Best books I’ve read 2024

I have read 29 books in 2024, a number so far below my usual rate that I’m tempted to search for a cause — perhaps my brain was melted by Brat summer? Holding too much space for Cynthia Erivo’s stratospheric final note in Wicked? Simply enshittified?

But those I did read more than fought the tide of the malaise. I continue to push Australian writing on everyone who will listen. This year’s Stella Prize shortlist was, well, stellar, including my favourite read of last year, Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy (the winner), plus Feast, Body Friend, The Swift Dark Tide, Hospital and Abandon Every Hope. What I read of the Miles Franklin shortlist was similarly invigorating: Praiseworthy (winner again) and Hospital, Wall, Only Sound Remains, and Anam.

A couple of other highlights: Fiona Kelly McGregor’s delightful 1930s Sydney romp Iris, which for my money has the best sex scenes I read this year (and I also read All Fours), and from very different times and places The Wren, The Wren (21st Century Ireland) and The House Of The Spirits (20th Century Chile), which ruthlessly send up the atrocities of patriarchy. In the same spirit, I read another brilliant translation of The Iliad, this one by Emily Wilson. As always, you can find all the gayest books I’ve read under Certified Gay.

The best writing event I went to was the inaugural Liminal Festival, where I found many books that I’m certain will shape my reading into next year.

So, here are my top five reads of the year. None particularly cheerful, although there is always space for beauty and love, if not in their subjects but in their author’s care with them. Above all I think they are truthful about the ways that freedoms have been lost and how they might be restored. These books are — I promise — working against enshittification.

Banzeiro Òkòtó by Eliane Brum (translated by Diane Whitty) — Brazilian journalist Eliane Brum takes you into the whirlpool in this tangled and vital account of the war against the Amazon, and those fighting on its behalf. Brum attempts, in her writing, to find a way of documenting this existential conflict in a way that does not further extraction and exploitation.

Always Will Be by Mykaela Saunders — Saunders takes us to beautiful Bundjalung Country in this short fiction collection, and then leaps off into futures wild and unbound where colonisation slips away and culture is restored.

Naag Mountain by Manisha Anjali — from the history of indentured Indian workers taken to the South Pacific to work on sugar plantations, Anjali weaves a thrillingly beautiful dreamscape that attempts to restore a people’s collective subconscious.

Abandon Every Hope by Hayley Singer — Brace yourself, for this exploration of the slaughter of animals does what it says on the tin. But if we’re to have hope, first we have to be real, and Hayley Singer documents the cost of the industrial killing — to them, but to us too — in these unflinching essays.

Beloved by Toni Morrison — Toni Morrison understands in a way of no other writer the power of words. To oppress, but also, through magic, to liberate, as she does in this novel of what happens after enslavement.

Plains Of Promise by Alexis Wright — Wright’s debut novel is set in a similar era of horror to Beloved, the mission days of mid-20th Century Australia. But as always in her novels, Wright offers the full suite: journeys sublime and surreal, slapstick humour and unparalleled satire, Country seething and stirring.