Let’s take a closer look at some of the most popular books of 2024 …
COVER STORY
As we prepare to bid farewell to 2024, it’s time to celebrate some of the most popular books that captivated readers this year. From gripping dystopian thrillers to heartwarming romances, 2024 proved to be a great year for both readers and writers. Let’s take a closer look at some of the most popular books of 2024 …
Moon of the Turning Leaves
by Waubgeshig Rice
It is a heartwarming experience to read this book. As a short sequel to Moon of the Crusted Snow, Rice has been successful in capturing the essence of the story through its characters. In this sequel, we rejoin the members of an Anishinaabe community who survived an apocalypse, and are introduced to a new generation of rising leaders.
We get to see how these characters fight for their community and preserve humanity at its best in the worst of times. While journeying down the long, hard road of a destroyed world, characters stay hopeful.
Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind
by Annalee Newitz
If you have no idea what psychological warfare is, then you should definitely read this book. We all know that powerful people with political backgrounds often tell blatant lies, and this behavior is typically categorized as ignorant and hateful. This book will help you understand just how diabolically strategic these lies, often presented as stories, truly are.
Newitz, a journalist and author of both nonfiction and sci-fi, provides a comprehensive introduction to psychological warfare and its history in the U.S. and abroad, particularly in areas where the U.S. has been, and continues to be, involved. They then delve into the psyops of the recent past and leave readers with a beacon of hope for the future.
The City in Glass
by Nghi Vo
Demon Vitrine loves her city: she has built it, fostered its people, and sheltered its borders for hundreds of years. When angels strike it down, she curses one of them—binding him to her permanently. This book, in some ways, is an epic: the story of a city spanning centuries. But it’s more the story of Vitrine—of her stubborn determination to rebuild her city, even in the face of utter mass destruction, brick by brick if she has to. And it’s all told in visceral, poetic prose. This novel captivates your imagination and will leave you thinking about it constantly.
The Anxious Generation
by Jonathan Haidt
Giving a child unfettered access to social media is like sending them to Mars unaccompanied, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues in the opening pages of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. After reading his best-selling book, which examines how the advent of smartphones and social media in the mid-2000s led to the current epidemic of teenage mental illness, it’s hard to argue with his analogy. Haidt tracks what he calls “the Great Rewiring of Childhood” from the 1980s, when parents became more protective and children started spending less time socializing outside, to today, where much of childhood is “phone-based” and, in turn, has become more isolating during the most vulnerable developmental stages. With tenacity and candor, Haidt lays out the consequences of allowing kids to drift further into the virtual world, particularly adolescent girls, who experience higher rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm compared to their male peers. While offering suggestions and solutions that could help protect a new generation of kids from tech dependency, The Anxious Generation delivers a dire warning.
Playground
by Richard Powers
In his novel Playground, Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers tackles two of the most pressing issues of our time: climate change and artificial intelligence. Todd Keane—an AI pioneer who founded Playground, an app that’s a cross between Facebook and Reddit—is suffering from Lewy body dementia and is trying to record all his memories while accomplishing the items on his bucket list. One of his idols is the legendary scuba diver and scientist Evelyne Beaulieu, who explores the ocean while her husband takes care of their children onshore. Keane and Beaulieu’s lives intersect on the French Polynesian island of Makatea, where Beaulieu is conducting new research on an ocean ravaged by climate change, while Keane and American investors attempt to transform the island into the floating utopia of their dreams. With AI innovations threatening to destroy traditional ways of life, the novel asks readers to think how technology can render human lives as disposable as toys discarded on a playground.
[…]: Poems
by Fady Joudah
In poet Fady Joudah’s sixth collection, […], the titular poem includes the line: “There are precedents, always will be/and there will be Gaza after the dark times.” The collection, a National Book Award finalist, highlights not just the “precedents” of violence and erasure experienced by Palestinian people, but also the enduring and visionary presence of Palestinian art and joy. In real time, Joudah uses an ellipsis, and this book as a whole, to leave a space for reckoning with the unspeakable violence inflicted in Gaza. This space and the silence it represent push back on numbness as a response to war.
All This Twisted Glory - This Woven Kingdom
by Tahereh Mafi
Layered with exquisite tension and heart-stopping romance, All This Twisted Glory is the explosive third book in the captivating, bestselling Woven Kingdom series.
Ensnared by secrets, Cyrus has ached for Alizeh since she first appeared in his dreams many months ago. Now that he knows those visions were planted by the devil, he can hardly bear to look at her—much less endure her company. But despite their best efforts to despise each other, Alizeh and Cyrus are drawn together over and over with an all-consuming thirst that threatens to destroy them both.
Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir
by Tessa Hulls
In her evocative, genre-defying graphic memoir, Tessa Hulls tells the stories of her grandmother, Sun Yi; her mother, Rose; and herself.
Sun Yi was a Shanghai journalist caught in the political crosshairs of the 1949 Communist victory. After eight years of government harassment, she fled to Hong Kong with her daughter. Upon arrival, Sun Yi wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival, used the proceeds to put Rose in an elite boarding school—and promptly suffered a breakdown that left her committed to a mental institution. Rose eventually came to the United States on a scholarship and brought Sun Yi to live with her.
Gorgeously rendered, Feeding Ghosts is Hulls’ homecoming, a vivid journey into the beating heart of one family, set against the dark backdrop of Chinese history. By turns fascinating and heartbreaking, inventive and poignant, it exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.
These Deadly Prophecies
by Andrea Tang
Fans of Knives Out and The Inheritance Games will love this fantastical murder mystery that keeps you guessing until the final page. Tabatha Zeng gets more than she bargained for as an apprentice to the famed sorcerer Solomon. He predicts his own death, which tragically comes true. When Tabatha and Solomon’s son Callum become the prime murder suspects, they team up in a race against the clock to clear their names and find the true killer.
Where the Library Hides
by Isabel Ibañez
Where the Library Hides is Isabel Ibañez’s stunning conclusion to the story that began in What the River Knows. A lush, immersive historical fantasy set in Egypt, filled with adventure and a rivals-to-lovers romance like no other!
Inez Olivera traveled across the world to Egypt, seeking answers to her parents’ recent and mysterious deaths. But all her searching led her down a perilous road, filled with heartache, betrayal, and a dangerous magic that pulled her deep into the past.
The Encanto’s Daughter
by Melissa de la Cruz
In Melissa de la Cruz’s captivating YA romantic fantasy, a half-encanto named MJ takes on the challenge of claiming the throne in the Filipino-inspired realm of Biringan, following her father’s unexpected death. As MJ forges an unexpected alliance with the enigmatic knight Sir Lucas, she must grapple with matters of the heart and the responsibilities that come with being a queen, all while the threat of a deadly curse looms over her kingdom.
Spin of Fate
by A. A. Vora
If you’re ready to dive into an original, epic fantasy unlike anything you’ve read before, add this debut novel to your reading list. In a world that divides society into “uppers” and “lowers,” Aina is a lower who manages to get promoted and become an upper. But life in the higher realms isn’t the blissful paradise she was promised, and Aina joins a rebel movement to fight against the corrupt system.
