2024 Book Breakdown

I read a cool 48 books in 2024. This was a very interesting year for me, where I went from unemployment, to over-employment, to the beginning of a graduate degree. Where reading went from difficult, to exhilarating, to shameful, to nourishing.

Listen while you read:

I won’t go into all 48 of my reads (primarily because they’re embarrassing at times and boring at others), but I started the year with Red Dragon by Thomas Harris.

Thus began my Libby fanaticism. There is no greater motivator in my life than an impending deadline. Getting ebooks on loan from the Calgary Public Library has revolutionized my reading routine. Red Dragon foreshadowed my year of reading, sharing in the motifs of empathy, isolation, and the drive to devour.

My next highlight was Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World by Emma Marris.

I’ve read a lot of non-fiction ecology and environment writing, but few works in the genre achieve what feels like a productive dialogue between the human and non-human. Marris’ prose is educational and entertaining without falling into the strange tendency of this genre to self-insert and devote precious page space to describing the members of the scientific boys’ club they belong to. I appreciated Marris’ ideas on environmental stewardship and responsibility. I also thought she did an excellent job choosing case studies that were novel to the space and sticking with the stories past their digestible endpoints.

Back into the thriller/fiction genre, we have Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin.

I was blown away by this novel when I read it in March. Felker-Martin builds a very believable post-apocalyptic Maryland and fills it with feelings of nuance and nostalgia that feel remarkably dimensional for a splatterpunk piece. Manhunt is grotesque and brutal and feels like a realistic portrayal of how people are shitty and do shitty things to people that they love. It’s nauseating and heartbreaking and full of love and yearning and humanity. While I don’t support much of Felker-Martin’s online behaviour, Manhunt is a story that will stick with me for years.

Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World was a surprise hit.

This was an effortless single-day read. Labatut’s prose matches the pace of a racing mind on the path to a great discovery. I also read Labatut’s later work The Maniac, which I enjoyed slightly less than this one but would still recommend in an instant. I think Labatut’s writing is very singular in the historical fiction genre. He makes great efforts to humanize the characters of his novels, rather than relying on their actual real-life humanness to do that work for him. I enjoy the grounding in science, namely chemistry and physics in both of these books. I am an enjoyer of non-fiction scientific memoirs, and Labatut’s work feels like the fiction side of that same coin.

For my first foray into Ursula K. Le Guin’s bibliography, I read The Lathe of Heaven.

This book was lent to me by my dear friend Ryann. After reading this standalone novel, I’ve decided that I must read the Earthsea series. Le Guin’s worldbuilding is masterfully minimal. She allows the world to unfold itself rather than spending time describing every detail. I feel that this makes the many twists and turns of the story all the more exciting, as they force the reader to challenge the assumptions they passed on the world within the text. I got through this book in a breeze and felt enthralled by Le Guin’s writing, which felt simultaneously deeply familiar to me and reminiscent of the writing I aspire toward. I look forward to reading more of her work.

Now for the last book on our list, which is also the first book I’ve ever special ordered from Shelf Life Books: Negative Space by B. R. Yeager.

I recently watched a video essay about the literary concepts of cosmic horror and bliss. Learning this language has enabled me to describe what this novel made me feel. Negative Space follows the story of teens who explore the limits of their reality using mind-altering substances and meta-physical rituals. It follows largely unsympathetic characters and illustrates how contemporary youths might respond to world-breaking discoveries of deity and mysticism (which was largely as though they were reacting to peeling wallpaper, rather than paradigm dismemberment). This book is bleak and visceral and a brilliant read to accompany my winter-induced seasonal depression.

Quick honorable mention to Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez which I think I started in 2023? When I’m excited about a book, it will take me 3 years to read it and that’s the simple truth.

I hope you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing below if you’d like to keep posted on what I’m reading and thinking and feeling as of late.