Best 2024 Books: Beth’s Superlatives

Beth

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Every year we end with a Best of Book List. I did not read all the books I planned to in 2024. I read just 89 books out of the 100 I anticipated. But I did reach my reading goals.

Forget numbers, this year, reading was about experience: crafting my time and my favorite hobby with my personal growth and needs. Some of those needs included finding challenging series, marking a milestone in a favorite one, indulging in favorite authors’ backlists, reviewing debuts, and prioritizing essential non-fiction. When it comes to those goals, I feel more than satiated with my 2024 reading. Is it full of Kindle Unlimited smut like I like it to be? Not this year. I read very little of that, to be honest. Most of the books I read this year challenged, frustrated or buoyed me in totally new ways. It is not better or worse than other reading years. It was just what I needed for this one. So here are my favorite books of 2024.

Beth’s Best 2024 Book Superlatives

Best 2024 Release

I’m a public librarian, one who, in the last year or so since starting this career, patrons have come to trust to give them good recommendations. So I felt compelled to read some 2024 debuts. Some that I read that I also saw library patrons have interest in include Frozen River, Wild Faith, The Ministry of Time, The Familiar, All of Colors of the Dark, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde, The Husbands, and Come and Get It. But the one that stuck with me was one I never recommended to a patron (Friends, yes. Random patrons, no.)

Reading Little Rot was a feat of strength. I knew Akwaeke Emezi would deliver nonstop pace and essential characters, but I was unprepared for how haunting this book would be and how the elasticity of my own empathy would be tested.

Best 2024 Debut

In the same way that 2024 releases were important to me, debut authors also made a significant dent in my reading this year. Holly Gramazio’s The Husbands, Meredith Adamo’s Not Like Other Girls, Yulin Kuang’s How to End a Love Story, Isabel Banta’s Honey, Donyae Coles’ Midnight Rooms, and Tigest Girma’s Immortal Dark are just some of the new authors that made my list. But the best and most surprising of all was easily the one I couldn’t stop talking about.

Kaliane Bradley brought together science fiction, literary fiction and sweeping romance into The Ministry of Time, a powerhouse of a novel that I couldn’t put down. This was one I began in audio format on my commute home from work, and which was SO compelling out of the gate that I stopped at my local bookstore to purchase a copy before I made it home or even finished listening to chapter one. As Amy has said regarding it, “This book fucks, y’all.”

Best Romantasy of 2024

I’ll admit, this is not a genre I’ve been particularly enamored of lately. Too many tropes and not enough stand outs. But I tried. The Mask of Mirrors was my final book of the year. And it was good! Charlotte Stein’s How to Help a Hungry Werewolf hit shelves. I went back to Anne Bishop and re-started the Black Jewels trilogy. I read a few in Victoria Aveline’s Clecanian series. Y’all, I tried Bride AND The Hurricane Wars and I DETEST Reylo. I gave it a go. And easily, the best romantasy of 2024 for came from the most likely of sources.

Karen Marie Moning authored one of THE BEST urban fantasies of the 2000’s, so it was no surprise to me that her new witchy New Orleans-based series, starting with The House at Watch Hill, would hit all the notes that the rest of the genre leaves unexplored. I cannot wait for the follow up.

Best Young Adult of 2024

You can take a mom out of the twenty-tens but you can’t take the young adult book lover out of the mom. I will never quit reading YA. You can pry it out of my gnarled crone hands. Heartstopper 5, The Will of the Many (fight me, that book is YA all the way), Not Like Other Girls, Squire, Long Live Evil by the incomparable Sarah Rees Brennan, and Immortal Dark are just some that I read. But the best goes to the best.

I don’t know what kind of demon kept me away from the follow up to Laini Taylor’s Strange the Dreamer, which I read before it even came out. Something in 2018 was obviously messing with my head to allow me to skip Muse of Nightmares, but in 2024 I rectified that egregious oversight. I read – and loved – this perfect YA romance.

Best Romance of 2024

Speaking of romance, it was not the genre I pursued with my usual vigor this year. Sure I read This Could Be Us, Funny Story, Iris Kelly Doesn’t Date, How to Help a Hungry Werewolf, Tender Rebel, You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty, Beyond the Highland Mist and more this year. But I also read a shit-ton of Beverly (fucking) Jenkins.

And Indigo was the best of them all. Hands down, Ms Bev writes some of the most compelling, hottest and wildest romance in the genre. I spent almost all of February reading her historicals, and I’ll do it again.

Best 2024 Advanced Reader Copy

Another one of my hard-to-complete reading goals this year was to actually read the ARCs I get. I know this sounds like it should be an easy one, but trust me, my Net Galley ratio is lower than Matt Gaetz’s approval rating. But among the ALCs and ARCs that hit my apps this year, one absolutely stood out.

The Pretender was a surprise and a delight. Is little John Collan really the hidden son of the Duke of Clarence and the heir to what will be the last of the Plantagenet crowns? Doesn’t matter because he is king of my heart. This gorgeous historical fiction will hit shelves in April 2025 and will probably make my list for next year too in one category or another.

Best Re-Read of 2024

Don’t knock it until you try it. Re-reading is one of the most satisfying pastimes of a book lover’s journey. In fact, my re-reads are the only category where I have trouble picking just one.

I have a series on TikTok called The Best Book I Read That Year where I go through all or most of the books I read in a given year and pick the one that stood out then, stands out now and will stand the test of time. For 2015, just a mere ten years ago, that book was The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (and the rest of The Inheritance Trilogy series) by NK Jemisin. For as much love as Jemisin’s The Fifth Season gets online, I started to feel like her Inheritance Trilogy was getting short shrift, so my re-read was imminent. As I went through them again, though, I realized that the second installment of The Inheritance Trilogy, The Broken Kingdoms, was my personal standout. What a steely protagonist and fantastic tale. A true must (re)read.

Best Backlist of 2024

My number one goal this year was to get through some backlist titles of authors I have come to love. That included Octavia E Butler, Ursula K LeGuin, Beverly Jenkins, and of course, Robin Hobb.

I’d like to qualify this by saying that The Realm of the Elderlings is easily becoming my favorite series of all time, especially since I read the beginning of the Tawny Man trilogy. And yet it is Fool’s Fate that solidifies Robin Hobb, Fitz and the Fool as some of the best to ever do it. Never adapt this, studios. Leave it perfect as it is.

Best Protagonist of 2024

I am always looking for the best main character of the year. And let me tell you, my re-reads and my backlist reads were tied until I looked at each author’s influences. Which reminded me that my favorite little guys are all THIS GUY.

Doesn’t matter where you find your honorable himbo, your scruple-less hero, your shadow daddy; they all found themselves in the prototype: Francis Crawford of Lymond, the protagonist that we meet in Dunnett’s The Game of Kings. He is THE protagonist, and this re-read was excellent.

Best Non-Fiction of 2024

Dang but I read some doozies of non-fiction this year. Doppleganger, Say Nothing, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Wild Faith, In the Dream House, The Color of Law, Bone Black, Black AF History, and After the Last Sky. I don’t do things by halves, including picking my nonfic. But without a doubt the one that hit the hardest was the one that has spent the longest time on the shelves.

They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer was first published in January 1955, and it is one of the reasons that I got fewer books than I wanted read this year. I took my time with this one because I had no other choice. I read and re-read and went back to read some more. This book is beyond salient, and it needs to be on everyone’s list for its 70th anniversary. Even those of us who’ve read it already.

Best 2024 Adaptation

Books to screen. Ah, my bread and butter. But forget Bridgerton and Outlander and Heartstopper and Wicked. This year the best adaptation came from my non-fiction list.

Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes were the characters I longed to see on screen this year, and the Fx adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe’s extraordinary look into the IRA of the 1970s did not disappoint. And it’s not just the mustache.

Best Series of 2024

When I look back on this year a decade from now, I will be reminded that 2024 was the year of Thomas Cromwell.

Thank you to whatever crinkle in my brain that prodded me to pick up the copy of Wolf Hall that has been on my shelf for years because it began a love affair that I will always cherish. Hilary Mantel is a genius. These books are masterpieces. Thomas Cromwell is my whole new religion.

Best Book for My Soul in 2024

I knew there were books out there on my TBR that were going to be growth-inducing, thought-provoking and creativity-boosting. What I wasn’t prepared for was that one of them was going to be all those things while also being soul-nourishing.

LeGuin knows no competition for making me think, rethink, regroup, reorder and revitalize. The Left Hand of Darkness is on its surface, a landmark work of science fiction, a story of a single human in an alien world, a winter classic. It is underneath the snow and ice and intergalactic politics, a sweeping treatise on grief, alienation, gender, culture and friendship. I will treasure it always.

Best Book of 2024

And now we come to it. The book that wins my overall best of the year. The book I can and will and have recommend to every friend, library patron, English teacher and BookTok girly for years to come. The one that will continue to win hearts and awards because it’s just that damn good.

You don’t need me to tell you to read James by Percival Everett. The Booker Prize and the National Book Award and the Barnes and Noble folks have already told you that. So, call me basic. It is just simply THE BEST book of the year.