2024 Silver Medalists
The (nearly) best books I read this year
I love best-of lists. I love to see what books people enjoyed, how my opinions compare, and what I should be reading next. However, annual best-of lists are traditionally limited to books published within the calendar year, which necessarily excludes the thousands of books that already exist and still deserve to be read. This model makes sense for a publication like The New York Times, which has the resources and capacity to read a large chunk of the thousands of books that are published in a given year. I, however, didn’t only read books published in 2024. Thus, my best-of list contains my favorite reads of the year, not necessarily ones that were only published this year.
I will be releasing my favorite reads in two installments. The first, below, are my silver medalist reads: the ones that ranked #20 through #11. In a few days, the gold medalists will be announced. Even though I’ve ranked them, please don’t be distracted by the number I’ve assigned to each book. They were each so good that the distinctions between them is fully arbitrary. I loved every one of these reads and hope that you will too.
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20. The Appeal - Janice Hallett
Fiction/Mystery, 416 pages
The Fairway Players are a tight-knight community theater group in the fictional English town of Lockwood. The group, which has put on shows for over thirty years, is run by the revered Martin Haywood and his wife Helen. When Martin announces that their granddaughter Poppy has been diagnosed with a rare form of brain cancer that can only be cured with an expensive experimental American drug, the theater troupe quickly rallies to raise the money to pay for treatment. For those looking closely, however, Poppy’s cure and its extraordinary cost do not make sense. After a member of the group is found dead, two young lawyers are given the task of reviewing all the evidence in the case to try to work through the layers of what really happened.
The Appeal is the most clever and engrossing mystery novel that I have read in some time. By telling the story only through email and text correspondence, Hallett deftly controls the pace at which she dolls out the narrative. Readers only receive the version of events that any given character wants their recipient to have, making every message, no matter how seemingly extraneous, crucial to solving the puzzle. I’m blown away by the fact that this is Hallett’s debut and think she represents a fresh new voice in the mystery genre. Hallett has since written three more books, all using this unconventional format, and I’ve loved them all (click the titles to find my reviews for The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels and The Examiner). I recommend that you read this, and all her books, in a physical format because the unique formatting might not translate as well to audio.
19. Company - Shannon Sanders
Fiction/Short Stories, 190 pages
Company is a first-class multigenerational saga told through thirteen linked short stories. Sanders provides a family tree at the beginning of the book that I referred back to as I started each story so that I could be sure I understood how everyone was connected in this near-genius work of family, race, friendship, and growth. In the first story, two brothers return home to evict their mother’s boyfriend. In another, the brothers’ aunt attends a party with her nieces to celebrate her appointment as university provost after she is unable to convince either of her children to attend. In another, a cousin hosts his cousin in his apartment in D.C. while he is in town for a drag show. Each of the thirteen stories adds a layer to the family’s narrative, creating a depth and beauty that sets this collection apart. It takes pure skill to give so many characters life in such a believable and compelling manner, but Sanders pulls it off in stunning fashion.
18. Visitation - Jenny Erpenbeck
Historical Fiction, 192 pages
Visitation is the story of one plot of land along a Brandenburg lake over the course of a century. Jenny Erpenbeck expertly weaves together the lives of twelve people who occupied the land from the late 19th century until the collapse of East Germany, beginning with the town’s mayor in the late 1800s. Lacking any sons, the mayor chose to sell the land to an architect and a Jewish family at the turn of the century. The architect developed a beautiful home but fled during the Soviet invasion at the end of the Second World War. The Jewish family was forced to flee to South Africa in the late 1930s, and the home was eventually placed under the control of the East German government. The land is leased by the government and parceled until unification, when the architect’s family attempts to reclaim what they saw as lost. I have no idea how Erpenbeck packed so much history, detail, and individual mundanity into so few pages, but it is clear, based on all of Erpenbeck’s work, that she is a once-in-a-generation writer.
17. Happy All the Time - Laurie Colwin
Fiction, 214 pages
Happy All the Time, published in 1978, tracks the lives of two couples living in New York. Guido and Vincent are best friends and distant cousins who grew up together in Connecticut. After college and with their future careers in New York largely set, they each unexpectedly meet and marry well-suited women with distinct personalities. Guido meets Holly in Boston. Every few years, when she senses complacency in their marriage, Holly ups and leaves for an unset period of time. Vincent meets quirky Misty in the office at work. Misty fights off his advances with her dry sense of humor and refusal to accede to expectations until finally accepting their obvious compatibility.
The book continues in this vein. Not much happens plot-wise, but the development of the wonderful characters pushes the story forward. In this way, Colwin is writing the most ordinary and extraordinary of books; that of the messiness and unexpected joys of life, love, friendship and family. The last three pages of this novel are as perfect as they come. For no good reason other than that, they brought tears to my eyes.
16. The Searcher - Tana French
Fiction/Mystery, 450 pages
The Searcher begins a few months after Cal Hooper moves to the rural Western Irish village of Ardnakelty looking for peace and quiet after his retirement from the Chicago Police Department. He’s fixing up his place and getting a feel for the town and its inhabitants when Trey, a local kid, starts showing up at his door hoping for help in finding out what happened to her older brother, Brendan. Cal is hesitant to get involved, but the shady reactions he observes after he starts asking questions creates qualms that the inner-detective in him can’t let go of. This is Cal’s first investigation that doesn’t have the backing of authority, so he must rely on his soft skills — people reading, conversation, basic deductions — to get answers. The closer to the truth Cal gets, however, the more evident it becomes that the people closest to him have serious reasons for wanting him to back off.
As much as this is a story about Cal and his investigation, it is also a beautiful portrait of the town and the surrounding countryside. French has an incredible gift for transporting the reader exactly where she wants them to be, slowly peeling away layer after layer until answers are laid bare. I won’t include any spoilers, but after finishing this book and then its sequel, The Hunter, I’m fascinated by French’s untraditional depiction of the concept of justice and its interplay with a small town suspicious of outside intervention.
15. The Hypocrite - Jo Hamya
Fiction, 230 pages
A father, a famous author, enters a theater on the West End of London in August 2020 to see his daughter’s breakout play. He hasn’t read any reviews before he comes because he wants to be able to give her his honest thoughts without bias. As soon as the play begins, however, the father recognizes the character onstage as him. It quickly becomes clear that the show is an indictment of a vacation the father and daughter took to an island off Sicily ten years earlier. Throughout the course of the play, the entirety of Sophia’s critique of her father is laid bare until he can’t take it anymore, leading to one scene near the end of the book that involves brioche and a bathroom that I truly don’t think I can ever forget. At the same time the father is watching the show in horror, his daughter, Sophia, is anxiously eating lunch in a restaurant nearby with her mother, the unnamed father’s ex-wife. As the afternoon unfolds, it becomes less clear what Sophia’s debasement is supposed to accomplish, leading to questions of agency, power, and competing narratives. I really enjoyed this book and was blown away by the pacing, structure, and writing.
14. All Fours - Miranda July
Fiction, 336 pages
In All Fours, a semi-famous artist (resembling Miranda July) decides to drive across the country in pursuit of self-growth and personal development. She carefully plans her route and nervously sets out. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child she decides to stop for gas and get lunch. She will not be driving cross-country after all. During her brief break she meets a man named Davey, checks into a motel, employs Davey’s wife to completely redesign the motel room into a luxury escape, and then, once the remodel is finished, begins an extremely explicit affair with Davey. Note: the whole book is explicit, so if that’s not your cup of tea this isn’t the book for you. When the time allotted for the road trip is up she returns home trapped within the lie she’s telling her family about the past few weeks and the internal awakening she believes she’s had.
I listened to this book, which is narrated by July, and think it’s the best way to experience this novel. July’s performance is all-encompassing, which allowed me, as the reader, to buy into a story about a woman who, as Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times aptly wrote, shows “indifference to any current affairs but her own.” Despite all of this, I was totally enraptured by this book and its absurdity, quirkiness, honesty, and unique voice.
13. So Late in the Day - Claire Keegan
Fiction, 118 pages
So Late in the Day is a collection of three phenomenal short stories about the subtle tensions between women and men in relationships, professional lives, and power struggles. The first story, So Late in the Day, follows a young man over the course of a weekend as he agitates about his engagement that was recently called off. In The Long and Painful Death, a writer arrives at a weeklong residency at the idyllic home of Heinrich Böll, only to be interrupted by an academic who insists on seeing the house as a way of assessing the merits of the writer. In the final story, Antartica, a married woman travels to the city to see what it is like to sleep with another man, and ends up in a precarious situation.
In keeping with the length of Claire Keegan’s previous works, such as Foster and Small Things Like These, the three stories are short and crisp. You can easily get through this small collection in a few hours. Despite their brevity, Keegan has a gift for distilling complex, previously unnameable feelings into a few sentences. Indeed, this is why her writing has so much power. I am still thinking about a line in The Long and Painful Death, in which the narrator reflects on how her whole day has been subsumed by unexpected plans; how even though she still has the rest of the day open ahead of her, that one event will become the focal point of her day. I can’t recommend this collection enough. I only wish there was more.
12. On Beauty - Zadie Smith
Fiction, 443 pages
On Beauty is an expansive story about an interracial family living in a university town outside Boston amidst the culture wars of 2005, when this book was published. The father, Howard Belsey, is an art history professor who specializes in hating Rembrandt. His wife, Kiki, a hospital administrator, has recently discovered Howard’s three-week affair with a colleague, placing their marriage on the rocks. The couple does little to hide their martial strife from their three children: Jerome, a junior at Brown who spent the summer living with Howard’s academic nemesis in England; Zora, a sophomore at Howard’s college who worships her father and any cause that seems righteous; and Levi, a high-schooler who feels disconnected from his racial identity. The book follows the family throughout the academic year, in which conflict, culture, and politics define the personal lives of all five Belseys.
Although On Beauty was published 20 years ago and centered around culture wars of the time, the issues that were being debated then feel no less relevant now. The book is a perfect blend of campus politics, social politics, political correctness, and family drama. Zadie Smith is one of those rare and utterly talented writers that has the sharpest eye for detail and a wonderful clarity in her writing. After reading one chapter about Howard’s relationship with his father I had to put the book down because it made me too sad. A hundred pages later I was giggling out loud at a scene involving a glee club and uncontrollable public laugher. These polar opposite emotional reactions represent On Beauty in a nutshell: it is a masterclass in capturing the full range of human experiences within the microcosm of the individual, family, college, town, and, to some extent, wider world.
11. North Woods - Daniel Mason
Fiction, 369 pages
In many ways, the protagonist of North Woods is a patch of land in western Massachusetts. Eventually, that land will be settled by a British soldier and veteran of the Seven Years War, who is determined to make his living growing apples. When he dies fighting in the Revolutionary War, the house and orchard are passed to his twin daughters to carry out his life’s dreams. The sisters grow old as spinsters, the land is bought by a successful painter, then passed to an owner of a button factory. So moves time, as one generation after the next discovers the area and its beauty, attempts to claim and conquer it as their own, and discovers that in the eternal struggle between man and nature, nature nearly always wins.
It is a narrative feat to simultaneously tell the stories of individual characters, a few acres, and the country writ large. Each chapter added a different layer to pre-existing foundations laid by the people, animals, and nature that inhabited the land of the previous generation. This book is an incredible blend of structural ingenuity, narrative prowess, and writing craft.
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Want to see past months’ round ups? You can find those here.
Want to check out my favorite reads in 2023? You can find them below:
