DHM 2024 Recap
A Year of Dear Head of Mine and a Look Ahead
Most Popular Post: What Makes a Great Book Cover
Covers are by far the most fun thing to talk about in the book world. If you’re ever wondering (as we often do as publishing professionals): Where is the book review coverage? The top-10 book podcasts? The popular discourse about novels!? Remember that you can form an opinion on a book’s cover in 30 second while it might take most people 30 days to form an opinion on an actual book. I’m no different, I love discussing and analyzing book covers, maybe we’ll do more in 2025. In the meantime, here are some books I’ve worked on that are coming out next year that all have stellar covers to match the stellar books inside. Go preorder one if it catches your eye!
Percival Everett’s Very Big 2024
This was the year of Percival Everett (Barnes & Nobel knows what’s up) whose novel Erasure was transformed into a fantastic film adaptation, American Fiction, nominated for a couple of Oscars at the start of the year. This spring boarded him into by far the biggest commercial and critical success of his decades-long career in 2024. James, a brilliant new take on the American classic Huckleberry Finn, was nominated for a Booker prize and has Everett poised to take home the Pulitzer Prize in Literature next year.
Favorite Review: The Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
Last year started with a sincere analysis of the most popular book of the previous year, the dragon romance Fourth Wing (the paperback is still a top-10 seller this year). In a sea of scorching screeds and “if it brings people joy then it must be good” reviews, here was an attempt not to critically analyze what isn’t meant to be critically analyzed but describe it’s components, get to the root of what it is and why it’s big. I think I did a pretty good job while not taking what shouldn’t be taken too seriously, too seriously. Perhaps we’ll take a look at the most popular book of 2024 in 2025, The Women by Kristin Hannah.
2024: The Year of Mixed Reviews
Sally Rooney + Rachel Khong + Taffy Brodesser-Akner
For our book club we read a lot of commercially viable literary novelists in the middle of their fiction careers. We talked about why good artists deserve criticism and Sally Rooney’s newest novel, which didn’t quite hit the mark until it surprisingly did. For Rachel Khong’s Real Americans it was the opposite case of Rooney—the novel soared at its start and failed to land the plane in an ambitious three act, three-character construction. Finally, we looked at Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s latest and found some flaws in the choice of story and focus rather than execution.
Favorite Re-Read: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
One of my favorite books to revisit this year was (arguably) the first modern classic Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. An amazing novel — to put it mildly — now available in a published version of one of Shelley’s early raw drafts and an interesting case study in what is editing vs. co-writing. It’s also a refreshing reminder of just how little an editor brings to the process and how much a great work can be great without perfect grammar, spelling, and construction.
A Big Year of Book News
Lots of things happened this year and many somehow intersected with books. Taylor Swift continued to be at the center of culture writ large and published a book of sorts. We have our first author Vice President (and not the other way around). Some even analyzed the CEO killer’s Goodreads account.
In real book news book news, the person with the most important job in publishing was let go and the role has yet to be filled. We fiercely debated and discussed the New York Times top 100 books of the 21st century— while the reality of how these lists are made is minimally controversial or interesting. The Booker Prize got back to its weird roots—huzzah!
Good Advice: Steal Like an Editor
Dear Head of Mine doled out a lot of advice on editing and writing in 2024, but stealing like an editor was my favorite. That’s because it’s invaluable advice I stole from others and it is equally applicable to writers, editors, and just everyday people as they go about communicating an idea.
Daunting Classic: A Failure
In 2023 we powered through Moby-Dick, in 2024 we failed our second daunting classic, Doris Lessings’ The Golden Notebook. When you’re fighting through a massive classic you have to push harder than usual — you can’t just Boomer it on page 3 — but alas I did give up on The Golden Notebook 400 or so pages in. Now this is a particularly disappointing development as we specifically sought out Lessings’ book as we searched for a daunting classic written by a woman. Nonetheless as important as it is to seek diversity in your reading, it’s equally as important not to be patronizingly positive when it doesn’t work out. The Golden Notebook was interesting, but maddeningly dense, nine layers of meta self-referential, and hyper interior— it did me in. We’ll try again next year; I already have one or two fun ideas in mind.
Start Your TBR for 2025
In other news if you’re looking for some great novels to read by women, start with The Weird Ones. And if you’re looking for a list of books to avoid reading first, start with the end of Haruki Murakami master list we began last week.
As always thanks for reading, and feel free to leave a comment or email me at SeanAdelone@outlook.com to let me know what you’d like to see more of in 2025. Happy new year, which we will celebrate with the return to a modern classic, the breathtaking, gender norm destroying, genre busting thriller GONE GIRL!