According to Goodreads, I read 46 books in 2024.
There is an asterisk to that number (46) but we’ll get to that.
I haven’t posted a “year in reading” since my recap of 2021. Reviewing a year of reading feels different than reviewing music or movies. Those mediums, for whatever reason, demand lists. People, it seems, love lists and, more importantly, love to bicker. It’s all fine. It’s part of being human. If we didn’t have tastes, we would just be surviving, not living. It’s fine to just survive too, by the way. Writing and reading help us both survive and live.
Anyway.
It's fun to see what books found us throughout the year. They don’t always have to be recent releases, although I probably read more books released in the current year than I often do.
Highlights from books released in 2024 include:
Teju Cole - Tremor (Doesn’t match Open City but still explores weighty issues that I wrote about here)
Eliza Barry Callahan - The Hearing Test (b/w Jellyfish Have No Ears by Adele Rosenfeld - both novels explore the loss of hearing, a topic of interest since I get frequent earwax buildups - which are (fortunately) easily slurped out by the tools at the ENT)
Vi Khi Nao - The Italy Letters (The most accessible of her works I’ve probably read so far)
Jesse Ball - The Repeat Room (Eerie October reading - one of my favorite writers and consistent as ever)
Douglas Penick - The Oceans of Cruelty (A re-imagining of a myth that I knew absolutely nothing about - like an Indian tale of Sisyphus)
Ed Steed - Forces of Nature (modern Far Side comics - all killer)
From this year and others, I read a lot of books set in Chicago or by Chicagoans (past and present).
Nelson Algren – The Neon Wilderness
Mariame Kaba and Essence McDowell - Lifting As They Climbed
Kevin Kilroy – The Escapees
Stuart Ross – The Hotel Egypt
Paul Hoover – Saigon, Illinois
Toya Wolfe – Last Summer on State Street
Marguerite L Harrod – Chicago House Music
Jose Olivarez – Promises of Gold
Gregory Pratt - The City is Up For Grabs
My Goodreads also includes a 600+ page collection of stories by Clarice Lispector, which I received as a gift in 2021 and have savored slowly, glacially over three years, never wanting it to end (thus, the asterisk to the number of books).
My reading isn’t always the most conscious. Sometimes I sit with a pencil while I consume these works. Sometimes I glide through the stories so fast the book is over when it was just getting good. Sometimes I forget what a book is about a week after reading it. Sometimes I read in the morning, sometimes before bed, rarely in the afternoon.
Beans frequently purrs on my lap while I read.
My Goodreads doesn’t include Jacobin or the Reader or New City or the random zines and lit journals I found at Quimbys (which somebody needs to save by the way!). It doesn’t include books translated to a visual medium like two movies I saw at the Chicago International Film Festival: The Spook Who Sat By the Door (a book I’ve read) or Harvest (a book I have not).
I read books filled with music: Jarvis Cocker – Good Pop, Bad Pop, one of the best books of any genre I read this year.
Lol Tolhurst - Goth: A History and Thurston Moore – Sonic Life were both OK and probably only necessary reads for huge Cure and Sonic Youth fans.
Richard Hell’s What Just Happened stuck with me too, a perfect gloomy March read. Oil Spill by John Hoffman (of Weekend Nachos) sits patiently on my shelf (I should have bought it in October).
William Burroughs’ My Education and David Lynch’s Room to Dream are two other books by Important White Men (I enjoyed both, Burroughs more).
The “year in reading” also includes things that aren’t reading. A “year in books” seems more appropriate. A year in the written word and all that surrounds it. The experiences, the geography around the city. Where I found books and where I read them.
I went to a few different bookstores. I bought books by Zito Madu and Diego Baez at Madison Street Books; plays by Sarah Ruhl and Wallace Shawn at the Understudy; at City Lit, I bought CT Salazar’s Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking, which you’ve probably seen this poem floating around the Internet. I went to Passages, the new bookstore and wine shop on Chicago Avenue. I continued lamenting about Read/Write and Space Oddities closing – and the lack of literary vibe in my neighborhood (despite the ghost of Saul Bellow hanging out down the street).
Note: Jesse Ball wrote a large portion of The Repeat Room at Café Marie Jeanne (rest in peace).
At one point, I wrote on this website about the joys of bookstore wandering (I’ve only read three of the five books I bought that day – still waiting for the right time).
I went to Printers Row Lit Fest and talked with authors and publishers.
I read on the bus and train but sometimes the ride is so short I’d rather just look out the window or people-watch, storytelling and character development in its own right.
I’ve read in some bars and once at the beach.
I read Fernando Pessoa’s A Very Original Dinner in one sitting along the Riverwalk before meeting a friend for drinks and dinner in the Loop (since you asked: Sky Ride Tap, Miller’s Pub, and Italian Village, capped with karaoke at Brando’s Speakeasy)
I didn’t go to as many readings as I wanted to. Maybe that can be a goal for 2025. There is so much happening around the city: Tuesday Funk, Test Literary Series, Read Some Shit, Brighton Park Poets, Raging Possum Press, etc. and I should be more active. Who knows, maybe I’ll even get back out to doing a live reading.
Friends traveled to South Korea and brought back an incense stick that is supposed to smell like old books (it has a sweet yet lemony smell).
In virtual geography, I got rid of Twitter and adopted Bluesky, tried to start following more writers there, re-curating my feed to be more literary. I’m planning on ditching Goodreads for Storygraph.
I’m in a group chat called The Indelibles. I forget why we christened our chat as such, but we send each other pictures of pages in books with that word.
Looking ahead? I got books by Rachel Kushner, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and John Cooper Clark for Christmas. I anticipate those being early 2025 reads. I bought a few books that are en route from Two Dollar Radio during their Santa Fucked Up Sale. I have a few I recently purchased from NYRB. Maybe I’ll restart my Haymarket membership after being pissed off at Trump come January 20th (for now, I have a few of their previous books on the way).
I have a few random books I’ve bought online because the cover looks cool.
I saw a Bluesky post of someone wanting to open a new bookstore in Chicago so that might be something to explore.
Mostly, I want to continue to find connections in the unexpected. A recent example:
In 1963, Laurens Van Der Post published the book the Seed and the Sower, three novellas that depict the author’s experience in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in World War II. This inspired the film Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence by Nagisa Oshima. I watched that movie on Christmas day (spoiler: decidedly not a Christmas movie). In addition to David Bowie, Tom Conti, and Takeshi Kitano, the movie starred Ryuichi Sakamoto, who scored the film as well. Going down a Spotify rabbithole, I found a playlist that included the title-composition along with other beautiful piano works, including a piece by Erik Satie. The same day after listening to a portion of this playlist, I went to the Art Institute - I was invited by friends who wanted to see another Japanese masterpiece: Katsushika Hokusai’s “Under the Wave off Kanagawa”, or, The Great Wave. Wandering around the rest of the museum, in the Impressionist galleries, I expected to revisit an old friend, “At The Moulin Rouge”, by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. That painting is on loan to another museum and I was instead greeted with the tall portrait of a man, painted by Ramon Casas. The subject in question was Erik Satie.
This would have been interesting enough, but a certain gravity had taken hold of event, considering how I hadn’t listened to Satie in some time, but had been re-introduced that same morning, his melancholy piano piece the perfect accompaniment to the gloomy December weather.
These connections are all around us, and if nothing else, a year in reading is complete when the dots of the seemingly arbitrary join together, finding there place in each of our infinite worlds as more than just words on a page.