Favorites of 2024
I read 34 books in 2024. But don’t quote me on that. It could be more because I did a terrible job keeping track, and I just thought of another book I read last night that I had forgotten about! I wish it was double this amount, but life.
This short list of my favorites is based on where I am in life, and my own writing project. I read a lot of thriller/mystery books because that is what I’m currently writing. I also read books that connected with my season of life as well. Parenting teenagers and young adults is a new a wild animal I am learning to love and sometimes wrestle.
Some of these books didn’t even come out this year! But this is real life, for me anyway.
Book Number one: None of this is True by Lisa Jewell
I love a good Lisa Jewell book. She is the master of creepy strange tales that have you wondering and guessing as you devour her words.
Alix and Josie have the same birthday and happen to be celebrating at the same pub, but they couldn’t have more different lives. When Josie finds out Alix is a popular crime podcaster she plans to run into her and pitch her idea. Alix is intrigue, but also a bit unsettled. As Josie unravels her strange life, Alix fears there is more to the story as well as some dark secrets that could upend more lives than she knows.
The more Alix learns about Josie the more she wonders if she herself is in danger.
This book is dark, twisty and kept me glued to the pages.
Book Number Two: Go as a River by Shelley Read
My teacher Jenny Shank gave this book to me for my graduation. It was a comparable book I could use to my own writing project while in school. As I read the lovely story I was grateful for the comparison.
This coming-of-age story is set in my beautiful state of Colorado. Victoria is a teenage girl whose family runs a peach orchard in the small dwindling town of Iola. Set in the 1960’s Victoria has a chance meeting with a young man named Wilson who was a drifter. They begin a romance that is secret and passionate until tragedy strikes changing her whole world. She leaves and endures hardships, but captures a love for the land around her. This story is a beautiful tale of love and loss and finding your own way even when challenges and life block your path forward.
Book Number Three: Sandwich by Catherine Newman
This book. I laughed and cried as I read these words. Talk about a weird season of life. That in between of parenting kids into adults. Like I said, I am here and it is a balancing act. So to read a story about a woman traveling these same roads was very dear to me.
Every year Rocky and her husband and kids go to Cape Cod for a family beach vacation. This year she goes with grown kids and her son’s girlfriend. And a couple days into the trip her aging parents arrive.
The chapters bounce us back in time as she begins parenthood. We get a glimpse as she navigates loss and decisions from her past that now seem to have resurfaced. All the while she is balancing hormones and sadness nestled next to joy.
Everything seems to hang in the balance as the week goes along, and as old secrets come to light.
Book number Four: Starling House by Alix E Harrow
I read this book back in the fall and talked about it in an earlier post here. https://www.alyssalance.com/blog/lately-vacationreads
Opal and her brother have raised themselves in the coal mining town of Eden Kentucky, where most people think bad luck is just part of living there. The town also has a haunted house that has had various owners that always seem to keep to themselves, and don’t always have a happy ending to their story.
Opal dreams of the house and soon takes an offer to clean it to make cash to get her brother Jasper out of the town and on to better things. The house begins to share its secrets with Opal and when mysteries begin to unfold, she learns more about herself and her own history than she thought possible. She must fight to learn what family and home might look like, even when she thought she was all alone.
Book number five: All Good People Here by Ashley Flowers
I read this recently and then learned the author has a crime podcast too.
This was a quick read and I was into the plot right away. I love a book that switches between past and present and characters before and after a crime.
Margot is a journalist who remembers the murder of her neighbor when they both six years old. Now she has returned to care for her uncle and someone else has disappeared. New clues are popping up to connect the unsolved mystery from decades earlier. As Margot interviews townspeople the deeper she digs the more many of them seem to have things to hide. But eventually danger seems to catch up to her and she herself might be in too deep as she wonders who she can really trust in her old hometown.
This book was intense, it kept me invested in the characters and the storyline until the very end.
I know this is a short list, but I when I looked at my 2024 books these five really stood out, and I would recommend them to others so they felt like the right picks for this post.
Tell me your favorite read from 2024 here in the comments.
Happy Reading, there’s still time to get more reading in before the end of the year.
