LAST YEAR WAS A GOOD reading year for me all in all, even if my “official” volume was down. As you no doubt know if you’re a regular here at The Daily Grace, in April I was overjoyed to receive a publishing offer for my own debut, and once the contract was signed it was full speed ahead. Just yesterday I turned in the final, final MS9—meaning Manuscript 9—which means I’ve read (and done deep work on) my own book four times in the months since July. That, combined with lots of other exciting get-ready-to-publish duties, combined with a precious new grandbaby I will put ahead of anything else in my life right now left my reading time quite truncated. Which is just to say that the pool of books from which I’m lifting these gems was smaller even as the quality of my favorite reads held strong. I also chose some really long books this year, so that contributed, too.
In any event, Goodreads tells me I read 37 books in 2024, and those amounted to 11,583 pages.
(I mention this every year and feel compelled to do so again. For me, I don’t consider reading a competition so I don’t set goals or challenges for myself. I choose and read whatever feels appealing to me in the moment, or whatever the library serves up via my reserves list! I do love tracking on Goodreads since it accommodates real-time lists of What I Want To Read; What I’m Reading; What I’ve Read.)
These are in no particular order other than my favorite book of the year, which is hands-down this one:

James, by Percival Everett
A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view
This book has been everywhere and won everything, so there’s no great surprise it tops my list, too. Brilliant, and funny, and poignant, and enlightening. I listened on audio, which I highly recommend since the story really comes to life as the character James, AKA “Jim,” code-switches from a “slave dialect” when speaking in the presence of white people to regular speech among his own people. I found it moving and profound to experience this via the brilliant narrator, Dominic Hoffman.
Promo copy reads:
When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim’s agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

I Cheerfully Refuse, by Leif Enger
A big-hearted, hopeful novel that’s part adventure story, part love story, and a delight to read. The dialogue, characters and sense of place are unforgettable. Not to be missed by fans of Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility or Station Eleven.
I lost myself completely in this story—the strong sense of place; characters drawn so vividly I absolutely, positively knew them; a story so gently and masterfully told. And good lord the language. Enger’s command of language, with tiny pops and twists that make this near-future apocalyptic tale sparkle in that way a lake’s surface will do on a gorgeous summer day. There is music and wonder and just enough magic. And plenty of deep dark, to be sure. Still I settled right in, confident from page one that I was in good hands and was willing to go along for the ride.
What a ride it was. I loved, loved, loved this novel.
Promo copy reads:
Set in a not-too-distant America, I Cheerfully Refuse is the tale of a bereaved musician taking to Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved bookselling wife. Encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, Rainy finds on land an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, crumbled infrastructure and a lawless society. Amid the Gulliver-like challenges of life at sea, Rainy is lifted by physical beauty, surprising humor, generous strangers and an unexpected companion in a young girl who comes aboard. As his essentially guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy’s private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his strengthening wake.
A rollicking narrative in the most evocative of settings, I Cheerfully Refuse is a symphony against despair and a rallying cry for the future.

The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese
From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret
The day I finished this doorstop-of-a-read, I posted to Instagram:
Finished this novel this morning, and I cannot stop thinking about it. Big, soaring, layered, multigenerational and with multiple storylines—still so intimate. Heartbreaking. Beautiful. Hopeful. Abraham Verghese has given us a masterpiece.
I still feel the same. Verghese is one of our best storytellers, and this one soars. I both listened to the audiobook and then read the page in hardback, and it was wonderful to experience the accents (in Verghese’s voice, as he narrates) and then to see the gorgeous sentences/passages. Absolutely one of my favorite books of all time.
Promo copy reads:
Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala’s Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl—and future matriarch, Big Ammachi—will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.
A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. Imbued with humor, deep emotion, and the essence of life, it is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.

One Woman Show, by Christine Coulson
A sly and stylish novel—remarkably told through museum wall labels—about a twentieth-century woman who transforms herself from a precious object into an unforgettable protagonist.
I first heard about this novel on Anne Bogel’s podcast, What Should I Read Next. It sounded so quirky and fun I had to check it out. And I loved it! A tiny little read, the story packs a social-commentary punch and the structure is pure delight—I kept wondering to myself, “How on earth is Coulson pulling this off?” But oh she does. She really, really does.
Promo copy reads:
Author Christine Coulson spent twenty-five years writing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her final project was to write wall labels for the museum’s new British Galleries. During that time, she dreamt of using The Met’s strict label format to describe people as intricate works of art. The result is this bullet of a novel that imagines a privileged twentieth-century woman as an artifact—an object prized, collected, and critiqued.
One Woman Show revolves around the life of Kitty Whitaker as she is defined by her potential for display and moved from collection to collection through multiple marriages. Coulson precisely distills each stage of this sprawling life, every brief snapshot in time a wry reflection on womanhood, ownership, value, and power.
Described with poignancy and humor over the course of a century, Kitty emerges as an eccentric heroine who disrupts her porcelain life with both major force and minor transgressions. As human foibles propel each delicately crafted text, Coulson’s playful reversal on our interaction with art ultimately questions who really gets to tell our stories.

Somehow: Thoughts on Love, by Anne LaMott
“Love is our only hope,” Anne Lamott writes in this perceptive new book. “It is not always the easiest choice, but it is always the right one, the noble path, the way home to safety, no matter how bleak the future looks.”
I will repeat what I wrote on Instagram just after reading Somehow: Thoughts on Love, as it holds true in this moment in time: Anne Lamott is my heart. And this book of thoughtful, gorgeous, life-is-such-a-mess-and-yet essays—let me tell you, friends, it has been the balm that has gotten me through these last difficult, upsetting, and downward spiral days. If you need some hope, some peace of mind, some reminder there is good in the world, and beauty, and that you can have agency over your own existence in spite of all the chaos—this book is for you. I believe it is her best yet, and I will be listening on repeat.
(I loved Somehow on audio as Anne Lamott in my ear is a wonderful thing.)
Thank you, Annie, thank you!!!
Promo copy reads:
In Thoughts on Love , Lamott explores the transformative power that love has in our how it surprises us, forces us to confront uncomfortable truths, reminds us of our humanity, and guides us forward. “Love just won’t be pinned down,” she says. “It is in our very atmosphere” and lies at the heart of who we are. We are, Lamott says, creatures of love.
In each chapter of Somehow , Lamott refracts all the colors of the spectrum. She explores the unexpected love for a partner later in life. The bruised (and bruising) love for a child who disappoints, even frightens. The sustaining love among a group of sinners, for a community in transition, in the wider world. The lessons she underscores are that love enlightens as it educates, comforts as it energizes, sustains as it surprises.
Somehow is Anne Lamott’s twentieth book, and in it she draws from her own life and experience to delineate the intimate and elemental ways that love buttresses us in the face of despair as it galvanizes us to believe that tomorrow will be better than today. Full of the compassion and humanity that have made Lamott beloved by millions of readers, Somehow is classic Anne: funny, warm, and wise.

North Woods, by Daniel Mason
A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries—a daring, moving tale of memory and fate from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier.
Another 2024 novel I added to my All-Time Favorite Books list. So rich, so gorgeously written, so captivating and imaginative. I also loved the set-up: a single property in the wild woods of New England that is the constant, while generations of inhabitants pass through—a tale of nature and change and people and passion and devastating heartbreak. The Washington Post said North Woods is “storytelling magic” and I could not agree more. All the stars a rating system will allow.
Promo copy reads:
When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become home to an extraordinary succession of inhabitants. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins survive war and famine, only to succumb to envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths a mass grave, but finds the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle; as each one confronts the mysteries of the north woods, they come to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.
Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space. Written along with the seasons and divided into the twelve months of the year, it is an unforgettable novel about secrets and fates that asks the timeless how do we live on, even after we’re gone?

One Good Mama Bone, by Bren McClain
A novel of courageous parental love and the instructive, healing bonds that form between humans and animals
I loved this 2017 novel written by fellow South Carolinian, Bren McClain. The story is warm and inviting, and the vivid picture it paints of rural farm life, poverty, our relationship to animals, motherhood, love—and so much more—kept me engaged from the first sentence to the last.
Promo copy reads:
Set in early 1950s rural South Carolina, One Good Mama Bone chronicles Sarah Creamer’s quest to find her “mama bone,” after she is left to care for a boy who is not her own but instead is the product of an affair between her husband and her best friend and neighbor, a woman she calls “Sister.” When her husband drinks himself to death, Sarah, a dirt-poor homemaker with no family to rely on and the note on the farm long past due, must find a way for her and young Emerson Bridge to survive. But the more daunting obstacle is Sarah’s fear that her mother’s words, seared in her memory since she first heard them at the age of six, were a prophesy, “You ain’t got you one good mama bone in you, girl.”
When Sarah reads in the local newspaper that a boy won $680 with his Grand Champion steer at the recent 1951 Fat Cattle Show & Sale, she sees this as their financial salvation and finds a way to get Emerson Bridge a steer from a local farmer to compete in the 1952 show. But the young calf is unsettled at Sarah’s farm, crying out in distress and growing louder as the night wears on. Some four miles away, the steer’s mother hears his cries and breaks out of a barbed-wire fence to go in search of him. The next morning Sarah finds the young steer quiet, content, and nursing a large cow. Inspired by the mother cow’s act of love, Sarah names her Mama Red. And so Sarah’s education in motherhood begins with Mama Red as her teacher.
But Luther Dobbins, the man who sold Sarah the steer, has his sights set on winning too, and, like Sarah, he is desperate, but not for money. Dobbins is desperate for glory, wanting to regain his lost grand-champion dynasty, and he will stop at nothing to win. Emboldened by her lessons from Mama Red and her budding mama bone, Sarah is committed to victory even after she learns the winning steer’s ultimate fate. Will she stop at nothing, even if it means betraying her teacher?

Nightwatch, by Jayne Anne Phillips
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION • A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From one of our most accomplished novelists, a mesmerizing story about a mother and daughter seeking refuge in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War—and a brilliant portrait of family endurance against all odds
I have so many things to say about this powerful novel. First, how remarkable is it that for the second year in a row, an Appalachian novel won the Pulitzer. MAY WE ALL JUST SIT WITH THAT A MOMENT. Second, I read this book start-to-finish over the course of two otherwise very busy days, and I will just tell you it is not a quick read. It’s literary, in the best way possible, and requires thought, and diligence, and deep consideration. But it’s also compulsive in that I cared about these characters SO MUCH. I had to keep turning that page.
Bravo, Jayne Anne Phillips, for setting the bar so high. So many of us will be studying this one for a long, long time.
Promo copy reads:
In 1874, in the wake of the War, erasure, trauma, and namelessness haunt civilians and veterans, renegades and wanderers, freedmen and runaways. Twelve-year-old ConaLee, the adult in her family for as long as she can remember, finds herself on a buckboard journey with her mother, Eliza, who hasn’t spoken in more than a year. They arrive at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, delivered to the hospital’s entrance by a war veteran who has forced himself into their world. There, far from family, a beloved neighbor, and the mountain home they knew, they try to reclaim their lives.
The omnipresent vagaries of war and race rise to the surface as we learn their their flight to the highest mountain ridges of western Virginia; the disappearance of ConaLee’s father, who left for the War and never returned. Meanwhile, in the asylum, they begin to find a new path. ConaLee pretends to be her mother’s maid; Eliza responds slowly to treatment. They get swept up in the life of the facility—the mysterious man they call the Night Watch; the orphan child called Weed; the fearsome woman who runs the kitchen; the remarkable doctor at the head of the institution.

Enlightenment, by Sarah Perry
A dazzling new work of literary fiction from the author of The Essex Serpent, a story of love and astronomy told over the course of twenty years through the lives of two improbable best friends.
Sarah Perry is an automatic read for me with her command of language, her turn of phrase, her beautiful “England” sensibilities, her ability to surprise and delight on every page. This novel makes good on every one of those expectations and then doubles down, I exaggerate not: it is “language-y” (I read with a dictionary beside me AND LOVED THAT no kidding); it is spell-binding; it is desperate and hopeful and heartbreaking and beautiful—I could not stop underlining or turning the pages. Enlightenment is one heck of a haunting, imaginative, magical read.
Promo copy reads:
Thomas Hart and Grace Macaulay have lived all their lives in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits—torn between their commitment to religion and their desire to explore the world beyond their small Baptist community. It is two romantic relationships that will rend their friendship, and in the wake of this rupture, Thomas develops an obsession with a vanished nineteenth-century astronomer said to haunt a nearby manor, and Grace flees Aldleigh entirely for London.
Over the course of twenty years, by coincidence and design, Thomas and Grace will find their lives brought back into orbit as the mystery of the vanished astronomer unfolds into a devastating tale of love and scientific pursuit. Thomas and Grace will ask themselves what it means to love and be loved, what is fixed and what is mutable, how much of our fate is predestined and written in the stars, and whether they can find their way back to each other.
A thrillingly ambitious novel of friendship, faith, and unrequited love, rich in symmetry and symbolism, Enlightenment is a shimmering wonder of a book and Sarah Perry’s finest work to date.

The Last Devil to Die, by Richard Osman
In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to discuss unsolved crimes; together they call themselves the Thursday Murder Club.
This book is the fourth in Osman’s brilliant Thursday Murder Club series, and no kidding I do not know how he does it. The first, The Thursday Murder Club, was perfection, and each subsequent novel has just gotten better and better. Funny as all get out, with characters who tickle and delight, there is not much that’s more entertaining to me than a Thursday Murder Club mystery. Start with the first and go in order. THEY ARE SO GOOD!
Promo copy reads:
Shocking news reaches the Thursday Murder Club.
An old friend in the antiques business has been killed, and a dangerous package he was protecting has gone missing.
As the gang springs into action they encounter art forgers, online fraudsters and drug dealers, as well as heartache close to home.
With the body count rising, the package still missing and trouble firmly on their tail, has their luck finally run out? And who will be the last devil to die?
Yay! There they are! My Top Ten! There were plenty of other books I loved/enjoyed in the past year, and if you’re interested, you’ll find a complete list of my 2024 reads (and my all-time favorite books and audiobooks) on my website here. If you read any of these, I’d love to know what you thought. And I’m always up for recommendations! Do share with me and with other The Daily Grace readers via the comments. There is nothing more fun than talking books!
XXOO,
Cathy
One Woman Show!! Such a unique novel. I’m so glad you enjoyed it as much as I did. Now I need to cue up some of your books on Libby that I haven’t already read.
Thanks for taking the time to do this exercise!
Can’t wait to discuss all of these with you! And to hear YOUR list!
Wonderful list, Cathy! I just placed holds on all of them through Libby with Richland County Library so I can be surprised when it’s my turn to read them.
This makes me so happy!!! Let me know which is your fave 🙂
Rigg, gotta say that “James” was also my favorite of the year, with “Northwoods” coming in VERY close second. And, “The Last Devil to Die”, how can each one keep getting better and better?? This final in the series made me cry at times. I love these characters. There are several here in your list I will need to research. Please send money. I am going broke up here.
I’m always so excited when we love the same books! Must go back to our early days as English majors at Clemson. Love you!