Best Books & Music of 2024

Reading

This year I lowered my reading expectations, intending to tackle a pile of magazines and longer books I needed to read this year. I typically read between 40-60 books a year and thought 30 would be a good number to aim for instead of going above and beyond. Well, I hit 40 books a few days ago, picking up some steam in the last couple of months when I thought had burned out. I also read some of the magazines but definitely didn’t tackle the longer books I wanted to read. Looking at you 2025. I still listened to quite a few audiobooks but am trying to shift away from so many. I also didn’t have many mapping projects at work that facilitated listening to audiobooks, too much writing which means music or nothing at all. Also, I embraced abandoning books with, um, abandon this year! If I got what I needed out of a non-fiction after half the book, I stopped reading. If another book was making me angry or frustrated, or was just plain boring, I quit. Took many TBR books to get through to slog through something I’m not really interested in.

Here’s a summary of what I read in 2024:

Best Fiction

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

This was the first book I read of the year and it was batshit crazy. Coming on the heels of a Goodreads review scandal in late 2023, this book felt very prescient (published May 2023). This is the story of what happens when a friend/acquaintance, a rising star writer, pens an amazing draft of a book and only one other person, another writer, knows about it and the author suddenly dies. How far is the supposed friend willing to go to steal the draft and make it their own? It’s very much a villain/anti-hero book, one you are simultaneously rooting for the person to succeed while also realizing they are a horrible, horrible person. A veritable Walter White.

All Fours by Miranda July

I read this book while we were in Ecuador in July, taking it with me for my vacation read. I started it while in the Napo River and finished it while in the Galapagos and it was one of those perfect reads to pick up while lounging in the cabin of the boat or by the pool between various excursions throughout the day. It came out in May and I started seeing rave reviews about it and put a hard copy on hold at the library before we went because I couldn’t get the digital version in a timely manner. This book wasn’t what I was expecting and was so much more. It’s really hard to explain because it is one of those mid-life “coming of age” sort of books and you really need to have an open mind while reading it. Most people really love it or hate it because July is someone who just lays it all out there. We have an unnamed creative woman in her 40s, intending to take a road trip from California to New York to meet some friends and work on her next project for a few weeks while leaving her child with her husband during that time period to go about their lives. The marriage you can tell is on a precipice but you don’t really get the full details until later in the book and the narrator is also in the middle of changing her career. Like I said, go into this with an open mind when you read it because it is very unconventional. But I loved it! I’m planning on picking up July’s other books this year to read, too.

The Naturalist Society by Carrie Vaughn

I grabbed this one last minute in late September as one of Amazon’s First Reads before it went away for September. I read it while we were in New Mexico in early October and it was a great page-turner for that trip. If you enjoy books about intrepid early explorers of our poles mixed with magical realism, you’ll enjoy this one! It’s the 1880s and Beth Stanley is in a marriage of convenience. She also holds powers of Arcane Taxonomy, which she had been using to get her name into the world via her husband, because of course women of that time couldn’t get their name on anything. There’s a love triangle, lots of early naturalist talk, and discussion about the challenges and threats of being closeted LGBTQ in that time period. It looks like this is going to be a series and I look forward to the next one when it comes out.

Best Non-Fiction

Chasing the Smokies Moon by Nancy East

When we were in the Smokies for Spring Break I remembered I had this book on my Kindle, which had been sitting there unread for a couple of years already. I started reading it and finished it sometime on the drive back or when we got home but it was really great to be reading it while in the park and all of the trails were fresh on my mine. Nancy East is an avid hiker, runner, and SAR volunteer in western North Carolina and got the idea along with her running partner and friend Chris Ford to tackle the Smokies 900, which is to hike all of the trails in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, but to do it to set a speed record while simultaneously raising money for SAR operations.

Nancy is a really great writer and her writing only made me want to a: live near the Smokies and b: do another long hike. She weaves into her tales about tackling these trails with SAR stories from GSMNP as well as a particularly gruesome bear encounter by another hiker that derailed some of their plans during one of their hiking days. There’s a lot of mediocre trail writing out there but this isn’t one of them.

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Fans of RWK will absolutely love this book and anyone new to RWK will consider this a great entry point into her longer work, Braiding Sweetgrass. Originally published as an essay in Emergence Magazine, this book is an expounded version of that. There are so many tidbits of wisdom, mostly pertaining to reciprocity and the natural world and how it pertains to society as a whole, that I will be revisiting this book for many years to come. I do hope something longer is in the works from RWK, too!

Best surprise book

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

I’ve long been a fan of the movie and have always wanted to read the book but never got around to it. It popped up on someone’s best of book list early in the year and I saw it was available to listen to on audio at the library and went for it. The movie smooths over some of the rough edges that the book has, rough edges that are needed to explain the actions of the Lisbon sisters. In the movie you don’t feel, or at least I didn’t, so much disgust at the neighborhood/school boys in the story but in the book I hated them so much. I won’t elaborate more, but if you’ve only seen the movie definitely read the book sometime.

Popular books that were a snoozefest for me

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

Listen, I love Ann Patchett but god I hated this book! I really gave it a go, even getting back on the wait list after I didn’t get very far into it the first go-round on audio and trying again. I just got really tired of hearing about Our Town and this mysterious love of the main character’s life, and honestly, it was just so tedious. I heard so many rave reviews about this from everyone on the internet but it did nothing for me. Even Meryl Streep narrating the audio could not rescue this for me.

You Could Make this Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith

Smith is well known for her poetry, particularly the poem Good Bones, of which a line at the end of the poem is taken to create the title of this book. It’s about Smith’s rise to fame via the internet after years of writing while also being a wife and mother, her husband’s jealousy and how much of an asshole he was, and I went into it really raring to go to support Smith but found that I could not deal with her tip-toeing around so many issues. She would start to explain something and then decide she wouldn’t tell you about it because of her kids or even her ex-husband, but I found myself wanting to yell, JUST TELL US ALREADY. We know, your husband was a jerk, would have been a jerk even if you hadn’t become famous, please tell us the juicy bits or why did you even bother writing this? I’m thinking she was still too close to the events and this needed to marinate for another decade, at least. I gave up because it was all too infuriating.

Music
Listen, I fully embraced Pop Girl Summer this year. I generally do not listen to most modern pop music. I am not up on the times. You can find me listening to the classic rock station or the mix 80s/90s station most days on the radio and when I’m on Spotify I lean heavily into music I already love, mostly Fleetwood Mac, Florence + The Machine, etc. I definitely have various playlists from other musicians I put together seasonally but my moods are generally: does it have Florence Welch or Stevie Nicks? Ok, good.

I started seeing people talking about Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan in mid-June and was like, ok, let’s see who these people are. Carpenter’s Please, Please, Please had just come out and it instantly had me when I watched the BBC1 recording she did, which is the clean version, before it was out on Spotify or her music video came out. Espresso was already popular and I really loved it, too, and even heard it in Ecuador on the boat in the Galapagos.

Chappell Roan’s Hot to Go was really hitting its stride in June, with Pink Pony Club I think having kicked off Chappell’s launch into stardom in the spring after a decade of toiling in the industry. Good Luck, Babe! came out shortly after that (high notes and synth reminiscent of Kate Bush) and I was hooked onto her music after that! It was really a competition between Sabrina and Chappell on my most-listened for June and July but then I made a Sabrina Carpenter station on Spotify and it started throwing me Olivia Rodrigo and Vampire and All-American Bitch sucked me in and soon I was downloading Guts.

I tried to get into Charli XCX after her album came out and everyone was all over brat but I couldn’t do it. I did like Dua Lipa’s Houdini and will need to explore more of her work in the future.

More on the realm of F+M and Kate Bush was the Swedish folk band First Aid Kit, which I also have to thank Spotify for introducing me to. Somehow I stumbled across their 2012 album The Lion’s Roar and their 2014 album Stay Gold and fell for their music. They will definitely be in heavy rotation in 2025.

Rounding out the year was Florence + The Machine recording her 2009 album Lungs at the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall with a full symphony. The set is on Spotify if you want to listen, though I can’t find the entire video from the BBC on YouTube yet, someone has a few songs up on YT, you can watch Cosmic Love here. Yes, I have the album pre-ordered for its March release! I think one of my favorites from this recording is of Blinding—here’s a video from someone in the crowd. Lungs was an album I listened to a lot on our Florida Trail thru-hike in 2011.

Share what you loved
I would love to know what music or books were your favorites this year! Tell me what is on your TBR for 2025 (my major one is to tackle the latest Outlander I’ve been sitting on for two years! *sobs*) and maybe I’ll add some more music and books to check out this year. I love hearing what people are reading so send me any Best Of lists, too.