Past & Future Reading Lists

It's never too late

Jan 24, 2025

I’m deciding it’s not too late to do a best-of-2024 book list. I don’t know about you, but this year it’s taken forrrrrrr. evvvv. errrr. to crawl out of the grundle of the year. You know the time period - after Christmas but before the first work week of the new year starts, when you stay in your jammies as much as possible and time doesn’t really feel real? Between travel and having friends in town (related to the topic of this missive - my long-distance book club beloveds who I’ve been reading with over Zoom since 2020 came to stay with me for a couple days - they make reading difficult tomes an absolute joy so that is already a book-related highlight of 2025!!), the year finally feels like it might be opening its sleepy eyes for me to be able to look both backwards and forward.

I know that December is usually the prime time for “best of the year” lists but I love book recommendations any time, and maybe you do too. Plus the books I read are usually pretty far from current anyway. So in the spirit of “better late than never,” here are some of the best books I read this past year, with varying degrees of description, along with a friendly reminder that bookshop.org is a great option if you’re looking for an alternative to Amazon.

Nonfiction

Small Fires: an Epic in the Kitchen by Rebecca May Johnston. “I have written down what I have been doing in the kitchen because it is what I have been doing,” is the line that keeps going around and around my head. This book came to me through Alicia Kennedy as the inaugural title for her book club and wow did it blow me away. Johnston’s prose is searing and precise as she writes through the many, many iterations of making one sauce recipe, for example, and the unexpected ways that cooking intersects with her academic work of translating the Odyssey - asking the question: what if we treated cooking as though it were just as if not more important than the academic work? “And each time I return to the recipe I meet myself again, differently. Performing the recipe reveals an ‘I’ that cooks in order to speak,” she says.

I love any book that opens up a new plane of thought for me and this one does that in a way that is very tender. What is our work? What is the work of living and why don’t we talk about it that way instead of scuttling it into the corners and out of sight? As I’m writing about it I am already eager to read it again.

Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta. This book is beloved for a reason, and it’s already come up in this newsletter because of how much it stuck with me, how much it unpicks the seams of thought and ways of being that are based in the European so-called “Age of Reason” and “Enlightenment” and elucidates another way. Ignore the overblown title, I suspect that it’s a publisher choice that Yunkaporta probably loathes, but the book itself is great.

Let the Record Show: a Political History of ACT UP New York 1987-1993 by Sarah Schulman. I really, really wish I had read this book before Covid happened, but it’s not too late. Based on extensive in-person interviews and Schulman’s lived experience organizing in ACT UP through the AIDS crisis in New York City, this book looks at the organizing process, problem-solving, and personalities that shaped that political moment. I would say this is a must-read for anyone trying to figure out what to do and how to live during this current set of crises and political moments.

Other note-worthy nonfiction books I loved: Undoing Drugs: the Untold Story of Harm Reduction by Maia Szalavitz, Bury My Heart a Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, and Dancing in the Streets: a History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich.

Fiction

Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang. Okay, this one is certainly not for everyone because of the way the story leans into the sometimes-surreal viscera of bodily experience (translation: sometimes you might find its descriptions to be kind of gross!) - but I love that. This is a story about the friendship between two girls, and there is an absolutely stunning mythology unfolded, of dogs and trees and finding your way back home. This book expanded my idea about what a novel can do and I will definitely be reading it again.

Big Swiss by Jen Beagin. This is another one that is very uncomfortable to read at times because the main character keeps making these awful, cringe-inducing decisions - but that made me feel so tender towards her! I loved her and the mess she made of her life and the descriptions of the place she inhabited, like the two hundred year-old house she shares with a roommate and a beehive that is too big to be removed without destroying the house itself.

The first three books in the Sabriel series by Garth Nix. You ever look back on cultural touchstones that shaped your childhood and wonder, is that what made me a weird(er) kid or did I love that only because I was a weird kid? I read Sabriel when I was eleven in 1998 and it has stuck with me ever since. It’s about a teen necromancer who wades into the river of death and its nine gates to fight the hostile magic beings that have captured her father there. I found the first three books in the series for a dollar each at a used book sale and devoured them all with relish. They are *dark* books for the YA designation but I found that the pacing and the world-building really hold up!

Other note-worthy works of fiction I read this year and loved: Speedboat by Renata Adler, Illuminations by Mary Sharrat (historical fiction about the life of Hildegard von Bingen), Yellowface by R.F. Kuang.

Poetry

frank: sonnets by Dianne Seuss. This one came to me as a very strong recommendation from my friend Tom, who said, basically: you have to read this book. He doesn’t throw around that kind of suggestion often or lightly and I’m glad I listened. I read a lot less poetry these days than I used to and it’s because not a lot of books of poetry do what frank does, which is to blur the edges of language and experience while telling you, in pieces, a story, a history, a life. This book feels like flipping through a family scrapbook of the mind, resting briefly in this vivid moments of telling that are specific but not isolated. I was extremely moved, and I’m not doing it any justice so let me just be the one to tell you: you have to read this book.

two-headed woman by Lucille Clifton. I have been slowly working my way through Clifton’s Collected Poems chronologically - slowly because I have been savoring every word. Clifton can do with a dozen words what it might take any other writer 100 words to get across - it feels like watching a magic trick happen right in front of you that is impossible to account for.

: once teeth bones coral : by Kimberly Alidio. This book is a wide-set volume with the words scattered into clusters strewn across the page. Lots of empty space, the poems a field that can be read in several directions, which I loved. Alidio allows the reader to float through, to marinate, to spend some time and it felt enlivening to draw out the connections between the constellations of words and phrases.

I also really liked Aednan by Linnea Axelsson, translated by Saskia Vogel.

That’s it for last year! I would love for you to tell me in the comments anything you read in 2024 that you loved and would recommend.

I’m really excited about the books that I have lined up to read as I’m researching for some longer writing projects. I’ll be reading about what we can learn about prehistoric goddess cults and their symbols (snakes! bees! fawns! water birds! bears!) from the archaeological record, ancient beekeeping practices, and where we find animistic thought and practice echoing down from history. I’ve already been learning so much that I can’t wait to share, and noticing how the synchronicities wash over me. This last year I have really been sitting with how acquisitive I am with books, in a way that is the case for no other category of material object, and so it feels correct to have my reading be guided by my writing projects, rather than tornado-ing through every book that interests me as I normally do.