The Best Books I Read in 2024

Every month, I recommend books I love that you might too. Every year, I go back collect them into a single post. For reference, here are my picks from 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, and 2018.

And now, the best books I read in 2024:

The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler is a tightly knit speculative thriller that explores the dark underworld of the illegal ivory trade and the promise of resurrecting extinct species with genetic engineering. One of the characters is a conservation biologist whose connectdome is mapped onto the brain of a cloned mammoth, offering the reader the vertiginous thrill of imagining what it might be like to think like a mammoth. Nayler brings so much of human nature to life—from greed to rage to compassion—but perhaps the most beautiful aspect of the story is how it serves as an invitation to empathize with all the non-human animals we share this beautiful little planet with. Fun fact: I interviewed Ray about writing The Mountain in the Sea, one of the best books I read in 2022.

If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura is about a postman with terminal cancer to whom the devil offers an oddly specific deal: live for an extra day if you agree to erase something from the world so thoroughly that it will be as if it had never existed to begin with. Funny and poignant, the story dances with philosophy without ever losing its intimately personal footing.

Foster by Claire Keegan is about a girl in rural Ireland who goes to live with her mother’s cousin for a summer. The story’s simplicity belies its emotional and psychological depth. Every word earns its place. Every beat makes you want to find out what happens next. Every chapter will do something to you that you weren’t expecting. This book is a dagger: short, finely honed, dangerous.

The High Frontier by Gerard K. O’Neill presents a deeply-researched thought-experiment mapping out how humans could build an economy in space. O'Neill was a physicist at Princeton and spent years vetting his ideas with experts at NASA, MIT, and the big aerospace firms. But instead of reading like a technical proposal, The High Frontier paints an accessible, high-context picture of what's possible, and there are sections that are quite whimsical (e.g. how fun it would be to take your kids to microgravity swimming pools). The book has influenced many artists and writers and has become part of the canon for engineers working on space projects at NASA, SpaceX, and the new crop of space startups. I think The High Frontier is an example of an as-yet-unnamed genre: speculative nonfiction that crafts specific, detailed visions of things worth building at the leading edge of new frontiers, inspiring people to work on related problems and giving them something to rally around.

Moonbound by Robin Sloan is a wildly imaginative adventure that will pique your curiosity, subvert your expectations, and stoke your desire to find out what happens next. There are dragons made of code. There are wizards who engineer genes. Scholars swim in pools of high-dimensional math and beavers construct intricate arguments out of woven reeds. There is a boy. There is a sword in a stone. None of these things are quite what you think they are, and discovering the manifold hidden connections is tremendous fun. There’s nothing quite like a good story well told. Moonbound is one of those. I wish I could read it again for the first time. In fact, I loved it so much that I interviewed Robin about it.

Prince of Foxes by Samuel Shellabarger is a swashbuckling adventure about a young man seeking his fortune in the warring city-states of Renaissance Italy. You might expect a story like this to show a loss of innocence, the hero becoming more cynical as he enters a maze of intrigue and betrayal, but, refreshingly, this protagonist starts out steeped in a Machiavellian worldview, but grows to recognize the cold vacuum at the heart of the pursuit of power, and how life contains so many more important and beautiful things to focus on. This is an unusually well-balanced novel that weaves action, character, misdirection, growth, and psychological insight into a compelling, immersive story.

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall is a hyper-intellectual thriller that twists not just plot, but the nature of reality. As soon as you believe you’ve got this story figured out, it reframes itself, making you think even as it makes you want to find out what happens next. Remember that moment in The Matrix when Neo discovers he’s living in a simulation? Now, imagine a series of such transformative beats building toward an existential climax—that’s what reading this book feels like.

The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins by Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell paints a fascinating, detailed picture of what science has learned about cetacean society: how humpback whale songs spread like human memes, why killer whales are such picky eaters that they’ll starve rather than give up their favorite delicacy, sperm whale baby-sitting arrangements, and so much more. Enriching your understanding of how these marine mammals live will give you a new lens through which to view human behavior. More than just intellectually stimulating, it’s a funny, personal, and touching read. I wish there were more books like this: late career academics writing for a general audience to communicate their most important lessons learned from lives devoted to research.

The Boys by Katie Hafner executes the best plot twist I've experienced in a long time. It's only 250 pages, so I’m not going to tell you any more about the book, and don't look it up, just go read it and then email me when you get to the twist. Don't worry, you'll know when you get there.

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes is about a Dutch microbiologist who investigates two mysterious anomalies: one in a deep ocean trench and the other at the far reaches of the solar system. This is a science fiction novel that is also a book about doing science. Most of the characters are scientists or engineers working on complex, collaborative projects that go beyond any individual’s understanding, and the story makes you feel that you are forever on the verge of epiphany, that the impossibly sublime secrets of the universe are almost, but never quite, within your grasp.

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams tells the story of a girl who grows up to become a major contributor to the first complete edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. This is a novel full of love, loss, and ingenuity that brings its characters to life by showing how they bring their impossibly ambitious project to life, a project that is deeply entangled with the events and politics of its time. I received this book as a gift, and can confirm that it’ll make a great gift, especially for language-lovers and bookworms.

If you like the books I recommend, you’ll love the books I write. Start here:

Foundry is a near-future spy thriller about how the semiconductor supply chain that AI depends on will refactor 21st century geopolitics. The story wrestles with love, power, betrayal, reinvention, and summoning the courage to face the unknown. It’s also the best thing I’ve written, so if you read it, I’d love to hear what you think.

Thanks for reading. We all find our next favorite book because someone we trust recommends it. So when you fall in love with a story, tell your friends. Culture is a collective project in which we all have a stake and a voice.

Best, Eliot

Eliot Peper is the author of Foundry, Reap3r, Veil, Breach, Borderless, Bandwidth, Neon Fever Dream, Cumulus, Exit Strategy, Power Play, and Version 1.0. He also consults on special projects.

“A spy thriller about semiconductors; an acid trip; a lightning rumination on how thoroughly tech shapes the world around us. I absolutely love it.”
-Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, author of The Salvage Crew, on Foundry