Reads I Enjoyed in 2024
In no particular order. No recs. Just things I enjoyed this year.
I don’t like the framing of end of year lists. I don’t like giving recommendations. I also don’t like picking favorites.
Year end lists often tend to only include things that were published that year. So there’s often not space for things that you have reread or things you picked up that were published decades ago. (To that end, I reread sections of Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self-Regard and Ann Petry’s The Street this year, and was very glad I did.)
I only know the kinds of books that I like to read and have spent my whole life developing a distinct taste. As a result, I enjoy just about every book I pick up to read. This means, that at the end of the year, picking favorites is not something I’m interested in. I’d much rather tell you about what I enjoyed, what stayed with me, what I’ll carry, and as many as I’d like. Everything I read serves some purpose, even if it was only to nourish me in that moment, for which I am grateful. As Ralph Waldo Emerson has said, told to me via the Great Paris Geller: “I cannot remember the books I have read anymore than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” (Yes, the first time I heard that quote was in Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. Sue me.)
I only know how to feed myself. And I may be able to intuit what will nourish those who are closest to me—my best friend, the children who live next door, old college friends who are constantly searching for the next thing to devour.
But I can’t recommend what you should read. Figuring out your own taste is a really beautiful journey, and I encourage you to do some exploring.
I will, however, tell you what I enjoyed reading this year. This list is not complete. I did not document well what I read for the first time in a long while. (I’ll thank leaving my job unceremoniously in May for throwing my year out of wack.) I probably read around 40 books and several comic issues that I did not document well, either.
This is not counting the several things I reread while I was teaching my Black Comics class. (It’s always nice to read Far Sector by N. K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbell, Ironheart: Meant to Fly by Eve L. Ewing and Luciano Vecchio, and Wash Day Diaries by Jamila Rowser and Robyn Smith.)
This is also not counting the three books I have on my nightstand that I am currently reading and/or planning (probably over-ambitiously) to read before 2025: Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Little Devil In America: In Praise of Black Performance, Karen Strong’s Eden’s Everdark, and Renée Watson’s Skin & Bones. Considering I have never met an Abdurraqib, Strong or Watson book/story I have not liked, it’s safe to say they will make my list.
Without further ado…
With Love, Echo Park by Laura Taylor Namey
Black Girl Autopoetics: Agency in Everyday Digital Practice by Ashleigh Greene Wade
Bad Dream: A Dreamer Story by Nicole Maines and Rye Hickman
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Blood Justice by Terry J. Benton-Walker
Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy and Borders by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
The Sticky Note Manifesto of Aisha Agarwal by Ambika Vohra
The Poisons We Drink by Bethany Baptiste
That Self-Same Metal and Saint-Seducing Gold by Brittany N. Williams
This Land is Our Land: A Blue Beetle Story by Julio Anta and Jacoby Salcedo
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib
The Davenports: More Than This by Krystal Marquis
Black Girl Power edited by Leah Johnson
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Truth According to Ember by Danica Nava
Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Wrath of the Triple Goddess by Rick Riordan
Squire by Sara Alfageeh and Nadia Shammas
Jackie Ormes Draws the Future: The Remarkable Life of a Pioneering Cartoonist by Liz Montague
The Partner Plot by Kristina Forest
(I feel like it’s actually silly to do a book list without plugging my debut. I actually did read Love Requires Chocolate, too, a few times this year…)
2025 will be a good year for reading, as it always is. I aspire to use my library more, visit my local Friends of the Library shop more, try book swaps with friends, and shop local and independent more. I read enough Latine literature that I have been trying to learn Spanish well enough to read what phrases get dropped in my favorite books without stopping to look it up. I’m hoping to take the year to do some rereads of things I love to study and get my hands on things I’m long overdue for reading. I have a list of a list of Indigenous, Palestinian, and Asian books I’m excited to read, in tandem with my usual focus on Black authors’ works. I’m also in a moment where I want to read more about disability and queer books, both nonfiction and fiction. I think 2025 will prove to also be a big research year, so we’ll see what I discover on that journey.
2024 was not a great year for comics for me. I read some great graphic novels and did some good rereads but I’m only following three ongoing series right now (Storm, Exceptional X-Men and Star Signs) and I haven’t gone back to do much back issue stuff recently. Again, I’m excited to utilize my public library, as I did when I was a kid, to read some classic superhero stuff and hopefully some new graphic novels. I do, however, have a Milestone Compendium I have only read a few stories out of here and there. My goal is to read one comic a day out of that starting in 2025. It could be fun to share my thoughts on that read through here. Let me know if that’s of interest.
Even though I have these goals that require a lot of backlist reading for myself for 2025, there are some new titles I’m super excited about next year. I can’t wait for Tracy Deonn’s Oathbound (y’all know I’m Breehive forever, got the tattoo to prove it); Kristina Forest’s contemporary romance to finish out the Greene Sisters books, The Love Lyric; Eve L. Ewing has a new nonfiction coming out Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism; we’re getting a second (!!!) Nubia graphic novel from L. L. McKinney and Robyn Smith; my friend Stefany Valentine’s young adult debut, First Love Language, is out in January; and my friend Kay Sohini’s graphic memoir, This Beautiful, Ridiculous City, will be out in January as well!
(I also am hoping to get to a few other friends’ titles that I didn’t get to in 2024, like H. D. Hunter’s Something Like Right, in the new year.)
Whatever you want to read and however you get your hands on books, I’m wishing y’all lots of happy reading in 2025!
Note from Ravynn: I spent a lot of time making this very clickable! I hope you explore some of these authors and titles!