my favorite books i read this year
I read a lot in 2024; I read a lot all the time, although since 2020 the bulk of my reading diet has comprised a staggering number of truly inane Domestic Thrillers in which four to ten (heterosexual, obviously) couples are isolated by a freak hurricane/sudden snowstorm/other extreme weather event in a glamorous but increasingly sinister tropical island retreat/remote ski chalet/glamping compound and somebody’s been carrying a grudge all these years1/the least offensive husband is actually a serial killer.2 I don’t recommend doing this to your brain even if you’re starting from a more robust state of intellectual capacity, but my own brain has not been fit for much else if we are being honest. Anyway, this year was the year I finally began to feel a little bit smarter again, although the jury is still out on whether that is a lasting condition. I’m sure 2025 will be great. Ha! Ha! Ha! Here are my favorite books that I read in 2024 in the order in which I read them. I know you know not to buy any of them from Amazon (go strikers go!!!!)!
Fuck billionaires, don’t give up, and happy New Year. I’m glad you are my friend.
love,
sarah
Private Rites, Julia Armfield // A banger entry in Julia’s ongoing project of reinventing the damp queer gothic; in her latest, set in a permaflooded not-really-the-future-since-it’s-basically-already-this-shitty London, everyone (in this case, three sisters pitted against each other by a tyrannical architect father) still has to go to work and deal with their trauma despite the slow-roll apocalypse (Novel characters—they’re just like us!). Increasingly sinister slips into the surreal follow shortly. Important to note that Julia is also great at jokes.
Bliss & Blunder, Victoria Gosling // Gosling’s debut, Before the Ruins, is one of my all-time favorite contributions to the canon of “Chasing the Dragon of The Secret History,” a category of book to which I have devoted extensive research. Bliss & Blunder is a maximalist riff on Arthurian legend in which Arthur is a douchey tech bro, Guinevere a dissatisfied Instagram star, Lancelot a traumatized war veteran, and Morgan a lady with a serious grudge. Expansive, immersive, toothy-prosed, very fun.
Brotherless Night, V. V. Ganeshananthan // Set primarily in the first decade of the Sri Lankan civil war, Brotherless Night follows sixteen-year-old Sashi, whose greatest dream is to become a doctor. As her beloved brothers and her first love are pulled relentlessly into the maw of political terror, she begins the increasingly perilous work of bearing witness. A beautifully written and riveting examination of the choices people make when no choices are good, unputdownable as a thriller, deeply cathartic.
Grey Dog, Elliott Gish // Increasingly unhinged “spinster” takes on ill-advised teaching job in a remote small town in 1901. Sexy, queer, gross, gleefully terrifying, makes The VVitch look like Ramona Quimby, Age 8.
A Year on Earth with Mr. Hell, Young Kim // I would not describe this book as good, exactly, but if you are into rich people behaving badly in lavishly described luxury clothing this is a dishy little treat (the first blurb is from Bret Easton Ellis, which should tell you all you need to know). It’s a real leap of faith to assume someone with this much money possesses self-awareness; perhaps you, like me, will have a fine time trying to figure out whether Our Narrator is making fun of Mr. Hell on purpose. I read this while I had Covid for the fifth time and it was perfect.
This Wide Night, Sarvat Hasin // A bit like if The Virgin Suicides was set in 1970s Karachi and written by a very talented person who didn’t hate teenage girls. Dreamy and stupendously gorgeous. (The Giant Dark, an equally lush and wildly beautiful riff on Orpheus and Eurydice that includes a teen-girl chorus, great clothes, a hot doomed rock-star romance, and a surprise! vampire, is a book that feels like it was written specifically for me—it’s also not out in the US, because publishers are fools, but Blackwell’s ships free! Sarvat has a new book coming out next year, which is how we know at least one good thing will happen in 2025!!!)
The Crying Book, Heather Christle // Who didn’t cry a whole bunch in 2024?!? Ha! Ha! Ha! This one made me feel a bit better about it. Obviously written by a poet (in a good way), lovely, not as sad as you would think a book about crying might be.
Opacities, Sofia Samatar // O, Sofia! We are lucky to live in the same time and place as this magnificent brain! I read this book at a point when I was trying to decide whether or not to bother with ever writing anything again at all, and it was a wonderful antidote in its solidarity with the desire to no longer be perceived while simultaneously being perfectly understood. The only danger of reading Sofia (other than that you will find yourself possessed by the earnest desire to have intelligent thoughts again—terrible!!!) is that you will come away with an insurmountable reading list, but there are worse problems. The perfect book about writing for people who hate both writing and books about it.
The Light Eaters, Zoë Schlanger // The most fun I have had reading a science book since Entangled Life—you will spend your entire time with this book nonstop delivering Incredible Plant Facts to the group chat! “DID YOU KNOW YOUR PLANTS ARE MAYBE WATCHING YOU RIGHT NOW AND THEY ARE DEFINITELY THINKING ABOUT THE FUTURE” etc. I’m going to keep talking to trees, thank you very much! As someone who has spent a number of years working with scientists, I also quite enjoyed the tasty side helping of scientist gossip (tastefully presented but unmistakable in spice level).
Feast While You Can, Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta // Derangedly horny lesbo horror novel featuring a chatty body-hijacking monster, salacious small-town gossip, rapaciously hot sex, and great jokes. You will not stop enjoying yourself while reading this, and you will not feel slightly embarrassed afterward either.
Mysticism, Simon Critchley // Imperfect but engaging, lots to chew on here if you are for some unfathomable reason considering embarking on a path of deep spiritual enquiry and/or leaving civilization behind for a severely ascetic program in 2025. (That’s fine, but don’t forget to pitch in at your local mutual aid from time to time!) Exclusively focused on Christian mysticism and disappointingly white, but I still got a lot out of it; will likely be of use to my fellow raised-Catholic goths who can’t walk past a cathedral without going inside. Some especially nice thinking about Julian of Norwich, Anne Carson, and Annie Dillard. (I was once told by someone who studied under Annie Dillard at Western in the 70s that Annie Dillard would chain-smoke through all her seminars and send the handsomest gentlemen students out to fetch her hamburgers, which has nothing to do with this book but I dearly hope is true.)
WRITING LATELY: Ugh, I am still working on a novel, god help me! I will tell you more about it next year. I wrote approximately 17,337 words for Reactor about Michael Ende, The Neverending Story, and how despair is okay but inaction is not. You can order a print copy of my most recent published novel, The Darling Killers, here. It’s also an ebook. If you read this far and buy a copy I’ll tell you which gossips in it are true and which writers the gossips are about if you ask nicely. But only in person, because we don’t write our crimes down on the computer!
Nobody has ever done this better than the original, and it is unlikely that anybody ever will.
Sometimes there is a wacky side trip in which Our Heroine consumes one (1) Xanax and hallucinates a demonic orgy or is unwittingly recruited into a sex cult, which is always fun to read as a person who has actually taken Xanax, unlike, I can only assume, the majority of persons producing domestic thrillers.
I am...adding so many of these to my TBR.
i just took out Mysticism from the library! Thanks for the sorta rec.