Kristen Hall-Geisler

My 2024 Reading Roundup

—

by

Kristen
in ,

Note: All the books in this roundup have affiliate links, so buying books through these links supports my work. The link to the StoryGraph is not an affiliate link, I just love the app. Thank you!

I was surprised to learn, thanks to the StoryGraph, that I had read 64 books this year. That’s about 10 more than usual. I figured it was because I spent this year writing my master’s thesis, which required me to read about 60 sources, both books and journal articles. But no! I only entered two books that I used as sources in the StoryGraph, Hermits and Anchorites in England, 1200-1550 and Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages.

The list has physical books, audiobooks, and ebooks, and it’s made up of books I own and books I borrowed from the library. I listened to Number Go Up, Zeke Faux’s book about crypto, and Faith, Hope, and Carnage, a book based on a series of interviews that are more like conversations between Sean O’Hagan and Nick Cave. I borrowed Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham (snarky old-timey writers!) and Jan Morris’s classic memoir of transition, Conundrum.

I read a bunch of books for review, and I only reviewed the ones I liked, so here’s a handy list if you’ve got a bookstore gift certificate to burn (these links go to the reviews):

I read Bluets by Maggie Nelson and realized I might be the only person on the planet who does not like this book. Let me know in the comments if I’m not the only literary heathen.

I came late to the party for O! Caledonia by Elspeth Barker and cannot recommend this coming-of-age not-quite-autobiography about a wonderfully weird girl growing up in a large Scottish house enough. Somehow my mind pairs this with Loved and Missed, an entirely different book by Susie Boyt about a mother in London whose grown daughter is stuck in a cycle of drug abuse and who takes in (maybe slightly steals?) her granddaughter to raise. While we’re in the region, Only Here, Only Now by Tom Newlands is another coming of age novel set in Scotland, this time in the 1990s, and I loved it so much.

I read a few books about the current intersection of technology and culture. Besides Number Go Up, I read Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen and You Are Not a Gadget, an older title by Jaron Lanier that in some cases is prescient and in some cases flies far wide of the tech-prediction mark.

There are some big books on here, not only in size – Menewood, I’m looking at you – but in cultural heft. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar has been talked about and put on multiple lists, but even so I did not expect to like it as much as I did. The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates is another book that is about more than the blurbs and The Discourse would have you believe.

Ædnan by Linnea Alexsson was another book that hit a lot of lists in 2024, and it was gorgeous. If you have never attempted a novel in verse because you thought it might be too unmoored from reality, too hard to follow, give this one a try. Massive props to translator Saskia Vogel for bringing this into English.

I finally finished my little stack of a dozen books by Annie Ernaux, finishing up with Mémoire de Fille and Le Jeune Homme. Then I spent more than a month with the lastest doorstopper from Valérie Perrin, Tata. It was a great book that could have ended 100 pages earlier.

I leaned into philosophy pretty heavily this year and may do so again in 2025. We’ll see. Life Is Hard by Kieran Setiya will scratch an itch for many people. I finally read Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, a Buddhist classic. In The Rigor of Angels, William Egginton connects the literary, philosophical, and scientific dots between Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg in an attempt to pin down the nature of reality. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but if you think it might be yours, this is a good book.

I also tried pairing Virginia Woolf’s Flush, a novella told from the point of view of her dog, and Sigrid Nunez’s Mitz, about the Woolfs’ pet marmoset. I thought it would be an enlightening exercise. It really wasn’t.

Poetry this year came from bell hooks (Appalachia), Tracy K. Smith (Life on Mars), and Anne Carson (Wrong Norma). I’m not sure Wrong Norma is exactly poetry, but it isn’t easy to slot in anywhere, so I’m putting it here.

Going through all 64 books, even briefly, seems like it’s going to get tedious for me and you both. I’ve tried to be better about sharing my monthly reading roundups, and I’ll get those in my 2025 schedule for sure. And I’ll have more full book reviews in 2025, with three already in the works.

The book I recommend to get you through the next year, if you need a balm for your soul, because of course you do in this hellish timeline, is A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. Short and lovely, with a monk and a robot in the woods. This is the book.

You can buy all of KHG’s books and those she recommends at Bookshop.org. You can also buy her books in paperback and ebook formats directly from her shop.