Book Recs for Very Specific Moods, 2024 Edition

reading won't solve all your problems but it will solve at least one

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 2024 edition of Book Recs for Very Specific Moods, a thing I did last year and really enjoyed and decided to do again. The theme this year is “reading to cope,” because of course it is.

Hope you enjoy your holidays and the end of 2024. May these books buoy you through difficult times.

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I’m Tired of Making Decisions

So just, like…recommend something good. Please.

The City of Brass - S.A. Chakraborty

Nahri has never believed in magic. Certainly, she has power; on the streets of 18th century Cairo, she’s a con woman of unsurpassed talent. But she knows better than anyone that the trade she uses to get by—palm readings, zars, healings—are all tricks, sleights of hand, learned skills; a means to the delightful end of swindling Ottoman nobles.

But when Nahri accidentally summons an equally sly, darkly mysterious djinn warrior to her side during one of her cons, she’s forced to accept that the magical world she thought only existed in childhood stories is real. For the warrior tells her a new tale: across hot, windswept sands teeming with creatures of fire, and rivers where the mythical marid sleep; past ruins of once-magnificent human metropolises, and mountains where the circling hawks are not what they seem, lies Daevabad, the legendary city of brass, a city to which Nahri is irrevocably bound.

In that city, behind gilded brass walls laced with enchantments, behind the six gates of the six djinn tribes, old resentments are simmering. And when Nahri decides to enter this world, she learns that true power is fierce and brutal. That magic cannot shield her from the dangerous web of court politics. That even the cleverest of schemes can have deadly consequences.

This book has been out for awhile and I’ve seen it recommended by approximately one billion people, and I was like SURELY THEY OVERSTATE HOW GOOD THIS IS. Well, shows what I know. Stop resisting! Just read it!

The City in Glass – Nghi Vo

The demon Vitrine—immortal, powerful, and capricious—loves the dazzling city of Azril. She has mothered, married, and maddened the city and its people for generations, and built it into a place of joy and desire, revelry and riot.

And then the angels come, and the city falls.

Vitrine is left with nothing but memories and a book containing the names of those she has lost—and an angel, now bound by her mad, grief-stricken curse to haunt the city he burned.

She mourns her dead and rages against the angel she longs to destroy. Made to be each other’s devastation, angel and demon are destined for eternal battle. Instead, they find themselves locked in a devouring fascination that will change them both forever.

Together, they unearth the past of the lost city and begin to shape its future. But when war threatens Azril and everything they have built, Vitrine and her angel must decide whether they will let the city fall again.

Nghi Vo’s particular magic is that she makes things feel old and brand new at the same time. Like a story that’s always existed and has been retold for centuries, but also something you’ve never heard before. She’s so good I’m honestly a little mad about it. (Not really. But maybe?!)

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Numb and Desperate to Feel Something

A book that will sneak up on you with feelings.

Asunder – Kerstin Hall

We choose our own gods here.

Karys Eska is a deathspeaker, locked into an irrevocable compact with Sabaster, a terrifying eldritch entity—three-faced, hundred-winged, unforgiving—who has granted her the ability to communicate with the newly departed. She pays the rent by using her abilities to investigate suspicious deaths around the troubled city she calls home. When a job goes sideways and connects her to a dying stranger with dangerous secrets, her entire world is upended.

Ferain is willing to pay a ludicrous sum of money for her help. To save him, Karys inadvertently binds him to her shadow, an act that may doom them both. If they want to survive, they will need to learn to trust one another. Together, they journey to the heart of a faded empire, all the while haunted by arcane horrors and the unquiet ghosts of their pasts.

And all too soon, Karys knows her debts will come due.

I have unleashed my thoughts about this book on Goodreads, as I am wont to do, but I’ll do it again here: what got me to pick it up was the feeling that this book might end up being about someone falling in love with the person they’ve unwittingly bound to share a body with themselves, and I found that possibility to be desperately tragic and romantic, and let me tell you— it IS about that, and it’s also about a hundred other interesting, creative, fun, achy, dark, cruel, touching, horrifying, wonderful things.

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Screw the Village, I’m With the Monster

This is kind of self-explanatory, no?

Someone You Can Build a Nest In – John Wiswell

Shesheshen has made a mistake fatal to all monsters: she's fallen in love.

Shesheshen is a shapeshifter, who happily resides as an amorphous lump at the bottom of a ruined manor. When her rest is interrupted by hunters intent on murdering her, she constructs a body from the remains of past meals: a metal chain for a backbone, borrowed bones for limbs, and a bear trap as an extra mouth.

However, the hunters chase Shesheshen out of her home and off a cliff. Badly hurt, she’s found and nursed back to health by Homily, a warm-hearted human, who has mistaken Shesheshen as a fellow human. Homily is kind and nurturing and would make an excellent co-parent: an ideal place to lay Shesheshen’s eggs so their young could devour Homily from the inside out. But as they grow close, she realizes humans don’t think about love that way.

Shesheshen hates keeping her identity secret from Homily, but just as she’s about to confess, Homily reveals why she’s in the area: she’s hunting a shapeshifting monster that supposedly cursed her family. Has Shesheshen seen it anywhere?

Eating her girlfriend isn’t an option. Shesheshen didn’t curse anyone, but to give herself and Homily a chance at happiness, she has to figure out why Homily’s twisted family thinks she did. As the hunt for the monster becomes increasingly deadly, Shesheshen must unearth the truth quickly, or soon both of their lives will be at risk.

And the bigger challenge remains: surviving her toxic in-laws long enough to learn to build a life with, rather than in, the love of her life.

Again, I must direct you to my gushing, but basically I found this to be a very fun read that puts you in the alien-yet-familiar headspace of a monster. (About spaghetti, the monster observes: “Slightly strange. It's like an evasive bread.”) And like, who among us has not felt monstrous and murderous from time to time. Hashtag relatable.

On Kupala Night, Dymitr arrives in Chicago’s monstrous, magical underworld with a perilous mission: pick the mythical fern flower and offer it to a cursed creature in exchange for help finding the legendary witch Baba Jaga.

Ala is a fear-eating zmora afflicted with a bloodline curse that’s slowly killing her. She's just desperate enough to say yes, even if she doesn’t know Dymitr’s motives.

Over the course of one night, Ala and Dymitr risk life and limb in search of Baba Jaga, and begin to build a tentative friendship… but when Ala finds out what Dymitr is hiding, it could destroy them both.

Listen, it’s my newsletter, I get to recommend my own book. When I pitch this really quick I say it’s The Wizard of Oz meets The Witcher, in the sense that the monsters are mostly from Polish folklore with the accompanying darkness and brutality that lore implies, and it’s about people who find each other along their journey to see the wizard AKA Baba Jaga— and form a meaningful bond quickly. Do you want to feel the good kind of ache that comes from clicking the “hurt/comfort” box on ao3? Well, here you go. (If that question makes no sense to you, you probably leave your house more often than I do.)

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I Listened to “Simple Times” by Kacey Musgraves and Really Took It To Heart

I need to step away/If I don't, I'm gonna go insane/'Cause being grown up kind of sucks/And I'm really just missing the simple times, uh huh

Twelfth Knight - Alexene Farol Follmuth

Viola Reyes is annoyed.

Her painstakingly crafted tabletop game campaign was shot down, her best friend is suggesting she try being more “likable,” and school running back Jack Orsino is the most lackadaisical Student Body President she’s ever seen, which makes her job as VP that much harder. Vi’s favorite escape from the world is the MMORPG Twelfth Knight, but online spaces aren’t exactly kind to girls like her―girls who are extremely competent and have the swagger to prove it. So Vi creates a masculine alter ego, choosing to play as a knight named Cesario to create a safe haven for herself.

But when a football injury leads Jack Orsino to the world of Twelfth Knight, Vi is alarmed to discover their online alter egos―Cesario and Duke Orsino―are surprisingly well-matched.

As the long nights of game-play turn into discussions about life and love, Vi and Jack soon realise they’ve become more than just weapon-wielding characters in an online game. But Vi has been concealing her true identity from Jack, and Jack might just be falling for her offline…

This book transported me, not just back to high school (though: yes, I did identify with Vi’s overly intense buzzkill tendencies, as I was definitely like that as a teenager and sometimes I still am), but also to a kind of golden age of well-written, character-focused, mostly-lighthearted contemporary YA. If you’re feeling really overwhelmed at the end of this year, I invite you to escape…into this.

Read if you like anything by Maurene Goo, and if you haven’t read any Maurene Goo, you should also do that.

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Curled Up On the Couch Watching Police Procedurals For Comfort

Let’s face it: all police procedurals are fantasy because they always catch the bad guy. This one’s also got magic in it.

The Tainted Cup – Robert Jackson Bennett

In Daretana’s most opulent mansion, a high Imperial officer lies dead—killed, to all appearances, when a tree spontaneously erupted from his body. Even in this canton at the borders of the Empire, where contagions abound and the blood of the Leviathans works strange magical changes, it’s a death at once terrifying and impossible.

Called in to investigate this mystery is Ana Dolabra, an investigator whose reputation for brilliance is matched only by her eccentricities.

At her side is her new assistant, Dinios Kol. Din is an engraver, magically altered to possess a perfect memory. His job is to observe and report, and act as his superior’s eyes and ears--quite literally, in this case, as among Ana’s quirks are her insistence on wearing a blindfold at all times, and her refusal to step outside the walls of her home.

Din is most perplexed by Ana’s ravenous appetite for information and her mind’s frenzied leaps—not to mention her cheerful disregard for propriety and the apparent joy she takes in scandalizing her young counterpart. Yet as the case unfolds and Ana makes one startling deduction after the next, he finds it hard to deny that she is, indeed, the Empire’s greatest detective.

As the two close in on a mastermind and uncover a scheme that threatens the safety of the Empire itself, Din realizes he’s barely begun to assemble the puzzle that is Ana Dolabra—and wonders how long he’ll be able to keep his own secrets safe from her piercing intellect.

Featuring an unforgettable Holmes-and-Watson style pairing, a gloriously labyrinthine plot, and a haunting and wholly original fantasy world, The Tainted Cup brilliantly reinvents the classic mystery tale.

I know I’m having a hard time in life when I find myself binge-watching police procedurals (may I recommend: Elementary). The familiar beats of crime-solving are really satisfying to read—you know what will happen ultimately (investigator will find the answer, duh) but the mental puzzle is a delight. The Tainted Cup offers you that puzzle, but it puts the puzzle inside a truly excellent world that will light up all the fantasy-loving parts of your brain.

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Born to GO! Forced to Stay

When you feel the call of adventure but you have to, like, go to work, and stuff.

The Stardust Grail - Yume Kitasei

Maya Hoshimoto was once the best art thief in the galaxy. For ten years, she returned stolen artifacts to alien civilizations—until a disastrous job forced her into hiding. Now she just wants to enjoy a quiet life as a graduate student of anthropology, but she’s haunted by persistent and disturbing visions of the future.

Then an old friend comes to her with a job she can’t refuse: find a powerful object that could save an alien species from extinction. Except no one has seen it in living memory, and they aren’t the only ones hunting for it.

Maya sets out on a breakneck quest through a universe teeming with strange life and ancient ruins. But the farther she goes, the more her visions cast a dark shadow over her team of friends new and old. Someone will betray her along the way. Worse yet, in choosing to save one species, she may condemn humanity and Earth itself.

I sort of pitch this book casually as “Indiana Jones in SPACE” and I think, per my conversation with Yume at ALA earlier this year, I’m not alone— this is a wild ride of a book that still manages to be emotionally resonant and meaningful. Here’s what I said about it.

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Mad At Everything and Ready to Rumble

*cracks knuckles*

Those Beyond the Wall – Micaiah Johnson

Faced with a coming apocalypse, a woman must reckon with her past to solve a series of sudden and inexplicable deaths in a searing sci-fi thriller from the Compton Crook Award–winning author of The Space Between Worlds.

Scales is the best at what she does. She is an enforcer who keeps the peace in Ashtown; a rough, climate-ravaged desert town. But that fragile peace is fractured when a woman is mangled and killed within Ash's borders, right in front of Scales's eyes. Even more incomprehensible is that there was seemingly no murderer.

When more mutilated bodies start to turn up, both in Ashtown and in the wealthier, walled-off Wiley City, Scales is tasked with finding the cause—and putting an end to it. She teams up with a frustratingly by-the-books partner and a brusque-but-brilliant scientist in order to uncover the truth, delving into both worlds to track down the invisible killer. But what they find points to something bigger and more corrupt than they could've ever foreseen—and it could spell doom for the entire world.

This is the second book in a duology, the first of which is The Space Between Worlds. Micaiah Johnson infuses her futuristic world with Mad Max vibes and rage against the machine (the machine in this case being an unfair system with a huge class and privilege disparity, helloooo). So if you currently feel an anger that craves expression, well, you’re welcome for telling you to read this.

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Kindness Persists and So Do I

For when you want to remember that there’s goodness in the world.

Paladin’s Grace - T. Kingfisher

Stephen's god died on the longest day of the year…

Three years later, Stephen is a broken paladin, living only for the chance to be useful before he dies. But all that changes when he encounters a fugitive named Grace in an alley and witnesses an assassination attempt gone wrong. Now the pair must navigate a web of treachery, beset on all sides by spies and poisoners, while a cryptic killer stalks one step behind…

From the Hugo and Nebula Award winning author of Swordheart and The Twisted Ones comes a saga of murder, magic, and love on the far side of despair.

Feel like reading a story about two deeply kind yet wounded people who find love while also solving a murder? I feel like I don’t really need to pitch this book harder than that.

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Also: psst, next fall you’re gonna get a sequel to When Among Crows.

Happy reading! And happy end-of-2024! I GUESS!

-V