The Verge’s favorite books from 2024

When it comes to entertainment and education, we can choose from podcasts, videos, games, live performances, or books, one of the oldest and still most popular ways to learn something new or escape (at least temporarily) from today’s troubled world. We asked the staff of The Verge what their favorite reads were in 2024. Their answers ranged from fantasy and science fiction to histories of engineering and clothing to autobiographies, insights on body image, and more.

Read on, and see if there’s anything here that you want to check out during the holidays.

When recommending novels, I usually try to go with those that come from independent presses or that aren’t on anyone’s bestseller list because there are so many books and authors that don’t get the attention they deserve. However, this year, I’ve gone against my usual habit and chosen two books that are popular and publicized retakes of well-known tales, simply because I could not put either down.

James is an incredibly intelligent and insightful retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the boy’s companion, the enslaved man named Jim. And The Bright Sword is a fantastic (in both senses of the word) retelling of the mythos of King Arthur that takes place just after Arthur’s death, from the viewpoint of a neglected young man who defies the class system to become a knight. Both books are not only extraordinarily well written but also bring new and unexpected insights into tales that have been so microscopically examined over the years that you’d think there was nothing new to add. But in the case of both of these books, you’d be wrong.

Like most millennials, I grew up on a steady diet of daytime Food Network shows when I stayed home from school. Barefoot Contessa was always my number one. There was some form of procedural satisfaction about watching as this grandmotherly hostess spent hours, seemingly effortlessly, preparing a meal for a 20-person gathering, only to wistfully sigh, smile, and never enjoy the fruits of her own labor. So when I heard the Barefoot Contessa Ina Garten was writing a memoir, I knew I was already bought in. 

I’ll put it plainly: this book is perplexing. From her previous stint as a US nuclear budget analyst to learning how to fly planes to five entire chapters about how she wanted to decorate her Paris apartment, it’s a memoir that will have you constantly asking yourself, “Is this lady for real?” (There is a lot of “quiet money” as an explanation for her various achievements.) It’s a trip!

I listened to the audiobook (she narrates), and hearing her lilting, peaceful voice talk about her rough childhood, relationship with her fan-favorite investment banker husband Jeffrey, and her (at the time) radical decision to not have children reminded me that we’re all human and all experience life’s trials. Ina just has the unique ability to make it all look like luck.

Bill Hammack is a professor of engineering who is better known as “engineerguy” on YouTube, where, for years, he’s shared compelling videos breaking down the complex engineering of seemingly simple items we often take for granted. Think diapers, soda cans, and duct tape. His book, The Things We Make, does the same thing but provides more in-depth looks at the engineering behind ancient marvels like medieval cathedrals. It’s worth a read just to learn how the microwave was created and eventually found its way into the average home.

This deranged collection of linked stories is so preposterously good that I’ve read lines from it out loud to friends at dinner parties, on the subway, and once, in a public sauna. In this viscerally uncomfortable, laugh-out-loud, straight-up gorgeous book, Tulathimutte scrapes bare the corners of the internet and (forgive me) the contours of the human heart so piercingly that reading it is like a long-range emotional endurance exercise. I can’t stop thinking about it or talking about it. Disclosure: the author is my friend, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a genius. Buy a copy for yourself and for your weirdest, smartest pal.

This will surprise nobody: Midnight in Chernobyl is not an uplifting read. But it is meticulously well reported and an incredibly comprehensive look at the Chernobyl disaster, from the inception of the nuclear power plant to the aftermath visited on generations of people affected by its explosion. It’s all very matter-of-fact but recounts the events before, during, and after the disaster with remarkable humanity and places it all in the broader context of Soviet corruption without ever feeling like a history textbook. It is a thick book, and I could not put it down.

On a lighter note, I also picked up St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, an older collection of short stories from Karen Russell. The way she can just punch you in the guts with a sentence is unfair. The stories mostly feature kids in those awkward middle school-ish / early teen years, and they’re a little (or a lot) surreal. There’s a sleepaway camp for kids with sleeping disorders, a seaside formation of giant conch shells that might be haunted, and the titular home for girls raised by wolves, which is what it says on the tin. It makes you remember how hard it is to be growing up and more than once cracked my heart right open.

I read a lot of books this year, but these three stuck out because they made me think a lot about perspective. Notes on an Execution is the story of a serial killer on death row, narrated by both himself and three women whose lives he upended: his mother, his wife’s sister, and the detective chasing him down. The Travelling Cat Chronicles is told from the point of view of Nana, a sassy stray cat, as he accompanies his adopted human Satoru across Japan, trying to figure out why Satoru needs to rehome him. (Warning: you might want a tissue box if you’re a cat owner.) Meanwhile, The Memory Police is a dystopian story of a small island in which the government can make certain people’s memories of objects and things disappear at will — and one person’s choice to hide a friend who can still remember things they shouldn’t. (Its vibe is like The Giver by Lois Lowry, but make it Japanese.)  

They’re all different books, but I’ve been thinking about them all year because they deftly dig into why we make the choices we do — and how those choices are viewed and felt by the people around us. Each book made me look in the mirror and think about the sort of person I am and who I want to be. I think that’s the best kind of fiction, really.

My only regret about reading The Steerswoman (and its three sequels) this year is that I did not read it 30 years ago — this book would absolutely have become a formative part of my personal adolescent canon.

The best way I can describe the Steerswomen is as a wandering order of largely female natural philosophers. They observe, deduce, test, and share knowledge in a slow-motion, preindustrial world, and the way Kirstein lays out her prose and her characters encourages the same in the reader. Several times during the series, I formed conclusions that were not borne out by the evidence and had to discard them — and did not mind doing so because that was just… part of the process. 

I read a lot of genre fiction, and I love a slow burn, so The Steerswoman fits the brief. But also I admire Kirstein’s respect for the intelligence and wit of both her characters and her readers; she brings you along on the journey and trusts you to understand the people you’re journeying with. Despite starting the series 35 years ago, she’s still slowly adding to it, and to say I am looking forward to a fifth installment in coming years is a massive understatement. I will preorder and devour it when another book comes along.

Look, I love clothes. I research them, I buy them, I even make them. Fashion is an essential part of how we express ourselves and our ideas (if you don’t trust me, ask Steve Jobs). But the journey of how our fashion gets to us is purposely opaque, because the truth is far more upsetting than many of us are ready for — especially in this era of ultrafast, dirt-cheap clothing.

Sofi Thanhauser’s 2022 book is a pickax to this wall of secrecy. She traces the hidden history and costs of five types of textiles — linen, cotton, silk, synthetics, and wool — in this deeply reported work. Thanhauser travels to locales like China to learn from the last producer of ancient silk; to the North Carolina town where textile mill workers staged large-scale strikes in the 1920s; and to Northern England, where conservation groups are protecting local sheep biodiversity. This book isn’t just for fashion people (though they should be the first to read it); it’s for anyone curious about the labor that goes into the luxuries they take for granted. You will never look at a T-shirt the same way again.

As someone who is, more often than not, the fattest person in the room, it’s no surprise that I have struggled a lot with my body image and self-worth. That, on top of the guilt over feeling bad about feeling bad, ends up compounding like the interest on my student loans (and because “body positivity” feels like a pipe dream to a girl whose mind is riddled with body dysmorphic brain worms). 

Enter Jessi Kneeland, a former personal trainer turned body image coach, whose central thesis revolves around the notion that our body image issues are always a symptom of a larger and more complicated internal conflict. Through this, they share insight on how to identify the true source of a person’s body image issues as well as clearly outlined steps on what to do about it. “Life-changing” is an understatement.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest book is an exploration of the concept of storytelling, told through a series of essays centered around three different locations. Dakar, Senegal, a historic site of the transatlantic slave trade; Columbia, South Carolina, where a school teacher fights an attempted banning of Coates’ own book; and finally, Palestine, where he spends a few days in May 2023 observing the stark contrasts between life in Gaza and Israel. It left me with a sense of optimism (or maybe blind faith?) that despite how hopeless the present moment can feel, our collective imaginations are ever shifting toward something better than before.