The Art Attic #3: 2024 in Books

In 2024, I read 64 books. They were all audiobooks, so my 2025 goal is more eyeball reading, not because one format is more valid than another but because there are more eyeball books than ear books. I want all the books.

If you follow my stories on social media, then you've seen most of what I've read and how I rated them. Here's a little more information on which books are still in my head months later. If you are interested in purchasing any of the books I've mentioned, please consider patronizing Brain Lair Books, a local, black-woman-owned bookstore in my area. The owner does a ton of community work and curates her store for marginalized voices, yet she somehow doesn't have her own rocket company.

The Good

Non-fiction made a big, if occasionally depressing, splash in 2024. In February, I got culty with Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology by Leah Remini and When the World Didn't End: A Memoir by Guinevere Turner. Regarding the latter, you know it's bad when you hope someone can go back to the relative safety of a cult. Also powerful but depressing for any woman who's tired of being boxed in: She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O'Rourke, and A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell.

Not depressing at all even though it features a murder: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt. First of all, do check out the audiobook for the accents alone. I could not stop adding a sexy Southern drawl to my own inner monologue. Every time I thought I'd heard the most outlandish thing, something even more over the top would happen. I don't know how much of this book is true and how much was embellished, but I don't care. It's a fun and wild ride. Probably one of my top three reads of 2024.

On my fiction shelf, I couldn't stop recommending Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts by Kate Racculia to all of my friends. Who doesn't want to go on an Edgar Allan Poe-themed scavenger hunt put on by an eccentric dead millionaire? If you want a story that's full of lively characters, a mystery, and a little coziness and some romance, this is the book. Not cozy at all, The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix delivered on the premise. While I didn't find this book as charming as his other novels (How To Sell A Haunted House forever), it certainly served thrills and horror. More on that below.

The Bad

In my 30s, I realized it was okay to quit a book that wasn't bringing me joy. If I was actively avoiding reading, then the book was bad. Be free. I quit 6 books on my list, a record. A couple were just boring. Most had issues I couldn't look past — fatphobia, flat characters, graphic child abuse, #girlbossing — but the worst books I read in 2024 were the ones that had a twist at the ending that made me see red (which means spoilers in this paragraph because I recommend none of these). Hello, Twelve Nights at Rotter House, which turned out to be not a haunted house book but rather a guy who had snapped justifying to the ghost of his best friend why he had killed him and his own wife. (The short answer is misogyny and racism, so I'm glad that jerk got 10 hours in my brain.) I've also been raging about Bad Man by Dathan Aurbach. This book was beautifully written, but in the end, our protagonist was the bad man, which should have been obvious because why else would a character be fat? Even more infuriating, the journey of the character leads nowhere, so all that really happened after a dozen hours was that a family lost both of their kids. Great.

I did read one book that was so entertainingly bad, I liveblogged it for my bookworm friends on Facebook. The Return by Rachel Harrison read like an unedited novel being workshopped by a college freshman. The author mostly told instead of showed. Seriously, the first 45 minutes is just characters on the phone. It also felt abundantly clear as I read that the author has never had a healthy friendship. Yikes. Here's a bit of my liveblog:

• The protagonist is narrating and she seems to be burning with jealousy towards her friends and resents the idea that they might ever spend time together without her. No joke, this is how she described their relationship: "We were the closest of friends. We didn't share our struggles or talk about emotions or feelings.”

• I feel like the author loves decor and wrote this book as a love letter to the themes hotel of her dreams. It's full of excessive detail I don't need. I know the pricing structure of the restaurant and the entire dinner menu.

• The protagonist is also very worried about being rude at the weirdest times. "What I really want to know is what her job is, but I think it would be rude to ask outright." You're at a hotel. There's nothing rude about asking one of the employees what their job is.

• "She looks like she needs chapstick, but I don't want to be rude by offering her any." She's a friend of over a decade, not a stranger. What on earth is this concept of friendship?

• Omg, we're finally learning what happened to Return, and we're being told second-hand by Protagonist instead of hearing it from the corpse's too betoothed mouth. SHOW DON'T TELL!

• WHY ARE YOU BREAKING THE TENSION OF THE CLIMAX TO WONDER IF TREES KNOW DANCES?!??!

  
  

The Horror

I dove into horror like it was a pool in August. In particular, I love a haunted house book. I love the metaphor of the things that we live with and the ghosts that still haunt us. My favorite haunted house books of 2024 were Model Home by Rivers Solomon (about the ghosts of childhood and the demons of racism), Just Like Home by Sara Gailey (about the internal struggle of loving a monster), The September House by Carissa Orlando (about the evils we can trick ourselves into living with). The last one might have been funnier for me than it was meant to be because I kept picturing the main character as Jennifer Coolidge. I need to see her getting up before dawn to scrub the blood from the walls so her daughter doesn't realize the house is haunted. Someone make this happen!

But The Art Attic isn't a starred review; it's an examination of why things are rattling around in my head. One of the biggest themes I see in my reading last year is trauma. Not coincidentally, I'm in the process of writing out the trauma that I experienced as a child. Artistically, trauma has definitely been coming through in my work in the shape of thorns, skulls, and "imperfections."

Last fall, I felt compelled to paint a woman with a bird's nest in her hair. Then, I realized she needed to be looking away from the viewer out into the unknown and that unknown should be a cloudy beach. I started the piece in August; finished in October. This week when I was putting up the new prints of it in my shop, the title hit me out of nowhere. "Heavy With Child" was me following my instincts to paint out all of the pain I felt in the four years it took to adopt our daughter.

I read of hauntings, write of dark days, and mix them together to make beauty.