This is an edited re-publication of my article “A mood reader’s 2024 in books” on my Substack, Fixation Du Jour.

Disclosure: this post contains affiliate links with Bookshop.org! If you decide to make a purchase through one of my links, I receive a small commission and independent bookstores benefit from your support.

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This last year was the year I returned to reading, and it felt really, really good. After many years of longing for the vastness of novels but feeling too overwhelmed and distracted by life to finish them, I focused on creating a casual, relaxed reading routine and broke new ground. I ended the year with a 49-day reading streak — I’ve never felt more in love with books.

Today I’m sharing five exceptional books that I read for the first time this year! Each has influenced me, my interests, and my art in profound ways.

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I Who Have Never Known Men (1995) by Jacqueline Harpman, trans. by Ros Schwartz

The word for this one was: ache. Oh, how I ached for answers. How I ached for our nameless narrator as she wandered an absurd world, attempting to make meaning from it. Our narrator is one of forty women kept in an underground cage. The youngest of them all, she has no memory of a life before, unlike the other 49 women who remember being wives once, or typists, mothers, and factory workers. In the cage, they are not allowed to touch one another. Outside of the cage, men in uniforms stand watch; they supply food rations and crack their whips at any sign of physical touch.

Our narrator, on the cusp of womanhood, begins to wonder why. Her youth has primed her to adapt to this world and once she begins to ask questions, nothing is ever the same again.

“For a very long time, the days went by, each one just like the day before, ten I began to think, and everything changed.”

A premise this bleak drives away as many readers as it hooks, and its journey answers fewer questions than it proposes. Yet it is this very bleakness, this lack of clean and tidy answers, that makes this novel so stirring and profound. Harpman has much to say about humanity, community, critical thought, purpose, and the alien experience of being a woman and yet being much more than that.

Though written in the 90s, there is a timeless sorrow and hope exuding from I Who Have Never Known Men. The depths of this story are never-ending. Without a doubt, I know I will read this book again someday. Maybe even this year.

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Fruiting Bodies: Stories (2022) by Kathryn Harlan

In Harlan’s debut collection of short fiction, women and girls face the impossible — and the impossible stares back. The impossible becomes a mirror. An adopted girl recruits the help of her cousin when she suspects her newborn sister is a changeling. A trio of teens spends their summer at the lake as the world teeters nearer to environmental disaster. A lonely woman in the woods begins to sprout mushrooms from her body.

“These things make you afraid, love and proximity to the unknown.”

Harlan’s stories kept me up at night. “Hunting the Viper-King” delivers far beyond its premise, only to leave us guessing with a maddening final sentence. (I had to keep myself from screaming in that how-dare-you sort of way when I read it.) I still think about it all the time — as I do “Fruiting Bodies”, the harrowing story from which this collection takes its name.

My heart aches in a dozen ways for Harlan’s characters. She hooks you with a setup that discomforts you viscerally, and now you must learn what happens next. Now you must seek relief in an ending, happy or not. This collection, a new personal favorite, affected me at every turn.

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The Creative Act: A Way of Being (2023) by Rick Rubin

One of the most influential music producers of the last 50 years shares “78 areas of thought” on making art. Any art. There is no discussion of craft, no take-home exercises, and no obligation. You take what resonates and you leave behind what doesn’t.

This book may not be what every artist out there is looking for to transform their creative process. Rubin is less interested in providing a practical framework for success than in guiding readers through a philosophical investigation of creative germination, momentum, and enlightenment — what it means to create, and what that even looks like. But I found this book after realizing that my creative process was rooted in a deep sense of shame. This book was the palate cleanser I needed to untangle my own barriers; my practice has never felt healthier.

“Creativity is a fundamental aspect of being human. It’s our birthright. And it’s for all of us.”

Since finishing The Creative Act, it has become something like my Creative Bible. It sits on my coffee table, annotated to shit with pastel tabs and highlighters, and waits for when I need it again. And when I do need it again, I turn to a random page and encounter, somehow, the exact sentiment I need.

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A Sorceress Comes to Call (2024) by T. Kingfisher

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this YA fantasy novel is a Regency-era retelling of a Grimm fairy tale, “The Goose Girl.” Kingfisher is much more interested in telling the story of a compassionate girl who yearns to escape the silent abuses of her cruel, narcissistic mother. I was impressed by their portrayal of this dynamic — Cordelia, so accustomed to being made “obedient” by her mother for the smallest things, feels like such an accurate portrayal of a child of abuse. It made every moment of kindness toward her that much more gratifying.

Also, my god, THE HORSE! If you know, you know. Some deliciously chilling imagery awaits once you get into the, well, meat of this book.

“All these classes on proper etiquette for hostesses and they never mentioned what one is supposed to do after a murder.”

Distinct characterization, strong worldbuilding, and a shockingly memorable cast of minor characters whom you come to love — this book was just as rewarding as I had hoped. This was my first time reading Kingfisher, and I’m certainly coming back for more.

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This is How You Lose the Time War (2019) by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

The conceit sounds simple: two rival agents form an unlikely connection as they correspond between secret letters. But the execution is incredibly novel: this is epistolary, multiverse space opera spy fiction threaded together by an LGBT love story. And it contains some of the most beautiful prose, the most enthralling declarations of love, that I’ve ever read.

“Some things matter more than winning.”

What this story requires of you is to simply abandon whatever you expect it to be. Absorb the words on the page, drink in each detail, internalize it. Once you can do this, the lush prose and characterizations of Blue and Red will leap from the page. Every epic turn of setting and timey-wimey twist tickled the former Whovian in me.

Not every day do we find a time travel story so poetic, so wondrously vast, that also happens to be an unabashedly queer love story. I am so happy I finally picked this up, and that I chose it as my final read of 2024.

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Here’s to baby steps, to raising my goal in the new year, to losing oneself in a good story. And here’s to all we’ll read in 2025 — I’m certainly excited to read more, and write more about what I read, this year. You can check out my full list of books read in 2024 on Bookshop.org! Until next time — thanks for joining me today.