My Favorite Books I Read in 2024

I get a free eBook every month with Amazon Prime.

I love love love renting eBooks for Kindle or Libby from my local library.

I typically read about one book every week or two, sometimes more and sometimes less depending on my schedule.

I love historical fiction and scifi, but also I have been expanding into queer literature and memoirs and other genres. I still read school books with my kids too, even though they’re attending university now!

I didn’t realize that GoodReads has challenges, so I began that for the first time this year and it tracked my reading and gave me statistics.

I’ve read 77 books this year, but these stood out as my favorites.

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala’s long-existing Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl—and future matriarch, known as Big Ammachi—will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.

I loved his first book Cutting for Stone and this book is also wonderful and I loved the epic family legend and how everyone handled the “curse.”

Station Eleven: A Novel by Emily St. John Mandel

It is fifteen years after a flu pandemic wiped out most of the world’s population. Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony, a small troupe moving over the gutted landscape, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. But when they arrive in the outpost of St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave. Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the disaster brought everyone here, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty, telling a story about the relationships that sustain us.

I love dystopian fiction and yes, it’s probably overdone with the pandemic but this book is lovely. I didn’t want this book to end and I realize there’s a show based on it.

Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Herland, Gilman’s most famous novel, is a feminist utopian comedy in which three men stumble upon a society of women that has banished men. Also included in this Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition is a selection of Gilman’s poetry and other short fiction. Gilman scholar Denise D. Knight has written an enlightening Introduction that explores Gilman’s use of the utopian form, satire, and fantasy to provide a critique of women’s place in society and to propose creative solutions.

I enjoyed the psychology explored in this novel and can’t stop thinking about the events that took place. I just found out there is a trilogy.

The Boys from Brazil: A Novel by Ira Levin

Alive and hiding in South America, the fiendish Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele gathers a group of former colleagues for a horrifying project―the creation of the Fourth Reich. Barry Kohler, a young investigative journalist, gets wind of the project and informs famed Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman, but before he can relay the evidence, Kohler is killed.

Thus Ira Levin opens one of the strangest and most masterful novels of his career. Why has Mengele marked a number of harmless aging men for murder? What is the hidden link that binds them? What interest can they possibly hold for their killers: six former SS men dispatched from South America by the most wanted Nazi still alive, the notorious “Angel of Death“? One man alone must answer these questions and stop the killings―Lieberman, himself aging and thought by some to be losing his grip on reality.

I’m a little obsessed with Ira Levin’s novels and I’ve read most of them. They are nontraditional horror and quite chilling to think about.

The Moonflowers: A Novel by Abigail Rose-Marie

Tig Costello has arrived in Darren, Kentucky, commissioned to paint a portrait honoring her grandfather Benjamin. His contributions to the rural Appalachian town and his unimpeachable war service have made him a local hero. But to Tig, he’s a relative stranger. To find out more about him, Tig wants to talk to the person who knew her grandfather best: Eloise Price, the woman who murdered him fifty years ago.

Still confined to a state institution, Eloise has a lifetime of stories to tell. She agrees to share them all―about herself, about Tig’s enigmatic grandmother, and about the other brave and desperate women who passed through Benjamin’s orbit. Most revealing of all is the truth about Whitmore Halls, the mansion on the hill that was home to triage, rescue, death, and one inevitable day that changed Eloise’s life forever.

As Tig begins to piece together the puzzle of her mysterious family tree, it sends her spiraling toward a confrontation with her own painful past―and a reconciliation with all its heartrending secrets.

I didn’t want to like this book and it was slow at times and the characters could’ve been more vibrant, but the story was great.

I’m working through another reading challenge this year and I plan to try to read at least 100 books!

What was your favorite book this year?

You might also like:

• My Favorite Books 2023
• My Favorite Books 2022
• My Favorite Books 2021
• My Favorite Books 2020
• My Favorite Books 2019
• My Favorite Books 2018
• My Favorite Life Changing Books
• Apocalyptic Media to Binge
• 10 Classics to Read When the World Seems Too Bleak
• Top 10 Books for Homeschoolers
• Great Books for Writers
• 5 Best Life Skills Books for Teens

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