In 2024, I read 42,475 pages across 160 books, from 140-something authors. I didn’t have a number in mind as a target — I just knew that I wanted to read more. I found most of the time to read by simply limiting my screen time: social media (digital cocaine) and TV shows. If you think you don’t have time to read more — but you want to — then track your social media use for a week.
It’s not so difficult to pick 10 outstanding books from this year, but to rank them — now that’s a little trickier. The obvious place to start is my books of the month, but, upon further reflection, those don’t necessarily and automatically qualify as books of the year. Our response to books (anything, really) is predicated on a number of subjective things, like how we’re feeling (tired, sick, overworked, inspired, relaxed, stressed) and where we are in life. But you know all that. Whether Stoner or I Who Have Never Known Men should be in first place was, at least initially, my most difficult choice. Ultimately, Jacqueline Harpman won out, because, one year on, I still have questions.
Again, no lengthy reviews here — I have neither the time nor the desire to write them. Here, then, are my favorite books of 2024:
1. I Who Have Never Known Men
— Jacqueline Harpman
On the face of it, Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men is a bleak and disquieting tale. It’s difficult to describe why it’s such a page-turner without introducing spoilers. Where are they? How did they get there? And why do they have no memory of how they got there? These questions are part of the book’s appeal. What’s troubling is that one wonders if finding answers to those questions would change their lives or the outcome.
2. Stoner
— John Williams
An absolute gem. Human, all too human. An unexceptional life, an exceptional tale.
3. The Wall
— Marlen Haushofer
A brilliant and thought-provoking last-person-on-earth novel. Surprised this is not better known.
4. The Book of Strange New Things
— Michel Faber
I understand those who don’t rate this book. But for me, distant future sci-fi, aliens, and religion (especially those wild Christians) are right up my alley.
5. Job
— Joseph Roth
My first Joseph Roth novel. Echos of Stoner in this one. Just a magnificently written protagonist.
6. A Woman
— Sibilla Aleramo
The story of a woman, of millions of women. “Why do we idealize self-sacrifice in mothers? Where does this inhuman idea of self-immolation come from?” — p. 208.
7. The Road
— Cormac McCarthy
Visceral, violent, disturbing, and a reminder than not very much sets us apart from wild predatory animals.
8. The Sparrow
— Mary Doria Russell
Love the setup — again, religion and sci-fi, so it’s my thing. Sometimes a little corny, but still profound and, at the end, profoundly unsettling.
9. The Woman Destroyed
— Simone de Beauvoir
Fierce, frenetic, fantastic.
10. Silas Marner
— George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)
Not at all what I expected. Picked it up from my local bookstore (Fahasa) thinking it would be an easier intro to George Eliot than, say, the 800-page Middlemarch. Read most of it in one sitting. Great storytelling.
If this were a list of my 11 favorite books, then perhaps the first in the Expanse series, Leviathan Wakes, would be here. It’s a swashbuckling fun blockbuster and the beginning of a thoroughly entertaining and epic space opera. A top-20 would include Hugh Howey’s brilliant Silo series (Dust is my favorite of the trilogy), Steinbeck’s epic East of Eden, Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, Rachel Cusk’s Second Place, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, Simone de Beauvoir’s All Men Are Mortal, and more.
What were your favorite books of the year?