AARP’s Top 10 Books of 2024

All Fours by Miranda July​

This novel is hilarious — I loved it — though it’s definitely not for everyone. It’s a quirky, LOL funny and raunchy joy ride, told from the perspective of a 45-year-old woman who leaves behind her emotionally distant husband and kid in Los Angeles for a cross-country road trip to New York. The twist: She secretly holes up in a motel near home for a few weeks instead and begins a very different, fantastically strange journey in search of freedom (or something). Her transformative break from normal life includes a sexually charged obsessive relationship with a handsome young man named Davey, a wonderfully over-the-top motel-room redecoration project, and a passionate dance of desire that manages to be both very funny and poignant.  ​​

Courtesy Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books

​Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls

​Even if you’re not usually drawn to graphic books, this heartfelt memoir demonstrates how special they can be. Hulls, who was born to an English father and Chinese mother and raised in a tiny California town, uses a mix of text and evocative black-and-white drawings to describe her research into her family’s dramatic story through three generations of women. It begins with her late Chinese grandmother, Sun Yi, a Shanghai journalist persecuted for years for her anti-communist writings until she fled with her young daughter Rose (Hulls’ mom) to Hong Kong in 1957. Sun Yi suffered from mental illness, shaping Rose, who was an emotionally repressed, fearful parent to Hulls. The process of uncovering and understanding her family’s painful past to create the memoir, she suggests, has allowed her to placate the ghosts of history that her grandmother and mother so feared. But “they never wanted to devour us,” she concludes. “They just wanted to be known, to have their story heard.”​​

Courtesy Penguin Random House

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt​

Sometimes a book touches such a sensitive nerve, it makes you want to throw it across the room and hide under a blanket. I had that feeling a bit with The Anxious Generation, but more than that, I wanted to throw my phone — or, rather, my two young-adult kids’ phones — out the window. I should have probably done so many years ago, however, based on social psychologist Haidt’s well-researched, hard-to-dispute argument that members of Gen Z’s soaring anxiety and depression that began in the 2010’s is tied to their having grown up with constant access to social media and smartphones during their formative years. He points to the displacement of physical play and in-person socializing — the result of both addictive technology and helicopter parenting — as having “changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale.” But Haidt, 61, also suggests concrete steps that caregivers, schools, governments and tech companies can take to give our kids healthier, happier childhoods. It’s a must-read for parents, grandparents, and anyone else concerned about younger generations’ well-being.​​

Courtesy Penguin Random House

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout

​The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge, Strout, 68, returns to familiar characters in Crosby, Maine, in this bestseller, including cranky Olive (now in assisted living) and Lucy Barton, who form a kind of friendship through storytelling. Lucy is also in a deep, complicatedly platonic relationship with Bob Burgess (both are married to other people). Bob is working as a lawyer for a lonely young man who is suspected of killing his missing mother. But the novel isn't a murder mystery; rather, it’s a beautiful story about regret, acceptance, connection and love in all its forms. Like all of Strout’s work, it’s quietly wonderful and wise. You can read our Members Edition interview with the author here.​​

Playground by Richard Powers

​This thought-provoking novel by the acclaimed Powers, 67, whose novel The Overstory won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, was long-listed for the Booker Prize and described by the Guardian as “electrifyingly beautiful” and “magical” for good reason: It’s a mind-bending, totally absorbing story. Playground here has many layers of meaning, referring on one level to the ocean and humanity’s role in preserving it and, consequently, ourselves, and also to the technological (AI) advancements that are complicating the rules of the game, so to speak. It’s centered around a group of characters, including a famous diver/oceanographer, and friends who meet in college, then find their lives diverging — but just how far isn’t evident until the final pages. ​

Courtesy Pantheon Books

The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History by Karen Valby

​This fascinating biography tells the story of a trailblazing group of five ballerinas — Lydia Abarca, Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Sheila Rohan, Marcia Sells and Karlya Shelton-Benjamin — who either began performing with the Dance Theatre of Harlem in 1969 or soon after.  Valby describes the range of challenges they faced while breaking down barriers, including a lack of public recognition, which she tries to remedy in this deeply researched telling. Valby interviewed all five dancers, who have been friends for half a century (a relationship highlighted in her 2021 New York Times story, which inspired the book after it went viral).​

Courtesy HarperCollins Publishers

​How the Light Gets In by Joyce Maynard​

Maynard, 71, is the author of the bestselling memoir At Home in the World and novels such as To Die For and Labor Day (and is also known for her brief relationship with the author J.D. Salinger). This brilliant, moving story is a kind of sequel to her 2021 novel Count the Ways, which you don’t need to have read to become lost in this one. It’s centered around Eleanor, now in her 50s, who has moved from Boston back to the New Hampshire farm where she and her ex-husband, Cam, raised their family, to care for the dying Cam and live with her brain-injured adult son, Toby. Over a 15-year span, she wrestles with a baffling estrangement from her oldest daughter, along with guilt and resentment over the long-ago accident that injured Toby, while falling into a passionate but unfulfilling affair. And yet, as she ages, we see her begin to appreciate the love and beauty that her life holds despite (or because of) its many disappointments and apparent wrong turns. ​