Every Book I Read in 2024
Notes from The Year of the Re-Read
According to Goodreads, I read 23 books last year. Goodreads is wrong. I only read 20 individual titles, but three of them I read twice in a calendar year. So maybe it counts?
I fell short of my 24-book goal by any count, but I am very much OK with this. Two books per month was a goal I set for myself arbitrarily back in 2019 by simply guessing how many I thought I “should” be able to get through (not a great strategy!). But the goal stands, because each year I come closer to meeting it, and each year it feels easier to do so.
I finished at least one book every month except for April1. In December I finished five. I read 11 novels and 9 nonfiction books, making 2024 my most evenly split year since I started paying attention. Eight of them — forty percent! — are books I have now read at least twice, including the three (15%) that I read twice just this year.
What I’ve learned from “The Year of the Re-Read”:
I need to slow down. I need even more extra processing time than I already give myself. I really do need to let things soak in and gel for a few weeks or even months before I have anything to say. Plus, I like thumbing back through a highlighted copy and seeing which not-yet-neoned lines jump out. I like trodding out new neural pathways by re-reading my favorite quotes until the wrinkles of my brain rewire themselves into the shape of those sentences. I’m doing more of that this year. Who’s with me?
The more I read, the more I think. And I did both more deeply this year. I absorbed these books more completely because I spent time digesting, instead of racing through just to consume. The list of books I still want to write about is so much longer this year than last. Re-reading helped me get more out of these, and now I have more to say in conversation with them.
Reading aloud brings an entirely different experience of a book. For as big a reader as I am, the same cannot be said for my husband Josh, who much prefers to listen. But this year, one of the novels I read had a character2 that reminded me so much of him that I begged to read him the whole book aloud. He reluctantly agreed, but then (ha HA!) found that he liked it! Before we knew it, we were spending an hour or so each morning on out-loud story time with no plans to quit. It’s honestly one of my favorite things to come out of 2024.
The re-reads list tells its own story. It’s another fairly even split (5/3) between novels and nonfiction, but oh, the recurring themes! The novels all seem to have dystopian futures and/or themes of disillusionment with governments, institutions, and systems, while the nonfiction titles lean hard toward magical thinking and claiming one’s agency in situations that feel uncontrollable.
Re-reads are indicated below by an asterisk (*) following the title.
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1. You Belong to Me
Frankly, I’m not sure how this book made its way into my home. It’s not a library copy, but I never purchased it, nor did I “borrow” it from a friend and “forget” to return. It’s a thrilling mystery! So is this book.
Here’s what you need to know about Mary Higgins Clark thrillers: They are not challenging. They are the ‘80s/’90s white American upper-middle-class version of the British “cozy mystery.” The heroines are always white, thin, conventionally pretty, and rich — and/so/therefore they always make it out alive, even if somewhat scathed. Their hair is always “chestnut” or “sleek,” and until they end up trapped in a barn/office/BnB with a stalker/serial killer/axe murderer, they always seem to be wearing silk blouses and camelhair coats, drinking expensive wine alone in their stunning apartments in their cashmere sweaters. (I read a lot of these in high school, and that’s how I learned wine names in a teetotaling family.)
This one was about a psychologist who also has a radio show in the ‘90s. I read it while re-watching Frasier, and for a terrifying few chapters in the middle, my brain began to blend the two characters into one person.
2. The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality *
My first re-read of the year was this advance reader copy of
’s latest book, which I was given through her newsletter . If you’ve ever fallen prey to an anxious thought spiral fed by negativity bias, blamed yourself for things outside of your control through conspiratorial thinking, or confidently taken on a challenge only to fail spectacularly, then this book is for you.I interviewed Amanda last spring about how the cognitive biases she writes about in this book show up in real life. I’ll be sharing that here later this year (again with needing extra processing time!) and you can check out my notes on the first three chapters below.
3. Little Fires Everywhere
The story has an omniscient narrator, which is a refreshing departure from what I typically see now — I loved how this story unfolds from multiple points of view so you can see all its intricacies and nuance. And, in the year of Wicked, there was something deeply satisfying about a story where the response to feeling hopelessly overpowered, fundamentally misunderstood, and forever odds with the world is to burn it all down. I’ll give you three guesses which character3 I identified with most.
4. The Burnout*
I read this book from cover to cover in one day this spring during the last week of seasonal unemployment, covered my library copy in sticky notes, kept it for so long the librarians began to send threatening4 letters, then bought my own copy so I could continue marking it up.
If reading about burnout for fun is your thing (you’re here, aren’t you?), this book has two main points going for it:
It pokes fun at all the commonly given bad advice for burnout recovery, like expecting a vacation or a “20-step wellness plan” to magically fix everything.
It shows the type of structural and institutional changes necessary to course-correct burnout culture at the company level.
I’m working on a longer review so we have space to talk about how the relationship between the heroine and her career is just as much a romance as the one with the actual human love interest, and how putting any job or person on such a high pedestal is ultimately a recipe for heartbreak. In the meantime, here’s a review of Emily Henry’s Beach Read to tide you over:
5. Yellowface
This book reads like a panic attack. Forty-three pages in, I texted my friend Hattie that it was “so upsetting.”
As the title implies, this is a novel about cultural appropriation, racism, and white fragility. It’s an incisive satire with an unreliable narrator and asks the questions: Who really owns a story? Who gets to tell that story, and why does it matter? What do we owe to the dead?
In her acknowledgements, R. F. Kuang calls Yellowface a horror story about the isolation of the publishing industry, and it certainly raised some discomfort about my own creative practices, the connections I have around them, and the petty jealousies I feel about writers who I perceive as more talented or “successful” than I am.
Read it, feel uncomfortable, and sit with that discomfort.
6. Sleepless: Unleashing the Subversive Power of the Night Self
I didn’t have time to write about this advance reader copy this spring so am glad for a chance to do so now. This is a truly fascinating exploration of why and how brains — especially women’s — work differently at night, and to read it feels a bit like being awake at 3 a.m. I want to recommend it to every person I know and will be gifting it to multiple folks.
Faced with intense insomnia following a series of family losses, author Annabel Abbs-Streets chose to embrace sleeplessness rather than fighting it. Her dreamlike quest to understand her “night self” explores the famously nocturnal habits of influential creative figures like Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Lee Krasner, and looks at the science behind things like our fear of the dark and the circadian rhythm of anger. Along the way, Streets writes by candlelight and challenges herself to night hikes, wild sleeping, and Northern-Lights-viewing expeditions.
Ultimately the lesson here is about more than what gifts the darkest hours have to offer — it’s also about the healing effects of self-compassion.
7. Crying in H Mart
Media about dead or dying mothers, especially when there’s cancer involved, has been hard for me to consume ever since my own mother died from colon cancer in 2016. But this year, after working through a tiny bit of unprocessed grief in therapy, I felt brave enough to give this one a try.
I started reading the week before Mother’s Day, which was either a really smart idea or a really terrible one, and finished it the week after. I think I cried at every single chapter. And it was painful, but in a good way — like itching an old scab juuuust a little too hard so it accidentally starts bleeding again. I think I’m going to come back to it a LOT.
Amazon also made an error and shipped two copies of this instead of the single one I purchased, so maybe this is a sign — from the universe, from my mom, or from Chongmi — to share with a sister.
8. I Hope This Finds You Well *
A contender for my favorite novel of the year, and one I will definitely be purchasing for myself. I read this library copy in two days, then spent the next two weeks reading it aloud to Josh in the mornings. And I found myself taking lessons from it.
I went through a significant job change since I last wrote to you, which is a story for a different letter. But this new job means that, for the first time in nearly a DECADE, I’m communicating in a team chat on a daily basis.
At first I was rusty from eight years of freelancing, solopreneurship, and retail work. You simply don’t message a 50+ person Teams chat the way you text the friend group, so I spent the first couple of months constantly deleting and rewriting messages before sending. I pushed myself to perform in the team chat — reacting with creative emojis instead of the apathetic thumbs-up to show I was truly engaged, sending cake gifs in response to birthday announcements even if seven other people already had, etc. — as a deliberate way to ingratiate myself with my bosses and keep my job longer.
As both the main character and I learned, trying to be a good coworker, rather than a good employee, really does pay off. And in an eerie full-circle moment, my job has now expanded to give me some of the same access that causes the main character in this book so much trouble to begin with. DUN dun dun!!!!!!
If Cancer Moms are a trigger for you also, note that there is a minor plot line involving a tertiary character’s unfavorable prognosis.
9. Olivetti
A middle-grade novel, a fact I did not realize until after I’d checked it out from the library, told from the POV of an Olivetti typewriter. I chose it for the unconventional narrator, and that was a fun aspect of this short little book. At one point it gives Toy Story vibes, the horrifying part where Woody and Buzz are trapped in Sid’s house with his frankentoys. At another, it’s Lady and the Tramp once the baby is born and Lady is shuffled to the side and forgotten.
But SPOILER: In a nasty twist, it turns out to be a Cancer Mom Book! 🙃 I mean, that is THEEE twist.
10. Souper Tomatoes: The Story of America’s Favorite Food
A short and sweet combined history of soup, tomatoes, and how they intersect throughout time. One of the best book purchases I made all year. I snagged a used copy from Amazon for $5 (linked above although the price has gone up) and referenced it in two different essays! It’s unfortunately not available via Bookshop, but other food-history titles by this author are.
11. The Keeper of Night *
This Book of the Month selection from 2021 was Josh’s favorite book we read this year. It’s a vividly written blend of fantasy and Japanese folk mythology — think Shōgun meets The Odyssey — with a deeply relatable cast of anti-heroes and sympathetic characters. The plot’s central journey to find belonging will fill you with hope and then dash it to smithereens.
Don’t come here looking for a happy ending. This is the first in a duology — and we do plan to read the sequel this year — but Book One ’s ending is so tragic that both times I’ve read it I’ve needed to grieve afterward. Passages like these land so much harder when you read them aloud, and even though we read it way back in September, I teared up about it all over again as recently as this week.
12. So Thirsty
A fall ‘24 new release, and possibly one of the “It” books of the season. It’s the divorce novel to read if you’re not quite the right audience for the divorce memoir.
I won the Kindle version in a Goodreads giveaway and read it on my phone while traveling for my my friend’s birthday at the end of September. At first I thought it was just a silly, fluffy vampire book … but then I wound up really liking it for its philosophical lines about long-term relationships, both romantic and platonic. Because it was the kindle version I found myself highlighting passages, which I almost never do with fiction. Then I saw it on the new recommendations wall at my library. Then I overheard our bartender at dinner talking about it, so I shamelessly eavesdropped, swapped reccs for local bookstores to visit, and came away with a new bookish friend!
Try a sip:
I’m not quick to dismiss his indiscretions because I’m so in love with him. I do love him, but it’s never been about that. Nothing about my compliance is for his benefit. It’s for my own. It’s because I made a choice. I committed to the life I built with him, a life I like just fine. That’s familiar. That’s comfortable. I fear losing it if I lose him. I fear the unknown.
You look thirsty, have another:
I think I’ve done this before. Not exactly in this way, but there’s some recognition as I sit here. This is what it is to surrender. To be bled dry. You hold still and you let it happen, because the harder you fight, the harder you lose.
Maybe I’ll just leave the bottle.
The remorse should be consuming me, but it isn’t. His murder is the worst thing I’ve ever done, by far, and it just melts into the rest of my shame, my regret. Sinks into the tar pit that I slog through every day, that’s constantly rising, that will overtake me eventually. I can barely function with the calamities of this lifetime, the last thirty-six years. How am I supposed to go on existing forever? Aging isn’t just about our bodies decaying while we’re still inside them. It’s about living with the accumulation of experiences. The heavy burden of the ugly ones, the longing for the beautiful.5
13. The Space Between Worlds *
Another Book Of The Month selection that Josh and I read aloud; one that invites serious discussion and thought about race, class, social safety nets, the ethics of space exploration and climate change, and more.
There’s a lot going on in this dystopian future — religious sects, a queer love interest, a tech exec playing God — and between the world-hopping and the narrative flashbacks, there is no lag time to this plot. Josh says the slight chaos of it all reminds him of the Loki series on Disney+. There are certainly similarities between the this book and that show, starting with the spectral organization deciding which populations live or die. A timely read that I’ll continue to revisit regularly.
14. Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear *
Big Magic has become a sort of creativity bible for me over the years. I revisited it this summer when I was feeling not just stuck but absolutely MIRED in an essay I was am working on, then read the whole thing aloud to poor Josh in an attempt to verbally process my brain into submission. Ultimately it did help me get past that sticking point, but it also sparked a run of little creative projects in our household that had nothing to do with writing. I think that’s the real win here.
15. Buy Yourself The F*cking Lilies: And Other Rituals to Fix Your Life *
This book has made the list two years running. At times it reads like an affirmation; at others, an instruction manual or a cautionary tale. The bestie-style advice in this book touches on everything from writing thank you notes to fix your mood, to identifying the people from whom you should never seek advice, to offering yourself unconditional love when you did not grow up receiving it — all told with self-deprecating humor and a bit of a wince. I love it, and I think you might, too.
16. I Feel Bad About My Neck, And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
I think at least three books I read this year referenced this work by Nora Ephron, so when I saw this slim, bright-yellow volume at the library book sale in November, I snatched it up. I loved that it was small enough to carry in a purse and snackable enough to read while waiting, etc. Then I accidentally read it all at home in between other things, so now we’re back to square one on the Purse Books front.
Some of these essays I read aloud to Josh and was delighted that he found them just as sharp and funny as I did. Partway through “Serial Monogamy: A Memoir,” he asked, “Wait, did she write the screenplay for Julie and Julia?!”6, while “Moving On” reminded both of us of Only Murders in the Building. Other times certain lines I had read as quotes in other books leapt out at me from their context, like stumbling onto a famous artwork that you knew was on display in this museum but hadn’t realized was right here in this gallery!
17. Running with Scissors
An absolutely wild memoir of growing up surrounded by mental illness, neglect, substance abuse, and other abuse. I am still processing this one.
18. Book of the Month
Another Kindle version won in a Goodreads giveaway. Named after that Book Of The Month and the similar mass book clubs that play such a role in making or breaking a book’s bestselling status, Book of the Month is another novel about the lengths an author will go to in order to write a story that sells.
The beginning is a bit of a slow burn, but the pace really picks up in the back half. It’s a romance, so it’s more Beach Read than Yellowface. But where Beach Read was merely steamy, this one is flat-out raunchy. “Hello, I’m reading smut,” I told Josh when he found me reading this on my phone while waiting for him to meet me somewhere.
The plot is predictable, which will be extremely satisfying if you like to be right, or a bit of a let-down if you prefer a surprise. But I would argue that one doesn’t read a book like this for the surprise of it; you read it for the comfort of knowing there’s a happy ending regardless of what hurdles come before. Predictability is part of the appeal.
19. Uglies *
I first read this YA series as a teen when it came out in the late Aughts, and revisited it after watching the Netflix film adaptation this fall. I won’t lie to you — I fell asleep shortly into the movie. But Josh says it got him excited to read the book, which is honestly kind of the best-case scenario for a film adaptation.
What’s wild to me now, reading this in the year 2024, is the contrast between how far-fetched the dystopian future of this novel seemed then vs. how very plausible and real and near it seems now. Invasive procedures as a rite of passage no longer seems like science fiction in an age when most of the women I know over age 35 either want or have already had some sort of botox, filler, implant, nip, or tuck. A virus that infects a civilization’s power source and brings about their demise sure sounds like a pandemic to me.
It’s an excellent time for stories that examine how governments attempt to control a population, and I fully intend to watch the Netflix movie again. But first, Josh and I have to read Pretties, Specials, and Extras before the intra-library loan expires.
20. How to Keep House While Drowning
A book you can actually read while metaphorically drowning — only 150 pages, and written by a licensed therapist specifically to help a neurodivergent and/or chronically ill audience strategize around executive dysfunction and reframe our self-talk around chores care tasks. The chapters are extremely short and digestible (some only a paragraph long) and are chock-full of actionable tips — no massive overhauls, just tiny steps that have a giant impact. In the week or so since reading this both, Josh and I have noticed our household running more gently.
What should I read this year? What are you reading this year? I’ve left comments open for everyone, so let’s discuss below.
Thank you so much for being here. I know how valuable your attention is, and I appreciate you for spending some of it on me.
Talk Soon,
💜 Chloe
As we’ve already discussed, April was rough:
I Hope This Finds You Well’s Cliff from HR
It’s Izzy, the child who least fits into the mold of her family and chafes at the pressure to conform.
Very kind letters gently reminding me that it would continue to accrue charges until returned.
Bolded emphasis = my own.
She absolutely did!
so nice to see you in my inbox!