2024 Reads

Grouping these 4 together because they're a series and also because I read them all in the span of 4 weeks (Joe Country is sitting on my desk but I'm trying to savor it - about 9 months until Slow Horses s5 drops). Read after watching the series, and oh man, are these fun. Speies who suck at their jobs is SUCH a good premise, and it is always nice to read good genre fiction after living in literary fiction for months. Herron is so good at snarky dialouge - so many lines in the show are directly quoted from the book. The satire of the series shines harder in these books - I love how Herron digs into the ineffiency of burocracy.

Read this in 3 days, one of my favorite books of the year. A merticously researched account of the Troubles, framed through the murder of Jean McConville. Less interested in the question of "Was the IRA good or bad?" and more interested in investigating what drives people to violence and what the long term effects of that violence are. 100 pages of this book are notes but it reads like novel.

I love this book. Ok - I love just about any book about disillusionment in academia, but this was spectaularly fun. Our main character, Jim, is a pretty normal guy, who hates his job. To me this book was a love letter to being a hater. It's hilarious, and biting, and really goes into what the long lasting effect of boredom can do to a man (man, yeah, you really have to get over how the women are written in this book). The small things can kill, and as Jim as told at the end of the novel, "You don't have the qualifications, but you don't have the disqualifications either". You can really root for the main character, even though his situation is hardly pitable - job teaching history, etc, because of how everyone else in this novel acts.

Basically a book about a woman spy inflitrating a leftist commune with neolithic influences that is essentially a book about nothing. I liked this at the time - Kushner is a good writer, but writing this is December I haven't thought about this book since I read it.

Picked this up in September after reading Olivia Laing's essay on Wojarnowicz in The Lonely City. What struck me most about this book is how awake Wojarowicz was. His rage is focused. You can read the statistics about loss during the AIDS crisis, about the failure of the US government to do something about it, and then you can read the passages of this book, where Wojarnowicz photographed his best friend's body, Peter Hujar, after he died. You can read about what Wojarnowicz thought as was dying - "IF I DIE OF AIDS—FORGET BURIAL—JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE FDA." I've never read anything like this - the essays are sharp and vivid and like nothing you've ever read before. Essential to the queer canon

I tore through this one, because again, Ferrante is great at getting me into her characters heads. I hated every decision they made, but I could not put it down. The protagonists are full adults now, both married with kids, and the middle age marital problems started to lose me - espically since Lila and Elena pass around the same guy. Might pick the 4th up later.

This was my favorite out of the quartet (though I only read the first three.) It was great to read about Lila and Elena as girls, but reading about them as teenagers kept me up into the night. As a young adult, I am always hungry to figure out how other people go through it. What I loved about this one is how Elena, the narrator and only one of the girls to go to Unviersity, struggles with growing up politically and intellectually. Reading about the politics of Naples was interesting, and I really loved the depth of thought Ferrante gives her female characters.

Had to read this one after it got the number one spot on the NYT Best Books of the 21st Century, possibly the most presumptous list in the world. I thought this list book was good, but it didn't cross into great for me. I think the century could do better, but wow, is Elena Ferrante great at getting into the heads of her characters. Worth the read.

Pass!! The mystery was interesting but left open-ended, which sometimems works, but when paired with the main characters hooking up ("Men and women can never be friends!") and ending with the female detective marrying a side character out of nowhere, this didn't work for me.

An expiremental memior about domestic abuse in a lesbian relationship. I flew through this when I had broncitious. Machando writes in a way that makes the time fly, and I really liked how she told this story through different lenses - the choose your own adventure angle was my favorite.

A writer tries to rennovate her apartment. Don't remember much from this one. Nothing happens in Cusk's novels. You just stick around for a piercing level of anaylsis at human behavior told through conversations that still manage to sound like things people would say.

Read this book while I was feeling hopelessly alone, and it did help. Looks the problem in the eye by looking at the lives of lonely artists. Introduced me to Wojarnowicz. Would have appricated a more personal touch - I wanted to see how the writer approached the problem in her life, but the topic was left for the concluding paragraphs.

Do not like in the December retrospect.

Suprisingly did not have to read this in high school, though I tried to and quit because I hated Winston. Orwell writes novels like an essayist, but he is a very good essayist, so I think this works (works, she says, about one of the most famous books of the 21st century). Was motivated to read this after reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. In it he asserts that's Huxley's dystopia - where our addiction to pleasure and distraction stops us from rebellion more relevant than Orwell's. I agree with this, but this book still feels relevant. This a novel that shows the full force of the state.

A better enviormental thriller than Creation Lake. The plotting on this gets implausible at the end but it's a lot of fun. A question a character poses that stuck with me - "Would you rather be forced to say I'm sorry or thank you?" I would agree with Shelly on the answer: being forced to say thank you is worse.

Virigna Woolf's time-warp gender-warp novel. Distinctly queer, but tbh cannot rembember much a year later

Like a strange dream you once had. Unnamed woman hangs out in greece. People tell her their secrets.

I found this book so boring. Read the sequel first, which probably made it worse.

I read this for class over a year ago, and to this day I think it should come with a warning. This novel is just put in the stacks with normal books! No warning! To get your hands to this book you should have to walk through a maze - that's how it feels to read. There's an entire annotations book that's longer than the 700 page novel! Bookstores should tell people! My professor descibed this as "nighttime" language, and that is dead on. I'm going to Dublin and taking a tour of the streets to see if I can find what drove Joyce to write this (I will not figure it out). Confusing and should be read with guidence. I can't say I enjoyed this but it did show me that language is capable of more than I thought possible. Babel was struck down for a reason.

Read over a year ago, but when I think about this book I remember its intensity. This book is about romantic obession. Unnamed protagonist going through life. The language is twisty and violent (violent might be the wrong word, but love is not soft). I really do think Jeanette Winterson is an underrated writer.

A memior of Simone De Beauvoir's life, from age five to her early twenties. It was so interesting to read about a philospher analyzing her own brain and intellectual development. Unexpected humor. I got a ton of vocab from this.

A book about a woman running content moderation for a social media company. Short, disturbing, and forgettable.

I'm a sucker for the atmosphere of heat - the tension, the lack of relief, the haze it creates. Tana French zones in on this perfectly. This book also has a found-family dynamic I liked, so hook, line, and sinker.

I think this is the best Baldwin book I have ever read (out of Beele street, Giovanni's room, The Fire Next Time , and half of Tell it to the Mountain). It is also the Baldwin essay that made me the most angry, probably because this book has the largest focus on female characters. I don't think Baldwin is good at writing women - their lives revole around men, and their acts of agency are limited to deciding which man to sleep with. The books strongest female character, Ida, the only woman artist, is given a cheating plotline that I really wanted to be a lie, but it was true. It's a testament to Baldwin's writing that despite all of those flaws, this is still one of the greatest novels I've ever written. James Baldwin can write about the human-condition like no one else. He's at his best when he's writing about race, sexuality and the resulting feelings of alienation. This book is the longest one I've read, with the biggest cast of characters, set in the Village and Harlem.

What surprised me about this book is how I went from hating the first 70 pages (I do not care about this high school reunion Mr. Roth!) and then went to staying up until 2am reading it. Focusing on the story of an all american jewish father whose daughter bomb's a post-office and then disappears, this novel as some of the most hard hitting paragraph's I've ever read. If you can get over the scene where Swede kisses his daughter, Roth's decpition of interpersonal relationships is unmatched. I do think they should have given him some kind of Nobel Prize for this book, espically since he wanted it so bad (or maybe that's the reason he was denied...)

Read on Elif Bautman's reccomendation. Found this underwhelming, but I can't remember why.

Hits the same plot points as Oranges are Not the Only Fruit. I'd just go read that.

Read this for my college book club, which actually turned out to be a group of three lame people who started a book club to hang out with each other. Still, I liked this. Space novel!

The second I heard about this book I knew it was for me. Writing the review in 2025, now I want to reread this. I think about President Invective a lot. Funny, existental. Not too crazed about the ending, but I was here for a great time.

Advertised by the Atlantic as a book about defining the course of one's own life, I was so disappointed that this was really all about a young woman picking a man.

A coming-of-age memior in Berkley California, about counter-culture, zines, centered around a friendship between two college students. Really sweet, I've come back to this one a couple times