Favorite Reads of 2024
This year has included a lot of scholarly reading for work, and so it's been harder to turn to reading for pleasure. When I did, it was easiest to escape into fiction, letting the story do the work of hooking me, rather than quieting my mind enough to engage with poetry or being able to take in more information through nonfiction. I've missed them both, though, especially as reading more fiction led to more encounters with books I didn't care as much about. Whatever I read, though, most often was read on my porch—the first one I've had in a long time, and I can't enthuse enough over a porch space, a book (and a blanket in spring/fall), my pup Olive and a glass of tea/coffee/wine/dark beer, and dreamy gazing at the birds and blossoms nearby...
1. Perhaps my favorite fiction read was Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, who writes about the power of stories in our individual lives and the way one story can connect us across time, place, and circumstance. In the book, a story is just barely rescued from obscurity, existing only in fragments. Centuries later, it is translated from Greek by a Vietnam War veteran and performed as a play in the middle of winter by elementary school kids. Centuries after that, a young girl on a spaceship whose destination won't arrive in her lifetime finds this particular story and its history at a time when she needs it most. Because of illiteracy, a minority status, or circumstance, each character exists in a small or somewhat isolated world, which the fragmented story helps expand, both figuratively and then literally by being a catalyst that throws them alongside others. It's a beautiful novel about why we read, and Doerr's steady weaving together of the timelines has a very satisfying ending.
A lot of the book focuses on the act of translation and Doerr draws a line from being a good writer or creator to also being a good reader. One reads and is transformed by it, and then further transforms by embedding the insight into new fiction or another creative work, so that we are always building upon what's come before us, and in this way continue our connection.
2. Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin is, on the surface, about video games, which doesn't actually appeal to me, but on a deeper level, about the unique space friendship holds in our lives and in the creative life and about the energy of collaboration and telling a good story. Sadie and Sam are people who love video games and so become friends who make video games together. Zevin captures the messy and petty parts of being alongside humans for any length of time as well as that thrilling focus beyond yourself that comes when you join together. Sadie and Sam often interpret periods of their lives differently, assuming the other knows what's going on with them and feeling resentful by subsequent actions—a very human centering of ourselves. But there's also real care between them and figuring out how to show up for each other in their own ways. It's not feel-good, but it is rewarding.
3. As a time-traveling story, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley takes a very thoughtful and fresh approach. The story revolves around a handful of "expats" from various time periods who the British government brings in to study how they adjust to time travel. The expats are each assigned a "bridge," who helps ease their way. Our protagonist is the bridge for a Victorian arctic explorer, pulled from an expedition before he would have starved to death. Each of the characters are well written with distinct dialogue, and the expats' reactions to elements of modern life and the love story that develops, full of cross-cultural challenges, felt original. When the trust between two characters is ruptured, one character realizes they've read the other "as empire" and the other has read the protagonist as "nonconformist," each thinking they were on the same page but really seeing what they wanted to see, which is what they valued in themselves. The shock when they see each other anew felt very true. I wish the story went on a little longer, but the book overall was such a pleasure. It has the perfect last line, which I won't spoil.
4. In Memory of James Wright, Whose Poem I Ate by Tyler Cain Lacy is a novella told from the perspective of a swaybacked horse in Minnesota who ate one of Wright's poems, leaving us with a new poem of only a title and a blank page. David, the horse, has complaints—about the poem's reception and Wright's slowness in understanding the horse's lessons on writing and the very human interpretation generally assigned to the poem—as well as ideas of why the poem "works," what matters in poetry, and how rapture may be found. It's a clever folding in of both a close reading and ars poetica in a story, as well as being funny—every time the story leans more deeply into criticism, you're suddenly reminded this is coming from a horse, and a grumpy one at that. I would take a class with David the horse.
"[the poem] suggests that rapture is random and leads to nowhere but right back here. And this isn't a depressing conclusion nor a throwing-up of hands in defeat, but a liberating awareness that in the well-worn paths of our quotidian ambling, in our passive lapping at the algae-streaked trough, lay the meaning of our galloping lives."
5. I really delighted in Mathematics for Ladies by Jessy Randall, especially as I've been reading more science for work. Randall's persona poems highlight women scientists whose contributions have been overlooked or buried. The poems are funny and clever and distilled from a lot of reading and thinking about each scientist and the obstacles to her work. In the back of the book, a few of the scientists' stories are further detailed, but I don't think it hinders the reading experience not to know everyone's story; the women's passion for their subject matter and their perseverance in their discipline shine through. It is a book that leads to further rabbit holes.
6. Opening up Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss felt a little like coming home after reading much less poetry this year. It was easy to fall into the rhythms and play and leaps of her work. "The grooves were dug deep," Diane writes, about where we come from. Her newest collection is very much a love song to poetry: the love of it, the companionship of it, the boredom of it, the evolution of it. In long poems that end in satisfying callbacks and call to be read aloud, which I often did, my dog an indifferent audience, she wanders through memories, anger and hardship, practicality and wonder in an acceptance of what life is, the good and bad and hope of it. "Still, I'm copious," she writes about what can be taken, "and so are you."
7. Sarahland by Sam Cohen is weird and wild in the best ways possible. Each story in this collection is about a Sarah. I loved "Gossip," about the rise and fall of a brief relationship as interpreted by surrounding friends; "The First Sarah," which retells the story of Abraham and Sari, with Sari as a trans women; and "Becoming Trees," in which a couple decides they've explored their humanness enough and begin their preparations for becoming trees. There are a lot of funny lines and over-the-top situations grounded in some very big heart, and I couldn't put it down.
"There just aren't as many options for how to be human as people think."
8. Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel has a really interesting premise, taking place over the course of a two-day youth women's boxing match. Each chapter narrates one of the match's brackets and how the two teens come together not just with their fists but their whole selves, past and future, worldviews and personalities. Bullwinkel merges so well a present moment, staying with the circling of an opponent, and the larger picture of what brought someone to this moment and how it might define them in one way or another. Whether the match is a big deal to them or not, going through it adds a layer to their emerging self, shaped by how the teen integrates this moment into her larger story. It was an engrossing read with some great moments of prose throughout.
9. North Woods by Daniel Mason I knew would be nature-focused, but I did not expect it to be a ghost story! The book follows the history of a tract of land in New England and a couple fleeing the Puritans who build on it, and then the generations of people passing through the house, while the land and house change. The various stories are funny, moving, and bumbling, but all are immersed in the flora and fauna of the place.
What I loved about the book were the many moments where the history of a previous character was about to be unearthed in some way, and then something happened to hinder that: redecoration or death, the words getting lost in translation or reinterpreted. It shows how fragile, perhaps, but also mysterious history is and the many stories that aren't documented and so don't get told. Still, for the reader outside this world, Mason drops little callbacks throughout, a character encountering the same mossy stone or hearing words that someone else spoke into the earth that shows just how much we are influenced by the past, even without realizing it. A book club friend noted that in this way the book is also instructing on how to read a landscape, rewarding close attention with small variations and patterns, essential for us in understanding an environment and conserving it, and I loved that.
10. Though I've read individual pieces by Lydia Davis over the years, can't and won't was the first short story collection of hers that I've read in full. And it was riveting, focused as she is on the minutiae of the every day, of how an object or person "is taking action in its own little way." Rather than telling us a story of ambitions, desire, and change, she tells us the story of the moments that don't seem to matter, as in what happens during the act of walking: "But I am told that I must pause at each step, letting my foot rest on the ground for a moment, if I want to develop its full power and reach, before taking the next." Exactly my cup of tea. I loved it.
