Books of 2024

Because it is new year’s and because I am having a lazy day with Joe, hanging around the house and eating jammy eggs, I decided to write a little reflection on the last year in reading.  This is specifically about books I read outside of work, though I also read a lot of nonfiction connected to various assignments that I won’t get into (lots of it interesting and some less so). I got inspired by Sophie’s year in books. 

I began last year reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s collection “Rogues,” which I read all in one day, curled up in bed after going to Coney Island with Mara to jump in the ocean. “Rogues” is made up of profiles about criminals and the reporting is supreme. I kept finding myself pausing on details and wondering how he could have possibly obtained them, x-raying the paragraphs and then cleaving apart sentences surgically, what the best reporting makes you want to do. There were also these two profiles in the book — one of Anthony Bourdain and one of Judy Clarke, the death row lawyer — that I kept returning to in my mind all year because they were stories of people avidly and almost ludicrously devoted to the kind of work that turns your life inside out. 

I spent the next two weeks of January reading Mary McCarthy’s “The Group,” preparing for book club. I loved that it was a book of character study and ideas (psychoanalysis, communism) but also of aesthetics and social scenes. I kept thinking about the meals in that book. Tables full of jello and meats. A perfect book to discuss in a group, which we did at our book club, drinking wine and eating Charlotte’s perfect kale salad that I am always wanting to replicate.

A funny conversation with a coworker, standing outside the office in Times Square in the cold one evening, led to me picking up “Demon Copperhead,” which I loved and then foisted on as many people as I could. We went to Atlantic City for Kristi and Lily’s birthday and on the way home, on a Greyhound Bus, I read “Write Like a Man,” Ronnie Grinberg’s book about the New York intellectuals. It was sort of another book about ideas and scenes, all these men who in writing as in life were in love with the scale of their own eminence. I sent pictures of certain paragraphs to Marc with exclamation points and then talked about it on a walk with Rachel in Prospect Park. Then I read “We Burn Daylight,” which Conor recommended, and which I found propulsive, cinematic.

In March, Joe and I went to Big Sur for the most perfect few days of driving on Highway 1, hiking in the rain, napping under heavy quilts, and laughing over big, rich dinners. On the plane ride there, I started a biography of Jerry Garcia, called “Garcia,” by Blair Jackson. I didn’t expect to love it as much as I did. The book did what the best biographies can, which was not only to give a sense of Jerry — creatively genius, magnetic, of course awfully flawed and unsaintly — but also of the way the music shaped the 1960s and vice versa. It gave me a new appreciation for all the longing and the desire and the dashed hopes in songs I’ve sometimes absorbed only passively. How “New Speedway Boogie” captured this darkness bursting forward after Altamont. How “Uncle John’s Band” reminded people of the tenderness on the flipside of that rupture. 

After we spent those magical nights in Big Sur came April, and we went to Chicago for Alex and Abby’s wedding. I walked around with Coby and it was unseasonably warm. I ran 12 miles along the lake and Joe bought a new brown suit. Meanwhile I was reading “All Things Are Too Small,” by Becca Rothfeld, whose writing I always find sharp and surprising. I especially loved her essay on waiting, on its femininity. May was full of more weddings — Joe and I spent a beautiful weekend in Long Island with his family, then we went to this lush, drizzly farm in upstate New York for Lindsay and Max — and I was reading “The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.” I loved it for its exuberance. The whole thing felt like a yelp and a romp, like you could imagine yourself on that bus with the Merry Pranksters and simultaneously might wonder whether even the experience of reading the book was a dream. Afterward, craving more Tom Wolfe, I read “The Right Stuff.” 

In June, going west to the Sphere with Kristi, Lily and Sophie, I read Martin Amis’s “Money.” I loved the book for many reasons — another book of exuberance, another I marked up by underlining paragraphs that made me laugh — but also for its perfect capturing of New York. The excess and the spaces that somehow sit right on the line between glamour and grit. 

Summer was filled with more trips, many of them for work. On my way to Israel, I read “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” which I found staggering. The way the book used one traffic accident, one horrific day, to narrate decades of history and illuminate the political choices that made so many lives unlivable. Flying back and forth to Kentucky, for a different story, I read “Didion & Babitz,” which I found delightful, like eavesdropping on an extended conversation about women I only sort of know but live in thrall of. Sitting in my backyard surrounded by firefly light shows, I read another decadent New York book, “Let the Great World Spin.” There were so many moments that shattered me: Adelita and Corrigan’s bruised, bruising love, all these decrepit apartments filled with people defiant in the face of a city that doesn’t care. 

Joe and I took an idyllic vacation to Maine. We listened to the Beatles and ate too much lobster, so much that we joked afterward we were going on a lobster cleanse. Every afternoon, when we came back from hiking, we sat on the balcony outside our room and looked out over the surreal blue of the Acadia Bay, often drinking big blueberry cocktails that the innkeeper made us. I read “Tablets Shattered,” by my friend Josh, which I thought captured so perfectly the netherland of young Jews who don’t hold on to religious observance, distance themselves from Zionism and then are left with little more than bagels. (The ideal book to read in a week brimming with shellfish.)

Fall was the season when I read all my favorite books. Thinking back to the trip Joe and I took to Paris last summer, when I read Ernest Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast,” I decided to reread “The Sun Also Rises.” I picked up a copy while at the Book Culture on the Upper West Side with Coby, some afternoon around the high holidays when we kept bumping into neighbors on the street. One of our favorite ways to spend an hour is wandering through the stacks upstairs, making piles of books we want to read and then winnowing them down to a purchasable quantity. Coby was reading biographies from the Revolutionary War era. There is nobody whose taste in books I trust more, and he helped me make my stack. I hadn’t read “The Sun Also Rises” since high school and I was completely consumed by it, as charmed by Lady Brett as all those moping men around her. It made me want to go on a trip through Spain and drink wine in the daytime like Hemingway’s characters are always doing. 

Late in September, I flew to Utah and spent three days camping in a canyon. I read “Monkey Grip,” dazzled by its descriptions of parties and junkies and sappy, pulsating love that builds and then breaks. In the Uber ride from the airport, after landing on a Monday night, I talked to Sophie about “Health and Safety,” by Emily Witt, and then read that too. The sentences were such precise renderings of the type of slippery moments that can be difficult to translate into prose: 2 a.m. on a dance floor, or 5 a.m. on the street when the only people awake are the rave-goers still high on acid and the early bird shift workers passing one another as though in parallel worlds. I kept rereading the ways that Witt talked about reporting, with such barbed critique, and I sent voice memos mulling it over to Jonah, who had read and liked the book too. 

In October, more long days of sunshine. Gina got engaged and we surprised her with a party. Ally got married under orange leaves in Baltimore and I cried through her and Bryan’s vows. I read “Intermezzo” in preparation for a book club with Gina, Jenny, Lara and our whole reincarnated book club from post-college New York. I found the book shockingly tender and cried more, all through the last third of the book. I found myself defending it vigorously, because most of our book club found it depressing and dull. 

I wanted to pick three perfect books for my trip to France in November and I found them. First, on the plane ride, I read Laurie Colwin’s “Happy All the Time,” which might have been one of my favorite books ever. I copied over dozens of sentences just to keep rereading them. Who knew that the joys and the totally mundane anxieties of domestic bliss could be so perfectly bottled up? Holly was so vividly sketched that I can still close my eyes and see her at breakfast, picking up the newspaper and skipping immediately to the gardening section and the recipes. When I arrived in France, I read “Lives of the Saints,” which I’ve been meaning to pick up for years. I read it in just a few hours, sitting in a cafe drinking a cappuccino next to the ocean in Ville Franche. During the plane ride home to New York, I decided to read another Helen Garner and picked “The Children’s Bach,” which I liked less than Monkey Grip. The prose felt less lucious, not as brimming with bliss and ache.

I finished the year reading “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs,” by Kerry Howley, often on subway rides as Joe and I went to what felt like one hundred holiday parties. I was knocked over by Howley’s prose. She has a way of picking up a topic that seems sort of cold and abstract and then making it visceral, almost corporeal. I kept thinking about her introductory description of the fetus in her womb, the walls we build to protect what’s fragile, how all of that creates an intellectual lens to think about privacy and the state and what we give up for the sake of feeling safe. And finally, in the long, cozy days around Christmas, often in bed or on the couch, I read “Operation Shylock.” It was hilarious at the sentence level, and thematically devastating; I must have underlined half of it. Afterward, I read David Remnick’s profile of Philip Roth and thought of the way Roth constructed his life to allow for privacy, for long hours of reading, for silent mornings writing, for seasons of decadent austerity, and hoped for lots of that in the coming year.