The Internet Personified: The Best Books I Read In 2024

11 books (PLUS BONUS ROUNDS) from my list of 133

Dec 27, 2024

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Hello and welcome to the letter I most look forward to writing all year round: the best books I’ve read in 2024! (Previous editions can be found here: 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023) (where is 2018? Lost in the annals of time, no doubt.) As always I set myself a reading goal, this year it was 124 books, and as happens most years I whizzed past my reading goal to reach 133 books (and I’m still reading but the ones I finish after I write this newsletter will go into my January diaries.) Out of those 133, I whittled down my list to 11, with a few extra categories this year including authors I “discovered” and the books I absolutely did not enjoy.

Me with my little electric blanket, propped up, trying to read a doorstopper with a glass of wine next to me. I need one of these handy book stands though.

I use Storygraph (not Goodreads) to keep a track of my reading habits which always gives me these beautiful graphs which you’ll see below, but I’ve linked these books on Goodreads so you can see the summary and maybe the Amazon preview but please buy your books from independent sellers because Amazon is putting all us writers out of business by offering massive discounts which go out of our royalties. I mean, no one is making money off books any more so I don’t know what to tell you, but we want cities with bookstores, don’t we? And the only way to ensure that happens is to vote with your wallet, so to speak. Amazon takes care of the instant gratification of it all (as well as ebooks, which I agree, they have the market cornered on) but if you want a paper copy, I honestly recommend asking your local store (online or offline) to order it.

Lecture done, let’s goooo. (Oh wait, one last word! Have you seen the documentary Buy More on Netflix? You really must. It’s scary how much we as a species are consuming and how insidiously it’s built in to all the systems we use so we don’t even think about it any more.)

Go on, tell your friends all about this post and the amazing books you discovered.

This was my year to read mysterious, emotional, dark and reflective books which sort of sums up my year as well.

A note on star ratings: I believe that 3 stars is good if given out of five, that’s 80%, a topper’s score! But ratings are weird, if I was in a good mood that day, I scored up and vice versa.

The Best Books I Read in 2024

Quick fun reads

Good Material by Dolly Alderton: Reminded me of Baby Reindeer a bit, have you seen it? It’s super creepy though and Good Material is decidedly not. If I were to blurb it I’d say “High Fidelity but written by a woman so better at delving into the interior life of a man.” (Wow, that is a terrible blurb.) In this case the man is Andy, a comedian who has just been broken up with by Jen and can’t understand it. Pages follow, where Andy is just feeling sorry for himself which are not great reading but then it picks up and goes into themes of being single in your thirties when all your friends are having babies, and male friendship which I feel is so unexplored in fiction. After this, I read Alderton’s other book called Everything I Know About Love which features long autobiographical essays about being young in London which felt alien to me, I’ve never been young in London but at the same time very familiar (I’ve been young.)

The Husbands by Holly Gramazio: What a great premise. A woman comes home and her husband opens the door, but DUN DUN DUNNNN she doesn’t have a husband! What she does have is a magic attic which churns out a different man each time one goes in there. Like Groundhog Day, she has to live with all these husbands while figuring out what she wants from her life. SO FUN.

Books about loss

The Expatriates by Janice YK Lee: Set in Hong Kong, amongst expats, this is the story of three women bound together by children (or the lack thereof). This year I went for books with a strong sense of place, you’ll find that is a common thread among all my favourites and reading about expats in Hong Kong was apparently exactly what I wanted to read? I’ve always been curious about a certain kind of expat parent, living in their bubble and moving from city to city without really feeling it. Delhi’s an easy city not to engage with if you have the money. You have an army of staff, air conditioning and air purifiers everywhere and you can just exist, as you are, without making any changes. Hong Kong it turns out is a bit like that as well, unless something terrible happens and then you’re forced to be, just like everyone else.

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips: Speaking of a strong sense of place, Disappearing Earth is perhaps the most geographically bound of the books I read this year. Set in the Siberian peninsula of Kamatchka, the story begins with two little girls being abducted as they are walking home. Then the book becomes interconnected stories, each taking place weeks or months after the girls have vanished. It was so unusual, so immersive, and also so beautiful. I was so surprised to be fathoms deep in this part of the world that I’d actually not thought about before that the surprise lent itself to the pleasure of reading it.

Extreme interiority

The Book of Delights by Ross Gay: Ah, how I enjoyed this collection of short essays by poet Ross Gay. I liked it so much I deliberately slowed down while I was reading it, keeping it at my desk and choosing one new chapter every day (and extending my loan at the library as long as I could). Gay’s experiment here was to write something small—often just a paragraph or two—on the delights he experienced every day. From a sparrow to a person saying a phrase that evokes something in him to head nodding at a stranger, it made me want to note down my own delights in this odd world. (A delight: noticing that Gay has also done a sequel, so there is that to look forward to in 2025.)

Mrs Bridge by Evan S Connell: Published in 1959, Connell was in his thirties when he wrote this novel about the life of an American housewife from the time she marries into her old age. An odd choice, I’m sure you’d agree, and also a strange book which starts off all Perfect Mother and Wife and then ratchets up her interior voice so suddenly you are Mrs Bridge having your existential crisis while also judging people for their clothes and shoes. You start off feeling contemptuous of her and in the end you’re filled with such deep empathy that she might be your best friend which is a feat especially in such a short novel. I mean, I can’t explain why this is a good book but it’s a really good book. Turns out I’m part of a club now, all of us struggling to explain why the book works: “I finally read it for the first time this year, after what must have been the hundredth recommendation from someone I trusted. It only took me about ten pages to realize what an idiot I had been. Meh, indeed. This novel is glorious. […]But even as I read, enthralled, once and then a second time, I couldn’t quite figure out why.”

Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte: One of the most recent books I read to make this list, I only just finished it last week. I’m not sure I would call Rejection a “favourite” book, but it’s certainly a book I thought a lot about (and continue to ponder). It’s these stories about sad people that primarily take place on the internet, so very cringe, like reading a novel version of Am I The Asshole. You can read the first story online at n+1 where it went viral.

Books about jobs

The Gallery by Manju Kapur: I love Manju Kapur. I really do. Her books about women in Delhi are just *chef’s kiss.* Her new book is right up there for me with my personal favourites: Home and Difficult Daughters. There’s two sets of mothers and daughters in it, Minal and Ellora Sahni, the rich ones and their employees, Maitrye and Tashi. Their lives intersect in this weird way that can only happen in India where the domestic staff knows everything about their employers, in a really personal way, and yet the class system is a large divide between them. In all this is Minal’s gallery that she runs from her home in a posh Delhi colony, and her struggles to rise above being “just a housewife” and be someone in the art world.

Marzahn Mon Amour by Katja Ostkamp: This year I joined a book club where we just read books set in Berlin. We’re still going strong—having run out of Berlin books we’re now moving to books set around the world, which is lovely but I’ll miss our Berlin books as well. (Doing my own Berlin reading for my new novel so it’s become a private project.) Marzahn Mon Amour was something I’d read a good review of and I suggested, but I didn’t think it would be so good. It’s autofiction, a novella about a writer trying to make more money so she retrains as a podiatrist and works in Marzahn which is this old East German neighbourhood and is full of pensioners. Each chapter is a different client, and it’s moving and funny and sad. I’m keen to read her other books but I’m not sure if any of them are in translation so I guess I just need to learn German faster.

Extreme exteriority

The Feast by Margaret Kennedy: I read this on my recent holiday with my mother and when I tell you I couldn’t put it down, believe it. Like every time we were eating or sitting down or chilling in the hotel, there I was galloping through The Feast. It opens with a funeral, a cliff has collapsed and squashed a boarding house underneath it, and people are dead. Then we rewind and go through all the guests, and I just got so damn attached I had to keep reading to see how sad I had to be. It’s sort of a thriller, sort of a funny story about human foibles, and all the characters are so alive, they just jumped off the page. Incredibly, this book was published in 1949, but the writing is so modern, it could have come out last year.

Books about young people

Zen by Shabnam Minawala: Well, just the one book about young people. I loved this doorstopper YA so much. Set in Bombay in both 1935 and 2019, the novel features two young women across the decades. In present day, there’s Zen, half Hindu half Muslim dealing with the CAA protests and a NRI boy who doesn’t get it, and who reminded me of my own charming (can I say my own character is charming? Why not, eh?) Noor Khan Rai of Split. In the past, there’s Zainab, struggling with both her own independence and India’s. A lovely book even if you’re all like “oh I’m too grown up for young adult novels.” (Who are you and also you’re missing out on so much.)

Authors I discovered “discovered”

AS Byatt’s Frederica series: I came to AS Byatt after reading Patricia Lockwood’s description of the quartet in the LRB. I’ve read Possession, apparently, says Lockwood, Byatt meant for it to be a popular good book, to win the Booker. Possession in many ways is Byatt’s “easy” book, it’s a lovely little puzzle, designed to intrigue and charm. The Frederica books now—they’re writer’s books, power reader’s books. I’m not saying this to give myself props or anything, because these are hard books, muscular almost, to release yourself to them especially after a diet of “easy reading” is work, the muscle that controls your language processing skills is given a workout. But once you surrender to the world, and surrender you will, because the books are lovely, there is a favourite character for every single kind of person, you’ll be surprised by how quickly they finish. I have two left which I’m saving for the new year, and the nicest thing about Byatt is that she makes me want to be a smarter person, better read, she’s aspirational intellectual, you know? This is not making the books sound very fun, but here is a description that might grab you: the books follow the lives and fortunes of the Potter family and their friends, especially Frederica, the middle daughter, whip smart, unhappy and trying to pass through life unscathed, which she doesn’t, who does? Obviously Frederica is my favourite, but also her sister who chooses domesticity, Stephanie, the playwright Alexander, whose curse is that women love him too well. Ah, the people are so human. You must read them, let’s read together next year.

Deborah Levy: For my birthday last year, a friend gave me a copy of Levy’s The Man Who Saw Everything. It was such an odd novel, so intriguing, so vague sometimes that I totally lost patience, like was I looking at the head or the tail of this story and then at the end you figure it out and you’re like, “Huh.” And also: “that was brilliant.” From there I went on to Levy’s living autobiography because I found a copy in the library, starting with her third volume Real Estate, which still has passages I return to in my mind. Actually, I wind up thinking about Levy’s writing a lot, especially her non-fiction. I’m currently on Things I Don’t Want To Know, and little sentences come back to me over and over, like a repeating chorus. I really think she might be one of the greatest writers of our time. Here’s a wonderful profile which got me interested in her in the first place. It’s called How Deborah Levy Can Change Your Life. She makes me feel, as the children say, “seen.”

Karin Slaughter: Look, my life is not all highbrow literature all the time, okay, and my absolute devouring of Slaughter’s backlist should prove this. I had a summer filled with deadlines and also the pressure of being outside, honestly, I don’t know how anyone gets work done in Europe in the warmer months, and so Slaughter was my soothing read, my baby blanket, my I can pick this up any time and be reassured book. Yeah, the irony of this statement is that she writes very graphically, very descriptively about murder. Like describing everything, all the cuts, all the torture. I don’t know why they had the opposite effect on me: soothing bedtime reads, but maybe I do. Maybe if you read about terrible events and terrible people it sort of puts your life into perspective. I read them for plot, each races along, but also they repeated themselves like the The Babysitter’s Club or Sweet Valley High, especially the Will Trent books. He’s a dyslexic cop with a chihuahua called Betty, a crazy ex-wife, a beautiful pathologist girlfriend and he’s the anchor for each book which cycles through other people’s points of view. They’re gross books, not for the faint-hearted but if you like serial killer films and also the certainty of knowing the hero is going to win, no matter the odds, you’ll like her writing.

Favourite re-reads

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett: Read it several years ago, gave it five stars, read it last month, still gave it five stars. The ending made me so melancholy, especially with some jazz on in the background (although it should have been opera to go with the book) that I had to go out with friends and sit in a very noisy bar just to dispel the spell it cast over me. (I also read Tom Lake this year, which was very good, but Bel Canto knocked it off my top list.)

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields: I love this book, told in a series of vignettes about one woman’s slow Canadian life. Shields is the master of this kind of thing, I have just ordered her Larry’s Party from my second hand place and her short stories are worth reading over and over again. This was the year another of my favourite Canadian writers, Alice Munro, got tainted with her own personal history, so it’s good to have Shields as a back-up just in case you’re missing something in your own shelves as well.

Books I Did Not Enjoy This Year

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree: Cozy books like this one just get my goat. SO emotionally manipulative. I really hate “nice lit” I can’t explain why, or maybe I can. I just don’t like books that draw this dotted line with an arrow saying “HAVE FEELINGS HERE.”

The Pairing by Casey McQuiston: What is wrong with modern chick-lit/romance? Where are my funny relatable girls like Bridget Jones or the Shopaholic, or Marian Keyes’ women? This book was so dull, despite the fact that there was so much sex. My god, so much sex and yet not titillating at all, just like hearing your one dull friend get drunk and tell you about her holiday with her new boyfriend who is also kind of dull. (As a way to fill the chick-lit hole in my heart in this time between the years, I’ve been reading Liane Moriarty’s backlist, and those are really good.)

All Fours by Miranda July: At least the sex was sexy except when it was so massively cringe that you had to read it with your mouth making a permanent grimace. I’m only mentioning this because literally everyone is talking about this very average book because oh there’s a woman in perimenopause having an affair. I mean…

It was a weird book and I only read it because of the hype, and I think my time could have been better spent. At least it wasn’t boring though.

Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors: Another book I picked up because of the popularity of the author. I like to see what’s making headlines in the book world, it’s so rare these days. Unfortch, another disappointment even though it was a riff on Little Women. I can’t remember a single character’s name and it felt like it took me three years to read.

There are other books I didn’t enjoy but I felt like these four, given their popularity could take a little criticism. Adding to the general books discourse and all that. I have Intermezzo on my shelves, another birthday present and I’m looking forward to having opinions on that next year. I also read and abandoned about half of Creation Lake, where once again I felt like I was supposed to be rooting for a main character who was just hollow.

And that’s my list! What was your best of/worst of read this year?

The Internet: Personified

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