The best books of 2024

This list is part of the best books of 2024.

Join 2,415 readers and share your 3 favorite reads of the year.

My favorite read in 2024

Book cover of Gravity's Rainbow

❤️ loved this book because...

One of the best novels of the 20th century, it's on a league of its own and it achieves everything a book can on its scale, style, ideas and emotions.

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Outlook 🥈 Originality
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐇 I couldn't put it down

By Thomas Pynchon ,

Why should I read it?

10 authors picked Gravity's Rainbow as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Hailed by many as the major experimental nov el of the post-war period, Gravity''s Rainbow is a bizarre co mic masterpiece in which linguistic virtuosity creates a who le other world. '


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My 2nd favorite read in 2024

Book cover of Anna Karenina

❤️ loved this book because...

The story it moved me the most throughout 2024, Tolstoy manages to capture the essence of life and the eternal quest for meaning and happiness in life with rich and complex characters, accessible-yet-poignant writing and philosophical and social analysis that fits perfectly with the story, setting and ideas presented in the book. It's as perfect as the traditional novel gets, and it's the best way to understand the complexities and contradictions of one of the most important writers in the literary canon.

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Character(s) 🥈 Emotions
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐇 I couldn't put it down

By Leo Tolstoy ,

Why should I read it?

20 authors picked Anna Karenina as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In 1872 the mistress of a neighbouring landowner threw herself under a train at a station near Tolstoy's home. This gave Tolstoy the starting point he needed for composing what many believe to be the greatest novel ever written.

In writing Anna Karenina he moved away from the vast historical sweep of War and Peace to tell, with extraordinary understanding, the story of an aristocratic woman who brings ruin on herself. Anna's tragedy is interwoven with not only the courtship and marriage of Kitty and Levin but also the lives of many other characters. Rich in incident, powerful in characterization,…


My 3rd favorite read in 2024

Book cover of The Book of Disquiet

❤️ loved this book because...

The book it took me the longest to read, because there is no plot or characters or a "connective tissue" in The Book of Disquiet. What it has is amazing prose writing in every single of its almost 600 pages, filled with ideas and instrospection, wisdom and melancholy, futility and meaning. Every fragment of this diary of musings, this factless autobiography, is solid gold. It's a book to have as a buddy alongside you and to return to as time passes.

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Writing 🥈 Teach
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐌 It was slow at times

By Fernando Pessoa , Richard Zenith (translator) ,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked The Book of Disquiet as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A modernist masterwork that has now taken on a similar iconic status to Ulysses, The Trial or In Search of Lost Time, Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet is edited and translated with an introduction by Richard Zenith in Penguin Modern Classics.

'Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn't exist,' - so claimed Alvaro de Campos, one of the 'heteronyms', fully-realised substitute personalities invented by Fernando Pessoa to spare himself the trouble of living real life. In this extraordinary book, the putative 'factless autobiography' of an accountant named Bernardo Soares, Fernando Pessoa explores and dismantles the nature of memory, identity, time and…


Book cover of Gravity's Rainbow
Book cover of Anna Karenina
Book cover of The Book of Disquiet

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