Top Books of 2024
For gifts and pleasure
Let me say straight away that this post is slightly deceptive, given that not all of these books were physically released in 2024. Rather, I read these books in 2024, and they’ve all become favourites. So this is really ‘my favourite reads of 2024’, which is pretty bloody arbitrary. But then all polls are arbitrary, so here we are.
The list is also hopelessly incomplete of trendy titles. I’m yet to read Sally Rooney or Tim Winton’s new works, and there’s a new Helen Garner and Haruki Murakami too. What a year!
All Fours by Miranda July
I beg you - if you read no other book this Summer, read this one. I’ve just put this down, and it’s been catapulted into one of my favourite books of all time. A feminist tour-de-force, All Fours centres on a forty-six-year-old artist who flees her family for a cross-country trip in pursuit of pleasure. What happens next is constantly surprising, funny, poignant and confronting. The book traverses menopause, infidelity, sex, motherhood and more. It’s a millennial fourth-wave feminism masterpiece.
James by Percival Everett
Winner of America’s National Book Award and short-listed favourite for the Booker Prize, Everett’s amazing novel is a re-working of Huckleberry Finn. Written from the point of view of escaped slave James, the story has all of Twain’s wit and sincere love of boyish adventure, but it masterfully satirises race and the American mythos. It’s funny, devastating and wonderfully readable.
The Nice House on the Lake by James Tynion IV, Alvara Martinez Bueno and Jordie Bellaire
This addictive horror, fantasy comic now has all twelve issues collected together for easy reading. It is one of the few horror stories ever truly gotten under my skin. A charismatic man invites his friends to a fantastic cabin for a weekend anyway. But while they’re at the house, the rest of humankind experiences an apocalypse. From there, things only get weirder. Bueno’s art is staggeringly beautiful. Every part of this feels like a finely tuned, celebrated A24 horror movie.
Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to embrace your limitations and make time for what counts by Oliver Burkeman
One of my favourite reads of 2023 was Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use it. This follow-up lacks the knockout punch of that book, but I am more likely to dip into this volume over the coming years. Burkeman lays out twenty-eight nugget-sized ideas for you to digest over a month. The result is a profound and funny meditation on the limits of being human. In the age of anxiety and deathly capitalism, BBurkeman is one of the most influential philosophers of our time.
Stoner by John Williams
The oldest novel on this book by far (1965), but a consistently underrepresented classic, Stoner, I found through a brief obsession with several Booktubers. Williams’ fictional biography of William Stoner (yeah, the title has nothing to do with marijuana smoking) is elegant, sad, and almost perfect. Growing up in dirt-poor Missouri, Stoner eventually finds himself with a wife and daughter and works as an English literature professor. It’s a quiet and moving novel that’ll carry you along - and it’s particularly funny/disturbing for anyone who’s worked in a humanities or arts faculty at a university (I know there are a few of you out there).
Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s Strongman Politics by Lech Blaine
My favourite piece of Aussie writing this year came from Queenslander Lech Blaine, writing a Quarterly essay on another Queensland mutt, Peter Dutton. I love Blaine’s political writing; this intimate, funny and honest examination of the controversial ‘thug’ is gripping and poetic. Blaine has another novel out this year, which I have yet to read - Australian Gospel. So far, I’m yet to read anything from Blaine that isn’t absolutely amazing. Good fun.