Books of 2024

I finished reading 41 books in 2024, just slightly fewer than in 2023, but on average I thought they were considerably better books. But partly that was because a lot of them were re-reads of books I’d liked the first time. Or times. Or they were new-to-me sequels to books I’d liked. Leigh Bardugo’s Hell Bent, for example, sequel to Ninth House which was one of my favorite books of 2023. Razzmatazz by Christopher Moore, sequel to Noir. And Something Rotten, First Among Sequels, One Of Our Thursdays Is Missing, and The Woman Who Died A Lot, books in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series along with three previous volumes I’d read before and liked, though a little less well than the later books.

These are all novels somewhere on the science fiction or fantasy spectrum, and so are nearly all the other books I read last year. It’s still what I’m in the mood for these days. No mainstream novels, no classics, only one nonfiction book: A City On Mars by Zach Weinersmith and Kelly Weinersmith — a pretty good argument that building settlements in space is a lot more difficult than people tend to think it is and that waiting until we can do it big and do it right is better than trying and probably failing to do it small right now.

Even that’s kind of science fiction adjacent.

So among the novels that were not re-reads or sequels to books read in previous years, I’d say the most notable were:

• The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab. I’d probably put this at the top of the list of the best books I read all year. And I won’t say more about it here because I wrote a review of it back in May.

• Kalyna the Soothsayer by Elijah Kinch Spector. I’d expected something lighter from the descriptions and reviews I saw. It has its light moments, but the tone is generally a bit on the dark side. This is one of those books that sits somewhere on the boundary: Probably best to call it fantasy, but the setting seems to be another planet in a post space colonization future. Kalyna’s a young woman who was supposed to be a soothsayer; the talent runs in the family — but it stopped with her father, who’s no longer able to ply his trade, so Kalyna has to do it. By faking it. Then her father foresees a cataclysmic, imminent war, and Kalyna is conscripted right into the heart of where the war is likely to start. There’s a sequel, Kalyna the Cutthroat; I haven’t read it yet, but I expect I will.

• The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern is an atmospheric story of two magicians, apprentices to rival masters, who are set up on a decades-long game to see who’s better. And the contest is to end with one of their deaths. Even if they do fall in love.

• Shades of Grey and Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde. Shades of Grey came out in 2009, the first book in a promised series… and the second book, Red Side Story, was published only 15 years later. Last year, that is. (And I read both for the first time last year.) It’s a dystopian story about a future world in which Something Happened at some point. It’s not clear what, but in that future everyone is, sort of, color blind. Some people can see red, some can see yellow, some can see purple, and so on, and society is structured and stratified around color vision. The Greys can’t see color significantly at all, and they are essentially untouchables. It’s really your basic Things Are Not What They Seem And The System Must Be Changed story, but the characters are good ones and the odd premise is worked effectively. Fforde’s writing tends to be less goofy and absurd — a bit less — than in his early books, and that’s good.

I read or started to read several bad books in 2023, but last year only one that I got more than a few pages into: Sister Agatha: The World’s Oldest Serial Killer by Domhnall O’Donoghue. It’s about what it says on the box, and it’s… bad. I didn’t finish.