My Top 3 Books of 2024

Whether real or imagined, stringing cords between chance events is fun; patterns project intention and meaning to pure whimsy (how I actually decide what to read).

For the past four years, including 2023, I reviewed the top 5 books I read. This year, I want to limit my deep dives to the top 3, and instead focus my review on some dominating themes.

There is nothing more exciting than exploring my favorite genre (sci-fi) in experimental forms: The Complete Cosmicomics is a collection of Italo Calvino’s short stories, each a fantastical, dreamy tale devised around a scientific theory. The Employees by Olga Ravn asks us to read between the lines to piece together the unsettling narrative on a futuristic spaceship solely through workplace statements and interviews. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut uses time travel to explore PTSD in his sarcastic, dark anti-war book.

Continuing the theme of innovative literature, I picked up Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which cleverly combines lovely, fictional poetry with meta commentary. I ventured to New Journalism pioneers — Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem — and loved their distinctly American voices and immersive storytelling.

This year also featured multiple meditations on bodily autonomy. One of the most life-changing, universal questions is the choice to have children — Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel ponders voluntary childlessness while Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami narrows on the physical and mental realities of motherhood. Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro and A Very Easy Death by Simone De Beauvoir were heartbreaking novellas on the cruelty of terminal illness, the bureaucracy that follows, and the strain of caretaking.

Cross-cultural themes were also common and beloved this year: Babel by R.F. Kuang was a fantastical epic about colonial power and translation, The Secret of Laughter by Shusha Guppy is a charming collection of Persian folktales, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini is backdropped by a turbulent Afghanistan, and 12 of 27 books I read this year were translated literature.

I write reviews for all the books I’ve read on Goodreads; in the meantime, here are my top 3 of 2024, a choice I’ve arbitrarily decided is some combination of how much a book has entertained me, if I’ve learned something interesting from it, and how thoroughly the prose sank into my soul:

1. The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu

Genre: Science fiction, Fantasy, Short stories

Favorite quote:

“We are different, you and I, and the qualia of our consciousnesses are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe. And yet, whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me. Our minds managed to touch, if but briefly and imperfectly. Does that thought not make the universe seem just a bit kinder, a bit brighter, a bit warmer and more human?”

Thoughts:

This collection has captivated my mind and heart this year. Liu creates moving, meaningful stories by blending the surreal — whether that’s animated origami figures or immortality — with the very real folktales, history, and culture of East Asia. The distinct worlds he creates in each story are vibrant and fun, yet prod at thought-provoking concepts.

For example, “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” is about the creation of a particle machine that allows a snapshot of history to be viewed by an individual — but only once — and it questions how while narrative makes history more impactful to our story-loving species, does it dilute the larger, objective picture? Another one of my favorites, “A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel”, is an alternate history of an underground tunnel built in the 20th century connecting Japan and America, and it delves into the human cost of progress, the moral value of change.

2. The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

Genre: Biblical history, Historical fiction

Favorite quote:

“If you want to understand any woman you must first ask about her mother and then listen carefully…The more a daughter knows about the details of her mother's life - without flinching or whining - the stronger the daughter.”

Thoughts:

I picked up this book out of desire to correct my complete ignorance of biblical history, but I truly enjoyed this re-telling from the perspective of Dinah, daughter of Jacob and Leah in the Old Testament, whose only mention in the Bible is a footnote about her rape by the prince of Shechem. Through Dinah’s eyes, we’re better able to visualize the social structures and norms of the time while relating to themes that transcend — the rhythm of life and inexplicability of loss.

This book isn’t really about religion. It’s about coming-of-age as a girl in an ancient world, of the powerful rituals that arise from sisterhood and motherhood. Diamant does not shy away from topics like desire and menstruation in depicting this gritty, intimate reality, and her brazen style absolutely fascinates me.

3. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Genre: Essays, Journalism, Creative nonfiction

Favorite quote:

“But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I’”

Thoughts:

I admit it’s taken a while for me to get to Didion’s work only because her popularity has set my expectations so high, but this collection has not disappointed. The first section “Life Styles in the Golden Land” includes features on popular figures and movements of 1960s California like the hippie counterculture in San Francisco, the final “Seven Places of the Mind” is a smattering of essays on meaningful locations — New York City, Alcatraz.

My favorite, however, is the second section, “Personals,” and what I believe encapsulates what I like so much about her writing. Didion’s philosophy is an extension of Anne Lammott’s (Bird by Bird), that writing comes from flavors of observation, and thus, should always be self-centered. This approach, combined with her journalistic vision, translates into immersive and humanistic storytelling that makes me tingle with aspiration.

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Honorable Mentions:

“I play the game, in other words, the game of pretending there’s an order in the dust, a regularity in the system, or an interpretation of different systems, incongruous but still measurable, so that every graininess of disorder coincides with the faceting of an order which promptly crumbles.”

Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“She paid attention, the kind of attention that almost didn’t exist anymore. This was her gift. So few people did this for each other. Giving someone your attention — with the greatest amount of care she could muster in whatever allotted time period — was far more precious than any kind of commodity.”

Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“I told myself that I should never sit in the lobby again, never pick up the white telephone, never make the journey any more: I should so happily have broken with those habits if Maman had been cured, but I still had a nostalgia for them, since it was in losing her that I lost them.”

Simone De Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”

Toni Morrison, Beloved

“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Translation means doing violence upon the original, it means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So, where does that leave us? How can we conclude except by acknowledging that an act of translation is always an act of betrayal?”

R.F. Kuang, Babel

“…they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known.”

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Happy holidays!