Jul 8
@ Madison Theater in Covington, KY (2025-10-22) (+)
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@ Madison Theater in Covington, KY (2025-10-22) (+)
Great reads of 2024
Bye 2024, while you were a long and grueling year but at least there were some great reads to pass the time. In total, I read 333 books according to goodreads. I read a ton of horror, sci-fi, romance, and horror romances and will list some of my favorites and surprises by genre.
Favorite horror stories:
For being creeped and disgusted. Most of these stories deal with some real world nastiness like homophobia, transphobia, and racism.
Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle: Misha is a screenwriter being forced to kill his popular gay characters but what's that? His monsters are coming to life? Such a fucking blast.
The Reformatory by Tananarive Due: our MC is sent to a 'reformatory' where boys behaviors are 'corrected'. This is pretty horrific and forces the reader to confront the horrors of racism.
Compound Fracture & The Spirit Bares Its Teeth by Andrew Joseph White: I recommend all three of AJW's books, CF is more thriller while TSBIT is full on body horror and violence.
Fluids by May Leitz: The most disgusting book I've read this year! Want to read about lesbians doing absolutely awful things to themselves and others due to desperation? This is for you!
The Library on Mount Char by Scott Hawkins: God has a bunch of children stuck in a library and bad shit is happening. Think a speedrun of Gideon and Harrow. Wild and fun.
The Woods All Black by Lee Mandelo: This novella focuses on our nurse MC forced to help an Appalachian town in the 1920's. There's racism, transphobia, and some horrific transformation sequences. This has one of the most memorable sex scenes I've read this year.
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters: A classic haunted house story. The creeping and building dread is so wonderful.
Favorite Romances:
These are sweet and fun romances. I enjoyed the audiobooks for each of these stories.
The Nightmare Before Kissmas by Sara Raasch: this is such a cute story that involves the princes of Christmas and Halloween. I'm not over that every time our Halloween prince curses silly plastic decorations appear.
Swift and Swaddled by Lyla Sage: Super sweet western romance with our golden retriever MMC and black cat FMC. Cute!
Favorite Horror Romances:
Come for the gorgeous covers, stay for the body horror, the rot, and violence that may end in romance.
Tenderly, I am Devoured by Lyndall Clipstone (ARC-TBR July 2025): gothic romance that I found so engrossingly written. Highly recommend if you're looking for an incredible gothic romance.
My Throat an Open Grave by Tori Bovalino: Leah wishes her brother away, at which point he's kidnapped by the Lord of the Wood and has to reclaim her brother. Beautiful and sad, more horror than romance.
Together We Rot by Skyla Arndt: This is cult horror, our MMC is a sacrifice slated for his father's cult and our FMC just wants to help.
Favorite Romantasies:
More fantasy than romance, these fantastical stories are both book 1 in a series and do a great job of setting the stage for some elaborate fantasy and eventual romances.
Spark of the Everflame by Penn Cole: super fun, our FMC is a healer and the MMC is the prince and also a sort of demigod.
Nightstrider by Sophia Slade: This is a great start to a fantasy with two worlds--ours and a dream world. Little romance here but a really fantastical set up.
Favorite General Fiction:
Foster by Claire Keegan: this book is like 80 pages and is so good. We follow a girl sent to live with some older foster parents because her family are about to have another kid (I believe they already have like 9?). This was just so beautiful.
Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg: An exploration of queerness, gender, and power in the 1990s. This is a tough read but such an important part of queer history.
Blackouts by Justin Torres: A conversation between an old and a young man who explore and examine what it means to be queer interspersed with blackout poetry.
Horse by Geraldine Brooks: This explores the life of a horse through multiple perspectives. I'm not a horse girlie and I can't stop thinking about this freaking horse.
Favorite Nonfiction:
Truman by David McCullough: this behemoth covers ALL of Truman's life from birth to death and between. I found it enlightening especially before visiting Hiroshima.
Who Would Believe a Prisoner?: Indiana's Women's Carceral Institutions, 1848-1920 by The Indiana Women's Prison History Project: This is a collection of published articles by inmates at Indiana Women's Prison on the history of Indiana's Women Prison. The abuse and the ugliness surrounding the history of the prison is well explored.
Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler: I loved that Butler isn't fucking around this book. They postulate and describe where hatred and fear of gender come from and smashes every logical fallacy you can think of.
American Predator by Maureen Callahan: A detailed account of the murders and manhunt of Israel Keyes. Fast paced and quick true crime read.
Favorite Surprises:
These are all new authors for me. For all of these, I picked these up on a whim and was blown away.
The Theseus Duology by Mary Renault: a lovingly memoir-esque story of Theseus.
Death in the Spires by KJ Charles: this is a dark academia murder mystery. Think 'I know what you did last summer' but in old timely London. I've only read Charles' romances and oh boy was this a delight!
The Borrowed Hills by Scott Preston: this is about sheep farmers who plan a heist and things just go horribly wrong. So artfully written, such wonderful creeping dread.
Miracle Creek by Angie Kim: this is a courtroom thriller told from the perspective of several characters. Sort of slow moving in parts but I found this to be a breathtaking read.
2024's stand-out fiction reads
(according to me) (totally subjective) (in no particular order)
- The Borrowed Hills by Scott Preston
- After the Winter by Guadalupe Nettel
- The Maintenance of Headway by Magnus Mills
- Cathedral by Ben Hopkins
- The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk
- Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
- Fludd by Hilary Mantel
- The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher by Hilary Mantel
- Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So
- Memorial by Tine Høeg
If from looking at this list it seems like you and I might have some crossover in our reading taste, send me book recommendations for 2025 🌞🌈🫛
In 2015 James Rebanks published the bestselling The Shepherd’s Life, a seasonal account of a year in the life of a small-scale sheep farmer in Cumbria. He wanted, he said, to put “the working-class nobodies – our people – back into the books”. In one of the most unforgettable sections, he recalls the epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease that ravaged the UK in 2001. A “contiguous cull” required all sheep within three kilometres of a known outbreak to be slaughtered. Rebanks watched as the animals he had bred and raised were shot, one after the other. “When the last wagon had gone, I went into the barn … sat down in the shadows, held my head in my hands and sobbed.”
Foot-and-mouth devastated Cumbria, wiping out the livestock and livelihoods of nearly 900 farms. That devastation sits at the heart of The Borrowed Hills, Scott Preston’s blistering debut novel. Preston was a boy when the epidemic hit. Like Rebanks, he grew up in the Lake District, where his father was a dry stone waller. He too was frustrated that nothing he read told the story of the land and the people he grew up with in a way he recognised. The Borrowed Hills is an explosive bid to right that wrong.
Steve Elliman is the son of a tenant farmer in a fictional fold of the fells called Curdale Valley. When his father falls ill he chucks in his job as a lorry driver and goes home to help. The smallholding is “scarce a thumbprint” on the valley and rapidly falling into disrepair. Their flock of just 200 sheep live wild on the open fells 1,000 feet up, “higher than where the flycatchers and doves roosted in cragfolds, and higher than where falcons nested watching their dinner below”. When rumours of foot-and-mouth start to spread, Steve isolates the sheep but he cannot save them. The sickness has taken hold at a neighbouring farm and orders are clear. Every animal must be eliminated.
The massacre that follows is unsparing in its matter-of-fact violence. Steve’s first-person narrative is written in his distinctive Cumbrian voice, a vernacular stripped to its bones that encompasses stark prose and sudden startling flashes of poetry. Rifle muzzles are “placed between [the sheep’s] ears and the bullets lined along their backs so each bang stayed inside their heads”. The sheep panic. The squaddies sent to dispatch them panic in their turn. The result is half Tarantino and half pitch-black northern realism, an absurdist horror that slides under the skin and lodges deep.
Later Steve fetches up on his neighbour William Herne’s farm, where the outbreak is rumoured to have started. The sheep that William tried to hide out in the fells have been seen from a police helicopter and gunned down from the sky. The fires incinerating the dead animals burn day and night for a week. “We had burned through everything, even what we’d no right to, rubbed out the stars and hid the moon, and if the night sky wasn’t already black we’d have had a good go at making it.” When the job is finished Steve leaves the valley and goes back to driving lorries, but something in him has changed. He can’t stay away. When he finally returns, William has a plan to get back on his feet, a plan that will push both men into a spiralling nightmare of violence and bloodshed.
Despite the wild beauty of the landscape, there is something claustrophobic about Preston’s novel: the tyranny of a place that demands relentless back-breaking labour and will never pay back what is given. Steve and William’s increasingly feverish venture is not a quest for new frontiers but a frantic struggle to claw back a life that was already falling apart. “That’s what I like about you farm lads,” a man tells Steve. “Know what it is to raise something to be killed.” But like the slaughter of foot-and-mouth, the violence that enmeshes the two men is not heroic. It is ugly and senseless and it destroys lives. It offers no redemption. The best one can hope for is the restoration of a precarious equilibrium, a return to the harsh hardscrabble of before.
This is a sucker-punch of a novel, a viscerally vivid portrait of desperation, edged with knife-sharp black humour and shot through with moments of startling beauty, but there is little hope in it. Angry as it was, Rebanks’s book was a love letter to Cumbria. The connection to the land goes just as deep here, but, bound to a place that demands so much in return for so little, it is a more dysfunctional relationship.
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The adult men of LilyHeart, gotta be some of my favorite genders 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻
julien baker at the 2018 homecoming festival //
photos by Scott Preston
@ Madison Theater in Covington, KY (2025-10-22) (+)
@ Madison Theater in Covington, KY (2025-10-22) (+)