Our favorite books of 2024

Admitting this in public will probably get me thrown in writer jail, but there’s nothing I love more than a thoughtful, well-constructed run-on sentence. Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, The Horizon, And The Chain opens with a beauty: one sentence, 122 words, a whole paragraph all on its own. The prose is what makes Samatar’s science-fiction novella shine; the way she explores themes of enslavement, incarceration, complicity, art, and freedom through the eyes of a boy raised in servitude and the woman who believes she unchains him is stunning. It calls to mind Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas if that story was told from the perspective of the tortured child, bringing new emotional depth to long-posed questions to which we still don’t have any answers. [Jen Lennon]

Daniel Lavery tackles urban loneliness with his signature humor in his debut novel Women’s Hotel. The inhabitants of the Biedermeier, the book’s eponymous hotel, may not realize it, navel-gazing as they are, but they’re in the midst of a big cultural shift, one that would see such residences disappear from city life even as they gain greater personal freedom. These women would be just at home in the works of Rona Jaffe and Dawn Powell, which is something that’s clearly not lost on Lavery. The Something That May Shock And Discredit You author has always had a deft touch with allusions; here, he uses spot-on references to ground the story in the past with just a touch of anachronism. Women’s Hotel is less an elegy for this era than an album of vibrant snapshots that are just as likely to elicit nostalgia for bygone times as they are to make one question that feeling. [Danette Chavez]

Lauren Oyler tells us in the introduction to her latest book of essays that her title is a joke—it’s the kind of thing one reflexively says before they’re about to talk shit about someone else. It is fun to judge, and that is exactly what she does for the rest of the book, which covers topics like rumors, TED talks, and being an American expat in Berlin. (The first, which centers largely on the history of Gawker, is an especially fun read given what is still going on with its former portfolio of websites—hey Jezebel!) Oyler made her name as a book reviewer, and a particularly lethal one at that. This experience particularly informs her essay on Goodreads, the collection’s best, which expands to focus on the topic of writing criticism on the internet more broadly. (Again, something of particular interest to the person writing this blurb.) Scorsese’s now-infamous comments on Marvel movies are sent up amusingly as Oyler runs through the common rationales for those who disagree—those movies are primarily entertaining and some people want to relax when they go see a movie, for example. “They’re not wrong to do so,” she writes. “But still: I’m right.” You probably should have expected as much from an essay titled “My Perfect Opinions.” [Drew Gillis]

India Holton has become perhaps the most prominent author in what is a pretty niche mish-mash of subgenres: the romantasy of manners. That’s romance, fantasy, and comedy of manners all wrapped into one. You might’ve thought Holton was dropping the fantasy element when she wrapped up her Dangerous Damsels series about Victorian witches, pirates, and spies. but the first installment in her new series, The Ornithologist’s Field Guide To Love, also has a heavy helping of fantasy; you see, the birds are magical. Plus, her ornithologists are just as ruthless and adventurous as her pirates are.

Holton’s books are always brimming with whimsy, wherein the language and cultural strictures of Regency romance are a thin veneer for kooky capers and sexy, dangerous escapades. Like many of the author’s heroines, Beth Pickering is a brilliant woman with relatable foibles; like many of her heroes, Devon Lockley is irresistible, dashing, and down bad for his love interest. The Ornithologist’s Field Guide To Love is the perfect treat for the reader looking for something light, funny, and charming—maybe to break a reading slump, or maybe just to swoon at another beautifully spun romance. For me, it was all of the above, and I’ve never regretted putting another India Holton book on my shelf. [Mary Kate Carr]

A companion piece of sorts to his 2021 book Music Is History, Questlove narrows his focus with Hip-Hop Is History. Paired with his Academy Award-winning documentary Summer Of Soul (…Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised), the Roots drummer is proving to be one of our most vital music historians. In Hip-Hop Is History, Questlove traces the genesis of hip-hop back to its commonly agreed-upon beginnings at a back-to-school party hosted by Cindy Campbell and her older brother, Kool Herc, in the Bronx in 1973. Questlove both acknowledges and interrogates that narrative, digging deeper into that cultural moment and providing a nuanced take on the evolution of the genre. The introduction alone, a recounting of how he produced the tribute to hip-hop’s 50th anniversary at the 2023 Grammy Awards, is worth the price of admission, but Questlove uses his unique lived experience to create a definitive text that’s just as artful as the genre it celebrates. [JL]

An old house teems with ghosts but nothing haunts like family in Woodworm, the atmospheric novel from Layla Martínez. It’s the Spanish author’s first fiction outing, yet she nimbly dabbles in gothic horror and magical realism while also jumping between multiple viewpoints. It’s an inspired touch to withhold the names of her main characters, a grandmother and granddaughter, leaving the women to be identified by their places in the family tree and generational markers. If it weren’t for the errant angels and witch hunt that spring up around them, these could be any two women bound by filial attachments and family secrets. “We have a lot of traditions,” the granddaughter ominously observes, “including locking each other away.” The ancestral home she resides in with her grandmother is as foreboding for what it keeps trapped inside as for what it won’t let in. Unsettling and yet familiar, Woodworm will burrow into your mind. [DC]

For some reason, Weimar Germany was a topic that earned an inordinate amount of attention in 2024. If you’re someone who might not know any more about the time period than what you might glean from, say, Cabaret, Harald Jähner’s book Vertigo: The Rise And Fall Of Weimar Germany is a thorough primer on the years between the World Wars. Originally published in German in 2022 and translated to English this year, Vertigo is primarily focused on the popular culture of the time, rather than dates and locations (though there’s enough of that, too). The book excels at conveying what life was actually like for the average citizen in the 15-year period from 1918 to 1933, from the cosmopolitans who progressed from phone operators to office secretaries in Berlin to the select few who could afford to take their brand-new automobiles for joyrides around the countryside. Developments in architecture and nightlife, things that may be glossed over in a textbook, are subjects of full chapters here. Of course, the specter of the Third Reich looms over the whole time period, and what is perhaps most disturbing and interesting is how relatively innocent fads—outdoor leisure clubs, an interest in human beauty and musculature—were eventually corrupted for the most evil purposes. [DG]