My Favorite Books and Graphic Novels of 2024

Sat Dec 21 2024

1649 words, 9 min read

It’s been about 1 year and 8 days since my last year-end book roundup.

In that time, I’ve read 60 books, graphic novels, and comics, for a total of about 17,000 pages. 35 were books, 25 were graphic novels or comics. This represents a change in my reading habits compared to last year - where I did not read many graphic novels and comics, if at all.

I attribute this change to two factors - the first is that this year I prioritized learning more about tablet hardware, and so I acquired a few tablets to tinker with over the course of the year. This lead me to find media that can take advantage of the tablet form factor. Naturally, since I’ve never been one for watching shows or gaming, this lead me to seek out graphic novels. Indeed - the high quality screens that come with most high-end tablets are perfect for reading graphic novels and comics.

The other factor is that after quite a long search, I finally gave in and ordered Boys Weekend by Mattie Lubchansky online (via Bookshop.org!). Somewhat stubbornly, I’d been hoping to find it in a physical book store, even going so far as taking a detour to a few bookstores in the Castro in SF. But… no luck! However - as you can see, it kicked off quite a streak of graphic novel exploration. I read it on a plane going to Montreal, and as soon as I got back to the US, I set my Libby account on whatever graphic novels I could find!

Things have calmed down a bit, and I’m back to reading mostly books. But - depending on how the next year goes, I may bring back the graphic novels and comics section as needed.

Finally - it should be of no surprise that spoilers for the books may follow.

My Favorite Books

One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

The cover of One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston The emotional impact of One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston didn’t really hit me until I was reading the Acknowledgments. The author writes:

“I love this book. I love August, with her cactus spines and her dreams of a home, and Jane, my firecracker girl who refused to stay buried. I love this story because it’s about finding family and finding yourself against all odds, when the world has told you there’s no place for you. I love this story because it’s an Unbury Your Gays story. I’m so thankful for the chance to tell it. I’m so thankful you, reader, have chosen to read it.”

Understanding the story as a subversion of the Bury Your Gays trope hit me like a freight train because I’ve never really been able to identify that trope in action. But, by laying out the alternate history of how the ending might have gone in a different book, what the author subverts (other than lazy storytelling and cheap drama) is the notion that queer people don’t deserve happiness, don’t deserve to be seen, and don’t deserve to exist. I take a way from this book that a life centered on struggle, setback, and tragedy is simply not one worth living (and likely to be short and unsatisfying). Instead, there is no guilt or shame to be found in celebration, happiness, and joy.

Simply put, queer people deserve happiness and joy, and we should find it wherever we can get it, and I can tell you that we will not find it in the closet, even if that is where we find safety. We can also find our safety in community (in seeing and being seen, perhaps?) and our joy in living a life unapologetic, and by rejecting collaborators that seek to push us back in the closet in the name of delivering shareholder value.

Boys Weekend by Mattie Lubchansky

The cover of Boys Weekend by Mattie Lubchansky Boys Weekend by Mattie Lubchansky combines a sharp send-up of tech-bro libertarianism (is the apex of our collective achievement easily available online sports gambling, and do I treat my success at easily available online sports gambling as a referendum on my own masculinity? In this essay, I will…) with the easily relatable discomfort of being seen in an exciting, but somewhat uncomfortable outfit on a night out, except that outfit is also your gender.

On the way there, the book takes a quick trip through a cult that’s trying to resurrect an Eldritch horror through body-snatching, but the whole thing is structured like a corporation, and also in this revolting tech-bro version of Las Vegas, you can The Most Dangerous Game yourself! Well, technically it’s a clone of yourself having been assigned a gender not your own, and it escapes from the hunting area and later saves you when the Eldrith horror breaks containment, and eventually the whole island!

Yeah, look, literally finding peace and acceptance with your old self after trying to hunt and kill it is kind of on the nose, but it seems perfectly reasonable when you look at the context in all of its abhorrence. We live in Unprecedented Times, and there’s nothing like comedy to expose all this for what it is - nonsensical, unserious, and inhumane.

Three Different Books about Human Ecology

The cover of New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

The cover of A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys

The cover of The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz

If One Last Stop represents the liberation that we deserve (the… Last Stop on this journey, perhaps??) and Boys Weekend is a check-in on how it’s going, New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson, A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys, and The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz are the story of how we get there.

Utopian sci-fi is valuable because it models the structure of a world that is different from our own, but believable as a future because it centers people in a way that our current world simply does not. Each of these books is compelling enough that I’ve already written about them at length:

New York 2140 proposes a model of what duty we owe to each other - simply, by keeping an eye out for others, we can expect others to keep an eye out for us. “Individualism” in the American sense is just frontier romanticism of a time when land was plentiful (by theft), and lives were solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short (like a philosophical jumpscare, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan can make an appearance when you least expect it!).

A Half-Built Garden and The Terraformers discuss systems of governance that, while sometimes imperfect, sustain themselves on constantly re-affirmed consent, and that both depend on a shared respect for personhood, be it individual or collective. The Terraformers goes further and explores what it looks like to designate non-humans as people, which seems fantastical until you remember that some people don’t even believe that all humans are worthy of being treated with dignity and humanity.

What all three of these books have in common is a fascination with the ecology of humans - how do humans relate to each other and their natural surroundings? How do we create systems that sustain ourselves and our natural surroundings, even if our past mistakes have thrown things out of whack? Works of utopian sci-fi such as these give us the inspiration to imagine a world that is actually better, and worth struggling for.

Honorable Mentions

Books

Graphic Novels and Comics

Also Read

Books

Graphic Novels and Comics

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