A Year in Reading and Life in a World on the Brink: 2 Best and 2 Worst 2024 Books I Read
2024 was a long, busy, amazingly short, wonderful, and horrible year. In my personal life, being the stay-at-home parent of a toddler, with all its ups and downs of stress and joy, is a source of wonder for me, while at the same time, the state of the world, struggling between hope and despair with despair seeming to triumph brings its share of horror. A paradoxical, contradictory atmosphere for the year, focusing on the personal, in the constant glow of the political. Throughout it all, I read, and thought about writing.
With all of the demands of parenthood, I have not posted anything since last February, completing a project I started in 2023, and I have found myself conflicted about what purpose these entries serve. They take up a lot of “psychic space” for me, influencing what I choose to read, dominating my thoughts. I decided to take a break to focus on the present and what role my writing should serve. Why do I keep returning to this project, when there are so many other ideas I could work on during the limited time I have to focus on writing? I paused over the last year to focus on my parental role and step back but still wrestled with these questions. How much energy to devote to publishing free content online of dubious interest to others? What am I really getting out of it? And, more importantly, do I have anything interesting to say?
The posts I’ve published here on HTC over the years, continuing from earlier iterations, represent, I think, a desire to delve into a theme I’m interested in as though I were doing preliminary readings for a research paper or academic course. Nostalgia, perhaps, for my years of schooling, when life and its demands seemed more straightforward if no less stressful. During my weekend hours continuing my role as a librarian and library worker, I am constantly finding new and interesting books to add to the reading lists that are the basis of most of my work here. Basically, annotated book displays.
I have certain topics that I return to, ideas I’m curious about, and I just keep finding new sources with different perspectives to examine. Whether reading literary accounts of people struggling to express what life is like now (is it boredom tinged with horror?), a variety of political science and journalistic work to better understand the chaotic period we find ourselves in, works of speculative fiction drawing on post-apocalyptic and dystopian tropes to imagine the future implications of these trends, or taking a break from the depressing with some cooking or folklore or comics, I continue to read in themes. I’m obsessed, it seems, with the ways that knowledge and art flow into each other, finding insights in the context of one author’s experience and considering it as I read another, piecing together the complexity of the world through words and ideally putting some sort of interpretation together to share.
In the end, I’m opting to continue, even if each post reaches, at best, an audience of dozens, if only to keep up my writing practice and share some thoughts on my readings out of the endless supply of work out there, maybe piecing together a few common threads to understand better our complex world and how other minds understand it as well (or not!). I’ll end this entry by sharing five of the best (and worst) 2024 publications I read this year. These books reflect, I think, the ongoing obsessions I’ve brought to this project over the years- trying to understand the political landscape we find ourselves in (you know, the f-word), post-apocalyptic works of speculative fiction, works that explore how the internet changes our literary expression, and places where these themes overlap. Some, of course, did it better but the ones that failed, I think, failed very strongly this year.
First, I’ll discuss the ones I enjoyed! The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley was a tautly written and fun novel, an engaging mix of romance, action, and history that deftly plays with the tricky tropes of time travel. Bradley’s droll wit and casual writing style belies the more serious themes and topics she infuses into the novel, subtle until it’s not. Aside from the mental game of engaging with all of the paradoxes and weirdness time travel entails, she engages with thought provoking questions of colonialism, environmental collapse, gender and sexuality without losing the fun fish out of water moments. All in all, it fit well with my interests in considering how our present fits within the passage of time in between the past and future, how people are products of their times but also the same, how our actions now will affect those who come later.
As for nonfiction, two topics I’ve been really digging into lately are books attempting to explain our current political moment and if it can be described as fascism, and books exploring the role of the internet in our society. Journalist Elle Reeve’s Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics fits into both categories and is a fascinating and disturbing account of how we got here. A concise, gripping account of how Reeve’s years on the online extremist beat put her in a unique position to report on the dark, obscure corners of the internet that few felt worth paying attention, as they leached from the fringes to the mainstream in US society, black pill is a sobering but topical resource.
The same can not be said of journalist Nellie Bowles’s ridiculously dumb book Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History. I chose to read it to challenge my own assumptions about my own “side” from what I took to be a “moderate liberal” position, but Bowles’ tired arguments about “wokeness” were so inane, so flippant, so disingenuous, I couldn’t take anything in this book seriously. This is not a serious book. There was no critique, no analysis, no argument, barely even a rhetorical question. Being as glib and sweeping as Bowles, the basic message of Morning After the Revolution (if it could be said to have a message, lacking an argument or point) is “never ask anything of your betters. Things are fine, you whiners.” There is something just so fundamentally ludicrous about a book harping on the censorious, illiberal “left” with, well, everything that’s actually going on in this country. In the end, I’m actually embarrassed to have bothered with this one.
I’m in the same boat with Honor Levy’s obnoxious My First Book, which I felt compelled to read despite my better judgment due to my morbid interest in the evolution of the “alt lit” scene (I write about here) and how this collection of short stories was getting so much hype in the legacy media. Drawing on alt lit’s brand of bland autofiction, Levy’s pieces are bleak and repetitive, dealing with themes of alienation and existential dread in a blase, deadpan way, wrestling with the fuzzy boundaries between irony and sincerity, to best couch her edgelord statements about mental illness, race science, and gender. With Levy’s avant-garde style lending, I suppose, the illusion of a countercultural cool of a sort to the same old right-wing ideology, her work is not exactly groundbreaking, nothing that has not already been explored in alt lit. You could say there’s something weird about the whole thing, but I don’t think that’s really true. There’s just something all too banal about a nominally transgressive marginal artistic movement to be appropriated by corporate or right wing forces.
Good or bad, in any case, these works are good examples of the topics and themes I’m hoping to expand on this year. Whether obsessively reading quickly dated works of political analysis in a futile attempt to understand our political moment or looking for inspiration for my own work I’ll tell myself I’ll start soon in literature, from post-apocalyptic dystopias to examinations of contemporary US life (redundant, I know!), I’m hoping to post more frequently this year. I’m planning some entries on folklore (apparently the most popular topic I post according to stats), Lovecraftian horror, and comics as well. In a world that just seems increasingly dark, reading, for me, is both an escape and a way to process the absurdities of reality and I’m looking forward to a lot of reading (after the kid falls asleep anyway).