Books read in 2024

Browsing a physical bookstore must be one of my favourite things to do, even if I have no need or intention to buy something in that moment. It's something I truly don't do often enough in London. And yet I love this way of spending time with myself and some of my most regular companions: books.

Finding a new book this way — by thoroughly poring over a store's shelves and seeing what catches my eye — feels joyful in its spontaneity amid what is often a structured and planned existence. Sometimes I take home something completely new and unexpected. Other times, it's a title I've mentally filed away and it emerges in tactile form at the right time.

A new friend and collaborator Malina Dabrowska is also an avid reader, and loves visiting bookstores. They shared with me that they purposefully sit at a cafe after finding a new book, and start reading immediately. It's a ritual that ensures books don't begin to stack up unread.

In 2024, I had a lot of unread books in various piles around the flat. And I set myself the task of working through them. Admittedly I focused on fiction, volumes of poetry, and essay or short story collections; theory remains mostly untouched.

In the first half 2024, I kept to my usual pace, aiming for one book per week. And then something unusual happened in July — I finished 13 books. Not started, but finished, as I usually have multiple physical and audiobooks on the go at once. One of these 'finished' books was Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways, which I did ultimately enjoy, but it took me years to work through it. I started it in Brussels in November 2022 (I'm sitting at one of my favourite all-day cafe/bars Le Verschueren as I write this in January 2025), but I struggled to make it through the early chapters, put it aside, picked it up again more than a year later, and chipped away it as my interest allowed. Through it though, I learned about Roger Deakin's love of water bodies and swimming, and Nan Shepherd's life hiking in the Cairngorms.

Three books that I likely won't stop talking about for years to come include Belgian author Jacqueline Harpman's haunting and stunning sci-fi I Who Have Never Known Men. All Fours by Miranda July was a wild, thoroughly enjoyable read, and I've since devoured her first novel and collection of short stories too (she narrates the audio for all her books). Ali Smith shapes eerily familiar yet always slightly unknowable worlds, and in Gliff she tackles a near-future totalitarian UK. She's be following it with Glyph in 2025. Interestingly, I 'read' all of these favourites as audiobooks.

Inelegantly, and without my consent, time passed

— a line I found so stunning in Miranda July's short story How to Tell Stories to Children in the collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You

Monica Byrne's second speculative fiction novel The Actual Star took seven years to research and write. It's a long text and layered across multiple geographies and timelines, including a post-apocalyptic genderless future set in 3012. When I mentioned (complained, likely) to Gem that I was running out of patience for sci-fi that continued to feature patriarchal and misogynist actions and mindsets, she suggested I might find what I'm looking for — desirable futures and how to move towards them — in The Actual Star. And I did. But of course, power over others seems hard to shake for humans, even when we've dispelled with gender.

The Power by Naomi Alderman, which I read in 2020, still haunts me as what happens when women might manage to achieve an inch of power (spoiler: men's brutality intensifies).

Thanks to Verso's translations, I've been reading Izumi Suzuki's short story collections. The Japanese author wrote feminist sci-fi in the 1970s and 80s, often shaping narratives that flip the gender script. The result feels absurd and often uncomfortable to read when men are subjugated and oppressed — and yet we live with the opposite every day.

As a result of a living under patriarchy every single day, I read very little male authors. But one I have endless time for is Caleb Azumah Nelson, whose writing is stunning as always in Small Worlds. The author reads the audiobook, and in spoken form, his cadence and repetition of poetic lines gets under your skin and you feel what the protagonist feels.

Because the one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing...

— from Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson

There are more books below that I loved, that made me cry or laugh out loud. Others I felt I didn't enjoy and yet they haunt me all the same — books can change us forever, even if we didn't ask them to.

If you think about it, the very best books are really just extremely long spells that turn you into a different person for the rest of your life.

— Jonathan Edward Durham

What's playing on my mind, what I'm studying, what I find interesting, what I find soothing, what's sitting right in front of me quietly asking for attention, what turns up on the Libby app and I can access for free (big thank you to libraries for existing).

In writing about our reading lives, as YIR contributors are asked to do, we inevitably write about our personal lives, our inner lives.

— A Year in Reading 2024, The Millions

Documented by order read, with medium specified. [A] audio — [T] tangible.

1. [A] Birnam Wood, Eleanor Catton
2. [T] Girls Against God, Jenny Hval
3. [A] Boy Parts, Eliza Clark
4. [T] Death by Landscape, Elvia Wilk
5. [A] If Women Rose Rooted, Sharon Blackie
6. [A] Small Worlds, Caleb Azumah Nelson
7. [T] The Actual Star, Monica Byrne
8. [T] Weather, Jenny Offil (recommended by Gemma Copeland)
9. [A] Frantumaglia, Elena Ferrante
10. [A] How High We Go in the Dark, Sequoia Nagamatsu
11. [A] Greta and Valdin, Rebecca K Reilly
12. [T] No Modernism Without Lesbians, Diana Souhami
13. [T] The Exclusion Zone, Shastra Deo
14. [A] A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing, Jessie Tu
15. [T] maar bidi: next generation black writing, edited by Linda Martin and Elfie Shiosaki
16. [T] Terminal Boredom, Izumi Suzuki
17. [T] Rosewater, Liv Little
18. [T] Adulthood Rites, Octavia Butler
19. [A] Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari
20. [T] Carrier Bag Fiction, HKW Das Neue Alphabet Volume 6
21. [A] Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari
22. [A] Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman
23. [T] But the Girl, Jessica Shand Mai Yu
24. [A] Landmarks, Robert Macfarlane
25. [A] Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan
26. [A] Growing up Queer in Australia, edited by Benjamin Law
27. [T] The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane
28. [A] Belonging, Amanda Thomson
29. [A] I Who Have Never Known Men, Jacqueline Harpman
30. [A] Parade, Rachel Cusk
31. [T] Hit Parade of Tears, Izumi Suzuki
32. [T] Facing East at Sunset, Jim Hale
33. [T] The New Institution, HKW Das Neue Alphabet Volume 25
34. [A] All Fours, Miranda July
35. [T] Copywrong to copywriter, Tait Ischia
36. [T] Bluets, Maggie Nelson
37. [A] Inferno, Eileen Myles
38. [T] Yuiquimbiang, Louise Crisp
39. [A] The First Bad Man, Miranda July
40. [A] Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler (a re-read, listening this time)
41. [A] Orlando, Virginia Woolf
42. [T] Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck
43. [A] Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters
44. [A] So late in the day, Claire Keegan
45. [T] Making Matters: A Vocabulary for Collective Arts
46. [A] The Force of Nonviolence, Judith Butler
47. [T] Feminism, Interrupted, Lola Olufemi
48. [T] All Art is Ecological, Timothy Morton
49. [A] The Garden Against Time, Olivia Laing
50. [A] What It Takes To Heal, Prentis Hemphill
51. [A] Foster, Claire Keegan
52. [T] Are we human?, Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley
53. [A] Intermezzo, Sally Rooney
54. [A] Gliff, Ali Smith
55. [T] Quantum Listening, Pauline Oliveros
56. [T] All about love, bell hooks
57. [T] Material Reform, Material Cultures
58. [T] Imago, Octavia Butler
59. [A] The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson
60. [A] A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit
61. [T] The Position of Spoons, Deborah Levy
62. [T] Fish out of water, Claire-Louise Bennett
63. [T] this too is a glistening, fieldnotes collective (Pratyusha, Jessica J. Lee, Alicia Pirmohamed, Nina Mingya Powles)
64. [T] Sadvertising, Ennis Ćehić
65. [A] Taboo, Hannah Ferguson
66. [A] Dark as Last Night, Tony Birch
67. [T] Orbital, Samantha Harvey (recommended by Malina Dabrowska)
68. [A] No One Belongs Here More Than You, Miranda July

Regular bookstore haunts in London

• The Broadway Bookshop
• Artwords
• Burley Fisher Books
• Libreria
• London Review Bookshop
• Daunt Books

Friends who read

Lydia reads probably the most of anyone I know, and I'm so glad we met via Katie.

Sonia Turcotte on reading 100 books in 2023.

Gemma documents what she reads on Storygraph. If you use the app you can follow her here.