2024 in Reading
My twelve favorite books of the year: Two fiction, a lot of nonfiction, memoirs, memoirs in essays, ekphrastic poetry, and more...plus some art, of course!
2024 is ending, and I read fewer books than last year, but I was brought closer to something, and a glimmer of that something is in each of my favorite books of 2024! This is long, but I hope you enjoy and read until the end—you will find my twelve favorite books, two fiction, a lot of nonfiction, memoirs, memoirs in essays, ekphrastic poetry, and more. I have written a short blurb about each with mostly my personal thoughts and connection to each and a quote I found that distills each book and artwork or piece of art referenced in the text.
I began 2024 by completing Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin—It's all about feminist artists who were pushing the boundaries on what art can be and who can make it. All are unique in their mediums, approaches, and backgrounds, but all were trying to take as much as possible to give themselves entirely to an artistic life. Elkins's book, specifically her writing on the body and the body as it embodies art, captured something that had been drifting around my psyche for a while. It dangled in front of me, and I gently tugged until I pulled and brought with it Eva Hesse, the heart of why I started Picking Up The Thread in January. Elkin tells the reader that this book's genesis was through the work of Eva Hesse, specifically the piece Right After. This book will go on my all-time favorites shelf to be referenced and paged through when I need inspiration or an idea to get my brain moving.
I’ve traced something like a narrative through kinks and contortions, possibly losing track of it altogether. Suspending it from a few rough-hewn hooks, and coming out through what is only one of many possible exits. If the line frays a bit here and there…so much the better.
Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti is a non-linear personal storytelling experiment, but is a diary or journal really linear? Is alphabetizing ten years' worth of diaries different from a regular daily diary? In the hands of another writer, this could have been merely an interesting experiment. Random at best. But in the hands of Heti, this ten-year span illuminates common themes of human existence and experience, love, sex, disappointments, and wondering where we went wrong. Questioning if the wrong turn was in our past. Questioning if we had gone in another direction if life now would be simpler, more straightforward, a bit easier.
Fiction and nonfiction together, because the imagination is more amazing than anything in life, and life is more amazing than anything you can make up.
Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story by Leslie Jamison was everything I love about memoirs, creative and experimental in form and style with long-form vignettes that mirrored moments of new Motherhood and divorce. Her mind wrote in what seemed like bursts—mundane tasks led her to question life and the self, which she tries to work through in the style presented. Jamison shows us things breaking and coming back together in new and unexpected ways through the splintering of ideas, creativity, and the self.
All my adult life I’d considered time a resource that could be converted into other things—more than anything else, into art. Time was the instrument of my endless ambition, which was itself a frantic thing, an attempt to grasp the materials of the world and fashion from them a justification for my own existence. Being alive involved constantly justifying why I deserve to be alive, as if I were building a bridge one rung at a time across a vast chasm.
I, of course, loved the sections where Jamison takes her newborn baby to the Brooklyn Museum and describes the time as a “way to saturate our endless hours with beauty.” While looking at Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, Jamison says…
I wanted my daughter to wake up, so she could see this art; and I wanted her to stay asleep, so I could see it—or rather, so I could look at it without the interruption of her needs.
Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy by Larissa Pham perfectly captures the experience of youth. Pham is clearly writing as a woman in her late 20s and early 30s. However, she has perfectly rendered a still image of herself as a girl in her late teens and early 20s exploring herself and the possibilities for her college life, of trying to discover who you are as a person of color and as a sexual being. It’s like listening to a playlist of songs from the memory of a moment you thought would never end but also knew couldn’t last. Of developing your tastes via Tumblr and other DIY artistic expressions. Of pinning artwork on your dorm room wall. This collection is perfect for anyone who wants to be reminded of their past selves to know they are still that person, maybe just a bit different, with hindsight.
If I can be moved and understood, then maybe I can make something myself that conveys an understanding. For that’s something I’ve always worried about: that I keep making things that don’t mean what I want them to mean.
The photography and youth of Francesca Woodman are mentioned in the essay Body of Work. In it, Pham addresses the fact that Woodman died young; she remains a tragic figure, almost saintly in her youthful suffering and potential, making her self-portraits even more admirable, especially to young women searching for an understanding.
The Light Room: On Art and Care by Kate Zambreno. I debated if this was a top read of the year, and after months of constantly picking it back up and rereading passages, I realized it might be the best memoir I read all year. It also influenced and helped me write my essay In Case of Emergency. The Light Room focused heavily on Motherhood during the lockdown and focused itself in very few places, mainly that of the small family home, the main bedroom, the bathtub, and the living/work room. When Zambreno's family leaves the house during lockdown, they go to the park. They record the changing seasons through images taken with a phone and by the detritus her two children collect over time, leaves, rocks, etc. These treasures are placed in a space in the home that changes with each season, like an altar. While mothering and teaching during this unknown time, Zambrano feels depleted of her personhood— she is reading in the few moments she can capture for herself, exhausted at night in bed by the slight glow of her phone screen. Light is her beacon back to who she is.
In the morning, the weak winter light filters through the diaphanous front curtains. Often I sit on the couch in the front room to be nearer to this morning light, near also where the children like to play, where we cluster together our chaos.
The lives of the family in the living room, from the outside looking in, brings to mind, looking through a lightbox or shadow box, pieces making up the inside of a lived life or lives while living. Joseph Cornell is an artist often discussed in this memoir, collecting and displaying objects in a “Cornell Box.”
For fun, two other artists mentioned in the memoir are Howardena Pindell and Yuji Agematsu.
All Fours by Miranda July. Whatever I say about this novel has likely been said. Worth the hype! In my journal, I wrote…goodbye to the fumbling 20s millennial DWM (Depressed Woman Moving) and hello to the grounding complexities of your 30s, 40s, and beyond. July has written a character who understands herself and who she wants to be but wants to be those things on her own terms. She is in a place where judgments of her age and family life dictate much of how she moves in the world. She feels constantly perceived by her family and craves creating a literal space for herself only to her taste. July simultaneously had me eager for my 40s, edging closer to freedom while also fearfully anticipating perimenopause, oh, the unending horrors.
As a girl I fantasized about the perfect doll house now I fantasize about the moment when I would finally reveal what I’d been making in the garage and be suddenly seen, undertstood, and adored.
Before going back in I paused outside our house, looking at the lit windows.
The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing. My dear Olivia Laing is a writer who speaks directly to my heart and what I hope to aspire to in my writing. The genesis of this book was the excavation and revitalization of Laing’s personal garden during the early months of the pandemic, bringing it back to its original state after years of neglect. Through this process, Laing reflects on the biblical garden of Eden, created utopias, and a green space’s impact on accessibility during a global lockdown, inevitably showing its many inequalities. An overarching question Laing asks is who has access to green spaces, and what does this access afford an individual’s well-being and a community? As usual, Laing gathers multiple threads and weaves them together seamlessly.
It was a garden out of time, a garden against time, continually occupying the present tense, insinuating itself into the future by way of each visitor.
I Cannot Control Everything Forever: A Memoir of Motherhood Science and Art by Emily C. Bloom is a perfect research memoir. It rests at the intersection of science, history, disability activism, care work through Motherhood, mythology, the body, art, and literature. Bloom deftly weaves multiple ideas, explorations, histories, and the personal in each chapter: Motherhood, the art of Louise Bourgeois, Greek myths, the science of our past and its implications in the 21st century. What it means to bring life into a world that often struggles to support the needs of individuals with medical requirements. Documenting her older brother, Alex, with Down syndrome and her parents' relationship through age and care, as well as Bloom’s experience of caring for her daughter Willie, who has congenital deafness and is later diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. Bloom’s newborn world is quickly overtaken by navigating medical data, devices, medications, and the bureaucracy of accessing care and support. This memoir hit such an incredible balance when it could have easily tried to do too much. Still, somehow, Bloom seamlessly weaves various threads to create a memorable reading experience.
I shuttle back and forth between ancient texts and modern diagnoses. The more time I spend filling out daily logs of blood sugar levels, insulin dosages, and developmental charts, the more I hunger for worlds and images that can arrange this data into a meaningful pattern. As my tools threaten to overwhelm me, exerting their own chaos into my life, I’m reminded that stories are also tools, that art is also a divine gift handed down to help supplement the frailty of our minds and the insularity of our personal experiences.
It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken is my second favorite novel of the year. An undead woman has an existential crisis as she navigates a world in a life after death. It questions who we are once we lose our memory and our bodies. Are we still ourselves, something completely new? It’s existential and tender. The narrator places a dead crow into her chest cavity, and the crow talks to her. It's genuinely one of the most beautiful moments I have read in a novel in quite some time. I know this book will stay with me for a very long time.
Perhaps the chief difference between me now and me then is my tolerance for terror. I think this has to be related to the abstraction of pain. Physical pain. Emotional pain, The pain of others. My own. The flinch is there still. And I think the pain itself is there somewhere. But it is locked up. Locked up in a tiny, invisible, apocalypse-proof kernel. The tiny translucent egg of a subatomic insect laid at the center of each of us. When we’re gone, if we’re ever gone, this is what will remain of us. Fossilized pain. Not carbon. There will be a pain stratum where all the pain will settle. Pain shale, Pain veins. Quartzy ligatures made of tears, sighs, sobs, moans, terrible screams. Maybe when there are no more living, pain will have real value. Pain inflation will drive a pain market. There will be pain panners like gold panners, shaking out the suffering. Pain frackers. Pain centrifuges. We will build a giant pain collider to crack open its secret structure and release the tiny, lace-winged gasp of our lost humanity. Humanity. That word. Maybe we kill the living to get at their pain, Or our own.
My Infinity by Didi Jackson is an ekphrastic poetry collection. Utilizing the sacred found in the abstract paintings of the mystic Hima af Klint and the natural spaces inhabited by Jackson. It’s a collection about death, loss, grief, and the simultaneity of being alive in a world of beauty.
Old Age, No.10
For M.J.
My Infinity. The pitch of yellow
on the rump of the warbler.
My palm flattened against yours
when we make love. My feral.
Your smile as wide as the sky.
The ocher blocks like bricks
that make a life. The grid
that stitches with black thread
all that holds together a day.
My lips that touch the tip
of that thread before it passes
through the eye of the needle.
Where the needle points.
How we follow the needle.
How I brake. How you add
more blue to your smile.
My empty envelope.
My imperfect. My curious.
Your drawer of silk and wool.
The flip of the number
eight to its side. The laying
down of infinity. How it is
almost invisible. How it is
in and around, under and inside,
everything. Your green.
Your continent. Your swing.
My twist. Our union.
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie is a roughly year-long photography and writing collaboration during Ernaux and Marie’s relationship. It's about the simultaneity of a new relationship and the changing of its visual landscape while Ernaux was undergoing treatment for Breast Cancer. The everydayness of life, the newness of a relationship, and facing the reality of life and death. A theme throughout the collection of photographs taken by Ernaux and Marie was in the aftermath of sex, the immediacy of removing and throwing off items, and the following day revealing those items through photographs, never moving or intentionally arranging these objects as a rule. Each was tasked with describing or writing a piece corresponding to each photo. This is a very short book and one that had me asking a lot of questions. Ernaux has a unique quality where she will describe something in her present and then find the smallest entrance to the past, perfectly analyzing the self. Something she does seamlessly in all of her work.
Tactily, from that time on, as if making love were not enough and we needed to preserve a material representation of the act, we continued to take photos. Some we took immediately after lovemaking, others the next morning. The morning pictures were the most moving. These things cast off by our bodies had spent the whole night in the very place and position in which they’d fallen, the remains of an already distant celebration. To see them again in the light of day was to feel the passage of time.
When I look at our photos, it is my body’s disappearance that I see…It’s the disappearance of thought. Several times I’ve said to my self that if my thoughts could continue elsewhere, dying wouldn’t matter to me.
Now, we have come to the end, and my last favorite book of the year was Committed On Meaning and Madwomen by Suzanne Scanlan. What an incredible memoir! I buddy read this as my final book of the year, and barely ten pages in, I knew this would be a favorite. I decided to write this wrap-up in order of when I read these books. Art Monsters was the permission to follow a thread I followed through every book I read this year, leading me to this final book. A culmination of a year of deep work on myself of growing, changing, and failing a lot. This was a life-changing year in many ways, but it was also personally difficult. When I felt such hope for my artistic abilities in January after reading Art Monsters, those ideas were challenged and shifted more towards expressing myself through words. In January, I received a diagnosis that has given me the knowledge I desperately needed while also creating more significant obstacles I’m still trying to navigate. All this to say, Scanlon has written a memoir about her time living multiple years in an institution in the 90s for mental illness. Although her illness is very nuanced, a large portion of it was shaped by the death of her mother from Breast Cancer when Scanlon was nine years old. During her 20s and throughout her time in treatment, Scanlon found solace in the words of other women writers who were suffering and writing and creating through the “madwoman” narrative from Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and artists like Sinéad O’Connor. Scanlon upholds these writers while also questioning society's own biases towards who is allowed to be sick or mentally unwell, the white women's bodies who are afforded more creative liberties than women of color, the disenfranchised, or the unhoused. Scanlon plainly and honestly states that art and writing are what have saved her when the idea of death was all too welcoming—through writing and the words of others she was able to find a reason to her daily struggle. That is what I’m taking into 2025.
I thought about how my relationship to diagnosis had changed. How I once believed in what now I see as so vague and imprecise. I know that in many cases, for many people, a diagnosis can help locate and treat real experiences of pain, but there are many ways for us to find comfort in the pre-existing condition of being human, which is always inexplicable, on some level. This is why we read books. This is why I needed the stories of these other women.
Visual art is not as present in this memoir. However, a small section is written about the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who has lived decades in a psychiatric hospital a short distance from her artist’s studio. I will include a few pieces of her artwork. I will also include a brief memoir by Audre Lorde that is referenced multiple times and is on my reading list for 2025.
Happy Reading in 2025—I will return with more personal essays and musing on art and books. Also, I will be starting a new project called Archive 2025, which I will post more about soon, and I hope you will join!
Let me know what your favorite books of 2024 were and your plans for 2025!
You can follow me on Goodreads or StoryGraph!
Loved this. Thank you for this amazing review, the art, and for great new recommendations :)
This is such a fantastic year in reading and I feel so inspired by this booklist! 🤓📚🥰