27 Dec 2024

What I Read In 2024

Here we are at the end of the year! Like every blogger does eventually, I suppose, I have clearly fallen off on my posting schedule. I meant to write two posts each month, which means of course that I have a blank draft called “What I Read In May 2024” sitting around. Nothing else has gone up since then. There are reasons for that, some frustrating, some exciting, some just a bit blah. That’s all fine. It’s all fine! It’s still been a year. The world has kept on turning. I’ll keep on posting, too, though at a slower rate than I have in the past.

My reading goal for this year was 140 books. I don’t think I’ll try to come near that again in the future — it was probably too much — but by the time this goes up I’ll have finished book 140, Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child. It has been wonderful and horrible so far, as all of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels have been for me. I love it, and I will miss the series when I am done with it. I will miss it so much.

Not all of my reading has been so highbrow. In a fit of nostalgia, I have started rereading Robert Jordan’s epic fantasy series The Wheel of Time, starting with the prequel novel New Spring and then jumping into the series proper with The Eye of the World. Both held up better than I had expected, and I had a lot of fun going back to a series I read again and again and again in high school. I hope to read the rest of the books next year.

The Wheel of Time was not my only nostalgia read in 2024. I also found myself back with a bunch of Star Wars novels, most of which were published in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. None of them are considered canon by Disney at this point, but they remain tremendously stupid fun in the best way. I think of them as the kind of thing you would get if a child decided to make a novel out of a game played with a set of action figures. This is in no way a complaint. One does not come to franchise science fiction looking for anything too hard-hitting, just a good time. At present, I’m working my way through the New Jedi Order series, which does its level best to move the overall storyline of the universe forward and place a greater emphasis on the children of the characters from the original series. These books aren’t great, but I promise I’m still having a wonderful time with them.

I read What An Owl Knows, Jennifer Ackerman’s popular science writeup of new developments in owl science. I devoured Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters’ alternate history take on queer communities in 19^th^ century London. Along with just about everyone else, I fell in love with James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store and had my breath taken away by Percival Everett’s James. I got swept up in Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword, which is a perfectly imperfect take on a post-Arthurian Britain. I was delighted to have a new Susanna Clarke book, even a short one, in The Wood at Midwinter, and a sprawling new Alan Hollinghurst in Our Evenings. I got into baseball and spent time watching games, listening to games and reading Joe Posnanski’s incredible pair of baseball books, The Baseball 100 and Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments. Both were phenomenal, but it was the comparatively brief Doris Kearns Goodwin baseball memoir Wait Till Next Year that really did it for me. What an incredible little book, with life and baseball all tangled up together.

The best book I read this year, though, was one I picked up because of an incredible review. Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires is a retelling of Hérnan Cortés’s conquest of Mexico, a beautiful, trippy, time-fractured, anti-colonialist wonder, unlike anything I’ve read before. It put me in mind of Paul Auster’s The City of Glass, with its abrupt authorial intervention, but You Dreamed of Empires is less tied to a specific narrative, is far more interested in tone, mood, and an extended series of political games and misunderstandings than Auster’s book. I was astounded by it, bowled over by its absolute hurricane of an ending. Read this book! It’s phenomenal.

So anyway. So I’m back. So I’ve posted again. So I’m here. I’ve done a lot of reading, I’ve enjoyed a lot of wonderful writing and a lot of trashy writing and I’m looking forward to a 2025 that will undoubtedly be complicated. It will also undoubtedly bring some stranger and better things than either you or I have yet imagined. Here’s to 2025 and finding all the best we can in it. See you soon.