Dec 31 // Best Books (2024)
31 Dec 2024
weather: uncanny
mood: alright
music: Van Halen, “Could This Be Magic?”
Hello pals,
The end of the year is upon us! What a year it has been—incredibly fucking long, for one thing. Hell, September feels like it was about six years ago. I think that’s true for lots of people—the election had something to do with it, I’m sure—but also it feels like lots of folks had Big Changes come upon them this year, in one way or another. Mine, as most of you will know, arrived in the back half of the year with the simultaneous launch of The Lit Hub Podcast (give us 5 stars! write a review! please!) and my new job as bookstore manager at Rough Draft in Kingston, NY. If you thought starting a weekly news podcast and my first 40-hr in-person job since 2019 at the same time was lunacy… you’d be correct! It was insane! And also fun. And also I’m tired, but it’s a good tired?
Part of that tiredness maybe also comes from the year in writing, which was Good and Robust and also Bad and Weird. I ‘sold’ a handful of stories this year (and by ‘sold’ I mean ‘placed’ but I like saying I sold them, makes me feel like I’m writing in the 50s)—two of them are out (“The Palimpsest Trap” and “What Came Out of the Thaw”) and two of them will be out early in 2025—but I wrote a bunch more. I think I wrote something like fifteen stories in 2024? Twelve of those went out to nearly 150 people for this year’s iteration of The Birthday Project and… whew, I’m so proud of how some of them came out, the level-up that I felt doing them, but I’d be lying if I said it was easy or felt unequivocally ‘good’ while doing it. I want to process this more at some point and might send you another missive about it in January, if the spirit moves me. I spent a lot of time on these stories, in terms of what I was spending my writing-time on—I am aiming to redirect that energy back into a novel in 2025, but that feels daunting and scary right now. We’ll see.
But I’m glad I wrote so much. It was, in the end, fun. Plus, now I’ve got a proper town to play in for future fictions. I hope to share more tales from Allantide with you, and soon.
I confess have also been kind of dreading this year-end ritual of lists. Partly because I kept worse track this year than I ever have of what I read, what I liked, etc. There are books that, when I opened this draft (where I’d been listing things in the early half of the year), I forgot I’d read—apparently I liked them! Enough to put them in consideration for the best of the year! But not enough to remember them in the maelstrom that was 2024.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about how I’m reading, what I’m reading, why I’m reading. I tried to race to squeeze in some 2024 books that I think I’ll love OR that I felt like I should read in order to ‘be in the conversation’—Intermezzo, Orbital, All Fours—and I was so resentful of them! I didn’t want to be reading them, these past few weeks! I just wanted to read long-running fantasy adventures, or weird little translated novellas, or whatever. So I didn’t, and as a result, I’m doing what I’d describe as… ‘less’ of a list than normal. More “books of note” than “best books” because there were a bunch of books I liked a lot this year but that aren’t going to be in this email. I hope none of my friends and idols feel bad if they aren’t on this list because I probably really liked your book(s).
(Also, you can check Lit Hub’s Best SFFH of 2024 list to see a bunch of the SFFH that I really loved this year!)
Drew’s 2024 Reads of Note, in no particular order
Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino—heartwarming, funny, human. Will give you hope.
The Book of Love by Kelly Link—sprawling, messy, wonderful. I wish I could live in this novel forever.
Some Strange Music Calls Me In by Griffin Hansbury—beautiful, summer, smart. Destined to be a cult classic.
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021)—took me three years to read this, because it kept blowing my mind.
American Rapture by CJ Leede—fiery, sobbing, awesome. My god, what a great outbreak novel AND a great coming of age novel.
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister—bogs, family, Shirley Jackson. A perfect Southern Gothic that actually deserves the descriptor.
My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman—smart, writing-about-writing, passionate. A great literary trickster interrogating romance and why we love it? Yes pls.
The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman—epic, universal, personal. I said it best at Lit Hub.
Private Rites by Julia Armfield—wet, family, wet. 70s folk horror energy around the edges of a slow apocalyptic family collapse.
The Wonder State by Sara Flannery Murphy (2023)—magic, fall, home. Something about this felt like reading everything I loved to read as a kid.
Revelator by Daryl Gregory (2021)—spooky, holler, Gothic. I waited on this and I’m glad I did: it’s a perfect October read.
Brothers by Alex Van Halen—rock, tears, brothers. Yeah I cried like five times. I really miss Eddie too.
The Mars House by Natasha Pulley—space, politics, invention. A tricky but brilliant space epic about politics but also talking to mammoths and also romance.
Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle—art, anger, AI. Fuck the suits, fuck AI art, power to the artists forever.
Curses by George Wylesol (2023)—weird, art, fun. Total surprise, totally loved.
Can also attest that V.E. Schwab and Olivie Blake’s forthcoming novels are the best things they’ve done yet. Marie-Helene Bertino has a story collection coming that’s going to knock your socks off, as does Lydia Millet, and I think Catherine Lacey’s new novel is going to redefine what novels can do. Joe Hill’s got a new one late in the year, which is exciting. New Ali Smith, new Karen Russell, new Nell Zink. Sarah Gailey has a novella and Nghi Vo is going back to the Gatsby well. So that’s all pretty exciting.
Oh also I really liked going back to the movies this year. (Hooray for Upstate Films!) I Saw the TV Glow is the best movie I’ve seen in a long time. There are other good ones too, but that one deserves a shout-out here.
Alright. Time to make some intentions, time to take a break, time to gird your loins. Next year’s gonna be a hell of a year, even by our late standards of anni horribiles. Come see me in the Hudson Valley, talk to me online, write me an email, give me a call. We’ll get through it together.
xo
D