Happy New Year! I overloaded my brain with books in 2024, including those elusive “new” books full of fresh information and artistic experimentation! I kept thinking about these sixteen books this year amongst the horror, psy-ops and weird cyberwars of 2024. Here’s my favorites across the categories of “fake” and “real.”
Fiction
James by Percival Everett
A fun, voicey first person novel starring a cunning, confident character in a unique setting (the antebellum South) that also just so happens to be an adaptation of Huckleberry Finn. And it’s from James’ a.k.a. Jim’s perspective! A funny, provocative book with an exciting finale. Perhaps at its core, this novel affirms that literature is fan fiction. Everett is just having fun out there! It deserves all the hype and awards, and no, you don’t need to reread Twain first.
Scrap by Calla Henkel
A weird, quiet mystery about falling into archives searching for proof. I loved it, and the idea that the detritus we leave behind, the projects unfinished, the stuff in boxes that one might pay somebody else to dig through—that all of this could hold the secrets to a mystery or the ultimate meaning of our life? A book about imbuing piles with purpose!
Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet
Miami, as told by a Pitbull impersonator and a whale imprisoned in Seaworld. I was sold by the pithy (but entirely accurate) description. I ended up really enjoying Crucet’s prose, humor, ability to express the complex and overlapping feelings of being born into racial and geographic identities, and filtering this all through a whale’s thoughts was a real trip.
The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry
A western romance ending in violence, heartbreak and redemption. Now, I’m likely to enjoy any novel about an Irish cowboy junkie and a liberated mail-order bride on the run. Told brilliantly in lush, lyrical prose. The audiobook was a standout, read by the author. After I finished, I vowed to read everything Kevin Barry ever wrote.
The Mercy of Gods by S.A. Corey
I love The Expanse, so I’m primed to love this too, but the premise is simple and fun: a humanoid alien species gets abducted by advanced murder aliens. They live on a space station and have to do Squid Games / Hunger Games / Battle Royale-esque challenges. This new trilogy has a much smaller scope than the previous series about colonizing all of space and time, but it’s really fun seeing the detailed aliens, guessing their complex motivations, and watching the sympathetic humans get ZAPPED! The sublime SF pleasures.
Your Utopia by Bora Chung
Brain-scanning detectives, a really sympathetic robot car, a sentient elevator that falls in love, all kinds of interesting SF ideas are presented cleverly in Bora Chung’s second collection. My favorite was the lady who works at a “charitable foundation” for keeping rich people alive through cryogenics and brain uploads forever, but her clerical role was not granted the privilege of getting to live forever, she just gets a salary, and whoops, she gets drunk at the Christmas party and makes a big mistake. I love how Chung presents the weird crisis of consciousness felt by personified machines.
Hotel Lucky Seven by Kotaro Isaka
Bullet Train, the movie with Brad Pitt, is adapted from a Japanese series of assassin novels. First published as Ladybug, the newest translation Hotel Lucky Seven continues Ladybug’s story. It reads like pulp noir with anime’s pacing and complex plot hopping. Ultra-violent, ultra-silly, and a satisfyingly complex world paranoid about political power. What’s to stop the rich from using their money piles to hire hitmen? Nothing!
Assassin’s Anonymous by Rob Hart
But what’s to stop the assassins from reforming, ending the cycles of violence, and atonement? A lot, actually! Grudges, blackmail, federal police agencies, the dark web: all obstacles in Rob Hart’s new comedy crime caper. He delivers on his clever, high-concept premise: what if recovering assassins went to a 12-step program? Well, they’d meet more assassins and get embroiled in plots! Series like Lawrence Block’s Keller and Max Allen Collins Quarry have done a lot with hitmen, but I’m enjoying novels that play with the genre.
Non-Fiction
The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels by Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans
Two sociologists research some cadavers that go unclaimed at the Los Angeles County morgue. I never considered what happens when someone dies without anyone to claim them: the city keeps the bodies for a while, but eventually dumps the cremains in shared plot at the public graveyard. The authors research the system that manages this and some specific people who died and their bodies went unclaimed, the research that goes into finding a next of kin.
Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley
One death deeply felt. The author memorializes her friend and colleague in the publishing industry. She remarks how few self-help books deal with the death of a friend, but this book’s attention to feelings, and the detailed memories they evoke, made a rich meditation on the death of a friend and changes in the publishing industry.
Anxiety: A Philosophical Guide by Samir Chopra
Philosophy, history, self-help, spirituality, and grief memoir come together for a fascinating book on anxiety that positions the feeling as a historical constant, not a product of the digital age. In other words, reading ancient philosophical texts reveals that humans always felt anxious. Phones might make it feel worse. But the feeling itself, a vague fear of the future, and how one might go about facing the feeling, is the topic of this book and the wisdom of the ancients and heresy of the philosophers offer persuasive solutions.
Cuckooland: Where the Rich Own the Truth by Tom Burgis
An investigation of Mohamed Amersi, a businessman and major donor to the Conservative Party in London, who used his influence with the King and parliament to “open up” international markets. That means regime change, secret coups, and corporate takeovers. Amersi says as much, as quoted within the book, denying any criminal wrongdoing, insulting Burgis (he’s funny!), and laying out exactly how he plans to discredit him. It was fun to read how an oligarch plans to decimate an investigator. Amersi must have more influence with American publishing because the book shares a title with a popular fiction novel…
Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age by Norman Ohler
The Swiss invented LSD, and the Nazis used it as a truth serum! After the war, the CIA seized the files and started testing the compound in MK-ULTRA consciousness experiments. A short but incredibly accessible history of LSD as a weapon, with some interesting proof from pharmaceutical archives, and even memoir of a parent with Alzheimer’s Disease trying the drug and seeing progress.
Beverly Hills Spy: The Double-Agent War Hero Who Helped Japan Attack Pearl Harbor by Ronald Drabkin
Tracks the life of Fredrick Rutland, the famed Rutland of Jutland, who spotted the German fleet and saved a drowning seaman! But because of his lowborn class, he didn’t get promoted to The Queen’s Most Lovely Royal Officer. He broke bad, moved to Los Angeles, and started selling secrets to the Japanese aviation industry. Did he help plan the Pearl Harbor attacks? Maybe! This was a wild ride for fans of spies, WWII and Japan.
A Murder in Hollywood: The Untold Story of Tinseltown’s Most Shocking Crime by Casey Sherman
One of the most gossiped-about stories in Hollywood history: big-time gangster, Mickey Cohen’s personal bodyguard, the mademan Marine, Johnny Stompanato gets shot by little girl, Cheryl Crane, the daughter of Hollywood superstar, Lana Turner. It’s a great story that Casey Sherman researches thoroughly and tells incredibly, so vivid, like good gossip from the past.
From the Moment They Met It Was Murder: Double Indemnity in Film Noir by Alan Silver and James Ursini
Another book about LA crime that bends genres, from literary history, artist biography, film history, cultural analysis, and criminology! All centered around Double Indemnity, the novel about conspiring with a hunky door-to-door salesman to murder your husband for the life insurance money! Detailed history about James M. Cain, changes between the book and its adaptations, the set choices, the made for TV movie, and more. If you like film noir and crime fiction, check this out.
