My Highest Rated Book from Each Month of 2024
The problem is that data makes for weird inconsistencies that vibes don't. Like some months you read a ton of incredible books and other months you don't really care for anything that you read. A top book of March might not hold the same weight as a top book in July, and there are books I loved that got left off this list. Even within the same month, I've realized that certain ratings have a lot more love behind them than others. Also, sometimes, I give multiple books the highest rating and that changes the totals. Finally, there are books that are rereads that I wouldn't count in a normal end of year list that slip through here and throw off the balance. I'm including them because I'm going to stick true to my spreadsheet and the ratings. If you want to see where my head was at on a month by month basis, here are my top rated reads of every month that fall somewhere between 4 and 5 stars.
January
Everything I Need I Get From You by Kaitlyn Tiffany and Come and Get It by Kiley Reid
January's top rated are comprised of a reread of a nonfiction book that I love that I was reading again as I started my final thesis project for college graduation. Then Come and Get It had me totally in love with it when I picked up the ARC. My enthusiasm hasn't clung on through the year as highly (maybe tampered by reading so many negative reviews), but maybe that's just a symptom of time. This is one of those books that I enjoyed while I read it but didn't revisit in my mind often. I don't get the excessive negativity, though. It's very different and much more character driven than Such a Fun Age (and much less commercial), but I feel like this one didn't get enough love.
February
Martyr by Kaveh Akbar and Beautiful World Where Are You by Sally Rooney
(honorable mention: Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly, Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn, and A Swim in the Pond in the Rain by George Saunders)
February was a 10/10 reading month for me (as you can see by all the books that got .5 stars lower than a perfect 5 and I still felt I had to mention). Some of my fondest bookish memories are from February because of the back to back excellence across both fiction and nonfiction. Martyr captivated me from the start, and I ended up buying a copy a few months later to add to my permanent collection. BWWAY was a reread, and it just gets better every time. The style the novel is written in actually inspired this short story I wrote around that time and published months later.
March
Filterworld by Kyle Chayka
As you can see, March was sort of a strike out where I went into a bit of a slump period of a few months where nothing particularly captured me. Filterworld is an excellent nonfiction read, but it's rare that a nonfiction audiobook edges out all the novels. But these were also my last months of college, so I was busy and in a weird spot mentally, which probably also led to this. But because you're clearly online if you're reading this post, you should also read Chayka's book. It's a fantastic dissection of these new ecosystems we're all living in.
April
The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan
This was a quick, interesting read with very spare prose. I can't say that the book really stayed with me longterm, but it was an interesting literary portrait of a woman who experiences sudden hearing loss and has to alter the way she exists in the world.
May
Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman
I have weird mixed feelings about this one because I enjoyed the book and thought it was a concept that is often under-explored in literature, but I still can't get over the icky feeling that I had after hearing Waldman discuss her motivations and approach to writing the book. How she decided to work at a big box store to step outside of her bubble and get to know people she wouldn't encounter otherwise, which is fine. But the way she phrased it came off to me like she found herself so largely removed from people who would work the night shift at a big box store that she needed to visit them like an anthropologist, and it seriously made me question if she was the right person to be telling these stories as an outsider trying on this life essentially for fun when so many of her characters had no choice in the conditions of their employment. So this is a case of really liking a book but the larger picture around it making me uneasy.
June
Normal People by Sally Rooney and Mother Doll by Katya Apekina
Obviously, I reread a lot of Rooney this year. That's a big theme. But Mother Doll was the first book that really lit up my brain in a long time. The prose and the way the intricate story was weaved captured my heart and my brain. I couldn't put it down, and it definitely reignited my reading spark in the middle of a busy summer work season.
July
The Anthropologists by Ayśegül Savaș
I find this one interesting because it's much like Hearing Test in being short and very literary in its plain portraiture, but there's something about The Anthropologist that has stayed with me as the main character observes the simple happenings of the lives around her. There's so much withheld, and it's unlike really any other novel I read this year in how much it managed to do with so little.
August
The Wedding People by Allison Espach and The Book of George by Kate Greathead
The Wedding People is one of those books that I marveled over how good it was while I read it. I appreciated every second of it in the moment. It's rare that a close third person achieves this level of intimacy, and being in the thick of working on my novel, this ability was extra impressive to my writer brain. I also read The Book of George as an ARC in August, which I enjoyed in an entirely different way. It was interesting to see how Greathead took a character who was basically born of a trope and made him both generally infuriating while also sympathetic.
September
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
I read a lot of new release books in September, so it'll tell you what I thought of them that it was my reread of Conversations to complete my year of rereading Rooney to prepare for Intermezzo is what came out on top. It felt like a breath of fresh air after not enjoying much of anything I read in September. You'll also note that the reread outranked a certain new release I was very excited for...
October
Evenings and Weekends by Oisin McKenna
I read a ton of books while traveling because of plane and train downtime. While Evenings and Weekends certainly has an abundance of flaws, it's going to hold a place in my heart forever for being a reading experience so intimately linked with a period of my life. I've rarely had a cooler match-up experience about reading this book largely set in Dalston while staying in Dalston. Objectively, this probably should've been Colored Television which made the vibes honorable mentions.
November
The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes, Service by Sarah Gilmartin, and Monsters by Claire Dederer
November was another major reading month for me because I bought way too many books on my trip, so I had a ton of books I was motivated to read. I know if they sit on my shelf for too long, I forget to pick them up, so I wasn't going to let that happen. And every book that I picked up was better than the last, so it was the most successful book haul for liking the books I picked out cold. There were plenty of new favorites that came out of this month, and each book being so good made me want to pick up the next one.
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