I don’t usually distill my annual book list into favorites. This is just because I find it difficult to choose—all of the books seem important for different reasons. But maybe, using representative titles (3 each?), I can consider some themes in 2024’s reading web.
I read several biographies and histories.
- The Method by Isaac Butler
- This history of method acting was unexpectedly absorbing.
- Magnificent Rebels by Andrea Wulf
- The story of the early Romantics in Jena was un-put-downable.
- Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell
- I liked this peek into a time period that is obscure to me, plus the story of the poet, who is rather obscure himself.
I was interested in books about women’s lives.
- L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Mysterious Death of the “Female Byron” by Lucasta Miller
- The book that started my biography kick.
- The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
- A foundational feminist study. And more applicable in 2024 than you’d expect.
- Paradise, Piece by Piece by Molly Peacock
- This memoir occasionally made me feel ill, but was worth it.
I continued to read Japanese writers.
- The Emissary by Yoko Tawada
- I loved the images and sentence-level stuff.
- Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa
- A cozy story about an aimless young woman who goes to live at her eccentric uncle’s used bookshop. Pure pleasure.
- Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami
- A quiet love story. Made me cry.
And mysteries. My favorites were by Japanese writers.
- The Aosawa Murders by Riku Onda
- Wonderfully constructed, with one of my favorite kinds of endings.
- The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji
- A well-plotted spin on And Then There Were None.
- Devils in Daylight by Junichiro Tanizaki
- Off-the-wall and meta—loved it.
Plus theory, comics, and just-good-stories.
- Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes
- Barthes + Japan = an essential book for me this year.
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
- Love a school story, love a story of messy entanglements between girls, their friends, and their authority figures.
- Saga, volume 11 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
- BKV ruins your life in six issues. Again!!
I also logged progress on tomes that will take more than a year to read. This year, that includes:
- 300ish pages of Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante
- Everyone in this book is pathologically miserable, but it’s good reading for winter. Plus, instructive for a writer on character interiority, and how complex emotional relationships can move a plot.
- 250ish pages of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
- Necessary feminist philosophy—and compelling. (Although I’ll admit to skipping the chapter about women in French literature I haven’t read).
Time to stop—or I’ll keep categorizing until every book is on here somewhere. :’)
I read more nonfiction than usual this year. I wanted to read more history, and learn about ways people create their lives. This turned into a mini-obsession with the lives of people in the distant past. My more-than-mini obsession with Japanese writers has persisted for a couple of years. (And now, having been to Japan, there’s the added pleasure of the books sparking the feeling of “being there.”) I’ve continued to seek out books written by women about other women, or about themselves. In particular, I wanted to read about women with unconventional lives. I think I’m building a mental foundation out of their bravery; an in-progress resource for myself.
I don’t have any goals or proclamations to make about reading in 2025. I usually don’t know what I want to read until I try it out, and like to put as few reading-rules on myself as possible. I guess one hope is that I’ll read more of the books I already have around here, instead of continuing to acquire new ones. (no chance!) But the lost threads of things I get interested in—and then forget about—sort of haunt me.