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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.

A grid of small images of 12 of the featured books. ‘My Favorite Books of the Year So Far appears in a white text box in the center.

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

Poetry

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.

View of the ocean on a bright, clear morning just after sunset. There’s a line of seaweed on the beach and purple clouds in the sharp blue sky.
Nessa sitting on the beach with her mouth open and her ears back.

Catch you next week, bookish friends!

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