Kat’s 2024 Book List

Fiction

1. The Movement of Stars, by Amy Brill. 2024 gets off to a slow reading start given that I’m writing this in early February, and this is the only book I’ve read so far this year. It’s historical fiction about a young woman in the mid-19th-century who strives to be an astronomer, discovering celestial objects at a time when women were thought incapable of such feats. I was drawn to this book via my Quaker roots, as the protagonist and her community are Quakers in Nantucket. A strong subplot about a fraught emotional entanglement with a young black man the white protagonist is tutoring is compelling. This book took me a while to get into, but I enjoyed it as I got further into it.
2. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride. This isn’t a title I typically would choose; I did so because I saw it on several Best of 2023 lists. McBride is an excellent storyteller, and the book is full of lovely storied vignettes, but I lost significant interest after a major character was no longer part of the story.
3. Life Class, by Pat Barker. I grabbed this piece of historical fiction on sale, having heard great things about author Barker. It’s very well written, but for me, lacked sufficient feminine energy. The protagonist is male, and the book had such a masculine feel it that I wondered if I’d been mistaken that Barker is a “girl” Pat and not a “boy” Pat (she’s a woman). Set on the eve of WWI, Life Class begins as a story about art students and their romances and sexual encounters. While I didn’t love this one, Barker has plenty of other books, and I liked her writing enough to consider trying another one.
4. Caught, by Harlan Coben. My year having begun with 4 books that were perfectly fine, but that I didn’t love, I decided to turn to a reliable favorite author. I chose this 2010 release because it seems to be popular among fans and because it has a female protagonist; Coben does a nice job of writing about women. Coben does not disappoint with his engaging, twisty plot about a reporter’s investigation into campaigns to smear the reputations for 4 Princeton roommates. It is telling that I consumed this book in days (assisted by a road trip), while the preceding books of this year took me weeks. I was completely engaged and enjoyed, as usual, Coben’s references to my birth state of NJ and appearances by characters (Win Lockwood, Hester Krimstein) from his other novels.
5. Family Reservations, by Liza Palmer. Twists and turns about women running a family restaurant business? Yes, please! I choose this novel when a Facebook ad about it intrigued me with the premise of female entrepreneurship. A luminary of the food world is reluctant to share the spotlight with her three daughters.

Nonfiction

1. The Waltham Murders, by Susan Clare Zalkind. I always like to reflect on why I choose the books I choose. For this book, I don’t have an answer except that I like true crime and this one is very current (March 2024 publication). This account of a triple murder connected to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing is written in a solid journalistic style, and the investigative research appears to be meticulous. Like many true-crime tales, The Waltham Murders uncovers botched work by law enforcement. The author was friends with one of the victims, and the story is also the subject of a Hulu documentary on the murders (which I watched) for which Zalkind was the writer. A significant premise of the book is that if the triple murder had been better investigated, the Marathon Bombing might not have happened.