My Year in Reading
Hooray for books! Yet another list for book people to speed read through.
This year I managed 67 books. A big shout out to the free time that health lapses and freelance lulls afforded me!
With the help of other critics’ raves throughout 2024 (NYT, The Globe, NPR, Lit Hub) and my local library’s untouched new release shelf (thank god no one in Duncan reads), I pounded a lot of books that were published this year.
So while I’m proud to be up on new hardcover hype, my favourites of the year don’t deviate from many other best-of lists. Maybe I’m in good company with these titles already lauded elsewhere. But an engaging read is an engaging read, right? Pinky promise on reading more Canadian titles, more obscure finds, and more classics next year.
Here are a few standouts that were time well spent:
2024 Fiction
This year’s cartoony covers held some pretty dark stories inside. I had to read the acclaimed motel sex romp All Fours, but its portrayal of a semi-famous pop culture influencer stuck more than the bodily fluids for me. I couldn’t put down Headshot, the gritty round-by-round account of a low rent female boxing tournament. God of the Woods is literary mystery writer Liz Moore at her best, and the brooding Cahokia Jazz is 1920s Native American noir. Richard Powers pretty much Sgt. Peppered himself with 2018’s The Overstory, and the marine life versus AI epic Playground attempts to come close, but left me a bit waterlogged. My favourite of the year was Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Long Island Compromise. The Fleishman Is in Trouble author follows a wealthy family’s clueless legacy-grab that’s on par with Succession.
Other Goodies: Martyr!, The Sequel, The Ministry of Time, Sandwich
2024 Nonfiction
The tale of a 1959 jazz album is total a page-turner. 3 Shades of Blue also digs deep into the cultural history that enabled Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and BiIl Evans to dream up Kind of Blue. Emily Nussbaum weaves the sordid history of reality TV with a schooled critic’s eye in Cue the Sun! Filterworld’s look into our invasive algorithms scared the shit out of me, and Supercommunicators made me, like, a better talker and stuff. Ann Powers both praises and calls out Joni Mitchell in her memoir/biography, Traveling, and my buddy Steve Pratt has generously given away the secret to getting our creative work proper attention in Earn It.
Other Goodies: Your Caption Has Been Selected, Heartbreak is the National Anthem, Meditations for Mortals
Favourites from not so long ago
Late to the game, I am now a Kevin Wilson fanboy — first with Now Is Not the Time to Panic, and recently with Nothing to See Here, the singular story of combustable twin kids. The Upstairs Delicatessen is a swaggering love letter to old school eats and I devoured The Secret Life of Groceries in a single day. Raw Dog is the funniest book I’ve read in a long time, all about messy road trips, weird Americana, and the mighty hot dog. The Recovering is a heady and brilliant combo of literary criticism, memoir, and cultural history of alcoholism and the truest account of recovery I’ve seen. North Woods is inventive storytelling that hurt my brain, and how — as a down-and-out drifter enthusiast — am I just discovering Denis Johnson now?
Next up on the pile
What’s on your bedside table? (I mean books, not your weird personal hygiene stuff). I’m always looking for suggestions to add to my self-inflicted stress pile of reading.
And thank you so, so much for your support this year. It really does mean the world to me. I wish you all a holiday season full of grace and a new year full of good reading.
Just finished “Long Island Compromise” and have read at least half of the titles in your pile. Particularly a fan of Jesmyn Ward. You have some good reading to look forward to.
Congratulations on making the top ten "most read" list for First Person in the Globe and Mail (2024).