2024 Year in Books

All the Lonely People is a collection of short stories by Carolyn Dubiel. The stories run the gamut from historical fiction to modern murder mystery, and more. I loved how fully drawn the characters were.

My only complaint is that I wanted a full novel about each of these people.

Too Like the Lightning: Prose Poems to My Almost Loves by Teresa Spencer, with illustrations by Sydney Schwindt (both cool people I know, but I didn’t know they knew each other!).

In this series of short prose poems, Spencer imagines what she would say to people who catcall her on the street or get a little weird in a shared elevator. Schwindt’s illustrations provide some provocative context.

This is one of those projects that could have wandered into humorlessness, but in fact is completely hilarious, empowering, and thought-provoking.

Note, the illustrations are not for the faint of heart.

Tangleroot by Kalela Williams, is a twisty historical mystery, and I love it. I couldn’t put it down. To say too much would be too spoilery, but let’s just go with, there’s a teen girl who would like to be anywhere but the Virginia town her mom made her move to, and she unwittingly gets drawn into a mystery that took place there. What she uncovers changes how she sees the town, her family, and herself.

Seriously, it is so good. I wish I had never read it so I could read it for the first time again.

The Age of Deer by Erika Howsare, is a beautiful example of how nonfiction can be as engaging as any novel.

In each chapter, basically a series of essays on the relationship between humans and deer, Howsare examines the subject from a different angle. In one of my favorites, she goes to a taxidermy contest, where mounted deer are rated on things like the symmetry of their rack. In another favorite chapter, she looks at mythology around deer. And then there’s the one where she goes hunting with her brother, freezing in a deer stand…They’re all good, I can’t pick a favorite.

I assigned Silas to read the first chapter because he’s always been skeptical of nonfiction as a creative pursuit. He enjoyed it and found it engaging and intriguing.

Ever since I read this, every time I see deer on the side of the road, I feel like I know them in a way that I never did, despite growing up in a state with more deer than people.

The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center, by Rhaina Cohen, isn’t exactly “a book by someone I know.” Cohen is a friend-of-a-friend(-of-a-friend?). But I feel like I know her and I read it because of our chain of connection, which feels significant.

Cohen interviews people in the kind of intense friendships where the friendship is the central relationship, not a romantic one. I found this powerful and interesting. It didn’t perfectly reflect any relationship I have ever had, but it articulated something I have been trying to find the words for—about how complicated and interesting and filled with possibility human relationships are, and how we’ve flattened them all with the primacy of hetero romantic ideals.

So, Kasia Urbaniak, a dominatrix who is also a Buddhist monk (nun?) wrote everything she knows about negotiation in A Woman’s Guide to Power Unbound. That sounds like the set up to a weird joke, but it’s for real.

Emily sent me this book, and it was an intriguing and challenging read. I’m still digesting it, honestly, but I appreciate its direct tools and clarity around identifying what you want, and asking for it. And maybe unpacking why you feel like you can’t ask for it.

I’ve been doing this thing where I ask my friends to send me the 10 novels that they love the most (that are not children’s books, because that is a different category of thing). So far, Katherine is the only one to humor me. I highly recommend this prompt/request. Reading a novel that you know is important to someone you know well gives you a whole new lens on that person and on the novel

When I ran across The Heavens, by Sandra Newman, I recognized it from Katherine’s list, and so I picked it up. It’s the story of a woman who is living in New York in 2000, but sometimes she dreams she’s living in 16th century England. And maybe her dreams shift her present reality. I can’t say much more, but it’s a complicated and beautiful book that bends genres and bent my mind.

My sister, Heather, started a tradition several years ago where we each give each other one of our best reads of the previous year as a Christmas gift. It’s a perfect tradition, because we are both good readers, with broad taste. I love it.

This is the book she gave me last year, and it was absolutely amazing. Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi, tells the story of a family from Ghana, where one branch of the family is captured and trafficked into slavery in what becomes the US, and the other branch remains in Ghana. Skipping forward through time, it moves back and forth between the continents, telling a detailed and unflinching history of this family.

For those of you who are patrons of the Massanutten Regional Library, look for this book in the upcoming Big Read!

Diana Black, who played the Librarian in Underneath the Lintel at Silk Moth Stage, lent me The Man Who Planted Trees, a parable of sorts, about a man whose daily labor, one root at a time, created a forest of possibility.

I loved this vision of hopeful work, and the beauty and simplicity of the writing.

My friend Scott manages a book store, and he pulls ARCs that he thinks I’ll enjoy. This one, Murder your Employer, is about sort of a Hogwarts-style school….for murder. It’s a bit of a reverse murder mystery, in that you know exactly “who dunnit,” but the question is whether he’ll actually…do it. Or flunk.

I loved the voice of this book, the world building, and the endless wordplay. It was probably one of the most fun books I’ve read all year, deadly topic not withstanding.

I am so grateful that The Orphanage finally made my kids open to the concept of historical fiction. Or really, any books that don’t have dragons.

I’ve been waiting to read Number the Stars, by Lois Lowry, to them, for ever, because I knew I would be heartbroken if they didn’t love it.

They found it deeply moving and intriguing. When we went to the Holocaust Museum, they identified boats there that were very similar to the ones in the book that smuggled Ellen’s family to safety.

For a long-term project on putting US history in order, I’m reading historical fiction to the kids as part of their school work.

For our study on the American Revolution, we read Chains, by Laurie Halse Anderson. It tells the story of an enslaved girl who lives in New York City, in 1776. So many of the slavery narratives that we have are from the south, in the 19th Century, it’s easy to forget that the contradiction of slavery in a nation founded on the inalienable right to freedom was present from before the beginning, in New York as well as Georgia.

Anderson’s storytelling is powerful, clear, and relentless. Her use of historical documents to frame the chapters never lets us forget that this is all very real.

We’ve kind of had a run of duds with our bedtime reading. One kid or the other will be into whatever it is.

But The Bear and the Nightingale, by Katherine Arden, kept us all riveted. It imagines a Russia where the fairy tales and forest spirits are real, and have real power—which humans ignore or suppress at their peril.

Definitely going to read the sequel to this one.

The kids and I listened to the audiobook (read by Audra McDonald) of Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad. I love that she chose to use iambic pentameter. Her verse is perfection.

Although I was familiar with The Iliad, and certainly read excerpts in school, I hadn’t gone through the whole thing in order.

Things that surprised me:

• The Gods are interfering constantly. Not just in the war, but also in random games.
• It’s really funny, in parts, and graphic in others, and wildly, painfully human.
• There’s a lot more talk about Hecuba’s naked breasts than you might expect.

With our family’s accidental unit study on the Holocaust, I decided to re-read Maus. Our library had a companion to it, Meta Maus, which was about the making of Maus, kind of a “behind the scenes,” if you will. Reading them in tandem gave me a greater appreciation for Maus, which I already thought was a work of great importance.

Also inspired by Silas’ theatrical adventures, I decided to catch up on Alison Bechdel.

I had read Dykes to Watch Out For occasionally in alternative papers in my parents’ friends’ outhouses as a kid. I never really got it, but I was not the target audience, clearly. Reading The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For as an adult was an honestly delightful experience.

I reread Fun Home, and then hit her other two memoirs: Are You My Mother? and The Secret to Super Human Strength. Of all of them, I think I like the last one the best. They are all memoirs of her life, but each told through a different lens, and each with another decade or so of perspective.

I read a lot of comics that made me cry this year, and Solutions and Other Problems, by Allie Brosh, was no exception.

It was also terrifically funny.

Other kids in my elementary school made fun of what was in my lunchbox. Chocolate soy milk. Alfalfa sprouts. Whole wheat bread. Tofu. Yogurt. ETC.

What’s wild is that the same people who made fun of me several decades ago now buy kombucha and hummus at the grocery store.

Where did these foods come from, what did they mean, and how did they make it to the shelf at Food Lion?

Hippie Food, by Jonathan Kauffman, is a journalistic exploration by a fellow “granola Mennonite” of the origins of hippie food and how it has changed the American foodscape.

I love Judi Dench. She can do no wrong. Ever.

I pulled this book off a stack on the counter when I was staying with Katherine and Scott during the Measure remount. It was the perfect snack for after rehearsal; the short chapters are just the right length for a quick read before lights out, and they are just as likely to be a gossipy story about Ian McKellan’s skivvies as they are to be some profound textual insight.

I’ve read a lot of Sue Monk Kidd, and I have no idea how I missed The Secret Life of Bees. I’m so glad I found it in a little free library!

If you also have missed it, please just go read it. It’s beautiful and human and weird and feminist and it has lots of honey.

Real Americans, by Rachel Khong, was an option when I was searching Libby for “Kindle books available now” right before I got on a plane, and so I clicked “borrow.”

It started out like a typical rom com, which was fun and fine, and then they’re married with a baby and I’m only 34% of the way through the book.

WHAT

And then there’s a twist, and it’s just a rollercoaster of ethical dilemmas, science fiction, and mystery.

I have been meaning to read Circe and Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller forever, and Achilles comes first, so when I saw that in my Libby options, I pounced.

Miller has been called our generation’s Mary Renault, and I love her work, ever since I read The King Must Die. It’s an apt comparison.

The prose in Song of Achilles is gorgeous, poetic, and the characters are clear and powerful.

One thing I had wondered about was how she’d handle the death of Patroclus—he’s the perspective character, and he dies before Achilles (this is not a spoiler). I thought she managed it beautifully, and watching her do that was itself a technical pleasure, if that makes sense.