Best Books of 2024 TFF To-Read Festivus Guide

Best Books of 2024 TFF To-Read Festivus Guide

Dec 23, 2024 | Babel, Best Books, Best Of 2024, book review, Book Reviews, Brandy Schillace, Discworld, fantasy, Feet of Clay, fine press, Horror, Kurt Vonnegut, limited edition, Max Allan Collins, Michael Crichton, Mickey7, mystery, Phantasia Press, Quarry, R.F. Kuang, sci-fi, science fiction, Signed Limited, small press, speculative fiction, Spoiler-Free, Terry Pratchett, THE FRAMED WOMEN OF ARDEMORE HOUSE, walter mosley

Best Books of 2024 TFF To-Read Festivus Guide comes to you just in time to place some last-minute literature at the feet of your metal pole, recently taken from out of the crawl space.

Here at TFF, we are especially focused on the fiction that transforms us all, this Solstice.

So Happy Yule, Happy Holly King, Welcome Father Christmas, or whichever legends you may observe ere the New Year of 2025* comes!

*At TFF we review newly released books and also books that have been released any year, so our ‘best of list’ contains what we found and loved this year, not necessarily what was published in 2024.

Feast your eyes, Eager Readers, The Best of 2024:

THE FRAMED WOMEN OF ARDEMORE HOUSE, brandy schillace, neurodivergent, autistic, autism, mystery, murder mystery

The Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot’s Mustache Equals Best Mystery Award goes to the THE FRAMED WOMEN OF ARDEMORE HOUSE by Brandy Schillace.

Few can intertwine classic golden age mystery tropes with modern fiction themes, both with myriad intriguing facets, like Dr. Schillace writes in this classic.

An excerpt from our review: The witty, charming, and intelligent [protagonist] Jo is thirsty for answers . . . And despite her difficulty overcoming a not-too-distant divorce with a husband that continually reminded her of her autism and her behavioral faux pas . . . she collects herself time and again and proves to be insightful, well-read, and courageous as she presses on. [ReadTFF.com]

babel, babel by R.F. Kuang, the poppy war, r.f. kuang, book review, book, sff, fantasy, history

The Ray Bradbury Award Winner For Best Speculative Fiction Likely To Blow The Doors Off Your Mind Palace goes to…R.F. Kuang for the novel BABEL.

This book is the one that moved me the most in the entire year of 2024.

I knew as soon as I read BABEL, it would make an indelible dent in my brain.

An excerpt from our review: If you are a fan of language or translation or history or great characters being challenged beyond your wildest prescient thoughts, then you must read this . . . As with many great stories – especially in the SFF-speculative fiction realm – the character’s path needs to resonate deeply, and Kuang’s protagonist Robin Swift does this while being utterly captivating. [ReadTFF.com]

The 1984: You Made Me Cry…Twice Award goes to Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass – it hurt so damn much.

If you want to buy any of the award-winning books, check them out here in my Bookshop.org List – I get a commission if you buy from there and monies are donated to local bookstores with each purchase:

best, best of, best of books, books, book reviews, best of tff, tff

The Red Death Award For A Work Most Likely To Keep You Too Terrified To Sleep Award goes to…THE CLUB DUMAS by Arturo Pérez-Reverte and Sonia Soto (Translator).

I love bibliomysteries, but this one combines a historic evil, played out in brutal fashion, against the backdrop of New York City, Spain, Portugal, and the many twists of a previously unknown The Three Musketeers manuscript pages.

THE CLUB DUMAS is utterly unique, but be careful you do not lose yourself as you strive to unravel the book’s many strands.

TOUCHED by Walter Mosley, walter mosley, easy rawlins, sci-fi, sff, vonnegut

The Michael Crichton You Better Check Your Technology At The Door Sci-fi Award goes to…TOUCHED by Walter Mosley.

The language from one of the world’s best authors is as sharp as it comes!

book review, book, sff, fantasy, history, phantasia press, edward ashton, Mickey7, limited edition, small press, fine press, barclay shaw

The Da Vinci Ornithopter Award For Best Small Press Publication goes to…both Hard Case Crime for THE LAST QUARRY by Max Allan Collins and Phantasia Press for Mickey7 by Edward Ashton.

Quarry is the villain we love to root for, and, hell, make him an ‘antihero’ he does not give a damn as to your labels. In this book, there is an outstanding display of character growth for the would-be-retired assassin.

Mickey7 by Edward Ashton was the first in a historic Phantasia Press relaunch, as the first fine press dedicated entirely to Sci-Fi-Fantasy returns in the 21st Century with a resounding BOOM and a gorgeous limited edition.

The Kurt Vonnegut Satiric Stylin’ Society Needs Kilgore Trout To Give It An Enema Award goes to…TIMEQUAKE by Kurt Vonnegut.

You will never read anything remotely like this novel – TIMEQUAKE is genius, but I know of no sane way to describe it to you.

Feet of Clay, terry pratchett, discworld, night watch, fantasy, sff, sherlock, tolkien, tff, book review

Last, but not least, is the Inklings Award For Best Fantasy In Fiction is…FEET OF CLAY by Terry Pratchett.

The Discworld Series continues to daunt my dreams and haunt my, well for lack of a better word, daydreams, and, well, the point is these books are so bloody good, you want to keep reading more and more about Commander Vimes of the Night’s Watch and all of the plethora of fantastically, wonderful characters that contribute to the sludge that clings to the edge of the Disc.

FEET OF CLAY is an impactful classic on multiple fronts in the fantasy genre.

Here dear readers is the list of TFF Best Books of 2024:

  • The Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot’s Mustache Equals Best Mystery Award
  • The Ray Bradbury Award Winner For Best Speculative Fiction Likely To Blow The Doors Off Your Mind Palace
  • The 1984: You Made Me Cry…Twice Award
  • The Red Death Award For A Work Most Likely To Keep You Too Terrified To Sleep Award
  • The Michael Crichton You Better Check Your Technology At The Door Sci-fi Award
  • The Da Vinci Ornithopter Award For Best Small Press Publication x2
    • Hard Case Crime for THE LAST QUARRY by Max Allan Collins
    • Phantasia Press signed limited edition of Mickey7 by Edward Ashton
  • The Kurt Vonnegut Satiric Stylin’ Society Needs Kilgore Trout To Give It An Enema Award
  • Inklings Award For Best Fantasy In Fiction

 

Buy books here:

best, best of, best of books, books, book reviews, best of tff, tff

 

Happy New Year, Fictioneers!

patreon, tff, book reviews, rj huneke

 

Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett Is A Discworld Triumph

Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett Is A Discworld Triumph

Nov 4, 2024 | book review, Book Reviews, Discworld, fantasy, Feet of Clay, Night Watch, Spoiler-Free, Terry Pratchett

Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett is a Discworld triumph, a gem among shiny, albeit prickly, pointed [*ouch] diamonds.

Being the third novel in the “Night Watch” line of Discworld books, the holy number th-ree conjures up quite a bit of Monty Python-like shenanigans and humor, while unabashedly containing the unique and unmatched twisted magic that only Sir Terry Pratchett wrought.

The plot at the heart of Feet of Clay is a murder – more specifically and scandalously – and a murder that is unsanctioned by the Assassin’s Guild.

This sends a whirlwind that rattles the very top of Ankh-Morpork’s ruling elite.

And we as readers are gifted with a true treasure: seeing Commander Sam Vimes and the Watch painfully unravel . . . a murder mystery!

And in case you were wondering, the heartfelt love of and simultaneous bloody critique and parody of Sherlock Holmes and his ‘methods’ ensue in the most riveting and hilarious fashion.

“Samuel Vimes dreamed about Clues. He had a jaundiced view of Clues. He instinctively distrusted them. They got in the way. And he distrusted the kind of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, “Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times,” and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen* and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!” [Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay via Goodreads]

There are myriad quotes, you could take one per page and digest it for a lifetime, but Vimes is the best anti-Holmes character to carry along an enamoration of ‘the Game’ such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have admired.

Feet of Clay, terry pratchett, discworld, night watch, fantasy, sff, sherlock, tolkien, tff, book review

“It wasn’t by eliminating the impossible that you got at the truth, however improbable; it was by the much harder process of eliminating the possibilities. You worked away, patiently asking questions and looking hard at things. You walked and talked, and in your heart you just hoped like hell that some bugger’s nerve’d crack and he’d give himself up.” [Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay via Goodreads]

What makes a Discworld series story great – well, there are too many things to count, really – for me are the characters.

From the orangutan Librarian (largely absent in this book, but active in many others) to the wily autocrat in the Patrician, even minor characters are rich in personality, desires, bad habits and the like.

The more major players like Colonel Carrot, Knobby Knobs, and in this clay-littered caper, a golem with a shining sense of self-worth, are loud in the sense that you can hear them talking. Were you to side-step from Tolkien’s Middle-Earth into the fantastically spinning flat world – the Disc of Discworld – and you passed by the outside of any filthy, dank, troll-stench of a pub, you would recognize a number of the outspoken and meek, growling (there is a werewolf in the Watch, after all) and out-of-tune singing voices.

Read Feet of Clay and you will know them all by name, just by stalking away with the echoes of their conversation in your ear.

This book was particularly critical of the ruling class, the class system, autocracies, the slave class, the working class, and the abused factory class, and it also brought into focus an examination of what it means to be alive.

The golems are alive . . . wait, are they alive?

You can get metaphysical, philosophical, and skeptical of religion, of AI (artificial intelligence, even though it is not explicitly mentioned by Pratchett), of imposed (whether subliminally or declared outright) caste systems and apartheid, and of murder-mystery-fiction and procedurals too.

The large and vivacious cast of characters in the Night Watch novels know no bounds (unless they do, at which point there is a lot of fear and confusion, as befalls all of us, but you have to read it to see what I mean)!

Enjoy more quotes (they are so damn good) from Feet of Clay here:

“There were no public health laws in Ankh-Morpork. It would be like installing smoke detectors in Hell.” [Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay]

“Is It Frightening To Be Free?”

“You said it.”

“You Say To People ‘Throw Off Your Chains’ And They Make New Chains For Themselves?”

“Seems to be a major human activity, yes.”

[Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay]

“If you were going to be successful in the world of crime, you needed a reputation for honesty.” [Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay]

The Forgotten Fiction Grade: YEA (read it! buy it here)

Want To Buy A Book From A Local bookseller? Click Away!

Feet of Clay, terry pratchett, discworld, night watch, fantasy, sff, sherlock, tolkien, tff, book review

“Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett Is A Discworld Triumph” was written by R.J. Huneke