This is another tricky match-up of two completely different kinds of books, which leads me to wonder if Biography of X would do the same kind of damage against another fiction book. My gut says it probably will, which is partially why it will be moving on to the next round. As much as I truly adored Ross Gay speaking sweet delights into my ear during an otherwise very depressing January, the inventiveness of Biography of X engaged—and continues to engage—my reader and writer brain in a way that felt kind of essential and definitive for my creative trajectory in 2024. I have more to say on that front, but I think I’ll save it for the final battle because it has more to do with what Lacey is doing on a craft level and how it compares to other works of contemporary fiction. Until then, we say a gentle goodbye and thank you for your service to The Book of (More) Delights.
I’m just now realizing these match-ups are only going to get harder. Coincidentally, this is another thematically well-suited opponent for Catch the Rabbit, considering much of the story is told in flashbacks to a time when the characters were roughly Selin’s age, or at least moving through that same formative late high school/early college era of adolescence. While both books contain so many of my favorite coming-of-age hallmarks, I have to admit that much of Either/Or’s plot has already become a bit fuzzy for me, whereas I feel like I can still remember entire scenes and conversations from Catch the Rabbit nearly verbatim. This story has imprinted itself into my brain in a way that makes me want to revisit it not because I’ve forgotten it, but because I feel a weird urge to keep poking the bruise that is Leyla and Sara’s relationship, especially knowing where their journey ends. For sinking its claws in deep and not letting go, I’m moving Catch the Rabbit forward.
I thought I knew how this one was going to go, but now that I’m sitting here thinking about it, I’m having second thoughts. Obviously, a Sally Rooney goes right to the top, right? But if I’m being fair and comparing these two books head to head, then I have to consider the reality that The Spear Cuts Through Water was, objectively, a way more fun read. Sure, I think Intermezzo is Rooney’s best book on a technical level. Her prose is exquisite, her characters’ flaws painfully and deeply human, and her commentary on love/sex/relationships both scathing and oddly compassionate, like a god who recognizes her characters as silly playthings but loves them anyway and somehow convinces us to love them, too.
But TSCTW has actual gods. And magic, and quests, and talking turtles, and a mythical underwater theater you can only go to when you’re dreaming, and plotting and fighting and rivalries and a queer love story that doesn’t make you want to bang your head against the wall or psychoanalyze every word out of the characters’ mouths. TSCTW is a cinematic masterpiece on the page, and deserves a whole lot more hype, actually!! The more time I spend away from it, the more I realize I’m not done talking about it, whereas Intermezzo has, frankly, been talked and written about to death. Time to give someone else some airtime.
Surprised? Me too! This didn’t go quite how I thought it would, but I’m actually pretty pleased with where we’ve ended up. Stay tuned for the final round, coming this weekend (Saturday or Sunday, whenever I get my shit together).
Until then, what do you think? Agree or disagree? Which one do you think deserves to take the lead?
Chat soon, ❤ Catherine
Housekeeping note: all book links go to my Bookshop storefront, where each purchase supports independent bookstores (and this newsletter, because I get a small percentage of each sale).
Hello friends! Here we are again. 2024 was a long year, in which I somehow managed to finish 53 books despite numerous travels, weddings, getting engaged(!), and countless other distractions and diversions. Not as many books as years past, but a whole lot more life, and a really great year of reading, nonetheless.
For Round One of the Lit Chat’s Best Books of 2024 Bracket, we’ve got six match-ups. Most of these were pyramid-toppers, but not all! We’re working outside of the pyramids a little bit this year because I ended up combining a few months together a couple times (and I only read one book in November and December each, so no newsletter there, oops), but I want to make sure all these fantastic books get their fair shot. Make your predictions and place your bets now, because we’re about to get into it.
We started the year strong with two audiobooks narrated by their respective authors, which is an experience I treasure. For this specific match-up, the winner is going to be determined mostly by vibe, as both were fantastic in their own ways. I quickly became deeply invested in Jennette’s story, and found so much to admire in the strength and clarity of her writing, her resilience, and her signature humor. Meanwhile, The Book of (More) Delights found me during a time where I deeply needed a reminder to look for joy in my daily life, and Ross Gay helped me find it. I’ve tried to keep up this practice throughout the year whenever I’m out and about in the world, finding a contented feeling of peace in the way my neighborhood changes through the seasons and the small, tender moments of humanity witnessed on my morning commute. For being a consistent and much-needed source of joy, Ross Gay wins this round.
This is a very tough case of completely different kinds of books that have had a profound impact on me in completely different ways, and as such I would never otherwise be comparing them. Biography of X was a novel that changed the way I think about the novel as a form in its depiction of a character whose defining characteristic is a refusal to be defined. 1000 Words is the companion craft book to Jami Attenberg’s #1000wordsofsummer annual challenge, which has brought me invaluable connection and companionship along with inspiring me to produce literally thousands of words. These are both books that I keep close to my desk and return to frequently, so this is probably the most difficult match-up of this entire round. With a heavy heart, I’m going with Biography of X, purely because in a competition consisting mostly of novels, it feels most fair to compare this one to the rest of the contenders. However!! Let it be known that 1000 Words deserves a special honorable mention as being a book that well and truly shaped not only my reading year, but my entire writing practice.
While I do stand by ACOMAF being the best of the series, it’s simply no contest when up against a shining example of contemporary literary fiction at its finest. Either/Or was the smart, funny, and endearingly relatable sequel to a favorite from years past, The Idiot, about a Harvard undergraduate spending the summer as a travel writer. It played on my English major’s heartstrings, gave me glimpses into a part of a world I’ve never seen, and let me gobble up a progression of increasingly chaotic romantic encounters like the nosy busybody I am. This isn’t to say I didn’t also gobble up the enemies-to-lovers romance that dominates the second book in Sarah J. Maas’s steamy series; I did go on to read like two thousand more pages of this series over the course of the year, after all. But Either/Or was meaty in a way that fed my brain and my heart and made me feel like I was learning and growing right along with Selin, so onward Selin goes to the next round.
While both of these books are coincidentally about emotionally fraught road trips, and both can claim powerful endings that caught me by surprise, there is a clear winner here. The Road has the advantage of unexpectedly moving me to tears, but I finished the book and mostly stopped thinking about it after a few days. In contrast, I still think about the final scene of Catch the Rabbit probably twice a week. Catch the Rabbit achieved so many things that I am obsessed with during Sara and Leyla’s chaotic journey of reconnection: it seamlessly interwove years of personal and national history into the present moment, doling out perfectly-paced details and anecdotes as needed to reinforce Sara’s narrative, all while putting the slippery messiness of memory and growing up on full display. Bonus points for the experience of reading this book while on the train through the European countryside. I’m grateful to The Road for being my introduction to McCarthy’s work and enjoyed it so much more than I expected I would, but Catch the Rabbit became one of my favorite books of all time, and has a strong chance of beating out all the rest for book of the year.
Another tricky one, because these are two of my favorite authors living and writing today for an audience of people around my age, which is a really special experience. What this one comes down to is that while I thoroughly enjoyed The Pairing, it simply does not carry the same weight that Intermezzo does. To be fair, they are completely different genres, so this isn’t really a fair match-up! The Pairing is a rollicking, raunchy second chance romance set on a food and wine tour of Europe, while Intermezzo is a quiet, thoughtful, plodding and at times painful exploration of love, sex, relationships, and social norms through a solidly literary lens. At the end of the day, I feel like Intermezzo engaged my brain in a way that feels excessively rare these days,inviting me to forgo the instant gratification championed in The Pairing in favor of sitting with its characters and their situations in a way that inspired reflection and analysis. I am, for better or worse, exactly Sally Rooney’s target audience, and for that reason, she wins the day.
Writer Maris Kreizman called The God of the Woods “the thriller of the year,” and I wholeheartedly agree. It was a sit-down-on-the-couch-and-don’t-get-up-for-three-hundred-pages kind of book that simply requires absolute surrender. On the other hand, The Spear Cuts Through Water took me so long to finish that the Brooklyn Public Library threatened to make me pay for it. However! My slowness was more situational than merit-based, because The Spear Cuts Through Water is a book unlike anything I’ve ever read before. It’s the story of an epic journey, a reality-blending legendary history performed with the intermittent inclusion of a Greek chorus of supporting voices. It’s a love letter to the oral tradition and a love story at its heart, filled with magic, intrigue, and some of the most impressively all-encompassing worldbuilding I’ve read in a long time. The God of the Woods was a fantastic page-turner filled with compelling characters and sharp commentary on elitism and social class, but The Spear Cuts Through Water is entirely unique in its form and content, introducing readers to a world as vast, rich, and dangerously enchanting as Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones. This is the future of fantasy, people!! For that reason, it’s moving forward.
Thanks for coming along for Round One! Stay tuned for the Round Two in the next couple of days. In the meantime, I’d love to hear about your top books of the year, especially if we have any in common, or any recommendations you have for me in 2025!
Until next time, happy reading! ❤ Catherine
Housekeeping note: all book links go to my Bookshop storefront, where each purchase supports independent bookstores (and this newsletter, because I get a small percentage of each sale).
It’s September! Thank goodness. I don’t know about you, but this summer really took it out of me. Gone are the days where I could knock out the entire Lake Forest Library summer reading challenge in the span of a couple of days. From what I remember, we were supposed to log our reading in 20 or 30-minute increments, amounting to a total of maybe four hours? That was an easy rainy day for me.
This summer, free half hours have been few and far between, and most of my summer reading was concentrated into plane and train rides or rare, peaceful early mornings before the rest of the AirBnB woke up. I love the flexibility and freedom of summer, and I’m so grateful to have spent the past few months across more than half a dozen cities celebrating friends, family, love, and the joy of being in a new place with your people. That said, I’m exhausted!!! I’m so happy to have spent most of August recovering at home, and I’m so ready to start channeling some much-needed back to school energy into my September.
As you might imagine, this post is a big one! I read ten books over the months of June, July, and August, so for the first time since March 2023, we have an Honorable Mention tier as a ~blog exclusive~. If you usually prefer reading this in your inbox, though, make sure you’re subscribed to my Substack here:
I grew up reading the Artemis Fowl books and was excited to read an adult book by the same author, but disappointingly, this one didn’t do much for me. Highfire is about a young Cajun boy, Squib Moreau who befriends Lord Highfire (aka Vern), the last living dragon hiding out in the Louisiana bayou. The two become unlikely allies when they unite against a rogue cop trying to expose Vern while also aggressively pursuing Squib’s single mother. It was definitely a high-energy story, but the humor was a bit crass for my taste—the kind I usually refer to as “boy humor.” However! Apparently there’s a TV adaptation in the works, with Nicolas Cage executive producing and voicing the dragon?? So you might want to check it out after all.
I decided to make my way through the Earthsea books on audio as travel companions, but the narrator’s voice is so lovely to listen to that if I pop it on right as I’ve settled into my seat for an early morning flight, I’m asleep before we take off. Granted, I don’t sleep well on planes, so it’s more of a twilight half-sleep where the story kind of infuses into my dreams. I’m never quite sure how much of the story I’ve actually retained, but whenever I rewind, I’m like, “Oh, I listened to this already.” Anyway, this second book features a young priestess named Tenar, who meets an adult Ged when she catches him trying to break into her temple. Ged offers her the choice between the path she’s trained for her whole life, and the potential of a future beyond the temple’s walls. I’m still intrigued enough to want to continue listening to these books, but I think a fully awake physical re-read will produce a completely different experience someday.
Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I’ve been a bit underwhelmed by Leigh Bardugo’s latest books! I once claimed that if anyone was well-primed to write the next fully immersive fantasy phenomenon ala Harry Potter or Game of Thrones, it would be Bardugo. And yet, I’ve found her more recent books fairly forgettable. Her latest is a historical fiction (which I usually love!) set in the time of the Spanish Inquisition. Luzia, a young servant girl, unintentionally catches the attention of the Spanish court when she’s caught performing small magics in the home of her employer. She is then thrust into the spotlight and forced to compete against other would-be magicians for a position in the royal court, with the help of her wealthy patron’s mysterious—and mysteriously enticing—familiar. I enjoyed it, but as a standalone historical fantasy novel, I didn’t find it as wholly encompassing as I think her earlier fantasy novels were.
I’m still confused as to why this book is considered a novella when it’s still the length of a regular book (232 pages)? I mean, it’s not as long as the other books, but still! That’s a normal book-length! Anyway, no spoilers, but this is considered book #3.5 because it’s basically just a little filler story about Feyre and her extended family spending the holiday season in Velaris after the events of the third book conclude. It was sweet and nothing crazy happened, but as much as I enjoy this world and these characters, it also felt a little unnecessary? I’d rather just skip ahead to the next book, but I guess I’ll wait until I read that one to pass judgment on whether or not we needed this one.
This was actually the last book I finished in August, and the first contemporary novel that I’d read in a long time—it’s been a big genre summer, as you’ve already seen! This is certainly a novel that will bring you back to the messy beauty of reality. When Cam returns home to Houston from LA after the murder of his boyfriend, he’s not expecting to move back in with his estranged childhood best friend, TJ. But TJ proves to be the lifeline Cam needs when his grief and self-destructive coping behaviors start to overwhelm, and Cam’s newfound presence might just be what TJ needs to reclaim the life he wants, too.
Family Meal is a book about grief, queerness, found family, sex, food, and the many ways our relationships with all of the above can get messed up and heal again with grace and love. This one might be a little more difficult for anyone sensitive to content about eating disorders, addiction, and self-harm, so as Washington’s opening note to the book says: “please be kind to yourself. And go at your own pace. There’s no wrong way to be, and the only right way is the way that you are.”
I won’t get into plot details on this one because spoilers, but I will say it had book #5 levels of drama for only being book #3 in the series. Are these the best written books I’ve ever read in my life? Of course not. But the stakes are high, the pace is fast, the characters are hot and in love, and it was just so easy on a jet-lagged, post-work conference brain. I think book #2 is my favorite so far, but this was still a 10/10 reading experience. I’m curious to see where the story goes for book #5, especially knowing that it’s told from a different POV, but there was also enough of a resolution in this one that I feel okay with putting a pause on this series for another month or so.
When one sees a Nobel-prize winner in the Vienna outpost of Shakespeare & Co., one buys it!! The narrator of this strange book is the caretaker of a small community of mostly summer homes in the mountains of a remote Polish border town. When she’s not researching her neighbors’ birth charts or translating William Blake’s poetry, she can often be found advocating for the protection of local wildlife against the town’s hunting community.
Upon discovering that one of her eccentric neighbors has choked to death on the bone of a deer he illegally poached, our narrator becomes convinced that the animals are rising up and seeking justice against humans. When two more questionable deaths occur in the neighborhood, the reader is almost inclined to believe her. Part mystery, part slow-burn thriller, this book’s atmosphere stems largely from the narrator herself: rustic and pastoral but not quite cozy, an underlying tension and the suspicion of hidden secrets prevents the reader from getting too comfortable. This would be a great book to help you ease into fall and the onset of spooky reading!
I was not expecting this one to break my heart as much as it did!! The Road came highly recommended from a work friend who had recently read McCarthy’s entire oeuvre, and suggested this one as the best entry point to his work. The Road is a devastating novel about a father’s love for his son as they journey through post-apocalyptic America, surviving not for the promise of a better future—because there isn’t one—but simply for each other.
I was most impressed by McCarthy’s stark, spare prose and no-frills dialogue, how successfully it captured not only the hellscape they traveled through but also the intense, unspoken intimacy and vulnerability between the boy and his father. We don’t know their names or their ages, don’t know what happened to the world or what their life was like before the road, but we understand their secret hopes, fears, and defiant resilience with a rare, gut-wrenching clarity. I cried at the end! That should be endorsement enough.
I adored this sequel to Batuman’s The Idiot as much as I adored The Idiot, and am so glad we got to see Selin grow through this next chapter of her story. Now a sophomore at Harvard in 1996, Selin is still processing the strange roller coaster of emotions that last year’s situationship with Ivan sent her on, as she searches for meaning in his actions through the books he studied and through her own course reading list.
When her summer plans bring her to Turkey as a student travel writer, Selin’s coming of age begins in earnest, her travels taking her on adventures of varying success including equally varied encounters with men. An education in culture, sex, and of course, more literature, Selin finally comes into her confidence enough to start separating herself from the influences of the friends, family, writers, and philosophers that have defined her life so far. The former English major in me loved watching Selin experience the revelations of growing up and reconciling life with literature, choosing what to keep with her and what to leave behind, all in the timeless pursuit of living a life worth writing about.
My sweet friend Monique honored me by borrowing my pyramid format earlier this year to review her best books of February and March, and selected Catch the Rabbit as her top choice. Obviously, I had to check it out.
The novel, translated into English from Serbo-Croatian by the author, follows a chaotic road trip undertaken by two childhood best friends, Sara and Lejla, who have not spoken to each other in nearly a decade. The story is divided into the present moment of their road trip, driving from Bosnia to Vienna to find Lejla’s long-lost brother, and the past, in which Sara narrates anecdotes that illustrate the progression of their friendship as children and the starring role Lejla played in Sara’s life and memories.
The author nails the strange familiarity of being around people you knew in childhood now as adults, that weird intimacy of knowing someone’s essence and history so completely and yet feeling like time and physical distance have made you strangers. She also impressively captures the slipperiness of memory, the way certain defining moments can be so supercharged with emotion that it overshadows the truth, creating entirely different versions of a memory for the people who share it.
Like Monique, I finished this book and immediately wanted to dive back in knowing what I had learned throughout the course of the book—which included a lot of history about the Bosnian War that I had simply never known anything about—and reexamine both Sara’s and Lejla’s memories and motivations in a different light. No spoilers, but it’s one of the most perfect endings I’ve read in a long time. Unsettling, emotionally intense, unresolved, and yet somehow it’s completely satisfying, because you realize there was no other way that this particular journey could end. It leaves you literally wanting—not for anything specific, but trapped in a paralyzing moment of desperation: an ache of absence, with the hope of fulfillment slipping through one’s fingers.
And that’s a wrap on my summer reading! I’ll be back in October ready to go full send into spooky reads, my favorite time of the year. Until then, let me know if you want to chat about these or any other books or give me some recommendations for the fall! It’s good to be back.
Housekeeping note: all links go to my Bookshop storefront, where each purchase supports independent bookstores (and this newsletter, because I get a small percentage of each sale).
Catherine Thoms 