The best books of 2024

This list is part of the best books of 2024.

Join 1,593 readers and share your 3 favorite reads of the year.

My favorite read in 2024

Book cover of The Mourner's Bestiary

Melissa Holbrook Pierson ❤️ loved this book because...

The book's premise was one I thought I wouldn't be interested in, but boy was I wrong: the author meshed two subjects with compelling drive and instinct. Beautifully conceived and written, it was one of the most moving books I read this year.

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Originality 🥈 Writing
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐇 I couldn't put it down

By Eiren Caffall,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Mourner's Bestiary as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A critically-acclaimed literary memoir braiding together environmental research and the personal journey of generational healing, grief, and chronic illness.

"Caffall brilliantly parallels her family’s suffering with large-scale ecological upheaval, maintaining a flicker of hope for the future in both cases. This deserves a wide readership." Publisher's Weekly Starred Review

Author Eiren Caffall is the inheritor of a family legacy of two hundred years of genetic kidney disease and the mother of a child who may inherit that legacy.

A literary memoir on loss, chronic illness, and generational healing, Caffall’s The Mourner’s Bestiary is also a meditation on grief and survival…


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My 2nd favorite read in 2024

Book cover of An Image of My Name Enters America

Melissa Holbrook Pierson 👍 liked this book because...

Dense, smart, commanding, at times difficult: Ives has a way of looking at life that is wholly unique.

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Originality 🥈 Outlook
  • Writing style

    👍 Liked it
  • Pace

    🐕 Good, steady pace

By Lucy Ives,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked An Image of My Name Enters America as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

What would you risk to know yourself? Which stories are you willing to follow to the bitter end, revise, or, possibly, begin all over? In this collection of five interrelated essays, Lucy Ives explores identity, national fantasy, and history. She examines events and records from her own life - a childhood obsession with My Little Pony, papers and notebooks from college, an unwitting inculcation into the myth of romantic love, and the birth of her son - to excavate larger aspects of the past that have been suppressed or ignored. With bracing insight and extraordinary range, she weaves new stories…


My 3rd favorite read in 2024

Book cover of Selected Amazon Reviews

Melissa Holbrook Pierson ❤️ loved this book because...

It is rare to read a book that is as new as the daybreak: this is that book, which claims territory of its own. No one else has done what Kevin Killian did--he created his own genre.

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Originality 🥈 Writing
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐇 I couldn't put it down

By Kevin Killian,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Selected Amazon Reviews as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A book-length selection from Kevin Killian's legendary corpus of more than two thousand product reviews posted on Amazon.com.

An enchanting roll of duct tape. Love Actually on Blu-ray Disc. The Toaster Oven Cookbook, The Biography of Stevie Nicks, and an anthology of poets who died of AIDS. In this only book-length selection from his legendary corpus of more than two thousand product reviews posted on Amazon.com, sagacious shopper Kevin Killian holds forth on these household essentials and many, many, many others.

The beloved author of more than a dozen volumes of innovative poetry, fiction, drama, and scholarship, Killian was for…


Don‘t forget about my book 😀

The Place You Love Is Gone

By Melissa Holbrook Pierson,

Book cover of The Place You Love Is Gone

What is my book about?

A book that ventures to express how it feels to lose the landscape of home. Using three case studies--Akron, Ohio; Hoboken, New Jersey; the Catskills towns that were drowned for New York City's reservoirs--Pierson writes of the forces that have changed the places she has lived and called home, just as they have probably taken the place you love, too.

Book cover of The Mourner's Bestiary
Book cover of An Image of My Name Enters America
Book cover of Selected Amazon Reviews

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