What I Read in 2024

A handful of discoveries made for great reading this past year

Jan 02, 2025

I TYPICALLY KEEP an annotated list of the books I read. In recent years, I have averaged somewhere between 40 and 50 books a year. Apparently, this year I was woefully sloppy in keeping track of what I read, as my list only contains 15 books. I find it hard to imagine that I only read 15 books in 2024, as I consistently devour books at a pretty steady pace. Something happened. I know not what. Either my list is wrong, or I have lost a lot of gray matter.

Resolution for the New Year: Do a better job keeping track of what I read and take better notes about the books.

I read all over the map: a combination of new (and old) books by favorite writers, including novels, works of nonfiction, and memoirs. I read at least four literary journals (New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Bookforum) as well as reviews in the major magazines, newspapers, and in other Substack newsletters, and I often choose books to read based on those reviews. (LitHub is also a great resource for finding book reviews.) I also select books based on personal recommendations from those whose judgment I trust – which is a very small, exclusive club.

I DISCOVERED A GREAT WRITER previously unknown to me this past year – the British author Jeremy Cooper. His novel Brian blew me away. The title character is a Bartleby-like character with a bit of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, whose only non-work activity is going to the movies at the British Film Institute, where he stumbles upon a coterie of like-minded cinema obsessives. His efforts to be included in this group of regular filmgoers present a huge challenge for this extreme introvert. But in the process of telling Brian’s story, the reader gets a crash course in film criticism, as much of the book is taken up with Brian’s evaluations of what he sees on the screen. I was already an avid film buff before reading the book, but by the end I decided to up my game, taking memberships in several nonprofit movie theaters in the region and subscribing to film magazines both in print and online. I love it when a book winds up inspiring me so much that it carries forward into my “real life.” Of course that’s a rare happening, but blissful and transcendent when it does happen.

After Brian, I picked up another Cooper novel called Ash Before Oak. Ostensibly a nature journal, the story traces the slow mental breakdown of the narrator – another quiet, introverted character – and his subsequent recovery. Cooper’s writing is never obscure or purposefully difficult, but it is utterly profound, even at its most simple. It was wonderful at my age (64 going on 65) not only to discover a new (to me) author, but to find a new favorite author.

Speaking of late-in-life favorite authors, back in 2023 I read James McBride’s widely and deservedly acclaimed novel The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, which I thought was terrific. I had already read McBride’s meditation on James Brown, Kill ’Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul, but McBride’s novel really grabbed me and left me wanting more, which I found this past year in his novel Deacon King Kong – a gripping tale of New York City circa 1969 – and his memoir, The Color of Water, which although it was written first, served as great background to The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. I recommend reading the novel before the memoir.

I ALSO DISCOVERED French author Emmanuel Carrère this past year through his creative memoir Yoga, published in 2020. The book starts off as an inviting essay about yoga and meditation retreats before cataloging the author’s mental health struggles – including a period of hospitalization – in the wake of the attack on the offices of the French satirical journal Charlie Hebdo. Carrère’s most recent book, V13: Chronicle of a Trial, about the trial of the terrorists responsible for a series of attacks in Paris in 2015, most infamously at the Bataclan concert hall. That’s one I look forward to reading this year.

Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard has long been one of my favorite authors – I will read anything by him, whether he is writing fiction, art history, or about football (that’s soccer to you). I finally had the chance to read The Morning After, published in 2020, the first of a new trilogy of novels. That dreaded term “autofiction” got plastered to Knausgaard in the wake of My Struggle, his sextet of novels that appeared to be closely linked to the author’s real life. That definition, often used as a critique of My Struggle, totally overlooked the immense craft it took to make the banalities of everyday life read like a plot-driven thriller, to say nothing of ignoring how Knausgaard found a way to write long digressions about art, culture, and philosophy as part of his stories. In any case, no one (at least no one who is fair) can accuse Knausgaard of writing autofiction in The Morning After (and, presumably, in the books that follow in that series). Instead, while writing with the same attention to detail, Knausgaard conjures up a subtle psychological thriller told from various points of view, all hinting at something ominous taking place without identifying exactly what it is (the book’s title is a hint) in the perfect metaphor for contemporary existence.

BELOW IS THE INCOMPLETE “COMPLETE” LIST OF THE BOOKS my journal tells me I read in 2024. Just because a book appears in the list does not mean I liked it; truth is I was mostly disappointed by what I read last year. But given the wonderful discoveries I delineated above, it was all worth it, and I am ready to double down on my commitment to book-reading in the coming year (and, if I am able to, for the rest of my life).