The Curator: 2024 superlative book awards and 2025 book life goals

this is the year we follow all the rabbit holes and drink all the potions

Whatup weirdos.

I have this intense suspicion that 2025 will be a strange reading year for me, and it’s all in response to my experience of 2024. I had a great reading year, so great that it is hard to give most of the books I read any sort of distinction beyond a middling rating. Much of what I read was from trusted recommendations or books from my shelves that I’d already been looking at for months (or years). I read some duds, but much of what I read had already been vetted. Thus, there was not a huge sense of discovery but rather a sense of catching up on books I’d missed out on. Looking back, I feel a sense of accomplishment that is also devoid of passion. 🤷‍♀️

Here are the fruits of my annual labor in a single photo. Notable absences are Martyr!, The Third Gilmore Girl, Penance, William, The Ministry of Time, and some Karin Slaughter audiobooks.

It really solidifies your accomplishment when you have to take 40+ books off a shelf and then put them all back again.

the 2024 subverse book awards

Because almost everything I read was either quite good or quite bad, I want to give out a few Subverse Awards instead of a giant ranking. I read a grip of classics, lots of horror/crime, and spent a ton of time with made-up messy families. I only read three non-fiction titles, which I don’t feel one way about, but it doesn’t make for a great voting pool. I restrained myself from giving out a Worst Overall award, but let’s just say picking an NYRB winner was not a Sophie’s choice.

• Longest Time on the Shelves - The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

• Best 2024 Release - James by Percival Everett

• Best Mystery - The Enigma of Room 622 by Joel Dicker

• Best Crime - The Redbreast by Jo Nesbo (sorry to Miss Slaughter)

• Best NYRB - Stoner by John Williams

• Best Translated - Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth

• Most Unexpected Rave - The Historian by Elizabeth Kostovo

• Most Confounding - Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector

• Biggest Let-Down - The Ministry of Time by Kailane Bradley

• Most Unsettling - Jawbone by Monica Ojeda

• Best Shortie - Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

• Most Underrated - Woodworm by Layla Martinez

• Most Overrated - This Other Eden by Paul Harding

• Best Cover - Midnight on Beacon Street by Emily Ruth Verona

What I want to know is, what would you vote for Best Cover? Anything you read in 2024 counts.

book life goals for 2025

I’ve been refining my reading taste for a few years now, but it’s been a long road. I read what I was told in college, generally the Western canon. In 2020, when I joined Bookstagram, I was highly susceptible to other readers’ opinions. Book of the Month selections appeared every month, no matter how questionable. I read the books I saw over and over again on my feed and pretended to like them. I went from raw dogging The Crimson Petal and the White to being spoon-fed things like The Ex Hex, and in neither position did I feel strong agency over what I was consuming.

My one goal for 2025 is to follow my petites obsessions and read more of the stuff that lights a fire in my soul. The syllabus tends to be mostly dark, moody, and complicated lit fit, crime/mystery, and horror, with a concentration in messy families, speculative, dystopian, or magical realism. Clearly, Mr King, I do like it darker.

in the running for the lowest Storygraph mood map of all time

I know many people are out here promising to read more of what they own first, and I absolutely respect that. I plan on doing some of the same, but damn if I’m not also tired of looking at all of their tiny faces! I need a little fire in my reading life this time around, a little blind faith, a little ✨magic potion✨. A few ways I plan on accomplishing this goal:

• Working out ways to discover books on my own, buying/borrowing them, and then actually effing reading them right away. No more years-long languishing. No more reading only what I’ve seen around 1000 times.

• Chasing the rabbit down the hole. I tend to get fixated on a theme but worry that I am missing out on too much to pursue it. This year, I plan on letting those fixations take over, run wild and free until my brain is satisfactorily saturated. This plan risks alienating some readers, so my condolences now, but I promise to attempt to make my obsessions as interesting to you as they are to me. I will be exploring many of these this year, but ideas already percolating are Nordic noir & literature, Booker Prize lists, vampire lore, and adding more authors to the 5+ club.

• Ignoring new books (somewhat). There are a few I plan to read (more on that next week), but generally, I seem to be bad at vetting new titles - I mean, the blurb copywriters clearly need a raise because they are master swindlers!! Or, if not ignoring, at least reading the entire preview on the Kindle store before committing entirely. A lot can be gleaned in those first few pages…

• Eliminating my Goodreads Challenge goal. I set it for the same as always (52), but I REALLY do not want to care about my book count this year. I may just turn it on at the last minute of December simply so I can have an easy record of what I read each year, but that’s it. This will hopefully allow me to tackle all of those chonky books I consistently swoon over from afar.

I do not have any goals for types of books, types of authors, how “widely” read, etc., because I now trust myself to instinctively find the things that are important and to hell with the rest. If I get to the end of the year and find I have let myself down in some way (never picked up a book by an author of color, nothing that challenged me, nothing in translation), then maybe I will revisit that strategy in 2026. For now, we are just chasing all the magic bunnies and drinking all the potions. Cheers! 🥂

What are your 2025 reading goals? Reading more? Reading less?! Reading for comfort? Reading for resistance?

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reading 📖→

• The first obsession is well underway! Since I picked up Ragnar Jonasson’s Snowblind during the holidays, I have only been reading Nordic authors. So far, I’m on three Nordic noir (Ragnar Jonasson, Asa Larsson, and Jo Nesbo who I already loved) and two lit fic (Jenny Hval and Karl Ove Knausgard). I’ve also got some Lars Kepler, Henning Mankell, Carl Frode Tiller, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Robert Walser, more Vigdis Hjorth, and the contentious Knut Hamsun on deck. If you have any other Nordic author suggestions, have at it!

• I am 15% into Knausgard’s The Morning Star, which so far is the Nordic version of PTA’s Magnolia and yes. Just yes.

these are the vibes.

book news and restacks📰→

• Kailani B.
  of
  Damsel in the Library
  on Authors I’ve Given Up On (Substack)

• Tembe Denton-Hurst
  at
  Extracurricular
  gave us A Book List for Precedented Times (Substack)

• This insanely sightful piece on the state of academia from

  Mary Gaitskill
  back in 2023 still resonates: The Despair of the Young.

• An article about professional organizing that features someone I know IRL who wrote a book! What Professional Organizers Know About Our Lives (The New Yorker paid, unfortunately).

• And The 50 Biggest Literary Stories of 2024 is straight entertainment (Lit Hub)

consuming📽️🎧→

• Landman OOOO BOY am I obsessed with this show. And then because Billy Bob, after that came Friday Night Lights (movie) and then the Rewatchables episode on FNL the movie, but also the show, and now I need to watch the show? Any Friday Night Lights show lovers out there? Is it still worth it, or too outdated?

• We watched Dark Crimes, a 2016 crime thriller starring Jim Carrey as a Polish police officer solving a cold case murder. There was a lot of promise, but not even the excitement of solving a crime could outweigh the hopeless darkness of the storyline and Carrey’s fake Polish accent. Do not recommend.

and cats 🐈‍⬛→

when someone has the audacity to knock on your door.

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let’s chat 👻→

• Do you have any 2025 reading goals?

• What are you reading currently, and is it any good?

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in case you missed it 🖤

The Curator: best reads of 2024

The Curator: on becoming an author completionist

The Curator: when you don't enjoy a popular novel

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See you around the bookshelf!