2024’s Most Impactful Reads: My Favorites

Some of my favorite 2024 reads (the print ones, anyway)

The year isn’t over yet, but as I’m looking back over the last 11-1/2 months, I’ve read some amazing work, both nonfiction and fiction. So far I’m around 115 books, and 22 of those are rated 5-stars (so says The StoryGraph).

I’ll write a more comprehensive recap of the amazing reading year that was 2024, but for now, here are my most favorite reads of this year. Not all are 5-stars; a couple are just really really impactful even if not “perfect”.

James – Percival Everett

It would be hard to imagine that you’ve not heard about this yet. It’s been EVERYWHERE, and completely worth the hype.

This will be a classic, and it’s a deep, mature complement as well as retelling of the story of Huck Finn.

Told from the perspective of Jim, the slave in Huck’s story, this is a powerful illustration and takedown of pre-Civil War slavery with heavy doses of philosophy and ethics and sociology.

This book should be read and discussed in high school and college lit programs. Highly recommend to every one as a real eye-opener.

I also loved reading this via audiobook.

Chain-Gang All-Stars – Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

In the not-distant future, prison inmates are given the option to fight to the death, gladiator-style, for the slim chance of winning their freedom, while their lives and battles are broadcast to a bloodthirsty fan base.

This is a powerfully told story – dark, challenging, maddening – because it’s so damn close to the reality of the American prison-for-profit system now, and the dehumanization of both convicts and of “action sports” athletes (blood sports, whether the NFL or MMA or UFC or even the legions of young men who think that Fight Club was an invitation into tests of manhood.

The story is multiple-POV, multiple-voice, and you hear from athletes, their family members, “corrections” officers, abolitionists, pain researchers, board members of the sports broadcast company, etc. And these stories interweave, in sometimes surprising ways.

The pace is fast, the characters are multidimensional.

The print and audio books are also littered with footnotes referencing the current American penal system, both prison and legal, and those footnotes support the narrative as well as the education of the reader.

I’ve been describing the book this way: Powerful speculative fiction, incredibly well told story, and pairs well with [author:Michelle Alexander|3051490]’s masterpiece [book:The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness|6792458], with a broader target audience because it’s just a great story.. that will move and educate you.

EVERYBODY should read this, whether fans of fiction, nonfiction, storytelling, excellent audio narration, everybody.

I read it as an audiobook. It’s very well voiced by multiple voice actors, with energy and character dripping throughout.

In Ascension – Martin MacInnes

Majestic, mind shifting, mysterious, glorious. One of those novels I will never forget reading.

It’s like nothing I’ve ever read; the comparisons to Andy Weir etc fall flat.

Excellent character based literary sci-fi; read if you don’t need clear explanations and big action scenes.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century – Timothy Snyder

An excellent, quick, important, serious and hopeful read about how we prepare for and resist tyranny, using lessons from the regimes of Hitler and Putin as primary examples.

Whether you see the incoming USA administration, or outgoing one, at risk of tyranny, this is a thought provoking and easily actionable read.

You Dreamed of Empires – Álvaro Enrigue with Natasha Wimmer (Translator)

GORGEOUS retelling of the historical events of Spanish conquistadors under Hernán Cortés entering the city of Tenochtitlan and meeting with the court of emperor Moctezuma.

It’s rare that, as I’m reading a book, I wished it were MUCH longer, or a series. But this one is an entire world, and reimagines a dense and complex world that many of us have some passing familiarity with. It’s trippy hallucinogenic; it thrives in court politics and religious variety; its characters are all well shaped. The reader’s head swims in a fast paced, dense story with color and flavor everywhere.

Think multicultural Game of Throes meets Hunter S. Thompson packed into a 220 page novella.

TIP: Don’t skip the author’s notes to the translator in the first pages.

The Message – Ta-Nehisi Coates

Super interesting and super powerful book. You will likely have heard about this book through the author’s perspective on Palestine. It is that and much more.

It’s a beautiful blend of memoir, writing craft and vocation, and then a very deft look at Jim Crow in the US and Palestine occupation and the US’s role in crafting a narrative for easy consumption of our own ideologies. Like Coates’ other work, there is nothing simplistic or jingoistic about this. It is deep and complex and offers no easy answers to the observations Coates raises. And well worth reading and wrestling with. Highly recommended.

The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine – Cian T. McMahon

An incredibly well researched, academic, yet quite readable, deep dive into Irish emigration to North America and Australia during the 1800s potato famine era. Information dance without being boring. On my e-book, the end of the written text was 39% of the way in… 61% of the book is footnotes, bibliography, index, other information sources. Well worth reading for anybody interested in this part of history.

Prophet Song – Paul Lynch

Here’s the book description:

A fearless portrait of a society on the brink as a mother faces a terrible choice, from an internationally award-winning author

On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.

Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society.

How far will she go to save her family? And what – or who – is she willing to leave behind?

Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.

The Bee Sting – Paul Murray

A dark, complex family drama of the kind that Irish writers are so dang good at telling. The characters in this – the kids, especially – are hauntingly memorable.

Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care – Kelly Hayes, Mariame Kaba

A must-read for anyone seeking to fuel their activism and organizing with hope, inspiration, and practical wisdom, particularly those drawn to themes of abolition, mutual aid, and collective power-building.

Practical, hopeful and pragmatic work by two long time community organizers who have stories to tell.

The Island Child – Molly Aitken

This is an emotionally powerful story, a fictional memoir with teasing doses of Irish mythology and folklore, fraught mother relationships, and just crazy family tension in all directions. The characters are REAL, if not lovable, and emotionally complex. I felt so many thing reading this book. Haunting, gorgeous, so much vibes. I immediately headed over to my local bookstore to buy the author’s newer book (Bright I Burn); I love the way she tells a difficult story.

Light and Shade in Watercolour – Hazel Soan; also Hazel Soan’s Art of the Limited Palette

I *really* enjoy Soan’s approach to watercolour painting, and these two reads have been helpful in helping me continue to play, and establish my own style.

The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom: Essential Lessons for Collective Action – Erik Nordman

An excellent, very approachable introduction to Elinor Ostrom and her research into community management of common-pool resources using example stories.. think water rights, forestry, space exploration, fishing, climate, open source software…

I’m doing some work and thinking around The Commons, The Common Good, Common Pool Resources – and this is a great intro to Ostrom’s Nobel Prize winning work.

I do wish it were a bit deeper, but it’s a wonderful introduction.

What are your favorite reads of this year?

Here are my favorite reads from 2023.

pat loughery