A Year in Reading

(Or not reading, as the case may be)

It’s not that I’m in a reading rut but I spent 2024 starting a lot of books I have not yet finished. I will finish them because I am an avowed reading completist but I do not know when. It’s frustrating that I’m struggling to find a book that I want to finish. Is it me? Is it the books? Both? I don’t know.

If there was a recurring theme in the books I did finish last year, it was this sense of cringe, of the profound discomfort of watching people make absolutely terrible decisions over and over again.

My favorite book of the year

The Bang Bang Sisters by Rio Youers

I read The Bang Bang Sisters in one or two sittings. I was reading it while walking around the house because I didn’t want to leave the story. Bang Bang Sisters has rock and roll and action and adventure and righteous vengeance and plot twists and nefarious villains and elements of Southern gothic. I absolutely insist that you run to your favorite bookstore and buy this book at once. We can even do an impromptu book club if you want.

My other favorite book of the year that actually comes out this year

The Original Daughter by Jemima Wei

With elegantly composed, dense prose, Wei tells the story of two sisters—one who wears her ambition nakedly and loses all sense of herself when her life doesn't turn out the way she believes it should and the other who quietly works just as hard, to vastly different ends. This is a story about how resentment can twist a woman into something unrecognizable, and how it can leave her with nothing even though she desperately wants everything. I cannot tell you how infuriating I found Genevieve, the novel's protagonist. She makes every wrong choice possible, and cannot seem to see beyond herself at any time. And still, Wei crafts this character so well that you're able to harbor some empathy for her despite the unavoidable reality that she is her own worst enemy. This novel is a bittersweet and painful reminder of how unrealized ambition can turn everything someone holds dear to rot.

A sophomore novel that was truly excellent and elegantly polyphonic and even better than the debut*

Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange

A sweeping novel *

Real Americans by Rachel Khong

A vigorously tactile horror story as parable from a consistently excellent writer*

Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin

Other Audacious Book Club Selections, because TASTE!

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
With My Back to the World by Victoria Chang
The Women’s Hotel by Danny Lavery
We’re Alone by Edwidge Danticat
Lessons for Survival by Emily Raboteau
Bite by Bite by Aimee Nezukhumatathil
The Rich People Have Gone Away by Regina Porter
The Sons of El Rey by Alex Espinoza
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The book that had me cringing so much that my shoulders ached and then I had to start reading through my fingers because I was just so stressed out about the bad decisions the protagonist was making, like GIRL WHAT IS YOU DOING???? 10/10 no notes

Entitlement by Rumaan Alam

Speaking of cringe (in a very good way)….

Rejection: Fiction by Tony Tulathimutte

A gripping, heart-wrenching, beautiful classic novel for which I wrote an introduction for a new box set

Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin

A memoir I found to be terribly endearing because of the plaintive self-deprecation and self-loathing of the author and also there are interesting interpretations of biblical stories as a structural device

Feh: A Memoir by Shalom Auslander

A book with a strange conceit that is incredibly compelling and offers interesting insights into how we chronicle our lives to ourselves

Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti

A novel full of grim interiority from the perspective of a woman who is not at all loved well by the man she loves

Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan

A novel I loved that I hope you guys read as SOON as it is out in April so you can explain it to me; also it is a real treat if you love New York or the idea of acting on Broadway

Audition by Katie Kitamura

A quintessential Los Angeles novel about striving and being so close to what you want but not close enough

Colored Television by Danzy Senna

A novel where this one time, a hot air balloon falls into a backyard pool and hijinks ensue involving a billionaire and his wife and their assistant and his high school ex-girlfriend

Hot Air by Marcy Dermansky

A divorce and new motherhood memoir full of truly gorgeous sentences and frank revelations

Splinters by Leslie Jamison

A memoir about a pretty horrific childhood and homeschooling and the secrets families keep when under the boot of an abusive patriarch and also, I was quite curious about what went unsaid in the story

Educated by Tara Westover

A memoir from a punk rockstar that offered interesting insights on what it’s like to be a woman in the music industry

Rebel Girl by Kathleen Hanna

A book from a brother and sister about fatness and thinness and weight loss and learning to develop a better relationship with our physical and emotional selves

Swim Club: Stories from Being Fat in a World of Thin People by Ian Karmel and Alisa Karmel

An odd, claustrophobic, unputdownable little novel that is a portrait of a marriage as seen through family vacations in rental houses; there are layers here is what I’m saying

Rental House by Weike Wang

A book I read for research for a project that had such a great title and chronicled a different aspect of the civil rights movement, one where Black people chose to bear arms in defense of themselves and their communities

Negroes with Guns by Robert Franklin Williams

A charming cookbook with not just recipes but charts to help you better understand flavor and ingredient combinations so you can get creative in the kitchen (if you want)

What Goes with What by Julia Turshen

Forthcoming poetry I blurbed and I only blurb books I a. read and b. love and admire

Late to the Search Party by Steven Espada Dawson
In the Bone-Cracking Cold by M. Bartley Seigel

A sweet and soulful pictorial book about a familiar (for many of us) Black cultural tradition

Wash Day by Tomesha Faxio

A well-curated anthology that offers real optimism and interesting ideas about the climate crisis and what we can do about it

What If We Get it Right: Visions of Climate Futures edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

A haunting memoir about surviving a brutal and very public assault

Knife: Meditations on an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie

Books with a * were also Audacious Book Club selections.