A Year of Reading: 2024 in Books

A summary of reading in 2024, including all the books published this year, the 'best' books I read and lingering thoughts on the process of tracking & documenting reading

Reflecting on the 50 or so books I read in 2024, I would describe many of them as “quite good,” but not many as “luminous.” That’s a high bar to clear, but it’s good to have lofty reading goals!

People tend to read for specific reasons: distraction or pleasure; or to expand their understanding of the world. The most common complaint I see in casual reviewers (friends, user-generated, this website) are people annoyed when these goals overlap: a romance novel bogged down by the drama of real life, a ‘serious’ novel has too happy or too easy of an ending. When I say I read expansively—and I try to, across genres, voices, and perspectives—it’s to fulfill the goals of distraction, or expansion, and sometimes, at reading’s most luminous, both.

At the end of the day, however, I’m looking for that luminous experience when the book hits my nervous system: kicking my feet in delight at the successful execution of a romance, gasping out loud when plot comes together, scrambling for a pen¹ to document a perfect sentence, and of course, crying actual tears.

All that said, for this reading wrap-up I’ve decided to talk about how I’ve documented a year of reading, to discuss books from 2024 specifically, and to dive more deeply into two books that I thought about most.

Reading documentation

How do you track and document your reading?

I have to assume the most common method is just using a website on the Internet, like GoodReads. I know, I know, Storygraph is better, but I have a Goodreads history going back to 2016, several active friends there, the digital ghost of a deceased friend whose reviews pop up occasionally, and the visual of covers that a list cannot provide—all of which leads me to accept this mediocre website and its many bad-faith reviews into my life. At this point, Goodreads’ terribleness is a feature, not a bug. In the algorithm-driven internet which constantly sells our personal taste and material desires to advertising engines, Goodreads utterly fails to do a single thing with any of that data. There’s no Spotify-like overlord throwing highly curated suggestions at you. Not a single recommendation from that website has ever been useful or relevant to me. That’s beautiful.

The second digital option is the all-powerful spreadsheet. To my mind, the best method to measure yourself against specific goals: trying to read more marginalized voices, works in translation, backlist titles, or books from your own country because you can create all the columns your heart desires. I’m of the mentality that what gets measured gets managed (forgive me, this is not a productivity substack). I’m more likely to read more broadly if I’m tracking toward it as an intentional goal. And also, I like data. I did not keep the spreadsheet up for this year, and my reading reflects that!

And third, ye olde written down list in the planner or notebook of your choosing (see below).

The honest truth is that I have done all three. I could, of course, simply read books and keep no records, live truthfully and freely in the universe. However, I have never done that in any aspect of my life and I’m not about to start now. Each method serves a different purpose!!! The website is essential for long-term remembering, a spreadsheet tracks more detail, and looking at a handwritten page fills me with a level of serene inner peace I can find nowhere else.

On that note, here’s the notebook page of everything I read in 2024. Or the digital version. It’s still December and there may be a few more but I’m ready to close out the year early:

I know this is nigh-unreadable. I added the washi tape when I became convinced mid-August I wouldn’t make it to 50 and that the blank page on the right would haunt me. It does, a little bit. This is in my beloved Hobonichi Weeks’ tiny grid.

Of these books, more than half were published in the last two years. The vast, vast majority are novels, more than half are by white authors, and about one-fifth are works in translation—a reflection, in part, of an innate bias or inclination toward books about forlorn women who look like me. So much so that it filled a subcategory in my best-of list back in 2023:

As mentioned above, I would sadly describe this as a weaker reading year, especially compared to the previous year. A commonality from last year’s favourites is that there are many big, ambitious books. In fact, I read one (Birnam Wood) after telling a bookseller that exact description after finishing another (Biography of X). Another lesson: go to more bookstores and ask them for recommendations.

That said, based on no measurement but personal vibes, my favorite books I read this year were:

• Doppelganger by Naomi Klein

• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodr Dostoevsky

• Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth

• Enter Ghost by Isabella Hamad

• Twilight Zone by Nona Fernandez

• Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Books published in 2024 —

Looking over my spreadsheet, there’s a visible pattern in which I read books published in 2023 for the first half of the year and then switched to current releases around June. I started this newsletter around the same time, which means that nine of the twelve 2024 releases I read have already been documented in some form here. For the sake of completion, here are some quick reviews of the two 2024 books I read prior:

The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

Bardugo writes fun, plot-driven YA novels with the kind of dialogue that tells you that she grew up reading and writing fanfiction. This is supposed to be an adult novel, but it reads like her YA writing. It is a historical fantasy set in 14th-century Spain, in which the main character must keep her Judaism secret while her magical abilities bring her more and more attention.

Unfortunately, this book was thin and forgettable, even for a book I read for pure distraction. It revisits themes she has executed better in other novels and there’s a romance that feels almost exactly as though she got to retread the Darkling (a character from another series of hers) without the bland childhood friend tagging along. It does feel tonally different, a little more folkloric, like a fairy tale. If you like Bardugo and want to turn your brain off for a bit, you could do worse.

Coexistence by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt is an incredible writer and I wish he wrote longer books. This is a collection of interlinked short stories about queerness, sex, growing older, the urban and on-reserve Indigenous experiences, and love in its many forms.

He writes like no one else, bringing intense emotions like anger, lust, and vulnerability alive on the page. There’s a tendency to weigh these feelings and stories down with an almost defensive academic tone—defensive as a method to shield the intensity of feeling—and I do truly hope he eventually gifts the world with something longer, because he has consistently demonstrated skill with experimentation and I would selfishly love to see him work with plot.

For thoughts on the other ten 2024 books I read this year:

1. The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft

2. Consent by Jill Ciment

3. All Fours by Miranda July

4. The Hunter by Tana French

5. Vera Bushwack by Sig Burwash

6. Martyr by Kaveh Akbar

7. The Sleepwalkers by Scarlett Thomas

8. The Sisters K by Maureen Sun

9. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

10. Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange (read this month, review to come)

My personal favourite book published in 2024 was Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. My charming, bafflingly single housemate and editor Alanna² says Small Rain by Garth Greenwell is her favourite. Ceding the floor to her:

Freed from my shackles at last! 

In a nutshell, Small Rain is the first-person narration of a man hospitalized due to extreme pain during the era of early Covid lockdowns. It’s generally a hard sell to get me to read anything with hospital visits, non-linear plot, or any form of Dreaded Covid Novel, so no one was more surprised than me when this book crept to the top of my (humble) list. I’ve loved Greenwell’s novels in the past (Cleanness, What Belongs to You) but was a little wary of reading Small Rain due to the wild divergence in its reception, from Naomi Kanakia’s assertion that no one with a working brain could authentically enjoy this book, to some overly (perhaps) fawning reviews in the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and other more traditional media outlets. 

And yet, Greenwell succeeded in creating a book that was about all the issues above, plus much more: meditations on queer love and domesticity, the sublimity of one’s own life before illness (as well as sublimity when ill), the superlative excellence of house sparrows, the immersion in the world of healthcare workers (their tenderness and professionalism, but also their pettiness, or uncaring), the terror of having to place one’s fate in the hands of a broken healthcare system and at the mercy of strangers, and the grace that comes from this, too. 

There is a line from one of my favourite poems (After Paradise by Czeslaw Milosz, trans. Robert Hass) that sums up most of what it means to read this novel: “So that you watch what it is, though it fades away, / And are grateful every moment for your being.” In a year that felt frantic and often overwhelming, this novel slowed time to an almost crystalline standstill, and if you have the patience for it, it may do that for you, too. And with that, back to Laurel.

Books I thought or talked about the most —

Drawing out two books that left a lasting impact.³ Perhaps there is a lesson to be taken from the fact that both of these are two of the few non-fiction books I read all year.

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

I read this book in the early part of the year and have recommended it to a dozen or more people since. The starting point of this book is that Naomi Klein, the author of the seminal No Logo (a book arguing against the increased proliferation of brands in our everyday lives) finds her own “personal brand” or digital identity confused with Naomi Wolf, feminist-turned-anti-vax-fearmonger. From that vantage point, she writes about the doppelgangers of the digital age, the alternate realities that reshaped the ‘normal’ world.

It’s a book that has only become more relevant since its publication. Klein argues that most reactionary, bizarre right-wing nonsense is so successful because it addresses legitimate fears about technology, government, and the economy. One of the chapters I have thought about often is about the “diagonalism” between traditionally hard-right movements and formerly hippy, left-wing alternate wellness communities (the “wellness to white supremacy pipeline”) through the politicization of a monomaniacal obsession with the self and self-improvement.

It’s written in an easily readable writing style, but it is both dense and quite long,⁴ which makes it difficult to condense all of Klein’s arguments into a short review. That said, the part of the book that I have thought about the most, which has led me to push it into the hands of many people, is one of the later chapters on Israel and Palestine. Since October 2023, she made this entire chapter free online, and I highly recommend reading it.

Like me, Klein is a Canadian Jewish woman. It was deeply meaningful to me personally to hear this perspective tying together the history of anti-Semtisim and the Holocaust, how those were informed by European/American colonialism, how a failure to reconcile these facts plays out in Israel and (as certainly evidenced by the last year) Jewish diasporic communities, how we have been transformed from victim to victimizer, and how that transformation is part of a false contract of safety we cannot accept.

The Odd Woman & The City by Vivian Gornick

This is a short book, vaguely a memoir but more of a series of vignettes about living and aging from Gornick’s 80 years living (mostly) in New York City. In my opinion, people under the age of 40 should not be writing memoirs: what do we have to say, really?⁵ We can make an exception for memoirs that keep their focus tight on a specific period or event of the author’s life.

Throughout Gornick’s reflections on the lovers she’s had over a lifetime, her relationship with her mother, and thoughts on loneliness, is the constant background noise of the city. Gornick takes long, city-spanning walks every day.

This book had an outsized impact on me, considering how slight it was, because it convinced me to take out my headphones more often. It’s filled with brief descriptions of people and situations she sees while living in the city, all of which would be completely missed if you were stuck in in your own insulated little world. Like Gornick, I live in the city I grew up in (albeit half the size of New York) which means that also like Gornick, the city is full of ghosts—a personal map of disappeared structures, institutions, and people. But it’s still alive, which you can hear if you just tune into the half fragments of conversations as they whizz by you every day.

Looking to 2025 —

And now the eternal question: how to find truly dazzling books that make your heart sing? To quote my friend Kara, “If I were writing a novel, I would simply make it perfectly witty and cutting and prescient and reverberate beyond my generation, but that’s just me.” Is that too much to ask? Damn!

Here’s to a luminous year of reading in 2025. I’m heading to Germany to celebrate the holidays with my in-laws in Bavaria, with a side trip to Prague. It is a strange time of year for so many reasons. See you on the other side.

1. Or more likely, my phone to take a picture of the page

2. She has asked for this to be mentioned in every newsletter prior to this. Happy Hannukah, Lipson.

3. The book I actively talked about the most was Miranda July’s All Fours, the zeitgeist-iest book of the year. My feelings on the book soured somewhat in the long-run, although I still think it’s dynamic, memorable, and easy to read. In part for the reasons Tembe’s close reading of novels themes identify, as I said in my initial review, it’s a novel from a thin white woman without great consideration toward financial or personal consequence. And also because my sense from July’s, um, internet presence is that my reading of the novel’s self-awareness might have been generous.

4. I also highly recommend the audiobook, narrated by Klein herself who is a great audiobook narrator

5. I’m relieved to find that the author of one of the better books I read in 2024, and one of the best memoirs period, How to Say Babylon, Safiya Sinclair, turned 40 this year. Phew. Taking a moment to strongly recommend that book if you like beautiful writing and stories of personal growth and forgiveness—it’s about Sinclair’s journey out of a repressive Rastafarian childhood. If you read Tara Westover’s memoir Educated and felt confused like the narrative missed a few steps along the way, this is the book for you.