My 2024 Reading Wrap-Up
Fifty favorite reads from the past twelve months
Regan’s newsletter publishes book recommendations on a theme and the occasional essay. Subscribe, and you’ll find 3 new book recs in your inbox every few weeks. Past newsletters have covered the 5+ Club, the Cure for Autofiction, Women in Translation, and more.
Year three! I started this newsletter couple years ago solely to publish my 2022 reading wrap-up after spending weeks consuming year-in-reading content.1 A year later, I published my 2023 year in reading. And starting this May, I began writing and sharing more regular newsletters: reviewing three books tied together with a theme, thinking about author completionism, or paying attention to what people around me are reading. I’ve been looking forward to reflecting on the books I’ve read over the course of this year and, like past years, am only including the books I really enjoyed in this newsletter—just over half of the total books I read in 2024.2 I’d love to hear whether you’ve read any of these, too, and what you thought of them!
I spent the turn of the year with Jessi Jezewska Stevens’ disorienting and captivating second novel The Visitors and story collection Ghost Pains, before an interview with her for the Chicago Review of Books. I sank into classics during what felt like the darkest, longest month of the year: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Sebald’s Vertigo. I coupled Thomas Gardner’s Poverty Creek Journal—a slim, heartbreaking running-log-turned-memoir—with the second of Knausgaard’s My Struggle books.
A literary event in Berlin inspired me to pick up two of Austrian writer Friederike Mayröcker’s (many) books of prose poetry: the enchanting Night Train and as mornings and moss green I. Step to the window (tr. Alexander Booth). I read Christopher Isherwood’s story collection Goodbye to Berlin, too, and enjoyed Austrian writer Maria Lazar’s “rediscovered” 1929 novel Viermal ich before interviewing its publisher.
I leaned toward more contemporary novels as winter turned to spring (although their content can hardly be described as “sunny,” and Hamburg became cold and rainy again after a week of blue sky in early March). I read Kiley Reid’s bold campus novel Come and Get It, Tanya Tagaq’s haunting Split Tooth3, Kayla Mauri’s Mother in the Dark, and Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend. Later, after a few misses, I picked up works by reliable favorite authors: Anita Brookner’s Look at Me; Kazuo Ishiguro’s debut, A Pale View of Hills; and the third in Elena Ferrante’s famed quartet, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. All three equal parts amazing and devastating.
Working in a school meant spring break again, and I tackled Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad (though I have yet to read Life and Fate) alongside Annie Ernaux’s The Years, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch. Pajtim Statovci’s My Cat Yugoslavia (tr. David Hackston), the first book I’ve read by a Finnish writer, surprised me in a wonderful way. Then, with summer around the corner, I leaned into more lighthearted reading and flew through Emily Henry’s Funny Story, Rufi Thorpe’s Margot’s Got Money Troubles, and German writer Caroline Wahl’s 22 Bahnen and Windstärke 17.
Dark Satellites by Clemens Meyer (tr. Katy Derbyshire) set me up for a deep dive into GDR-era German writer Wolfgang Hilbig, whose most recently translated work I reviewed for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Alongside miscellaneous stories and novel excerpts, I read his collections Territories of the Soul/On Intonation (tr. Matthew Spencer), The Sleep of the Righteous, and Under the Neomoon (tr. Isabel Fargo Cole). And at the end of a humid month in the Midwest, I enjoyed the linked story collection Women and Children First by Alina Grabowski.4
I moved back to New York during a very hot August while engrossed in Katya Apekina’s The Deeper the Water, The Uglier the Fish and Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot. I read six novels by women in translation back-to-back for two newsletters; my favorite three were Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days (tr. Susan Bernofsky), Nathacha Appanah’s Tropic of Violence (tr. Geoffrey Strachan), and Mariana Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire (tr. Megan McDowell).
Classics of the fall included Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. I dipped into (and adored) formally experimental nonfiction with Danielle Dutton’s essay/story collection Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other and Heather McCalden’s genius braided memoir The Observable Universe, and I became hooked on contemporary novels about women in STEM—including Chemistry by Weike Wang and Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi.
For the Asymptote Journal blog’s “What’s New in Translation” column this December, I reviewed Liliana Corobca’s Too Great a Sky (tr. Monica Cure)5, A History of the Big House by Charif Majdalani (tr. Ruth Diver), A Season with Marianne by Alain Segura (tr. Anna O’Meara, Sarah Lynne Roberts), and Troll by Johanna Sinisalo (tr. Herbert Lomas). Some more favorites right here at the end of the year have included Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed (I wept) and Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte (I read with my jaw hanging open), and I’m deciding which book to cap off the year with: Esther Kinsky’s Seeing Further? Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd? or Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star? Too many good books to choose from!
Would love to hear about your year in reading—or any goals you’re setting for 2025. Happy holidays,
Regan
I’ve been loving year-in-review pieces by fellow Substack writers this year, too, and if you’re looking for more, I’d recommend…
Laurel at intellectual rigor mortis / A Year of Reading: 2024 in Books
Petya at A Reading Life / Issue 100: On Boredom as Growth
Lindsay Turner at stay you are so fair / Good Books 2024
Jam Canezal at Books Worth Sharing / Annual Book Awards
On The Millions, of course, and LitHub, the NYT, the NYer, and more
I had interviewed Susie Nicklin, the publisher of the Indigo Press, earlier in the spring.
You can read an interview I conducted with Liliana and Monica on the Asymptote blog as well!
Our fall of Anna Karenina 💕
Things We Lost in the Fire mentioned🙂↕️