Volume 4, No. 39: My Favorite Fiction of 2024

Including The One, obviously

Greetings, book and treat people! This is the last newsletter you’ll receive from me this year: my favorite fiction of 2024. Before we get into it, I want to thank all of you for being here, for sticking around through all the changes Books & Bakes has gone through this year. Thank you to everyone who became a paying subscriber, everyone who sent me words of encouragement, everyone who generously gifted me a book from my 40 by 40 wishlist, everyone who read Martyr! and told me about it. I was feeling so done with this newsletter six months ago, and I don’t feel that way anymore.

I don’t know exactly what 2025 will bring. I plan to send out monthly reading reflections at the end of every month, as it’s a practice I’ve come to cherish. Beyond that, I’m going to treat this newsletter more like a container for creativity and joy and less like work. I don’t know if you’ll hear from me weekly, monthly, or sporadically. I may send out frequent newsletters about my 40 by 40 project. I might publish some of the hundreds of book reflections I’ve written this year. I might write about poetry and school. Maybe I’ll start sharing recipes again? Maybe I’ll do none of these things. We’re all going to find out sometime in January.

Until then, thank you, thank you, thank you. May we carry the spirit of the Season of Light with us into the new year. We’re going to need it.

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Some notes on the list:

• It includes the best fiction I read in 2024, not just books published in 2024.

• It’s organized by moods and themes.

• It includes 20 books. Because maximalism? This is by far the smallest number of fiction books I’ve put on a year end list since I started making them in 2021. My 2021 list had 40, my 2022 list had 40, and my 2023 list had…65. This year, for the first time ever, I read more combined nonfiction and poetry than fiction. I also did a ton of rereading. The fact that there are less books on this year’s fiction list doesn’t mean I didn’t have a great reading year. It just means my reading went in some unexpected (and wonderful) directions!

• Books marked with an asterisk are ones I loved on audio.

• Clicking on a title will bring you to Bookshop. Clicking on linked text in the description will bring you to my review.

• The year isn’t over yet, so this list is not definitive. It also doesn’t include rereads. I did, however, read two of these books a combined total of five times this year, so it sort of includes rereads.

• A caveat: I thought I read an ARC of Cat Sebastian’s You Should Be So Lucky last year, but it turns out it was this year! I didn’t realize this until after I’d made the whole list. So consider this glorious book about crying, sweaters, baseball, and one very good dog on the list, too.

Queerness Flourishes in Company

She of the Mountains by Vivek Shraya (2014): Vivek Shraya is so good at messing with form and genre, and she does so beautifully in this strange little book. Half of it is a retelling of Hindu mythology and half of it is a contemporary coming-into-self story about the boxes the world makes and how queer love can help smash them.

Blessings by Chukwuebuka Ibeh (2024): A gutting and gorgeous queer coming-of-age story set in Nigeria. Religious homophobia and toxic masculinity and rigid binaries and what they kill. Becoming a whole queer person is sometimes only possible in the presence of other queer people.

A Small Apocalypse by Laura Chow Reeve (2024): This is a book of ghost stories. Ghost stories about the sticky Florida heat, about Asian American familial inheritance, about bodies and bodily desire, about memory and queerness. It’s sweaty and weird. It’s full of love and transformations and grief. Every single story is a stunner. Best collection of the year in my opinion.

Traversing Continents

*Cinema Love by Jiaming Tang (2024): This decades-spanning, continent-spanning novel is everything I crave in queer fiction. It has an alive setting and complex and layered characters who make all sorts of messy choices. It is deeply steeped in the specifics of two places: Mawei in Fuzhou, China, and Chinatown in Manhattan. It is full of sounds, colors, smells, textures, bodies. It’s about queer history and how it shapes the present, and about how and why queer and immigrant architectures matter. It's about memory and mistakes and how they form people. There are three intersecting timelines that tangle with each other in a wonderful, nonlinear way.

*The Foghorn Echoes by Danny Ramadan (2022): A beautiful, haunting about two Syrian boys who fall in love, and the men they grow up to become during and after the Syrian civil war. Ramadan uses time and POV so brilliantly. This is a sad book about ghosts and homophobia and violence, but it’s sad in the way I love: layered and honest, funny around the edges.

Extremely Real Stories About Kids & Teens

*The Year My Life Went Down the Toilet by Jake Maia Arlow (2023): This is probably the most excruciating middle grade book I’ve ever read. It’s so vividly real. It’s also funny and warm and full of queer joy and beautiful kinship between sick kids.

*Canto Contigo by Jonna Garza Villa (2024): This book annoyed the hell out of me, which is why I loved it so much. Rafie is a high school mariachi star who’s grandfather has just died. He moves to a new school expecting to be lead vocalist, but instead he has to share the role with the dude he hooked up with the day he found out his abuelo died. Rafie is insufferable. He is a total asshole for about 2/3 of the book. He’s selfish and clueless and shallow and petty. He’s mean to basically everyone he cares about. It’s such an intimate and unbearable portrayal of teenage grief. The pacing is perfect. I think about this novel all the time.

Beautifully Unsettling

*And Then She Fell by Alicia Elliott (2023): This book is dark and gorgeous and painful. It’s about the implicit horrors of colonialism and what it takes to survive, and more importantly, how and why people choose each other. So much intergenerational love. Elliot’s observations about the world are so sharp, but her characters are so soft.

*The Girls by John Bowen (1986): This lil gem from the 1980s took me by surprise. It's a lesbian gothic-y novel about a couple who lives in this quiet English village, where they make jam and cheese and own a quaint gift shop and oh yeah there's a body in their septic tank but how did it get there?!?! It is funny and dark BUT ALSO it's all about queer parenting (they have a baby!) in the 1970s, and how isolation and silence wear on a partnership, and how hard it is to be a family when no one outside of your family knows you are one. It’s about loneliness and boredom and despair and did I mention all the cheese and jam? A stunner, to be honest.

Narrative Voices I Will Never Forget

Bad Habit by Alana S. Portero, tr. by Mara Faye Letham (2024): This is my favorite coming-of-age novel of the year, and maybe an all-time favorite, too. It’s about a trans girl growing up in a working class neighborhood in Madrid in the 1980s and 1990s. It reads like a fictional memoir. The narrative voice is incredible. She’s funny, sharp, campy, bitchy. But she’s also tender. She makes fun of herself but she’s also deeply self-reflective and astute. It reminded me a lot of Faltas—it has that same mix of sharpness and earnestness, dark survival humor and buoyant love.

Still Life by Katherine Packert Burke (2024): I adored this quiet novel about a trans woman dealing with grief and regret and where to go next. It’s about friendship and musicals and writing. From my review for BookPage: “It’s an ode to both the sweet and thorny parts of queer friendship. Its urgency lies not in what happens to the characters, but in how they feel about what happens to them. Most of all, it’s a novel about navigating that most human of conundrums: change.”

The Butterfly Jungle by Diriye Osman (2022): This short novel is a dizzy, vibrant mix of languages, lists, moments, fragments, and memories, disjointed and meandering. It’s a series of meditations on Black queer love. The protagonist Migil, a queer British Somali twenty-something, is full of wit and snark, silliness and wisdom. I loved everything about it.

Warm & Funny Stories About Loving & Dysfunctional Queer Families

*Rules for Ghosting by Shelly Jay Shore (2024): So warm! So funny! Jewish death rituals and found family and grandfathers and eldest daughter woes and yikes this family is so dysfunctional but wow they really love each other a lot. Plus ghosts! Learning to ask for help! Emotional meltdowns in the family funeral home! Extremely soft queer romance. Trans joy. 100% delightful but also you might weep.

*Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly (2024): This is a hilarious and tender novel about two queer Maori Russian siblings and their big chaotic family. This family is a joy to witness. There are a million branches. They live in various countries. They sprawl. They’re connected by an intricate web of biology, happenstance, choice, accident. Everything about this novel is warm. I could have read it forever.

Morally Complex Masterpieces

*Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan (2023): This is an incredible work of historical fiction set in the 1980s during the early years of the Sri Lankan civil war. It’s about Sashi, a young Tamil medical student who is fierce and smart and courageous and just wants to live her life with the people she loves. She just wants to practice medicine, to heal anyone who needs healing. And she’s forced to make impossible choice after impossible choice. There is so much to say about this book, but the one thing that kept breaking me, over and over, is how every system in this novel, every organization, fails the people. The Sri Lankan government is murderous and evil. The Tamil Tigers murder and disappear Tamil people who disagree with the movement’s dogma. The Indian Army arrives as a “peacekeeping force” and the soldiers violently rape Tamil women. The UN looks on in silence as if Tamil lives do not matter. Are expendable. Does this sound familiar. These governments and organizations are not the same. There is no equivalency—none—between the Tigers and the Sri Lankan government. And yet they both fail the people. I don’t know what to do with this horrifying truth, but I’ll be thinking about this book for a long time.

A Dream in Polar Fog by by Yuri Rytkheu, tr. Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse (1970, English translation 2006): I started this in January, set it aside for many months, and picked it back up in the spring. It’s a fascinating historical novel by a Chukchi writer about a white man who, sick and injured, is left in a small Chukchi village by his shipmates. He makes a life with the people there. It’s essentially a book about how this man becomes truly human by rejecting whiteness. I found it upsetting and strange and beautiful and while I can’t say I liked it, exactly, I have not been able to stop thinking about it. I didn’t like it, but I really loved it and everything it grapples with.

The Future is Not Certain

*Toward Eternity by Anton Hur (2024): I love this book to incoherence. I don’t even know how to write about it. It’s a thorny, poignant, very queer speculative novel told through multiple POVs, beginning in the near future and ending in the very distant future, as earth and its inhabitants change. The whole book is a love letter to poetry. It’s about language and why it matters

Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072 by M.E. O’Brien & Eman Abdelhadi (2022): I’ve come to love this book more with every day that passes since I finished it. The timeline is bonkers. In the 2040s and 2050s, capitalism and nation states fall. A series of global revolutions lead to communitarian communes taking shape all over the world in place of state governments. The book is framed as an oral history project. The author-interviewers talk with 12 people living in or connected to the New York Commune. The interviews cover diverse topics, from ecological restoration to child-rearing. Together, these fictional characters think through so many thorny questions about family-making, work, infrastructure, production, health care, disability, art, connection, land, food, and how we relate to each other. The power of this beautiful, hopeful book lies in the space it offers us to imagine a different world. What if our livelihoods weren’t tied to work? What if our basic needs were met? What if we didn’t have to live in isolated nuclear families? What if academia was decentralized? What if we actually took care of each other? I think this is one a lot of us are going to need in 2025.

Book of the Year / Books of My Life

*Small Rain by Garth Greenwell (2024): If someone forced me to pick my favorite book of the year, it’s true that I would choose Martyr!. But who would force me to do such a thing? This book is everything to me, which is why I read it twice and made 30 Instagram posts about it.

*Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (2024): If you don’t already know that this is my favorite book of the year, book of my life, book of my heart forever and ever amen, you have not been paying attention. I read it three times and made 41 Instagram posts about it.

It’s not possible to quantify love. I’m just using these silly numbers to try to explain how many words and worlds these two books have opened in my heart.

Please come talk to me about all the great fiction you’ve read this year in the comments!