I don't know about you, but I'm ending 2024 the same way I started: with an overwhelming sense of looming dread.
That makes me appreciate books all the more, because they turn the volume down on that background gahhhhh more effectively than almost anything else.
It especially makes me appreciate fantasy romance, where the underlying promise is that things will turn out well, often via the characters triumphing over all the looming-dread stuff.
(My best friend, also an author, saw this meme and immediately shared it with me because she knows me well.)
As I'm writing this, I'm on my 102nd book of the year. I don't normally count how many I read, but the question came up on Bookstagram, I took a wild guess of "more than 50?" and went off to check.
On the one hand, I could have filled some of that time with writing. (Sorry!)
On the other, it really kept me afloat this year. Writing does tend to go better when you're not, you know, doing continual variations on the Edvard Munch scream.
Here are just a few of those 102 books that kept me sane this year, in case you're in the market for that too:
Paladin's Grace by T. Kingfisher. A broken paladin and a perfumer "must navigate a web of treachery, beset on all sides by spies and poisoners," as the blurb puts it. The paladin is a sock-knitting sweetheart of a berserker and the perfumer's inner voice kept making me laugh out loud.
The London Charismatics series by Jacquelyn Benson. You know when you read the first book in a series, think it's fabulous, fully intend to read the rest and then life gets in the way? Well, this was my year for gobbling up the rest. X-Men, but as an Edwardian fantasy romance.
Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk. A hard-boiled detective in a fantasy version of 1940s Chicago needs to solve an impossible case to buy back her soul and stay with the love of her life. Could not put this novella down.
A Marvellous Light and the rest of the Last Binding trilogy by Freya Marske. A wizard and a baronet who's just discovered magic exists must team up to foil a sinister plot in Edwardian England. (Edwardian wizards and sinister plots? You can see why this appealed to me.)
And I'm lucky to have fantasy author friends who kept me in books with all the feels: cathartic (Lisette Marshall's Fae Isles series — imagine the Star Wars rebellion but in a fantasy romance world instead), swoony (Vela Roth's vampire high fantasy series Blood Grace crosses forbidden love with fated mates), delightfully cantankerous (S.L. Prater's Eternal Enemies series about a witch and a vampire in a wild gothic world), giggle-snort out loud (Finding Your Choux and Other Charming Pursuits by Erin Vere, Cinderella meets MasterChef) and warm-fuzzies (Live, Laugh, Lurk by Elsie Winters about the least terrifying mothman ever).
What books stood out for you this year? Hit reply and help me with my 2025 TBR, please and thank you.
I have the feeling I'm going to need a lot of books.
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