Reading in 2024

You can see what I read last year—well, most of it—in the header image. I count a total of approximately 48 books. (I don’t think I missed any, but I’m not counting the Dragon Masters books that I read to my son. I am counting the Judy Blume and Roald Dahl books, though, since I actually had fun reading them. Dragon Masters, I mostly just enjoy vicariously through my son’s reactions.)   

For me, the standouts were: 

Nonfiction, Biographical: This one’s a toss-up between Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, which I found a rather moving and troubling look at racial politics in America (and by extension, much of the rest of the English-speaking world), and Peter Pettinger’s Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings, which is a musical biography of a pianist I’ve only just lately started to listen to… but also, to whom I’ve been listening for years already, on that one fateful Miles Davis album that changed all their lives. Bill Evans’ life is depressing and troubling and moving, too. But I think the Coates book might win out. 

Nonfiction, Academic: Here I can’t choose between Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China by Frank Dikotter, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Xun (which is a pretty fascinating exploration mostly of opium use in China and how banning opium was mostly bad for Chinese society, as well as a debunking of Western and modern conceptions of opium, which mostly seem to have developed more out of assumptions based on how we felt about laudanum), and Francis Young’s Twilight of the Godlings (which, though it’s very hard to summarize briefly, debunks a lot of cod-academic explanations of where we got the ideas of fairies, while exploring the diverse sources that contributed to the syncretic, post-Christian creation of faerie lore in Great Britain). 

Nonfiction, Music: Kenny Wheeler’s Effortless Mastery is a very interesting book. It feels a bit like The Inner Game of Music except it’s a little looser and a little more philosophical. It’s a book I need to return to, and of course to listen to the meditation tracks to see what I think of them. 

Nonfiction: Science: Hands down, it was Michael Tunick’s The Science of Cheese. Sure, it was also the only science book I read in 2024 (for shame). But I really enjoyed it, even as dry as it occasionally was. Tunick does a great job making the subject fascinating. 

Graphic Novels: I’ll have to say it was Nijigahara Holograph by Inio Asano. It’s a wild, sprawling, horrific tale that’s worth checking out, especially if, like me, you can get a copy from your local library. (I don’t reread comics, is one reason why I tend not to buy them.)

Novels:  A lot of the novels I read could be in this list. I think the strongest contenders are The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson—hoo boy, it’s a disturbing one—and Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Both novels carry you away into a bizarre, dark structure full of weirdness and haunting evil.

I also really enjoyed the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic. Runners up include Marc Laidlaw’s Underneath the Oversea and Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s The Centre, which are, ha, each of which is an odyssey into a world turned upside down in an instant. 

Novellas: Hands-down, my favorite of the year was The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed. What a horrifying little fairytale it is. Read it. 

Short Fiction: I didn’t read all that much of it in book form—more on online webzines—so I guess my answer here is a toss-up between C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry, which is a wonderfully self-contained collection of stories about a brilliant and tough warrior woman,  and  Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, which definitely is a great setup for the setting, but isn’t as good as the later books in the series. Oh, and of course there’sFritz Leiber’s Swords Against Wizardry (though I guess that’s a novel), The Swords of Lankhmar, and Swords and Ice Magic, though honestly the second half of this series has been less of a pleasure than the first three books were. 

(Grey Mouser’s skeeviness and Leiber’s “dirty old man” routine are increasingly becoming a turnoff as these aspects of the series come to the fore in the later volumes. I’m still putting off reading the last volume, because I hear it’s even more like that.)

Poetry: Medrie Purdham’s Little Housewolf. Yes, I read the Iliad in 2024 too, but I honestly didn’t enjoy it as much as I did Medrie’s book. Maybe that’s partly down to knowing Medrie personally, but I don’t think so. It’s a really good collection with some stunning verse in it. 

Sidenote: I can see why the Iliad is a huge classic, but I prefer the Odyssey. 

RPG Books: Hands down, Jesse Ross’s Trophy Dark was the most interesting and enjoyable RPG book I read this year. The system is unlike anything I’ve ever run before, and I had a great experience running it, but I want to highlight here that I also just plain enjoyed reading the book… despite forgetting to include it in my November-December readings list. It’s a very well-written game, full of flavor and with every line of text meaningful, in the right place, and necessary for the reader’s understanding of the game. The economy of Ross’s writing is enviable, and that is from where it derives its power. 

I’d also say Trophy Dark was also the most different  game I’ve played (well, run) this year. It’s a unique game and I am looking forward to reading and running a few Trophy Gold adventures soon. (Very soon, actually!)

Beyond all of that, I want to mention that I’m still part of that book club I joined last year. We’re only semi-active, in part because of schedules and in part because we’ve kind of had a challenging run of books. Challenging as in, twice in a row the author of a book we were reading was outed as a horrible, disgusting, rotten person. You’ll notice that several covers in the header image above do not show book covers: there’s three, but they involve two authors. For a while there I was worried to choose another book, because it felt like—as if by clockwork—the next book’s author also would be outed as a scumbag, too. That didn’t happen in the end, but it was the start of a disturbing pattern that, happily, ended after a run of just two authors. 

Anyway, I hope we manage to meet a little more often this year, even if I’m keeping my hope modest.