Amy Glynn's 3 favorite reads in 2024

I can't believe it took me so long to read this book; it's a longtime favorite of my mom's. My daughter is an undergrad at Bennington College in Vermont, and I visited her in October 2024. I'd been to Bennington before but not the music building, Jennings Hall. When my kid casually noted "by the way, this is 'Hill House.' Shirley Jackson was living down the street when she wrote that book," I realized I needed to get the original novel off my "read this eventually" list.

Jackson's rich descriptive sensibility and the weird dread and dissociation the book evokes are magnificent. And it's a decidedly late 50s-early 60s sensibility, which I adore... it was a more formal and somewhat more repression-forward moment in our culture, which is honestly gold for novelists who want to play with the often vast differences between someone's public facing persona and their suppressed / unvoiced thoughts. The house itself is kind of the main character, which I also love.

I'm a huge fan of Dashka Slater, and Accountable landed in a pile of novels submitted for an award where I serve on the adjudicating panel. I live in the area where both this book and The 57 Bus are set, so I had the "home turf" advantage of familiarity with the neighborhood where these events unfolded.

Slater has an amazing knack for truly "looking at both sides." Quotes because there aren't two sides, there are an infinitude of them. And she's brilliant at illuminating the reality that no one is a villain in his own story. The prose deftly oscillates between semi-poetic and semi-journalistic. Everything is described neutrally, and somehow, that's why it's all so freighted. It's a genius look at the kaleidoscopic collisions of teenagers, social media, anonymity, racism, disaffection, resentment, privilege and whatever "getting over it" is.

I admit it: I'm a superfan of Mark Gatiss' brilliant interpretation of these stories—I can watch episodes of "Sherlock" an infinite number of times. (OK: I can also do this with "House MD," and for exactly the same reasons.) Part of that is the amazing chemistry between Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman (or Hugh Laurie and Robert Sean Leonard), but more of it is the obvious references to "deep cuts" buried in the source material, which until this year I had never read. My eldest uncle died not long ago and I became the curator of his utterly massive collection of books, which included several editions of Conan Doyle's fantasia on infinite deductive power coupled with kelvin-scale zero social skills. Sherlock Holmes is the most relatable, lovable sociopath of all time, and it was just pure fun to go right to the source for once.