My favorite part of this gig is that whenever I am reading, I can claim to be working. When you can figure out how to make an activity you enjoy and would be doing anyway your work, you’re one lucky person. But because I can claim reading as work, I end up reading many more books than I have the time or space to cover here, even when I’m writing every week. There are so many works of fiction that I couldn’t cover in depth, I realized they deserve their own Biblioracle Book Awards. Book I Was Least Surprised by How Satisfying It Was of the Year I have been a fully committed Sally Rooney fan from the moment I read her first novel, “Conversations with Friends,” so I was confident that “Intermezzo” would deliver, and lo and behold it did. I think I didn’t write about it because there is so much public “discourse” about Rooney and her work, while I’d rather just kick back and immerse myself in the story of two brothers, the young, awkward chess genius Ivan, and the older, dashing lawyer Peter, as they navigate the grief of their father’s death, and the complications surrounding the women they love. How’d She Do That? Book of the Year The main character, George, in Kate Greathead’s “The Book of George” is a smart, sometimes charming, sometimes callous, self-sabotaging young man who over the course of the book becomes a somewhat older man, and then older still. George should be frustrating in his refusal to move past his “Georgeness,” but as told through a series of chapter vignettes marking different important moments in George’s life, Greathead manages to intimately connect us to her main character in a way that pays off handsomely by the end of the journey. How’d He do That? Book of the Year With “Godwin,” Joseph O’Neill takes two characters who are only tangentially related to each other and somehow intertwines their stories in ways that work both in terms of story and theme. Mark Wolfe is a prickly technical writer with a wife, child and wayward half-brother who has roped him into a scheme to find a possibly phantom teen African soccer prodigy. Lakesha Williams is the director of a collective of technical writers to which Mark belongs, and who comes under attack by a malevolent co-worker. Told in sections alternating between these two characters, O’Neill delivers a powerful experience simply by looking closely at the world through these different eyes. A brilliant work of conjuring. Book It Took Me Seven Months to Read of the Year Rita Bullwinkel’s “Headshot” is structured as a series of stories covering a tournament for teenage girl boxers being held in a ramshackle Reno gym. As the matches unfold, Bullwinkel probes the lives and psyches of the combatants with an intensity I can only liken to, well… a boxing match. That intensity made it hard to read straight through, so I started taking breaks between chapters. I started in April and finished at Thanksgiving. My verdict: Wow! This Is Too Much Fun (Wait, There’s No Such Thing as Too Much Fun!) Book of the Year Margo, the main character of Rufi Thorpe’s “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” gets pregnant after an affair with her married professor, and against all advice and common sense decides to keep the baby, which she attempts to raise with the help of her former professional wrestler father, and a couple of Margo’s fellow online performers of adult material. Frank, and funny, and charming, and I get a happy feeling just thinking about the period I spent reading it. 2025 is looking as promising as 2024, so buckle up. Biblioracle: My 2024 Biblioracle Book Awards for fiction, the first half John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.” Twitter @biblioracle Book recommendations from the Biblioracle John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read. 1. “All Fours” by Miranda July 2. “The Vegetarian” by Han Kang 3. “Pachinko” by Min Jin Lee 4. “Free Food for Millionaires” by Min Jin Lee 5. “Sugar Street” by Jonathan Dee — Billie P., Highland Park This is one of those cases where it’s not clear to me why this book is coming in so strong on my Biblioracle sensors other than this author’s name rhymes with one on the above list, but I’ve learned to trust the gut: “High Dive” by Jonathan Lee. 1. “Love Letters to a Serial Killer” by Tasha Coryell 2. “The Mighty Red” Louise Erdrich 3. “Dept. of Speculation” by Jenny Offill 4. “No One Is Talking About This” by Patricia Lockwood 5. “The Widow” by Fiona Barton — Nancy G., Chicago This feels like a good occasion for a book that has mystery at its center but also has some of the philosophical life explorations that Nancy seems interested in, “Case Histories” by Kate Atkinson. 1. “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma” by Bessel van der Kolk 2. “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” by John Boyne 3. “The Devil Wears Prada” by Lauren Weisberger 4. “Little Fires Everywhere” by Celeste Ng 5. “The Covenant of Water” by Abraham Verghese — Dilly P., Lincolnwood I feel like Emma Straub’s “This Time Tomorrow” has the right mix of character and heart that Dilly is looking for. 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