My Top Books of 2024

My Goodreads goal this year was 12 and I finished #11 last night, so it’s looking a little bit dangerous but I think I should be able to lock in and finish my last one in the next week and a half. Regardless, here are my current top 3 books of the year.

#3 Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

Blake Crouch does some very smart sci-fi thrillers and this is one of two of his that I’ve read. Like his other books, in Dark Matter he takes a relatively common sci-fi concept and then uses it to write a smart and epic ride. In this case, he explores the multiverse. This book came out in 2016, a little bit before the multiverse shot into the mainstream with a bunch of superhero movies and Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. My favorite part of Crouch’s take is that, unlike those movies in which the multiverse is portrayed as a fun and silly place where up is down, left is right, and people have hot dogs for fingers, Dark Matter depicts the idea of alternate realities are something that is actually very scary and not to be messed with. He makes the existential terror of being lost outside of space and time seem really palpable, and I found that take to be pretty fresh and realistic. 

 

#2 Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

A great book for any up and coming artist to read. Steve Martin was just bad at comedy for so long before he became incredible at it. But he just loved doing it and kept going for the love of the game. A favorite quote that I’ve been thinking about, as a performer, since I read it: “I learned a lesson: It was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: Like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the abominable circumstances.”

 

#1 The Will of the Many by James Islington

The thing about me is that I love a smart fantasy novel that brilliantly depicts and acts as an allegory for real world socio-political and geopolitical issues. The Will of the Many is exactly that. Under the backdrop of a Roman Empire-esque nation, James Islington creates a vivid world that has a lot to say about colonialism, the prison-industrial complex, capitalism, and the line between freedom fighters and terrorists (uh oh). Most importantly though, there’s a cool but grounded magic system with many mysteries yet to unfold. I can’t wait for the sequel.

Thanks for reading!

Rudolph