Amber’s Year in Books 2024 – About IBD Podcast Episode 165

Leave a reply

Amber shares some of the books she read over the previous year including biographies, young adult fiction, bestsellers, and romance. Hear about Amber’s reading list from 2024, which was truly a mixed bag. The good news is that it contains something for everyone. Plus: learn about how you can read or listen to books for free using your local library — maybe without even leaving your house.

Listen and Subscribe to About IBD: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | Castbox | Amazon Music | All Other Podcast Apps

Library apps mentioned in this episode:

Books mentioned in this episode:

Find Katie Connelly and the Chronically Ch(ill) Book Club at:

Find Amber J Tresca at:

Find Mac Cooney (mix, sound design, and theme music) at:

These show notes may contain affiliate links. If you choose to purchase after clicking a link, Mal and Tal Enterprises, LLC may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

[Music: IBD Dance Party]

Amber Tresca 0:05
I’m Amber Tresca and this is About IBD. I’m a medical writer and patient educator who lives with a j-pouch due to ulcerative colitis. It’s my mission to educate people living with Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis about their disease and to bring awareness to the patient journey.

Amber Tresca 0:19
Welcome to Episode 165!

Amber Tresca 0:21
This is my end of the year book roundup. This year I didn’t track my reading as much as I have in previous years. I didn’t set a reading goal. I didn’t complete the library book challenges. Turns out that maybe setting goals and taking part in those things are helpful, because I read fewer books in 2024 than I have in previous years.

Amber Tresca 0:40
However, I realized that I also abandoned a bunch of books this year. My Did Not Finish pile is honestly pretty impressive. I almost never used to abandon a book. I would stick it out to the end. But this year I changed my mind about that, and if a book wasn’t holding my interest, I dropped it.

Amber Tresca 0:58
Plus, there were a couple of books that I re-read either in full or in part because they were adapted into movies or TV shows. Like books from the Dune universe or the Mayfair Witches series, but I’m not including those here. So, welcome to my chaotic reading list for 2024. But the good news is, because it is so all over the map, I’m sure there’s something here for everyone.

Amber Tresca 1:25
The first book I’m going to share with you is Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam. You may have seen the movie version of this book. It was on Netflix. The novel is a different experience than the movie. I know that that’s something that can divide readers, especially if a favorite part is left out or changed.

Amber Tresca 1:46
This story, if you haven’t seen the movie, is both small and really expansive at the same time, the story is a family is vacationing. They’re at this Airbnb. They’re outside of New York City, and the homeowners come home unexpectedly. It turns out there was a blackout in the city, and the homeowners thought, well, it might be safer to go home to their house in the suburbs, because it’s somewhat isolated.

Amber Tresca 2:12
And then what takes place next is this very bizarre dance as the two families navigate being in each other’s space while something really weird is going on in the rest of the world, some of the themes of this book are parenthood, race, class and trust is really unique. I liked it a lot, but it also made me anxious, because the characters don’t have patterns, or at least they have left their patterns behind, and they’re trying to act against their personality type for various reasons.

Amber Tresca 2:49
Now, it makes for a good story, but it’s also a little bit unsettling, because you never really know what somebody’s gonna do. So overall, I recommend the book. I recommend the movie, as long as you’re okay with being a little bit creeped out.

Amber Tresca 3:02
All right. Moving on to the next book, which is a young adult novel called The Giver by Lois Lowry. And I read this because my kids read it. And so in the world of the giver, everybody has a place. People still live in nuclear families, but they are assigned to one another. Children are not raised by their birth parents, but instead, in a family unit that is created, they go to school and then eventually they’re assigned a role in the community that’s based on their talents.

Amber Tresca 3:33
So it sounds like it’s a place that’s pretty free from stress and worry, but the story centers on one middle school aged child who’s different from everyone else, and so he is assigned a special role. He begins to suspect that the leaders of their community are not being truthful, and he starts to uncover this dark undercurrent in their society.

Amber Tresca 3:59
My kids really enjoyed this book. There’s also a movie, and the movie is a little uneven, but I think it’s also worth seeing. For me, I like contrasting how the director’s version of a world is different than the one that I came up with while I was reading the book. For the kids, it’s their first time being exposed to some of the themes and kind of this dystopian yet utopian future. But for people who have read more of these type of books, it’s not really anything new. It was more just fun to read something that my kids were also reading. And of course, it’s it’s apparently something that is assigned in a lot of school districts across the country. So it was good just to get caught up, because I think this is one of these books that also feeds into a lot of things in our popular culture.

Amber Tresca 4:52
Next up is Warrior Girl Unearthed by Angeline Boulley. So in the beginning of this episode, I said I didn’t take part in any of those. Library challenges, but I did do one, and that is the one book one town where your town chooses a book, and then everyone in town kind of reads it. They get a lot of copies of the book, etc. And that’s what Warrior Girl Unearthed was in 2024

Amber Tresca 5:18
The story is of a native woman. Her name is Perry Fire Keeper Burch. She lives on an island off the coast of Michigan, and that was another thing that drew me to this story, because I grew up in Southeast Michigan through her summer internship, she learns about the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and the current struggle to bring the bones of her ancestors back to her tribe.

Amber Tresca 5:43
Through the story, we also learn about how red tape gets in the way and prevents artifacts and even bones from being returned to the tribes to which they belong, Perry tries to take the situation into her own hands, and she puts herself and her friends in danger. Warrior Girl Unearthed is actually a sequel to Fire Keeper’s daughter, but I read them out of order, which turned out to be fine.

Amber Tresca 6:06
I was also able to attend a talk by the author, and it was so interesting to hear why she made certain choices throughout the book, and how she walked the line between reality and fiction. As it relates to her tribe, Warrior Girl Unearthed won a slew of awards, and because it focuses on a world that’s rarely covered in fiction, it’s well worth the read.

Amber Tresca 6:28
Okay, let’s take a hard right turn here, and we’re gonna go over The Woman in Me by Britney Spears. Yes, yes, I did listen to this book. At least a couple times a year. I pick up the hot biography that everyone is reading, and everyone was talking about this Britney Spears book. So I got the audio book. It was narrated by Michelle Williams rather than the author. So that was also a big topic of conversation, because memoirs are usually voiced by the author.

Amber Tresca 6:59
I’m what I would say passing familiar with Brittany’s music, because some of her songs make great additions to a cardio workout playlist. But other than that, I did not know too much about her life. So many times while listening to this book, I was shocked. I recently attended a workshop about writing a memoir, and one of the things the presenter said was that writing a memoir was like taking a shower in your living room with the curtains open. I could not believe how honest this book was, because many people in Britney’s life did not come off well. If everything she wrote is true, it is believable and also extremely sad and upsetting.

Amber Tresca 7:40
I think it’s important that she told her story. I’m not sure there’s much to take away from it for regular people, because we aren’t subject to the forces that she was, but it does put into context the sensational events of her life that we’ve seen play out in the media.

Amber Tresca 7:57
Next up, My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, this book is so different I can’t even imagine how hard it must have been to get it published. It’s a book about two sisters, and one of them happens to be a serial killer. I’m not going to call it horror. It’s more of a thriller, and then it’s also a dark comedy.

Amber Tresca 8:17
In the story, the protagonist does her best to cover up for her sister, who keeps killing her boyfriends. But the story really kicks off when a man comes between the two sisters, because one of them keeps killing boyfriends. That’s a problem.

Amber Tresca 8:32
The book is set in Nigeria, so it gave a glimpse into what life looks like there for women. It is a story that is super unique, which is what drew me to it. It’s also on the shorter side. It is on the shorter side. So the audiobook is about a four hour Listen, which is just perfect when you’re not ready to tackle one of these longer, larger books.

Amber Tresca 8:54
Moving on to another audio book that I listened to is Yellowface by Rebecca Kuang , writing as R, F Kuang . This book is really timely because it’s hitting on a major topic of our time, which is, who gets to tell stories? Should we be writing things that are outside of our own ethnic and cultural experiences?

Amber Tresca 9:15
This book doesn’t solve these questions, because it does add thoughts on either side. It’s more of a dive into how an unstable personality winds up questioning everything in her life and even convinces herself she’s in the right even when she is objectively in the wrong.

Amber Tresca 9:31
Jealousy of a colleague who is successful is something we can all understand, because there’s always someone out there who has more money, more awards, more recognition. Where it gets really tricky is when the character convinces herself that she’s owed something because she wants it, and even though everyone around her tells her that she is not living a life within her capacity, she denies it and tries to continue on the wrong path. It was really entertaining, even if I did spend a lot of time talking out loud to the main character, telling her not to do the thing she was obviously going to do anyway.

Amber Tresca 10:08
Next up is Everyone Here Is Lying by Shari Lapena. I saw this book described as domestic suspense, and I did not know that that was a genre, but it really does describe this book well. The story follows a few different families who live in the same neighborhood.

Amber Tresca 10:25
A nine year old girl goes missing, and while they’re looking for her, all sorts of secrets start coming to the forefront. When people start having to account for where they were when the girl went missing, we find out they’ve been up to all sorts of things and keeping secrets.

Amber Tresca 10:43
There are a couple of pretty significant twists which I did not see coming. So that made it a real page turner. However, the ending is pretty unsettling even so I would recommend Everyone Here is Lying.

Amber Tresca 10:57
The next book I want to cover is The Cloisters by Katy Hays. I have still never been to The Cloisters, which is a museum and garden in Manhattan. It’s not easy to get to which is partly why I’ve never been there, but I have always wanted to go anyway, when I saw the title of this book, and I’ll confess, the beautiful cover art, I knew I had to read it.

Amber Tresca 11:18
The story follows a grad student who was working at the museum for the summer. When she gets there, she finds this cast of characters working there who are bending the rules for their own purposes, and they are too involved in each other’s lives. She gets sucked into their drama and the research they’re doing into the history of divination, and of course, somebody ends up dead, and that leads to all the secrets coming out. This peek into the life of academia and the Manhattan elite was fun, and I was absolutely stunned by the descriptions of The Cloisters. I really do need to find the time to get there and see it.

Amber Tresca 11:56
I’ll be right back with more books after the break.

Amber Tresca 12:13
I want to take a minute to talk to you about how I’m able to pick up so many books, and even abandon them like it’s my last day on Earth. I am a heavy library user. I’m so fortunate to live in a place that has a robust library system. But, even if you live in a place that doesn’t have a branch that’s easy for you to use, you might be able to take advantage of their digital offerings.

Amber Tresca 12:36
My library, and many others, have an ebook app called Libby, a streaming app called Hoopla, and a music streaming and downloading app called Freegal. They’re free to use with my library card, and I can find a huge amount of media on them.

Amber Tresca 12:51
Libby has eBooks and audio books, Hoopla has books, movies, TV, comics, and music. And Freegal can be used to stream music, or I can download 5 songs every week. Check out your library system and see what they have that’s available to you. I promise the librarians will help you access it. I’ll put more information and resources in the show notes, so check those out, or head to AboutIBD.com for the links.

Amber Tresca 13:20
Okay, back to the show.

Amber Tresca 13:29
Up next, another celebrity memoir, Rebel Rising by Rebel Wilson, I heard about this book on a podcast. Otherwise, I’m not sure I would have picked it up. I listened to the audiobook, which Rebel narrated. You might recognize her from the movies Pitch Perfect and Bridesmaids.

Amber Tresca 13:46
She’s Australian, and she tells the story of her painful childhood, yet somehow she makes it hilarious. Those early experiences led her to drama and eventually to New York. She tells so many intimate stories from her life. Again, it’s another book where I wonder how she gets on with her family after laying everything out.

Amber Tresca 14:07
At the heart of the story is her desire to have a baby, and then the struggle with her fertility. Even though she’s a celebrity, she was subjected to the same poor care and bad advice that lots of other women experience. Eventually, she has the moment where she realizes that while she’s made a career of being a plus sized actress, her eating habits were beginning to affect her health, she decides to make some changes, and that brings us to where she is today. As you’d expect, Rebel’s book is really funny, but she also lets us see how she continually questioned herself, even in the midst of all of her success.

Amber Tresca 14:44
Up next is another book that it seemed like everybody was reading, which is, I am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sanchez. It is another best seller, and it’s the story of a Mexican American teenager named Julia. Julia’s sister, Olga, is killed unexpectedly in an accident,

Amber Tresca 15:02
Julia is rebellious while Olga was more obedient. But as Julia tries to piece together the parts of Olga’s life, she discovers that her sister was leading a more complicated life than she knew. The story really digs into family dynamics and how Julia feels out of place because she isn’t always able to be the person her family expects her to be or wants her to be.

Amber Tresca 15:24
Julia gets pulled into doing detective work to figure out exactly who her sister was, and in the process, find her own place in her community. This book shows the reality of an immigrant family. So I learned from it, and I see from discussions online, that lots of children of immigrants found it validating of their experiences.

Amber Tresca 15:43
Next up, Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy. This novel is set in the Scottish Highlands, which is a place that I absolutely loved when I was able to visit a few years ago. So I was really drawn to read this book.

Amber Tresca 15:55
The story follows a woman who is part of a team that’s reintroducing gray wolves to the highlands. She’s American, so she’s living there until the wolves are settled and she has her twin sister with her. She gets pulled into the drama of the people who live in the closest town, some of whom don’t want the wolves to be reintroduced.

Amber Tresca 16:14
Then there’s a murder, and it’s not clear if a wolf was involved or not. This is another one of those books where I kept yelling at the protagonist to make better choices in her life, but if she did, this story wouldn’t be as good. Not only is it a great murder mystery, but we learn a little bit about wolf reintroduction and why it’s important for healthy ecosystems.

Amber Tresca 16:36
All right, we’re back again with another celebrity memoir. This one is Hello, Molly! by Molly Shannon. I think maybe I pick up these books because the reading I do for work is so technical, and at the end of the day, when I’m making dinner, or on a Saturday, while I’m doing laundry, I am looking for something light and easy to follow.

Amber Tresca 16:55
But here’s the thing, this memoir was not light at all. What I didn’t know about Molly Shannon, is that her mother, her baby sister and a cousin, died in a car accident when she was a small child. Worse, it was her father who was driving. That was certainly a defining moment, but there are many more, including When Molly and a friend snuck onto an airplane and flew to New York as children. Her entire childhood was really wild.

Amber Tresca 17:25
Anyway, at times I found Molly’s narration a little challenging because it was consistently upbeat, and that’s just not really my jam, but it was worth the listen because her stories are absolutely bonkers.

Amber Tresca 17:40
All right, one more celebrity memoir for this year, I promise. And this one is, how do I say the name of this book? I guess we’ll have to partly bleep it. It’s Leslie F*cking Jones by Leslie Jones

Amber Tresca 17:54
Sometimes I listen to books, and sometimes I read them, and sometimes I go back and forth between listening and reading. For this one, I only listened. So I don’t know what the printed book looks like, and this is important, because I don’t think Leslie read her book word for word. I think she more told the stories in a conversational way.

Amber Tresca 18:13
I can’t even describe it. It’s truly a performance, and I have never heard anything like it. Her story is so interesting, and she gives all the details about what it was like for her to be on Saturday Night Live and in Ghostbusters, among other projects.

Amber Tresca 18:28
She also has a significant amount of tragedy in her life. So it’s not all funny, but I laughed so hard at many of her stories and got really invested in it. She does swear a lot in the audio version, and gets pretty graphic about her relationships. So that’s something that’s important to know before picking up this book. But overall, so funny, and I thought it was delightful.

Amber Tresca 18:55
Next up is another young adult book called Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon. I picked this one up because one of my kids read it. Plus I was interested, because the main character lives with a rare disease. I was curious to see how this was dealt with, because it does seem to me that there are now several books in the young adult space that have characters with illnesses.

Amber Tresca 19:17
In this story, the main character can’t leave her house because of her disease, so her world is pretty small, until she meets a neighbor. The neighbor happens to be a boy, and they develop a romantic relationship. So that’s where the conflict comes in.

Amber Tresca 19:32
And then there’s a twist, of course, and the main character finds her world completely upended. I’m not sure that this book adds much to the conversation as far as rare disease or chronic illness is concerned, but in the end, that’s not really the focus of the story.

Amber Tresca 19:47
It was a quick read, and I think it captures the struggles that teenagers face as they start to take on the adult world. So it’s well worth a read.

Amber Tresca 19:55
Up next is another very popular book called Funny Story by Emily Henry. I read this book as part of the Chronically Ch(ill) Book Club that’s spearheaded by Katie Connolly. You may remember Katie from episode 156. This is one of these books where I went back and forth between the audio version and the written version.

Amber Tresca 20:13
It’s a romance, so it’s a little outside of what I usually read, but it can be fun to pick up something different from time to time. Plus, it’s another book set in Michigan. So that was also interesting to me. I don’t remember ever reading a book set in Michigan when I lived there.

Amber Tresca 20:29
Anyway, the main character is a children’s librarian. Her fiance breaks up with her and takes up with his childhood best friend. They were living together, so she moves out of their house and moves in with get this the ex boyfriend of her ex fiance’s new girlfriend. Got that? It’s kind of like partner switching.

Amber Tresca 20:52
She deals with the grief of losing her fiance, as well as the life they built together. She and the roommate go into cahoots, since they both want to show their exes that they’re moving on with their lives, even if they’re actually not. This was a fast read, and it’s a romance, so there’s a lot of will they won’t they going on. Overall, it’s pretty light and it’s great escapist reading. I will also put information about Katie and the Chronically Ch(ill) Book Club in the show notes so that you can join us.

Amber Tresca 21:22
My last book this year, or the last book that I’m going to share with you, at least, is Snow Globe by soyang Park. This is another young adult book, and it is set in a dystopian future where the earth is a frozen wasteland, except for an area called the snow globe. In the snow globe, people live lives of privilege. Outside the snow globe, everyone is forced to work in power plants that provide the energy for the snow globe.

Amber Tresca 21:52
The one thing that people outside the snow globe have is entertainment, which comes in the form of 24 hour reality show programming which features the people inside the snow globe. One of these reality TV stars dies, and a girl who lives outside the snow globe happens to look exactly like her, so she’s tapped as a replacement. That’s plenty of story right there, but there’s more, because there’s a twist, there’s so much more that there’s also a sequel.

Amber Tresca 22:22
This book was originally written in Korean, so I listened to the English translation. It’s been compared to Snowpiercer, The Hunger Games and squid game. I think it does share some of the same themes, but it has its own fully realized world, and we learn the rules of living in it along with the characters. It was not an easy listen. I did have to pay attention to remember and understand what was going on, but that’s expected with a more complex story.

[Music: IBD Dance Party]

Amber Tresca 22:57
Hey, super listener.

Amber Tresca 22:58
Do you know why I call you a super listener? Because you’re listening to the outro, some people stop the episode after the main content is over, and then they delete the download. Can you imagine? No, you can’t, because you’re still here and you’re a super listener. Thanks for doing that.

Amber Tresca 23:15
If you pick up any of these books, please send me a DM or tag me on one of the bazillion social media apps we now have let me know what you’re reading. I think for 2025 I’ll make an actual list of books rather than flying by the seat of my pants. I don’t know. Let me know what you think.

Amber Tresca 23:34
Also come join the Chronically Ch(ill) Book Club that’s spearheaded by Katie Connolly. You can find her on the Instagrams and on Discord. As always, links to her in transcript, everyone’s social media handles, and more information on the topics we discussed is in the show notes and on my episode 165 page on AboutIBD.com thanks for listening, and remember until next time, I want you to read more books!

Amber Tresca 24:03

About IBD is a production of Mal and Tal Enterprises.

It is written, produced, and directed by me, Amber Tresca.

Mix and sound design is by Mac Cooney.

Theme music is from Cooney Studio. 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *