The best books of 2024

This list is part of the best books of 2024.

Join 1,187 readers and share your 3 favorite reads of the year.

My favorite read in 2024

Book cover of North Woods

Joanna Higgins ❤️ loved this book because...

This monumental novel spanning centuries is a heart-rending hymn to Nature, Time, and humankind's place in it as one small piece within a far greater "architecture." It is brilliantly imaginative, a time-capsule of a novel whose many voices shift and change even as the land itself continually does.

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Originality 🥈 Immersion
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐇 I couldn't put it down

By Daniel Mason,

Why should I read it?

22 authors picked North Woods as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries—“a time-spanning, genre-blurring work of storytelling magic” (The Washington Post) from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier.

“With the expansiveness and immersive feeling of two-time Booker Prize nominee David Mitchell’s fiction (Cloud Atlas), the wicked creepiness of Edgar Allan Poe, and Mason’s bone-deep knowledge of and appreciation for the natural world that’s on par with that of Thoreau, North Woods fires on all cylinders.”—San Francisco Chronicle

New York…


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My 2nd favorite read in 2024

Book cover of David Copperfield

Joanna Higgins ❤️ loved this book because...

I reread this novel prior to reading Barbara Kingsolver's take on it in her Pulitzer Prize winning Demon Copperhead. David Copperfield is a stunningly rich novel on every level. It is world building by a master. In essence, the good characters in this novel help one another; the bad prey upon one another. Sound familiar?

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Character(s) 🥈 Story/Plot
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐇 I couldn't put it down

By Charles Dickens,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked David Copperfield as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Now a major film directed by Armando Iannucci, starring Dev Patel, Tilda Swinton, Hugh Laurie, Peter Capaldi and Ben Whishaw

'The greatest achievement of the greatest of all novelists' Leo Tolstoy

In David Copperfield - the novel he described as his 'favourite child' - Dickens drew on his own experiences to create one of his most moving and enduringly popular works, filled with tragedy and comedy in equal measure. It is the story of a young man's adventures on his journey from an unhappy childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a novelist. Among the gloriously vivid cast of…


My 3rd favorite read in 2024

Book cover of I Don't Know How She Does It: A Comedy about Failure, a Tragedy about Success

Joanna Higgins ❤️ loved this book because...

This novel is a humorous yet serious take on the life of a working mother in a high-powered finance job. Pearson creates a detailed world rife with day-to-day catastrophes involving children, job, husband, and guilt for leaving for work each day. She also deftly dramatizes an insidious double standard: working fathers have no problem and can display their children's photos on their credenzas or desks; working moms can't even mention their children too much or else risk not being taken seriously. A poignant novel published two decades ago yet still relevant. Just think of some of the recent bizarre comments in the news that reflect a variation of that double standard--"childless cat ladies," for instance, who have been accused of not having any real stake in the future because they aren't raising their own children, unlike those women engaged in raising their own kids who will become future citizens. Crazy. Was such a thing ever said disparagingly of men in government or working elsewhere? I doubt it.

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Character(s) 🥈 Thoughts
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐇 I couldn't put it down

By Allison Pearson,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked I Don't Know How She Does It as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

The prequel to How Hard Can It Be?

Meet Kate Reddy, fund manager and mother of two. Always time-poor, Kate counts seconds like other women count calories. Factor in a manipulative nanny, an Australian boss who looks at Kate's breasts as if they're on special offer, a long-suffering husband, her quietly aghast in-laws, two needy children and an email lover, and you have a woman juggling so many balls that some day something's going to hit the ground.

In an uproariously funny and achingly sad novel, Allison Pearson brilliantly dramatises the dilemma of working motherhood at the…


Don‘t forget about my book 😀

In the Fall They Leave

By Joanna Higgins,

Book cover of In the Fall They Leave

What is my book about?

This Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Winner (2023) was inspired by the British nurse Edith Cavell's real-life clandestine work saving hunted Allies in German-occupied Belgium in 1914 and 1915. IN THE FALL THEY LEAVE tells the story from the point of view of a fictional student nurse at Edith Cavell's nursing school and clinic in Brussels. Having failed at a prestigious music academy, Marie-Therese fears failing again and has become a careful student. Yet her experiences at the clinic lead her into increasingly dangerous situations of moral ambiguity and risk-taking. This is a story of war told from the perspective of citizens on the home front who find themselves caught up in complex and fraught interactions between occupiers and the occupied.

My book recommendation list

Book cover of North Woods
Book cover of David Copperfield
Book cover of I Don't Know How She Does It: A Comedy about Failure, a Tragedy about Success

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