With so many best-of lists popping out left and right, who has time to read all of them?
Turns out: we do. But because you probably don't, we rounded up all the top 10 lists we could find, smashed 'em together in a big spreadsheet and spat out overall top 10 lists for the year's best books, games, TV shows and movies. You're welcome.
The Best Books Of 2024
10. 'Beautyland' by Marie-Helene Bertino
Through friendships, hardships, adolescence, adulthood, celebrations of life, death, and the publication of an alien's musings on humanity, Bertino has brought a stunning story to us all. "Beautyland" is not only a story of remembering the difficulties and beauties of being different, but one of discovering life as a person every day, and holding each moment tenderly, examining it with wonder, awe, and a little bit of humor.
9. 'My Friends' by Hisham Matar
"My Friends" is a tour de force in its treatment of history. Matar sidesteps the more obvious temptations of the epic subject matter to home in on the everyday, intimate moments that make up the wider sweep of time, moments that give history texture and warmth and flavor — and in so doing reveals that there are alternatives to the schemes of the unreasonable beyond acquiescence on the one hand and violent opposition on the other.
8. 'Creation Lake' by Rachel Kushner
You know from this book's opening paragraphs that you are in the hands of a major writer, one who processes experience on a deep level. Kushner has a gift for almost effortless intellectual penetration.
7. 'Here One Moment' by Liane Moriarty
Most novels wrap up predictably or peter out or go off the rails. But not Moriarty's. Her conclusions aren't obvious, and they don't necessarily give readers what they want, but they do induce a sense of sanguinity — an exhale of relief that the world makes sense. Or Moriarty's world, anyway.
6. 'The Book of Love' by Kelly Link
The prose is diamond-sharp; it's hard to imagine Link ever writing a clunky sentence or a bad description. Her characters are all brilliantly fast-talking and fast-thinking, their conversations full of wordplay and in-jokes. As people, they are multi-faceted; charming and understandable and tragic, as well as a bit obnoxious.
5. 'All Fours' by Miranda July
But "All Fours" possessed me. I picked it up and neglected my life until the last page, and then I started begging every woman I know to read it as soon as possible.
[The Cut]
4. 'Intermezzo' by Sally Rooney
Rooney's ability to seamlessly present age-old questions and ideas within the reality of our current world — which, at times, can feel hopeless — seems to be, in part, what makes her a significant writer today. If "Intermezzo" is any indication, the author's literary finesse grows with each new novel.
3. 'The Ministry of Time' by Kaliane Bradley
What's most impressive about Bradley's debut, aside from the seamless melding of genres, is the way it juggles the weighty themes of identity, colonialism, government corruption, genocide and climate change with quieter explorations of love and connection.
2. 'Martyr!' by Kaveh Akbar
The novel itself is almost violently artful, full of sentences that stab, pierce and slice with their beauty ... Akbar's writing has the musculature of poetry that can't rely on narrative propulsion and so propels itself. It's tonally nuanced — in command of a dazzling spectrum of frequencies from comedic to tragic — rigorous and surprising.
1. 'James' by Percival Everett
What sets "James" above Everett's previous novels, as casually and caustically funny as many are, is that here the humanity is turned up — way up. This is Everett's most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful. Beneath the wordplay, and below the packed dirt floor of Everett's moral sensibility, James is an intensely imagined human being.
A note on methodology
We wish we could say there was a super fancy algorithm that combed the internet and did this for us. But the truth is that the entity doing the internet combing was a human Digg Editor, and calculations were performed by an Excel sheet that ingested and re-ranked all the lists we fed into it (briefly: #1 ranked items received 10 points, #2 ranked items got 9 points... down through #10 ranked items, which got 1 point; items on unranked lists all got 5.5 points).
