The Year In Books
2024 Syllabus
Book lists: 2023/2022/2021/2020
Peace and love to you all.
Once again I start at the “why?”
This yearly exercise of recounting the past — I know I have come to this same juncture before. All I need to do is go back to past year-end musings.
So what do we do it all for? I’m not talking about the meaning of it all. Boring. Why talk about what we watched or what we read at all? Like consuming is some all-knowing, righteous act. To better ourselves? Or to fill the big super-unknown of time and space? To enlighten the uninitiated — the non-seekers? Or to signal our learnedness and breezy intelligence? Maybe a smattering of each. The latter if we are keeping it fully one hundred.
Maybe the point is to fill our lives with beauty. Babies. Puppies. Flowers. Sunrise. Sunset. Poetry and literature. And to encourage the next generation to fall in love with beauty and to make art of their own. And the wheel goes round and round. Maybe. Just maybe.
I remember reading Paterson at the beach in Cape May this summer. It felt wildly out of place, and I found it incredibly hard to follow.
Ask The Dust went quickly, likely how Fante intdended. Maybe a few hours sitting in my chair next to my reading lamp. I drank maybe two bottles of wine during that sitting. I probably should have read this one when I was Nineteen.
Couples by John Updike blew me away. I started it, and read a good chunk after a day of Skiing at Hunter Mountain in New York. Legs jellied, laid up on the bed of a nice hotel room as I watched the day fade away into night while big, chunky snowflakes fell inaudibly outside.
I recounted my experience with reading The Turn of The Screw in Naples, Florida in this post.
I hated Intermezzo.
Death of the Black Haired Girl appeared to me at Sheafe Street Books in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I have bought multiple Robert Stone Books at this used shop — and each time I do the owner and I have a nice little conversation. I look forward to my next trip.
Molly by Blake Butler was easily the most bleak book I have ever read. Passages were shared multiple times in texts back and forth with friends. Equally gutted. Not for the faint of heart.
Heat 2 is going to be a great movie.
More Stephen King in 2025. This was a down King year. Regrettably.
The Lead singer of Thursday wrote a visceral recovery novel titled Someone Who Isn’t Me — I remember telling a lot of people to read that one.
I will be writing more, and making physical copies of a new poetry collection this year.
I gave a ton of books out this year. I buy books to read them and hopefully give them to someone who lingers longer than usual at a book shelf in my home, or genuinely asks me what they should be reading next. This brings me joy and I hope to do more of giving in the future. Presents are for children. I want to live in a world where adults are passing books back and forth, tattered and beaten — and talking about something that made them feel.
Beautiful, buddy. Thanks for the recs!
Great list and thanks for sharing your book perspectives !