2024 Reading Wrap-Up: My Top 5-Star Books
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you click on these links and make a purchase, we may earn a commission. This commission helps us to keep the site running and provides you with more helpful content. However, this does not influence our reviews, which are always honest and unbiased. We only recommend products or services that we believe will be of value to you.
Hi everyone,
What a year 2024 has been for reading. I am not sure if its because the the three years of taking a Creative Writing degree has finally sunk in or if I am becoming a more mature reader - but honestly? A lot of the books that I read in 2024 sucked. It was the year where I have had the most one to two star reads. This is probably due to a lot of reasons. I have friends who work in publishing at the moment who are saying the industry and work load is going crazy with how focused everyone is on fast pace consumerism. But it is quite shocking how much of this is now reflected in current releases. Lots of lazy writing and editing!
But instead of focusing on that, today I want to talk about my absolute favourites. My top five-star reads. The books that saved my reading year. I want to give them the love they deserve, and a 60-second video just doesn't do them justice.
Let's get into it.
1. Private Rites by Julie Armfield
Okay, let's start with this masterpiece. Julia Armfield has now become one of automatic buy authors. After she emotionally wrecked me in the best way with Our Wives Under the Sea, and after how much Salt Slow has influenced me as a writer I would have followed her anywhere. Private Rites not only met my expectations; it completely reset them.
This book is set in a near-dystopian future where the rains keep raining and the Earth is slowly succumbing to water. The environment in the book isn't just a backdrop; it's a suffocating, omnipresent character. The water gets into everything both literally and metaphorically.
At the centre of this drowning world are three estranged sisters who are forced back together by their father's death. Each sister has her own POV and it threads the narrative into a twisting, untrustworthy game as more and more of their lives and their world gets revealed. While it is a retelling of King Lear , Armfield uses the climate disaster to amplify the personal. How do you grieve a monster? How do you re-learn sisterhood when the world is dissolving around you?
This book is queer, it's claustrophobic, and it's deeply, unsettlingly weird. As the old world drowns, arcane rituals and strange, forgotten beliefs start to creep back in. It's this blend of the mythic and the mundane that I really enjoy. It explores what we cling to at the end of all things.
2. The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
If I had a penny for every time I went to the bookstore on a whim and discovered a Sci-Fi book specifically focusing on speculating what could emerge from our oceans due to climate change, I would have three pennies, it is a very strange pattern!
This book blew me away and I think part of it was because of how little I know of the book and so my expectations were very neutral. The premise is really engaging and touched on a lot themes I have been interested in like humanity and the body and how this correlates with water, evolution and language.
It is about a species of octopus has been discovered in a remote Vietnamese archipelago. A species that has developed its own language, culture, and symbols. The majoritiy of the plot focuses on Dr. Ha Nguyen, the marine biologist who desperately wants to communicate with the octopuses, and how this comes into conflict with the ruthless corporation, DIANIMA, who has sealed off the island to exploit them. While the octopus hold the main focus of the story, it also expands itself to explore intelligence in creatures - beyond humans - looking at artificial and alien intelligence.
The book is a pressure-cooker. How do these three forms of intelligence interact? With violence? With curiosity? With greed? I really enjoyed how the author navigated these questions with a science, philosophical and religious lense. I also loved the idea of how human traditions in religion could also evolve with the age of science and technology.
It asks, "what makes someone human?" and then, more profoundly, "why do we think being human is the benchmark?" It's a spectacular debut, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.
3. Small Bodies of Water by Nina Mingya Powles
I'm still emotional about this one. This book found me at the exact right moment. I had just moved to London and was making the first steps in settling in when my best friend recommended it to me. As I had nothing to read I gave it a try.
I am not a huge essay person. I often find them too academic or too disconnected, but lately with the push for more personal takes on nature writing and using nature as a tool to explore the personal, I have been really enjoying my non fiction.
This collection is lyrical, it's poetic, it's personal. Nina Mingya Powles, who is Malaysian-Chinese and Pākehā, writes about what it means to live between worlds, between cultures all while focusing it through the perspective of water and interacting with these bodies.
From the wild coasts of New Zealand to the Ladies' Pond on Hampstead Heath (which I had just begun to swim at!), water is her "anchor point." It's where she goes to belong, to think, to connect to her family and her heritage.
But it's not just about swimming. It's about food, and language and what "home" means when it's not a single place. It's a gentle and profoundly beautiful book about finding your space in the world.
It was a very special book to me as the author explored places and ideas that were deeply familiar but also deeply unfamiliar which made the reading experience delightful and curious.
4. The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher
This was my unexpected favourite. When I began the book, I wasn’t the biggest fan of T. Kingfisher's prose. It's chatty, it's funny, it's full of down-to-earth characters who react to things in a way you or I would. Which sounds great when you say it like that, but sometimes I find the very personal first person a bit cringe to read.
The protagonist has just gotten divorced and moves in to help her eccentric Uncle Earl at his "Wonder Museum." And the museum is just a collection of weird, creepy junk. Its a little bit strange but the plot begins typically, the usual female character who has had her ‘normal’ life disrupted and now has to move somewhere bizarre where she will be challenged and develop a new life… yadayada.
And then she finds a hole in the wall. A hole that shouldn't be there. And it leads to... somewhere else.
Around this point I realised that the simplicity made the strangeness of the next part of the plot so good. We go from this very straightforward realistic narration to something that is, honestly? Terrifying. The cozy relatable narrator confronted with mind-bending, cosmic, Annihilation-level horror, is what makes this book so effective. It's a world of fog, willows, and bunkers, and it operates on a nightmare logic that I found genuinely chilling.
Its great for fans of Annihilation who perhaps thought it was a bit much and you want something more low key. It's that perfect chill not cozy read. It's a book you can curl up in an afternoon and read, but you'll be side-eyeing your walls for weeks.
My Final Word
So there you have it. My absolute standouts. In a lacklustre year, they were a reminder of what reading is all about.
I hope that gives you a little more insight into my 2024 favourites. Now, I want to hear from you! What were your five-star saviours last year? Did you read any of my picks? Let's talk in the comments below.
Thanks for reading!
Amazon.com Links: