2024 Books of the Year
Pickle Me This Digest for December
As I say every year, it is RIDICULOUS that there are this many books on my Books of the Year list (30!), but it’s less so when one considers that I’ve read more than 200 books in 2024 and even getting down to 30 was a struggle. I suppose I could fight the list down to a smaller number, but what would be the point of that? The point of this is to celebrate and spread the word about the books that rocked my reading world this year, and the more of that, the better.
Death at the Sign of a Rook, by Kate Atkinson
Atkinson has talked about writing this book in lockdown and her desire to have some fun with the experience, which makes this a lighter Jackson Brodie than we’ve encountered for a while. What leads to the great house begins with a series of art thefts in Northern England, Ilkley, specifically, which is one of my favourite English towns… (Read the rest)
Death By a Thousand Cuts, by Shashi Bhat
Naturally, every time I think of this book, the Taylor Swift song of the same name starts playing in my head, which I’m not sorry about. And I don’t know if Shashi Bhat is a Swiftie, but her literary preoccupations are not different from those in Taylor’s tortured poetry—her stories are about seeking and not finding, about the tedium of dating, about longing and wanting and disappointment, but there’s also a brutality to them too, a sting. (Let the wasp on the cover of the book be a warning.)… (Read the rest)
Bad Land, by Corinna Chong
In our conversation on the BOOKSPO Podcast, Corinna Chong talks about how arriving in Drumheller feels like going back in time, the seeming unreality of such a landscape, the metaphoric possibility of fossils, about how teaching SEXING THE CHERRY required her to be intimately connected with the text, the challenge of writing a slow-burn narrative, and more! I loved this weird and wonderful novel so much, and our conversations lived up to all my expectations. Listen here.
The Roosting Box, by Kristen den Hartog
War does the most horrifying things to people’s minds and people’s bodies, which den Hartog makes clear in all these stories. She writes about field hospitals and medical boats coming under attack—justifications that the former was build too close to strategic targets and that the latter’s conspicuous red cross was a trick. The images are indelible of nurses’ bodies resurfacing in the water long after, their long blue dresses, and huge white veils. Did you know what being buried alive, even temporarily, does to a person’s digestive tract, let alone their psyche? (Read the rest)
We Are Already Ghosts, by Kit Dobson
Imagine—structurally speaking—To The Lighthouse a century later, Woolf’s modernist masterpiece transposed from Cornwall to rural Alberta, the story of a family cabin, a summer idyll, one precious week a year in which time appears to stand still and nothing ever changes. (Read the rest)
The Mighty River, by Louise Erdrich
Like the river of its title—which originates in Minnesota and North Dakota, and flows north through Manitoba (where I’ve visited it in Winnipeg!), ultimately to Hudson’s Bay—this novel holds vast amounts of geological time, and history, and sediment, and strangeness, and ghosts, and kindness, and cruelty, and it flows and flows and flows. (Read the rest)
Peggy, by Rebcca Godfrey
The two stories behind Rebecca Godfrey’s novel Peggy are interesting, first the biography of Peggy Guggenheim herself, the iconic art collector from a famous American family, and then Godfrey’s own experience working to complete her novel about Guggenheim before her death from cancer in 2022 and how, when she was unable to do this, her friend Leslie Jamison stepped in to finish the book. But as a reader who knows almost nothing about Peggy Guggenheim and who hasn’t read Godfrey’s work widely, neither back story seemed necessarily resonant or pressing to me. Would Peggy be a book I really needed to to pick up? But then I did, and I couldn’t stop reading... (Read the rest)
The Husbands, by Holly Gramazio
Dolly Alderton’s fiction meets RUSSIAN DOLL meets THE FLATSHARE meets TOM’S MIDNIGHT GARDEN meets SLIDING DOORS meets LIFE AFTER LIFE meets a slice of BRIDGET JONES minus the self depreciation but all the humour. (Read the rest)
Monsters, Martyrs and Marionettes, by Adrienne Gruber
And this is the neighbourhood that Gruber is exploring in her essays, writing about the various ways that bringing life into the world is tangled with death, dead pigeons on the sidewalk. She writes about her pandemic pregnancy, about the challenges of unruly toddlers and being able to hold a child’s gigantic and ferocious feelings, about being stuck in a two bedroom apartment with small kids due to wildfires that have made the air outside unhealthy to breathe. She’s writing about legacy, about her own struggles with mental illness, and those of her scientist mother, and her grandmother’s cognitive decline. (Read the rest)
After the Funeral, by Tessa Hadley
I’ve never read a Tessa Hadley short story before, just her novels (most recently, Modern Love, and mercifully I still have most of her backlist before me [though they’re not easy to come by—perhaps some of them were never published in Canada?], so I was excited about her new release After the Funeral because it was a Tessa Hadley book at all, and not necessarily because it was a story collection. And then I started reading it and then spent two days walking around exclaiming, “OMG THIS BOOK THIS BOOK THIS BOOK!” because this Tessa Hadley story collection is basically 12 Tessa Hadley novels in one… (Read the rest)
Bury the Lead, by Kate Hilton and Elizabeth Renzetti
It’s the story of Cat Conway, who’s turned up in Port Ellis (where she’d spent summers with her grandparents years before) on the burnt out trail of a marriage and a career both gone out in flames. Very soon, however, it seems that her new, smaller, quiet life is not going to be so quiet after all when the lead in local theatre production (who is a world-famous actor) turns up dead on opening night, and not of natural causes. Ever the reporter, Cat is determined to get to the bottom of the story, along with her posse of news colleagues, a motley bunch if ever there was one, except that it seems like somebody in town is intent on getting between Cat and the truth. But is there anyone more indomitable than a middle-aged woman fuelled by rage who has nothing left to lose? Bury the Lead is pure delight. (Read the rest)
I Think We’ve Been Here Before, by Suzy Krause
Suzy Krause’s I THINK WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE was a total word-of-mouth book for me, a book I picked up because a trusted friend promised I would love it—and I did! A comforting book about the end of world—can you even fathom such a thing? It’s a novel that Suzy pitches—most remarkably—as (wait for it…) Iain Reid’s I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS meets Stuart McLean’s VINYL CAFE DIARIES. Cozy and unsettling at once. Okay! (Listen to Suzy Krause on BOOKSPO)
Not How I Pictured It, by Robin Lefler
Robin Lefler’s sophmore novel NOT HOW I PICTURED IT is the shipwreck rom-com you’ve been waiting for, a pitch perfect DREAM of a book whose wacky premise brings some real heft to the table. And I was so happy to be able to talk to her about NINE PERFECT STRANGERS, by Lianne Moriarty, the novel about a group of people isolated together at a wellness centre that inspired Lefler as she shaped her own book. (Listen to the BOOKSPO podcast!)
Apples on the Windowsill, by Shawna Lemay
Shawna Lemay’s new essay collection is the first book I’ve read in 2024, and while it’s called Apples on the Windowsill, it’s as much about lemons, not only about how the light falls on their unwinding rinds, but also what we do when life gives them to us. Which is to say, put them in a bowl and take their picture, and notice them, how they absorb the light, and how they change… (Read the rest)
The Gift Child, by Elaine McCluskey
With her seventh book, The Gift Child, short story superstar Elaine McCluskey has pulled off a novel that’s as great as one of her sentences, which is saying a lot. It’s a novel in the form of a memoir by Harriett Swim, a photojournalist who lost her career when the bottom fell out of the industry, and lost her marriage around the same time for reasons she’ll eventually make clear, which is also to say that she is struggling. Age 52, she’s returned to her hometown of Dartmouth, NS, where she’s got a job at the casino and can’t help getting sucked into the vortex of her father, Stan, iconic news anchorman, philanderer, narcissist, pathological liar, and jerk. But does the story of what’s wrong with Stan and all his various crimes have to do with who Harriett is? And what about her cousin Graham, a bit slow, last seen riding a bicycle with a giant tuna head in the basket and missing ever since?
God of the Woods, by Liz Moore
This novel, I supposed, would be just a book jam-packed with all my favourite literary elements. And it is, it really is, but what makes it so exceptional is what Moore does with those elements, how she manages to take these familiar devices and tell a story that’s suprising and subversive, like nothing I’ve ever encountered before. How the dripping blood on the cover is in fact dripping paint, is the kind of thing I’m talking about. A thumb to the patriarchy, wonderfully queered, and so fiercely feminist, plus it goes down a treat. (Read the rest)
Black Boys Like Me, by Matthew R. Morris
Three pages into the first essay in Matthew Morris’s new collection BLACK BOYS LIKE ME: CONFRONTATIONS WITH RACE, IDENTITY, AND BELONGING, and I was hooked, as Morris describes a 4am journey through Brooklyn, the way he adapts his performance of self as he passes a police station (“stage my innocence”) versus how he would have acted if he’d run into another Black man on the subway who presents himself in public as Morris does (“I would have amplified my Blackness—for survival”). The former I could have discerned, but I’d never considered the latter—how racism and anti-Blackness could be as pervasive as that. (Read the rest)
Sandwich, by Catherine Newman
And mostly this is a novel about the glorious mess of motherhood and menopause, and memory-making, and secret-keeping, and old wounds opened up again. About aging parents, and adult children, and the preciousness of time, especially time together. About what Newman’s protagonist Rocky terms the “reproductive mayhem” that constitutes her entire adult life, and it goes on and on. About living in a nation whose Supreme Court’s ideological bent means that Rocky daughter will have fewer rights to bodily autonomy than she did. It’s about family, and summer, and the impossibility of stopping time, and about the crushingly beautiful, terrible and ridiculous experience of being alive. (Read the rest)
Hum, by Helen Phillips
In Helen Phillips’ HUM, as with her previous novel THE NEED, the most unsettling parts of the narrative are those that are most familiar, and I don’t even mean the post-apocalyptic backdrop that certainly draws on the possibilities of our present (the forests have burned, May’s children have never seen strawberries growing on a plant, unhealthy air quality is a baseline, the heat is unrelenting, and society is structured on a network of AI systems called “hums”), but instead the anxiety underlying every sentence, an echo of the title. This is not so much a plot or character-based novel as a vibes-based novel, and the vibes are bad. (Read the rest)
The Rich People Have Gone Away, by Regina Porter
I had no idea what I was getting into when I started reading THE RICH PEOPLE HAVE GONE AWAY, a Covid-era novel by Regina Porter, a book that came to my attention via Maris Kreizman’s wonderful substack. A novel whose first section begins with an encyclopedia definition of “door”: “barrier of wood, stone, metal, glass, paper, leaves, or a combination of materials, installed to swing, fold, slide, or roll in order to close an opening to a room or building,” the novel’s following two sections beginning with similar definitions of “doorframe” and “threshold.” And Porter’s doorway/opening to the novel itself, (which is to say, her book’s first paragraph): “Mr. Harper takes sex in doorways. Halts new lovers at the threshold of his front door. Left hand on shoulder. Right hand on hip. He searches the ninth-floor hallway for furtive eyes before pressing the whole of himself in the tender nook of his lover’s ass.” I mean, what now? (Read the rest)
Peacocks of Instagram, by Deepa Rajagopalan
Deepa Rajagopalan is the author of the short story collection PEACOCKS OF INSTAGRAM, a book that’s so great it’s got me accosting strangers in the street, and she came to our conversation with a very cool twist on the Bookspo format. Her Bookspo pick is Alice Munro’s short story “Corrie” (which was included in her 2012 DEAR LIFE), which she used as inspiration for her own same-but-different story “Rahel,” published in her collection, and you can listen to our conversation here.
What She Said, by Elizabeth Renzetti
It makes no sense, but the gift of WHAT SHE SAID is that Renzetti connects the dots enough that it almost does, and the reader can breathe a sigh of relief: it’s not just you, and it’s not just me, it’s the patriarchy (and it’s all around the world). (Read the rest)
Who by Fire, by Greg Rhyno
In his excellent, riveting, heartful and hilarious second novel, Who By Fire, Greg Rhyno pays tribute to the fact that all the best classic detective novels always include some dame. Although his dame is not just any dame, instead Dame Polara, truly an original, only daughter of legendary PI Dodge Polara, whose brain is now scrambled after a stroke. If elder care wasn’t stressful enough, Dame is recently divorced, her latest IVF round has failed, her dodgy landlord keeps demanding she catch up on rent bills she can’t afford, and her straight job at Toronto City Hall working with heritage preservation is starting to seem pretty futile, particularly as a string of arsons take down one listed building after another. (Read the rest)
Intermezzo, by Sally Rooney
And now, with her fourth novel, Intermezzo, a novel whose premise wasn’t immediately appealing—about two brothers, grief, and chess?—consider me completely on the bandwagon. This novel is fantastic. So full of heart, and pain, and feeling, and this is what I’ve loved about Rooney’s work, the absence of cool, ironic distance, even if the characters therein might aspire to such a thing. And in Intermezzo, these characters are Ivan and Peter, two brothers separated by a decade, and so much more besides that, as they grieve the death of their father. (Read the rest)
Slow Dance, by Rainbow Rowell
And wow, SLOW DANCE, just a beautiful, impossible, agonizing-at-times love story about two messed up weirdos who everybody always assumed were together in high school, but they were just friends. “Just friends” who were everything to each other, and so terrified of communicating that truth and daring to take things any further for fear of messing it all up and wrecking everything that they mess it all up and wreck everything. (Read the rest)
The Lightning Bottles, by Marissa Stapley
Before I'd ever met or fallen in love with @marissastapley, I fell in love with her debut novel MATING FOR LIFE, and picking up that book would be the beginning of a friendship that's become part of the bedrock of my experience. I've loved celebrating her publications and successes since then, and having her so generously cheering on my own, and now there's something about her forthcoming release—THE LIGHTING BOTTLES, dropping in September, the follow-up to her New York Times-bestselling LUCKY—that feels like a full circle, or an arrival. And not JUST because an important character from that first book makes a cameo in this one, but because it's infused with the same spirit, and has all the confidence of a debut novel coupled with a decade of success and experience, and the result is a book I adore so wholeheartedly… (Read the rest)
Tell Me Everything, Elizabeth Strout
When I say that Elizabeth Strout begins her novel wrongly, what I’m also telling you is that her style is actually subversive. On top of the rule-breaking already noted, she has published a book that is so earnest that it’s sometimes embarrassing, never mind the exclamation marks, the sentiment. Tell Me Everything is a novel about love—has any author less been catering to fashion? All of this making for a literary work that’s edgy without even trying, and what’s more subversive than that? (Read the rest)
Vigil, by Susie Taylor
The stories in Taylor’s Vigil are a chorus, and they make a song that soars, the bleakness of their concerns offset by the vitality of the voices, and the shimmering moments of redemption woven like miracles throughout the text. (Read the rest)
The Time of My Life: Dirty Dancing, by Andrea Warner
Warner explores the movie’s roots as based in “the classic Jewish value” of tikkun olam, its celebration of liberal idealism before the ’60s got complicated, the subversiveness of a film whose entire plot hinges on abortion (screenwriter/producer Eleanor Bergstein was deliberate about that!) at a moment when American women’s reproductive rights seemed assured, and how its iconic soundtrack is the bedrock of the film. (Read the rest)
Make Me a Mixtape, by Jennifer Whiteford
In our conversation on the BOOKSPO podcast, Jennifer Whiteford and I talked about what was literary about the mixtape—she talked about how both a book and a mixtape need to be an effective communication tool and tell their stories, how a great first line and a great first track work the same way, and so much more that’s analogous between the two, which brought back all kinds of memories for me. And so did her wonderful cozy romance novel, which managed to be cool and punk-rock at the very same time, but not so cool that the soundtrack doesn’t appeal to the likes of me (Pat Benatar! Heart!). I loved this ode to music and friendship, and it’s one of my favourite books of the season. (Listen to Jennifer on BOOKSPO!)
And now a moment for the book I read this year that I hated with a vengeance, a book that stole hours from me that I will never be returned…
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