My Books of the Year 2024
What's a favorite anyway?
Before we are blessedly inundated with lists of books to look forward to in 2025, I wanted to provide you with my favorite reads of 2024. What makes a favorite? Just as when Associate Justice of the Supreme Court looked at prurient materials and rendered whether qualified as pornography, I know them when I see them. Some tell-tale signs of a favorite read include:
I would rather pick it up than put it down.
It makes me think critically about life without seeming like homework.
It gives me pleasure to tell other to read it.
I find myself talking about it to other people.
I would call it “fun” even if it’s terribly depressing, or “moving” even if it makes me laugh out loud.
The guidelines are vague, but the feelings are strong. How’d my reading year go?
I ended up reading 72-ish books over several thousand pages, mostly digital ones. A few less than last year. I’m going to recommend 21 of them that were especially favorite-coded below.
I’m not sure how the above graph is particularly helpful, but you can kind of see when I was on airplanes and/or unable to sleep because of the real world.
According to this graph, my reading was emotional, reactive, funny and dark, and this does bear out with my birth chart if we’re being honest.
If you’ve ever thought of me as literary, gay, or contemporary, then this chart would back you up.
Anyway, here are 21 of my favorite reads of the year (and some blurbs about them) listed in mostly random order! (You may have to click below to exand this whole post if you’re reading it in your email - it’s a long one!)
THE LIBRARY IS OPEN
Martyr! – Kaveh Akbar. Perhaps my favorite read of the year gave us a character for the ages - Cyrus Shams, a queer, Iranian-American poet in recovery whose desire to find meaning in martyrdom leads him to a life-changing moment with a performance artist who lives in a museum. Sounds bleak, but absolutely overflows with life, humor, and hope.
James – Percival Everett. A modern masterpiece lives up to the hype when one of our most prolific living authors tackles an American classic. Clever and never didactic, the absurdity of slavery and the question of who gets to tell stories are on display in this feat of a novel that will be read 100 years from now.
Beautyland – Marie-Helene Bertino. If this book were a song, it would be Stephen Sondheim’s Being Alive. Anyone who’s ever felt alienated will relate to Adina, sent from space and born to a Philadelphia mother. As she makes her way through humanity, we reckon with the exile of self and pure joy that go hand in hand while living on Earth.
The God of the Woods – Liz Moore. A thriller with heart set in a 70s summer camp in the Catskills. An unputdownable doorstop of a book that deals with the disappearance of siblings a decade apart, the ways our memory buoys or fails us, and how rich people have always been awful - just not always in the ways we think.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles – Rufi Thorpe. An *actually* funny novel about the ways we judge how people get by. Said money troubles are alleviated only slightly whenMargo’s former professional wrestler of a dad moves in with her after she has her college professor’s secret baby and her OnlyFans ambitions take off in unexpected ways.
I Make Envy on Your Disco – Eric Schnall. A queer coming of middle age story brings our hero to Berlin as his relationship falls apart at home. This gentle novels shows that sometimes what you need to bring you perspective is the courage to say yes to adventure, a new location to explore, and strangers who become family.
Ways and Means – Daniel Lefferts. Foretold brat green. The only book I read this year to feature a throuple and a MAGA orgy, it elegantly traces how finances dictate the way we live, how we love, and the ways we set expectations for ourselves and others. The fact that it clocks the growing undercurrent of fascism beneath the world of corporate finance is just a bonus.
Rejection – Tony Tulathimutte. A collection of connected short stories that shows us HOW WE LIVE NOW online, and how it spills over to real life. Shocking, pathetic behavior that will make you gasp and look away. You’ll clutch your proverbial pearls, but with the author’s sleight of hand, you never totally lose sympathy for this cadre of losers.
Help Wanted – Adelle Waldman. Never preachy, but routinely devastating and important, this novel is at once a fizzy caper set in the workplace as well as an anticapitalist critique of how working classes are forced to operate and sabotage one another - in a way, it’s a subversion of the workplace novel itself.
The Safekeep – Yael van der Wouden. On vacation, I affectionately referred to this one as “Gaslight for Dutch Lesbians.” I stand by it. This tense novel slowly unfolds the motivations of a a rouge houseguest, as her uptight host in a stately house in 1960s Netherlands discovers herself. What’s revealed indicts a complicit society.
Anyone’s Ghost – August Thompson. Everyone’s got that one person who landed in their life and changed everything, especially if you’re queer. This novel follows one of those relationships over the years as a memorial to lost youth, self discovery, and the bittersweet melancholy of witnessing your life’s beacon of coolness being unable to live up to your expectations.
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The Torqued Man – Peter Mann. Just when I thought we’d reached the end of what WW2 novels were able to do, along came this novel that I somehow missed a couple years ago that’s a cat and mouse spy game involving a repressed homosexual bureaucrat, an omnisexual mercenary, and a plan to sabotage the entire Third Reich. A dazzling surprise for me.
Little Rot – Akwaeke Emezi. Something’s rotten in the state of New Lagos. A polyphonic spree of all killer/no filler, as we follow a cadre of friends and associates over the course of a crazy, sex and murder filled night in Nigeria. Trans girlboss sex workers, a psychotically violent pastor, and sex party curators only scratch the surface of this cast of characters.
How We Named the Stars – Andrés N. Ordorica. A sad but hopeful story of a queer man’s first love ending in tragedy, and how his exploration of this moment in his life leads him to connect deeply with his family back in Mexico. One of the many new voices I read this year whose career I can’t wait to follow.
Greta & Valdin – Rebecca K. Reilly. Our best New Zealand familial journey since they filmed all those hobbits down there, this novel follows a quirky and (somehow) almost completely queer as they navigate that queerness, their biracial identities, and the various lovers entering and leaving their lives. It’s the Maaori-Russian-Catalonian family you didn’t know you needed to meet.
Worry – Alexandra Tanner. If I handed you this book, I’d tell you it’s something like a mashup of the best conversations in Girls and Fleabag. The dialogue sparkles and stings. Sisters play off each other in the ways that the best siblings in literature do - unable to live with each other but understanding each other more deeply than anyone else ever will.
Grief Is for People – Sloane Crosley. A raw and insightful memoir of someone who in the course of a very short period of gets robbed of family heirlooms by a burglar and loses her best friend and mentor to suicide. She subscribes to the magical thinking that solving the crime might help her understand why her friend is no longer living in the world.
Good Material – Dolly Alderton. What on earth is a seemingly heretosexual romcom doing on this list? Standing out as an anti-romcom that delves into the loss of a relationship and how all of us - no matter who we love - have to rely on others and ourselves to get over it. The excellent supporting cast brings color and life.
In Tongues – Thomas Grattan. A coming of age tale of an adrift young queer man in search of direction and family and who falls in with a powerful art dealing couple. The book examines found family and growing up despite the inertia of settling where you land. Bonus sections in Mexico City and Europe are delightfully evocative.
When the World Tips Over – Jandy Nelson. A gorgeous magical realism-laden, young adult journey of a family who lost the ability to communicate after the patriarch leaves. But destiny intervenes and historical curses culminate when tragedy occurs and they must band together. Loosely based on East of Eden and gorgeous throughout.
The Art Thief – Michael Finkel. An utterly bananas true story about, well, an art thief. Stéphane Breitwieser is a master thief in his spare time, absconding with and collective more than 200 works of art totaling millions of dollars. The author takes us step by step through the crimes and follows the unbelievable aftermath. Couldn’t believe this was real.
Bonus other great books you might love. I sure did. Monstrilio – Gerardo Sámano Córdova, Doppelganger – Naomi Klein, Come and Get It – Kiley Reid, The Husbands – Holly Gramazio. Evenings & Weekends – Oisin McKenna, Providence: A Novel – Craig Willse, My Documents – Kevin Nguyen (out in 2025), Headshot – Rita Bullwinkell, My Friends – Hisham Matar, The Happy Couple – Naoise Dolan, Yellowface – RF Kuang. Blue Sisters – Coco Mellors, The Wedding People – Alison Espach
Until next year…happy reading!