A Most Precious Pearl

My Favorite Books of 2024 + Dreaming about 2025

December 29, 2024

The week after Christmas is my favorite of the year. It feels like the hours where the world sleeps and I get to dream in the crisp silence of night. This is the week I fantasize most about where I could go in the New Year—how many countries is feasible with my budget and time off work? How much do I want to be away from family? (The answer: As little as possible, but the call of the world is irresistible.)

Most of us already know whether or not a year has been good to us long before December, if we’d ever repeat it given the chance. I have mixed feelings about 2024—I progressed in my grad program, got to visit four countries for the first time (which I will be sharing here soon—the posts are in progress), and spent the summer home with family. But I also struggled immensely. My mental health was like a string pulled taut for the majority of fall semester. A writing workshop pushed me past my limits and creative energy was hard to come by. My dog almost died and plane tickets were $700, so a weekend home was out of the question. I spent August to November homesick for the South, for Music City, for a feeling I can’t put my finger on. And in this December, everything caught up to me. A clarity I haven’t felt in years sweeps over.

2024 was good, but 2025 feels like a most precious pearl in a shell that is creaking open. Just barely, its sheen is visible. I can’t look away.

In this time of reflection, days with loved ones, and pondering what is next, I wrote this list of my favorite books of the year. Out of the 32 books I read, these were the novels that really stuck with me, and I’m sure will remain on my conscience in years to come—especially the number one pick.

What books did you love this year? Share below if you so desire. :-)

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The Zone of Interest, by Martin Amis

This book changed things for me. The subject matter is incredibly difficult, and I emphasize incredibly. The Zone of Interest is Auschwitz, so that explains at least some of the tension in this novel. But Martin Amis takes this place and this time and writes characters that make the depravity of this place ring so clearly. The novel is told from the perspectives of three characters: the Kommandant, a lower-ranking Nazi in love with the Kommandant’s wife, and a Jewish prisoner. All three are vital to the plot—the Kommandant is sold out for the cause, the lower-ranking Nazi is disillusioned but still anti-Semitic. But the Jewish prisoner’s chapters? The book would not and should not exist without them.

The novel was published ten years ago and was adapted for screen this year. The screenplay does deviate from Amis’ plot significantly, but both forms are so compelling. The film shows more of the high-ranking Kommandant’s family living outside the camp as if nothing were happening within its walls. I don’t think the changes detract from the message, and it’s an even stronger reason to experience both the book and movie. They’re amazing. Proceed with caution, but I urge you to engage. This is how we never forget. We pay attention.

The full film is on HBO Max. Here’s the trailer on YouTube:

Swimming in the Dark, by Tomasz Jedrowski

After living in a Ukrainian community and working with locals, the experiences of people under the USSR are important to me. I never learned about this in school outside the Cold War and how the regime was perceived by Western countries. We never focused on daily life behind the Iron Curtain. After living in Ukraine, I seek out books like Swimming in the Dark.

This novel is the debut of a Polish author that has lived most of his life outside Poland. He wrote this novel about a forbidden love under Communist rule, where one of the pair is building political capital to rise in the ranks of society. I remembered Ukrainian neighbors explaining to me that this was the way to make do under the regime—even the best summer camps for children rode on parents’ political connections. The other lover grew up with his mother and grandmother listening to Radio Free Europe, strictly forbidden under the USSR. He dreams of defecting.

Beautiful writing, tension, an incredible sense of longing. This debut is stunning.

The Safekeep, by Yael van der Wouden

Also a debut, The Safekeep takes place in post-war Netherlands and the silent tension in this novel is so amazing it’s almost unbelievable. The story opens with Isabel, a woman who centers her life around the house she grew up in. The house isn’t even in her name, and it can’t be because she’s unwed in the 1960s—her brother is the heir, and humors her by allowing her to stay there. As for the house and its upkeep, he couldn’t care less. Leaves it all to her.

One day, he invites all the family to a dinner where he introduces his girlfriend, Eva. Isabel finds her incredibly off-putting—in every way, they are opposites. The plot heats up when he goes away on business and Eva comes to stay in the house. As it turns out, Eva is not who she claimed to be and this house has a history that intertwines both families irrevocably. This novel portrays a legacy of the Holocaust that is unforgettable and pervades all land touched by the war.

Beloved, by Toni Morrison

This book changed American letters forever. In many ways, it changed me, too.

In the novel, Sethe, an enslaved woman, runs away and successfully escapes a plantation called Sweet Home. (Morrison is amazing with names—they always mean something deeper.) After they all make it out to free Ohio, they are eventually tracked down by slave catchers that try to take them back. As soon as Sethe sees them coming in the yard, “the men without skin,” as she calls them, she kills her daughter Beloved to save her from the fate of being an enslaved girl. Then, one day, an apparition comes out of the river behind their house, and she comes to stay. She is Beloved in the age she would have been had she lived. Her appearance changes everything.

This book is more intense in a similar vein to The Zone of Interest, but it’s a must-read to me. Through all its themes, a thread persists: How does a human belong to oneself after being told, explicitly and implicitly, interpersonally and societally and legally and religiously and all the other -lys, that they belong to everyone else?

Beloved provides an answer of her own: ‘“I am Beloved’s and she is mine.”

The Empusium, by Olga Tokarczuk

I’m a bit biased on this one, because I love Olga Tokarczuk. I own every book she’s written that’s available in English. The Empusium is her newest release, and her first after winning the Nobel Prize. Her writing is beautiful, even after translation. The main character is a Polish young man living in the early 20th century, just before World War I. His affluent father, a widower, sent him to a health resort because he is, on the whole, defective. Less of a man than he “should be.” On top of that, he has tuberculosis, so off to the resort for clean mountain air and a regimen overseen by a doctor he goes.

The Empusium is marketed as a health resort horror story, and there is an ominous tone throughout. That being said, there’s much more happening than just a nebulous spirit out for blood. (Even though that’s happening, too.) There is an incredibly compelling conversation about gender Tokarczuk engages through this book, and that is why it’s amazing to me. You must read her closely to keep up; she is a demanding author. But when you do, when the world outside these pages melts away, the magic happens. My one gripe about this book is the lead-up took a while. But the climax and resolution of this plot—oh! I smiled the rest of the day.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz

I had no idea what to expect from this book, but it definitely wasn’t, well, this. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a generational saga of a family from the Dominican Republic. The youngest generation, which includes Oscar, lives in New Jersey. Oscar is obese, has no friends, and stays in the house all summer playing video games. It takes a college roommate his polar opposite to bring him out of his shell. Before coming full circle to the rest of Oscar’s story, the narrative takes on a generational saga and reveals each character’s relationship to the Dominican Republic. It follows the story of Oscar’s older sister after she’s sent to the island to live with a relative, then goes back in time to their mother’s adolescence. This continues until the time of the Trujillo dictatorship, where the story portrays how this family coped with living under a brutal surveillance state. It’s incredible. I flew through it this summer.

Junot Díaz wrote this novel almost in Spanglish. Dominican Spanish slang is thrown in as needed. There were moments I had to put the book down and look up words I never knew even after ten years of studying the language. I loved it. His form of storytelling gives this book so much character, makes each person so tangible. Highly recommend.

Honorable mentions:

Still Born, by Guadalupe Nettel. I loved many things about this one, namely its complicated plot. There were moments that the writing itself fell flat, but this could be due to translation. Still comes highly recommended, just not in the top of the year for me!

Butter, by Asako Yuzuki. This one has such a fascinating premise. It’s based on a true story of a journalist interviewing a female serial killer in Japan. I thought this book was good, but not amazing—many compelling moments, but some where the plot lapsed or took too long to reach its precipice.

Nightbitch, by Rachel Yoder. The vignette about the protagonist’s upbringing as a Mennonite and her agony at witnessing her mother forego her dream of being an opera singer in Europe is the most captivating vignette I read all year. On par even with the chapter in Beloved I wrote an entire 6,000-word paper on.

I hope this year has been good to you, and if it wasn’t, I hope the coming new year feels like 2024 was worth it. I hope in these slow days, where time feels different, that you are dreaming dreams you want to stay in. I hope you have your own pearl. <3

-S