BEST of the YEAR

2025 is almost upon us. It's time to take a look back and let your fellow readers know which books really stood out for you. Even better, let them know why it stood out.

I think one of my early review books was among the best or was the best I read this year:

Frank's Bloody Books by Mack Green

The first few pages of this novel had me regretting requesting it as an early review book. The rest of the book had me thankful I did.

I hope author Mack Green had a reason for going with small publishing company April Gloaming, because if he shopped his book around to larger publishers and they passed, some people should be worried about losing their jobs. And kudos to AG for getting Green's book out to the world. His characters are fantastic and fantastical and memorable. They're Cormac McCarthy level larger than life - with (slightly) less violence associated with them. The writing, the descriptions of the time and locale...all pure art. The story of "Half-Pint" Crowe, told from a look back now that he's an old man, is fantastic. It's believable and inconceivable at the same time and the pace and connections through the story all work so well. I highly recommend this book.

I gave 5-star ratings to 5 books this year:

A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace, Arkady Martine
Burn, Patrick Ness
Tidal Creatures, Seanan McGuire
Greatest Hits, Harlan Ellison

Those are all at least SF-adjacent, as it happens, but to pick a couple of favorites outside that genre:

The Big Bite, Charles Williams
Dogland, Tommy Tomlinson
The Husbands, Holly Gramazio (Is this also SF-adjacent? Yeah, but even with its obvious fantasy elements, I think it reads a lot more like rom-com, so much so that it shouldn't scare off the SF-wary.)

Goodness, right off the top of my head, Canterbury Tales, The Sound & the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Possession, The Blue Flower and a collection of Emily Dickinson’s poems come tumbling out. That’s without looking at my list.

>3 KeithChaffee: I'm reading A Memory Called Empire at the moment and it is fantastic.

The five I added to the LT best of the year list were:

— House of day, house of night by Olga Tokarczuk
— Our evenings by Alan Hollinghurst (new 2024)
— The railway by Hamid Ismailov
— James by Percival Everett (new 2024, also high on the LT list)
— Lower than the angels: a history of sex and Christianity by Diarmid MacCulloch (new 2024)

This year I read almost exclusively fluff, and I don't regret a minute of it. Most of it I enjoyed immensely, and some of it was really good. However in retrospect, even the books I gushed about right after reading them have left very little impression behind. I guess my memorable books of the year will be non fiction books:

Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
Petits Viêt-Nams

I also discovered a few wonderful series, and even though I can't pick a single book, I think they are worth citing as series:

Lois McMasters Bujold's World of the Five Gods
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller's Liaden Universe
And Victoria Goddard's Nine World novels

>7 FlorenceArt: This year I read almost exclusively fluff, and I don't regret a minute of it. Love that!

>7 FlorenceArt: I'm doing that for 2025 - focusing on cat cozy mysteries!

Best- hmm- I picked 6
North Woods by Daniel Mason
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
The Postcard by Anne Berest
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
Away From the Dead by David Bergen

5 star books
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (reread)
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (reread)
The Fiery Trial by Eric Foner
Possession by A.S. Byatt (reread)
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (reread)
North Woods by Daniel Mason
Chrysallis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis by Kim Todd
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

4.5 star books
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
American Wolf by Nate Blakeslee
Nansen by Roland Huntford
Baba Dunja’s Last Love by Alina Bronsky
Quake by Auður Jónsdóttir
Bear by Julia Phillips
Enlightenment by Sarah Perry
The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers
Hunger by Knut Hamsun

For me there is only one book The Woman with the Cure by Lynn Cullen. It will take a long time to top this book. I can highly recommend it.

>11 japaul22: What a great reading year you've had. I'm a real fan of rereads too.

>12 Ameise1: A woman who knows her mind!

>10 torontoc: Taking note of the McBride, as he is the monthly author for February.

My top 10 books of 2024, in no particular order:

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi
Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story that Awakened America by Joy-Ann Reid
My Friends by Hisham Matar
My Father's Brain: Life in the Shadow of Alzheimer's by Sandeep Jauhar, MD
Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary by Timothy Snyder
Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine by Uché Blackstock, MD
The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
James by Percival Everett
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie

Honorable Mention:

Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Orwell's Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century by Laura Beers
The Upcycled Self: A Memoir on the Art of Becoming Who We Are by Tariq "Black Thought" Trotter

My top reads this year were:
・27 Views of Raleigh: The City of Oaks in Prose & Poetry
・Aesop's Fables
・Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan
・Genesis
・New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time
・Obey, Not Know: Essays on Japanese Law and Society
・The Question of Palestine
・Revolution of Values: Reclaiming the Public Faith for the Common Good
・So Can You
・They Can't Kill Us until They Kill Us: Essays
・Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension
・Zen Poems of the Five Mountains

I also submit these as honorable mentions:
・American Zion: A New History of Mormonism
・#Bars: the Evolution of Battle Rap in the Internet Age
・Be Smaller than Flowers: Paintings, Poems, and Essays
・Believe Me: the Evangelical Road to Donald Trump
・Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai'i
・A Literary Bible: An Original Translation
・Living Life as It Comes: Post-Disaster Reflections of a Zen Priest in Fukushima
・Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

My best reads of 2024were:

Nonfiction:
Wild Swans by Jung Chang
Chekhov by Henri Troyat
The Day the World Came to Town by Jim Defede

Fiction:
Apeirogon by Colum McCann
The Book Censor's Library by Bothayna Al-Essa
Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
The Assault by Harry Mulisch
Network Effect by Martha Wells

Rereads (both Book Club picks):
Song of Achilles by Madeleine Miller
Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

FICTION 5*
ELIZABETHS GERMAN GARDEN
TWILIGHT SLEEPING
JAMES
THE TREES
NORTHWOOD
GO WENT GONE
RAZORS EDGE

FICTION 4.5

MONKS HOOD
DEVILS NOVICE
TO SHAPE A DRAGONS BREATH
THE BOOK CENSORS LIBRARY
MONSIEUR LIND AND HIS CHILD

NON FICTION

WIFEDOM
BRAVE ESCAPE OF EDITH WARTON
TALES OF ALHAMBRA

SHORT STORIES

THE JOURNAL I DID NOT WRITE
OCTOBER COUNTRY

SERIES

CADFAEL
DISCWORLD WITCHES

Here are the books I enjoyed the most in 2024. I meant to include five books in each list, but then couldn't resist adding a sixth to each:

Fiction
The Manor by Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.
Timbuktu by Paul Auster
Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
The Third Ghost Book edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith (best anthology)

Non-fiction
The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America by Russell Shorto
The Mountains Wait by Theodor Broch
Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History by Cait Murphy
Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica by Zora Neale Hurston
American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West by Nate Blakeslee
Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege - 1942-1943 by Antony Beevor

Here are my favourites:

Stories of the Sahara by San Mao - random bookshop find, the collected translated newspaper columns of a Taiwanese woman living in the Western Sahara some 50 years ago and telling folks back home about her life there with her long-suffering Spanish husband (or maybe she was the long-suffering one? Either way they make a memorable couple). San Mao ploughs her own furrow, makes little effort to fit in (she accepts who and what she finds around her and assumes she’ll get the same in return, sometimes with very funny results) and is one of the most wonderful characters I’ve come across in a long time (and she really existed!)

The Lucy Barton books by Elizabeth Strout. I read them back-to-back as if they were one long book so can’t pick a favourite. I love the humanity of the characters, the insight into how people tick, and the way Strout builds up a whole world with characters popping up again - like real life.

My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss. I only read this memoir this week but I didn’t hesitate to include it here. I read it without knowing at all what it was about, just because I really like Moss’s fiction and this happened to come through from the library, and it blew me away.

I can’t not mention L’Arabe du futur, Riad Sattouf’s series of graphic novels about the childhood of a half-French, half-Syrian child (Sattouf) in Syria, even though I’m only 2 volumes in. It’s brilliant, utterly inspired as a means of telling both an interesting and amusing personal story (his childhood as an outsider) and the recent history of Syria and the Middle East.

My top ten (ish) for 2024 in roughly the order I read them are:

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune
Fury by Kathryn Heyman
Wifedom by Anna Funder
A Psalm for the Wild Built/A Prayer for the Crown Shy by Becky Chambers
The Book That Wouldn't Burn/The Book That Broke The World by Mark Lawrence
Nettle and Bone by T Kingfisher
For Life by Ailsa Piper
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
The Briar Club by Kate Quinn
The Warehouse by Rob Hart

My top in each category in sort of chronological order:

Fiction
The Human Stain by Philip Roth - a controversial book which I almost abandoned 50 pages in, but then found compelling
Redgauntlet by Walter Scott - a good adventure and just plain fun
The Traitor's Niche by Ismail Kadare - it's Kadare, what more needs to be said
The Lost Musicians by William Heinesen - like their music, it lingers in the mind
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner - a long overdue reread

Non Fiction didn't read as much of this as usual here so only four top books:
Spirit of Place: The Making of a New England Garden by Bill Noble - a beautiful garden in a beautiful part of the world
1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei - more interesting about his father than himself, but does give good insights into his work
The Life of Stuff by Susannah Walker - probably generated the most conversation, and something to consider daily
In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden by Niall Williams and Christine Green - a history of place, and a look at the downside of wind farms

Only four books listed in nonfiction leaves room for

The longest book of the year
The Woman back from Moscow by Ha Jin - coming in at 736 pages, it worked well in the nonfiction aspects, but the fictional dialogues could by excruciating

Books I rated 4.5 stars or higher in 2024:

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
The Gravity Falls trifecta: The Book of Bill, Gravity Falls: Journal 3 and Gravity Falls: Lost Legends by Alex Hirsch
Annie Bot by Sierra Greer
How Things Work: The Inner Life of Everyday Machines by Theodore Gray

Looking back at the year, these are the books I enjoyed most:

Marriage Portrait, Maggie O'Farrell
Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu
Women Talking, Miriam Toews
Spare, Prince Harry
Bass Rock, Evie Wyld
A Devil Comes to Town, Paolo Maurensig
The Flatshare, Beth O'Leary
When We Lost Our Heads, Heather O'Neil
Fit to Die, Daniel Kalla
Sorrow and Bliss, Meg Mason
And Then She Fell, Alicia Elliott