Favorite Books of 2024 & A List of Good Things Pt VIII
More end-of-year lists, more things that make life lively & worth living
I learned to read again during the pandemic. It was probably the best thing that happened to me between March 2020 through Summer 2022— months and years that were, without a doubt, some of the most miserable of my life. Despite getting a PhD in Comparative Literature, I somehow stopped reading for pleasure. And not just recently, either: I brought a whole treasure trove of books with me to college in NY, and then quickly became overwhelmed. Don’t get me wrong: I was an English major; I read all day, every day. But reading for pleasure was something relegated to Harper’s and The New Yorker, until, fed up with the accumulating to-read piles under my desk, I cancelled my subscriptions altogether.
With the exception of a gap year I took writing/drawing Soviet Daughter in 2013-2014 in which I read a series of Big Books—Hugo, Melville, Tolstoy, an unfortunate and much-reviled Murakami—I read maybe a small handful of new books a year. Yet I used to have a Rory Gilmore-esque obsession with the written word. I read so much I developed worse vision than my grandparents by 6th grade. Embarrassingly, I read Gone with the Wind only because it was the longest book I could find in the library. Enter: pandemic, and enter: my ravenous urge to consume new books, returning like a prodigal son after a multi-decade absence. Now, my bedside table is by far the messiest place in my house. There are usually 5 or 6 genres that I circulate through based on whim, or whichever one is due back to the library soonest.
I don’t consume books with the same rapidity that I do movies, but some of the 45 books I finished this year were so genuinely life-changing and mind-altering that I decided to include all of them in a list. Which is in full below, in all its vulnerable weirdness and eclecticism! Divided by genre. I don’t include academic books since I don’t tend to read those cover-to-cover. Those I especially loved I highlighted in bold. List of Good Things to follow below! (I still can’t believe I read every single page of A Thousand Plateaus in 2024…)
Poetry
The Rumi Collection; Carol Ann Duffy’s Rapture (2005); Poems of Paul Celan, translation by Michael Hamburger (1972); Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée (1982); The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (1997)
Fiction
Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (2011) (I’m so late to this, I know); Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth (2018); Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World Where Are You (2021)* ←hate-read; Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979); Miranda July’s All Fours (2024); Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990); Joshua Cohen’s The Netenyahus (2021)
Graphic Narrative - Nonfiction
Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Grass (2017); Art Spiegelman’s Maus I & II (1986, 1991) (reread); Nakazawa Keiji’s Barefoot Gen (1973) (reread); Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1993); Sam Wallman’s Our Members Be Unlimited (2022); Una’s Becoming, Unbecoming (2018); MariNaomi’s I Thought You Loved Me (2023); Liana Finck’s A Bintel Brief (2014) (reread); Ebony Flowers’s Hot Comb (2020); AK Summers’s Pregnant Butch (2014); Liz Prince’s Tomboy: A Graphic Memoir (2014); Solomon J. Brager’s Heavyweight (2024); Sharon Rudahl & Michael Kluckner’s The Bund: A Graphic History of Jewish Labor Resistance (2023); Charles Berberian’s Une éducation orientale (2023)
Graphic Narrative - Fiction
Ilan Stavans & Steve Sheinkin’s El Iluminado (2012); CLR James’s Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History, adapted by Nic Watts and Sakina Karimjee (2023)
Philosophy
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980); Georges Bataille’s On Nietzsche (1945); Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952); Plato’s Symposium (385-379 BCE, lol) (reread); Michel Foucault’s Madness & Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1965)
Nonfiction
Ginette Paris’s The Sacrament of Abortion (1992); ME O’Brien’s Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (2023); Melissa Cooper, Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance (2024); Lawrence Weschler’s Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders (1995)
Memoir
Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias (2019); Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018); Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)←(would not recommend); Souvankham Thammavonga’s How to Pronounce Knife (2020)
Theater
Bertolt Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards (1932)
Autotheory? Hybrid genres?
Maggie Nelson, Bluets (2009); Ram Dass’s Be Here Now (1971) ←(hey don’t knock it ‘til you try it)
A List of Good Things Pt VIII
I was in Chicago over the New Year, and so thankful to have a fun and cozy celebration with dear friends. Most, but not all, of these are Chicago-based!
After 6 years of living in Philadelphia, I finally went to the Mutter Museum, which others have recommended for years. And, reader, I loved it. Ostensibly a museum of medical history (“it has lots of creepy stuff”), it’s also a kunstkammer or wunderkammer. Not as mind-blowing as the Museum of Jurassic Technology, but I could have spent several more hours looking at medical tools, skulls, creepy bones, mummified bodies, etc. Hats off to my very-much-a-Scorpio friend for recommending it and coming with me! Also there was a great, thoughtful contemporary art exhibit on the unhoused population of Philly. Highly recommend.
On the topic of serendipitous museums: Wrightwood 659 in Chicago’s Lincoln Park! I heard about this museum on the radio, of all places. I was driving my mom’s 22-year-old Corolla with nothing to distract me from the horror of existence except the radio, and I happened to scroll through the classical station and heard the name John Akomfrah on an ad. John Akomfrah! One of my favorite contemporary artists? I turned up the volume and heard there was an exhibit of his in a museum I had never heard of. I googled it and dragged two friends with me the very next day. Outdoors the building is a rather generic brick three-flat but the interior was a beautiful modernist haven designed by Tadao Ando. Honestly so breathtaking!
More on Wrightwood 659: the Akomfrah exhibit, his film installation Four Nocturnes, was great (as always), but I was especially taken with the Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now exhibit (up until Feb 15!). The exhibit is incredibly cool and thoughtful, and asks contemporary Himalayan artists to choose pieces from the traveling Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art (RIP to its in-person NYC location :( ) that inspired their work in some way. Looking at the older and more modern pieces side by side was extraordinary, and just such good curatorial instinct.
Love this piece by Shraddha Shrestha that was clearly inspired by the same cartoons I was watching in junior high! In the same exhibit my friend and I were completely hypnotized by a video piece called DOKU - THE SELF (available in full on the artist Luyang’s website). The video uses the medium of video games and their aesthetics to communicate the soul’s journey according to Buddhism.
(Also I’m obsessed with this hoodie the artist made for the video: )
Another incredible part of the exhibit was a Spotify playlist made by artist/musician Salil Sabedi for the exhibit (yes Spotify sucks but I have also been listening to this playlist practically nonstop since early January)
On the theme of digitally-aided transcendental experiences, albeit not Chicago-related (and possibly related to the theme of music?): I really enjoy this website that crawls through millions of totally unedited YouTube videos.
According to the artist Riley Walz:
Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in "Send to YouTube" button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.
The experience of looking through these is a little bit akin to the described time capsule but there’s also this beautiful, harmonious quality to it. I like to mute the videos and put on my playlist I started years ago called Fit for the Movies, in which I include songs that just sound like they’d work really well in a soundtrack. Listening to these alongside the videos makes it feel like watching a wistful movie encapsulating all of human existence, like an alien from space. Something about it feels like that moment from Amelie in which the brittle-boned man watches a VHS tape that describes for him all the beauty of life that he can’t physically access.
Otherworldly experiences, cont.: I went to King Spa in Chicago on New Year’s Day and was reminded of just how much I love Korean spas. I love a banya on any day, but I probably love Korean Spas equally. There’s a King Spa in NJ as well, just outside of NYC, and Google tells me there is also a King Spa in Dallas and Virginia. Also, there is always a Groupon. And an H-mart next door, for post-sauna snacks.
On other Chicago experiences: my friends and I got delivery from Pizza Lobo in Logan Square and it was p.e.r.f.e.c.t.i.o.n. No it was not deep dish.
On other Chicago-related/but actual general cold-weather recommendations: MITTENS! I will preach the gospel of mittens until the cows come home. Gloves are useless. Terrible. Mittens, especially the nice, old-timey knitted ones, are the equivalent of a giant sleeping bag for your hands. Would you walk around in sub-zero temperatures with a thin sweater, even if the thin sweater claims to be phone-screen-sensitive? No. Those things never work for more than a few days anyway, no matter the price. Put down the phone. Put on some mittens. Your digits will thank you.
I didn’t end up finishing Jackie Wang’s incredible book until after the new year, but I find myself thinking about this quote all the time. Perhaps it will similarly bring you comfort in cold, dark times:
Let your mistakes be a way of remembering what it takes to be free.
Until next time,
xo-J