2024 Review: The Books

I fell off the radar a bit at the end of the year but I’m back. I’ll be restarting the regular posts soon, but I have a couple 2024 wrap-ups coming first.

First, here’s a collection of thoughts on the books I read this year. They aren’t quite reviews and they aren’t (as you might notice) completely independent of each other. Most of the content is new, but some of it has been included/reworked from earlier posts.

If you have thoughts on these books, have read them, or simply want more on one of several of them. Let me know in the comments below.

1. Stephen Graham Jones: My Heart is a Chainsaw. My favorite aspect of this book is the narrator’s obsessive focus on genre. That being said, the fact that the book is not actually the genre it purports to be actually became quite confusing by its end.
2. Confucius: The Analects. I’ve read Confucius several times before but, given that I am now teaching his ideas in my global rhetorics-based writing courses, I decided to do a reread of The Analects toward the beginning of the year. I’m about five years back into a formal Zen practice, and the cross-contamination between Confucian thought and Zen Buddhism was evident in this read. Despite certain overly traditionalist and patriarchal elements of Confucian thought, which need to be put aside, I really do appreciate the model of the “good” that The Analects otherwise offers.
3. Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morals. It’s Nietzsche. What else new could I say? Maybe this: Nietzsche’s understanding of Buddhism is so wrong it is laughable. That doesn’t mean I didn’t like it but, again, what else could I possibly add the discussion of one of the most important thinkers of the Western tradition?
4. Stephen King: It. This is, sadly, one of my least favorite books of all time. I regret saying this not only for the amount of time I spent reading it but also because I feel ridiculous being critical of Stephen King. In the same way as the The Stand (everything I say here applies equally, or moreso, to that book) I wanted to like this because, well, it’s Stephen King. But I simply could not get past how indulgent and offensive the writing was. On the latter point, IT goes well-beyond being a “time and place” thing and really is just actively bad in terms of its representation of nearly every category of person included in the book. I do plan to give King another shot this year to see if there’s anything that clicks. The book I choose will be substantially shorter.
5. Simon Reynolds: Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984. Rip it Up was a fantastic read and gave me a language and a historical context for several of my favorite bands. It also taught me that a surprising amount of groups I like from this period (luckily none of my absolute favorites) were playing very fast and loose with fascist/Nazi aesthetics. This sucks. But I’d rather know it than not know it.
6. Brian Hodge: I’ll Bring You the Birds from Out of the Sky. This was just an absolutely stunning cosmic horror novella. The dread of certain passages has stuck with me for months and given that my wife is West Virginian the location was especially intriguing.
7. Han Kang: The Vegetarian: I (still) don’t even know what to say about this novel. Most “literary” readers are aware of it by now but, if you aren’t, it’s an incredibly haunting text told in three parts about the dissolution of a Korean family when a woman bucks social norms by becoming a vegetarian. The story itself, oddly, has very little to do with vegetarianism and more to do with gender roles, patriarchy, and social punishment. A must-read.
8. Sara Gran: Come Closer. If you like horror novels, you need to read this book. It’s haunting, psychological, demonic. It’s so incredibly fucked up. I rarely actually get spooked by reading horror—this one spooked me good.
9. Dan John: Mass Made Simple. I am slowly reading everything Dan John writes about fitness and lifting weights. I’m unsure if I’ll ever run this particular program, but it’s filled to the brim with insights about the practice of weight training in general.
10. Oliver Burkeman: Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. A few times a year, I usually indulge in my guilty pleasure of reading a few productivity/self-help books. I nearly never get anything out of them, but I enjoy them for some reason. Burkeman’s, however, is the rare kind that is actually useful, normal, applicable to a real person, and worth spending the time reading.
11. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. This one is the other, more common kind. I recommend reading one of the eight million blog posts about this book, as that’s about the amount of information it contains when you remove redundancy.
12. Andrew Culp: Dark Deleuze. Culp argues that academics have shockingly (note my sarcasm) deradicalized Deleuze’s thought. Deleuze is my favorite Western philosopher, or at least the one most influential to my general worldview, and I’ve had Culp’s book on my reading list for quite a while. It’s an odd read for me because I agree wholeheartedly with Culp’s larger points and don’t always appreciate his smaller ones in the construction of the argument. The book would be of negative interest to anyone not invested in Deleuze, but it’s highly worth a read for anyone who is.
13. Immanuel Wallerstein: World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. One of the most fascinating academic books I’ve ever read. I have since read a number of academic articles from the field of sociology that touch on (positively and critically) world-systems analysis and I must say that I’m very persuaded by it as a critical lens for making sense of the world.
14. Paul Virilio: Speed and Politics: Virilio got a lot of play on my blog this year. (See here and here.) The idea that we’re all caught up in “habitable circulation” is intriguing and useful for considering the world around me, despite being at this point a bit of a cliché.
15. Plato: The Trial and Death of Socrates. In the age of artificial intelligence, I find reading Socrates more and more refreshing. I still disagree on many fundamental conclusions he draws, but Socratic dialogue and—more fundamentally—the ability to say that certain things are bad are practices I think we need to recover.
16. Paul Kelso: Powerlifting Basics: Texas Style. Dumb as hell, but fun.
17. Sarah Manguso: Ongoingness: The End of a Diary. Sarah Manguso is my favorite living writer. Siste Viator was probably the most influential text for me in college, and everything I’ve read by her has left a mark. This book focuses on the author’s archival obsession and her process of releasing it. It is, to me, an absolutely essential read.
18. Claudia Rankine: Citizen: An American Lyric: It’s hard to actually say anything about this powerful book, which feels like a cop-out. I’m sorry for that. Its experimental, multimediated construction was a fascinating way for Rankine to deliver her perspective on race in America.
19. Reb Anderson: Being Upright: Zen Meditation and Bodhisattva Precepts. A collection of practices I hope to deepen in 2025.
20. Immanuel Wallerstein: Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization. Once again: world-systems analysis is good.
21. Oliver Onions: The Beckoning Fair One. Lovecraft without the extraordinary racism that losers on the Internet try to pretend isn’t there. A great ghost story.
22. Jacques Rancière: The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Probably one of the best books on teaching I’ve read. Rather than rehash them, I encourage you to read my extended thoughts here.
23. Ursula K. Leguin: The Lathe of Heaven. Equal parts fantastical and tragic, The Lathe of Heaven is my favorite Le Guin novel I've read so far. Among its many themes, one stood out as particularly significant and ahead of its time. Toward the end of the novel, Orr is unable to keep track of the various realities affected by his dreams. “He was living almost as a young child, among actualities only. He was surprised by nothing, and by everything.” How did Le Guin blow so effortlessly past postmodernism, perfectly capturing the post-postmodern regression, the complete capitulation to the flow, that we see today?
24. Anna Kornbluh: Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism. A good book of social theory. I was more persuaded by it when I read it than I am now, especially after the publication and seemingly near-universal praise of Intermezzo, which feels exactly like the type of book/phenomenon that Kornbluh says is less possible these days. See my earlier, actual review for more.
25. Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot. Reading this in high school was honestly the thing that spawned my love of the humanities, literature, philosophy, being a fashionably/unfashionably literary person (an imaginary type of person, of course), etc. I was disappointed to find that it really didn’t hit the same for me as a 34-year-old in 2024. The sad truth is that the world lacking meaning doesn’t seem radical or even particularly interesting anymore. The world is absurd! Yep. The real question today, I think, is how do we get the meaning back in?
26. Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Message. Coates trying desperately to consider how writers can get the meaning, and the truth, back in. Another essential read.
27. Dean Young: The Art of Recklessness. I picked this up for no reason when I was between books and unsure what to read next. I’ve had it since a college poetry class, and this was a re-read. Was it interesting? Yeah. Was it useful/sticky for me as a non-poet? I’m undecided.
28. The Táin: From the Irish Epic Táin Bó Cúailinge. Irish warrior mythology? Yes please. It was a bonus to learn that the Irish clearly invented “going super-saiyan,” as Cú Chulainn does so, repeatedly, in this epic.
29. G. Bruce Boyer: True Style: The History and Principles of Classic Menswear. It is somewhat embarrassing to say out loud (much less write on my blog) that I am in the process of improving and, maybe more accurately, becoming more intentional about my sartorial choices. What I didn’t know is that Boyer (and many others) have done so much work situating men’s fashion within a larger sociological history. This is the only full book on fashion I’ve taken this year, but I’ve read many (many) more articles, and menswear is becoming almost as equally an intellectual rabbit-hole as practice-based one.
30. Sally Rooney: Intermezzo. I’m noticing that everyone is reading this book now. They are right to do so; it’s a masterpiece. It perfectly captures the modern affect. I cried at the end.
31. Ryan Gattis: All Involved. A fascinating research-based fiction novel set during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. I strongly encourage you to at least watch Gattis explain some of the backstory involved in writing it which is… incredible and terrifying. Finished on New Years Eve.