Every year we like to look back at what we’ve read and pick a few of our favorites. These aren’t all books that were published in 2024 — in fact, this year we even have one that was first published in 1962! — but they’re all books that we enjoyed sometime during the past year.
Jenny Bristol
The books I enjoyed most this year were A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again by Joanna Biggs, Stories I Only Tell My Friends by Rob Lowe, Somewhere Beyond the Sea by T.J. Klune, and Trouble by Lex Croucher.
A Life of One’s Own was a bit dense but very informative analysis about a bunch of women writers through history, some of whom I knew very little about. It made me want to read Sylvia Plath’s work all the more, and Simone de Beauvoir all the less. Stories I Only Tell My Friends was a fun romp through Rob Lowe’s early years, and it felt like spending time with and getting behind-the-scenes looks at some important pieces of my own childhood. Somewhere Beyond the Sea is a very worthy sequel to The House in the Cerulean Sea, and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the first one. It continues the story with most of the same beloved characters, and it’s worth your time, especially if you lament the lack of literature promoting and celebrating diversity. Trouble is “just” a fun and interesting romance book, but it’s cleverly written, and felt like it was worth my time all by itself, not as just another book to pad my Goodreads reading goal. Most of the book isn’t even actually focused on romance; that’s just a small piece of the story.
Robin Brooks
I read a lot of books in 2024, including every entry (apart from the last one) for the Waterstone’s (a UK book chain) SFF book of the month. Whilst one of my reads of the year was on that list, I will not continue the exercise in 2025. Across 12 months the books chosen felt too much like commercial picks, rather than quality books — though sometimes the two did happily coincide.
Working forward in time from January, my first choice is to recommend The Eidyn Saga by Justin Lee Anderson. I read the second book, The Bitter Crown, at the beginning of the year and it built on the already excellent first. Wonderful characters, breathtaking worldbuilding, and a plot steeped in fantasy, yet rooted in real-world dilemma. Book 3, The Damned King, is out in August, and I can’t wait to read it.
My children’s book choice is The Fights That Make Us by Sarah Haggar Holt, a book about identity and acceptance. This was a powerful, issue-driven story about gay and trans rights. It injects much-needed empathy into a battle that strips many of its combatants of their humanity. A book that makes you realize how far we’ve come, how far we’ve got to go, and the importance of not ceding ground already won.
In April I read two more excellent fantasy novels. Play of Shadows by Sebastien de Castell, the first book in a new series set in his Greatcoats universe. The book features magically talented theatre performers and a complicated plot to overthrow the rulers of Jereste. Play of Shadows is a funny novel, with great action scenes and a host of likable characters. Much the same could be said for The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty, which was a terrific fantasy suffused with a great deal of humor. The two books are linked by the theme of “found family.” Fantasy fiction is often built on the tight-knit bonds of a group of friends. These two are no exception and I highly recommend both.
July brought the unexpected beauty of Tom Lake by Anne Patchett. My book group choice from that month and about as far from SFF as you can get. There is much discussion about the merits of genre vs literary fiction and I tend to be on the side of “if you enjoy reading it, it’s a good book.” That said, Patchett is a literary giant; the prose of Tom Lake is on a different level to the other books already mentioned. There is no fast-moving plot, here. Just real lives elegantly portrayed. This was a wonderful book, about the complications of family and the impact of COVID on business, family, and communities, as well as a love letter to the cherry orchards of Michigan.
September was my best month month for reading, featuring the two winners for my choice of book of the year. They’re so different and I can’t split them. Shauna Lawless’ Land of the Living and the Dead, the third book in her Gael Song sequence, is a lesson in how trilogies should be written. Forgotten threads from the first two books were woven into the larger themes and events from across the series, as this book reached a culmination of sorts. Easily the best historical fantasy I’ve ever read, Gael Song melds Irish history and Celtic myth into something fresh, original, and utterly compelling. From a historical perspective, this trio of books tells a complete story, but there is surely more to come from Gael Song’s supernatural protagonists. I sincerely hope so.
Appliance by J. O. Morgan, on the other hand, is a single, slender, volume that looks forward. It’s a book about how technology becomes integrated into our lives. In this case teleportation technology. Through a series of linked but distinct short stories, Morgan plots the rise of teleportation and examines its impact on society. It offers a cautionary allegorical tale that parallels the rise of the internet and perhaps prognosticates the dangers of AI. This book was so good, I read it twice. The second time with my book group, all of whom thought it was excellent. If you are looking for a left-field reading group choice, Appliance provoked an invigorating discussion.
My unexpected joy of the year was Designing Terry Pratchett’s Discworld by Paul Kidby. I feared that this might have been a “money for old rope” cash-in on Pratchett’s legacy. What I found was a vibrant meditation on the artistic process, providing a deep examination of the power of art and the importance of the artist.
My final choice was my most anticipated book of 2024 and one that I had to wait until December to read: Titanchild by Jen Williams. Sequel to my 2023 book of the year Talonsister, Titanchild did not disappoint. It marks Williams as one of the UK’s top fantasy fiction writers. The books are a duology, so the series is complete. If you haven’t tried them, do yourself a favor and pick up Talonsister as soon as possible.
Mariana Ruiz
The highlights of this year for me were literary classics, comic re-issues, and, of course, works by master storyteller Stephen King. On the pile of old books I tend to find at thrift stores, I found a 100-year-old Kim by Rudyard Kipling and felt like a deep diver finding underwater treasure.
I found one book by Master King I did not like (Revival) and cried my eyes out with You Like It Darker, especially when he recovered the couple from Cujo, giving them something of a closure, a long life, and some more supernatural on their way. All of the stories in the book deliver, and one of the best is why you should never try to divine your luck, as real fortunetellers will happily explain to you.
I finally got around to A Wrinkle in Time in the classics genre, and this 65-year-old book did not disappoint. Written, as the author says, to better explain Einstein’s theory of relativity, the themes and ambiance of the book are still relevant today.
This year was great for comics, as well: Mike Mignola keeps going strong, and Alan Moore, Stan Sakai, and Frank Miller all reissued classics. Cassaday left us this year, and I mourned a genius who left us too early.
Finally, Lisa Flipps broke my heart and healed it again with And Then, Boom! A story about a kid facing food scarcity, insecurity, and chaos, a brave soul who is willing to face everything to keep his life together, even in a hurricane.
Jonathan H. Liu
I’ve been tracking my reading on StoryGraph for a few years now, and although there are a lot of features that I don’t use (for instance, I don’t mark the moods and pace when I’ve read a book), it does help me go back and look at what books I read and how much I enjoyed them at the time. I’ll admit that I do tend to give a lot of 4-star ratings, because I like a lot of what I’ve read but I want to reserve the 5-star for ones that really stood out in some way. Even so, I see that for 2024 I marked 25 books as 5-star reads, so I’ll probably need to pare down even more.
The biggest category of books I read was comics and graphic novels, which included some favorite re-reads this year as well as continuing some series I’ve enjoyed. Here are a few stand-outs from the new-to-me pile: Plain Jane and the Mermaid by Vera Brosgol is a wonderful folklore-ish tale about a determined young woman figuring out her worth (and encountering a number of magical creatures). Ash’s Cabin by Jen Wang features a trans teenager who is tired of people and decides to go live in a cabin that their grandfather reportedly built somewhere in the woods. The Boy From Clearwater by Yu Pei-Yun is a two-part biography of Tshua Khun-lim and was an eye-opening look at Taiwan’s tumultuous history.
I didn’t read as many kids’ books this year, but I really enjoyed the continuing adventures of the City Spies as well as Shenanigan Swift. The City Spies series is about a team of clever kids, each with their own areas of expertise, who work for a top secret division of MI6. The Swifts features a family of colorful characters who are all named from random words in a dictionary, and the second book finds them in Paris, where they encounter their distant relatives (and bitter rivals) the Martinets.
In the world of fiction, I had several that I really enjoyed but here are just three highlights: The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands by Sarah Brooks features a world in which the Trans-Siberian Express runs through a mysterious, magical wasteland, and a number of different characters each have their own motivations for taking a trip on the train. I liked The Leap Year Gene of Kit McKinley by Shelley Wood in part because it’s time-travel-adjacent; Kit McKinley was born on a leap day, and ages at quarter of the rate of a regular person, so her life spans almost the entire 20th century. Finally, The Editors by Stephen Harrison is a fictionalized take on Wikipedia (known in the book as Infopedium) and the people who author and edit articles there; the story takes place at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and one of the interwoven plot lines involves the Chinese government trying to control the flow of information.
Hope you read some great books in 2024, and may you find your next favorite book this year!
