Best Books of 2024

yeah that’s right I read books

2025-02-04

Previously: 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019

New for this year is that I’m not using goodreads as my primary way to track books. I am using my local books.sqlite database! My goal was to have one single database and then export to goodreads and bookwyrm and storygraph from there. This has been mostly successful.

I read 46 books. Here are some highlights.

Fiction

• Remarkably Bright Creatures, Shelby Van Pelt: A cute story about family. And a giant octopus. Cute, despite it using one of my least favorite narrative tropes: big, entirely preventable misunderstandings. If only people would use their words at each other! Read this if you want something light and cute, and if you like intelligent sea creatures.

• My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh: Disquieting story of a young woman who tries to take enough drugs to black out for a year. Read this if you want to feel uneasy and uncomfortable about a protagonist acting badly.

• Dead Collections, Isaac Fellman: A trans archivist who gets turned into a vampire inconveniently at the start of their transition tries to figure out their job and their love life. Read this if you want to learn about what it’s like to be trans. Or a vampire. Or an archivist.

Fantasy

• Witch King, Martha Wells: Totally cool fantasy, and also kind of a mystery. Read this if you want deep world building and discrete magic systems, and to read about a demon prince who is also a witch trying to figure out what happened to him and his friends.

Horror

• Mongrels, Stephen Graham Jones: Coming of age story about a family of werewolves trying to get by on the fringe of society. Read this if you want to read a self-aware story about werewolves which is part metaphor for people being squeezed out on the margins of society, and is also part metaphor about growing up without any home stability.

• Our Share of Night, Mariana Enriquez: Coming of age story about a kid and his dad who are both caught up in a dangerous cult. Takes place in Argentina, translated from the Spanish. Read this is you want a straight up spooky horror mystery where the real monster is the things that the dad does to his son in the name of protecting him and keeping him safe.

• Red Rabbit, Alex Grecian: Weird western about cowboys and ghosts and witches and devils. Read this if you want to read about cowboys with good manners and good shootin’ who get kind of accidentally caught up with hunting down a witch, and all of the weird weird stuff that happens as a consequence.

Memoirs

These are all audiobooks, all read by the author. (I’m sure there are also other formats, but that’s how I read them.)

• Making It So, Patrick Stewart: Read the audiobook if you want to hear Stewart narrate it. Read this if you want to hear about Stewart growing up dirt poor and falling in love with stage acting. And cheating on all his romantic partners. Oh yeah he was in Star Trek and Dune and X-Men. But mostly he just wants to tell you how much he loves stage acting.

• Sure I’ll Join Your Cult, Maria Bamford: Read the audiobook so you can hear Bamford expertly delivering her own weird brand of comedy. Read this if you want to hear how somebody with a ton of neuroses and mental illnesses deals with their misfiring brain. (It’s self help programs. That’s how she copes. That’s where the title of the book comes from. She collects 12 Step programs as if they’re pokemon.)

• Better Living Through Birding, Christian Cooper: Remember when that white lady called the cops on a guy in Central Park for birding while black? That was this guy! Read this if you want to hear a gay, black, harvard educated comic book writer, traveler, and lifelong birder talk all about birds also his daddy issues.

Comics

One graphic novel, one superhero comic, and one revivalist comicbook.

• Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, Kate Beaton: Read this if you want to hear a true story from the author of Hark! A Vagrant about all of the trauma and abuse she accumulated over the years she spent working in the oil fields of rural Canada.

• Justice League vs. Godzilla vs. Kong, Brian Buccellato: Straight up awesome superhero nonsense. Read this if you want to see Godzilla punch the shit out of Superman. Or if you want to see Mecha Batman got toe to toe with some other kaiju. It is absurdly awesome. Absolutely ridiculous.

• The Flintstones, Mark Russell: A surprise hit! Read this if you want a very funny and scathingly satirical fresh take on everybody’s favorite modern stoneage family.

Audiobooks

Best narrator:

• The Eyes and the Impossible, Dave Eggers: Read by Ethan Hawke. A charming Animal Story about a wild dog who lives in a park and all of the stuff that happens to him. Hawke does a fantastic job reading Eggers. Don’t miss this one.

Nonfiction

• Dying for a Paycheck, Jeffrey Pfeffer: How workplace stress is killing us all. Read this if you haven’t already been radicalized about workplace reform.

• UNIX text processing, Dale Dougherty: Niche selection of the year. Part technical manual, part history book from that particular time when we were transitioning from typewriters to computers, but before word processors were really a thing. So this is about how to do text processing and prepare your writing for print with groff and a little awk.