🗝️ Books Are Gifts: 20 Recommendations
The Best Nonfiction and Fiction I Read This Year
Books are gifts. Books offer us ideas and invite us to think. Books take us on scenic routes or pull us out of our comfort zones. Books make us who we are.
Here are my 20 book recommendations for 2024: 11 nonfiction reads and 9 novels.
Desk Journeys aka Reading Recommendations
Nonfiction
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023). Half-memoir, half-political analysis, I consider this essential reading for anyone wanting to understand our current times. Klein explains how rightwing advocates stole the vocabulary (and constituents and causes) of the left. We now live in a shadow world that puts the left in need of new strategies.
Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World by Rutger Brugman (Back Bay Books, 2018). I’m an optimist at heart. I know how vile people can be and have (at times) been seduced by cynicism, but in the end, I truly believe most people are good. Rutger Brugman thinks likewise and makes a strong case to prove that our systems—not our human nature—is at fault.
Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying by Sallie Tisdale (Gallery Books, 2019). I stumbled upon this jewel of a book when I researched recommended reads to include in my memoir in progress. Many people postpone talking about difficult matters such as death until it’s too late. Tisdale will let you look at death with wit and intelligence and offers practical advice to get prepared.
How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair (Simon & Schuster, 2023). A powerful, lyric memoir by a young Jamaican woman about her Rastafarian upbringing, her loving yet violent father, and how she broke free as a poet. I listened to the audiobook read by the author and it’s like one long beautiful performance.
The Unwritten Book: An Investigation by Samantha Hunt (Picador USA, 2023). An unfinished novel written by her late father leads Hunt to annotate his work and question the meaning of ghost books in our lives. I’ve written an open letter to the author about this fabulous work (that I will publish in 2025)—I was so moved.
The Slow Road North: How I Found Peace in an Improbable Country by Rosie Schaap (Mariner Books, 2024). How guilty would you feel if you accidentally missed the moment on which your husband died? How would you deal with this guilt if you did not believe in self-forgiveness? In this gorgeous memoir, Schaap takes you from NY to Ireland, from denial to grief, from coldness to new love.
Landed: A yogi’s memoir in pieces and poses by Jennifer Lang (Vine Leaves Press, 2024). Earlier this year, I published a full review on Lang’s first memoir, Places We Left Behind: A memoir-in-miniature. My review on her excellent second memoir was unfortunately postponed yet is forthcoming in World Literature Today. Here’s an excerpt: “How should we react to terror that’s here to stay? Lang and her family members [who live in Israel] respond with stubborn resilience and temporary denial. With self-defense lessons in the synagogue’s social hall and learning how not to get stabbed. With being drafted into the army and learning how to kill. With bodily inversions and heart-opening exercises that encourage relativity and gratitude.”
Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel by Shahnaz Habib (Catapult, 2023). We need more diverse voices in travel writing, and I was delighted to find this collection. In long, elegant essays Habib writes about the history of travel writing and her own experiences in moving through the world as a woman without a privileged passport. What does it mean to be a tourist amid the ruins of colonialism, capitalism, and climate change?
Real Estate: A Living Autobiography by Deborah Levy (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022). After having enjoyed Levy’s previous books in this trilogy on life as an author (Things I Don’t Want to Know and The Cost of Living), I truly fell in love with her voice in Real Estate. Levy dreams up a house for herself and her artistic friends and imagines a life in which she serves vodka and cigarettes to young women. Will she ever convince film producers that female characters don’t need to be likable to be interesting? I read about her wish of having a house with a pomegranate tree while I was living in Bracciano in a house with a pomegranate tree. I love it when life throws such serendipities my way.
The New Tourist: Waking Up to the Power and Perils of Travel by Paige McClanahan (Scribner, 2024). Much has been written about overtourism and how our mass holidays are changing the world, but not all that writing is as in depth and engaging as the essays in this book. From Hawaii to Saudi Arabia and from Amsterdam to Angkor Wat, The New Tourist tells the truth about the travel industry and our role as consumers.
Water, Wood, and Wild Things: Learning Craft and Cultivation in a Japanese Mountain Town by Hannah Kirshner (Penguin Books, 2022). Kirshner, an artist from Brooklyn, fell in love with the mountain town Yamanaka and stayed there long enough to learn about tea ceremonies, lacquerware, onsen bathing, rice production, wood carving, saké serving, and more. A gorgeous collection of essays that brings Japan into your home.
Fiction
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (Avid Reader Press / Simon&Schuster, 2024). I don’t keep up with Dutch literature and because it’s harder for me to write in English after I’ve read Dutch for a while, I rarely read books in my mother tongue. Fortunately, this atmospheric debut novel by the Dutch Yael van der Wouden was written in English. In the aftermath of WWII, two women with opposite natures feel drawn to each other and slowly unravel each other’s worlds.
Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund (Verso Fiction, 2023). An artist returns to her home town after a long absence to work on a retrospective of her art. Once there, she feels forced to emotionally deal with her estranged mother and everything that happened between them in the past. A detailed and beautifully told story of trauma and obsession.
All Fours by Miranda July (Riverhead Books, 2024). As always, July expresses the complex emotions and thoughts we didn’t know we had until we see them on the page. An artist despairing at her diminishing sex life and questioning her role in the world as an aging woman starts an affair with a much younger man. Raw, outrageous, and intimate. Also a lesson in well-chosen unique metaphors.
The Tree Doctor by Marie Mutsuki Mockett (Graywolf Press, 2019). Another novel about an aging woman and her sexual needs, yet the protagonist in this novel is far less self-obsessed and holds the health of her cherry tree higher than her own desires. In beautiful prose, Mockett takes you through pandemic isolation, motherly sacrifices, daughterly duties, Japanese immigration, and the love for trees. How do you write yourself out of a story that makes you unhappy?
See: Loss. See Also: Love by Yukiko Tominaga (Scribner Book Company, 2024). When her young husband dies, the protagonist, recently resettled from Japan in the USA, finds herself alone in caring for her toddler. She strengthens her relationship with her outspoken Jewish mother-in-law to stay afloat. Written in short vignettes that perfectly capture the rollercoaster that is loss.
Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Grove Press, 2024). Booker-prize winning short novel about six astronauts orbiting Earth and the fragility of our planet. In an interview on the Auraist, the author writes: “I wanted the prose to feel and sound like if it were a piece of music.” She succeeded.
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Gacia (Del Rey Books, 2021). This book had been on my to-read list for years and I finally gave it the time it deserves. A young woman travels to a mansion to visit her forlorn cousin and nothing is as it seems. I’m writing my own gothic novel at the moment, so this was both an escape read and a masterclass for me. Utterly compelling.
Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth (Vintage, 2022). Another contemporary gothic that kept me in the right mood as I wrote. A young woman must take drastic measures to save her husband and herself from the vengeful ghost of her mother-in-law. The ending is a bit over the top, perhaps, but I loved being in the protagonist’s mind so much that I would have followed her anywhere.
Liars by Sarah Manguso (Hogarth Books, 2024). An exquisitely written novel about how the patriarchy teaches men to act and women to endure, and how this impacts all couples, healthy or doomed.
Find all the books I recommend on my shelves in Bookshop.org. If you order books from these shelves, you don’t pay anything extra, but I make a small commission on each sale. Thank you for your support!
Related Posts
I recommend books regularly in my newsletters. Earlier this year, I listed:
Time to Say Goodbye
Next week I’ll be back with a travel newsletter on Umbria, followed by one on Florence where I am now.
All my best,
Claire
P.S. What were your favorite reads in 2024?
If you love intelligent travel writing, try Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts. She’s a real deal traveller who loves to tell the stories of those she meets along the way and weaves political history in.
The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin - for the 4th time! My favourite travel book.