Before we crack into this recap, I do want to make a series of public acknowledgements:
For backstory, a mainstay of my Book Journal layout has been the selection of the Best Book of the Month, each month across the year.
I also acknowledge that it's pretty funny to try and select a Top Twelve from a year where I only read a total of 25 books as a whole. I wouldn't go as far as saying that one-in-two books I read was a certified 5 star read, but for the most part, I enjoyed myself with all of these Top Ten here listed and plan on reading more from quite a few authors on the list.
And finally, yes, I recognize this post is somewhat extraordinarily long. Believe me, it could have been longer, but I'm trying to get better about salient and coherent editing this year. I just need to address the length publicly or I know that the first words out of my Dad's mouth when he tries to read it are going to be "It's too long!" Yes, Dad, I'm aware.
Anyways, onto the books...
nonfiction
I have, in solely the last few years, seen elements of this book quoted in various cookbook introductions, cooking blogs, TikTok cooking videos, and more. When we stumbled across a secondhand copy in one of my favorite bookstores in one of my favorite places (Serendipity Used Books, in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island), it felt like kismet, and it was quickly selected as one of my first books of 2024.
Her voice is welcoming and personable, and her ethos around cooking dovetails pretty completely with my own, so much so that reading this memoir felt very close to sharing a coffee with someone across time and space. Our commonalities were so intense that they made me laugh in places - including the fact that one of the only foods we're allergic to is caviar! - and I felt like I was making a new friend.
It honestly helps that food was not Colwin's distinct trade; her background is in novels, and that day job is more than present by way of her sense of storytelling, with sideways tongue-in-cheek humor and a penchant for emotional vulnerability backing up her various cooking exploits. It called to mind similar culinary meditations from MFK Fisher and Tamar Adler, whose charming voices match together quite well with hers.
Colwin only published one other cooking-related book, for all that Home Cooking sold so well - the similarly titled More Home Cooking - and furthermore, it was published posthumously. It makes me feel like something precious I need to save for a special occasion, as she is truly an author whose work I want to savor.
I had read Thomas' Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America - with its pastel pink cover and joyful spray of confetti - while on a camping trip back in 2021. The exuberant, honest and insightful exploration of being Black and Queer and Unapologetically Himself was all at once heartfelt and outrageously funny. His tumultuous relationship with identity and religion, growing up in environments where he constantly felt like the odd-one-out, and what it was like to become famous online, all carried a sense of depth and reflection, while also utilizing Whitney Houston song lyrics and chaotic Internet language to effectively get the point across.
This second installment of his personal essays / memoirs is similarly funny and fun, while also serious and seriously smart. It details everything from the panic of moving home again to Maryland, to grappling with the realities of Covid and quarantine, to trying to figure out how to manage the ramshackle backyard and the army of frogs that had taken up residence there.
Like Colwin, there was conveyed this immediate sense that Thomas was someone you were sharing a drink with... maybe at that cool bar downtown, the one you wanted to support because it was still new enough to be finding its footing, and you were there early enough in the evening to beat the rush but also so that you both could make the long drive home before it got too dark. His voice is so personable and friendly, and his anecdotes flow so seamlessly in a winding, conversational way, that this is another one of those authors whose voice starts to feel like that of a friend.
Something that crops up every time I read a celebrity memoir, is an innate sense of sleuthiness: how much of this is actually this person's voice, and similarly, how much of it is actually true? They are separate, but equally important, questions, especially when you're already a fan of the celebrity under consideration.
I think the responsibility associated with this kind of detective work was one of the reasons I slowed down how often I read from this genre... because the cult of celebrity status has such importance placed on brand preservation and continuity, sometimes reading this kind of a "memoir" can feel like willingly purchasing into a marketing activation, like a mirage of parasocial relatability.
My outcomes on this particular read did, in fact, end up somewhat mixed:
One one hand, I do feel that this book was predominantly written in RuPaul's voice, and I'm not just saying that because I listened to it in audiobook format, for which he serves as his own narrator. There are elements of it that do ring as slightly disingenuous - specifically, around places where he gives context to LGBT history and current phrases - but that might simply have been the result of a publisher or editor asking for additional clarification on terms for the benefit of a wider or less initiated audience. Still, parts of this book did feel a little haunted, as if a ghost writer was lurking around the corner.
I also think, for the most part, that it rings as truthful, simply on account of names explicitly dropped - for instance, RuPaul does not like Madonna - or specifics in difficult circumstances offered, and sordid details talked about frankly, with little attempt at modesty. Especially the pieces of his life that painted him, fairly explicitly, in a pretty bad light, or those that featured a candid discussion of his past destructive relationship with illicit substances.
I do feel, in some ways, it was a little overly long, and detailed to the point of minutae, and of course, in keeping with RuPaul's attitudes onscreen, was a little overly fond of self-aggrandizement. But for a fan, that's honestly the sort of thing I wanted to read. Hearing it in the legend's own voice made for an additional layer to the reading experience as well, as emotion was clearly reflected in the performance of it. It was an interesting read, and a great way to commute to work.
The difficult thing about trying to write a review about as prolific and well-loved an author as Joan Didion, especially about a book as highly-regarded as The Year of Magical Thinking, is that there is very little to add to the conversation. Devastating and powerful, evocative and beautiful, encompassing the most accessible and human forms of total devastation, and carrying the weight of the world-shattering nature of having loved and lost, this book is, in itself, a kind of magic.
It will make you feel helpless, in the same way she did, and hopeful, in the same way she did: her husband has died (a sudden heart attack in their NYC apartment after dinner), only a few days after their only child, Quintana Roo, is hospitalized for pneumonia and septic shock. Later, while Didion is still processing the tragedy, Quintana falls and suffers a brain bleed, leading to more hospitals and more cosmic questions from Didion. (Quintana would die only a few weeks after the book was published in 2005, from pancreatitis. Didion chose not to revise, but instead wrote Blue Nights.)
The sense of powerlessness of constant hospital transports, of watching someone suffering in front of you, is translated beautifully by a master of words, as Didion grapples with her relationship with grief and guilt. She spends time weighing the joyful memories against harsh realities of her situation, but in total, the book is imbued wholesale with the deepest and most genuine love, for both her husband and child. "Was it about faith or was it about grief?" she asks, "Were faith and grief the same thing?"
I made the mistake of trying to expound on the book's many virtues to one of my younger siblings, who laughed and said it was slightly "cringe" watching me get so worked up about something she'd seen others doing the same for on TikTok. Which makes me feel slightly better about reviewing it, too, based on how many others have tried.
fiction
For a book I picked up for a handful of dollars on sale on Kindle, this was an exceedingly fun and exciting way to spend an afternoon on the couch. I didn't even really set out to read a book in a day when I picked it up, but truly, truly couldn't put it down.
It's definitely for fans of The Boys, as it features superheroes behaving badly, with bloody results. (The two make a pretty direct comparison, actually, but perhaps this one leans less directly into explicit media parody and politicism, and perhaps is slightly kinder to its female characters.) It's probably a good match for fans of Shane Kuhn's The Intern's Handbook, as it features the banal mundanities of business professionalism, projected into a campy genre landscape. And if you're a fan of the Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog shorts on YouTube, the storylines are kind of similar: a villain ascending through the ranks, becoming more widely respected, going up against a hero who is a complete jerk, at great personal cost, etc.
What I loved most about it included its significant humor and willingness to lean into the absurdities of a world with superheroes in it, without losing its heart or edge along the way: the human relationships remain at its core, and the human cost of the effects of heroes on civilians is directly present in main character Anna's disability and complex PTSD. Realistic consequences for otherworldly actions.
There were parts that felt a little bit slow or gratuitous - action sequences and descriptions of grievous bodily injury, specifically - but I do understand that those tie pretty deliberately to genre.
It did make me wonder, on the other side of the novel, if I was supposed to be drawing deeper connections to real-life corollaries, as the genre usage was so deliberate and forceful it did make me wonder if I should be interpreting it more as satire, and if so, what the story was supposed to be an indictment of. In the end, I gave up overthinking and decided to just enjoy myself instead... and I certainly did. Thankfully, the sequel - Villain - is coming out this August.
This was the first book that I managed to finish in approximately two months (give or take five days). Since I had previously finished a lackluster Romance novel back at the end of February, I hadn't been able to tackle a single thing more... which made it all the more impressive that I started it at 9PM on a Thursday night, and had finished it the following morning.
Published in England under the title Lord Edgeware Dies - but originally serialized in The American Magazine as Thirteen at Dinner - this novel feels like something of a classic amongst Christie's work, with many hallmark elements of her work present, notwithstanding the fact that our hero is none other than Hercule Poirot. (Its immediate successor would be Murder on the Orient Express a year later, which gives you an idea of how Christie was operating at the time.) But its actually the genteel perspectives of London's elite social set that make it something truly spectacular, not to mention the 1933 date on the copyright.
(Other elements involved that somewhat telegraph the 1933 time stamp? Stereotypical perspectives on Chinese, Jewish and Scottish people, disparaging remarks made about an "effeminate" man, and somewhat funny commentary about those once-dignified actors spurning stage careers to find work in Hollywood.)
The mystery has high stakes, a vast and involved cast of characters, and multiple murders, as well as multiple references to both Poirot's "foreign" origins and his favoritism shown towards basically any egg dish. It was high society, and in many ways, high performance, with larger-than-life personalities creating somewhat bonkers leaps of fancy, polished off with enticing outfit descriptions and hidden romance.
Plus, the guy who gets bumped off at the very top is clocked as a total creep partially by the contents of his bookshelf, which is just too funny.
romance
I am a sucker for so many things - raw oysters, lemon drops, gingham, the glassware section at Value Village - but there is very little guaranteed to catch my attention quite as effectively as anything related to The Bachelor. Which is why it's such a bummer that very few tropes disappoint and frustrate me more regularly in Romance novels than being based off The Bachelor.
So it might surprise you that I kick off this review by asking you a couple of questions: Truly, must a book always be Good? Must they even be Likely, Plausible, or bear any sense of Nuance? Can they not simply be a - frankly - silly and cute and goofy good time?
Got to be honest: originally, the verdict for this one wasn't looking too good: I had actually started reading it several months previously, and only made it approximately 3% of the way in before bailing. But once I really gave it more than five minutes to breathe, like aerating a good glass of red, I was enamored.
Sure, it does that thing, where it feels the need to tap into a semi-effective Bachelor-adjacent gimmick, so that it can shoehorn the classic trappings of the show into a cohesive narrative arc without getting sued by ABC. Yes, the manufactured drama of will-they-won't-they is contrived beyond contrived, and major plot points have virtually no relationship to how life occurs out here in the real world. And yes, it does that thing where everyone in a group setting in an LGBT Romance spontaneously is revealed to be LGBT by the end, and to be honest, that's totally fine and cool and dandy with me. Plus, major characters do abrupt about-faces in characterization and direction for virtually no reason at all. Again, things I am willing to accept.
Because it was cute. A bit paint-by-numbers view of mental health, sure, and sexuality, which, okay, fine. The things that feel a little pedestrian to me might be revolutionary for someone else. I read it in two days, and that's mainly because I also have to do things like go to work. I liked it!
A tremendously fun and sweetly sexy madcap romp ensues, when a bespectacled spinster bride finds herself unexpectedly bolting through a window on her wedding day, with the Best Man following closely on her heels. What's not to love?
The easiest media comparison I feel like I can make is to It Happened One Night, one of the greatest romantic comedies of all time. Partially due to the subject - a runaway society bride and the man following on her progress - as well as just how FUNNY this book was.
Unfortunately, like the film, there was a lot about the book's gender norms and views on class and social rank that rubbed this modern girl the wrong way... think "boys will be boys," but excusing both violence (the restoration of lost honor by way of dueling, something women couldn't begin to understand), and blurry boundaries of consent / the mental faculties of men around women (the belief that men are inherently driven to overpower and dominate, especially those that hold both rank and title). It seems to be a classic issue I encounter in a lot of otherwise really good Historical Romance, and I recognize why that's both culturally and historically the case; it's just what kept this book from being explicitly five stars for me, instead of an otherwise sterling four.
Bare minimum, though, is that this book gives great evidence to the belief that Loretta Chase is a queen of the genre. I'd love to see this book get something like the Bridgerton treatment, to be entirely frank.
I possess the second title in this series already, but am uncertain about jumping into it just yet... for starters, I have quite a few other books to get around to first, and for seconds, the character who was such a prominent and unrepentant jerk in this one features prominently in the sequel, and I don't know if I care overly much about his happy ending so much as his being hit by a cart or something. We may just have to circle back sometime this year.
classic rereads
2023's Sibling Shakespeare Book Club - in which my brother and I did a four-hour Zoom meeting every week in July, while reading The Tempest - was such an immediate success, that I was faced with two separate thoughts: 1. Obviously we had to do this again in 2024, and 2. How could we ever do it again as successfully as the original?
The primary action I decided upon was to generate a few meaningful differences in the new year; namely, focusing more completely on genre choices and adaptations of one of Shakespeare's most enduringly beloved comedies, of which I knew that my brother had at least a semblance of previous cultural awareness.
This ended up being a pretty good move. We had already covered some of the Shakespeare "basics" the year previous - plus the fact that we each had four years of Shakespearean reading in high school - so we spent a lot of time discussing things like 1600s-era perspectives of feminist history, authorial intention in use of Iambic Pentameter, and what contemporary versions look like when they're performed today. He had a lot of fun watching more current cast recordings, and thought that it was pretty modern for a play originally written over 400 years ago.
He did say, at the very end, that he preferred our discussions of The Tempest, not just because it was such a formative experience, or because of how much he enjoyed the more fantastical elements, but because he thought there was more by way of authorial voice, there were more variations in the staging, and he connected more with the main characters.
Naturally, we have plans for SSBC again in July 2025, and being that we both organically arrived at the same conclusion for which play we'd be reading next, I'm definitely looking forward to the experience.
I desperately needed a relevantly-themed audiobook to get me through the Christmas season, and was overjoyed when this one became available shortly after the start of the month. Unfortunately, because it is also, itself, short, it only managed to last the length of one shift of Guest Services work (it was a slow night), and about one day's additional commuting to and from work.
What it lacked in length, it absolutely made up for in impact. I am no stranger to this story - after all, I was in the stage adaptation for three years of community theater, I have watched a Muppets Christmas Carol once a year essentially every year I've been alive, and a handful of other adaptations besides, plus I've read the book twice before this - and yet, reading it again led me back towards so many tidbits and treasures my brain had accidentally sanded off and smoothed over across the years.
One of the best parts of this years' exploration was the fact that I also managed to convince my brother to listen to the audiobook as well, and he was similarly impressed by the experience. It's a dark tale, and a true-blue ghost story, to be sure. Still, a very uplifting one as well, and it felt like the perfect addition to my holiday season!
These were my Top Ten Books of 2024... what were yours? Let me know, in the comments below!
