My favorite books released in 2024 - in alphabetical order.
“‘I would die for you,’ Cyrus said alone to his reflection in the little hospital mirror. He wasn’t sure he meant it, but it felt good to say. For weeks, he had been playing at dying. Not in the Plath ‘I have done it again, one year in every ten’ way. Cyrus was working as a medical actor at the Keady University Hospital. Twenty dollars an hour, fifteen hours a week, Cyrus pretended to be ‘of those who perish.’ He liked how the Quran put it that way, not ‘until you die’ but ‘until you are of those who perish.’ Like an arrival into a new community, one that had been eagerly waiting for you.”
Martyr! is one of the first 2024 books that I read and it has endured as one of my absolute favorites.
So often, when poets write novels, lightning strikes and magic happens. This book is magic. I found myself moving through it as if I wasn't reading at all; just thinking and feeling and experiencing the world as if I was Cyrus Shams, a writer and addict whose mother was shot down in a passenger plane over the Persian Gulf when he was just a baby. The prose moves between dreams and reality and I lost myself in Akbar's project.
This is an ambitious novel. It's unafraid, funny, surreal, and transcendent.
The beauty of this book lies in the ease and joy of Akbar’s prose. Even just in the small opening section quoted above, you can feel his at-homeness with language.
Akbar, just like Cyrus, is playing for an audience - but his play is deadly serious. Inspired by the 1988 downing of Iran Air Flight 655 by the U.S. Navy, Akbar is intent on giving the deaths of those aboard meaning.
Consequently, Cyrus is obsessed with making his own death mean something because his mother was on Iran Air Flight 655 - shot down in midair by a foreign army, forgotten by the world, lost to the water. The bending of truth and fiction is important here as Akbar’s whole project calls into question what is real and what is a dream. How do we make meaning in a world so intent on holding so many down? And when meaning, like art, is so subjective, what is it that we should be clinging to?
“Sabine had taumatised only a few people in her life and one of them was her husband. She stood in their back garden and waited for Constantine to remove the camera from the tripod. It was Monday night. It was about to storm. The sun had set hours ago, and dinnertime had come and gone without mention.
‘A reminder that we’re aiming for stark and otherworldly,’ said Sabine. Despite her tone, she was not too dictatorial.
‘The sky is actually purple,’ said Constantine. He held his hand out, palm up, and looked at the cloud overhead.
Sabine unbuttoned her vinyl coat, smoothed her hair back behind her ears, and crouched at the base of their fruiting lemon tree, ready to be immortalised.”
Woo Woo is in my Top Ten this year based almost solely on the fact that it expects so much from its readers - and that is my favorite kind of text.
Sabine is a successful artist whose work runs the gamut from visual art to performance art to an almost constant stream of social media output. Her new exhibition at a prestigious gallery is opening in a week and she has set an ambitious schedule of promotion and output prior to the Day.
Boundaries begin to collapse. What is public and what is private? Sabine’s desperation to be seen teeters to the brink of an uncomfortable surveillance from a violent stalker, endless comment threads, and inane online forums. As she aims to dive deeper into her art she begins to question what art even is? Is life art? And if it is, can it ever be real?
Sabine is complicated in the best way; she is an unreliable narrator of the highest order. She’s falling apart under the pressure and her support system - full of equally boundary-less people - is a beautiful and terrible mix of exactly what she needs and the fulfillment of the most indulgent parts of her herself. She’s not interested in being likeable and as a result she became someone who I wanted to protect with everything I had. She’s a mess. I don’t blame her.
Woo Woo is such a compelling book exploring the ways in which intimacy is complicated by parasocial relationships and social media engagement. Can online connection really equal connection to in-person community, to intimate partner and friend relationships? Further, how does art exist in a world with no barriers to entry? When the commodification of being seen tips into dangerous surveillance, can you still recognize the difference between casual observation and actually being understood?
These are questions we need to be asking in the days of artificial intelligence - especially as community connections feels increasingly like the only thing we can really rely on.
The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family by Jesselyn Cook
“On February 11, 2021, my inbox erupted with a cascade of emails from strangers across the country sharing chilling, hauntingly similar stories. Hundreds of them.
There was a navy veteran in California who was thinking of leaving his wife, unable to endure one more rant about Tom Hanks torturing children for pleasure. A college senior in Washington, D.C., who’d spent the pandemic hiding in her bedroom from her conspiracy theory-obsessed mother. A Rhode Island man whose brother, consumed by online doomsday projections, had started stockpiling assault weapons to prepare for a civil war…and there was Adam, still reeling from his mother’s words.
They were all reaching out in response to an article I’d written about families splintered by QAnon - and they all had the same question.
‘What happened to the person I love?’”
One of the wonderful things I discovered this year is that I love reading excellent investigative journalism (big thanks to books I loved that are not on this list - mainly because most were not published in 2024 - but which have given me a new appreciation for the genre: We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America by Roxanna Asgarian, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us by Rachel Aviv, and Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm by Emmeline Clein). The Quiet Damage is some of the best I’ve ever read.
Part of the reason that this book feels so important to me is that it showed up in my life at exactly the right time.
Jesselyn Cook’s project is expansive and heartbreaking. Over the course of a number of years, she follows the stories of five very different families who have lost a family member to QAnon and its associated conspiracy theories. Importantly, the families she features are very diverse. There are conservative believers and liberal believers from very different socioeconomic backgrounds. She features a Black family and four white families across a large span of ages: Millennials to 80 year olds.
Even more importantly, Cook is able to meet these people, who I have often admittedly and ashamedly written off as illogical, unhinged, hateful, and mentally unstable, with more empathy and compassion than I have ever been able to myself. She has an amazing ability to pinpoint the exact moment in each of their stories when a human need was not being met and then she demonstrates how QAnon stepped in and met that need.
I don’t think it is a secret that the election did not turn out how I had hoped that it would. I am not of the belief that we need to move further to the center to reach across the aisle and shake hands with people who have no regard for my rights as a woman, for my daughter’s rights as a woman, for my queer and trans friends’ rights as people, and the list goes on and on. I think that in order for us to progress as humans in community together, we need to push to create a society that values all people and aims to make safety a priority.
AND - there is always so much more happening in the lives of the people around us than we can ever know. Stepping into conversations with people who disagree with me, I am determined to lead with empathy and compassion. This book gave me the language and the capacity to at least try to do that.
This has always felt like part of my personal activism as I am a white, cis-gendered, heterosexual woman with plenty of privilege. It is not typically unsafe for me or my mental health to listen to people who disagree with me, even to push back against them as much as I possibly can. This privilege is not shared by far too many of my friends and neighbors and I’ll always do what I can to try to make the world safer for them.
The Quiet Damage isn’t in the business of making readers feel sorry for the QAnon believers it features. Instead, it shines a light on the darkly sinister nature of online conspiracy theories, the threat of radicalized social media influencers, and the exploitative lengths these groups go to in order to attract followers, many of whom are hurting and lonely and simply searching for purpose and belonging.
Vladivostok Circus by Elisa Shua Dusapin
“I walk out into the ring. Carpeting on the ground, rumpled here and there, talcum powder and splashes of water, traces of the show that finished earlier. The space seems smaller than I’d expected, less imposing than when seen from the outside. Four hundred seats at most. Red risers, velvet-covered seating. A platform overhangs the public entrance, with six chairs, music stands, a drum set and a double bass.
‘Do you need a hand?’ I ask, watching Leon climb up one of the towers located at intervals around the edge of the ring.
He doesn’t respond and I breathe a sigh of relief. I can’t see myself going up there to join him. He unhooks a trapeze, disturbing one of the spotlight projectors as he moves around. The spotlight begins to wobble, its beam falling on a torn curtain over a window. I can see a section of sky through the tear in the fabric. It’s dark outside, and still only six o’clock. The sky is studded with stars.”
Vladivostok Circus was a late addition to my favorites list. I just read it last month, and I struggled with whether it could unseat other worthy books that have been favorites throughout the year. The truth is, this is my favorite kind of book - one where very little happens but the sensory landscape of thought and emotion are at the forefront of the action. It’s a small, quiet book that blew me away in its deceptive simplicity.
The plot is relatively simple: a recent college graduate who studied fashion design and has a job all lined up for a few months after graduation is hired in the interim by a Russian Bar Trio (take yourself on a YouTube rabbit hole here as Russian Bar is amazing to watch and will absolutely set the scene for this fantastic book) to design costumes for a new routine they’ll be performing at an upcoming competition.
There’s an in-betweenness to this book that I love.
Nathalie is between college and her permanent job, in a city very far from her home. The circus, between the fall and winter seasons, is letting the Trio use their facilities to work on their routine. The tent and lodgings are essentially empty except for the five people and ill cat involved in creating something together. The book explores what can come from that intermediary space.
So much of the magic takes place off the page - in the future, on a phone call only partly overheard, in assumptions about presence and absence that add to the mystery of being in community with people who are never fully known.
What are the guiding principles of creativity among relative strangers? What happens in the moments in between that allow for clearer communication, more understanding?
This is an innovative, compelling, and profound book that explores creativity and collaboration and I really hope you’ll read it.
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich
“On a mild autumn night in the Red River Valley of North Dakota, Crystal pulled herself up behind the wheel of an International side-dump, steered out of the sugar processing plant, and started her haul. Out in the country the sugar beets from Geist’s fields were piled in a massive loaf on the company piling ground. Crystal drove down the highway, turned onto the access road, and got loaded from the pile. She cruised back to the plant, unloaded. Repeated for as many times as fit into a twelve-hour shift.
On night hauls she always packed a certain lunch. Two sandwiches - turkey salami on whole wheat - carrots, apple chips, peanuts, peanuts, two cookies. She’d attached a segmented canvas tool bag to her lunch cooler. The pockets of the bag were always filled with the same things: phone, multiuse tool, Black Jack gum, Icy Hot roll-on, Tylenol, lip balm. She brought jalapeno meat sticks, her toothbrush, wallet. In her pocket she kept a lucky hat knitted by her daughter. Crystal also wore an olivewood cross brought back from the Holy Land by Father Flirty. She wasn’t much of a Catholic, but like other people who crave order, she was superstitious. Her shift from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. By the time she left for work, her daughter was at her homework, unless she was waitressing. Crystal got back in time to see her off to school.”
I mean, don’t you already just love Crystal? Two paragraphs into the book and I have an intimate understanding of the machinations of her days, the rituals she uses to get through her shifts hauling sugar beets, her spirituality, and her love for her daughter.
I started this book with delight as a return to the sugar beet fields felt like a return to one of my favorite books by Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen. And that’s when I realized that when I open a book by Erdrich, I immediately feel like I’m with friends - not because The Mighty Red is necessarily connected in any way to any of her other books or series, but because we’re all connected to each other. No one teaches me that more than Louise Erdrich.
And we all have stories to tell.
When I closed this book, I missed Crystal and Kismet and Hugo and Bev and even Gary. And so I opened another of her books, The Painted Drum, just because I wanted to live in a world that she created for a bit longer. She has deep love and respect for her characters, each more passionate and flawed than the next. I love to get lost in her sentences and in the connections that she draws between people who at first seem so different, but are usually just searching for a place to be with people who see them and love them, who respect their stories and listen patiently, who gently roll their eyes while appreciating complexity and nuance.
Reading Louise Erdrich makes me a better person - or at least makes me strive to be.
“Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dreams - of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in dark, and of the bright energetic black of space that slams their senses. Raw space is a panther, feral and primal: they dream it stalking through their quarters.
They hang in their sleeping bags. A hand-span away beyond a skin of metal the universe unfolds in simple eternities. Their sleep begins to thin and some distant earthly morning dawns and their laptops flash the first silent messages of the day; the wide-awake, always-awake station vibrates with fans and filters. In the galley are the remains of last night’s dinner - dirty forks secured to the table by magnets and chopsticks wedged in a pouch on the wall. Four blue balloons are buoyed on the circulating air, some foil bunting says Happy Birthday, it was nobody’s birthday but it was a celebration and it was all they had. There’s a smear of chocolate on a pair of scissors and a small felt moon on a piece of string, tied to the handles of the foldable table.
Outside the earth reels away in a mass of moonglow, peeling backward as they forge towards its edgeless edge; the tufts of cloud across the Pacific brighten the nocturnal ocean to cobalt. Now there’s Santiago on South America’s approaching coat in a cloud-hazed burn of gold. Unseen through the closed shutters the trade winds blowing across the warm waters of the Western Pacific have worked up a storm, an engine of heat. The winds take the warmth out of the ocean where it gathers as clouds which thicken and curdle and begin to spin in vertical stacks that have formed a typhoon. As the typhoon moves west towards southern Asia, their craft tracks east, eastward and down towards Patagonia where the lurch of a far-off aurora domes the horizon in neon. The Milky Way is a smoking trail of gunpowder shot through a satin sky.
Onboard the craft it’s Tuesday morning, four fifteen, the beginning of October. Out there it’s Argentina it’s the South Atlantic it’s Cape Town it’s Zimbabwe. Over its right shoulder the planet whispers morning - a slender molten break of light. They slip through time zones in silence.”
Orbital is the second novel I’ve read by Samantha Harvey, and the second time she’s ended up in my Favorite Books of the Year (The Western Wind was one of my favorite books in 2019). There’s a quality to her prose that is hard to describe. It’s a bit like solitude, a pervasive quiet that deserves the full attention of the reader.
In Orbital, Harvey takes her readers onto an International Space Station that is orbiting Earth. The six astronauts and cosmonauts are close enough to observe the surface of Earth, run tests, and take photos, yet so far from their daily lives which include spouses - both happy and not, children, friends in the path of a typhoon, and a recently deceased mother.
Through the course of one orbital day they will watch the sun rise and set sixteen times. They cling tightly to the stated time on their space station clocks as such systems would collapse if they simply followed the sun and moon, as we all do on Earth.
It’s easy to get lost in that idea, in the immensity and futility of time. And perhaps that is actually the quality of Harvey’s prose. Her ability to peacefully dwell in the dualities that could easily haunt her astronauts - and us as humans on Earth - is astounding.
They are so close to their families and so far away. They are tiny specks being hurled through space with no one on Earth even sensing their orbit and huge human beings with the power to observe their home planet from space.
These concepts have the ability to crush me, shut down my brain in their complexity, but in Samantha Harvey’s deft hands I was left only in awe.