My 2024 reading list

I continue to read fewer books each year, but I guess I’ve been choosing books I know are good: All of my rereads were Pinnacles, and many of the new books I enjoyed were by authors I knew. I suppose 2024 was a year of comfort reading.

It was also the year a small, well-curated bookstore opened up the street. I made a point to buy at least one book from them every month: I don’t know what we did to deserve it, but I’ll be damned if I take it for granted and let it go out of business.

As with previous years, I continue to log each book to Blurt as I finish it. This post is a recap of the year, lightly editing those posts, and grouping books into categories:¹

All books are novels that I read for the first time, unless otherwise noted. Within each category, they’re listed in the order I read them. As usual, I liked far more of the books than I was neutral towards, and was left with mixed feelings for just one.

The pinnacle

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  Menewood (Nicola Griffith, 2023): Hild series, book 2 (I’m not sure if Griffith has a name for the series, but I’m labeling it for clarity). Picking up right where Hild left off, this was another great book, with through-lines of trauma, grief, and becoming true to oneself. There was a perhaps-secondary theme of disability, from simple lactose-intolerance to the aforementioned trauma (Griffith self-identifies as a cripple). Like Hild, I will reread this at some point. I hope Griffith is able to write the next one in less than ten years.

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  Cahokia Jazz (Francis Spufford, 2024): A noir murder mystery set in the thriving city of Cahokia in an alternate 1922. The story ends up being a bit like one of Le Guin’s, asking whether a utopia is worth the price; this is made explicit by the appearance of Le Guin’s father, archaeologist Alfred Krober, as a supporting character. In the meantime, it explores cultural identity, racism, and economics, with all the elements of noir (a corrupt establishment, dirty police, a femme fatale, etc.). I loved this, and kept thinking about it (and recommending it) for the rest of the year.

Rereads

I read three other pinnacles this year, but since they were rereads, I’m separating them from the two new ones. I thought about demoting these to Recommended to keep from diluting this section, but couldn’t justify it for any of them.

• The Raven Tower (Ann Leckie, 2019, reread): I love this fantasy novel, about gods and bargains and thoughtfulness, and its casual queerness is the cherry on top.

• Lavinia (Ursula K. Le Guin, 2008, reread): Her final novel is one of my favorites. I still tear up on the last pages.

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Susanna Clarke, 2004, reread): This massive book is about the return of English magic during the Napoleonic era. It proceeds at an appropriately stately pace, but the intensity ratchets up a notch every time the Gentleman with the Thistle-down Hair appears. In addition to her well-crafted writing, Clarke’s footnote game is top-notch.

Recommended

• Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands (Heather Fawcett, 2024): Emily Wilde series, book 2. I guess I didn’t mention that the first book was a romance novel in addition to all the other stuff it had going on. This book continues right along the same path, and was equally charming.

• Legends & Lattes (Travis Baldree, 2022): A short fantasy novel about an orc who retires from the adventuring life to open a coffee shop in a city where nobody has ever heard of coffee. This was completely ridiculous and cozy and charming, and the kids would probably describe it as “so gay (affectionate)”.

• The Mountain in the Sea (Ray Nayler, 2022): This was a wild ride — I couldn’t put it down — about labor and sentience and connection. Very briefly: A woman and the only possibly-sentient android explore the possibility of an octopus civilization, while a man is enslaved on a fishing trawler run by an AI, and a savant tries to hack into a more sophisticated AI. I thought this would stick with me all year, but I was surprised to find that I didn’t think about it much at all after I was done, which knocked it down from Pinnacle-status where I expected it to land. Rhymes with Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin and, unexpectedly, Pink Floyd’s “Echoes”, which I’d been listening to quite a bit around the time I read this.

• You Deserve a Tech Union (Ethan Marcotte, 2023, nonfiction): I needed to pace myself with this, because I keep getting mad about my job and the software industry as a whole. Even though the point of the book is to inspire and mobilize unionizing, I ended up disheartened. This eventually passed, but I regret that (for structural reasons) my workplace is unlikely to unionize in the next decade.

• Parable of the Sower (Octavia Butler, 1993): This was a harrowing book, written in the early ’90s, about a teenager growing up as the United States is collapsing in 2024. It ended on a slightly hopeful note, and the book’s society is more collapsed than ours, so I guess there’s that, but reading about a president promising to make America great again … [I pause to gaze into the far-off distance]. Content warning: There’s nothing on-screen, but there are plenty of references to rape.

• The Tainted Cup (Robert Jackson Bennett, 2024): Another murder mystery, though not quite so noir-y as Cahokia Jazz. This one is a Holmes-and-Watson–style mystery, set in an odd fantasy world, and we’re left with a clear path to more stories starring the protagonist and his brash boss. Thinking back on it, it felt somewhat similar to Bridge of Birds, which I should reread one of these days.

• Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (Robin Sloan, 2012), and its accompanying novella “Ajax Penumbra 1969” (also 2012): This was fun; it felt like a light Neal Stephenson novel, in length and intensity and depth, and earnest where Stephenson tends ironic.

• The Design of Books (Debbie Berne, 2024, nonfiction): This is a casual overview of the process of, as it says on the cover, designing books, from cover to page layout to interacting with authors and editors. Very interesting, though of course not especially relevant to my life.

• Lake of Souls (Ann Leckie, 2024, short fiction): A handful of the stories are set, at least notionally, in her Imperial Radch setting, several are in the setting of The Raven Tower, and several others are their own things. I enjoyed all of them to greater or lesser degrees; The Raven Tower in particular seems perfect for short stories.

• Moonbound (Robin Sloan, 2024): The book started with a banger of a prologue, eased off a fair bit, and brought it back up for the finale. Even though I didn’t quite fall in love with the book, I enjoyed it thoroughly, perhaps because it consistently surprised me. I was struck in particular by the book’s fundamental kindness and generosity.

• On Tyranny (Timothy Snyder, 2017, nonfiction): A collection of twenty brief essays about how tyranny and resistance work. Quick and bracing; nothing I didn’t already know, but a good refresher.

• The Bear and the Nightingale (Katherine Arden, 2017): Winternight trilogy, book 1. This was recommended by one of the owners of the new bookstore. I super-enjoyed this, based on Russian mythology, about a girl who can see spirits at a time when Christianity was driving them away. I wasn’t fully hooked until about halfway through, but then devoured the rest of the book.

• The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories and “The Wood at Midwinter” (Susanna Clarke, 2024, short fiction): The former is a collection of short stories which fit right into the Strange & Norrell setting, some explicitly, some only by vibe; all are charming and have the novel’s characteristic humor. The latter is a brief story that is unsettling in the same way as Piranesi.

• The Player of Games (Iain M. Banks, 1988, reread): The Culture series, book 2. I think I must have read this about 25 years ago, but I have even less memory of it than I would have expected, recalling story beats more than scenes or even plot points. I quite enjoyed it, and plan to read more in 2025.

Good

• The Eighth Detective (Alex Pavesi, 2020): Several short murder mysteries linked by an explicit exploration of the form. The overarching story doesn’t play fair, but nevertheless is clever and ends on a satisfying note.

• Witch King (Martha Wells, 2023): The protagonist is the demon that a bunch of fools tried to bind in the first chapter. Turns out he’s mostly a nice guy, or at least trying, as he tries to (in one arc of the story) overthrow an evil empire and (in the other) prevent a new empire from taking its place. Quite good, but I thought I wanted a different book.

• Dinner in Rome: A History of the World in One Meal (Andreas Viestad, 2022, nonfiction): A light overview of food and history, through the lens of a single (large) meal at Rome’s La Carbonara. The lightness is counterbalanced by an excellent bibliography, like Tom Standage’s A History of the World in Six Glasses (itself discussed in the bibliography).

Okay

• The Long Earth (Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, 2012): The Long Earth series, book 1. A promising setup (what if people could step through an endless series of parallel Earths?) was let down by merely adequate writing and a very abrupt out-of-nowhere ending (that wasn’t really an ending at all but a setup for the next book). Glad I read this book; not sure if I’ll read the next.

Very mixed feelings

• Kafka on the Shore (海辺のカフカ) (Haruki Murakami, 2002; trans. Philip Gabriel, 2005): This was my first Murakami book; I finished it uncertain of what exactly I’d read. I’m fine with magical realism, and there were parts I really loved. But, content warning, there were parts which let’s say I found problematic: The protagonist rapes his sister in a dream. I don’t know if that’s a Murakami trope or unique to this book, but it leaves me a little leery of attempting another.

Unfinished

• After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000–5000 BC (Steven Mithen, 2004): Carried over from last year; I made a bit more progress this year.

Appendix: stats

“Published recently” means that year or the year before. For books with multiple authors, “distinct authors” counts each separately, which might skew the counts a little towards nonfiction.