Every book I read in 2024, with commentary
I started keeping these notes on my reading in 2015. That means this is my tenth list — ten years is a long time to do anything! In January, I wrote a little essay about what these lists have meant to me and how they’ve changed my reading, which is to say, my life.
The biggest thing I did this year was put out a book. It’s called Any Person Is the Only Self, and it’s largely about reading. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who bought a copy, showed up at one of my events, or said something nice about it. You made my year.
Other highlights? I went to the zoo, took a harbor cruise around Newport, saw lots of good art, heard some jazz, visited the house where Melville wrote Moby-Dick, enjoyed my birdfeeder. Favorite meals of the year, off the top of my head: shrimp puttanesca at Frankie’s in Lenox, MA, and every kind of taco at Elemi in El Paso, TX.
Here are the usual bookkeeping notes: This list (which is organized into fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, each list in the order that I read them, from January to December) only includes books I read in full. I read parts of a lot of books that I don’t finish — not necessarily because I don’t like the books; sometimes I just don’t feel the need to read the whole thing at that juncture, or ever. On the other hand, if I finished a book, I probably liked it or at least found it interesting to think about, which is almost as good.
Here are my lists from 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, and 2016.
Now, onto the list. For whatever reason, this was an especially good year in nonfiction reading, for me. As always, I’ll share favorites at the end.
FICTION
1. God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer by Joseph Earl Thomas (2024) — A complex, sometimes even disorienting novel told on two timelines. In one a young man works a long hospital shift, trying to earn enough money to appease the many people who are asking for it (exes, lovers, children, parents), increasingly dizzy with hunger. In one he relives his history, “the story about the story,” “a version of the truth wrapped in a longer lie,” working discursively through the episodes of love and hate and friendship and sex that got him here. You might call it present time and past time, or body time and head time. It’s about all the traps of black reality (poverty, fear, war, sickness, death) but also always about language, writing and speech, play and possibility. Contemplative, often hilarious, and very daring.
2. The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner (1984) — One of those lovely small but big novels, Penelope Fitzgerald-esque, about a cluster of interesting people (two families, more or less, parents and children and siblings and lovers) who affect each other’s lives over a short time, destabilizing habits, making new kinds of beauty and pain possible. Delightful characters, vulnerable, noble, embarrassed of and by each other. Had been meaning to read this for a while and am glad I did.
3. Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages by Manuel Puig (1982) — A novel almost fully in dialogue, in cryptic conversations between a dying old man (who, for some reason, I kept picturing as Lo Pan from Big Trouble in Little China) and a younger man, seemingly hired to be his caretaker, though their relationship is mysterious. I really did not enjoy reading this, but kept reading anyway, hoping for some satisfaction or revelation, which remained unachieved. I guess I just loved the title; I hope I’m not eternally cursed by it.
4. True Grit by Charles Portis (1968) — My friend Sebastian, who’s a great reader, remarked that Portis characters are, to an extent, an excuse for Portis dialogue. Because this is a first-person novel, in a way it’s all dialogue, but not in the same way as Eternal Curse; more, as Donna Tartt notes in the afterword of our edition, in the way of Huck Finn. Very cute. I especially enjoyed the courtroom scene and the last twenty-five pages.
5. Revenge of the Scapegoat by Caren Beilin (2022) — I got a lot of pleasure from Beilin’s very particular sentences, the way they insist on being exactly as they are (as I always say of style — a little wrong, in consistent and interesting ways): “It was warm, but ribbons of crispness did exist.” “Why-I-can’t or, even better, why-I-won’t writing was better, much much better, than any other writing I was currently reading.” “Joe was sucking off his own finger, showing me how he’d want me to do it to his cock. He wanted to blow himself, I thought, look, he had ideas, the way he sucked with a technique.” Very funny and interesting for stretches, but silly at times, in parts that are clearly intentional and in a tradition but still exasperating, thankfully short enough to finish regardless. I liked it, mostly, found it both endearing and annoying like an actual person.
6. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (1924) — I wanted to read something lush, not in terms of landscape really, but in terms of worldview — rich in intellectual detail. And Forster’s so good for that; I love him for his interest in subtle change and subtle misunderstanding, which on the wrong day can almost wreck your life. The main plot: On a picnic excursion to the “Marabar caves,” based on the Barabar caves in Western India, an English woman goes into a dark cave alone and believes she is attacked. Has anything happened? In any case, she blames it on her Indian host, who is swiftly arrested. And events unfold, etc. A very moral novel, but I take it to be mostly about friendship, what friendship is, and what makes it possible, given differences and conflict and unknowability. There’s something strikingly beautiful, funny, sad, or uncanny on almost every page. “Having seen one such cave, having seen two, having seen three, four, fourteen, twenty-four, the visitor returns to Chandrapore uncertain whether he has had an interesting experience or a dull one or any experience at all … Nothing, nothing attaches to them, and their reputation — for they have one — does not depend upon human speech.” “After one of these bouts, she longed to go out into the bazaars and ask pardon from everyone she met, for she felt in some vague way that she was leaving the world worse than she found it.” “The revelation was over, but its effect lasted, and its effect was to make men feel that the revelation had not yet come.” Sadly the last of the really major Forster novels I hadn’t read yet, though I’ve still got Maurice. My favorite is Howards End.
7. Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel (2023) — I really loved this novel, in which a narrator (a mother, using found pandemic time) kind of live-writes a biography of Melville, so we learn all about his life, and the lives of other Melvilleians, through the lens of the character’s obsession, amassing her notes and quotes and facts. It’s listy and fragmentary — John read a page over my shoulder one day and said it looks just like Reader’s Block, which I haven’t read; I thought it looked like a poem — and the form might suggest that the authors (who are married) each wrote their own chunks or chapters, but in an interview they say they wrote “every sentence” together. It’s amazing that a book written under these conditions should be so successful. An adorable book, adorable as Melville is.
8. Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza, translated by Thomas Bunstead (2014) — A short novel in essayistic chapters (my friend A called it “vibes-based”), each a mix of personal narrative and writing about art and artists: Courbet, El Greco, Shiavoni (a number I’d never heard of; looked them up in image search, natch). I liked it, but having recently read John Berger, I can’t say I found the art writing earth-shattering. (I know this isn’t fair, I don’t want to be compared to John Berger!) I often wonder why we celebrate/tolerate this kind of book more when it’s translated? American publishing has problems.
9. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (1985) — It took me almost two months to read this, due to travel and the general distraction of my book coming out, but I’m glad I spent so long with it; I think it helped me feel the length of the novel’s journey, the long drive from Texas to Montana and back, and all the different parts of the adventure. I loved it, of course. I loved to spend a little time every day with my cowboy friends, and I loved learning about what cowboys actually do, which I had somehow never really thought about before. I loved their strong opinions about horses. My favorite parts were the episode with the sign, in Chapter 8, and the parts with Roscoe, and Chapter 94. The dialogue is very, very funny — it reminded me a lot of True Grit, at times — and just very easy to read. The prose is not especially rich, thought it’s not cheap either, but the novel achieves its richness mostly through the sense of so much time and distance crossed. I felt the book was making me wiser, like I was learning how to handle cattle and snakes and widows myself, and when [redacted] dies, I cried.
10. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (2021) — I’m not sure how I managed not to know anything about this, but I didn’t, and requested it from the library in July — turns out it’s a Christmas book. But it’s short and I had it, and in a switch from Lonesome Dove I read it in one night. It’s kind of a glorified short story, really, and seems universally praised but didn’t quite knock my socks off, sorry to say. Feels closer to A Christmas Carol than, say, Women Talking, in terms of richness and moral complexity. But, again, I read it in the wrong season! Your mileage, and so on.
11. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, translated by Ros Schwartz (1995) — Another short novel, post-apocalyptic and sci-fi-ish, about a nameless girl who grows up in a cage in an underground bunker with 39 women. They call her the child. One day there’s some kind of sudden emergency while the cage door is open and the guards disappear, so they are able to escape. Eventually, the child grows to be the last woman alive on a strange barren planet they aren’t sure is Earth. The first part, the part in the cage, which is 55 pages, is thrilling — a story of somebody learning to think, and the evocation of the power it gives her is incredible. After they get out of the bunker, it remains interesting, but somewhat less so, I felt. The question of what has happened and why is sort of an unfortunate distraction from what Harpman is able to do with the premise on a character level, and a philosophical level. I think I would have been obsessed with this if I’d read it as a teenager.
12. State of Paradise by Laura van den Berg (2024) — A funny, eerie book about writing, families, and alternate realities, which manages a lot of complexity in just over 200 pages. There are portals and pilgrimages, weird animals and weird objects — very much a Laura book, but also feels like an interesting departure. Really enjoyed spending time in this Version of Florida.
13. One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes (1947) — As the title suggests, this novel takes place in one day, on Dalloway time, a mostly uneventful day in the lives of a small family (Laura, Stephen, and their daughter Victoria) in the post-war days, as things are returning to normal and yet, will never be the same. I love this kind of novel, where the scope has to come from inside, like additional dimensions — from richness of detail, from the characters’ memories and fantasies. (As Deleuze wrote of the Baroque, “It endlessly produces folds”!) Observant, sometimes bitterly funny in the way of Muriel Spark, and beautiful.
14. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1864) — For a month or two it seemed like the universe was telling me to read some Dostoevsky, so I did. I loved this! A short novel in two parts, the first part (“Underground”) is a seething, bitter, hilarious philosophical speech, of a kind, just written notes as the narrator tells us, but as if spoken, addressed, confessed to a panel of judges. (“For what and to what end, in fact, do I want to write? If not for the public, then why not simply recall everything mentally, without transferring it to paper? Right, sir; but on paper it will somehow come out more solemnly… it will gain in style… I believe for some reason that if I write it down, I shall then be rid of it.”) The second part is called “Apropos of the Wet Snow” (I love this), and consists of some terrible, humiliating memories from the Underground Man’s debauched youth. This guy’s thing, primarily, his problem, is excess of consciousness, which is clearly a problem of modernity: He sees himself as though he is a character in literature, a character he hates, and yet he can’t change who he is or what he does. He is forced to both live it and watch it. “Any consciousness at all is a sickness.” “I’ll explain to you: the pleasure here lay precisely in the too vivid consciousness of one’s own humiliation; in feeling that one had reached the ultimate wall; that, bad as it is, it cannot be otherwise; that there is no way out for you, that you will never change into a different person; that even if you had enough time and faith left to change yourself into something different, you probably would not wish to change; and even if you did wish it, you would still not do anything, because in fact there is perhaps nothing to change into.”
15. A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr (1980) — A novella about a summer between the two world wars; a “shell-shocked” soldier as they said in those days takes a job uncovering a medieval painting on the wall of a church. While there, he makes friends in the small village, thinks about life, work, and art, and falls in love with the reverend’s young wife. This is all told from many years later, the narrator keeps reminding us; it was so long ago. “There was so much time that marvellous summer.” “Never forget this was 1920, another world.” It’s nice, at times very, very nice, but for whatever reason didn’t fully sweep me away. We need a term of those books it seems we should love but don’t quite — something like, A Seven Alas.
16. My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman (2024) — This is a classic poet’s novel, by my own definition, which is to say it’s metafiction-y/autofiction-y, essentially a book about writing a novel. The premise here is that an author by the name of Renee Gladman is interviewed by an unnamed interlocutor about a lesbian romance she began and never finished writing years before, many passages of which (maybe everything that was written?) are contained within the “interview,” rendered in dreaded italics (mercifully, the italic sections read quickly). I love the “outer” novel, as it were, the playful meditations on writing and narrative and character, which are kind of like a notebook turned into a philosophical dialogue. “I’ve never wanted to write a novel per se. I have wanted to inhabit the expanse of a novel, to durate within it.” Unfortunately, the “inner” novel is pretty banal, and I’m aware that sounds like snobbery but “Gladman” herself, the author character in the book, freely admits that the romance books she’s read hundreds of, become a “scholar” of, before attempting to write one of her own, are mostly badly written and laden with conventions she hates. I don’t think the romance in My Lesbian Novel reads exactly like a conventional trope-y romance; it has Gladmanness. But it still felt, to me, like an excuse for the more pure Gladman. My favorite part is the idea of “the third book” (the outer outer book) “that’s practically invisible.”
17. Affinity by Sarah Waters (1999) — A Tagebuchroman, told in diary entries, and set in Victorian England; a wealthy gay “spinster,” closeted (naturally) and grieving her father, starts visiting a beautiful spiritualist medium in Millbank prison and ends up embroiled in her plan to escape. Fun and interesting and well put together but felt kind of long and dragged out, for me.
18. Fresh, Green Life by Sebastian Castillo (2025) — This very funny little novel takes place on one night, on New Year’s Eve, which hardly matters since so little happens in scene and so much in the narrator’s head, in a monologue he delivers while he tries to decide what to do with his evening and then does the thing, with surprising results. The narrator, a kind of pseudo-writer anti-hero named Sebastian Castillo, has a nuanced relationship to agency; he seems both passive and floaty, the kind of guy who frequently “finds himself” somewhere, and yet governed by oddly strict systems of his own imposition — on this last night of the year, he has gone without speaking to any other human for twelve months. I’m glad I read Notes from Underground last month so I can say this is Dostoyevskian.
19. Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal, translated by Jessica Moore (2012) — Strangers on a train: great setup for a novel, based on this and one other book! Interesting POV in this very short novel that follows a French woman running away from her lover and a young Russian conscript defecting on the Trans-Siberian. It’s present tense, close third, with subtle reminders of what they each don’t know at a given moment, what no one can know (“we will never know why they remain this way, not speaking, not touching” — that we is the only reference to us in the book). Lovely sentences.
NONFICTION
1. The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen, translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman (1967–1971) — My first read of the year, and I read nothing else (fiction or poetry) while I read this. These memoirs (of poverty, loneliness, yearning) are so highly immediate, so easy to read; though full of sadness, they made me very happy. A friend told me each book is better than the last, but I think I loved most the early/middle years, before the author was famous, when all she wanted in life was to write a good poem, meet an editor before he died, and get something published. She even marries the old man who first puts her work in a magazine! (She married four times; her third husband was a doctor who kept her in Demerol and methadone.) “Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own.” “I don’t think very much of reality.”
2. About Looking by John Berger (1980) — A collection of short pieces about art, mostly paintings, some photography, plus one opening essay about zoos (“Why Look at Animals?”) and a final essay, “Field,” on the experience of looking at a literal field, a grass field, which is especially beautiful and arresting. Full of compelling biographical sketches and great critical writing, often quite direct and clear, and always (as John, who collects Berger books, says) “humane.” He covers so much ground in so little space, it doesn’t give the impression of expertise, but the impression that you can be interesting on anything if you give it enough thought and care. But he also has a knack for making, and quoting, absurdly strong yet enigmatic proclamations that are almost indefensible, but so well phrased that you are dazzled into believing. “Everywhere animals offered explanations, or more precisely, lent their name or character to a quality, which like all qualities, was, in its essence, mysterious.” (Is that true, are all qualities mysterious?? Perhaps all sentences are!) He writes of Georges Roualt: “It was a nocturnal, solitary face. One might have rashly concluded from his photograph that he was an aberrant entomologist obsessed by moths.” He quotes from Magritte, a passage he inexplicably calls “remarkable for its clarity”: “I am not a determinist, but I don’t believe in chance either. It serves as still another ‘explanation’ of the world. The problem lies precisely in not accepting any explanation of the world either through chance or determinism. I am not responsible for my belief. It is not even I who decides that I am not responsible — and so on to infinity: I am obliged not to believe. There is no point of departure.” I want this from writers, this gorgeous almost unintelligibility. Basically, when I read a book, I want to join a temporary cult. Obviously, I loved it.
3. Opacities by Sofia Samatar (2024) — One of those books I collect that are designed to feel unfinished, a writer’s notebook/“companion text” we get to read pre-posthumously, intimate and intense. It’s a meta-book, rather like Woman Pissing by Elizabeth Cooperman, about ambition, anxiety, and desire, the fantasy of publication without publicity, the impossibility of escaping the self while also being read. Why can’t we be Kafka? “One simply could not be sure what a book might do, or if it would do anything at all.” “It’s like everything has to be written not only from the beginning, but actually from the beginning of all writing, as if nothing’s ever been written before, as if I’ve never read anything.” “These are just notes for another book, the one I wanted to write.”
4. The Miro Worm and the Mysteries of Writing by Sven Birkerts (2024) — I love Birkerts’ essays, and since I first began reading him, his sensibility as a writer has felt very close to mine–the kinds of things he notices and finds worth describing, the particular way he follows his own thoughts. Reading these feels like listening to someone you like a lot talk about something you’re interested in, or will soon be interested in. My favorites were the one on author photos and the one on Bob Dylan.
5. Alone by Richard E. Byrd (1938) — My friend Janaka mentioned this book to me one frigid night in Cambridge, and I got a copy from the library the following day. It’s the memoir of a pilot and explorer who spent several months alone in a shack in inland Antarctica during winter. (At the poles, there are really only two seasons, and winter is completely dark all the time.) This is what really blew my mind: Despite how obviously dangerous and insane the idea was, within the first ten pages, he admits that he really wanted to do it, not for the ostensible scientific reasons (weather observations etc.), but so he’d finally have some time to read books and listen to records! I find this almost unbearably moving. He wanted to listen to music. But during the first few weeks, he’s much too busy doing his work and staying alive for any of that. (One item he forgets to pack is an alarm clock, and the observation schedule requires him to follow strict timetables; he writes that all his life he had always been able to wake up whenever he wanted, without an alarm, but in the boundless cold and dark of Antarctica, with no difference between night and day, he loses that ability.) Then he gets carbon monoxide poisoning because the shack isn’t well-ventilated, and he’s much too sick and weak to crank the phonograph or focus on a book. He’s also too proud and too cautious to ask for help, since he worries that a rescue mission might kill more men. Byrd kept a diary while he was down there, but the book isn’t simply the diary; it’s a combination of excerpts from that diary and later/further reflection. It reads like a mix of adventure story and philosophical nature writing. I really loved it. “Here was the spaciousness of the desert; the spaciousness, you might say, of the raw materials of creation.” “At home I usually awaken instantly, in full possession of my faculties. But that’s not the case here. It takes me some minutes to collect my wits; I seem to be groping in cold reaches of interstellar space, lost and bewildered. The room is a non-dimensional darkness, without shadow or substance; even after all these days I sometimes ask myself: Where am I? What am I doing here?” “A soundlessness fell over the Barrier. I have never known such utter quiet. Sometimes it lulled and hypnotized, like a waterfall or any other steady, familiar sound. At other times it struck into the consciousness as peremptorily as a sudden noise… it was taut and immense; and in spite of myself, I would be straining to listen — for nothing, really, nothing but the sheer excitement of silence.” Months after he left the base, he writes, he would still pace a room in the pattern of his pacing in Antarctica, “my steps unconsciously regulated to the dimensions of the shack, and my head jerking away from an imaginary lantern.” (I once read that when astronauts get back to Earth, they sometimes drop a coffee cup or a pizza box in midair, expecting it to float.) “My thirst was the tallest tree in a forest of pain.”
6. Written Lives by Javier Marias, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (1999) — A collection of brief, irreverent, idiosyncratic biographies of renowned authors, full of witty and delightful quotes and anecdotes and details. In a prologue, Marias explains that the inspiration came from an anthology he worked on whose authors’ lives were mostly mysterious, such that he had to compose their bio notes from scanty information that gave the impression of being apocryphal or made up by Marias himself. He realized he might create the same effect for much more well-known writers (Nabokov, Rilke, Faulkner, James, etc.) — he could treat them, he writes, “as if they were fictional characters, which may well be how all writers, whether famous or obscure, would secretly like to be treated.” The result is extremely amusing. While not disrespectful or unaffectionate, Marias has a habit of highlighting these writers’ little vanities and other personal flaws, along with their proclivities and passions, which makes them feel very much like real people. “Arthur Conan Doyle was convinced of his own importance, which is an agreeable way to go through life for those who manage to believe such a thing.” “Wilde’s witticisms are legion, and most found too warm a reception in quotation heaven to repeat them here.” He attributes to at least five or six of these figures a loathing of Dostoyevsky, which made me laugh every time and makes me confident that Marias himself hated Dostoyevsky. An instant fave.
7. The Years by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer (2008) — The particular formal project of this memoir is fairly compelling in itself, simply because it’s so strange: Ernaux set out to write about her life in the “je collectif,” or collective I, “an existence that is singular but also merged with the movements of a generation.” It is almost entirely composed of broad generalizations about what life was like for people about her age living through the second half of the twentieth century (marriage, kids, divorce, the sexual revolution, the AIDS crisis, fall of the Berlin wall, etc.), not really narrative at all but habitual and impressionistic. This amounts to an interrogation of “History” versus experience, which, again, sounds interesting and often is, but I can’t say I was fully convinced that the project is worthwhile and effective. I often wished it was more personal. (There are passages where she explains her own book and comes close to reviewing it: “All that the world has impressed upon her and her contemporaries she will use to reconstitute a common time … By retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History.”) I strongly suspect it works better in French and, especially, if you are French, because the references are frequent and detailed and were mostly obscure, to me.
8. Anonymous Objects: Inscrutable Photographs and the Unknown by Kim Beil (2023) — What a beautifully designed little book this is, an essay in a pocket-sized paperback, about the mysteries inherent in old photos, and how they show us, like ruins, our future: we too, and our representations, will fall into the fog. “The things in photographs were real. But what were they?”
9. In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcolm (1984) — This is some vintage niche gossip right here, a dissection of conflicts between three Freud scholars, one established, old-guard analyst (Kurt Eissler, the founder of the titular archives) and two younger outsiders, Jeff Masson and Peter Swales, who both pursue Eissler’s mentorship/employment and later betray him. The crux of the conflict has to do with the “seduction theory,” an uncomfortable name for Freud’s early idea that “hysteria”/neurosis often resulted from incest and sexual abuse in early childhood. He later abandoned that idea and came to believe (or pretend to believe, in Masson’s reading) that his patients’ memories or preoccupations with these early experiences were actually fantasies in disguise. Masson felt his abandonment of the theory was intellectually dishonest and a moral failing, and that in exposing this fault he would topple the field of psychoanalysis. (As Masson puts it to Malcolm, “There’s an enormous difference between whether you actually were in Auschwitz and whether you dreamed you were in Auschwitz.”) Unsurprisingly, this view didn’t sit too well with the board of the Freud Archives. Malcolm must have had some interest in that material, but her primary interest, it seems, is the conflict itself: the battle of egos, the patterns of sabotage and self-sabotage, deception and self-deception, behind these men’s entanglement. I read most of it on planes to and from Chicago and found it very stimulating.
10. Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir by Anatole Broyard (1993) — This short, episodic memoir of youth in the late 1940s, published unfinished after Broyard’s death, is very lively and very funny. I love the style of his prose, the descriptions and similes, his tendency toward the “or,” as in, “Her waist was so small, it cut her in two, like a split personality, or two schools of thought” — he loves describing and evoking and comparing so much, he can’t bear to choose between comparisons. He describes telling an analyst that he “wants to be transfigured” out of some vague desire to impress, and not to be boring: “I don’t know whether he was surprised by this, but I was … When I came out with the word, I was like someone who sneezes into a handkerchief and finds it full of blood.” He describes a particularly scintillating lecture class he takes at the New School: “They didn’t drop out because he was disappointing — in fact, it might have been better if he had disappointed us now and then. What drove even his admirers away was a certain remorselessness in his brilliance. It made some of us anxious to think that everything meant something: there was no escape. It was like a fate.” He writes, of a close friend who had been diagnosed with leukemia: “When I called his mother, she said, He’s dead. That’s the word she used. She pronounced both d’s.” Speaking of the towering specter of sex at the time, he writes: “Sex seemed so much more extreme before it was explained to us — we reached back into our imaginations and brought out the unheard-of.” “When a girl took off her underpants in 1947, she was more naked than any woman before her had ever been. It was as if time or history itself had been evolving toward her nakedness.” “I loved the awkwardness of these girls … The awkwardness was, for me, a kind of sublime … I remember a girl whose awkwardness took the form of stepping in dog shit in the street when we were on the way to my apartment. It happened three or four times and I asked her, Don’t you see where you’re going? But that was precisely what she didn’t want to do. Stepping in dog shit was like retreating all the way back to the pregenital. It was a proof of her inadvertence, her sublimity.” ❤
11. Men of Action by Howard Akler (2015) — This book-length essay begins with the author shaving his father, who is comatose after the removal of a brain tumor. What follows is a rangy meditation, in 87 fragments, mini-essays born of long hours in hospital rooms, on consciousness, personality, writing. What is thinking? Who are we? Very interesting. I loved learning this: “Up until the 1960s, movie houses ran films continuously. Newspapers did not list show times, so people simply showed up at any point during the screening, took their seats and, in the dark, did enough mental editing to piece together a plot. And they remained seated, through closing credits, newsreel and cartoons, till the movie began again and they could watch up to the scene at which they arrived. Then they got up to leave. Hence the old saying, no longer much in use: This is where I came in.”
12. It All Felt Impossible: 42 Years in 42 Essays by Tom McAllister (2025) — People used to say, or maybe still do, that just before you die, your whole life flashes before your eyes. Leaving aside that if that were true, we the living wouldn’t know it, It All Felt Impossible is a life flashing by in the form of a book, each short essay zeroed in on a day or a moment or a temporary pattern, some thing we remember for apparently no reason or because it changed our lives ever after. Very funny and very honest, and so full of heart-breaking love (for his wife and his family and dogs, especially) and the palpable desire to be a better person, to be worthy of his loves.
13. The Unsignificant by Srikanth Reddy (2024) — Really enjoyed these three lecture-essays on poetry, art, wonder, foreground and background, likeness, and possibility: “things that are larger inside than outside.” Full of close attention and energy.
14. A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar (2019) — This short book is sort of a memoir, sort of an essay on spending a stretch of your life’s limited time and attention in a single place, looking at a limited selection of art — in this case, some paintings of the Sienese School, which talk to each other and to us across the centuries. “This exchange of ideas between the artists who walked through Duccio’s door is nearly audible. To look closely at their work is to eavesdrop on one of the most captivating conversations in the history of art, one concerned with what a painting might be, what it might be for, and what it could do and accomplish within the intimate drama of a private engagement with a stranger.” Matar writes, of Caravaggio: “We are looking at David look at Goliath — this is clear — but what remains unknown and unknowable is what Goliath is looking at. Goliath is now outside the range of our experience.” And of Siena’s walled design: “I suddenly felt that I understood, and could see from Siena’s point of view, that infinity is a claustrophobic prospect, that it is perfectly appropriate, given the chaotic nature of life, to cordon off an area in which to interpret ourselves…” And of a sprawling graveyard: “The deceased outnumber the living. The present is the golden rim of a black cloth.” Lovely and thoughtful, and very kind in spirit.
15. The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier, translated by Lorin Stein (2004) — Described as “an account,” this really feels like a story, as you might hear at a dinner party, almost a theatrical monologue, about a time when the author was going through some shit, trying to get over a woman who had left him abruptly and without any word for five years. Suddenly she calls him and invites him to Sophie Calle’s birthday party (“she was a ‘contemporary artist’ [she said this in quotes]”), where there is always in attendance one “mystery guest.” Exaggerated, cute and French. The part about wearing turtlenecks cracked me up. (Calle and Bouillier met again years later and had an affair; when he broke up with her via email, she turned it into a conceptual piece for the Venice Biennale!)
16. The Wilderness by Aysegul Savas (2024) — An essay on the forty days after childbirth, that wildness, that crazed and unspeakable, nearly unknowable and near-animal state, the sense of “being multiple.” “I can’t tell whether I’m imagining the sparkle of sadism from some mothers … They want more details, more signs of desperation. They say this is just the way it was for them. When I ask at what point it gets better, some of them respond cynically, even cruelly, that it doesn’t.” “The experience resists narrative. Nothing rings true.” I like that it’s structured as forty sections, one for each day, though the content isn’t aligned to individual days, and she clearly didn’t write this while she was actually going through it, exhausted and suffering. (I’ve read of a few of these little “Undelivered Lectures” titles from Transit Books and I’ve liked every one of them.)
POETRY
1. In Springtime by Sarah Blake (2023) — This is one long narrative nature poem, very novel-like, a kind of eerie pastoral, that feels on first read appealingly unplanned, like it’s inventing itself as it goes along, as dreams do. (“That’s the most you want to think about it, in case thinking about it makes it happen.”) But this seems to be a magical illusion; every time I flipped backwards, all the parts seemed perfectly connected. The main character, if we can call her that, is trapped or lost alone in the woods, with a mouse, a dead bird (she’s haunted or befriended by its spirit), and a pregnant horse. There are signs of a bear and coyotes. But the voice is an estranging second person, which makes it read a little like one of those text-based adventure games from the 80s: “Morning. Finally. You shake out your arms and legs.” “You empty your pockets and line up your belongings in front of you in the dim light.” Do you mean me? Are you my god? Is this a dream? The fact that this character dreams every night, so we know what dreams are like, suggests not. And if it’s a game, we make some wrong moves. “The horse surprised herself. But she also thinks, Good riddance. She understands riddance.” It reminded me of The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer. I really loved it.
2. Autoblivion by Trey Moody (2023) — Some of these poems take the form of little fables, others are something like a snapshot of nothing in particular, a quiet and seemingly insignificant moment that nonetheless captures a bit of the meaning of life and death. Life happens too while you’re washing the dishes. “But here, in the car, there is music with no // words. There is desire without resolution. On both sides, / everything is green, everything is loud. I hear it all, clearly.” (I like that the radio exists in the world of these poems, as weather, as background harbinger of change.) “I can give you this. I can give you / that. I cannot take anything away.” Lovely.
3. Silver by Rowan Ricardo Phillips (2024) — Poems that feel poised right between the contemporary and the classical, making frequent use of a little reversal device that I thought was chiasmus but have just learned is actually antimetabole, as in: “I do dark things lightly / And light things darkly.” Very nice.
4. Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space by Catherine Barnett (2024) — I love Catherine Barnett’s poems. These are about all the same things most poems are about (life/death/grief/time/art), they’re just really good and full of human warmth, somehow nourishing. Hard to quote and give a sense of them, just from a line or two, because the best effects come from the flow of the thoughts, the small leaps that add up to make the poem feel expansive.
5. To 2040 by Jorie Graham (2023) — A book full of grief, self grief and world grief. “I loved // so many / things — sitting by the window on / the train, thinking of death as if it were / a sweetness.” There’s a move in here where words are sometimes condensed in a text-y way, u for you and yr for your, but not always, suggesting there’s no time now for formalities or consistency. It gives them the just-written feeling of drafts in a Notes app, or hand prints on cave walls. There’s also a kind of bitter humor I don’t usually associate with Graham: “Let me tell you, / there is a guard. Yes he’s a servant too // but he’s yr guard. / Don’t let down yr guard. / Perform yr aliveness every / instant for him, & cheerfully // keeping him fascinated / so he doesn’t accidentally / fall asleep on yr / watch.” There’s also a sense of regret and futility, mixed with resignation, as if to ask, was there after all any use to all this? And yet, a resistance to ceasing: “yr set of wrong answers, yr insufficient offerings” … “you are in history dear child // you are only in history” … “the blossoming exit-wound keeps hissing sing.” Very sad.
6. Plat by Lindsey Webb (2024) — Very interesting, spatial poetry that uses a conception of a garden or a house as a setting for thinking. There’s a style of abstraction that reminds me of early Jorie Graham (I’ve been reading lots of Graham though; she’s been on my mind). “They tell me a tree has nothing to have.” “I imagine the world exactly as it is, then heaven as a grid overlaying it.” “I consider escaping through the second life of description.” “We can only forgive each other through a vestibule.”
7. Scattered Snows, to the North by Carl Phillips (2024) — I found this book very beautiful. It’s slim but dense, just over thirty poems, with precise and sometimes complicated syntax. There’s a deep strain of something like regret or guilt (“There are plenty who’d hardly / recognize me now, I used to be / that cruel”) but the poems keep insisting it’s not quite that (“not / regret, which I still can’t believe in”). There’s a constant slippage between, I guess you could say, the tenor and the vehicle of the metaphors, such that the objects of comparison feel as real as the real they represent, or it all feels vaguely unreal, mythical. “The way the present cuts into history, / or how the future can look at first / like the past sweeping through, there / are blizzards, and there are blizzards.” “The trees grew quiet, / like thinking.” A book most about, I think, belief, which is always a kind of faith.
8. The Cloud Path by Melissa Kwasny (2024) — A good collection of grief-and-nature poems with many references to books and reading, and other poets/writers, a move I (unsurprisingly!) really enjoy, e.g.: “Emerson spoke / of a bird-while, you tell me, the measure of a bird’s pause, / perched just long enough to allow itself to be seen.” “‘Hold yourself straight, / little goat,’ said her dying mother to Virginia Woolf.”
9. The Selected Shepherd by Reginald Shepherd (2024) — I love Shepherd’s poems, and reading across his career I like seeing how he maintained a certain disappointment or bitterness toward life, at least in the poems. I love how weather and landscape work in them, too. We almost always see the sky, and what’s happening in the sky is an inextricable part of the poem’s mood and the way it moves.
10. A Night in the Country by Laura Newbern (2024) — A relatively short book of poems that are extraordinarily subtle, sometimes austere — I’m not surprised Louise Gluck, who wrote the foreword, liked them. Elegance can seem a bit cold, almost mean. Recommended, nonetheless. I appreciate the poems’ approach, and their occasions — they might comment on a painting, a novel, a letter, or a pointed or perplexing question that the poem both tries to answer and takes slow revenge on. “And dark clouds / raced down the river — not the word dark, nor / the word clouds, but the fact of the secret boat now / in the open.” “I know this, but knowing means nearly nothing.”
11. Thingking by Kate Colby (2024) — Great little chapbook of poems where language and ideas fold in on themselves, full of tricky, ticklish pleasures. “My body / bag of stars will stay // the same in my small / time — that I could see // them all, in theory, / means I don’t need // to see any.” “Sometimes there’s a secret room — / my daughter is one, I think. // She is infinitely regressive. / Every night she says I love // you even more until / I stop saying it back.” “‘Thus’ means this much, in this / way and consequently all at once, // as you hope to find that guy / who passed you on the right // in flames around the bend. / You don’t really want that — // you do / do you?” “‘Tell’ means // both discern and relate, / as though to narrate were // to determine. I am fine / with not knowing any- // thing as long as / I can describe it.”
12. Moving the Bones by Rick Barot (2024) — Just lovely, thoughtful, attentive. I’m drawn especially to the ekphrastic poems here, “My Rembrandt” and a two-part poem called “Crosshatch.” “The ocean is so large it doesn’t have to know what it is.” “I read four books in a row that quoted // Sontag.” (That move I love again, of mentioning other books!) “Every image in a piece of information. When he spent a year painting / clouds, Constable looked up at the weather and his own moving mind. // Each day was an experience of something not sublime, exactly, but entire. / This is the sky and its clouds. I stand under then. This is its chronicle.”
13. Good Monster by Diannely Antigua (2024) — Really good and readable, open, strikes me as honest by which I guess I mean it feels authentically intimate. “All flowers want to be looked at.” “In conversation, I drop a little French / like a baby out the window.”
14. An Authentic Life by Jennifer Chang (2024) — A lot of the poetry I’ve liked in the past few years has either been ekphrastic or explicitly engaged with other literature, philosophy or mythology, plays or novels, but in a sort of light-handed way that doesn’t feel academic or stuffy at all. For example, “On the Soul,” in this collection, with appearances by Socrates, Shakespeare, and Poe. In one poem, Chang writes, “Writing // has no voice / because voice is a metaphor, / I know, having read How // Poems Get Made” (a James Longenbach book). She often quotes other people, friends, old teachers. I like this too, this opening up to multiple sources of language. The title poem is great, a horse poem; I love horse poems! “I loved horses / only in theory, / by watching … I had not been taught to ask questions … I had not been taught to want.”
15. All About You by Chris Nealon (2024) — Nealon is a great example of one of my favorite styles of poetry, quite talky and playful and thinky, but still formal in the sense that it feels like poetry, it’s elevated, written in lines. Also made me think about poetry as practice and as fundamental identity: it’s how poets live. “Alive as much in temperature as time.” “Mortality is rich material.”
16. Wrong Norma by Anne Carson (2024) — I haven’t really kept up with Anne Carson’s new work in recent years. It’s almost like I thought I’d moved past her, or something. More the fool was I! This was just terrific, a bunch of weird and startling, often hilarious pieces that are sometimes kind of poem-like, but often feel more like essays or fictions, which is just the thing that blew my mind open when I first read Carson in college, a bafflement re: genre and the idea that the label of “poetry” gets you out of something, of having to say if it’s “true” or “not true.” You’re not allowed to ask!
17. Saturday by Margaret Ross (2024) — Striking poems about desire, cruelty and justification, and learning/change (if possible?). The occasions are not, I suppose, all that unusual but Ross’s approach to her subjects does feel unusual. Instead of taking place in the frame of a particular hour or day they sort of skitter across a season or one of life’s eras (what a summer was like, a job was like), beginning and ending almost randomly. Their restraint feels almost eerie. “Obviously this was desire / but I didn’t know that then.” “Exquisite corpse evolved from an earlier British / parlor game called consequences. / No one has those anymore // I would have said of parlors.” “Touching certain strangers / I could feel the future just / below the surface of their skin, things / can happen, you could sense time / quicken beneath your hand.” “… do I / hurt people because of what / they made me feel or do I / have feelings I have always had / and try to make the world / look like it gave them to me?”
18. The Opening Ritual by G.C. Waldrep (2024) — These poems are incredibly intense, incredibly dense with meaning and metaphor and image, just flooding the system with lyricism — sometimes it looks like madness. I had to read the book slowly because it tired me out. But I loved it. They’re often connected to a physical place, a church or monument or somewhere holy in nature, and seem wrested from the total singularity of any stretch of time: you were there, only you, and never will live through that time again. “We raise the future / as if from a deep well, hand over hand. / The future is dark & wet like well water & / sings in me, a weakness.” Physical pain and suffering are often part of the material: “Ruins multiply. But the void, the vacancy is not one of them, it is present, always neither more nor less than fully present, it chambers as with a thought. / Thought, take me back to the brink of that ancient well, where I knelt. / Healing, what does this word even mean?” This sounds so serious, but there’s wit here too, a kind of raised eyebrow: life is absurd. Or poetry is, absurd, in response. “It is easy to imagine hunters here, so why not do it: / hunters.” “You may think of the heaven of images, if there is one — / you may think there is one.” “The deer do not know / the earth is round. / Somehow / they bear their young / anyway, in Vermeer’s / blond glow.” “Are you / not astonished, the sunrise / demands, swigging / its chalky nectar. / I am a war / is what I tell it, / then. It nods, it / has read the book, / it can see / time’s other motion.” “I slept inside / night’s / insomniac eye.”
19. Diary by Marisa Crawford (2023) — This is so fun and funny! It really reminds me of my mid-to-late twenties and the poetry friends I had then, and how irreverent we were and how immediate everything felt. I zoomed through it and it really cheered me up. “I found a dead cockroach / in the sink this morning. Its antenna didn’t register me. / I’m a Gemini, I’m a goddess, I’m a medium. / Alligator shirt I bought you at the store under the train tracks. / Jay, I miss you. I miss the ‘idea’ of you. I miss the feeling / of it slamming around in my head. I’m a loose / woman, you guys.” “The TA I had in college / who asked what poetry I liked to read. / I said Frank O’Hara, unconfidently. / And for some reason he laughed at me.” ❤
20. True Mistakes by Lena Moses-Schmitt (2025) — These poems were well-suited to near-solstice mornings, the imminence of year’s end. They are animated by a restless, endless question that is never exactly articulated (outside of the manifold asking across many poems) but the mood is calm, peaceful. “The cold is dazzling. / So dazzling you forget to console yourself / in the second person.”
21. Invisible Bride by Tony Tost (2004) — This came out twenty years ago! It’s prose poetry with a sort of inscrutable organization — hard to tell which parts are part of other parts, in a way that seems intentional. I’m meant to be confused. Surreal, image-forward, and resistant to resolution. “My beard is a bridge between my past and my face.” “The moon is the face of madness (it has no beard).” “I’ve never seen anyone sleepwalk before, not even in a movie.”
FAVORITES!
My most beloved reads of the year:
Fave fiction: Dayswork and Lonesome Dove
Fave nonfic: Hard to choose, but About Looking and Written Lives
Fave poetry: In Springtime and Wrong Norma
Happy new year, friends! Tell me what you loved this year!
