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    Year in Review

    As critics issue their year-end lists, we want to know your personal favorites of 2024.It’s the most wonderful time of year, and I don’t mean the holiday season, although I’ve heard that people are excited about that too. No, for nerds like me who love to plan out their holiday culture consumption — those whose appetites are always far larger than their capacity for viewing/reading/listening — December is sacred because it is when critics issue their retrospective best-of lists, their verdicts on the best movies, music, TV, books and other cultural artifacts of 2024.I’ve always thought it a shame that everyone I know doesn’t issue a best-of list. Yes, critics are experts in their fields, completists who have surveyed the landscape of their beats such that their assessments of “the best” are far more informed than the average cultural consumer’s. But I also want to know what my friends and family loved, and why. There’s no easier way to get to know someone a little bit more deeply than by asking them for a recommendation. I have a fantasy of pulling out a bullhorn on my morning commute and asking everyone in my subway car their top five films of the year. I’m not sure anyone would play along with my reindeer game, but if they did, I expect that I’d get a few good recs, some truly nutty ones, and that it would certainly bring a spirit of joy and conviviality to a typically alienating part of the day.And why stop at the usual categories? Best-of lists are typically limited to the same categories. Tell me your favorite movie, book and song, but I also want to know the best line of poetry you read this year, the best cocktail you devised, the best tradition you started, the best grilling technique, the best piece of advice you received. We’re all living and exploring and absorbing.And so I ask you, as I do every year, to send in your own highly specific, idiosyncratic, genre-free favorites from 2024. What did you discover? What did you learn? What did you love? Submit your answers here, and I’ll include as many of them as I can in upcoming newsletters.For moreThe Morning readers’ bests of 2023 and 2022.The best advice Morning readers received in 2023 and 2022.“As with everything worth making — bread, sweet love, mix tapes — there’s an art to creating a great Top 10 list.” From 2011, Dan Kois on how and why to make a best-of list.The Times’s best of 2024 lists.More year-end lists from around the internet.THE WEEK IN CULTUREFilm and TVAmy Adams in a scene from “Nightbitch.”Searchlight Pictures, via Associated Press“Nightbitch,” which stars Amy Adams as a stay-at-home mother who turns into a feral dog, is one of the movies Times critics are talking about this week.“The Agency” on Paramount + and Netflix’s “Black Doves” are part of a new crop of spy dramas whose biggest battles take place within the hearts and minds of their agents.ArtThe discovery of a rare picture of the poet Arthur Rimbaud, made by his lover Paul Verlaine, prompted a bidding war in Paris.At New York’s Grolier Club, an exhibition renders physical representations of lost or unfinished works by writers including Ernest Hemingway and Christopher Marlowe.More CultureJean-Charles de CastelbajacAlain Jocard/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen Notre-Dame Cathedral reopens, the clergy will be wearing new liturgical garb designed by the French designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac.The most expensive dinosaur fossil ever sold at auction — a stegosaurus that went for almost $45 million — has a new home at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.The two remaining defendants in the case against Young Thug’s rap label YSL were found not guilty of murder and gang charges.THE LATEST NEWSWar in SyriaRebel fighters in the streets of Hama on Friday.Bakr Al Kassem/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesRebels fighting to depose Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, advanced on another major city en route to the capital. The sudden intensification of the war has led neighboring countries to close their borders.Iran, which for years has helped Assad maintain control of Syria, is now evacuating military personnel from the country.The leader of Syria’s rebel groups told The Times that he was confident his fighters could oust Assad. “This operation broke the enemy,” he said.Other Big StoriesA vote on whether to impeach South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, slowed to a crawl as the opposition tried to convince members of his party to support the ouster of the president.A federal judge ruled that the U.S. Naval Academy can consider race and ethnicity in admissions, asserting that affirmative action was essential to protect national security.A panel of federal judges upheld a law that would ban TikTok in the U.S. unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, sells the app. Donald Trump opposes the ban.The U.S. Department of Agriculture will begin testing the nation’s milk supply for the bird flu virus.Police officers now believe the man who shot the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare in Manhattan escaped from the city that day. Investigators recovered a backpack in Central Park similar to the one he was carrying.CULTURE CALENDAR📺 “Somebody Somewhere” (Sunday): In the second season of this HBO half-hour, a character graces a potluck with St. Louis sushi, a delicacy that combines ham, pickles and cream cheese. It’s delicious. And tough on the gut. That’s also true of this riotously funny, achingly tender comedy created by Hannah Bos, Paul Thureen and Bridget Everett. Everett stars as Sam, a woman who returns in middle age to her Manhattan, Kan., hometown. A sweet and salty heartbreaker about family found and chosen, this show will end its three-season run on Sunday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. 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    The 10 Best Books of 2024

    Here they are — the 10 Best Books of 2024.At the Book Review, we spend all year getting ready for this moment. We begin debating our annual best-of list in the spring, going to the mat for what we love. By fall, we’re preparing for rhetorical slugfests.Ultimately, we aim to pick the books that made lasting impressions: the stories that imprinted on our hearts and psyches, the examining of lives that deepened what we thought we already knew.We break down three of these picks in a handy video. For even more great books, take a spin through all 100 Notable Books of 2024, or even this list, which features every book we’ve anointed the best since 2000.FictionAll FoursBy Miranda JulyJuly’s second novel, which follows a married mother and artist who derails a solo cross-country road trip by checking into a motel close to home and starting an affair with a younger rental-car worker, was the year’s literary conversation piece, dubbed “the talk of every group text — at least every group text composed of women over 40” and “the first great perimenopause novel” in just two of many articles that wrestled with its themes. Sexually frank and laced with the novelist’s loopy humor, the book ends up posing that most universal question: What would you risk to change your life? Read our review.Local bookstores | Barnes and Noble | Amazon | AppleWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    100 Notable Books of 2024

    If you read Ferris’s original 2017 graphic novel, you can’t forget it: a beguiling, haunted hybrid of personal memoir, murder mystery and 20th-century time portal. This surreal and densely referential follow-up, drawn in Ferris’s signature cross-hatched style, continues to follow 10-year-old Karen Reyes in circa-1968 Chicago as she wrestles with loss, sexual identity and a […] More