It’s been a minute since I participated in Top Ten Tuesday, because that exhausted student life has caught up with me (apparently that happens even during your fourth degree), but I couldn’t resist this topic, particularly on this very apt date!
Yep, it’s the best of 2024, according to me. Let’s go!
- Heaven Official’s Blessing, by Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiù. This was an inevitable choice. I started reading The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System in 2023, so of the two MXTX novels I’ve read so far, this was the more obvious pick for “best of 2024” (even though I finished Scum Villain in 2024, and it is very fun). It’s an epic love story, but the plot around the love story is pretty astounding too, with Xie Lian’s principles being tested again and again and again. No matter what, though, he has Hua Cheng at his side — and Feng Xin and Mu Qing too, bickering all the way. I love so many of the characters, love the world, and love Xie Lian’s journey to prove that you don’t have to save yourself at the cost of others.
- A Gentle Noble’s Vacation Recommendation, by Misaki, Momochi and Sando. I’d love to read the light novel, but for now what we have in translation is the manga — and I fell in love with it all in a heap this December. There are nine volumes out, with the tenth dropping in late January. It’s a fairly low-stakes story: Lizel gets transported to another world, where he proceeds to very competently secure himself an adventurer to show him the ropes and a coterie of fans to make life smooth for him. He’s clearly not as sweet (or at least, not as simply sweet) as people think, but Gil sees through him. It’s not a romance, explicitly, but the bonds he forms with Gil, Eleven, Ray, Judge and Studd (and his existing bond with his king) are pretty heavily coded as romances and crushes. I adore Lizel and his excitement about bookshops, and particularly his “friendship”(?) with Gil. I have a few critiques (female characters where?) but I’ve had so much fun with this series.
- A Letter to the Luminous Deep, by Sylvie Cathrall. This is a debut that absolutely stole my heart. It’s a bittersweet story, since we see E. and Henery falling in love through their letters when they’ve already been lost, and their siblings working through what happened with grief and love. All the same, I love how the mysteries unfold and intertwine, I love the personalities revealed through their letters, and the world we’re presented with. It’s the first of a series and I absolutely can’t wait. It’s haunted me: when I was partway through it, I kept picking it up to read just a little more, and getting lost for a hundred pages at a time; since then, thoughts of how it’s all going to work out have kept coming back to me.
- The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, by Roland Allen. This was one of my earliest reads of the year, and I loved it. It’s a ramble through the history of humans using notebooks to think, from simple jottings of numbers to bullet journals, ICU diaries, morning pages, and more. I’ve been a journaller most of my life (though not always on paper), and loved the rambling trip through the history of it. Learning about ICU diaries made me cry, and I gave morning pages a shot because of it. (It’d have gone better if I had more time — maybe when I’m no longer a student?) Definitely a recommended non-fiction.
- Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries, by Heather Fawcett. It has a bit of a flavour of the Isabella Trent books (by Marie Brennan), which attracted me. It’s by no means a copy, but I could imagine Emily and Isabella getting along beautifully, and they share the same kind of “deranged practicality” that’s Isabella’s hallmark. I love Emily’s serious study of faeries of all types, her knowledge and competence, contrasting with her relative inability with people. (Lovers of Isabella: Emily is even worse at handling stuff like local politics, and doesn’t generally get that kind of thing to come right by her own meddling efforts either.) I found both books of the series so far a lot of pure fun, and not too heavy on the romance as to eclipse Emily’s serious academic endeavours.
- The Mountain in the Sea, by Ray Nayler. In a way this is three books in one, and I preferred one of the three (and didn’t think that the other two stories wove in as well as they ought to have done). But I was so fascinated by the thread I did love that that didn’t matter. I really, really loved this one, and read it in just a few sittings, always reading just a liiiiittle bit more, just a few more pages won’t hurt, etc, etc. I think it has some weak points, but it presents such a compelling thought experiment that that kind of didn’t matter. I don’t know how well I’m selling this, but it had me mesmerised.
- Moneta: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome in Twelve Coins, by Gareth Harney. This is the kind of history I’ve found myself really liking, where history is teased out of a physical artefact or collection of a similar type of physical artefact. In this case, coins. Harney writes really compellingly, fascinated about his own subject, which is always the most fun kind of non-fiction to read. I usually find it easier to set non-fiction aside for a bit even when I find it really interesting, but I was constantly picking Moneta up to read just a bit more.
- Hands of Time: A Watchmaker’s History, by Rebecca Struthers. On a similar vein, this tells us the history of watches, and a little bit about the history of the wider world through discussing watches and the changes in timepieces. It’s another one that I found hard to put down, finding myself as absorbed in the detail as Struthers describes being in the watches she mends. It lent me a bit more appreciation for the pocket watch of my grandfather’s that I’ll be inheriting once it’s been fixed.
- Honey and Pepper, by A.J. Demas. This is a romance set in an alternate Greece, and I ended up really loving the characters. I had some quibbles about the portrayal of slavery (it’s obviously negative, but some of the characters are neck-deep in slaves when they suddenly decide to free them and support them — which doesn’t and shouldn’t erase a lifetime of keeping humans as slaves), but it does try to be nuanced and handle the fact that one of the main characters has complicated feelings about it all.
- What Moves the Dead, by T. Kingfisher. Horror isn’t entirely my thing, but this novella managed to tiptoe juuust around the edges of things that trigger my anxiety too much, giving a sense of unease that worked well. It’s a retelling of “The Fall of the House of Usher”, but it’s far more than that too, introducing the character of Alex Easton and an element of Ruritanian romance in kan’s origins and cultural baggage. There’s a bunch of fun characters, and Ursula Vernon/T. Kingfisher always writes very engagingly. I liked the sequel too, but What Moves The Dead felt creepier and managed that unease better.
That was a mix of my four and five star reads (I’m stingy, there weren’t many of the latter), and it was very difficult to narrow down what should be included here. Honorable mentions go to The Warden, Out of the Drowning Deep, Rose/House, Written in Bone and The Eye of Osiris.
