I did more reading in 2024 than I have done in a long time, thanks in part to having a job where I’m allowed to keep one headphone in while I’m working. I didn’t put up numbers that would spark controversy on social media, but I did read twenty-one books for non-work purposes. Here are my favorites:
The Familiar, Leigh Bardugo
Before 2024, I had never read Leigh Bardugo, due in large part to my misperception of her work. Because she’s so often mentioned in the same breath as Sarah J. Maas, I assumed her work would be similar.
Reader, it is not.
The Familiar is the story of a young kitchen maid in Inquisition-era Spain who’s hiding two terminal secrets: her ability to work magic, and her Jewish heritage. After her ability to work “milagritos” is discovered, Luzia is quickly swept into the service of a cruel noble who’s seeking to get back into the king’s favor. With the help a cursed mentor, Luzia explores the limits of her abilities while always cognizant of the danger she’s in from the Catholic Church, who can deem her miracles acts of the devil at any moment.
There is so much in this book. Another of my favorites this year was also written by Bardugo, and the thing I’ve noticed about her writing is her ability to use an economy of words to set a scene. She can say that a courtyard smells of oranges in a way that makes you not just smell the oranges, but see the trees and the stones and what the light looks like. I was so invested in this story that I couldn’t see where things were going from one moment to the next, until they happened and I went, “Are you kidding me? I should have seen that all along!” She swept me away so thoroughly that I could be surprised, which is hard to do for me as a reader.
I adored this book. It comes with my highest possible recommendation, and was my favorite read of 2024.
The Priory of the Orange Tree, Samantha Shannon
I have been chasing the high of reading A Game of Thrones for the first time since 2003. This book helped me find it again.
When the book was first published in 2019, it was touted as a feminist version of the St. George versus the dragon story. I don’t think it was particularly groundbreaking, from a feminism standpoint, but it was sure entertaining. The story is fairly standard for the epic fantasy genre: a mean dragon did a bad thing and will do more bad things if he rises again. Secret society of magic is fighting him. People ride dragons. Sword fights. It’s not groundbreaking, but it’s fun, there’s sapphic romance, and more action and dragons than A Song of Ice and Fire accomplished in however damn many books we’re up to now. But the writing is incredible, three of the POV characters are likeable (fuck you, Niclays), and the drama is high.
I wish this was a fifteen book series. I would read every single one. It doesn’t reinvent the fantasy genre, but it’s what fantasy can be in the right hands. You know, hands that don’t need to include extremely problematic bullshit to tell a story. Hands that can write a diverse cast without resorting to one-dimensional stereotypes, and can pull from numerous mythologies without blatant appropriation. This totally satisfied my craving for a chunky brick of an epic fantasy.
The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin
This is the second book in the Broken Earth trilogy, and frankly, I kind of expected a let down. The Fifth Season blew me away, but one of the biggest elements for me was the slow unveiling of the POV characters and their connections. I thought there was no way book two could keep up but I was wrong.
Trying to write about this series without giving too much away is impossible, especially with book two, so I won’t even try. I’ll just say that this is a fantasy series with such an unusual premise and execution that I’m able to keep reading it despite my sensitivity to maternal heartbreak. I’m actively avoiding reading book three because then the series will be over. And what will I do then?
Slewfoot, Brom
One of my favorite horror movies in recent memory was The Witch. Something about Puritans not being able to resist the lure of the Devil has always been my jam. In Slewfoot, the Puritan in question is Abitha, a young woman sent to the New World to be the bride of the milquetoast, but earnest, Edward. Her quick temper and penchant for folk magic make her a target for the ire of the local villagers, and a thorn in the side of her greedy brother-in-law. She’s on the verge of losing her farm and falling into indenture when she’s befriended by an ancient and terrifying forest spirit.
This has the exact same atmosphere of The Witch, and it falls into the same genre of “good for her” horror pioneered by Stephen King with Carrie, but with a far more satisfying ending than both those stories. And Abitha is my new favorite book girlfriend.
Babel, R.F. Kuang
Anything I could say about this book has already been said, and by critics far more intelligent than I am. I spent a lot of this book thinking, “Wow, I might not be smart enough for this.”
The novel’s protagonist, Robin, is taken from his home in China after suffering a terrible sickness. His guardian, a staunch supporter of the Empire and a celebrated professor of linguistics, prepares Robin to enter Babel, an Oxford college that turns translators into magicians through the power of words. But Robin’s race keeps him from truly becoming a part of Oxford society, and as such, he finds himself in close friendship with other students made misfits by their lack of whiteness and/or maleness. Though Robin is initially seduced by the world of knowledge and power offered by Babel, his eyes are opened to the theft and appropriation that keep the sun from setting on the Empire; his political radicalization follows quickly behind, leading to protest, murders, and heartbreaking betrayals.
Kuang blends linguistics into a magic system unlike any you’ve read before, and the story makes no apologies nor offers sympathetic portrayal of characters who, if written by a white author, would be redeemed by the end of the novel. Despite the existence of magic (and the non-existence of Babel, which is covered in a delightfully snarky author’s note), the story is brutally real, probably because Kuang doesn’t substitute the usual fantasy formulas, settings, and tropes in order to rely on reader familiarity with the genre.
2024 was also the year that I branched out by reading titles that I would never usually have picked up. This led to some quick DNFs, but also some gobsmacking surprises:
Regretting You, Colleen Hoover
I’m as stunned as you are. It Ends With Us is Hoover’s most well-known book. It’s also unreadably terrible; I DNFed in the first chapter. But I found Regretting You in a Little Free Library and thought, okay, let’s give her one more chance. I’m so glad I did. Regretting You was gripping from the very start, with realistic characters (no twenty-eight year old neurosurgeons or heroines with saccharine puns for names) in high-drama, but not unbelievable, circumstances. The writing was simple and easy to quickly digest, and while it didn’t leave me pondering the mysteries of life or anything, I did find myself desperate to return to it for just one more page, just one more page, until it was done, at which point I went into a reading slump. Is Hoover a problematic literary figure? Sure. But a stopped clock, etc., and I really enjoyed this one.
Lightlark, Alex Aster
WOULD YOU READ A BOOK ABOUT AN ISLAND THAT APPEARED EVERY 100 YEARS—
Yeah, yeah, we all saw the non-stop TikToks about the damn book. We all saw the way Aster teased scenes and themes that aren’t present in the novel to take advantage of BookTok algorithms. We’re all pissed off at the fact that she was marketed as a stunning new debut voice when she had two books under her belt already, and that her “decade of rejection” was simply not possible due to the fact that she was twenty when Lightlark was published. It’s not just you. Everyone hated Lightlark, before it even came out. And when it did come out, people hated it even more.
Little Free Library strikes again, folks. Is Lightlark brilliant? No. Is it well-written? Absolutely not. But I enjoyed it, the same way I enjoyed the show Ashes of Love. Did I know what was going on? Nope. Does the plot make sense? Soft maybe. But the world was sparkly and interesting and damnit, sometimes I just want to see a shiny thing and not think hard about it. I put Lightlark up there with Modelland in terms of “It was bizarre, I enjoyed it,” with the caveat that the cast of characters is nowhere near as diverse as Modelland.
