2024 Favorite Reads
Plus some thoughts about self-reflection amid a brutal year.
Because of how much I write and talk about books for my day job at Book Riot, I find myself wondering if it’s worth talking about the books I liked this year because it feels like I have talked about them nonstop for weeks. But that’s not really true.
My reading life is parceled out into bits and pieces. Most of what I write for work is focused on YA, meaning that more than half of what I read, adult fiction and nonfiction, rarely gets much time or attention in the spaces where I like to talk about books. Whether or not people choose to read a roundup of my favorite reads or reflections on my year in reading doesn’t matter as much as the feeling that if I don’t take the time to reflect on it, I feel like I have not spent adequate time with self-reflection, period. I desperately want to plow ahead right now, since this year has been top tier terrible, but because so much of how I think and engage with the world comes through what I read, I feel untethered skipping it.
Self-reflection is important. This was hammered in over and over while I was enrolled in a clinical mental health counseling program. It is how you not only better learn about who you are and what habits you’ve developed, consciously or not, but it is also a tool for helping think about what it is you want to create for the future.
But as I came to learn during my stint in that program, you can do too much self-reflection and burn yourself out on your own life. You can and do get sick of your own voice.
There was a moment early in 2024–right after leaving that masters program–when I sat on the floor of the dance studio where I do ballet and just spit out to my teacher that I’d left my master’s program. She and my classmates were among the first to know this happened, and it wasn’t because I was particularly close to any of them. It came out because that teacher had told me early on that she knew many folks who did similar programs and finished with a lot more confusion than clarity about themselves and their place in the world. I felt that. I felt it deeply every single time I was forced to do another assignment reflecting on some experience. We can only look in the rearview mirror so much before we lose control of the steering wheel and the car takes us off the road.
Since leaving, I’ve shied away from reflection as a conscious act because it has brought up far too much. It isn’t that I’m not reflecting. It’s that I am deeply reflective in every waking moment of my life, and living that much more in my head just doesn’t feel good. In a year of ceaseless downs, spending time reflecting feels more and more punishing.
But there are things I want to reflect on as this year comes to a close. I left a program that, despite being very good at, was not going to work out for me. I went on many great coffee and tea dates with people I care about, including some with whom we’ve talked about doing something together for years. I got laser hair removal on my chin, which for most people is no big deal, but for me, put to bed some of the questions I kept circling in my essay for Body Talk (and the subsequent essay promoting that book in Ms. Magazine). I got two tattoos, both of which were done with ink that included the ashes of several of my beloved pets. I saw a snowy owl with my daughter in the wild locally before someone killed it with their car, and I paid off my credit cards from a long-term freelance project that I just put the finishing touches on (more on that in the new year). I was honored to give a number of talks to library workers about book censorship, including a keynote at the Michigan Library Association and a luncheon talk on mental health for youth librarians in far upstate New York. I was brave enough at that one to pull off the bandaid about leaving the previously mentioned counseling program and the support I got can’t be put into words.
If I’m being honest, the list of good ends there. My list of failures, inadequacies, fears, worries, doubts, frustrations–that one continues to grow even as we inch toward the finish of 2024.
This was a year of survival. I remind myself often that if waking up in the morning, getting out of bed, and going through the routine is all I can give the world, then the day has been successful enough.
And yet the gentlest I’m able to be with myself comes in my reading life. It was a slow reading year, as I mostly dropped listening to audiobooks in favor of podcasts and the same three or four musicians on repeat. There were weeks I would read nothing at all in favor of zoning out on TikTok* or simply going to sleep at 7, 7:30. Other times, I would read most of a book and then not muster the energy to finish it. It was nothing about the book. It was about me.
As I write this, I’m almost finished listening to book 51, and I will likely finish 52 before the year closes. That’s a book a week and far more than the “average” person reads in any given year. It is about half of my normal. What I’ve taken away, though, is that the books I did make it through–ones that I either read in one sitting or needed to drag out for weeks and weeks–were all what I needed to be reading in those moments. There were no bad books this year, and there were few middle-of-the-road books, either.
I didn’t force myself to read what I thought I should be reading, and I didn’t take on any obligations that required me to read books that were outside of what it was I needed most from reading this year: intellectual stimulation, absolute escapism, and most importantly, curiosity.
Curiosity was exceedingly hard to come by this year. It’s not in wondering why book censorship continues to rise–we know this from the unrelenting years and years of this. It’s not in wondering whether or not the chemo your loved one is going through will work. It’s not in losing your beloved cat of 18 years nor in an election where the most ignorant and uneducated voices carried the majority nor in someone betraying you personally in ways there are not words to describe. Curiosity is not there in a car accident nor in months of fighting your insurance company for the accident that was not your fault nor in having an honor bestowed upon you completely dragged across shitty circles of social media. It’s not in feeling like there’s never enough time, that you’re never good enough as a mother and worker and daughter and friend and person unto yourself.
Finding curiosity in my reading life helped keep me here.
The final episode of Hey YA for 2024 was devoted entirely to my favorite YA reads of the year. If you’re not going to listen, that’s fine. The books I talked about there included Kill Her Twice by Stacey Lee, Clever Creatures of the Night by Samantha Mabry, Shift Happens: The History of Labor in the United States by J. Albert Mann, and Suffragist’s Guide to the Antarctic by Yi Shun Lai.
Something interesting in my reading this year that I haven’t seen before was a gravitation toward the historic. This is both in fiction–Lee’s book and Lai’s book are both early 20th century–while Mann’s book is a work of historical nonfiction about American labor movements from the country’s colonization. Perhaps there was something comforting in knowing that these stories have a beginning and an end. Dates on a calendar that bookend the story being told, even if the legacy of those stories lives on generations later.
This year, I read not one, but two, reimaginings of Huck Finn. I enjoyed Hope Jahren’s take through the perspective of Huck’s late in the story love interest Mary Jane in Adventures of Mary Jane–it’s part “road trip” adventure as it takes the titular character down the mighty Mississippi–and I found myself deeply engaged in the humor and heart pulsing through Percival Everett’s James. I suspect I don’t need to say a lot more about that book, as it’s collecting every honor it deserves. But it was a book I read on my first flight in four years and one that I was eager to spend time with alone on a hotel couch with a big bottle of regional seltzer.
I kept flipping the pages through the short stories inside The Collectors, edited by AS King last year. I especially loved “Play House” by Anna-Marie McLemore (beautiful, lyrical, engrossing writing), “Take it From Me by David Levithan” (the idea of giving things away was a clever take on the idea of what having a collection means), “Museum of Misery” by Cory McCarthy (the illustrative format of a museum was brilliant), “A Recording for Carole Before It All Goes” by Jason Reynolds (sweet and sorrowful all at once), and my hands-down favorite, “Pool Bandits” by G. Neri (skateboard boys in the 1970s trying to prove themselves cool by honing their wheel skills in pools they drained was not just clever but just so very teen). Short stories kept my attention in ways this summer that anything longer simply could not.
Speaking of Jason Reynolds, somehow I did not mention that his book 24 Seconds From Now was at the tippy top of my favorites this year. I’d say I don’t know the reason, but I do: I had the chance to talk at length with Jason about the book, about writing for teens, about the powerful role of literature in all of our lives, and so much more for an upcoming podcast episode. I kept thinking about that conversation and how excellent it was and somewhere along the way the book itself publishing this year and my having read it this year kept failing to gel. 24 Seconds is so cleverly crafted and such a wonderfully emotionally internal story of love from the point of view of a teen boy, something we simply do not see often enough.
It was perhaps the unexpectedly funny and “what the hell is going on?”-ness of Holly Gramazio’s The Husbands that puts it at the top of my favorites of 2024 list. What of finding a new man claiming to be your husband every time you turn around? It was a weird little world I loved living in for a while. I was also surprised to enjoy the bestselling Sandwich by Catherine Newman as much as I did. What happens when decades of family secrets come spilling out during a summer vacation to the coast? It was the kind of book I could not at all relate to but enjoyed deeply from a distance (see: The Husbands).
Still perhaps the weirdest young 30-something character I’ve read–weird as in she sounds and acts 30 years her senior for some reason–I couldn’t help but down book two and three in Annelise Ryan’s “Monster Hunter” mystery series. Set in various parts of northern Wisconsin, each book follows cryptozoologist Morgan as she’s called in to investigate a suspicious death related to local legendary monsters. I don’t know why Morgan insists that her home in Door County, Wisconsin, is so long distance from her beloved’s on Washington Island, as that’s a whopping 20 minute ferry ride, but all of my qualms aside, the premise of the books keeps me coming back. This year, the monster of the week was a bigfoot type creature in Death in the Dark Woods, and the January 2025 entry, Beast of the Northwoods, takes on the hodag.
Feast While You Can by Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta was such a strangely sexy horror novel about queerness in the 90s, and while I found the end to be less satisfying than I wished, the entire ride was worth it. What happens when you’re being haunted by a spirit from your family’s past and the only way to keep it away is to keep your hands on the one person who should be most off limits to you? I blew through it earlier this month. I wouldn’t say it lived up to the comparisons to Nightbitch and We Ride Upon Sticks–two books that each offer something special and unique to feminist horror–but it was a solid, strong, very very gay read.
Every year, I wonder at the idea of naming books to a “best” list and have written at length about the way I see books as “favorites,” as opposed to “bests.” I find myself this year wondering if “favorites” is honestly even right. Several other books I read this year offered me a lot to think about and write about, things to point to and refer to in my own work. None of them were necessarily favorites but instead among the titles that left me mulling them over months and months later. Among those were Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, especially his writing on the sameness of every coffee shop everywhere. We see that sameness in our four color options for cars, our four color options for houses, our four options for what a house looks like, and so on and so forth. It comes as no surprise that this category of books would include Mike Hixenbaugh’s They Came For The Schools, exploring where and how Southlake, Texas, became the red hot center of fights in school boards over what is and isn’t appropriate in public education. If you’re looking at what we’ll be up against in the coming administration, this book is a must-read because the infusion of PAC money and partisan peddling in public education won’t be stopping any time soon.
One project I was invited to join year had me revisit a book that I have reread more times than I can count. I flew through Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak again, in preparation for an interview about what piece of media has had the biggest influence on my career. The interview, which is part of a book on stories from librarians from all segments of the field, isn’t out yet–sometime next year or the following–but I spent several months trying to figure out what that piece of media would be when presented the prompt. It occurred to me that I kept overthinking this. Rather than try to find some deep or philosophical work of art to talk about, I instead needed to get back to my roots. To the first actual YA book I read as a teenager. To an author whose longtime, deep engagement in anti-censorship work has been a model for my own over the course of my life.
Speak might be more relevant now in 2024 than it was when it released in 1999. Revisiting it both broke and healed things within me while reading it on a short flight from Traverse City to Chicago. I found the book at a pivotal time in my adolescence, and I find that every time I revisit it, it’s exactly the right time for that book to be in my life once again.
Make it bend — trees are flexible, so they don’t snap. Scar it, give it a twisted branch — perfect trees don’t exist. Nothing is perfect. Flaws are interesting. Be the tree. — Mr. Freeman to Melinda in Speak
I wouldn’t wish the year I had on most people, nor would I want to live much of it again in any capacity. But this year reminded me that perfection doesn’t exist and no matter how much control you wish to exert over your life, it’s not possible. The winds can only be predicted to a point. The rest is luck and circumstance.
But books, as always, were the companions who helped me find the ground and put faith into the roots I’ve grown, strengthened, and nourished.
Notes
I didn’t include my thoughts on Real Change by Sharon Salzberg in this piece, but you can dive in here.
*Even if the new administration saves TikTok, that victory feels disgusting and frankly, I think 2025 will be about divesting from and erasing more social media from my life. I get the trickiness for TikTok creators in a potential pause on the app’s banning, but as someone who simply consumes, I can step away because I don’t want to support a tool that a fascist believes helped him win the election–and killing the ban will inevitably give him a bigger power trip.