After the gap I’ve decided to call The Great Silence of 2024, I thought it would be fun to get back into the swing of things by sharing some of my favorite reads from last year. It was interesting to reflect on the way this blog changed the way I think as I read. Even though I wasn’t blogging, my subconscious could not help but craft summaries and non-sequitur intros even as the story unfolded. I know I won’t be able to back-fill all 30-something unreviewed books from last year, but a good half of them will be too good to leave unremarked, so look for those in the coming weeks. You know the drill: as usual, there are no stars and no criteria, only how much I personally enjoyed it. Also, these are books I read in the calendar year 2024, not necessarily (in fact, rarely) books published last year. Cool? Cool. Let’s get down to it.
Winterset Hollow by Jonathan Edward Durham
Literary horror with deep emotional beats. This one received a full review before the Great Silence, so I won’t repeat myself here, but know that even looking back almost a full year later, I still recall Winterset Hollow as one of the most moving and impactful reads of the year. After listening to it as an audiobook, I still collected it in physical form just to admire on the shelf.
Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher
Cozy-creepy modern fairytale with a beating heart. Once again, this one received a full review already, but I cannot undersell how brilliant Kingfisher is at bringing her quirky, eclectic characters to life with just a few sentences. I’ve only just met these fictional people, and I already want to take them home in my backpack. That said, this is a legit fantasy adventure, with dire straights and daring escapes well worth the price of admission.
Godkiller and Sunbringer by Hannah Kaner
Epic yet character-driven fantasy adventure. Kaner creates a hauntingly beautiful fantasy world which builds on the familiar idea of a pantheon of gods as the embodiment of universal concepts powered by belief and dives deep into the ways that dynamic would shape the world. For my tastes, she brings just the right balance of crunchy worldbuilding to fascinating character moments. In brief, a ragtag crew of misfits with various complicated relationships to the gods go on a dangerous quest to rescue their minor deity friend and break the influence of a dark fire goddess who lusts for blood. Even as I type it, I am disappointed with how little that sentence captures the depth of the story in the first two entries in this trilogy. I’m going to give both of these a full review very soon, I cannot recommend them highly enough.
The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean
A dark but surprisingly heartwarming family saga. Mild spoilers for chapter 1: The title is much more literal than you might expect. This is a creepy-cute family saga/action-adventure about a mother and her son’s quest to escape the terrible fate prescribed to them by birth in their patriarchal, pseudo-medieval hidden society of book-eating monsters. That was a heck of a sentence, are you still with me? The worldbuilding is light where it needs to be and layered where it counts. In the end, this book about monsters will have you questioning what it means to love, to be alive, and to be human.
The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
Clever, wistful, yet hopeful observational humor. Do you ever sit alone on a front porch, perhaps overlooking your favorite view, and think about how life can be both terrible and beautiful in equal measure, and that these opposed forces often spring from the same source? That’s definitely me after 9pm, on any road trip, or in the presence of fire. If that’s you, you’ll love this book. John Green has a fascinating resume: the author of emotional best-sellers like The Fault in Our Stars is also the co-founder of the Awesome Socks Club, half of the Hank and John YouTube universe, and, lately, an international tuberculosis-awareness philanthropist. In this collection of essays, he brings a nuanced perspective wrapped in honey-soaked prose to the overlooked beauty of the mundane to expansive cosmic truths and everything in between. I give The Anthropocene Reviewed five stars.
That’s it for the list, folks. This marks the beginning of weekly updates from here on out. That is, until the next big life event strikes.
Happy reading,
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