My year in reading, 2024 edition

All the books I read in the past year

A very small sampling of the books I read this year.

As 2024 draws to a close, I’m once again sharing my list of the books I’ve read in the past year, with a short synopsis/review of each. I hope this gives you some ideas for what to read (or not read, as the case may be) in the coming year.

I’ve divided the list pretty straightforwardly into fiction and nonfiction. Sometimes in previous years I’ve tried to make finer distinctions like “memoir and autobiography” or “spiritual nonfiction,” but somehow the categories always overlap one another and mess up my plan. So I’m keeping it simple and listing the books alphabetically by author in the two main categories.

Once again, the usual disclaimers:

• These opinions are mine and mine alone.

• I was not paid to give a review, nor was I paid NOT to give a review. Basically I wasn’t paid at all — which is outrageous, come to think of it!

• Sorry if I liked something you didn’t like or didn’t like something you liked.

FICTION

The Midnight News - Jo Baker.
(This one is by the author of Longbourn, which I read and enjoyed a few years ago.) It’s a gripping novel about a young woman in WWII London. After two important people in her life die, she begins to believe a mysterious shadowy figure is responsible for their deaths. But she has already had one mental breakdown in the past; she is not sure who can she trust now to believe her story and help her find the truth. This one will keep you turning the pages.

The Other Bennet Sister - Janice Hadlow.
I was excited to read this one (it’s also going to be made into a TV series), and it was even better than I expected. It focuses on Mary, the dour, straitlaced middle sister of Pride & Prejudice’s Bennet family, and imagines her perspective on the events of that novel and where life may have taken her afterward. The book captures the Austen-esque style very well as it chronicles the ups and downs of Mary’s struggles to find her own voice and place in the world. I could really relate to Mary and found her journey satisfying and quite heroic in a quiet way.

The Life Impossible - Matt Haig.
I thoroughly enjoyed this latest novel by the author of The Midnight Library. An English widow named Grace finds out that a young woman she met and helped many years ago has died in Ibiza under strange circumstances and has left her a house there. Grace goes to claim her inheritance and gets caught up in a supernatural mystery connected to the fight to protect the island’s natural wonders. In the process, she also has to deal with the guilt and grief she is carrying over some past family heartbreaks. Haig's books always carry a positive, uplifting message as well as being really good stories.

The Fortunate Brother - Donna Morrissey.
This was one of three books of Morrissey’s I read this year (see her memoir below in the Nonfiction category). It’s the third novel in her series about the Now family, and many of the events in the series are drawn directly from her own life. I had already read Sylvanus Now (about the decline of the Newfoundland cod fishery and its effects on a family in a small village) and What They Wanted (about two of the younger Nows who go to work in the Alberta oil fields and encounter tragedy there). The Fortunate Brother concerns not only the family’s grief over what happened in Alberta but also their entanglement in the murder of a local bully. It was good, though I liked the earlier ones better.

Rage the Night - Donna Morrissey.
This book (Morrissey’s latest, and unrelated to the series mentioned above) was the first novel I read this year, and I'd say it was my favourite. It is just so good. It’s about Roan, a young man in northern Newfoundland in 1914, who has been raised by a kind doctor but knows nothing of his own birth or parentage. He leaves the only home he has ever known and travels across the vast province to board a sealing vessel in St. John’s because he has heard one of the seal hunters might hold the key to his past. The story is based on a real-life Newfoundland sealing disaster, and Morrissey’s depiction of the horrific conditions and the heroism of this ill-fated expedition is incredibly vivid and suspenseful.

The Authenticity Project - Claire Pooley.
This one was a fun read. Several unconnected people are brought together by a mysterious green notebook, in which the original owner has written about how people should be more authentic with one another and not hide behind facades and pretense. As these various people find the notebook, read it, and write in it themselves, their lives become intertwined — and changed — in unexpected ways.

The Maid and The Mystery Guest - Nita Prose.
I read The Maid at the recommendation of a friend and absolutely loved it, as did Allison — so we quickly devoured its sequel, too. Molly, a maid in a fancy hotel, is loyal, meticulous, and probably neurodivergent. Her closest confidante and supporter was her late grandmother, also a maid, who taught Molly everything she needed to know about her chosen career. Molly’s carefully organized world is turned upside down when a murder occurs in the hotel and she tries to solve the mystery while being under suspicion herself. She finds out in the process that while her judgment of people’s intentions and motives isn’t always accurate, there’s a community of people out there ready to care about and support her. The second book, The Mystery Guest, delves more deeply into Molly’s childhood and her grandmother’s past. There are more books coming out in the series, and I look forward to reading more about this endearing character.

Long Island - Colm Toibin.
This was one of the few duds I read this year. I enjoyed Toibin’s novel Brooklyn (which was made into a lovely movie) about an Irish girl named Eilis who travels to New York to find work and faces a choice between two men, one of whom she has already married. Long Island is a sequel to Brooklyn. At the beginning of the book, Eilis discovers another woman is pregnant with her husband’s child, and she resolutely refuses to have anything to do with the baby or her husband again. Returning to Ireland, she has the opportunity to rekindle an old flame. The concept is intriguing, but the reality didn’t live up to it. I read the whole thing because it was an easy read and I wanted to find out more about characters I’d come to love from the Brooklyn movie in particular — but even for Toibin, whose style is quite understated, this book was flat. I wanted to love it, but it was pretty forgettable.

This is Happiness - Niall Williams.
This book is a real treasure. It’s set in the late 50s in the Irish village of Faha where Noel (“Noe”) Crowe, a lonely, grieving young man, is living with his grandparents. When Christy, a member of the team bringing electricity to the town, comes to board at their house (and to right a wrong from his past), Noe’s life is changed. Williams isn’t just telling us a story, he’s also introducing us to a place and time long past. He takes his time introducing us to the eccentric characters in the village, inviting us to slow down, enjoy the unfolding of their stories, and see how all the threads weave together toward a satisfying conclusion. I loved it.

Time of the Child - Niall Williams.
Williams’s newest novel brings us back to the village of Faha and many of the same characters introduced in This is Happiness. The lives of the widowed Dr. Troy and his unmarried daughter Ronnie are altered when an abandoned baby is brought to them; the doctor devises a plan to subdue the scandal and perhaps reunite Ronnie with the man he believes she loves. The book is warm and humorous, and as it moves slowly to its conclusion it’s so touching. I’m glad I found out about Williams’s books, and I look forward to reading some of his earlier ones in 2025.

NONFICTION

The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder - William Anderson, editor.
This interesting collection gives lots of detail and background to Wilder’s life as a world famous writer, a farmer’s wife, a journalist, and more. The only thing I didn’t like was how Every. Single. Letter. is preceded by a brief quotation from it, in a fancy font. That’s unnecessary and just clutters the pages.

Bright Shining: How Grace Changes Everything - Julia Baird.
I enjoyed this exploration of the concept of grace and how it shows up in individual lives in the midst of personal tragedy and social and national crisis. Related themes like forgiveness and reconciliation are addressed as well. Baird doesn’t give easy answers, but she shows the courage and strength of human beings in the face of great suffering.

It Wasn’t Roaring, It Was Weeping: Interpreting the Language of Our Fathers Without Repeating Their Stories - Lisa-Jo Baker.
One of the most powerful and beautiful memoirs I’ve read in a while. Baker, who grew up in South Africa, was a teen when her mother died and she was left with her volatile, rageful father, who took his own grief and childhood hurts out on her. When she saw the pattern recurring in her own life as a parent, she vowed to break the cycle and revisit her past and her father’s, in order to write a new story with him.

Field Notes From the Wilderness: Practices for an Evolving Faith - Sarah Bessey.
Bessey’s book is for anyone who’s struggling with faith, with church, and with God and wondering if there’s a place for them in the Christian story and community. In her warm, encouraging style, Bessey explores various practices and perspectives that might be helpful to anyone faltering on the journey — themes like hope, change, loving the world, truth-telling, lament, joy, and more. I know I'll be returning to this one again and again. (A guided journal is also available to accompany this book; I was fortunate enough to receive a free copy of that in a pre-order offer.)

The Message - Ta-Nehisi Coates.
This small book by the author of Between the World and Me and We Were Eight Years in Power is basically about the stories we’ve been told or have told, and how they sometimes need to be rewritten. Coates discusses his travels to Senegal, where myth and truth about African kingdoms intertwine; to Columbia, South Carolina, where he attends a meeting about a movement to ban his books from schools; and Palestine, where he faces the fact that some of his published writings about the conflict there have been uninformed and naive. Coates’s writing is beautiful and reflective, and he is always willing to rethink his approach to important issues.

First Love: Essays on Friendship - Lilly Dancyger.
I enjoyed this book of essays on the female friendships in Dancyger’s life and the way they have shaped her — particularly the tragic death of her cousin, which became the impetus for her writing of the book.

Negative Space - Lilly Dancyger.
In this excellent memoir, the author explores her relationship with her father, a gifted, charismatic artist who struggled with addiction and died when Lilly was 12. In adulthood, as she searches for messages in his artistic works and talks to her mother and her father’s friends and past lovers, she realizes the mythology she’s created of who her father was is incomplete and needs to be dismantled.

How to Walk Into a Room: The Art of Knowing When to Stay and When to Walk Away - Emily P. Freeman. I would have benefited from this book earlier in life. Freeman talks about the rooms we find ourselves in, whether by choice or fate, and how to know whether to stay in them or leave, and when. As we might expect, there are no magic answers to these questions — just things to think about as we make decisions about life’s stages and changes, as we all do. I loved this one.

Consent: A Memoir of Unwanted Attention - Donna Freitas.
Wow. This memoir was incredibly powerful, shocking, and infuriating. In the 1990s Freitas attended a Catholic university as a graduate student and was mentored by a respected professor who was also a priest. She was flattered and excited by his interest in her work and his encouragement of her academic pursuits — but then his friendly mentorship turned into obsessive stalking: urging her to take more of his classes, calling her, visiting her, making inroads into her family, and on and on. Freitas explores in detail how these kinds of situations can escalate, how young women — particularly in hierarchical systems like academia and the Church — can be taken in by older mentors they look up to, then gaslit and made to feel guilty and doubtful about what is happening. Really good, but not an easy read.

Breathe, Cry, Breathe: From Sorrow to Strength in the Aftermath of Sudden, Tragic Loss - Catherine Gourdier.
This memoir focuses on a tragic incident in 2009 here in Kingston, Ontario. An elderly couple and their 40-year-old daughter with Down Syndrome were hit by a car while walking across a road after dark on their way home from church. The mother and daughter died of their injuries, and the father, while unhurt, died weeks later of shock and grief. The author, a filmmaker, is the oldest daughter of the family. The early chapters are devastating in their recounting of this horrific event and its impact on their large, close family. But the later chapters — which chronicle Gourdier’s obsessive efforts to fix things and to focus responsibility on the 84-year-old driver (whose age police firmly said was not a primary factor) or the lack of a crosswalk — left me a bit unsettled. It appears her siblings were not always supportive of these efforts or of her book, but everyone copes with grief in their own way, and unfortunately some of those ways can isolate and alienate us from others. I also saw that the author responded to some reader criticisms on Goodreads and even rated her own book(!!), which made me think her authorial judgment perhaps wasn’t the best. But the incident was indisputably tragic and sad, and she conveys that vividly.

End of the Hour: A Therapist’s Memoir - Meghan Riordan Jarvis.
Jarvis, a therapist, developed severe PTSD after her mother died suddenly two years after her father's death from cancer. She sought help from the same mental health facility to which she referred her own clients, and worked to uncover old childhood trauma and come to terms with her losses. This is a raw but inspiring memoir.

The Brave In-Between: Notes From the Last Room - Amy Low.
This is a memoir of the author’s battle with incurable Stage IV cancer. Low, a Christian, chooses the Apostle Paul’s words from Philippians (“Whatever is pure, whatever is lovely,” etc.) to structure her narrative. But I think her story would be compelling enough without this template; it makes her narrative kind of artificial and contrived at times. I was also put off at one point when her doctor was discussing potential treatments with her and said she had certain advantages such as being thin. At the end of the appointment Low said, “Just to clarify: you’re saying I’m thin?” The doctor was not complimenting her! It seemed tasteless to use a clinical discussion to highlight her slim body size — and to share it with her readers (at least not without some disclaimer like “I realize I was trying to cope with my fear by grasping anything that boosted my ego”). Overall this book was pretty good, but I feel it could have been better.

Becoming Green Gables: The Diary of Myrtle Webb and Her Famous Farmhouse - Alan MacEachern.
The author, who is also my brother, has written an interesting, original book based on the diary of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s cousin Mrytle Webb, who with her husband Ernest owned the Prince Edward Island farm that became famous as the location inspiring Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. MacEachern presents a selection of the brief, bare-bones entries from Webb’s diary, which spanned the years from 1924 to 1954. To each entry he adds detailed, well-researched commentary on topics such as farm life, the roles and responsibilities of women, the PEI tourism industry (the Webbs hosted and boarded countless tourists from around the world who came seeking the Anne connection), World War II, and the development of the PEI National Park which ended up making the Webbs essentially government employees in their own home. A fascinating book about an ordinary woman and family caught up in an extraordinary situation.

The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church - Sarah McCammon.
This is a kind of hybrid of memoir and journalism. McCammon grew up in and was deeply influenced by evangelical Christianity, yet started to question many of its assumptions, particularly in 2015 when Christians embraced Donald Trump’s run for the Republican nomination for president. I found it very interesting.

Moving On Doesn’t Mean Letting Go: A Modern Guide to Navigating Loss - Gina Moffa.
This book on grief and loss — of all kinds — is really good. Moffa, a therapist, writes in a caring, empathetic way about her own sorrow over her mother’s death and what she has learned about how individual and personal the grief journey is.

Pluck: A memoir of a Newfoundland childhood and the raucous, terrible, amazing journey to becoming a novelist - Donna Morrissey.
I have read and enjoyed several of Morrissey’s novels (see two of them above in the Fiction category), and her memoir did not disappoint. It chronicles her childhood in a small Newfoundland village, her move to the Alberta oil fields where tragedy strikes her already grieving family, marriage and motherhood, and her development as a writer. I loved it.

Everything Sad is Untrue (A True Story) - Daniel Nayeri.
This beautiful memoir, written as if Nayeri is addressing his classmates in his Oklahoma school, weaves together fanciful tales and anecdotes from his family and ancestors with his experiences as a child fleeing Iran with his mother (whose conversion to Christianity was a serious offence), living in a refugee camp in Italy, and eventually settling in the United States. Sad, funny, and very moving.

Holy Runaways: Rediscovering Faith After Being Burned By Religion - Matthias Roberts.
An excellent book about faith deconstruction and reconstruction. Roberts faced his own questions about the church and faith when he came out publicly. He sought acceptance within his family and the church he’d grown up in, but realized he had to find a new kind of belonging. As a therapist, Roberts uses a trauma-informed approach to talk about why leaving what we’ve always known is so hard; why we sometimes end up repeating the same oppressive, even violent patterns we’ve fled from; and how important it is to find healthy environments where, like seeds, we can be nourished and grow.

Flannery at the Grammys - Irwin Streight.
This interesting, well-researched book discusses the influence of writer Flannery O’Connor on such diverse musicians as U2, Sufjan Stevens, Bruce Springsteen, Lucinda Williams, and others.

The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience From the Forest Floor - Lore Ferguson Wilbert.
This is a lovely book. Wilbert explores various elements of the forest floor — seeds, lichen, mud, decomposing leaves, etc. — as metaphors for human growth and change. She talks about her own experiences as a seeker and questioner in a church and a culture that she was finding more and more unfamiliar and disorienting. She grieves broken relationships, traumatic moves, and other difficult life passages, using the forest as the context for her reflections.

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Well, that’s my list for 2024. Next book up for me will be Elizabeth Strout’s latest, Tell Me Everything, which I was determined not to rush through just to get it on this year’s list — it’ll just have to wait for 2025, when I will tell you everything. (Did you see what I did there?)

I’d love to know if you’ve read any of the books on my list and what you thought of them — and I’d love to hear what you read and liked this year. Let me know in the comments!