Ulubione książki The Verge z 2024 roku

When it comes to amusement and education, we can choose from podcasts, videos, games, live performances, or books, 1 of the oldest and inactive most popular ways to learn something fresh or escape (at least temporarily) from today’s troubled world. We asked the staff of The Verge what their favourite reads were in 2024. Their answers ranged from fantasy and discipline fiction to histories of engineering and clothing to autobiographies, insights on body image, and more.

Read on, and see if there’s anything here that you want to check out during the holidays.

When recommending novels, I usually effort to go with those that come from independent presses or that aren’t on anyone’s bestseller list due to the fact that there are so many books and authors that don’t get the attention they deserve. However, this year, I’ve gone against my usual habit and chosen 2 books that are popular and publicized retakes of well-known tales, simply due to the fact that I could not put either down.

James is an incredibly intelligent and insightful retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the boy’s companion, the enslaved man named Jim. And The Bright Sword is simply a fantastic (in both senses of the word) retelling of the mythos of King Arthur that takes place just after Arthur’s death, from the viewpoint of a neglected young man who defies the class strategy to become a knight. Both books are not only extraordinarily well written but besides bring fresh and unexpected insights into tales that have been so microscopically examined over the years that you’d think there was nothing fresh to add. But in the case of both of these books, you’d be wrong.

Like most millennials, I grew up on a steady diet of daytime Food Network shows erstwhile I stayed home from school. Barefoot Contessa was always my number one. There was any form of procedural satisfaction about watching as this grandmotherly hostess spent hours, seemingly effortlessly, preparing a meal for a 20-person gathering, only to wistfully sigh, smile, and never enjoy the fruits of her own labor. So erstwhile I heard the Barefoot Contessa Ina Garten was writing a memoir, I knew I was already bought in.

I’ll put it plainly: this book is perplexing. From her erstwhile stint as a US atomic budget analyst to learning how to fly planes to 5 full chapters about how she wanted to decorate her Paris apartment, it’s a memoir that will have you constantly asking yourself, “Is this woman for real?” (There is simply quite a few “quiet money” as an explanation for her various achievements.) It’s a trip!

I listened to the audiobook (she narrates), and proceeding her lilting, peaceful voice talk about her rough childhood, relation with her fan-favorite investment banker husband Jeffrey, and her (at the time) extremist decision to not have children reminded me that we’re all human and all experience life’s trials. Ina just has the unique ability to make it all look like luck.

Bill Hammack is simply a prof. of engineering who is better known as “engineerguy” on YouTube, where, for years, he’s shared compelling videos breaking down the complex engineering of seemingly simple items we frequently take for granted. Think diapers, soda cans, and duct tape. His book, The Things We Make, does the same thing but provides more in-depth looks at the engineering behind ancient marvels like medieval cathedrals. It’s worth a read just to learn how the microwave was created and yet found its way into the average home.

This deranged collection of linked stories is so preposterously good that I’ve read lines from it out loud to friends at dinner parties, on the subway, and once, in a public sauna. In this viscerally uncomfortable, laugh-out-loud, straight-up gorgeous book, Tulathimutte scrapes bare the corners of the net and (forgive me) the contours of the human heart so piercingly that reading it is like a long-range emotional endurance exercise. I can’t halt reasoning about it or talking about it. Disclosure: the author is my friend, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a genius. Buy a copy for yourself and for your weirdest, smartest pal.

This will surprise nobody: Midnight in Chernobyl is not an uplifting read. But it is meticulously well reported and an incredibly comprehensive look at the Chernobyl disaster, from the inception of the atomic power plant to the aftermath visited on generations of people affected by its explosion. It’s all very matter-of-fact but recounts the events before, during, and after the disaster with remarkable humanity and places it all in the broader context of russian corruption without always feeling like a past textbook. It is simply a thick book, and I could not put it down.

On a lighter note, I besides picked up St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, an older collection of short stories from Karen Russell. The way she can just punch you in the guts with a conviction is unfair. The stories mostly feature kids in those awkward mediate school-ish / early teen years, and they’re a small (or a lot) surreal. There’s a sleepaway camp for kids with sleeping disorders, a seaside formation of giant conch shells that might be haunted, and the titular home for girls raised by wolves, which is what it says on the tin. It makes you remember how hard it is to be increasing up and more than erstwhile cracked my heart right open.

I read quite a few books this year, but these 3 stuck out due to the fact that they made me think a lot about perspective. Notes on an Execution is the communicative of a serial killer on death row, narrated by both himself and 3 women whose lives he upended: his mother, his wife’s sister, and the detective chasing him down. The Travelling Cat Chronicles is told from the point of view of Nana, a sassy stray cat, as he accompanies his adopted human Satoru across Japan, trying to figure out why Satoru needs to rehome him. (Warning: you might want a tissue box if you’re a cat owner.) Meanwhile, The Memory Police is simply a dystopian communicative of a tiny island in which the government can make certain people’s memories of objects and things vanish at will — and 1 person’s choice to hide a friend who can inactive remember things they shouldn’t. (Its vibe is like The Giver by Lois Lowry, but make it Japanese.)

They’re all different books, but I’ve been reasoning about them all year due to the fact that they deftly dig into why we make the choices we do — and how those choices are viewed and felt by the people around us. Each book made me look in the mirror and think about the kind of individual I am and who I want to be. I think that’s the best kind of fiction, really.

My only regret about reading The Steerswoman (and its 3 sequels) this year is that I did not read it 30 years ago — this book would absolutely have become a formative part of my individual adolescent canon.

The best way I can describe the Steerswomen is as a wandering order of mostly female natural philosophers. They observe, deduce, test, and share cognition in a slow-motion, preindustrial world, and the way Kirstein lays out her prose and her characters encourages the same in the reader. respective times during the series, I formed conclusions that were not borne out by the evidence and had to discard them — and did not head doing so due to the fact that that was just… part of the process.

I read a lot of genre fiction, and I love a slow burn, so The Steerswoman fits the brief. But besides I admire Kirstein’s respect for the intelligence and wit of both her characters and her readers; she brings you along on the journey and trusts you to realize the people you’re journeying with. Despite starting the series 35 years ago, she’s inactive slow adding to it, and to say I am looking forward to a 5th installment in coming years is simply a massive understatement. I will preorder and devour it erstwhile another book comes along.

Look, I love clothes. I investigation them, I buy them, I even make them. Fashion is an essential part of how we express ourselves and our ideas (if you don’t trust me, ask Steve Jobs). But the journey of how our fashion gets to us is purposely opaque, due to the fact that the fact is far more upsetting than many of us are ready for — especially in this era of ultrafast, dirt-cheap clothing.

Sofi Thanhauser’s 2022 book is simply a pickax to this wall of secrecy. She traces the hidden past and costs of 5 types of textiles — linen, cotton, silk, synthetics, and wool — in this profoundly reported work. Thanhauser travels to locales like China to learn from the last maker of ancient silk; to the North Carolina town where textile mill workers staged large-scale strikes in the 1920s; and to Northern England, where conservation groups are protecting local sheep biodiversity. This book isn’t just for fashion people (though they should be the first to read it); it’s for anyone curious about the labour that goes into the luxuries they take for granted. You will never look at a T-shirt the same way again.

As individual who is, more frequently than not, the fattest individual in the room, it’s no surprise that I have struggled a lot with my body image and self-worth. That, on top of the guilt over feeling bad about feeling bad, ends up compounding like the interest on my student loans (and due to the fact that “body positivity” feels like a tube dream to a girl whose head is riddled with body dysmorphic brain worms).

Enter Jessi Kneeland, a erstwhile individual trainer turned body image coach, whose central thesis revolves around the notion that our body image issues are always a symptom of a larger and more complicated interior conflict. Through this, they share insight on how to identify the actual origin of a person’s body image issues as well as clearly outlined steps on what to do about it. “Life-changing” is an understatement.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest book is an exploration of the concept of storytelling, told through a series of essays centered around 3 different locations. Dakar, Senegal, a historical site of the transatlantic slave trade; Columbia, South Carolina, where a school teacher fights an attempted banning of Coates’ own book; and finally, Palestine, where he spends a fewer days in May 2023 observing the stark contrasts between life in Gaza and Israel. It left me with a sense of optimism (or possibly blind faith?) that despite how hopeless the present minute can feel, our collective imaginations are always shifting toward something better than before.