Another Top Five of 2024, Please!
Five more books with complimentary coffee pairings, a guest post by Grace Riensche
For our second list of Top Fives from 2024, we've reached out to our friend Grace Riensche. A coffee lover, voracious cross-genre reader, and semi-professional book club member, Grace reads and reviews books on both Instagram and Goodreads (@alatteofliterature), and she pairs each review with a coffee suggestion she thinks would enhance your reading. Here are her top five of the year, with some recommended coffee pairings to go with them!
The Unmaking of June Farrow by Adrienne Young (not pictured) - Pair with a vanilla latte
A perfect blend of mystery, love, and local lore, this book made me cry, but in a good way. It’s a story about time travel but more importantly, it’s about the sacrifices of motherhood, of losing family, of grief and of forgiveness.
Adrienne Young sculpts characters in a way that I feel a connection to each of them: Eamon, June, Margaret, Birdie. I’m not the biggest sci-fi girlie (it is a genre I plan to dive into in 2025!), but this dash of time travel/magical realism is my cup of tea.
Rarely do I find myself saying a book is the perfect length, but this one earns it. While I could read another 200 pages happily, this clean 320 is practically perfect in every way and definitely stuck the landing.The audiobook was also phenomenal and had me looking into other Brittany Pressley reads.
Another small thing I can’t quite describe, but this has Where The Crawdad Sings vibes in the best way.
Overall, The Unmaking of June Farrow goes on my favorites list and would also be a stellar book club pick!
“It hadn’t been perfect, but it had been a life full of love.”
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë - Pair with a cappuccino
Dare I say, the best Bronte? This book made me fall in love with a Brontë book (third time’s the charm). Romance? Drama? A lead character standing firm on moral absolutes when the anti-heroes around them throw them away all wisdom for short-term pleasure? All of my favorite things in a novel.
Part epistolary and part diary, the book begins through Graham Markham’s eyes as he speculates on the new tenant of Wildfell Hall. I thoroughly enjoyed this first portion as it felt like a role-reversal of the Pride & Prejudice intro of “Netherfield Park is let at last!”
Graham endeavors to learn more about the mysterious neighbor, Helen and her young son - truly Helen's worst scenario. Her story unfolds through her diary, which she eventually gives to Graham to read. Graham learns that she has endured a tale as old as time, falling into young love with a man named Arthur and telling those around her “I can fix him, no, really, I can.”
Reader, she can't ...
Her diary lays out the entire saga, and what follows I will not elaborate on because you should read it for yourself, but it is a beautiful tale that was WELL ahead of its time. Other reviewers have laid out more excellently than I could the merits of the story in context of the local laws and culture around women's rights (or lack thereof), regardless of marital abuse/neglect, etc. and I think that's incredibly important when reading books like this.
5 stars for me, and one that I'll look forward to reading again.
East of Eden by John Steinbeck - Pair with a cappuccino
The Great American Novel. Steinbeck’s magnum opus, the 1952 novel follows the Trask and Hamilton families in California's Salinas Valley. It’s a true time capsule and a historical treasure.
This quote is the crux of the 600-page behemoth: “We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.”
I so appreciate the characters grappling with original sin throughout the generations. In fact, numerous characters identify with their sinful hearts but despair over how to change, or how not to succumb to the darkness they acknowledge inside themselves. “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” - Psalm 51:15
Steinbeck creates some of the most epic foils for other characters, creating parallel situations and showing the various decisions characters make. Some run from their problems, while others take them head on.
However, in contrast with the bootstrapping ideology of other American novels, Steinbeck’s characters rarely change as the result of their own great intuition or moral compass. Rather the opposite: a character like Samuel or Lee rather bluntly calls out the person for their sin, their inaction or their action, and calls them to repentance.
One of the best scenes of the book is when Samuel goes over to Adam’s house and, in an extremely out-of-character moment, charges him to be a better man for his children. It’s a scene foreign to most literature but one of great importance.
I’ve loved Steinbeck for years, and will read all of his books someday (Grapes of Wrath, you’re next), but I’ll leave you with one of the quotes I underlined in my annotations:
"I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one... humans are caught — in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too — in a net of good and evil."
“Virtue and vice are warp and woof of our first consciousness and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good, or was it evil? Have I done well–or ill?”
The Farmer’s Wife: My Life in Days by Helen Rebanks - Pair with a pour-over and a splash of cream
This book was a delightful memoir on the life of a farm wife raising a family in rural England. It brought to life one of my favorite quotes, by Annie Dillard, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
Also, the “farmer’s daughter who learned how to cook and went to school and worked in a cafe while honing her baking skills and then married the farmer” trajectory was one I felt very personally.
A few favorite quotes:
“There are many ways to live, many ways to be a woman. I know lots of women don’t want what I want. Some would say mine is a small life. But this is how I want to live.”
“I have often felt undervalued, not so much by my own family but in society as a woman choosing to stay at home and cook for her family. There is a strong cultural dogma that life outside the home is more important than the one inside the home. As if domestic work isn’t a good enough way to spend a life. But isn’t it one of the most important things we can do?”
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah - Pair with a vanilla latte
Hands down, bar none, best book I read this year. 6/5 stars, if I could.
In the French village of Carriveua, sisters Vianna and Isabelle endure Nazi occupation as soldiers infiltrate first their country, and then hometown, and finally their very doorsteps.
I felt entranced from the first page. I couldn’t put it down. I laughed. I cried. I see things differently now. And what more could one ask of a book than for the reader to close the final page as a different person than the one who started it.
Kristin Hannah shows a story so well, more than just telling it. She brings history alive on the page, and I’m so excited to read more of her books.
Honorable Mentions:
The Great Unknown by Kristin Hannah
Go As A River by Shelley Read
The Bridge Kingdom by Danielle Jensen
Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir
Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross.
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken
When Books Went to War: The Stories that Helped Us Win World War II
Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton
Ragged by Gretchen Ronnevik
Grace Riensche is a Lutheran farmer’s wife and former barista who enjoys reading and writing book reviews over at @alatteofliterature. When she’s not working in her agriculture marketing job, she can be found perusing bookstores or antique shops, baking, gardening, canning, or renovating her and her husband’s acreage home in northeast Iowa.