My Favorite Books of 2024
I only read thirty-five books this year — a record low for me, considering I usually read over fifty — but I loved many of the books I read, and there were very few that I read that I disliked. I traveled quite a bit this year, and went to places I had always dreamed of: I galloped alongside zebras and giraffes and elephants in Kenya, I kayaked with penguins and whales in Antarctica, I explored the streets and canals of Venice, and so much more. And the funny thing is, as magical and lifechanging as those adventures were, when I think about the best books I read this year, my memories of those books and the images and the things that happened in them seem to me as vivid in my mind as the adventures I had. I remember walking through the empty forest with the protagonist of Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall as vividly as I remember hiking through the empty, cold, desolate hills of the Antarctic Peninsula. I remember riding into battle with Nikolai Rostov as clearly as I remember galloping in a herd of zebras at Sosian Lodge. How can this be? How is it that when I have read a brilliantly-written book, I feel that I have truly lived the story within its pages? How can it be that its events, characters, and feelings become so real inside me, and feel as real as the events, people, and feelings within my own life? I don’t know how it works, I don’t know why it is. All I know is that this is the magic of books. It is why I keep reading, why I pick up book after book, why I spend all of my free time curled up in a corner, my head in a book.
You can find the complete list of books I read in 2024 here. These were my favorites:
A group of women are imprisoned underground, and one day, their captors disappear. We never learn why the women were imprisoned, or why their captors imprisoned them, or why the world outside is the way it is. The lack of an explanation, the complete immersion in the story, only makes the story better. It is difficult to explain, and puzzling to read, and completely rewarding. I will never forget it.
4. 4:50 from Paddington, by Agatha Christie (and other books by Agatha Christie)
I brought five of Agatha Christie’s novels with me on my trip to Venice, and read and loved every single one. I couldn’t put them down! I’d read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd once before, and was curious to see how it would hold up even though I knew the twist — I’m pleased to report that it was even better the second time! The others were new to me: The A.B.C. Murders, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, The Hallowe’en Party, and 4:50 from Paddington. The latter one, starring Miss Marple, was my absolute favorite of the bunch.
I knew very little about the Siege of Sarajevo and the Bosnian War. Wanting to rectify that, I searched for a book that would help me understand it better. As a journalist, I found that Sarajevo Daily was the perfect thing for me to read, as it tells the story of the war, the siege, the horrific genocide, and the context and history of the conflict all through the story of the city newspaper and the brave journalists who refused to give up on their city and their beliefs. I think this is essential reading, especially for journalists.
Even though this was my third reading of War and Peace, it was my first since graduating from college — my first time reading it as an adult, as a grown-up, as someone who has seen and lived in the world. As I always find it goes when re-reading books at different stages in life, the things that struck me on this reading were so different from the things I had noticed as a teenager or as a college student — at times, I felt as if I were reading an entirely different book. My younger self identified heavily with Natasha and Marya, and was enraptured with their storylines. This time around, however, I found myself completely enthralled by the commentary about war — something I hadn’t paid attention to at all in my younger days and earlier readings. I read, over and over, Tolstoy’s words about the calculus of history, mesmerized, taking obsessive notes, and couldn’t believe that I hadn’t understood what he was saying until now. I will read it again, perhaps in five years, or maybe in ten — I wonder what I will discover then…
Note: The copy of the book that I read this time around, which is the one pictured in the image above, was missing 49 pages — pages that I had to go hunt down in an ebook — so if you are going to read this edition, be sure to double check that it is not missing the pages between 988 and 1037.
A woman wakes up one morning and finds that the forest she is in is surrounded by a wall that she cannot pass. The world outside the wall has changed, and is frozen, decaying, lost forever. She lives in the forest with the animals she finds, and we follow her through season after season, through birth and death, feeling her pain and her joy.
This book was a revelation. It was the best thing I read all year, is one of the best books I have ever read in my life, and I think about nearly every day.