My 2024 Reading Year + 10 Favorite Books

This is just an absolute delight of a book. A true comfort read. It’s about Leonard and Hungry Paul who are friends and they are just…nice. They play board games. They spend time with family.

The plot gets going when Leonard’s mother dies and Hungry Paul’s sister is getting married. But it’s just a novel about life, and changes, and relationships, and finding contentment in the simpleness of life.

I’m cheating a little bit and counting this whole series of graphic novels as one of my favorite books of the year. Oh well, I make the rules.

In the first volume, we meet Charlie and Nick. They get sat together in school and Charlie has a major crush on Nick, but is pretty sure Nick is straight. But Nick starts to have confusing feelings about Charlie when they spend more time together. It’s such a heartwarming read and you’ll adore Nick and Charlie.

In 1996, Krakauer joined an Everest expedition as a reporter. And in this memoir he recounts the whole journey (the climbing process is so interesting), the dynamics between the groups of climbers and guides, and the tragic storm and poor decisions that lead to multiple people dead on summit day.

This is one of those books where you’ll find yourself looking up all kinds of additional information online. And I didn’t want to put it down.

This is a character-driven novel (one of my favorite things!) about Sarah and Warren. They dated in high school, but then went on to marry other people.

Now, decades later, they see each other again. Warren is still married, but Sarah isn’t, and they begin an affair.

Really though this book is about the impacts that affair has: on themselves, on their families, and how they must make decisions when all the choices seem bad. It’s a quiet read that will pull on your heart, and I loved it.

What a romp! Here’s the premise: Lauren comes home one night to discover her husband waiting outside for her. Except she’s never been married.

Then later, he goes up to the attic, and out comes a different husband. Lauren discovers that her attic is magical and she can exchange husbands (and lives) until she finds what she is happy with.

But how will she know when she’s landed on the right one? This book is so whimsy and fun and full of dry British humor. Think the movie Palm Springs crossed with an Emma Straub novel, but British.

Oh this book. It’s a story about the women in a family and it’s just full of love and adoration.

In it, Kalb writes from her grandmother’s perspective, covering four generations of their family. It’s full of memories and voicemail transcripts and family stories. It’s so clear that Kalb and her grandmother had a special relationship.

I’ve never read anything quite like this one, and I wanted to soak all the warmth in.

This may just be my favorite book of the year. It’s simple: A family goes to Cape Cod on vacation. Two parents, two adult children, one girlfriend. The grandparents come to visit.

Our main character is the mom, Rocky, who makes sandwiches for the family, guides her parents, and hangs out with her kids.

But what it’s really about is so much more. It’s about aging, and seeing your parents age, and watching your kids grow. It’s about loss and grief. It’s about your family relationships now, and how they change over time. This is definitely one I think I’ll read again and again at all kinds of different life stages.

A couple years ago I fell in love with the HBO show Julia, and discovered who Judith Jones was: Julia Child’s editor.

But she was, of course, SO much more than that, and this biography details her life and her publishing career.

Jones was behind so many of our most well-known writers: Sylvia Plath, John Updike, Anne Tyler. But she also had a special love of good food and basically revolutionized the way Americans saw cookbooks. This one definitely had me adding to my TBR list and putting new cookbooks on hold at the library.

I love a good rom-com, and if you ask me a different day I might chose a different one as my favorite of the year.

But today this is the one that’s standing out to me. It’s about Nora, who writes a movie script about her life. And when the production comes to film at her house, the star of the movie, Leo, stays a bit longer to clear his head.

They start to fall for each other, of course. But then he leaves and goes back to his life, and Nora is left wondering if she had imagined all their feelings. It’s a feel-good story and a quick read that breezes by.

In 1980s Ireland, Bill Furlong is a coal merchant starting in a busy time of year right before Christmas. But when he delivers coal to the convent, he sees something he wasn’t meant to and has a crisis of conscious.

This is a book about the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, but it’s also about Christmas and family and how the “small things like these” are what make up our lives.

To add to my reading experience: I started it on the same day the beginning of the book is set and read it in the two days leading up to Christmas. Perfect reading experience.