What Life is Letting Me Read Lately

10 books that excited me in 2024 and my evolving relationship to reading

Oct 30, 2024

I learned to read when I was 4 years old.

I took my favorite Barbie book out of my mom’s hands and read every word. Assuming I had just memorized it after she read it to me every night, she handed me a Dr. Seuss book and I read every word of that, too.

As most writers, I have been a voracious reader my entire life. I flew through the shelves of my elementary school library. After we completed tests in high school, my classmates would talk across the room while I buried myself in my book in my seat. I have lived within words before I knew that’s what I was doing.

But living within words in the way I have been the last two years has changed my reading life in a way for which I was not prepared. I used to strictly live within others’ words, sporadically and haphazardly putting my own pen to paper and only when the purest form of inspiration came. My writing practice strictly produced what others needed from me.

I now write, as Joan Didion said, “entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

That act of getting to know myself through writing has taken precedence these last two years. I’ve necessarily felt my relationship to reading shift, a visceral change in my body chemistry as my mind spends more time looking inward rather than getting lost in someone else’s story. It’s logical that this would happen as I have given writing more essential space in my life. There are only 24 hours in a day that I must divide between that writing, my fulltime job, my part-time job, exercising, caring for my diabetes, doing the dishes, being present in my marriage and family and friendships, sleeping a healthy amount, all of the small tasks that comprise being an adult human being…

Plus, the sickening and demoralizing war against the time I want to spend scrolling on my phone. Reading takes intention and focus that I am constantly working to cultivate.

Last week,

Alexander Chee

wrote about how novel writing controls what he’s reading at any given moment.

I am writing a novel and am trying to do everything in my life from within the novel’s centrifugal force, a period during which you are made to read whatever it wants to read to build itself. It lasts as long as it lasts. It’s a little like having a bully in your head, a possessive imaginary lover that demands to be fed books but sort of the way you’d drop grapes into that lover’s mouth, if you were in a Warner Bros. cartoon from the 60s. And it’s fine, I don’t mind. I forget that it happens each time.

So I suppose this is how life is allowing me to read right now. With some exercising of the time management muscles that I’ve historically neglected, I’ll mold my reading diet into something more of what it used to look like. Or even better.

Until then, here are 10 books, some that I have read and some that I’m hoping to sneak in before the end of the year (which feels unlikely but hey, I love a stretch goal), that have excited me in 2024.

1. You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith

This is now the 3rd time this book has been mentioned in my Substack this year. But the deftness by which Maggie molds poetry and memoir is too perfect not to highlight as many times as I possibly can.

2. Black Friend: Essays by Ziwe

Ziwe is a generational voice that I thought I understood. This is a phenomenal journey deeper into her as a person and what has led to her iconic comedic character.

3. Trophic Cascade by Camille Dungy

I committed to reading more poetry in 2024 and bought this collection after hearing Midwest poet Camille Dungy speak on a panel on “ecopoetry” in Des Moines. She interrogates both the physical and metaphorical relationship between humans and nature in a way that completely elevated my understanding of what nature poetry can be.

4. Good Bones by Maggie Smith

If you are like me and wanting to build a stronger relationship with poetry, I recommend this. The titular poem gave me the first set of lines that I’ve ever committed to memory without even trying:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

"Life is short, and I've shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I'll keep from my children..."

Just the BEST.

5. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

I am incredibly late to the Sally Rooney train, so I made sure to pre-order this one to feel a part of the Literary Conversation. I thought I was going to hate it through the first few chapters and now that I have 50 pages left she has me wrapped around her writerly fingers.

6. The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

My mom and I attended his reading in Des Moines earlier this month. I find him incredibly sincere in how he hopes his work changes the world, especially while deeply insincere and misguided conversations happen around him. I’m excited to dig into this one next.

7. Somebody with a Little Hammer by Mary Gaitskill

Two essays I read this month called this book out as an example of excellent essay writing. I’ve been thinking a lot about how I can become a better reader in service to my writing skills, and this is one I bought for that purpose. And I just simply love a well-written essay.

8. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

I’m embarrassed of how little I’ve read of the Great American Writers, outside of what I had to read for college. Especially writers like Virginia Woolf. I’m putting this into my TBR line up for the rest of the year so I can’t procrastinate on it any longer.

9. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

I discovered Marilynne Robinson by stumbling across an interview with her and immediately fell in love with the way she views the world. I first bought her essay collection “The Givenness of Things” and quickly realized it would be quite difficult for me, so I’m excited to get to know her better through this.

10. The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison

My knowledge of Toni Morrison’s nonfiction is woefully underdeveloped as compared to her fiction, which was some of my favorite work I read in college. I feel a deep connection to her voice. It’s far past time I get to know her in these genres.

What book excited you this year? Leave a comment—there’s nothing I love more than talking about books!