Morjes!

Welcome to my blog. I write about fitting in, sticking out, and missing the motherland as a serial foreigner.

Books 2024

Books 2024

I’m combining my book stats and favorite books into one post!

First, my favorite books of 2024. I only read 38 books this year, the lowest number since 2004 (though I consider my pre-2006 counts to be imprecise). So I’ll only name five favorite books.


Island of the Lost, by Joan Druett. Two separate shipwrecks, on the same remote island, AT THE SAME TIME (the 1860s). You can’t make this stuff up (this is non-fiction). I loved reading about the varying degrees of pluckiness and give-up-ness the castaways had and how they sought to survive, form societies, get off the island, or just look out for themselves.

Batavia’s Graveyard, by Mike Dash. Another shipwreck book! (I also read The Wager around the same time but it was somewhat outshined by these other two books.) This book has everything: 17th-century Dutch sociopolitics, religion, and commerce, plus everyone involved in the shipwreck becoming either the best or worst version of themselves.

The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson. I think about this book almost every day. Aside from all the things i learned about race and American history, I really appreciated reading about people doing really hard things for the sake of their families, themselves, and future generations.

American Girls, by Jessica Roy. Is this a nearly perfect book? I think it might be. It would be so easy to flatten the story of a so-called “bride of ISIS” into something palatable but Roy did such a good job fleshing out this story of two American sisters who were born into one kind of religious extremism and then victimized again by another.

Lucy Undying, by Kiersten White. This book slots PERFECTLY in between the lines of the original Dracula book. It pokes fun at its weak spots and reinterprets some of the events in equally plausible ways and, most importantly, breathes life into the character of Lucy Westenra. And it’s a bonkers good time: in this book, there is a literal vampire MLM (based in Utah, even!) and some of the vampire characters go to therapy. Please read Dracula, and then this book.

Other distinctions:

I re-read Ruta Sepetys’ books Salt to the Sea and Between Shades of Gray this year.

Best cover is Lucy Undying (see above). I can’t stop looking at it! It’s so weird and beautiful!

Best title: Sujata Massey’s books always have good titles, and The Mistress of Bhatia House was no exception. I also liked Know My Name by Chanel Miller - very fitting.

Logorrhea books (books I couldn’t stop talking about): American Girls, Lucy Undying, and Burning Country, a book by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami about Syria’s revolution.

Themes: I read nine books about or set during WW2 this year.

Now for all the books I read this year and some stats about my year of reading in 2024.

The books i read this year were mostly fiction (26 fiction books and 12 non-fiction), and mostly adult (not YA).

All but one of the books I read this year were from the library (nine in hard copy, two audiobooks, and 26 Kindle books). The only one I bought was a hard copy of The Land of Snow and Ashes to read on our trip to Finnish Lapland in May.

Here’s how the books were distributed throughout the year (date is when I finished the book):

My best books of 2023 (and other distinctions)

My best books of 2023 (and other distinctions)