Vietnamese land reform, and the Vietnam war. The narrators are a grandmother and her granddaughter, but are about their family as a whole and the various ways war and communism kept them apart. Their stories are immersive and dramatic, often sad but it somehow maintains an air of optimism that made me forget the content I was reading was so heavy.
This story also highlights the confusing and dangerous times in Vietnam where people were often made to choose between loved ones and country, and navigate conflicting and dangerous ideologies. I learned a lot about Vietnam’s history and thoroughly enjoyed the narrative.
Horror:
8. Bunny by Mona Awad
If you’ve read Bunny, you know this is a hard book to categorize. There is no genre labeled surreal-Frankenstein-magic-cult-academia. If you haven’t read it, trust me, just pick it up. It starts with Samantha Mackie (lovingly called “Smackie” by her best friend, Ava), an MFA student starting her second year and struggling to fit into the pretentious program and her workshop with four ultra-clingy girly-girls who all call each other “Bunny.”
When this story first started going off the rails about a third of the way through, I almost stopped reading. It was all wild and absurd and seemed to have lost any semblance of a thread. But, soon enough, it picks back up. The narrator starts to try to figure out what is happening. Where is Ava? Why was she sucked into this cult? Are the Bunnies her real friends? And did she create the wolf-eyed, sexy stranger that shows up at the bus stop? For being a wacky mind trip, this story has a lot of heart and meaty themes to dig your bunny claws into.
9. The Watchers by A.M. Shine
A. M. Shine is now a must-read author for me. I had this saved on my Hoopla for a few years and was spurred by seeing the trailer for the movie version. While I have thoroughly explored my thoughts on both of these on my blog, it’s worth mentioning the thick, rich sense of dread Shine creates for his characters and a class of eldritch horror of its own.
I also listened to The Creeper, also by Shine. This was marked by the same intoxicating qualities, yet with less cohesion by the story’s end. Regardless, it was also a great atmospheric fall read.
10. Diavola by Jennifer Marie Thorne
Diavola did something I haven’t seen in other horror stories: Our protagonist has something of a relationship with her possessor.
The story starts like you’d think: our protagonist, Anna, partakes in a family vacation in rural Italy amid family tensions and strange happenings in their AirBnB. We are made to question the protagonist’s reliability through her family, who seem to be waiting for Anna to cause a scene. But the Anna we follow is exceedingly smart and level-headed.
Thorne successfully uses toxic family dynamics to corner her heroine. The family refuses to believe their experience being haunted and instead blame the happenings on Anna. Shunned and having run home to New York, Anna still finds herself dogged by the demonic mistress of the villa. It is here that the relationship between Anna and the ghost becomes something new. She understands her actions and intentions and talks back to her (often to hilarious, yet not campy, effect). Her relationship with the ghost feels more solid than that with her gaslighting family. It was a highly enjoyable, scary, and hilarious story.
11. A Love Like Blood by Marcus Sedgwick
I still, to this day, have not seen A Love Like Blood anywhere but from the Pango seller I bought it from. The story sounded like a gothic old-timey vampire story, but taking place post-WWII. I opened it hoping for the best and happily found myself with a new favorite.
A Love Like Blood follows a war veteran who sees a man drinking the blood of a dead woman. He can’t get the man’s face out of his mind, can’t forgive himself for running away instead of trying to help the woman. Years later, he sees the same man out for a drink with a different young woman and his obsession takes flight.
This story has the tone and cadence of a classic with noir vibes and an upbeat pace. I highly recommend this one for the Halloween season.
12. Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda
Whatever you think Jawbone is, prepare to be proven wrong.This story starts out as a schoolgirl horror cult, a toxic friendship, and a kidnapping. What happens inbetween is beautiul and brilliant. Aside from heavy references to Lovecraft, Melville, and “creepypastas,” the books takes on a mythology of its own making. The writing is complex and unnerving. I listened to it on audio (which was an amazing performance by narrator Victoria Villareal) but I wished I’d been able to sit with the words and reread passages with the book in my hands. I know I will absolutely be acquiring this in book-form for a reread.
