Volume 4, No. 27: My Favorite Books of the Year So Far

I promise it's not just Martyr!

Greetings, book and treat people! Look, here’s the deal. I don’t have a lot of capacity this week. I don’t have the capacity to write about the world, or my life, or any of the wonder and grief and love and heartache and anger and despair and curiosity and joy that’s swirling around inside me.

So I’m just gonna talk about books, and I’m gonna be brief, as brief as I can be, which means I picked 35 books I’ve read and loved this year and I’m not going to write long paragraphs about each of them, I’m just going to tell you what I loved about them in one sentence or less. I’m also not going to sort them into thematic categories like I usually do. If you wish I would just sort books into basic categories, like poetry and memoir, today’s your lucky day.

As always, here’s the link to subscribe, and the link to pledge. And here’s where you can read about why I’m asking for money.

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We’re halfway through the year, so it’s time for my annual Best of the Year So Far List. I don’t believe in ranking and picking favorites; it stresses me out. To make this, I went through my 2024 reading spreadsheet from beginning to end. I wrote down all the titles that excited me A LOT. There were 41. I cut it down to 35 by gut instinct, and here we are.

An important caveat: This list does not include picture books! I have read and loved many picture books, several as much as most of the books here. It also doesn’t include rereads. In other words: Here are some books I love. Elsewhere are many other books I love.

It’s rare that I have a clear favorite of the year so far, but this year, as all of you probably know by now, I do, and it’s Martyr!. I’m doing a 35-day slow reread of it and writing about it on booksta.

Titles will take you to Bookshop. Linked text in the descriptions will take you to my review (if it exists). Books marked with a star are ones I loved on audio. Let’s go!

Fiction

• The Butterfly Jungle by Diriye Osman: Queer family, extravagance, hilarity, diaspora. A new queer language of desire and longing and art!

• *And Then She Fell by Alicia Elliott: Colonial violence; intergenerational healing.

• A Small Apocalypse by Laura Chow Reeve: Weird queer Floridan perfection.

• *Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar: This book is my heart, what more do you want from me?

• *The Year My Life Went Down the Toilet by Jake Maia Arlow: The realest middle school book about chronic illness and queerness.

• *Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly: The queer family saga of my dreams.

• Bad Habit by Alana S. Portero, tr. by Mara Faye Letham: Fierce & funny transfemme coming of age.

• *Cinema Love by Jiaming Tang: Ghosts and the past and mistakes and lost loves and new beginnings and deep friendship and other things that haunt.

• Still Life by Katherine Packert Burke: The messiest trans novel about friendship and love and making art and bodies and the weirdness of identity.

• *You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian: So much baseball, so many sweaters, so many feelings. A perfect dog.

• Blessings by Chukwuebuka Ibeh: Heartbreaking but tender gay coming of age novel. Beautifully structured.

Poetry

• *Aster of Ceremonies by JJJJJerome Ellis: An ode to plant and human elders and ancestors. Language play. Disability dreaming.

• Spill by Alexis Pauline Gumbs: The rhyme in this book absolutely awed me. So did the endlessness of the genre/form.

• The Lost Arabs by Omar Sakr: Gutting and precise and full of love.

• Black Pastoral by Ariana Benson: An absolutely stunning collection about Blackness, nature, history, ecology, myth-making.

• Transit by Cameron Awkward-Rich: Every time I read Awkward-Rich I feel like I’m passing through some kind of water.

• An Ordinary Woman by Lucille Clifton: Lucille Clifton forever and ever amen.

• The Moon That Turns You Back by Hala Alyan: Some of the most beautiful lines of poetry I’ve read in ages.

• Coriolis by A. D. Lauren-Abunassar: Incredible intimate rhythms.

• Arrow by Sumita Chakraborty: Grief, form, mystery, space, planets, mountains, wonderment.

• Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season by Forugh Farrokhzad, tr. by Elizabeth T. Grey: So much rage and so much beauty and so many long, luxurious lines.

• Thirst by Mary Oliver: It feels silly to pick just one of the Mary Oliver collections I’ve read this year. I didn’t love this the first time I read it a few years ago, and this time it broke me. A gift.

• She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks by M. NourbeSe Philip: Breaking language to remake it.

Memoir

• Faltas by Cecilia Gentili: Letters that are gossipy and dishy and funny and rageful and heartbreaking and tender and smart.

• Bad Indians by Deborah A. Miranda: World-remaking. A song of history, resistance, language, loss, mapping, land.

• Our World by Mary Oliver, with photographs by Molly Malone Cook: I can’t explain how much this book means to me.

• *Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace: Earnestness and tenderness and trying. Making amends and doing love. Parenting and breaking. Healing as a collective act.

Other Nonfiction

• Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison: An essential American text. Essential.

• Indigiqueerness by Joshua Whitehead with Angie Abdou: A remaking of form and genre.

• *There’s Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib: A book-length epic poem. Home and basketball and flight. This book is endless.

• *A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib: What do you want me to say? Abdurraqib is brilliant and we are all lucky to live in his timeline.

• *Wild & Precious by Sophia Bush and Mary Oliver: Soul-filling.

• My Trade is Mystery by Carl Phillips: Beautiful essays about making art and living art.

• *The Age of Deer by Erika Howsare: A rich exploration of the tangled, complicated, contradictory relationship between humans and deer.

• *Creep by Myriam Gurba: Incredible scholarship about gender, art, race, sexual violence, meaning-making. The last essay is incandescent.

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: I got to spend last week with my family and the ocean. My pup was happy and so was I.

Catch you next week, bookish friends!