Best Reads of 2024

I previously shared my Worst Reads of 2024 and now it’s time to be more positive and celebrate the ones that I loved the most! This post is also going to do double duty as it’s also this week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday!

For the uninitiated, Top Ten Tuesday is currently hosted by Artsy Reader Girl and has weekly topics for bloggers to respond to and share a love of all things books!

The All Stars 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Penance by Eliza Clark

This might be my favourite book I read this year. I was blown away by the intelligent layering of unreliable narrators which was an inspired device to critique the True Crime industry. It was tricky and it challenged my own past participation in True Crime as entertainment. It was full of references, and the depiction of life as a teenage girl in the 2000s was horrifying realistic. It is a compelling read with a great story, but it also offered a lot of food for thought and it has stuck with me.

Alias by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos

I am so ashamed I owned this for nine years and just left it sitting on a shelf, still in its wrapping. This Marvel Max comic book series is a masterpiece. It’s mature and complex, and Jessica Jones is a fantastic character with depth and growth I’d not encountered in a comic book series before. The art is also fantastic and really sets the tone.

Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England’s Kings and Queens by David Mitchell

I don’t read many history books but one written (and narrated) by David Mitchell was irresistible, and it was everything I wanted it to be and more. I learned some things, I thought about some aspects of the past I’d not considered before (like actually waht the Dark Ages meant!) and I laughed a lot. Highly recommend the audiobook of this one! It is also the only audiobook to date I did not have to speed up to listen to!

The Best of the Rest ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll

This book was not without flaws, but it has stuck with me. Like Penance this novel takes on the True Crime industry, in this case specifically the one around Ted Bundy. It tells the story from the POV of his victims who get so often excluded from the crazy story that surrounds him. The novel doesn’t name The Defendant and the characters are all fictionalised, but the crimes described and the trial depicted are all real as was the frankly bullshit mythology that the media so gleefully helped the murderer construct. He wasn’t a charismatic genius! He was a below-average intelligence loser who primarily attacked sleeping women, university students who were demonstrably brighter than him! His escapes from law enforcement were not clever, they’re only impressive in how incompetent his guards were!

I found this to be another moving and thought-provoking book, highly recommend if you have ever engagedwith Tedy Bundy based media.

We Spread by Iain Reid

This is one I wish I’d had more bandwidth for when I’d read it as it I would have liked more time to pick over it! This was a wonderful short bit of weird, ambiguous fiction set in a creepy retirement home and from the POV of one of the elderly residents, Penny. It’s up to you to decide what you think is going on – something nefarious, or is Penny suffering confusion from dementia? Or could it be both?

I also read Foe by this author this year, but I thought We Spread was better.

Breaking the Dark (Marvel Crime, #1) by Lisa Jewell

This won’t be for everyone – it’s definitely one for comic book fans, not specifically Lisa Jewell fans – but I loved it. It was everything I didn’t know I wanted! My favourite Marvel P.I. character novelised by my new favourite mystery thriller writer! This was what prompted me to go and finally read Alias!

Watching You by Lisa Jewell

This one has stuck with me. It wasn’t so much the characters or even the story itself, though this was a good twisty one, but it was how the theme of voyeurism was explored that has really made me think a lot about how true it is that “you can never know what is going on behind close doors.” You can’t know everything about a situation from seeing it played out in the street for two minutes. We all come with out own biases that lead us to make assumptions, that could be entirely incorrect. I thought about this when read several of the books above, which I read after this one, and when I watched The Acoltye!

The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

I need to finish my review for this complete series (the links is for books 1-2) but suffice to say, this series is an absolute delight! Mostly comprised of short novellas it’s not particularly deep but it is wildly entertaining, and Murderbot is such a relatable character! The audiobooks are really well read by Kevin R. Free.

The Silo Trilogy (Wool, Shift and Dust) by Hugh Howey

In my experience, it is incredibly rare to find a series where each book is as good as the one before it! I gave all three of these four stars on my re-read, and I enjoyed them just as much as I did the first time I read them in 2014! Great characters, for the most part, the plot is tight, the mystery is intriguing and well-paced, and, most importantly, the ending is satisfying! I highly recommend this if you enjoy adult dystopic fiction.

I just started watching the TV adaption and have mixed feelings so far… the cast is great, but they’ve made some weird changes from the books that I’m not sold on yet.

Rouge by Mona Awad

I’ve read this twice now, and my analysis is still pending. It is jam-packed with references, motifs and themes and I’m starting to work on unpacking them all to write my thoughts for the blog! I always enjoy Mona Awad’s novels (3 for 3 to date), she’s a unique visual and visceral writer and the themes she explores always resonate on some level. However, I haven’t loved Rouge as much as Bunny or All’s Well perhaps because the world of Beauty and skincare is nothing thing I’ve ever paid the slightest bit of attention to, but also because I felt more similarities to All’s Well and that one had a tighter execution, and resonated more powerfully.

Let me know in the comments if you’ve read any of these! I look forward to seeing everybody else’s favourite reads in the link up!

I’ve also now completed my little series of reading-focused annual review posts for this year:

1. Worst reads of 2024
2. Best reads of 2024
3. Reading activity review for 2024