It's been a crazy six months. Kaiju & Gnome is nearly four months old. We did our first themed week and we have two or three more planned for later in the year. And I've read either 61 books according to my Goodreads account or 71 according to my excel spreadsheet I use for recording my reading. That discrepancy is due to me usually starting my "Reading Year" on Christmas Eve and going until the next Christmas Eve instead of January 1 to January 1. I've read a lot of good books this year and I've read a lot of weird books. I've read books that had me clinching my fists and books that had me weeping. This will be a short summary of just some of the 2024 releases I've read this year.
Battle for the Best of the Best of the Best
This year is definitely looking to be a toss up for what my favorite 2024 release book will be. There's several options that are currently battling for the top spot.
Crucible of Chaos/Play of Shadows by Sebastien de Castell
I've written about both of these books already. I loved them a lot. They brought us back to Tristia in a completely unexpected way and introduced us to some great characters. We have Estevar, a Greatcoat that hates previous protagonist Falcio and pretty much everything he ever did as a Greatcoat, and Damelas, a well-meaning coward who has spent his entire life trying to measure up to his Greatcoat grandparents. We also have a heroic mule, a struggling theatre troupe and conspiracies galore. de Castell's Court of Shadows series is off to a great start and I can't wait for the next installment in this series.
The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
This book has been an absolute highlight of my year. If you know me IRL, you know I love a good detective story and this one was far better than it had any right to be. The short description for it is that it's a bio-punk Nero Wolfe homage in a fantasy world that is constantly under threat by kaijus. It's bonkers and it's brilliant and I can't wait for the second book which is slated to come out next Spring.
Oracle by Thomas Olde Huevelt
I've already talked about this book a bit in my Nonfiction for the Fantastically Inclined column (you can read that here) and I absolutely loved it. Huevelt's previous books have blown me away. Hex was a wild roller coaster with one of the most unique horror plots I've read in a long time and Echo was a possession story unlike any I'd ever read before. Oracle bested both of these books in my opinion with this weird tale of a mysterious ship showing up in a field of flowers and the bad things that ensue when you go into it. It also brings back Robert Grim from Hex as its reluctant protagonist. At times feeling like Stranger Things and other times feeling like a kaiju movie meets the Grudge, this was a book that I could barely put down. Thomas Olde Huevelt has definitely moved to the top of my "must pre-order" list.
The Sword Unbound by Gareth Hanrahan
We devoted a whole week to this book. You can read about that here and here and then we did related articles here and here. Ed and I loved this book. I loved it so much that I instantly bought all of Gareth Hanrahan's other books and have been slowly reading them as well. It continued the story of Alf and his friends with a plot that surprised me at every turn. I read a lot of books and it takes a pretty cunning book to completely circumvent all my expectations but Sword Unbound did at every step of the way. I've been thinking about the ending ever since I put it down and I have no idea where Hanrahan is going to go with these characters next. I'm definitely going to preorder it the moment it's available though. And that sequel will definitely be getting another week of its own.
The Instruments of Darkness by John Connolly
Usually a John Connolly book is an easy pick for my favorite of any given year. The fact that there's three other books that it's battling with shouldn't be taken as a sign of this one being any less high quality, it's just been a high quality book year. This book involves a haunted house (or maybe a house that is itself the haunting), a missing/presumed dead child, and Charlie Parker is thrust into the middle of it. This is probably in my top ten favorite Connolly books and it's a thrill-a-minute read. It moves the series along nicely, promising some interesting future conflicts, while also being a great standalone entry in the series. This book is the book I hope every Charlie Parker book will be!
Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham
One of the most unexpected ways that Kaiju & Gnome has impacted my reading is that I'm reading a lot more nonfiction these days. Of those, one of the best is also one of the newest: Adam Higginbotham's Challenger. It's a captivating and heartbreaking history of the Challenger shuttle disaster on January 28, 1986 and it was absolutely riveting. It follows the evisceration and near collapse of NASA during the 1970s and its high-stakes rebound in the 1980s during the Reagan administration. Culture, political, and business pressures ultimately lead to the tragedy on that January morning. Challenger will hopefully win a lot of nonfiction book awards this year. This book is looking like a sure pick for my favorite nonfiction book of 2024 unless something surprises me.
List of all 2024 Releases I've read so far this year:
Oracle by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
The Doors of Midnight by R.R. Verdi
Instruments of Darkness by John Connolly
Crucible of Chaos by Sebastien de Castille
What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher
Exordia by Seth Dickinson
Antique Hunter's Guide to Murder by CL Miller
The Sword Unbound by Gareth Hanrahan
The Haunting of Velkwood by Gwendolyn Kiste
The Play of Shadows by Sebastien de Castell
Star Wars: The Living Force by John Jackson Miller
Indian Burial Ground by Nick Medina
Extinction by Douglas Preston
You Like it Darker by Stephen King
Spirit Crossing by William Kent Krueger
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima
Challenger: A True Story of Disaster and Heroism on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham
Overall, it's been one of the strongest reading years I can remember. It seems that there's been lots of books that I can't wait to get my hands on this year and that continues through the rest of the year. Yet to come this year we have the new R.R. Verdi (which I got an eARC of and it's great), Brandon Sanderson, and Naomi Novik books that I'm super excited for. I'm also cautiously optimistic for Richard Chizmar's Memorials. There's also rumors that a new John Connolly short story collection is coming out in October. There's still a lot of greatness to come, I think.
Have you read anything particularly great this year? Let us know in the comments, via email kaiju@kaijuandgnome.com or message us over at Bluesky @kaijuandgnome.bsky.social.