The shelf reflection is starting a little early this year (maybe I’m just desperate for 2024 to be over?). We all know I have a little problem with BABLE – Book Accumulation Beyond Life Expectancy, thank you Mark Hodkinson for that terrifying concept – so why not have fun with it? Here’s a round-up of some of the books I bought (but didn’t read) in 2024.
Sign Here by Claudia Lux
Blurb: “Sign Here is a darkly humorous, surprisingly poignant, and utterly gripping debut novel about a guy who works in Hell (literally) and is on the cusp of a big promotion if only he can get one more member of the wealthy Harrison family to sell their soul. As old secrets and new dangers scrape away at the Harrisons’ shiny surface, revealing the darkness beneath, everyone must face the consequences of their choices.”
Kink by R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell (ed.)
Blurb: “Kink is a dynamic anthology of literary fiction that opens an imaginative door into the world of desire. The stories within this collection portray love, desire, BDSM, and sexual kinks in all their glory with a bold new vision. The collection includes works by renowned fiction writers such as Callum Angus, Alexander Chee, Vanessa Clark, Melissa Febos, Kim Fu, Roxane Gay, Cara Hoffman, Zeyn Joukhadar, Chris Kraus, Carmen Maria Machado, Peter Mountford, Larissa Pham, and Brandon Taylor, with Garth Greenwell and R.O. Kwon as editors.”
The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie
Blurb: “The Oxford English Dictionary is one of mankind’s greatest achievements, and yet, curiously, its creators are almost never considered. Who were the people behind this unprecedented book? As Sarah Ogilvie reveals, they include three murderers, a collector of pornography, the daughter of Karl Marx, a president of Yale, a radical suffragette, a vicar who was later found dead in the cupboard of his chapel, an inventor of the first American subway, a female anti-slavery activist in Philadelphia… and thousands of others. The Dictionary People is a celebration of words, language, and people, whose eccentricities and obsessions, triumphs, and failures enriched the English language.”
Crossing The Lines (After She Wrote Him) by Sulari Gentill
Blurb: “It’s an author’s job to create a new world in the pages of a book. But when lines start to blur and reality begins to fade, getting lost in a story can be dangerous―especially if you can’t find your way back. After She Wrote Him by Sulari Gentill, USA Today bestselling author of The Woman in the Library, is wildly inventive twist on the murder mystery, a book-within-a book consumed with passion, obsession, and the emptiness left behind when the “real world” starts to fall away.”
The Incredible Events In Women’s Cell Number 3 by Kira Yarmysh
Blurb: “A young woman, Anya, is arrested at a Moscow anti-corruption rally, and, under false charges, sentenced to a ten-day stretch at a special detention center. A brilliant exploration of what it means to be marginalized both as an independent woman in general and in an increasingly intolerant Russia in particular, and a powerful prison story that renews a grand Russian tradition, The Incredible Events in Women’s Cell Number 3 introduces one of the most urgent and gripping new voices in international literature.”
Your Driver Is Waiting by Priya Guns
Blurb: “Damani is tired. Her father just died on the job at a fast-food joint, and now she lives paycheck to paycheck in a basement, caring for her mom and driving for an app that is constantly cutting her take. The city is roiling in protests–everybody’s in solidarity with somebody–but while she keeps hearing that they’re fighting for change on behalf of people like her, she literally can’t afford to pay attention. A wild, one-sitting readbrimming with dark comedy, and piercing social commentary and announcing Priya Guns’s feverishly original voice, Your Driver Is Waiting is a crackling send-up of our culture of modern alienation.”
A Touch Of Jen by Beth Morgan
Blurb: “Remy and Alicia, a couple of insecure service workers, are not particularly happy together. But they are bound by a shared obsession with Jen, a beautiful former co-worker of Remy’s who now seems to be following her bliss as a globe-trotting jewelry designer. In and outside the bedroom, Remy and Alicia’s entire relationship revolves around fantasies of Jen, whose every Instagram caption, outfit, and new age mantra they know by heart. Part millennial social comedy, part psychedelic horror, and all wildly entertaining, A Touch of Jen is a sly, unflinching examination of the hidden drives that lurk just outside the frame of our carefully curated selves.”
Listen For The Lie by Amy Tintera
Blurb: “After Lucy is found wandering the streets, covered in her best friend Savvy’s blood, everyone thinks she is a murderer. It’s been years since that horrible night, a night Lucy can’t remember anything about, and she has since moved to LA and started a new life. But now the phenomenally huge hit true crime podcast “Listen for the Lie” and its too-good looking host Ben Owens, have decided to investigate Savvy’s murder for the show’s second season. Lucy is forced to return to the place she vowed never to set foot in again to solve her friend’s murder, even if she is the one that did it.”
Acts Of Service by Lillian Fishman
Blurb: “What do we bring to sex? What does it reveal of ourselves, and one another? And how do we reconcile what we want with what we think we should want? In the way only great fiction can, Acts of Service takes between its teeth the contradictions written all over our ideas of sex and sexuality. At once juicy and intellectually challenging, sacred and profane, Lillian Fishman’s riveting debut is bold, unabashed, and required reading of the most pleasurable sort.”
That Time I Got Drunk And Yeeted A Love Potion At A Werewolf by Kimberly Lemming
Blurb: “Brie’s never been particularly coordinated… or lucky. Who else would accidentally throw a drink at someone’s head only to miss entirely and hit a stranger behind them? And who else would have that stranger fall madly in love with them because it turns out that the drink she threw was a love potion? Yeah, probably just Brie. That Time I Got Drunk And Yeeted A Love Potion At A Werewolf is a raunchy, laugh-out-loud rom-com fantasy by the genre’s freshest new voice, Kimberly Lemming.”
Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby
Blurb: “Samantha Irby’s career has taken her to new heights. She dodges calls from Hollywood and flop sweats on the red carpet at premieres (well, one premiere). But nothing is ever as it seems online, where she can crop out all the ugly parts. Quietly Hostile makes light as Irby takes us on another outrageously funny tour of all the gory details that make up the true portrait of a life behind the screenshotted depression memes. Relatable, poignant, and uproarious, once again, Irby is the tonic we all need to get by.”
The Undoing by Jean Hanff Korelitz
Blurb: “Grace Reinhart Sachs is living her best life. Devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice, her days are full of familiar things. Grace is also the author of a book You Should Have Known, in which she cautions women to really hear what men are trying to tell them. But weeks before the book is published a chasm opens in her own life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only an ongoing chain of terrible revelations, leading her to dismantle her life in order to create a new one, lest she allow these disasters to destroy her.”
Kiss The Girl by Zoraida Córdova
Blurb: “A modern tale of unexpectedly falling in love and finding your voice, Kiss the Girl is the highly anticipated third installment in the acclaimed and best-selling Meant to Be collection. Ariel del Mar is one of the most famous singers in the world. She and her sisters—together, known as the band Siren Seven—have been a pop culture phenomenon since they were kids. But lately, she wants more. Caught between the world she longs for and the one she’s left behind, can Ariel follow her dreams, fall in love, and, somehow, find her own voice?”
Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall
Blurb: “To clean up his image, Luc has to find a nice normal relationship…and Oliver Blackwood is as nice and normal as they come. He’s a barrister, an ethical vegetarian, and someone who has never inspired a moment of scandal in his life. In other words, he’s perfect boyfriend material. Unfortunately, apart from being gay, single, and really really in need of a date for a big event, Luc and Oliver have nothing in common. So they strike a deal to be publicity-friendly (fake) boyfriends until the dust settles. Then they can go their separate ways and pretend it never happened. Boyfriend Material is an LGBT romance about exact opposites falling in perfectly imperfect love.”
A Routine Infidelity by Elizabeth Coleman
Blurb: “Private investigator Edwina ‘Ted’ Bristol deals in the cheating husbands and missing chihuahuas of Melbourne, but yearns for the heart-stopping excitement of real crime. When Ted discovers her sister, Bob, has fallen prey to an internet catfishing scam, she sets out with her beloved miniature schnauzer and shrewd sidekick, Miss Marple, to catch the swindler. As Bob’s case takes a series of bizarre twists and turns and an embezzlement investigation escalates into murder, Ted finds her own life in peril. Will she crack her first criminal case before it’s too late? If you love the madcap adventures of Phryne Fisher, you’re sure to love A Routine Infidelity.”
The Pisces by Melissa Broder
Blurb: “Everything changes when Lucy becomes entranced by an eerily attractive swimmer while sitting alone on the beach rocks one night. But when Lucy learns the truth about his identity, their relationship, and Lucy’s understanding of what love should look like, take a very unexpected turn. A masterful blend of vivid realism and giddy fantasy, pairing hilarious frankness with pulse-racing eroticism, The Pisces is a story about falling in obsessive love with a merman: a figure of Sirenic fantasy whose very existence pushes Lucy to question everything she thought she knew about love, lust, and meaning in the one life we have.”
The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez
Blurb: “Elegy plus comedy is the only way to express how we live in the world today, says a character in Sigrid Nunez’s ninth novel. The Vulnerables offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past. A search for understanding about some of the most critical matters of our time, Nunez’s new novel is also an inquiry into the nature and purpose of writing itself.”
Hello Stranger by Katherine Center
Blurb: “With its emphasis on its central character, combined with its swoony romance, Hello Stranger is a hit. Sadie is everything you could want in a protagonist — the right amount of quirky, sunshiney and stubborn, and the men she’s in love with are equally fascinating. All the side characters provide humor and comfort, and even those characters who you aren’t really supposed to like are annoyingly intriguing and captivating. Center created a brilliant cast of characters, set to a plot that’s sure to keep you reading.”
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
Blurb: “A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its drama, Austenian in its wit, and, like both influences, fascinated by what makes us who we are. A brilliantly constructed study of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is a mesmerizing, unflinching consideration of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.”
Love Letters To A Serial Killer by Tasha Coryell
Blurb: “In Love Letters To A Serial Killer, Hannah’s new pen pal feels like an exciting adventure at first. But when William is released, when she finds herself engaged to him and living in his home, she must wonder if her obsession has gone too far. Because how blissfully happy can you really be if you’re worried you might be your fiancé’s next victim? And what if William’s innocent – just an ordinary man who loves her? Will she still want him if he is?”
Factory Girls by Michelle Gallen
Blurb: “What seems to be a great opportunity to earn money turns out to be a crucible in which Maeve faces the test of a lifetime. Seeking justice for herself and her fellow workers may just be Maeve’s one-way ticket out of town. Bitingly hilarious, clear-eyed, and steeped in the vernacular of its time and place, Factory Girls tackles questions of wealth and power, religion and nationalism, and how young women maintain hope for themselves and the future during divided, violent times.”
The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman
Blurb: “In The Nineties, Klosterman dissects the film, the music, the sports, the TV, the pre-9/11 politics, the changes regarding race and class and sexuality, the yin/yang of Oprah and Alan Greenspan, and (almost) everything else. The result is a multidimensional masterpiece, a work of synthesis so smart and delightful that future historians might well refer to this entire period as Klostermanian.”
Wildfire by Hannah Grace
Blurb: “Wildfire, the latest in the TikTok sensation and deliciously swoonworthy Maple Hills series, follows two summer camp counselors who reconnect after a sizzling one-night stand. Russ knows breaking the camp’s strict “no staff fraternizing” rule will have him heading back to Maple Hills before the summer is over, but unfortunately for him, Aurora has never been very good at caring about the rules. Will the two learn to peacefully coexist? Or did their one night together start a fire they can’t put out?”
Bachelor Nation by Amy Kaufman
Blurb: “Bachelor Nation is the first definitive, unauthorized, behind-the-scenes cultural history of the Bachelor franchise, America’s favorite guilty pleasure. She has interviewed dozens of producers, contestants, and celebrity fans to give readers never-before-told details of the show’s inner workings: what it’s like to be trapped in the mansion “bubble”; dark, juicy tales of producer manipulation; and revelations about the alcohol-fueled debauchery that occurs long before the Fantasy Suite.”
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