best of the year

and the worst too don't worry

heeeeyyyyyyyyyyy. soooooo sorry gang. I’ve got to stop apologizing because this is a free newsletter that no one cares about but me, but, whatever, we’ll call it an apology to myself for being bad. I swear I wrote stuff — I have like five drafts saved that I just never got around to sending. Unfortunately those are all irrelevant now so we’re just gonna start from scratch. Oops! and Hooray!

Well, I suppose I should tell you that I managed to cap off my first semester of graduate school with a big fat essay on Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting. Longtime(ish) subscribers will remember I read and loved this at the tail end of 2023 and getting to revisit it was an absolute joy. It’s actually the first major reread I’ve done in a long time (Eragon DOESN’T count) and, frankly, I want to reread more faves in 2025, because this was even better than I remembered it being. While I’m a very instinctual reader — I pretty much know how I feel about a book before its halfway mark — it’s so fun to get to reread something that can fully immerse you once again even though you’ve been in it before. Not every novel can do that! AND this is the first time I’ve gotten to academically analyze a book I genuinely loved reading and have lots of thoughts on, so I really took my time with it and god it was just so fun. Of course, my preferred reading method is to hyperfixate and bang it all out in a frenzy, but this was a nice reminder of the merits of, you know, not doing that.

After reading this one again, my opinion of the ending has changed entirely. In my review last year, I wrote:

I can imagine the ending is quite polarizing amongst those who have read it, as I myself feel personally polarized and a little bit victimized. On the one hand, it’s kind of brilliant and pretty twisted. But I think Murray needed to afford himself a little more room to really stick the landing — it feels a bit crammed together, and I don’t think the final, say, 20% of the novel holds itself together quite as well as it could.

Now I feel basically the exact opposite. I think it’s actually beyond fucking brilliant; this time around, I could completely understand and appreciate Murray’s decision to leave things the way he does. I really can’t say much without spoiling it and I really think you need to go into it with zero idea of how things go, but I will just say I was wrong last year and Murray did afford himself plenty of time to stick the landing and the final 20% of the novel IS great. In light of this, I’m bumping it up to a 4.7/5 stars which, as you all know, is the readwithmith equivalent of a Goodreads 5. This has really inspired me to reread some more of my favorites and see if they hold up under scrutiny. Unfortunately, there are too many more fucking books to read and I will never have time to do this so I guess every school project for the next couple of years will just have to be based on an old favorite.

best of 2024

Compared to the past couple of years, my reading output this year was a bit of a pittance. But what are you gonna do? Sometimes you just want to sit on your couch and watch youtube for five hours. Even in these dark times, I read some pretty great stuff. Here are my four absolute favorites:

Intermezzo, Sally Rooney: No surprises here. I declared after about ten pages that this was already my favorite book of the year, and that held up. There’s something in the water in Ireland that makes its authors some of the best writers in the English language in the world. Anyway, you can read everything I had to say about this one in my review, but it’s a brilliant treatise on love and its quirks. I’ve seen on my bookstagram that some people who aren’t Rooney diehards also really enjoyed this one, which should be a push for you if you are skeptical of her sparse prose and obsession with skinny women (the latter I am also not a fan of) to give her a try.

Pachinko, Min Jin Lee: This is a book I put off for many years because I knew it would be very sad. I was right to think that, but wrong to wait so long. This is a family epic unlike any I’ve seen before; Lee, with graceful prose, genuinely invests in the numerous characters depicted across generations, and while I could have been a bit more emotionally engaged, I was nothing but invested. I’ll leave you to read my review for more details, but I couldn’t recommend this more as an addition to your 2025 backlist.

Tar Baby, Toni Morrison: I unfortunately quit on the 12 months of Morrison challenge because I am bad at committing to things (I WILL read Beloved this year), but I luckily didn’t miss out on this one. It’s one that I don’t hear about as often as others in her canon, so I didn’t know anything about it, but it blew me away. Seriously, this should be studied in creative writing programs as an example of how to write good dialogue (maybe it is, I don’t know). Full review here — I haven’t talked with many people who have read this one so I’d really love to know your thoughts if you do check it out!

The Portrait of a Mirror, A. Natasha Joukovsky: What a delightful book. Ridiculous but grounded, dark but hilarious, this is a vision of New York from the perspective of the young and wealthy elite. Turns out they’re as bummed out as the rest of us! But also, too bad! While Joukovsky beats the fuck out of the rich here, she also takes care to make it a love story that we do end up investing in. I randomly wrote about this and Pachinko in the same post after reading both at the beach on vacation — maybe the best week of beach reading ever?

honorable mentions

While the arbitrary cutoff for “best” books is 4.5/5 and up, I do want to give a shoutout to some of the other great stuff I read this year:

Stay True, Hua Hsu: An amazing memoir about growing up, feeling different, and the people who make you who you are; it just gets better as you go along.

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, Mosab Abu Toha: A brilliant, fucking devastating book of poetry on the ground in Palestine — written, for what it’s worth, before October 2023, if you need reminding that Isr**l has been a piece of shit apartheid state since its inception. Free Palestine.

The Lying Life of Adults, Elena Ferrante: Another foray into the twisted, brilliant mind of Elena Ferrante. It starts off a little slow, but once it gets going, by god, it gets going. Being a teenage girl is hard enough without being surrounded by fucking batshit crazy adults.

Close to Home, Michael Magee: We read this at the end of the semester, and I’ll write a full review soon, but it’s about a college graduate just trying to figure his shit out after he moves back home to Belfast in a massive economic recession. A poignant interpretation of Northern Irish culture and the generational traumas and fixations that get passed down amongst families.

How to Read Now, Elaine Castillo: Probably the best work of nonfiction I read this year. Again, I’ll write a full review for this one in the next one since we read it at the end of the semester, but it’s a fantastic series of essays on the ethical practices of reading, combining theory with a lot of personality and heart. Would recommend to anyone interested in that sort of junk.

And some other books I enjoyed include:

More: A Memoir of Open Marriage, Molly Roden Winter

Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, John Krakauer

A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan

The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy

Funny Story, Emily Henry

The Rachel Incident, Caroline O’Donoghue

worst of the year

Yeah, yeah, you sick fucks know what time it is. I actually didn’t read anything too heinous this year, but a few real pieces of shit stick out:

The Midnight Feast, Lucy Foley: This is the worst mystery novel I’ve read in my entire life. Lucy Foley had something interesting with The Guest List, IMO, and The Paris Apartment was boring, but not an affront to my intelligence. But THIS absolute piece of DOG shit had me, on every other page, going, “oh, this isn’t what happens, right? this would be too obvious. she’s setting us up. right?” Reader, everything you think will happen does happen, and everything you don’t expect to happen is not an interesting twist but something that adds absolutely nothing to the story and in fact makes it worse. I hate this book and Lucy Foley will have ZERO more chances from me moving forward. Worst read of the year by FAR (even including Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland, which I’m counting because it’s book-length). Also, and if you don’t heed my warning and end up reading it anyway, please, PLEASE don’t do the audiobook version, which I think makes everything horrendous about it even worse, especially if you hate British people.

House of Flame and Shadow, Sarah J. Maas: A thoroughly underwhelming conclusion to what was once a promising series in Crescent City. Just an absolute fucking disaster that was so bad I wrote an entire post on it.

The Only One Left, Riley Sager: A real fucking stinker of a mystery/thriller (yeah, none of these panned out this year) with about fifty thousand twists that all undo each other, deeply unlikeable main characters, and an ending that will leave your jaw on the floor because of how mind-bogglingly stupid it is.

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LMK what YOUR favorite and least favorite reads of 2024 were!! I have a fuck ton to read before the semester starts, but I’ll add your favs to the ever-growing TBR that threatens to topple over and bury me alive.

Happy 2025! Hopefully this year is marginally better than the last one, though I don’t think that’ll happen unless an anarchist revolution finally gets going in earnest. A girl can dream. xoxo