We are back with our 5(ish) favorite reads (and games) of 2024!
We try very hard to keep it to five, but it’s simply not always possible. So, per staff member there may be more or less than five titles, but there can also be an A and a B list, memorable reads or just plain marvelous books.
We’re presenting our lists in bite-size chunks to make them more digestible, as there are more than 150 titles for you to sink your teeth into.
We hope to inspire you to try some of them in the new year.
Happy reading (and playing)!
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jaqueline Harpman
Easily the best book I’ve read this year and actually one of the best books I’ve ever read.
It’s a strange premise: a young, unnamed girl is kept in a cage underground with 39 other women, guarded by men who never speak to or look at them. No one knows why they’re there, how they got there or where they are. Some of the women have patchy memories of their lives before but the protagonist is too young to remember life before the cage.
The rest of the story I can’t talk about without terrible spoilers, but this short book manages to ask most of the important questions we face in our lives. Why do we live? Who are we without other people, without culture? Why do terrible things happen and what does it do to us when they do? Our moral understanding of the world, is that something we develop ourselves or does it come from our upbringings & communities? Does it matter really, in the end, what we do and how we live?
The book gives you no easy answers, it’s as mysterious and unknowable as life itself, there is no neat ending where all questions are answered, but it is nonetheless a beautiful, moving and affecting story which I cannot stop thinking about even months after I’ve read it. I think it’s also important to mention that Harpman was a holocaust survivor who fled Belgium at the start of the war and I feel it gives a different cast to the book to think about it in those terms.
I relentlessly recommend this to customers, mostly because I want to talk about it with people, and that’s worked! I’ve had quite a few come back to tell me how much they loved it too. My colleges have been roundly bullied into reading it and it says a lot that it’s on at least two top 5 books lists that I know about.
Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
This book is the very definition of ‘not for everyone’ but if you can take a bit of nastiness in your social satire then I cannot recommend this book enough. I read it because my colleague Sywert had it in his staff pics list and I am so glad I did. Set in a dystopian future where humans can no longer eat meat, they of course find a way and that way is to farm other humans for food. Naturally before we can reconcile doing something so horrific to our fellow man, we have to work out a way to ‘other’ them and invent euphemistic language to cover the truth of what we’re doing. Humans have always been good at that and it’s laid so bare here. Bazterrica doesn’t stop there though, she also touches on sexual politics, human cruelty, how vapid and selfish so many people are and how small a societal shift it takes for people to show that happily. There is of course a lot to learn here about the meat industry too, how we think about animals and how we really treat them in reality. What I really like as well is that although a lot of Tender is the Flesh is biting satire there’s still space for her to go a bit ham and really enjoy some silly over the top evilness.
I could go on (inevitably) but it’s just so good; cruel, shocking, nasty but so so smart and with really a lot to teach us all.
Morvern Callar by Alan Warner
I re-read this strange and lonely novel this year after finding it when moving house. I read and loved it when it first came out nearly 30 years ago and I’m so glad I gave it another go around.
It’s a first person story set in a small town next to the ocean in the Scottish highlands with all the dialogue in Scotts (readable for any English speaker though). Morvern lives in this small, desolate town with her boyfriend, who she one day wakes up to discover has killed himself in their bathroom. Her reaction is not one of hysteria or emotion but of quiet, calm detachment. From this first page of the book you quickly understand that Morven is an utterly odd and inscrutable human. Her inner world is shown fully here but you never feel that you know her or understand her motivations. She is utterly detached both from the world and herself and I found myself glued to even the most mundane details of her life trying to get clues as to who she really is. Morvern is a true, badly-behaved anti heroine, with absolutely zero of the redeeming features we normally ask of difficult female characters and is therefore an important and impressive creation. I love this strange book & I wish everyone would read it!
You Have Me to Love by Jaap Robben – translated from the Dutch novel Birk
Another lonely young person living close to the sea novel that I loved!
This time about a young boy growing up on a desolate island of only two households somewhere north of Sweden. Originally written in Dutch it has all the sparse language and direct speech that I love in Dutch writing and is so sensitively translated. The book opens with the death by drowning of the boy’s father and explores the fallout of losing a person in a place where there are so few people to be had. If I’m totally honest I was a bit let down by the ending, but right up to that point I enjoyed every moment and it’s so worth reading that it didn’t stop me including it on my top five list. It’s a dark book but the way it explains the mental process of a child trying to manage and live through awful trauma is beautifully done.
The Mercy of the Gods by James A. Corey
If I’m totally honest I haven’t finished this yet but nearly and it’s so good and fun I still want to recommend it to people! It’s a new universe from the well known James A. Corey ‘Expanse’ world and maybe a bit less with the full on fun cheese of that series (which I love by the way), but still has the same rollicking pace which makes it tricky to put down. Despite this fun and high-octane pace, like other Corey books it’s underpinned with intelligence and a really thorough exploration of human motivation which makes it much weightier in the end than it might at first seem. But if you like the idea of a bit of space colonialism from a hyper intelligent alien race, locked in an eons long battle with a powerful enemy, galactic war, space battles and all the good sci-fi tropes we love, then this is for you. I had such fun reading this & I’m excited for the next stories in the series. If you’re a sci-fi fan this will scratch your space opera itch with aplomb.
Lies With Man by Michal Nava
The amazing Michael Nava is back with another Henry Rios crime novel. In his last two books you get everything that made his earlier books so good, but with the history of the gay movement in church and politics as part of the plot and background for the story. Rios is the main character you can’t help falling in love with. And the writing by Nava is amazing, there is not an unauthentic word in his books. What I realized after finding out that in both this book and in Goldenboy (republished as Carved in Bone), he meets and gets in a relationship with Josh Mandell. Lies With Man is actually a totally new book to replace Goldenboy/Carved in Bone in the series, which hasn’t been reprinted by Nava and is at the moment only available through our Antiquary/Second-hand supplier. By comparing the two, this is the better novel, so much more mature, so much denser.
Letting Go by David Hawkins
One of the most important aspects in your growth process is letting go. Let what go? The personal structures you created to protect yourself. You mostly came up with these defense mechanisms when you were a child and they are totally outdated, but are still running your life. Hawkins explains that your soul is the gateway to an enlightened life, but our mind, clinging to patterns inside of us, is blocking our natural inner light. This whole book is about letting those blocks go, written from all levels on the emotional ladder that tells you where you are in your personal growth process.
Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aceman
This amazing story is an emotional journey about a push-and-pull romance between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents house on the Italian Riviera, seen through the eyes of an unprepared 17-year-old boy who isn’t ready for the consequences of their attraction. At first they feign indifference, but during the smoldering summer currents of strong emotions of love and obsession and fear and desire transport you back to your own life at that age, your own first time falling in love.
A beautiful and subtle love story that plays with your heartstrings.
The Weight of it All by N. R. Walker
After being dumped by his boyfriend for being boring and overweight, Henry Beckett decides to make some drastic changes in the hopes of getting his boyfriend back. He joins a gym and gets a gorgeous personal trainer named Reed. Henry feels horrible as he stands out in the gym with his weight, but Reed supports him all the way. They both love food and start sharing recipes and become buddies. As their friendship lines start to blur, Henry is convinced there’s no way Reed could ever be interested in a guy like him. But Reed does, having been where Henry now is. Men have body issues too and this is the cutest love story.
You Like It Darker by Stephen King
It has been a long time since I picked up a short story collection by King, but this one really did it for me. Most of the stories are more literary than real horror, which shows just how good a writer King is. Some of the novellas have a scary element in them and they read like small novels with characters from earlier work (like Vic Trenton from Cujo). This is not the King of the 1980s who scares the hell out of you, but a more mature King who can basically write anything and keep you glued to the page.
When the Moon Hatched by Sarah A. Parker
A high fantasy with a great world and a slow burn romance. There are some plot twists I did not see coming and was blown away by. A must-read if you are a fan of fantasy creatures.
The Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini (Eragon, Eldest, Brisingr and Inheritance)
I revisited this series this year. Having read it when I was a teen, I wanted to see if I still liked this series as an adult. And I do. The last book is absolutely the best in my opinion.
A great ending to the series, though it is bittersweet to say the least.
A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid
A book that has a great gothic mansion/haunted house theme. With feminist commentary on academics, literature, and society as a whole. I loved it.
The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves & China Mieville
Immersive and trippy, that’s it, that’s all I can say. A real recommendation if you’re not into the normal narrative type of books.
The Spirit Bares Its Teeth by Andrew Joseph White
After I read Hell Followed With Us I had to read The Spirit Bares Its Teeth. I love gory books and this did not disappoint! But next to that it’s dripping with historic atmosphere. With an autistic trans main character in the 1800’s, this book is also heartbreaking and really intense.
