playing favorites 2024

This is the annual list of my five favorite books—a once-ambitious number that now feels super low. I read a lot this year and left many books unread on the table. There's always 2025, right?

Be the future is now an official store on bookshop. I don't know how it works yet, but if you buy any books at the links below I may get a small cut. I will no doubt use this money to buy more books. And I'd much rather you get these from a library instead!

I'm sharing a few honorable mentions that didn't make the final cut. Priya Parker's book The Art of Gathering did inspire more than one blog post this year. You Glow in the Dark by Liliana Colanzi is a brilliant collection of short story sci-fi set in Latin America. Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll was a book I called "beguiling" when I read it back in January. And I couldn't stop talking about White Women: Everything You Already Know about Your Own Racism and How to Do Better by Regina Jackson and Saira Rao, though I wish I didn't have to! Please enjoy this list of my favorite books I read this year.

5. A Last Supper of Queer Apostles, by Pedro Lemebel

This is a collection of essays written by Chilean author and artist Pedro Lemebel. Writer Garth Greenwell explains Lemebel's use of the term crónica to describe his writing. "It's a “bastard genre” accommodating reportage, memoir, economic analysis, history, poetry, and extravagant acts of imagination." The book is a series of crónicas in this style: story, poem, memoir, all running together. Lemebel's stories include sex workers, people living with AIDS, and elderly travestis. One story is about a former art school student of his in the years of the dictatorship. Begging Lemebel to help radicalize him, “he was barely nineteen years old on the afternoon when a sneaky little military bullet blew out the kindling flame of his passionate life.”

I hold a special place in my heart for my queer ancestors of all relations. This goes double for queer artists of color. Lemebel experienced the fascist oppression in his native Chile under Pinochet. He grew up and old in a world that I barely knew. The people in his stories don't usually have ones written about them. I loved all the ways Lemebel expresses queerness through his words. With the subjects above, he showed love and tenderness to people who really need it.

4. Making Love with the Land, Joshua Whitehead

This is another memoir that blends genres that reached me at the right moment. Joshua Whitehead is a two-spirit, Oji-nêhiyaw Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation. This book feels of the pandemic, even post-pandemic. Each story is a behind-the-scenes look into his life and what moves him.

Whitehead's novel Jonny Appleseed made Playing Favorites 2021. I didn't know what to expect when I started this one. It started light, almost superficial, but I ached through so much of this book. The essay 'Me, the Joshua Tree' floored me, as did 'I Own a Body That Wants to Break.' The book was relatable and vulnerable, two qualities I love in a memoir.

3. The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans—and How We Can Fix It, by Dorothy A. Brown

It's racism all the way down. Brown wrote this book after becoming a tax policy lawyer. It wasn't until she took that job that she realized how racism figures deep into our tax code. Heterosexual white men changed laws and set policy for the benefit of other white men. These have generational impacts that many of us assume to be neutral artifacts of the past.

I didn't know a book about taxes would be this good! It's readable, with information that may shock, surprise, or anger you (or all three). Brown's book helped me realize how complicated remedies for equity can be. It's not enough for white and Black families to pay equal tax rates now. They haven't had the same access to credit. Black families were unfairly denied wealth-building opportunities the white families had. Their two households are in very different financial situations. Federal policies created those differences. We can't make it right without solving for that harm.

2. The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Message begins in Senegal and concludes in Palestine. The section on Palestine or a when the book came out. The story also includes a stop in South Carolina, where the ghosts of apartheid still linger. Through it all, Coates draws a line between the Jim Crow south and modern-day Israel. He describes what it was like to have bought into another big lie. And he reckons with what happened when the wool fell from his (and hopefully our) eyes.

This was a powerful book that I found myself slowing down to read. I admired how he laid out the book, taking little for granted, in as clear a way as he could. He writes about his big mistake: when he cited Israel in his article about reparations done right. This book goes beyond simple atonement. He calls us to awareness and action.

1. Chain Gang All Stars, by Nana Kwame Adeji-Brenyah

In a future unlike ours, participants in the us prison system have a choice. They can serve out their sentences in deteriorating and dangerous prisons. Or they can risk it all in a televised no-holds-barred battle royale with other prisoners. Make it through a gauntlet of matches and you could one day be free. Every moment of the prisoners lives is broadcast and dissected by reality-TV-loving fans. Loretta Thurwar enters the system to become the most beloved player on the circuit. She and her lover Hamara "Hurricane" Staxxx work to lead their chain to solo and team victories. They navigate their relationships in a world that simultaneously loves and despises them.

I loved this book! The entire novel read like a movie, like grim reality. The setting was both future-fiction and present-day reality. It felt like a story that could take place in just a few years. Adeji-Brenyah connects this world to the reality that incarcerated people face today. It was funny and realistic and tragic and informative. Definitely the book of 2024 for me.

a focus on people

Another book that touched me this year is several decades old. Black Power: Politics of Liberation in America is by Charles V. Hamilton and Kwame Ture. They write about the institutions of their day in ways that still ring true today. They write,

The year ahead will ask more of us than most people are willing or able to give. I'm going to try to keep my focus on the folks around us. The institutions some people are desperate to preserve will fall eventually. Let's build something new instead.