Book Review

Best Reads of 2024

Book Review, Climate Fiction, Creative Non Fiction, Crime Fiction, Eco-criticism, Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Thrutopia

2024 was another good year for reading – even better than 2023, it turned out. I feel I have successfully developed a good reading habit again and nothing makes me happier these days than sitting down with a coffee and a book to lose myself in it. This year I did a lot of international adventures – including two transatlantic trips (California and NYC), long car journeys into the far north (the Highlands) and the far south (Cornwall) and crossing Europe by train – and books kept me company all along. 

I’ve also realised that many books in this year’s list (almost half) are written by trans and non-binary authors and almostall books are queer in some degree or another – something that I wasn’t necessarily actively pursuing but I suppose reflects some (internal) journey I may have gone through in 2024!

Here is a selection of what I enjoyed the most this past year.

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Queer medieval utopias, polyamory and complicated adulthoods: December 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Graphic Novels, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature

The Con Artists by Luke Healy

I loved How to Survive in the North and Americana by the same author. I found this one in the library and immediately picked it up. This is an interesting story in that it’s framed in such a way that you are never sure if it’s autobiographical (like Americana) or a complete work of fiction (like How to Survive in the North).

This is the story of Frank and Giorgio, two gay men living in London. Their friendship goes way back: they grew up in Ireland and their families know each other. But as adults, they’ve also grown apart and even though they live in the same city, they rarely see each other. Frank is far too busy, focusing on his goal of becoming a reputable comedian and struggling with an anxiety disorder. However, when Giorgio gets hit by a bus and ends up hospitalised, it’s Frank he callsin the first instance. Horrified seeing Giorgio doesn’t have anyone else (and that he refuses to tell his family what happened not to worry them) Frank agrees to move in temporarily with his friend as he recovers from his wounds and needs a bit of help to get around the house.

As soon as they start living together, Frank starts noticing a few strange things. Giorgio is unemployed and living on benefits, yet there are a few luxurious items lying around the house. On top of everything, Giorgio spends his day buying extremely expensive designer products online, such as bags and clothing. Where is all that money coming from?

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Indigenous horror and a certain French flavour: November 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Climate Fiction, Crime Fiction, Eco-criticism, French, Horror, Indigenous, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature

Never Whistle At Night edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.

Version 1.0.0

This was a highly anticipated collection for me – as soon as I knew it existed I went to get a copy.

In this book, indigenous authors use elements of their own cultural background to revisit and reinvent many tropes and archetypes commonly found in horror fiction.

As this is an anthology by many authors, the tones, approaches and styles vary enormously from story to story. In fact, one of the best things about this collection is that it’s allowed me to discover writers I’m now very curious about and would love to read more from in the future. Here there is a short list of the stories I enjoyed the most:

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Some dark retellings: October 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Climate Fiction, Creative Non Fiction, Crime Fiction, Eco-criticism, Graphic Novels, Horror, Queer Literature, Speculative Fiction

Diaries of War by Nora Krug

I love Krug’s graphic novel memoir Heimat, which is a fascinating meditation on the value of historical fiction, not only for the descendants of those who have been treated unfairly but also for the descendants of those who perpetrated violent acts or allowed them to happen because they benefited them in some way or another.

It is clear that Krug is interested in the consequences of war and conflict – and how people deal with them. So Diaries of War is a bit of an experiment (and an interesting one at that). Right after Russia attacked Ukraine and a war between these two countries started (an ongoing conflict) she contacted two people she knew from the arts and literary industries. One was a journalist in Ukraine, and the other one was an illustrator in Russia. She proposed them she’d get in touch once a week to ask for updates on their daily lives as the conflict progressed – she’d then illustrate these to create a book that captured perspectives from both sides.

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Seahorses, aliens and willows: September 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Graphic Novels, Horror, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Weird Fiction

The Hollow Places by T Kingfisher

This is the third book I read by T Kingfisher and it’s possibly the one that I’ve found the spookiest. By now I know Kingfisher is an author I enjoy – I’ve literally devoured all her books. What I love the most is her fast-paced writing style and her characters.

In this story, we follow Kara, a thirty-something-year-old recently divorced who goes back to live with her uncle Earl in North Carolina. Now, Uncle Earl has quite a special job. He’s the owner and curator of a very particular museum: Natural Wonders, Curiosity and Taxidermy. You can imagine the deal: all sorts of quirky stuffed animals (including a Fiji siren) and strange artefacts. Kara, however, is anything but spooked. In fact, she has very good memories of growing up around the museum, so when her uncle offers her a job there helping him out she immediately accepts.

Things are going normal until one day, when she’s taking care of the museum while his uncle is in the hospital healingfrom back surgery, she discovers a strange hole in the wall. At the beginning she tries to patch it up but ends up realising that the hole is actually quite large – she gets inside (of course!) and discovers that she’s actually in a tunnel in a completely different dimension. That’s how she ends up accessing another world. Now, this new space she discovers is one of my favourite parts of the book. A strange alien, empty land filled only with water and willows.

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Travelling all Over: August 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Speculative Fiction

Last Call by Tim Powers

I’m so confused about this book – I’m still trying to decide if I like it or not. First of all, I bought this book ten years ago when I wanted to get into steampunk because I had heard that Powers was a master in the genre. Obviously, I didn’t do my research well because this book is definitely not steampunk.

Back then this was the book I took with me on the plane when I first moved to Lancaster (ten years ago). That day I read a few pages, I was quite confused (the beginning is quite convoluted, although in a good way) and then forgot completelyabout it as I was trying to adapt to life in England while studying for an MA.

This summer I was looking at my bookshelf at home and I realised that ten years had been way too long and I needed to give this book a chance. I was quite eager to get into it and curious. 

Well, let’s start with the good stuff first. The writing. Tim Powers knows how to write, and that’s undeniable. He reminded me of Stephen King in that he uses multiple POVs to show the scope of his plot. This was a very entertaining book to read, and you know, as I type this I think that’s enough. I like this book because I had a good time reading it.

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A Queer Summer: July 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature

Non-binary Lives, edited by Jos Twist, Ben Vincent, Meg-John Baker and Kat Gupta

(If you notice a theme on my reading for July it is because I raided my library’s showcase of queer books for June…)

This is an edited collection of essays. One of the editors is Meg-John Baker, a British author I keep finding every time I manage to get my hands on books about non-binary experiences. This particular collection has different sections, ‘cultural context’, ‘communities’, ‘the life course’ and ‘bodies, health and wellbeing’. The writers behind these essays are all quite diverse in terms of background, class and race – and their experiences of a non-binary life are very different.

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There’s more than one side to a story: June 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature

Queenie by Candyce Caty-Williams

Perhaps because the cover I have of this book is neon pink I was convinced it would be a sweet romance but this ended up being much darker and dramatic than I could have anticipated. Also, I loved this book much more than I thought I would, even if I sometimes wanted to scream at the main character (red flag, RED FLAG! RED FLAG!!!!!) 

Queenie is a twenty-five-year-old English girl from a Jamaican family living in London. She has what many of us would consider a dream job – she works as a writer for an important newspaper. She has a group of supportive friends. She lives with her white boyfriend in a flat they rent together. All seems perfect but it couldn’t be further from the truth. She’s struggling with her relationship – her boyfriend is slowly breaking up with her, saying she’s ‘too intense’ and accusing her of always messing up things with his family (who are a bunch of, well, entitled racists, for the most part, but also the kind of racist people who would openly deny being racist…) She may not be able to be who she really is around her family. At work, her bosses would discourage her from writing anything remotely political or critical because they don’t think there’s an audience for it. As for her friends, not all of them are as supportive of her as it may seem; her friend Rebecca for example seems to secretly enjoy lending her money whilst at the same time questioning a lot of her life choices (for context here, Rebecca is white from an affluent family, Queenie is the first person to go to university in her family and has been brought up by her grandparents and her aunt as she has an absent mother and a father she never knew).

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Thrutopias: May 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Climate Fiction, Creative Non Fiction, Eco-criticism, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Thrutopia

None of the Above by Travis Alabanza

This year I’m doing a lot of reading around gender (starting with books I really liked, such as A Real Piece of Work by Erin Riley and Disphoria Mundi by Paul B. Preciado). I was very excited to find this book at the university library because it is written by a non-binary author, which is a perspective I haven’t encountered all that often.

This was an entertaining book I read very quickly, each chapter centring on a specific theme around Alabanza’s experience of transness, queerness and being non-binary. It was thought-provoking – for example, their experience of being harassed in the street because of the way they look was painfully shocking. It made me think of the many ways appearances are policed, specifically when it comes to how appearances fail to fit the idea of ‘womanness’ ingrained in our society. For example, Alabanza’s anguish of showing themselves as someone who is femme but also has hair in their legs or even facial hair reminded me of a similar anguish I feel as someone who is femme and has hair in all these places but is not supposed to show it when being out in public.

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Non-fiction and psychedelics: April 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Fantasy, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Weird Fiction

Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

This seemed a fun book and I was in the mood for something I could read on a long train journey. It was a quick, entertaining reading – even though it’s narrated in quite an interesting way. Basically, it’s written in the form of interviews and statements made by people who belonged to the fictional rock band from the title. This American band became extremely famous in the 1970s and is loosely based on Fleetwood Mac. This formatting threw me off at the beginning but I soon got into it and I think that, thanks to it, the book is certainly quite pacy.

One of the things that I didn’t like (subjectively) was how Daisy Jones (the band’s female lead) was depicted from the beginning. She’s from a rich but emotionally detached family, and she’sbasically born gorgeous (she’s described as beautiful as a girl, as a teenager, and as a woman, no matter how much alcohol she drinks and how many drugs she does). She’s also incredibly talented music-wise. And everyone loves her. But she’s also kind of broken inside because it’s so hard to be perceived ‘only’ as a beautiful girl… I mean yes, but also, give me a break. I’m so tired of female characters that have beauty as their primary characteristic.

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