I read 51 books in 2024. I’ve moderated book panels for five, written about 13 for work, and bookstagrammed about a lot more.
I’m a reader, and other people know it. That’s why they’re always asking me for book recommendations. But universal recommendations are difficult to give. What do you like? What do you read? There are some books I love that other people can’t finish. But every year, I try to curate a short list for my friends who don’t read much.
You might only read one or two books per year or only partake on long vacations, and that’s okay. Better to read sporadically than not at all. I’m not here to judge.
If you only read a few books in a year, these are the ones I believe you should consider. If you’d like to get any of them, you can do so at bookshop.org with my link:)
To understand the times that we live in: Jesus and John Wayne
This book came to me when I was writing for Sojourners this year. As my editor put it, the thesis is that modern articulations of masculinity in the white Christian Evangelical movement enable abuse. If you are wondering, as I have on many occasions, how Evangelicals embraced Donald Trump or why abuse in the church sometimes gets covered up/enabled, this is the book for you. Seems particularly timely this year.
Best essay collection: Nola Face: A Latina’s life in the Big Easy
This collection of essays has my heart. My blurb in the Advocate:
This collection of essays explores everything from how not to hate your writing to parenthood. Whether she’s writing a treatise on swearing or processing her complex relationship with her grandmother, Lala, author Champagne is bold, self-aware and downright hilarious.
The individual essays experiment with form, but the book is held together with Champagne’s voice, which shines in this collection. Reading “Nola Face” makes you want to laugh with her, cry with her and be her friend. The book is perfect for breaking out of reading ruts or writer’s block.
Serena Puang for the Advocate. I curated best Louisiana books of the year
Most thought provoking: Sky Full of Elephants
This book daringly asks the question what would America look like if all the white people disappeared. It’s meant to be controversial, not meant to be taken literally. In concept, it’s one of the most controversal books I’ve ever reviewed. In reality, I think it opened up a space for me to talk about race with my friends in a way I don’t think I would have otherwise.
“They killed themselves. All of them. All at once,” the first words of Cebo Campbell’s debut novel, “Sky Full of Elephants,” are a haunting refrain reminiscent of a fable.
The book explores the aftermath of a genocidal event in which every White person in America wakes up, walks into the nearest body of water and drowns.
“The event” as it is known in the book, upturns society. The internet only works sporadically now, the Ivy League shuts down, and Alabama becomes a monarchy. People unseal the jails, board up police stations, set country clubs on fire and overhaul the economy.
The novel follows Charlie, a wrongfully incarcerated Black man who is unexpectedly reunited with his 19-year-old daughter Sidney. Up to the event, Sidney had been raised by her White mother’s side of the family believing that she was White too. She holed up in her mansion in Wisconsin alone for a year after losing her family, but after seeing a note from her blonde, green-eyed aunt claiming that White people are “not all gone,” she tracks down Charlie to take her to a colony in Orange Beach, Alabama, where all the people who think of themselves as White have congregated.
What follows is a journey from Wisconsin to Alabama that involves a trip through an airport where there’s no security but some planes might never take off, a visit to the Alabaman king and queen and a whole lot to unpack.
As with many magical realism novels, the premise can get muddled. How “non-White” do you have to be to survive the event? What about White Latinos? Where did all the Black cops go? In this version of the world, people who think of themselves as White still exist, so should Black conservative pundits and racist Asians. How did this new world order avoid recreating all the problems of the old one?
But those willing to suspend their disbelief will see a version of utopia that doesn’t include White people, and this is radical. So often, America’s conceptualization of diversity is based in Whiteness. White people have historically held the power and the wealth in this country, and the vision for equality looks like adding other people into this picture. It is the same Harvard but now with some Black people. The same multimillion-dollar company, but some of the employees now have more melanin. Campbell dares to ask the question: What would a new, better society look like if it didn’t have any White people at all?
His daring premise promises to be as thought-provoking as it is openly jarring. But in popular media, Black characters are often defined by their racial suffering. In the U.S., it’s difficult to find a novel about Black people that isn’t also at least partially about racism, slavery or a confrontation with White people unless it’s set in a magical realm or in Africa. Writing a world where all the White people die is one of the only ways Campbell can force readers to picture a Black community in contemporary America that is not defined against a White community/their structures of power but as a force to be reckoned with in itself — with its own energy, traditions and drama worth writing about.
My full review of Sky Full of Elephants in the Advocate.
Popular and also worth the hype: The Wedding People (TW: contemplation of suicide)
I’m sometimes accused of only reading depressing and weird books, so every year, I try to read some of the mainstream/popular on bookstagram books. Only after I started reading did I realize that this book had a sad premise in its own right.
It’s an “A Man Called Ove” style book about a woman who happens to be the only guest at a hotel that is otherwise completely booked out for a wedding. She planned to commit suicide there. But over the course of the over the top wedding week (yes, this bride wanted a whole week), she makes friends and finds life worth living again. It’s a surprisingly light-hearted and at times funny book despite the premise, and it deserves all the praise its been getting from my fellow bookstagrammers.
Overall book of the year: All This and More
I will not stop talking about this choose your own adventure style magical realist novel by Peng Shepherd. It’s so well done and interesting, it made me want to read all her other books.
It’s about a woman who goes on a game show that allows you to make different choices in life and open up alternate realities.
“Marsh — short for Marshmallow because she’s “so sweet and soft” — hates her nickname but goes by it anyways.
“No one even remembers my real name anymore,” she explains. “As soon as anyone hears Marsh, that’s all they remember. Because I’m so nice.”
After her marriage falls apart and a disastrous attempt to reconnect with a high school ex, she gets a once in a lifetime opportunity to fix her life through quantum bubbling, a new technology that feels almost magical. In the safety of the bubble, a million paths lay in front of her: What if she hadn’t quit law school to have a family, never broken up with her high school sweetheart, and actually traveled like she always wanted? She could have all this and more, and she’s allowed to experiment until she finds the life she wants and make it hers. Just one catch: she has to do it all live for a reality tv show.
In Peng Shepherd’s “All This and More,” the titular TV show unfolds as a choose-your-own-adventure style novel, but it soon becomes apparent that Marsh (and the reader) is not as in control as she seems. No matter what life she chooses, certain details remain the same. Her coworkers and boss are always played by the same cast of characters, scenes keep repeating, and she always has a pet named Pickle. Is it fate? Or is something else going on?
As a premise, it’s clever. And in execution, it grapples with some of the deepest fears that we all live with: that we’re not making the right choices, maximizing our potential, and that if only we’d made a different choice at some point in the past, life would be better. In a world of infinite decisions and a comparable number of possible regrets, we all wonder what could’ve been. Everyone went to school with someone famous or was almost right there when some potentially world-altering event happened. How can we ever know we’re in the best of all possible worlds?”
My full review of “All this and more” in my book column for Rooted.
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