Books I read and listened to in 2024, with commentary (Part 1)

It's that time again.

Photo by Tom Hermans on Unsplash

Hello!

It is time, once more, for the annual book list. These are all books that I finished reading in 2024 in either paper or audio format. As in most years, I read more fiction than nonfiction, more women than men. Since this post is bound to be criminally long, I’m dividing it into two parts:

1. Fiction

2. Nonfiction, Memoir and Poetry/Other.

You can find my previous book lists here or click here to read why I’m ambivalent about the whole enterprise of making these end-of-year lists.

Without further ado, on to the list!

Fiction

I read 35 novels this year. To make the list less unwieldy I’ve divided them into the following categories:

• Novels that deal with marriage and motherhood

• Mystery! (Unintentionally, I read more crime and mystery than usual.)

• New novels by familiar favorites, e.g. Elizabeth Strout

• New-to-me authors, including two brilliant Sarahs (Perry and Moss)

• Exciting debuts

• Books that made me think

• Most recommended books – a handful of titles that I think a lot of readers will like

Marriage and motherhood

• All Fours by Miranda July. In a post called Menopause Lit in September, I wrote that I was having an unprecedented number of conversations about this book. Months later, I can report that people still want to talk about this book! Just now, my dad came over to watch football with my husband and son. He is listening to All Fours and finding it laugh-out-loud funny. I am delighted by the men in my life who are enjoying this novel, and the conversations it has sparked about midlife female desire.

• Sandwich by Catherine Newman. This novel about a middle-aged woman on vacation with her family did not delight me as much as All Fours, but I’m intrigued and gratified to have read several novels this year in which characters are dealing with trauma from pregnancy, pregnancy loss, and childbirth. Much of the humor in Sandwich felt trite, but the narrator’s emotional arc has stuck with me.

• Reproduction by Louisa Hall is a slim novel that reads like memoir or autofiction. Ostensibly, the plot is about a woman who is writing a book about Mary Shelley while trying to become a mother. But that description doesn’t convey the book’s depth. This is stunning, wise, essential reading for anyone who has given serious consideration to fertility, creativity, and motherhood in the Trump era. I bought Reproduction at the 2023 Texas Book Festival after hearing Hall speak on a panel about “monstrous motherhood.” It sat on my to-read pile for a whole year, and when I finally picked it up I read the whole thing at once. I can tell I'm going to be talking about this book for years.

• The Nursery by Szilvia Molnar. Molnar was another author on the same panel at the Texas Book Festival in 2023. I wrote about her novel, which I loved, here.

• We Were the Universe by Kim King Parsons. I heard the author on the Brad Listi podcast, where she said she tears up when she sees the shape of Texas and described her novel as "Texas motherhood and psychedelics.” How could I resist?

• Dayswork by Chris Bacheldor and Jennifer Habel. I loved this funny, fascinating novel-that-reads-like-a-memoir about a woman who becomes obsessed with Moby Dick while quarantined with her husband and children during the pandemic. I wrote about it in Catch a Case of Melville.

• The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. I had a goal to reread more books this year, and this was the only time I fulfilled that goal. I first read this novel about a single mother and her son, a child prodigy, in my 20s. It was lovely to come back to it now that I have two children in their teens. I wrote about the experience in Helen DeWitt Ate My Newsletter.

Mystery!

• After Image by Jaime DeBlanc. Jaime has been a trusted writing teacher and coach to me for years, so of course I was thrilled to read her debut novel. I started reading and was immediately hooked—next time I looked up, I had read 100 pages. This is a moody and suspenseful mystery with so many things I love -- sister dynamics, an unconventional love triangle, the dark side of Hollywood and online true crime forums. I can’t wait to see what Jaime does next!

• The Hunter by Tana French. I wrote a primer on French’s novels in This St. Patrick’s Day, Fly Your Tana French Flag High.

• The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett is a super fun puzzle of a mystery that I heard about on the New York Times book podcast. The plot, about a journalist working on a true-crime book about a murder/suicide cult, was creepy and the characters believable, but my favorite part was the innovative structure, consisting of found fragments from multiple different sources: text and WhatsApp messages, screenplays, emails, and more.

• Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. This amazing novel was my first book of 2024. It’s sort of a noir but deconstructed. Atkinson is one of those novelists who I will follow into any genre. Evidently there are five Jackson Brodie mysteries, including Death at the Sign of the Rook, which came out in September. How exciting that I’ve only read the first one!

New books by familiar favorites

• Day by Michael Cunningham. I was a fan of Cunningham’s The Hours, and returning to his well-crafted prose and characters felt like a conversation with an old friend. I wrote about this family novel set before, during, and after the pandemic in White Lady Problems.

• Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout. I have described Strout as my favorite novelist, but I have to agree with other readers that the latest novel by the creator of the Olive Kittridge/Lucy Barton universe was odd. Strout’s unique voice and peculiar phrases, which I normally love, threatened to become cliches by repetition. One or two instances of "because you're Bob" and "she was filled with a [something]-ness" can be effectively disarming. Any more than that, and you start to think someone is losing her touch. I came away from this novel thinking it could have used another edit.

• Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante. Last year I finished the Neapolitan quartet, and this year I read a much shorter novel by the Italian queen of dramatic pacing while vicariously enjoying my husband’s reading of My Brilliant Friend from the other side of the bed. Ferrante (in translation by Ann Goldstein) writes the best sentences. I have transcribed both the first and last sentences of Days of Abandonment in my notebook of perfect sentences.

• Lovers and Liars by Amanda Ward. This is a very funny and clever novel about three sisters named after literary suicides (Emma, Sylvia, and Anna) who reunite for a destination wedding in a castle in England. I have recommended this novel to several writers working on scenes where a character gets very drunk. Ward excels at writing about adults behaving badly.

New-to-me authors I wish I’d been reading for years

• James, Erasure and The Trees by Percival Everett. After watching American Fiction with my family, I read the novel it was based on, Erasure, listened to James, and devoured The Trees. I wrote about these novels in Percival Everett Is a Fox. With James winning the 2024 National Book Award, I am not the only reader who has just discovered Everett’s work! It’s exciting that he has so many other novels. On my TBR list for 2025 is Colored Television by Danzy Senna, who is married to Everett.

• Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler is a fun, deceptively breezy novel about a middle-aged woman contemplating the choices she’s made in life. I wrote about it in What Exactly Is a Beach Read?

• Veronica by Mary Gaitskill. I read this short, dense novel about a friendship between a model and an older woman who dies of AIDS in ‘80s NYC on a plane ride home from vacation. Gaitskill’s prose is intoxicating, intimidating and inspiring in equal measures. I can't think of another novel that so effectively captures the thrill and grotesquery of being a young, attractive woman in a city.

• The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. This novel about an ex-con bookstore employee in Minneapolis in 2020 might have been a little unfocused, plot-wise, but it’s set in a bookstore in which the author, who really owns a bookstore in Minneapolis, is a character! For a smart, voicey writer like Erdrich, I can forgive a little sprawl. (If you like Ruth Ozeki, you will love this book.) The chapters that describe the city in turmoil after George Floyd’s murder are unforgettable.

• The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry. Apparently there is already a series with Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston, but I hadn’t heard of this book or its author until a very smart person in one of my book clubs told me I should read her. Perry is best described as a literary author because her writing is ambitious and very good, but I want to specify that this super enjoyable novel has strong genre notes, specifically: mystery, romance, and historical. In my notes, I wrote: “Like A.S. Byatt but cozy?” IYKYK.

• The Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss. In this short and thrilling novel, a teenage girl participates in an Iron Age reenactment in Northumberland with her domineering father and passive mother. It’s clear Moss has spent a lot of time thinking about the implications of anachronistic exercises that reach back to a more patriarchal time. I particularly enjoy the physicality of Moss’s writing. Her characters inhabit real bodies: they pee, sweat, eat, run, etc. I am currently listening to Summerwater, in which she transcribes the inner monologue of a woman whose fiancé is working diligently to bring her to orgasm while she would really rather get out of bed for a cup of tea and one or three “bacon baps” (sandwiches). I’m quickly working my way through Moss’s oeuvre, and I hope she is working on a new book now because I can’t get enough.

Exciting debuts

• Practice by Rosalind Brown. I loved this short novel about a day in the life of an undergrad at Oxford who must write an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets. I wrote in Young Women in Limbo about how it reminded me of myself when I was a studious 20-year-old.

• Some Strange Music Draws Me In by Jeremiah Moss. I enjoyed this novel’s shifts in time from 1984, when teenaged Mel meets a brave trans woman in her working-class Massachusetts town, to the present, when Max (formerly Mel) is a teacher at a prestigious private school who is forced to attend sessions with a sensitivity trainer after he runs afoul of the school’s language code regarding appropriate terms for trans people. Some of my favorite parts were the moments when Max describes how other people look at his trans body, searching for signs of the past. You can read my interview with the author here.

• The Haunted Screen by J.M. Tyree. This novella follows an American couple transplanted to Germany, where the husband, a film scholar writing a book about Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, believes he’s being followed by an uncanny presence. I am always interested in writers who dwell in both fiction and nonfiction. Tyree, an editor of Film Quarterly who has authored several books of film criticism, has clearly metabolized Vertigo; his novella is not so much about Hitchcock’s movie as it is related by DNA. The Haunted Screen is as moody and atmospheric as you would expect, but it is also quite funny! Anyone who has spent time trying to navigate a foreign culture in a foreign language will relate.

• Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips. I was late to read Phillips’ debut, which came out in 2020, but I made up for it by reading her next novel, Bear, immediately afterwards. In my creatively titled post, Two Novels by Julia Phillips, I wrote about how Disappearing Earth reminded me of the summer I spent studying in Russia in 1997.

Novels that made me think

• Orbital by Samantha Harvey. My brother and sister-in-law gave me this short novel about astronauts orbiting the earth for my birthday, which occurred several months before it was awarded the 2024 Booker Prize. They really know how to pick ‘em!¹ I can’t improve on what I originally wrote in my reading notes: “Beautiful sentences, plotless, nice to read a bit before falling asleep at night.”

• Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino. I enjoyed this story about a girl that’s sent by aliens to monitor life on planet Earth while growing up in Philadelphia in the ‘90s. In my book club, much discussion centered on whether the heroine was “really” an alien, or whether her otherness could be attributed to a more mundane cause like autism. I found the debate interesting, but ultimately it didn’t matter to me one bit. I believe everything I read when I’m reading a good novel. Fun fact: Bertino is a death doula. Knowing this about her gave me an extra appreciation for the metaphysical aspects of the plot.

• The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. A short novel about a woman who lives in a small Manhattan apartment and agrees to care for the giant dog of her late friend. I loved this meditation on complicated friendship, grief, and human-canine bonding. If you’re looking for a fast-paced plot, this is not the book for you. Some chapters read almost like standalone essays. I admire how Nunez adds just enough story to hold them in place, like a meatball with just the right amount of egg.

• Mother of Strangers by Suad Amiry. This novel, set in Jaffa in 1947-1951, is based on a true story, told to Amiry in a taxi, of two teenagers separated by the 1948 Palestine War. The pacing is odd, and it often feels like a YA novel, but I will remember the scenes of everyday life before, during, and after the establishment of the state of Israel.

Most recommended

I don’t rate the books I’ve read, but I do notice myself recommending some titles more than others. Here is a list of the novels that seemed to come up the most when someone asked me if I’d read anything good lately.

• Search by Michele Huneven. The plot sounds unlikely—a food critic writes a memoir about serving on a year-long committee to find a new pastor for her Unitarian Universalist church? But this book is delightful. I came away from Search wanting to read more by Huneven and hopeful that her other novels also include recipes. (Incidentally, John Warner recently recommended Search in the Biblioracle, but I heard about it first from a rabbinical candidate whom I interviewed while serving on a search committee for a senior rabbi at my synagogue.)

• Come and Get It by Kiley Reid. The second novel by the author of Such a Fun Age was just as fun, smart, and propulsive as the first. Check it out if you, like me, are fascinated/horrified by female archetypes of the American South and interested in novels that deal frankly with race, class, and money.

• More than You’ll Ever Know by Katie Gutierrez. I’m so glad my husband found this novel on this list of crime fiction novels by diverse female authors. He and my daughter listened to it first and insisted that I do the same. I love that it’s set in Austin, Laredo, and Mexico City. I love the plot, about a true crime writer investigating an older woman who married a husband in Mexico even though she was already married (and had twins!) to a perfectly nice man in Laredo. Most of all, I loved how Gutierrez writes about motherhood.

That concludes the fiction part of my 2024 book list. In the next installment, I’ll continue with nonfiction, memoir, and poetry.

An announcement

If you subscribe to A Reader’s Compendium, you already know that I send out semi-monthly dispatches about what I’m reading and writing plus occasional interviews with writers. These posts are free and will remain free for as long as I can get away with it.

In the new year, I’m planning a series of posts about how to read like a writer. I’ve heard from many of you that this is a topic you care about, and I’m excited to share more about some of the practices I’ve developed as a reader, such as keeping a commonplace book and sentence log. If you would like to support my ability to continue doing this work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Bye for now.

• If you’re ever near Asheville, NC, go visit my brother and SIL’s coffee shop/bookstore, Daymoon Coffee & Books!

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