Sometimes, what I read for pleasure turns into the germ of an assignment I then hound an editor to let me write. I began this year preparing to interview my friend, the brilliant critic Becca Rothfeld, about her first book, the essay collection All Things Are Too Small. I read then reviewed Joy Williams’s new story collection Concerning the Future of Souls (and re-read her previous collection 99 Stories of God). In the summer, I interviewed Charlotte Shane on my Substack after reading her new memoir An Honest Woman and the third edition of a previous memoir called N.B. At the end of the summer, I was fortunate (through sheer incessant prodding) to moderate a conversation with Danzy Senna at the bookstore where I work about her novel Colored Television.
Beyond what I engage with for work, I try not to give my personal reading too much premeditation; I find that the books that interest me when they first come out will generally still interest me however far into the future I eventually pick them up. There were several authors and subjects that haunted me throughout 2024 and around the beginning of spring, after a kind of meandering unhurriedness with what I picked up, those authors and subjects made themselves apparent.
One such was a more deliberate engagement with books about Catholicism. I spent much of this year reading Garry Wills, an American historian who, until recently, identified as a Catholic: The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis, Bomb Power, The Kennedy Imprisonment, and Why Priests?. No longer a Catholic, Wills remains one of my favorite writers on religion and politics, his methodology reflecting one I’ve been increasingly drawn to as I continue exploring my own faith. His voice is shrewd, often terse, but emphatic. In that way, he reminds me of another favorite Catholic writer, Herbert McCabe, whose more theological and philosophical work scratches the metaphysical itch that Wills doesn’t.
Extending from this interest in pointedly Catholic writing came a general interest in works either by Catholic writers (though not necessarily works about Catholicism) or works about faith more broadly. Christian Wiman’s new book Zero at the Bone, Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work, Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene, The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton, and The Wizard Knight by Gene Wolfe. A hodgepodge of genres and subject matter, all of them so loosely connected that, by the end of spring, I was really using the “Catholic” designation more as inspiration than a hard mandate.
As with Wills, I clung to a few writers this year. I re-read Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea series during the summer, nearly starting over again after finishing. It’s too easy to romanticize LeGuin, her style, her polemics, her singularity as an artist of uncommon outspokenness and imagination. Earthsea was, more than Harry Potter or Narnia, my lodestar as a child. It seemed a small miracle to find that those books have grown alongside me. I read a few of Jeffrey Ford’s books: A Natural History of Hell, Big Dark Hole, Ahab’s Return, and Crackpot Palace. I read a few new-to-me titles by my friend Brian Evenson: Black Bark, Dark Property, and Good Night, Sleep Tight.
Ultimately, this is all too tidy.
I’m scrolling through my list of books from 2024 now and while I can see certain patterns, there are equally random entries that represent impulses followed, recommendations acquired, threads to be picked up again in the near future, or one-off explorations. Some have stayed with me, others I only remembered upon opening my list.
I leave the rest here in no particular order: Orbital by Samantha Harvey, When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, About Looking by John Berger, Remake by Connie Willis, Darryl by Jackie Ess, True Grit by Charles Portis, Antigone’s Claim by Judith Butler, Beautiful Days by Zach Williams, When the Clock Broke by John Ganz, A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch, Come to the Window by Howard Norman, The Book of Elsewhere by China Mieville and Keanu Reeves, The Prestige by Christopher Priest, Forces of Nature by Edward Steed, The Coiled Serpent by Camilla Grudova, An Ethic for Christian & Other Aliens in a Strange Land by William Stringfellow, Recognizing the Stranger by Isabella Hammad, Culture & Imperialism by Edward Said.
