I read the entirety of The Violent Bear It Away and there wasnât one bear. I do not accept as excuse that âit awayâ either. Meanwhile, Wise Blood had several bears! Advantage: Wise Blood.
the *Wise Blood * movie is good
iâm gonna take a break from reading for the month of december, so iâm essentially done reading for the year. i read 60 books on the dot, which i think is about how many i read last year. part of me wants to inch closer to 100 in 2025, the other part of me wants to halve this number or more just to see what my life would be like. how many more new and exciting ways would i find to be lazy?
i have an annoying, contrived, and pretentious way of rating books in that:
- 0 stars is not recommended
- 1 star is recommended â
- 2 stars is strongly recommended â â
- 3 stars is âsignficantâ â â â
- 4 stars is âmasterpieceâ â â â â
so with that in mind, here are the 4 and 3 star books i read in 2024. iâll start with the 4 star masterpieces, arranged by date of reading
Masterpiece â â â â
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
this was the first mishima book i ever read many, many years ago. i wanted to reread it in preparation for visiting the mishima museum, something i would do a few months later. the first time i read it, itâs hard to say i felt anything beyond âwoah crazy.â this time around, i was able to appreciate sailor as a work of art. this isnât to say itâs not shocking, which it certainly is, but i could better see the ends mishima is approaching with his transgressive means, the questions that arise by way of his framing. as with most things that appear uber-somber at first, i was also able to see how funny the book was. a group of suburban teenage boys who speak in aphorisms about chaos and want revenge against a momâs new boyfriend? come on! thatâs hilarious. what makes the book genius, though, is what makes all of mishima genius: he dares you to take things seriously.
Poor People
this was the first vollmann book iâve read despite him in my aura for the last 15 years or so. this is a book of his reportage, the conceit being vollmann travels the world talking to the poorest people. âamerica poor,â yes, but also the type of poverty that only exists in regions of africa, china, and the subcontinent that most of us have never heard of and fewer will ever go. vollmann attempted honesty here, so while there is no sentimentality, there is also no judgement. this can make it maybe uncomfortable if youâre hoping for the author to be a moral guide, but i would call this book essential for understanding how people live (or rather, how our economic order forces people to live).
All the Lovers in the Night
kawakami continues to impress. all the lovers is similar to heaven in that she finds an interesting character angle and drills into it beyond the point most others would stop, leading the novel into dark and murky territory before arriving at a rare and organic beauty. instead of bullying, this book is about an alcoholic woman who has no meaning in her life. she always leaves me a little shaken. i hope to reread this in the short term.
Nietzche and Philosophy
the first deleuze book iâve ever read. hopefully not the last, but i did find this book considerably harder to work through than the âprimary text.â however, that work did pay off in dividends in appreciating my friend fred. looking at my notes, i most appreciated deleuzeâs expounding on memory being a function of the future, nietzcheâs distrust of the dialectic, âthe yes of the ass,â the evil of historyâŚ
We have proceeded as if culture goes straight from pre-history to post-history. We have seen it as a species activity which, through the long labour of pre-history, arrives at the individual as its post-historic product. And indeed, this is its essence, in conformity to the superiority of active forces over reactive forces. But we have neglected an important point: the triumph, in fact, of inferior and reactive forces. We have neglected history. We must say of culture both that it disappeared long ago and that it has not yet begun. Species activity disappears into the night of the past as its product does into the night of the future. In history culture takes on a sense which is very different from is own essence, having been seized by strange forces of a completely different nature. Species activity in history is inseparable from a movement which perverts it and its product. Furthermore, history is this very perversion, its identical to the " degeneration of culture. "Instead of species activity, history presents us with races, peoples, classes, Churches and States. Onto species activity are grafted social organizations, associations, communities of a reactive character, parasites which cover it over and absorb it.
The Remains of the Day
a beautiful, elegiac book about a butler looking back on his life caught in history. this was very much âgood fictionâ of the james wood variety, which is to say it was masterfully craftedâfilled with ironies and narrative techniques that made the book singâyet there was still some red blood flowing through the pages that separated it from a machine. one of the things that always surprises me when reading a deserving âblockbusterâ book like this is how intimate and even cloistered it can seem. wonderful stuff.
Motley Stones
for a long time, the english speaking world only had the rock crystal, a charming and mercurial little fable as beguiling as it is breezy. rock crystal is in this collection too, along with a host of other stories that are equally lovely, some about priests and landscape surveyors, others about house fires. there is a 19th century innocence to stifterâs writing, but there is also a sweeping grandeur when he writes about nature that is swiftly followed by a darkness, as if he wanted to write these mannered closet drama but knew his characters existed in an unpredictable and violent world.
The Lord Chandos Letter
hereâs what i said about this book earlier:
the only thing iâll add to this is there was something really sinister lurking underneath this book. i am tempted to call it horror.
Scandal
can the tortured christian author of silence write a metafictional, psychosexual thriller that rivals the surrealism of kobo abe while still retaining the questions of faith and existence of a soul central to his work? i doubted it before reading this book, but i was surprised at how well it worked.
Self-Portraits
The Setting Sun
Flowers of Buffoonery
i read no longer human a while ago and didnât think much of it. i read self-portraits on a whim this year and was blown away, quickly reading the other two books on this list. each of them was a searing masterpiece of loathing, hatred, longing, love, beauty, effacement, awareness, striving, knowing, forgetting, virtue, sin, misery, boredom, death. just knockouts all around. i feel an allegiance with authors like dazai as much as i feel the retroactive urge to protect them. maybe something going on with me internally there, but the books still stand on their own two feet!
Techgnosis
a history of technology overlayed on a history of religion and metaphysics. i canât think of a book better suited to our current moment, especially when trying to determine what it means to be human when living in silicon valleyâs shadow. davis is such a generous tour guide, too. naturally curious and erudite. as enthusiastic as he is critical. this book is a bit of a skeleton key, a scholarâs response to the similarities between demonic sigils and circuit boards.
Psychopolitics
i read han for the first time this year and found a lot to love, despite tombo and i drawing swords over it. han writes continental philosophy in the truest sense, in that his arguments are better read and understood as art than as something with analytic proofs. there isnât much rigor here in terms of scholarship and sourcing, but if youâre willing to buy what han is selling (like i was), there is a lot of illumination, poetry, and solace here.
The Selected Poems of Tu Fu
this reached through time. a failing scholar living in poverty and fleeing a civil war, tu fu wrote poems based on what he felt and what he saw compressed into potent and fleeting forms. loneliness, acceptance, despair, hope, witness, shunning, nature, culture, family, lineage, history, death. poems so good i did not even care to wonder about the translation.
The Wolves of Eternity
The Third Realm
books 2 and 3 of knausgaardâs yet to be finished fictional series, centered around the conceit of a morningstar appearing in the sky that raises the dead and prevents anyone from dying. unlike my struggle, he focuses purely on the other here, meaning there is a very wide cast of characters spanning age, gender, class, and nationality. he still brings his singular focus to each character, just as he brings his strange kinda naivety. the best analogy i can conjure is these books made me feel the way âthree chrods and the truthâ songwriters do when they still manage to create art of staggering depth and complexity. he is my goat!!
The End of Eden
i read quite a few âclimateâ books this year and this one was the best of them, solely because of the attention it gave to animals. there was an extended chapter on puerto rican parrots that hasnât left my mind since i read it and has changed the way i look at my own life. i donât know why. i love animals and hate what we are doing to them. this book unlike any other iâve read captures the whole of our destruction. god.
Sad Planets
a thick book of micro-essays, all essentially rooted in the question of âhow do we live with the sadness of climate change,â but each ranging from textual interpretations of hong kong cinema, obscure sci-fi, medieval monks, geology, dust, emil cioran, music, moons, water, evolution, sex, everything else. a potpourri of topics. the tone was wry and irreverent, frequently funny, often profound. very sad and panoptic.
Significant â â â
Our Mutual Friend
the first dickens i ever read. it was funny, both smart and stupid. the âcharactersâ of dickens were close to what i expected in that they were cartoons that felt real. this book was concerned with âmoneyâ and âclass,â in a dedicated way, so that was cool to read. i donât know. itâs dickens. iâd read more.
Molly
i donât really like blake butler that much as a writer, i read this mostly because the subject matter was too hard to ignore. itâs a memoir about his wife who killed herself, then when going through her things afterward, he found she had multiple strange affairs over the years. thereâs been some âdramaâ about whose story this is to tell since the book came out, but i do find questions like that morally and artistically interesting, and this doesnât change the fact that this book was a brave and vulnerable thing to write.
Carbon Ideologies
long-winded and sometimes annoying, these two books are still the best answer iâve found to just how deep-rooted our âcarbon ideologiesâ are and the work involved were we to ever excavate them from our economic system. itâs hard to say there is anything optimistic about what vollmann writes here, but still an indispensable resource for understanding the scope of the problem. be forewarned that once you take on that scope, it is hard to view any talk of âclimate solutionsâ with anything but disdain.
The Waves
on surface, there is nothing that draws me to woolf in terms of subject matter, approach, background, etc. but my god she is a monster writer. iâm in awe whenever i read her, even if there is a cold gulf between us.
If We Burn
bevins is beast. this and the jakarta method would be the two books iâd recommend for anyone trying to understand our global political moment, jakarta method for the last 50 years, if we burn for the last ten. if everything sucks so much and everyone is so miserable, why donât things change? this book is not a full answer, but it does bring you a lot closer to understanding.
Eye of the Chickenhawk
probably the most sober and realistic paranoid schizo book iâve read (not to say it isnât schizo). it largely refrains from arguing a thesis, instead laying together a series of documented connections, incidents and evidence of a sexual blackmail ring. where i differ from a lot of people in that sphere is i donât think the existence of such things âexplains everything,â but it does explain some things, both about power and about how cruel life can be to the vulnerable.
Little Snow Landscape
more walser, but there can never be enough. i think sebald said it best that walser wrote ephemeral little pieces that disappear as soon as you finish reading them. light and playful, but so real they dip into melancholy. in my pantheon.
The Life of Tu Fu
elliot weinberger wrote a biography of tu fu in the style of poems by tu fu. that conceit alone is enough for me to love the book, but this book ended up being quite wonderful, too.
The Uninhabitable Earth
somehow more florid than vollmann. focuses solely on humans. thereâs a tension where it tries to be too pragmatic and optimistic for itâs own good, but it is noble in the terror it tries to invoke. like the other climate books iâve read, they all seem to be aware of what actually must be done but are all too afraid to say it.
Annotations
this book demands your attention. a novel for the poets, one of those âhyper geniusâ books full of reference and joycean tricks that are impressive but only work for me in small doses. this book was just the right amount of dose. john keene is a treasure. this is ostensibly about growing up in st. louis, but ends up being about everything else. race, gender, sexuality, you name it.
as always, thanks for indulging me! this was a fun excerise in seeing how much i could remember about each book.
This thing sucked me in and spit me out, was always curious what happened to the PFLP during the 80s and now I know. Would recommend to anyone interested in real existing Palestinian resistance from the underground, also the dudes just really good at transferring his feelings of paranoia/craziness of isolation into words
Do you often not read in December, or is it just something youâre doing this year? I always find the winter months to be my favourite time to read, particularly since the early darkness means thereâs little distraction (and little else to do.) I am also thinking about slowing my pace for next year, particularly by having less books on the go at one time (I often have 6-7 books on my side table), which I realized was pulling my attention in too many different directions. It kinda worked when I had a lot less going on in my life, but now it just makes me a little crazy.
We seem to read at a similar pace, as I am just approaching 60 books for the year.
At the end of the month, perhaps I will discuss some of my favourite books I read this year! Stay tuned!
just something this yearâthereâs a few writing projects i want to finish (or at least attempt to finish), and i think i often use reading as âproductive procrastination,â so iâm trying to see what itâs like when iâm not doing that. it does get darker earlier here in the desert, but otherwise there isnât the cozy winter feeling that is good for reading.
looking forward to your wrap-up!
Techgnosis sounds like exactly the book Iâve been searching for. Thank you!
Dom Casmurro just not good enoughâŚ.
that got two stars from me
I started reading this I like it so far. Reminds me a little of The Ruined Map
As for 2024 reading I didnât really come across anything super astonishing other than I guess Tadeys which took a ton of time of psychic energy to get through. A dense and difficult book in general and I think itâs reputation as being real nasty is accurate. Donât run across that stomach dropping feeling too often. I suppose that experience is why I did a fair amount of re-reading and circling back to more minor novels by favorite writers. I think I probably spent the most book time translating Arlt come to think of it.
Now thereâs a book i gotta reread.
Would be interested in hearing more about Tadeys considering itâs a book i likely wonât read anytime soon (or ever barring translation)
itâs a description of a fictional central European country called Comarca that focuses on a couple of loose narratives following a family of local rubes and the local mengele, and with long expository sections covering history and socioeconomic dynamics. Whatâs distinct about Comarca is that these socioeconomics are based on the chattel-industrial exploitation of humanoids called âtadeysâ that are I guess a different species but thatâs unclear. Whatever the case, the text is like wall to wall de Sadean cruelty. It has a similar narrative tone where the author-narrator comes across as like an evil person. But unlike de Sade, this is a knowing satire so itâs a coherent pitch-black send up of a state built entirely on pathology and insecurity and how the resultant insane cruelty is visited on pretty much everyone all the time. But itâs an interesting and unsettling choice for the narrator to be such an asshole because like a Ballardian clinical tone would have actually been a relief; instead it elects to go with that de Sade queasiness. The closest comparisons outside of MdS would be those chapman bros âHellâ dioramas and could also describe it as several hundred pages of Blasted
Wow, I hadnât heard of this before. Amazing stuff. So this is the art worlds answer to the brothers chaps
anyone take a look at âThe Waste-Landâ lately? Kind of lame if Iâm honest
T.S. Eliot is a real weirdo (derogatory).
ts eliot is indeed a weirdo, but i really like some of his poems, particularly the love song one. the wasteland doesnât really do it for me, but thatâs common for more modernist stuff. i can appreciate what itâs doing. âapril is the cruelest monthâ because things are coming back to life? yeah i can vibe with that.
I, too, have measured my life out with coffee spoons. Itâs just wild to me that he was an absolutely true believer when it came to British monarchy.
honestly, iâd be disappointed if he wasnât
he wasnât going to hack it in missouri