Books of 2024: Fiction

Despite efforts to maintain a balanced diet of fiction and non-fiction this year, the vagaries of library availability offered up more of the latter when I got to my next book on my to-read list.  I made a special effort to focus on books that had lingered in to-read for a while rather than adding more.  Not easy!

In the end, I read 55% non-fiction in 2024.  Still, that 45% contained gems.  Don't let the number of titles fool you.  I recommend all of these - even the honorable mentions - as strongly as I can.

Books of the Year: Fiction

Tom Lake, Ann Patchett, 2023

This book came within a gnat's eyelash of being my book of the year.  In Tom Lake, Ann Patchett tells two versions of her favorite story: throw a group of people together unexpectedly, and see what happens.  In the present, Lara, her husband Joe, and their three daughters have been thrown back together by the Covid-19 pandemic on their Michigan cherry farm.  Their typical picker helpers can't get there, and they have no choice but to harvest relentlessly together.  To pass the time and satisfy her young adult daughters' obsession with the story, Lara tells them about the summer stock company at Tom Lake in which she was cast as Emily in Our Town and May in Fool for Love during a long-ago summer before they were born.  It's perfect Patchett, mixing the heart-warming with the heartbreaking.  The characters in both timelines prove complex and unpredictable.  In what I've come to consider familiar, I had to remind myself that I could not Google and find out more about the people and places Patchett has invented here.  Patchett uses Our Town as an especially strong thread through the story.  You could call Tom Lake a love letter to that play, in fact.  Patchett manages the flashback and the present deftly, giving neither short shrift.  I am glad that I chose to read this when I needed a diversion.  It went beyond satisfying.  It delighted!

Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, James McBride, 2023

Graham and Laura Hennessey gave Paige and me this book for Christmas 2023.  My competent wife got to it first.  When I got my hands on it, I got excited a few pages in.  This is the first McBride novel I've read.  He tells a wild tale extremely vividly.  McBride's gift for layering characters and plotlines on top of each other impressed me.  Throughout the book, when I thought I knew whose story and which story he was telling, he would introduce someone new, and that someone would have his or her own motivations and ideas.  The new character would bring new action.  Not to telegraph too much, but, of course, those plot lines intersect.  Sometimes, the plotting was complicated enough that I didn't totally follow it.  But I grokked enough, and I was happy to go on the cinematic ride McBride captains.  The eponymous grocery store is in Pottstown, PA in the 1930s.  We see some flashes forward and back, and nearby Reading and more distant Philadelphia figure into the story.  There are two leaps into present-day cultural analysis that jarred so supremely against the story that I had to question McBride's sanity.  Even if he was trying to evoke certain contemporary themes with a 90-year-old story, it's either artless or foolish to make it so explicit.  Or maybe he's working on a genius level I do not understand.

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, Tom Hanks, 2023

I'm grateful to my friend Cassie Christopher for recommending this delightful novel.  From the overlong title, you get the idea: the book tells the story of the making of a movie.  If it's set on a movie set, it takes competence as its theme.  Competence recognized and rewarded.  This feel-good theme makes it a breath of fresh air (especially during an election season that has re-elected the most feel-bad, incompetent candidate imaginable).  We meet the writer/director, the crew, and the actors.  The movie in question is a Marvel movie for Netflix (all by different names).  We get the background material for a comic book that eventually gets written and later optioned into a movie.  While at points it feels like maybe a few too many strands of story are being told, Hanks inspires confidence as an author that he will weave all this together.  I would describe the omniscient narrator's voice as Hanks-ian, which is as welcoming as a warm sweater.  Although the book may be 20% longer than it needs to be, I only felt that in the last march to its conclusion.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin, 2022

A Cassie Christopher repeat: she read this book in 2023 and recommended it to me.  Then, at a moment when my competent wife found herself low on books, she read it first out of my under-nightstand pile.  Cassie didn't say much about it, but she did feature it in a short list of non-romance fiction books that she recommended. (She has learned that my spy novel habit and her romance novel habit don't need to cross over into our recommendations for each other.) My competent wife then compared it favorably to Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings, and them's salivating words for me.  I brought high expectations to a novel with a setting as weird as the fake Microsoft in Douglas Coupland's Microserfs: video game developers.  Since I'm too old to believe in spending a lot of time playing video games (I'd rather be reading!), I wasn't sure I could get into this world.  To be honest, there were moments when I feared I would start to dislike this book.  That didn't happen though because Zevin writes deftly and from a sweet, good core.  Don't get me wrong; plenty of challenging things happen to characters here.  The most realistic depictions of the messiness of friendship come against those backdrops.  A zag late in the book was one of those times when I thought Zevin would lose me.  Instead, she spurred me to turn page after page with lyrical heights of...writing about (or within) video games.  Gamer or not, read this book.

Honorable Mention

Small Thinks Like These, Claire Keegan, 2021

The Thursday Murder Club, Richard Osman, 2020