Over Thanksgiving, with the weather pushing towards winter, I began drafting this post, curious to see how the books from the year were starting to talk to one another. I think of a year of reading in that way: as books forming little circles and groups, like people at a party, sinking into different conversations.
I like reading such lists from other people. I like it even when there are a lot of them, and this year, it seems, there have been more than usual. (Though maybe I’ve just been seeing them more frequently? Who knows.) I like reading them both from strangers and from people I know, for the little window they provide into others’ reading habits, as well as the way they inevitably prompt me to add new titles to my to-read stack for the coming year. And I like how they take the solitary act of reading and make it feel somewhat communal.
In another sense, though, the communal aspect of reading has already been embedded in many of the books on my list this year.
To choose just one: Back in the spring semester, my classmates proposed that we all read Sylph, our professor Abby Cloud’s debut collection from 2014. We did, and then held a gathering in which Abby read some of the poems and graciously entertained a slew of our questions.
This was, quite simply, the best. Reading the collection on my own, I’d felt taken into a kind otherworldly autumn, populated by spirits. Now, as Abby talked about her process of structuring the book around the acts of the 19th-century ballet—the prologue, the black act, the white act, the apotheosis—I began to see how the poems moved with and against one another. During the White Act, she said, a portion of the ballet that tends to venture into the forest, the poems veer off into a more uncontrolled space of the mind—“the brain’s woods,” she called it. A place of unbridled wandering.
I loved that image. I paged back through the book, seeing the poems in a new light. Abby read a few more poems; we asked several more questions; the conversation and the poems and the book increasingly opened up.
When I see Sylph on my shelf now, I see, inevitably, all of us circled around in the English building’s lounge late that evening, eating pizza, chatting with Abby. I feel the intersection between people and writing and place.
I wish I could capture those kind of moments with each of the books below, but that would make an absurdly long post even longer. Instead, I hope, by grouping them together, to narrate a little how they form a kind of conversation with one another.
Most of these are collections I came to through the writer: I missed my classmate Tyler’s book launch in Toledo, but got a copy before he and his family left for Nebraska—the main setting of his poetry; you can feel the landscape permeate the collection. I mentioned Laura in my post on prose poetry and Eduardo C. Corral in a post on memory.
Frank O’Hara is the outlier on the list. I bought his book, somewhat embarrassingly, after seeing this scene in Mad Men years ago, and finally got to it this summer.
Sylph (Abigail Cloud)
The Weight of Drought (Tyler Michel Jacobs)
Butterfly Nebula (Laura Reece Hogan)
Guillotine: Poems (Eduardo C. Corral)
Meditations in an Emergency (Frank O’Hara)
I had a favorite short story in each of these collections: “The Rememberer” by Aimee Bender, in which the narrator’s boyfriend is “experiencing reverse evolution,” becoming first a turtle and then increasingly less-evolved forms. “The Go-Seekers” by Christian Moody, about a prolonged game of hide-and-go-seek that begins in Elly and George’s childhood but escalates into longer and more elaborate versions as they grow up. And “I Looked For You, I Called Your Name” by Laura van den Berg, about a couple on their honeymoon, confronting questions of knowability.
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (Aimee Bender)
Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds (Christian Moody)
The Isle of Youth: Stories (Laura van den Berg)*1
Clearly a genre of interest for me this year. Microfiction, flash fiction, flash nonfiction, and a hybrid collection, respectively.
New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (ed. by James Thomas and Robert Scotellaro)
Best Small Fictions 2024 (ed. by Amber Sparks)
Short Takes: Brief Encounter with Contemporary Nonfiction (ed. by Judith Kitchen)*
Bingo, Bango, Boingo (Alan Michael Parker)
Novels, expectedly, formed the majority of my reading. This is a catch-all list of the ones that didn’t fit in with more significant themes—though they still clustered into smaller groups and pairs. I was most pulled in by Orbital (pun intended), which had been recommended to me by multiple people.
Dark academia
Donna Tart, I learned, started this subgenre with The Secret History, a thriller about a group of classics students who commit murder. Mona Awad’s Bunny, about a group of fiction students in an MFA program, goes in a more wildly speculative direction. With both, I felt immersed in the beginning—in the moody atmosphere of Secret History and the campy satire of Bunny—but didn’t feel that they held up midway through.
The Secret History (Donna Tart)
Bunny (Mona Awad)
Disaffected female protagonists
Young women negotiating their relationship to people and the material world. I ended both not sure how I felt about them, but the prose was good.
The Guest (Emma Cline)
My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Ottessa Moshfegh)
Strong settings
Orbital is set in a space station orbiting earth. The Midcoast in Maine. Birnham Wood in a national park on New Zealand’s South Island.
Orbital (Samantha Harvey)
The Midcoast (Adam White)
Birnam Wood (Eleanor Catton)
Books on my shelf forever
White Noise has been on my literal shelf forever. The Lord of the Rings trilogy has just been in progress forever.
White Noise (Don DeLillo)
The Return of the King (J.R.R. Tolkien)
I wanted to reread Mrs. Dalloway this fall because of its depiction of midlife (more on that below) but was drawn towards the thread of illness running through the novel instead, which I had not remembered. I recalled the details about Septimus Smith’s shellshock from the war, but not the fact that Mrs. Dalloway has recently recovered from influenza. I ended up reading it alongside Patricia Lockwood’s Will There Ever Be Another You, which details the narrator’s experience with long Covid. I tried to write an essay about how both novels grapple with questions of the self, but it never came together. They remain, however, permanently linked in my head.
Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
Will There Ever Be Another You (Patricia Lockwood)
During my thesis defense, I received some feedback that one of the characters—a mother in her late 40s—read young. So I decided I would “research” by reading books with protagonists somewhere in midlife. I figured I’d just immerse myself in a wide variety of books—fiction, nonfiction; literary, popular—for a month or so, but it was a bit of a failed experiment. I enjoyed The Lost Daughter (as well as its film adaptation) but found the other two grating. I asked for book recommendations from people, but we came up surprisingly short. So if you have any good ones—let me know!
The Lost Daughter (Elena Ferrante)
All Fours (Miranda July)
You Could Make This Place Beautiful (Maggie Smith)
After This was another attempt to read about midlife, but I ended up focusing on the children’s narrative in the story, rather than the parents’. It wasn’t my favorite of McDermott’s novels—but it left me with a surprising emotional hangover, where I couldn’t stop thinking about the characters for days afterwards. The same thing happened with The Dutch House, though in that case, I was immersed in the story the entire time, staying up late multiple nights reading. The image of the two siblings, smoking in the car while they observe their childhood house and recount the past, is still stuck in my mind, months later.
I’m finishing up the year with Hamnet right now, which feels similarly emotionally vivid. It forms an odd bookend with Intermezzo, Sally Rooney’s novel centered on two brothers, which I read last December, just after I made 2024’s list.
Joan Wickersham’s The Suicide Index is the only nonfiction here. Her short story “An Inventory” has long been a favorite of mine for its use of footnotes and listing. Her memoir, which chronicles the death of her father, structures memory through the form of an index.
After This (Alice McDermott)
The Dutch House (Anne Patchett)
Hamnet (Maggie O’Farrell)
Intermezzo (Sally Rooney)
Little Fires Everywhere (Celeste Ng)*
The Suicide Index (Joan Wickersham)
These were all rereads for the annotated bibliography of my thesis. They could also fall into the “family narrative” category above, but I was drawn back to them for the way in which they handle narration and point-of-view. The language is beautiful. The themes compelling. I can’t recommend them enough.
The Bluest Eye (Toni Morrison)
Housekeeping (Marilynne Robinson)
To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
Reading about the Catholic Worker was part novel-research (some of the novel deals with intentional community, which I initially thought would be modeled after the Worker, though I’ve since abandoned that idea) and part personal (as a Catholic myself). I know I ought to prefer The Long Loneliness, Day’s well-known autobiography, but I was drawn more to Loaves and Fishes, for its interesting glimpses into the early days of the Catholic Worker and the people comprising it.
The Long Loneliness (Dorothy Day)
Loaves and Fishes: The Inspiring Story of the Catholic Worker Movement (Dorothy Day)
I read Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom a few years ago and can’t help thinking about it any time I read a book on a chronic health condition—for the strength of her writing and the deft way in which she weaves her story alongside the broader questions she raises. I’ve reread her book several times since.
I wanted to feel that way about Zeller’s book, which I read when I was in the middle of post-travel concussion symptoms. Like O’Rourke, he blends memoir and journalism, narrating his own experience with cluster headaches alongside an account of the complicated history of headache treatment. The book ended up being a bit of a mixed bag for me: fascinating in parts, harder to follow and less convincing in others. But I will say: It made me feel less alone, hearing about the wide array of experiences people have with chronic headaches, and this was no small thing.
(The other two are both passes: an informational text on head injuries, relevant only if you are seeking out such a thing, and a potentially interesting history of chronic illness that was ultimately flawed and frustrating. O’Rourke’s book is a better choice.)
The Headache: The Science of a Most Confounding Affliction—and a Search for Relief (Tom Zeller, Jr.)
Healing the Traumatized Brain: Coping After Concussion and Other Brain Injuries (Sandeep Vaishnavi and Vani Rao)
In the Kingdom of the Sick: A Social History of Chronic Illness in America (Laurie Edwards)
Both of these books were assigned for class—I’m not in a place where I’m thinking about the practicalities of publishing, but Maum’s book is one that I appreciated knowing about and would recommend to others. Detailed but straightforward.
I was intrigued by the premise of Big Fiction, but it was one of those books that didn’t know what it wanted to be. For anyone who has read McGurl’s The Program Era—which analyzes how MFA programs have shaped literature—it was trying to be that for the publishing industry, but kept shifting into anecdote and jumping around in time. I did learn a bit about how the major publishing houses differ from one another—and some of the history behind the independent presses here in Minnesota!—but this was a fairly frustrating way in which to do so.
Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer’s Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book (Courtney Maum)*
Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature (Dan Sinykin)*
Of the books below, Meander, Spiral, Explode is the one that stuck most in my mind. Allison examines the traditional story structure and explores other forms, based on patterns in nature. When/if I ever get around to drafting that Part 2 about stand-up comedy and writing, this is what I’ll turn to. It’s been running through my head as I rewatch James Acaster’s old specials (see below) this month.
How Fiction Works (James Wood)*
Bird by Bird (Anne Lamott)
Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir (ed. by William Zinsser)*
Meander, Spiral, Explode (Jane Allison)
I love stand-up comedy, and so my go-to easy-listen is an audiobook read by a comic. Though in the case of James Acaster, the book is more memoir than stand-up: about music and breakdown and loss of religion, so while funny, it is also oddly moving. It’s prompted me to revisit his stand-up series, Repetoire, which, though mostly absurd and ridiculous, can also strike a similarly strange, emotional chord.
Big Dumb Eyes (Nate Bargatze)
Perfect Sound Whatever (James Acaster)
What’s the best book you’ve read this year? Or a book you’d recommend for the year to come? I’d love to know.
I’ve marked books assigned for class with asterisks—which only means that I did not select them (and that I was bound to finish them, whether I liked them or not!)
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