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My Reading in 2024
I read 101 books in 2024. My goal was 100, as it’s been the past few years. 100 books sounds like a lot—I often elicit bemused reactions from people when I tell them—but I’ve found the number very attainable if you listen to audiobooks and read lots of poetry.  During the year, I rarely think about the 100 book goal, letting interests and circumstances dictate my reading, assuming I’ll be fine when November and December roll around. But this year, I was dismayed when I did my count at the end of October and had read only 68 books—well behind schedule. I’ve hustled these last two months to make up lost ground, flying through random poetry collections lying around the house and limiting my audiobooks to those less than 7 hours in length. This sprint has felt both fun and insincere, and I’m looking forward to returning to my meandering, unadulterated preferences again in 2025, though I know I’ll also look back fondly on this frantic time of book gorging. Life is confusing like that. Below, I’ll elaborate on my 2024 reading habits and share some favorites and least favorites along the way. Total Pages Read: 6,551 Total Time Listened: 536:03   Novels I began reading novels again in 2024 after more or less swearing off them for several years. Emma Cline’s The Guest was the apotheosis of this shift. The Guest made me feel alive to elements of fiction—plot, character, setting, and the power of sentences to be both beautiful and useful—in a way I haven’t felt before. Moreover, the book’s commercial success, often a red flag for me, I found encouraging. It’s nice to know there’s a decent audience for fiction that doesn’t treat the reader like an idiot. Other fiction highlights included: However, the fiction wave crashed in the latter half of the year. I got carried away and read novels more indiscriminately than I should have. Chief among these was Septology by Jon Fosse. I read it with a Twitter group, and boy was I confused by how much everyone loved it. The 700-page sentence thing isn’t all that interesting once you get past the fact of it, and the recursive sentimentality was like Gordon Lish on MDMA. Annoying. The Small Presses It was not a great year for the small press ecosystem. Small Press Distribution’s implosion in March felt like the end of an era, an era that had already been over for many years—possibly even a decade—but now it was official. I was a frequent customer of their website when I was first diving into contemporary literature circa 2009-2010, so I want to assign some significance to the collapse via my own nostalgia, but honestly they fucked over a lot of people, so I’m not going to mourn them. For the past several years, it’s felt like the small press model is perpetually on the ropes, weathering blow after blow from the brutal, bottom-line oriented incentives erected around our art, and yet the presses are still there, putting out great work. Among my favorite reads of 2024, small presses are well represented, including my absolute favorite read of the year: Sex Goblin by Lauren Cook, published by Nightboat Books. It’s a perfect book. Funny, tender, wise. I’ve gifted multiple copies to friends.  from Sex Goblin by Lauren Cook We also got a new Matthew Rohrer book in 2024, a major event in my world, and Army of Giants did not disappoint. What a gift. Early in the year, I read Courtney Bush’s I Love Information on my phone after borrowing it as an ebook from the library because I liked the title, and it was amazing. Immediately thereafter, I found a used copy of her out-of-print first book, Every Book is About the Same Thing (an all time great book title), and loved that as well. I look forward to re-reading both of these books in the coming years. An additional shoutout to Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries, my platonic ideal of what a book should be—formally inventive yet emotionally intact—which I purchased from Fitzcarraldo Editions because it was released earlier in the UK, so it felt like a small press book to me, even though I realize it was published by FSG in America. The Spoils of Book Touring I did a number of readings in 2024 in support of Fudge, my poetry collection released in late 2023, and at every event I tried to barter a copy of my book for a copy of the other readers’ books. These books included: They’re all awesome books written by real ones. Audiobooks I had less time to listen to audiobooks this year compared to previous years, which definitely slowed my progress to the 100 book goal. There are three main reasons for this:
I also tended towards long memoir/biography audiobooks that would take weeks to finish, instead of days. This definitely slowed down the rate of consumption but was rewarded with a greater depth of experience. Blake Gopnik’s riveting, 44-hour biography of Andy Warhol was the highlight of my audiobook listening this year, followed by the 26-hour Thelonious Monk by Robin D.G. Kelley and Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. Werner Herzog’s Every Man For Himself and God Against All was fun because he narrates it, and I enjoyed his voice in my headphones for 14 hours last January. I also enjoyed several books about basketball this year that approached the game in new and interesting ways, especially Black Ball by Theresa Runstedtler and There’s Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib. The Witts I want to give a special shout out to the Witt family for writing two books that I very much enjoyed in audio format this year: How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt and Health and Safety by Emily Witt. The Cringe List Finally, I’d like to acknowledge some of my cringiest reads of 2024. I do most of my audiobook listening on the Brooklyn Public Library’s Libby app, which is free, so it does not feel like there’s much risk to trying something new or tangential to my interests. I do not look down on “practical” books, such as self-help, parenting, or business advice genres, and have actually learned a great deal from some of that reading, but these categories also have the biggest downside. There are many such books that just do not need to exist, propped up by straw man arguments and cherry-picked facts, intellectually dishonest and spiritually incomplete. You can feel the production machinery at work in these books—the author who needs a paycheck, the editor painting by numbers, the marketing team manufacturing demand. I find I learn something form these books too, it’s just not what the book intended.
Top Five Books I Read in 2024 (Any Genre) Top Five Poetry Books I Read in 2024 Top Five Fiction Books I Read in 2024 Top Five Non-Fiction Books I Read in 2024 |