Favorite Book in 2024

For several years running I’ve written a post about my reading experiences through the year. I offer up what I consider to be my favorite book. For 2024, I didn’t have many contenders.

Oh, I’ve read several books I enjoyed and that I thought were well crafted. Some that were engaging stories but fairly flawed. But finding that nugget of gold was a challenge.

My Favorite Book

Ultimately only one book gave off the glitter of true gold. That was The Hurting Kind by Ada Limon. I had proposed it to the book club I’ve been in for a couple of decades. My pitch went something like this:

“I know not everyone enjoys or understands poetry, but I think we should give Limon a try. She grew up here, where we live and experienced some of the traumas we have, including the devastating wildfires of 2017. She writes about them and other observations about nature that I think we can relate to.”

Somehow, I convinced this group of non-poetry readers to give The Hurting Kind a chance. They all enjoyed the experience of reading a very different kind of book and found themselves relating to her poems with a surprising amount of depth. All in all, it was an enriching opportunity for them to stretch their reading muscles.

For me, I enjoyed being back in familiar territory for an English major.

What I Like about the Book

The back cover copy describes Ada’s poems as “…making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight.” Her poems are not complex on the surface. She writes of a kingfisher she just happens to spy, or of the glint of life in a fish’s eye. Yet out of these specific images, she then turns her attention to herself and what insight this creature or object offers. Often I found myself startled out of the power of her words and rhythms to discover an insight about life that struck me as apt for me too. She put into words so much of what I feel about life, nature, and relationships.

When a book can serve as such a powerful mirror of myself, I can’t help but being drawn back to it again and again.

What Others Say about My Favorite Book

This being Limon’s sixth poetry book, others find in their reviews the same magnetic power of her previous books, writing about her in this way:

“Ada Limón is a bright light in a dark time. Her keen attention to the natural world is only matched by her incredible emotional honesty….Reconciling the all too human matter of our lives within the spectacle of nature, Limón archives a suspended grace…. The Hurting Kind … explor[es] the restorative connections between human life and the natural world. The poems reckon with vulnerability and grief in a startling and broken world.”—Vanity Fair

“In one of Ada Limón’s early poems, she asks, ‘Shouldn’t we make fire out of everyday things?’ For the past 16 years, that’s exactly what she’s done. [She is] fearlessly confessional and technically brilliant.”—Washington Post

“Again and again in this poetry collection, her sixth, Limón confronts nature’s unwillingness to yield its secrets—it’s one of her primary subjects. The seemingly abundant wisdom of the natural world is really a vision of her own searching reflection. Limón looks out her window, walks around her yard, and, like Emily Dickinson, trips over infinities.”—New York Times, “100 Notable Books of 2022”

Who Is the Author