Top 10 Favorite Books I read 2023–2024
Hello again! As per tradition, I’m ranking my favorite books I’ve read over the past two years. It’s a chance to reflect on what I’ve enjoyed the most, think about some great books, and see how my tastes change over time.
10. Babel by R.F. Kuang
The previous book by R.F. Kuang I read was her much-lauded debut, The Poppy War. I thought it was good but very uneven, which sometimes happens with a debut novel. With Babel, Kuang is clearly much more polished and adventurous. I love the magic system and as someone who studied abroad for two terms at Oxford her depiction of Oxford rings so true — it is hard to explain just how strange that place is unless you have been there for a while. My biggest frustration with the book is that I didn’t really care for the ending of The Poppy War, and somehow Babel magnified all my issues with that ending.
9. Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
Eleanor Catton’s previous work was The Luminaries; a sprawling, wildly ambitious novel (and my #2 book of 2016). So when she returned a decade later I was expecting another massive and slightly crazy novel. Instead, Birnam Wood is a shockingly conventional and normal-length thriller. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed Catton didn’t write another book that was super out-there. Still, her great writing is still here, I liked the characters, and found this to be a fun page-turner.
8. The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright
This is the first of multiple multi-generation family dramas to make this years list. The Wren, The Wren stands out from other family dramas for two reasons. First, one of the central characters is dead before the story begins; their presence looms over the novel in a way that I found interesting. Second, there is a lot of poetry in the book. In many ways it is a book about writing and about poetry. The book is slooow, but the absolutely gorgeous writing helps a lot. The experience of reading the book matches the birds in the title. It’s like bird watching — most of the time you are just sitting in the bush without much happening, but the scenery is beautiful while you are waiting.
7. Uzumaki by Junji Ito
I read Uzumaki when I heard Netflix was coming out with an adaptation of the famous manga. The adaptation had a very strong episode 1, then the rest of the series was made with a different director and vastly inferior animation. So don’t watch the series, and read the manga instead.
Uzumaki follows a high school girl in a remote Japanese village which is infected with spirals (as in, the shape). The idea of a shape as the antagonist works brilliantly. Ito’s work is often compared to Lovecraft’s and I like the idea of it as a modern successor. One thing that is hard to convey in adaptations of Lovecraft’s work is the sense of incomprehension snf terror of the unknown. While Uzumaki is set in 1990s Japan rather than early 20th century New England, there is the same sense of a completely alien malevolent force looming over the story. Also warning that it is fairly visually horrific — you will know within a chapter or two if the story is for you.
6. Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing
While The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard is the OG Antarctic adventure story, Endurance is likely the most famous. It describes the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition led by Sir Ernest Shackleton, how the expedition goes horribly wrong, and how the crew somehow manages return home with no deaths. The trials of Shackleton’s crew are utterly harrowing and their survival is extraordinary. It was also written long enough ago that Lansing could talk with some crew and their family members, something which is impossible for most modern accounts.
The book is as gripping as you would expect, but I was left with two questions: First, how good was Shackleton as a leader anyway? The book was written in the 1950s, and accounts of polar explorers written at that time tend to be hagiographies. I can’t tell if Lansing’s account reflects the biases of the time or if it is a fair portrait of an incredible leader. Second, the three lifeboats on the ship are absolutely pivotal to the story. All are unique and described in depth. Yet in both the ship blueprints and in photographs of the ship, there appear to be four lifeboats. Were there originally four and one was somehow never mentioned?? Did Shackleton depart with only three and they keep moving around in pictures so it looks like there were four?? I have spent an unreasonable amount of time now trying to figure this out and have no answers please someone let me know if you know what the deal is.
5. Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night by Julian Sancton
Wow it is yet another book about an Antarctic expedition gone horribly wrong. The journey of the Belgica is actually fairly similar to that of the Endurance, except with far more death and people going insane. Having now read a lot of books about the “heroic age” of Antarctic exploration, I appreciate how this one deviated from the typical patterns. If an expedition is successful, books typically are about how a hyper-competent badass conquered the elements. If they expedition is unsuccessful, they are a tragedy about Man’s hubris in the face of nature. But the Belgica’s journey is like… bad, but most people survive? And the leader is really good at some stuff and really terrible at other stuff? The whole journey feels muddled, improvisational, and surprising, in a way that is unusual among these expeditions.
4. Pale by Wildbow (John C. McCrae)
Boy, I have a lot of thoughts about this one.
Pale is a web serial from Wildbow, best known for his earlier web serial Worm (#5 on my list in 2018). A web serial is a story posted online in regular intervals. One of the best things about web serials is you can read along with a community on Discord, listen in to podcasts discussing it as it releases, and so on. Pale also features a bunch of stuff that would be very difficult in a printed book, such as more experimental chapters that were largely images or other content.
Wildbow writes easily the best magic systems of any author I’ve read and Pale’s is brilliant. It is not as elegant as the system as in Worm; if anything the system is deliberately inelegant. But I struggle to think of any other fictional magic system that feels sufficiently deep for someone to actually spend a lifetime studying it. Of the 40+ different types of magic in Pale, by the end of the book I feel like I had a moderate understanding of how one of them worked and a surface-level understanding of maybe three of them (actually implementing any of these magical approaches would take months/years of work in addition to understanding what to do). The characters are also terrific and the book has the highest highs of any book I read this year(s).
The problem is… it’s a web serial, which means it was published in serialized installments with minimal editing. This means it is long, at over 3.6 million words not counting extra material. For comparison, all the Harry Potter books combined were just over a million words. Frankly, Pale is too long. A decent editor would cut half of it, minimum, and I suspect they would cut closer to three quarters. It is often great, but simply too bloated to recommend to most people. Plus, there is the unfortunate situation where at this point a new reader somewhat misses the experience because they aren’t reading along with a community. I’m not sure I’ll read another story by Wildbow — they are just so long — but I greatly enjoyed reading this one.
3. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
The first Gabrille Zevin book I read was The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, a huge hit (and later a movie) which I really didn’t care for. So I was incredibly pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this story. It is partially about video game design but that’s not the real draw. I thought the ideas about games were interesting enough to be enjoyable, but they served as more of a framing around the characters and their ongoing relationships. This would have been my #1 of the year if not for the final act which I didn’t care for. Still an excellent book though, and I’m excited for Zevin’s next novel.
2. Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano
My mom is somewhat infamous in my family for liking a very specific genre of movie; stories about the struggles of women in countries ravaged by war. Growing up she would be all excited to see Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame or whatever, while the rest of the family would watch Iron Man. The point of this anecdote is that as you grow older you turn into your parents, which in this case means I too am a sucker for certain types of stories. I always have at least one multi-generational family drama on this list and Hello Beautiful is this year’s winner in the category. It follows an aspiring basketball player named William and the four sisters of the Padavano family. There’s drama, there’s trauma, there’s all the hallmarks of the genre. I don’t know why these sorts of books so appeal to me, but they clearly do because I had a great time.
1. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
It was fairly difficult to decide what should be number one this time. Sometimes the decision comes down to “how excited am I to recommend this book to others?” Rebecca ended up number 1 because it is so easy to recommend and so worth reading. The 1938 classic is about a girl who marries a wealthy man twenty years older than her that she barely knows, her life at his gothic mansion, and her complicated relationship with his ex-wife. Some books are classics for a reason. The beginning and ending are justifiably famous, the story is gripping, Manderley is one of the best settings ever, and the book sent me into a mini gothic literature phase.
2021–2022
10. Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips
9. My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
8. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
7. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
6. Beloved by Toni Morrison
5. The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
4. Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson
3. To Lose a Battle: France 1940 by Alister Horne
2. The Green Bone Saga (Jade City/Jade War/Jade Legacy) by Fonda Lee
- The Overstory by Richard Powers
2019–2020
10. How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe
9. Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East by Stephen G. Fritz
8. The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave
7. Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight by Timothy Pachirat
6. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
5. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat
4. Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh
3. The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
2. The Last Place on Earth: Scott and Amundsen’s Race to the South Pole by Roland Huntford
- Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson
2018
10. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
9. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
8. White Teeth by Zadie Smith
7. Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
6. What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe
5. Worm by Wildbow (John C. McCrae)
4. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
3. My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki
2. The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin
- Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
2017
10. The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King by Rich Cohen
9. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi
8. The Magicians Land by Lev Grossman
7. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
6. A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton G. Malkiel
5. Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
4. Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea’s Elite by Suki Kim
3. Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government by Christopher H. Achen and Larry Bartels
2. A History of the World in 12 Maps by Jerry Brotton
- The Magicians by Lev Grossman
2016
10. Uprooted by Naomi Novik
9. 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works by Dan Harris
8. A Hologram for the King by David Eggers
7. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
6. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
5. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
4. Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez
3. The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer
2. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
- H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
2015
10. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
9. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
8. The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss by Edmund de Waal
7. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
6. Hild by Nicola Griffith
5. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki
4. Kingkiller books 1+2 by Patrick Rothfuss
3. In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette by Hampton Sides
2. The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
- Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
2014
5. Bring Up the Bodies by Hillary Mantel
4. The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht
3. The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t by Nate Silver
2. A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
- How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy
2013
5. Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version by Phillip Pullman
4. The Trial by Franz Kafka
3. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
2. The Metamorphoses by Ovid
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
