The Best (New) Books I Read in 2024

Besides being extremely fun and surprisingly endearing, How to Leave the House also features some fascinating side characters whom I’d happily have read about for much longer: a dentist who paints mouths (and whose neighbors-slash-patients are the unknowing subjects of his works); a snarky teenage girl trying to handle the consequences of pretending to be an adult online; and an imam whose love of old films is censored by his uber-devout wife.

Any Person Is the Only Self, Elisa Gabbert

 

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This book of short, beautiful essays loosely centered upon the theme of literary criticism might not have crossed your radar. Or, if it did, it may not have stuck out, and for that, I can only blame the vagaries of marketing, because there’s no succinct way to sum up this lovely book. 

One essay opens with Janet Malcolm’s review of Gossip Girl (the books, and one of many, many pieces I had to pause my reading to go track down); two pages later, she’s woven in the memoir by Norman Podhoretz, a literary neoconservative. But even though some (most?) of Gabbert’s references may not be top-of-mind for every reader, her work is not a brag that she’s read more than you, unlike much of contemporary literary criticism. She’s just read a lot, thought about it a lot, and now really wants to share it with whoever will read it.

This book is ultimately for anyone who’s ever read, written, or created, or thought about reading, writing, or creating. It’s a beautiful, quiet, approachable book. (And if you’re a Sylvia Plath head, take my positive review and double it.)

Devil Is Fine, John Vercher

 

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Devil Is Fine was published in June, so publishing math means it was probably mostly written in 2023 (if not earlier). But its identification of the reactionary swing of the last 18 months made it feel impressively timely when I read it in November—and I strongly suspect that ideological trend will only become more relevant. Vercher’s unnamed narrator is a biracial writing professor whose novel about identity and experience was critically acclaimed in the post-Black Lives Matter publishing frenzy. He’s now facing pressure to publish again, this time about something else, and his university colleagues are masking their racism less and less. 

Then his teenage son, Malcolm, dies. And he inherits land from Malcom’s (white) great-grandfather. Upon which the skeleton of an enslaved person is found. That’s where the magical realism—and the bureaucracy—kicks in.

Our narrator has clearly been Going Through It for years (if not his whole life), but the trauma of losing his child has broken something in him, loosening his connection to the world and thrusting upon him the ability to see the past. It’s at first somewhat jarring for this pretty straightforward novel to take such a turn into the quasi-supernatural, but it becomes clear that what Vercher has actually done is tap into the tailspin that sudden trauma and grief can send a person in to. 

Role Play, Clara Drummond (trans. Daniel Hahn)

 

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So much happens in this dark, semi-satirical, stream-of-consciousness novela that I keep forgetting it is just over 100 pages. It takes place within the upper echelons of Brazilian society, where the very-rich do everything they can to compete with the super-rich (from sending their children to elite universities abroad to ignoring sexual misconduct against their kid). Vivian is one of the merely very-rich and makes some half-assed attempts to abandon her milieu for a more middle-class one, but mostly chooses to be very cynical about it and enjoy her proximity to good parties and drugs. She’s somewhat class-conscious and genuinely feels bad about rampant racism in her country, but she isn’t going to do anything about it. You do not like her, per se, but she is a compelling, pithy narrator. The fairly harrowing ending indicates Drummond might be readier to embrace a “burn it all down” ethos than the rest of the book suggests—but it works, and it kept me thinking. 

Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm, Emmeline Clein 

 

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I wrote a full piece about Dead Weight in March, so I’ll direct you there for a lengthier discussion of why you should read it, but the TLDR is: Eating disorders are so much more complicated—and interesting!—than fearmongering discussions in the media let on. Clein is a defender of those seeking comfort in eating disorder chatrooms, and is angry at a system that’s all too quick to write off young women in favor of maximizing profits for health insurance companies. (Sound familiar?) 

This is a radicalizing, solidarity-building book by, for, and about people with eating disorders. “I’m trying to find out what might happen if we blame someone other than each other and ourselves for a change,” Clein writes. 

Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood 

 

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Our nameless narrator—an accidental pattern on this list—is an older woman (either old middle age or young old age; I will not wade into the muddy waters of age discourse) who is obliquely discouraged in her environmentalism work and completely disengaged from her marriage (or, you could ask, is her marriage disengaged from her?), and visits a convent for a solo retreat of some sort. She leaves, but returns shortly thereafter for good, becoming a nun despite being apathetic, at best, about the concept of god. 

This was another title on the Booker shortlist this year and, even though it’s already out in the U.K., it doesn’t come out in the U.S. until February 11. So, do future you a favor and pre-order it, and then sometime in the bleak midwinter a package will arrive that you’ll probably have forgotten about, and you’ll have a deeply engaging, somewhat mystical book to get you through.