The Books of 2024

Too long for an email - like you wouldn't have expected it

It’s been a strong reading year. I’ve racked up 232 books in the last twelve months. I’ve read a satisfying mix of things from children’s books to poetry, old and new releases, fiction and non-fiction and for the first time in a long time, I've done some re-reading. This was particularly pleasurable and I aim to do more of that in 2025.

I see that I have read mostly women authors this year. Not by design, it just seems to be where my interests take me. I have consciously tried to read a bit more widely in terms of queer fiction and authors who are neither white nor British this year and that’s something I want to continue going forward.

I also, and this is extremely rare for me, chose not to finish a book this year. Normally If I pick something up, I read it to the end. If I don’t finish something I usually feel extremely guilty and a bit of a failure all round. As it was, I got given the audiobook of Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe via Netgalley and ten hours into a twenty eight hour listen, I waved a white flag.

It wasn’t that the narrator was bad, or that the book was bad. It was that I began to dread pressing the play button so much I couldn’t go on. I sat down and thought about why I was hating it. I decided I had had enough of rich, white men fucking things up in the most boring, predictable and narcissistic ways possible and I didn’t want to read, think or hear about them anymore. The banality of evil and all that.

I’d like to finish less books I don’t like in future. I feel it could be wildly liberating.

Here’s my top ten reads of the year, in no, particular order:

You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith. Exquisite. A masterclass in writing something extremely difficult and making it seem easy. I wrote about it here.

The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing. I was delighted when this won Waterstones’ Book of the Year. It’s so good. I wrote about it here.

Ghosts of the Tsunami by Richard Lloyd Parry. I think about this book all the time. I wrote about it here.

Sandwich by Catherine Newman. So funny. So perfectly done. A triumph. I wrote about it here.

Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly. It’s hard to believe this is a debut novel. It’s pretty perfect. Funny, touching and sharply observed with a dark undertow that stops it being too cute. I have been recommending this to everyone and I can’t quite believe I didn’t write a post about it, because it deserves one.

O, Caledonia by Elspeth Barker. This had been on my to read pile for far too long and I am so glad I finally picked it up. It’s darkly twisted and bleakly funny. It’s everything I love. It reminded me of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast if it had a love child with Barbara Comyns’ Our Spoons Came From Woolworths and it went to live with Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

My Good, Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss. A fierce, uncompromising and tender in the rawest of ways, examination of what it is like to live with an eating disorder. I wrote about it, here.

The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark. I loved this hundreds of times more than The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It’s sharp, brutally funny and viciously dark. Not a wasted word. In a lot of ways it made me think of the National’s adaptation of One Man, Two Guv’nors. It has that frantic, farcical quality that only works when the writing is really, really good.

Wifedom by Anna Funder. I’ve read various criticisms raised against this book with interest, but for me, it was still a brilliant read. Her dismantling of the patriarchal systems that allow men to be quirky rather than abusive. Her fury with the looming ghost of the pram in the hall and her ability to take non-fiction and write it so you read it like a thriller is exceptional.

A Flat Place by Noreen Masud. I’m increasingly interested in writers who focus on place and this is a masterclass. Part memoir, part examination of an almost uncanny tie to flat places, we go from Lahore to Orford Ness, from Ely to Morecambe to bleak Scottish islands. This is a deeply strange and beautiful thing.

Honourable mentions go to:

You Made A Fool of Death With Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi.

Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name: A Biomythography by Audre Lorde.

Saints: A New Legendary Of Heroes, Humans And Magic by Amy Jeffs.

Small Bodies Of Water by Nina Mingya Powles.

Acts of Resistance: The Power Of Art To Create A Better World by Amber Massie- Blomfield.

Four Hedges by Clare Leighton.

James by Percival Everett

Glorious Re-reads:

The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M. Boston (with special thanks to

Katherine May

and

Rebecca Armstrong

for the gorgeous, December read along)

The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper

Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett (see here)

Books to Look Forward To in 2025

I’ve been blasting through my Netgalley pile in the last week and can wholeheartedly recommend:

Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives by Lucy Mangan - a sequel to Bookworm and a joy from beginning to end. As befits a true bookworm, I read it in a single sitting. This comes out on 13th March.

Children Of Radium: A Buried Inheritance by Joe Dunthorne. This is so good I can’t even begin to describe how gripped I was by it. It comes out on the third of April.

Tell me your favourites and your best.