I read or listened to 89 full books this year. Yeah it doesn’t quite make sense to me either, but that does seem to be the reality of the situation! I got an e-reader which made reading on the go a lot easier, I got more connected with my local library, and most importantly- I figured out my personal system for knitting and reading at the same time. I’m also just a self employed hyperlexic person with abnormal capacity for taking in information and lots of time for reading built into my knitting based job. (Basically, please don’t compare yourself negatively to this if you could never read this much, it’s my own way I wanted to spend my time, not a moral achievement or productivity gold star!)
I used to read like there was no tomorrow when I was a kid, idk why it dropped off. Probably my phone, and guys my screen time has NOT lowered throughout this process so I’m beginning to worry that my days are longer than everyone else’s. After like at least a decade of hiatus from being a Serious Reader ™️ I figured now is as good a time as any to get back to it.
By the time I hit 30, I’d really like to know what exactly it is that I like in someone else’s writing. It feels important, especially as a novice writer, to be able to find out what I admire, enjoy, and aspire to. But equally importantly, the power of stories to introduce, model, and inhabit new and precious ways of thinking and living is so much more powerful than I remembered! It has been an exciting thing to devour books again! A few were graphic novels, some closer to pamphlet length, some incredibly easy to read, and some that nearly broke me with their sheer, persistent length (ahem, Lanark, 100 Years of Solitude- both of which I actually loved, but yes they are a feat!)
I took recommendations from friends, let the limits of the Glasgow Libraries catalogue shape much of my exploration, and signed back up to the Burning House Books wonderful book club which is run by the amazing Aimee who also happens to be my writing mentor. By the dregs of the year, however, I’ve started to notice that I am finally beginning to have a more crystallised sense of what I’ll find interesting and what I’d like to read next which is so new and empowering! I also have collected a few authors who I can honestly say I’m a fan of and am always excited to come across their works!
In 2025 I would love to be able to read more fantasy, sci fi, poetry, and plays. I don’t feel wonderfully equipped yet to say what I like in some of those genres and honestly guys I’m really struggling to find out which poetry really really speaks to me other than Anne Carson!
I know it’s not the end of the year quite yet, but I have a sense I won’t be finishing much in the next few weeks. So without further ado I present to you the books I loved most in each category I thought of off the top of my head!!!!!
Poetry - Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
As with quite a few of these books, I have already presented this on a previous WLM Digest, but it really was a poetry novel that changed my life! Beginning with comical and engaging dialectical explorations, and her own achingly beautiful translations of ancient poetry fragments, Carson goes on to tell the story of Geryon, a young gay guy in the 90s who also happens to be a red monster with huge wings. It’s funny, poignant, beautiful, and the way she uses words is just unmatched. Each word is chosen with the sensual mastery of a translator, each point made with the clarity and potentiality of an educator, and each character shaped in her genuine and apparent pleasure in the classic stories she is reworking. I will read it over and over.
Fiction - All Fours by Miranda July
This book, frankly, knocked my socks off! I hadn’t really engaged with anything of hers before and this has me desperate for more. It’s such a weird story that sits in this moment of a woman’s mid-life that is usually portrayed as so mundane and familiar, I can’t give away too much about the plot because it keeps taking turns that leave you holding on for dear life. You will feel incredibly horny, stressed, achingly sad, excited and seen when you read it. It’s like she’s trying to win a competition for how many things she can embody so beautifully in her writing- obsessive crushes, postnatal trauma, perimenopause, dancing, interior design, parenting, love that changes, the list goes on. It’s also shockingly easy to read, a treat.
Non Fiction - Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
After I read this book it was like I had been living in a world where I only saw half of everything that existed and suddenly I was seeing everything. It seems hyperbolic to be so sweeping but this truly changed the way I see things, and anyone who met up with me when I was reading it can attest that I couldn’t stop existing in a state of abject awe and wonder at the world. Through the lens of her relationship to her own personal indigenous culture and the related cultures of other groups near her, Wall Kimmerer explores how her paths through the world of ‘hard science’ and inherited knowledge and stories intertwine in her relationship with plants and her local environment. It’s really hard to capture in a short paragraph, she tells ancient stories, explains academic approaches and shares her own experiences in a way that creates an undeniable call for a joyful and relationship-led fight against the world-destroying ways of being that colonialism and capitalism have left for us.
Short Stories - Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
Don’t you love it when an author draws you so fully into their creepy, sexy, crazy, dense world so much that you actually can’t shake the stories? Machado’s work has an unmissable cleverness, seamless references to pop culture play alongside well worn folk tales, traumas become a fantasy that make them almost more true to life. I spoke about this one before as well, but I have to say it has stuck with me. The busy, almost cloying inward lives of her protagonists touch on complex themes of inherited anti fatness, abuse in queer relationships, mental health struggles and more. Somehow she fills her work with so much texture, fun, and rich descriptive prose that the heavy content still feels exciting and expansive in a way that keeps you coming back for more.
Memoir - The Years by Annie Ernaux
This memoir really hit me in so many ways at different points. Beginning with her rural post-war upbringing and taking the reader through the many slow modernisations and changes of the 20th century in France, Ernaux brings us with her into her early old age at the start of the 21st century. What is so unique about this book is that she chooses to embody a ‘we’ voice instead of a personal ‘I’- overtly and uncomfortably occupying the collective consciousness of the ‘average’ white, French baby boomer. It isn’t flattering, and in the combination of personal anecdotes and wider political history and context, she writes beautifully to paint a picture of large scale apathy and social injustice. The speed with which the popular opinion adopts a minority scapegoat, the way it adopts and throws out marginalised bodies at will, the short sightedness of political movements that centre only a privileged few. A frustrating but fascinating read, especially as someone not super familiar with French social history. I love reading books written by older women, but more on that another day I guess!
Art Criticism - The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson
Firstly, huge TWs for this book for basically everything, it describes in detail art that deals with horrible, unthinkable subject matter so if you don’t have that in you it’s probably best to avoid. Also a few random and disappointing incidences of ableist language from the author.
I think I had forgotten the particular joy of sitting down to a great art school tutorial with a tutor who just gets what you’re doing until reading this. While I didn’t take away many solid nuggets of specific knowledge, I feel like this book did what the best tutorials do: introduced me to new artists, contextualised ones I was familiar with, posed questions that influence both how I make and see art, and inspired in itself with the charm, talent and knowledge embodied in the person speaking to you. The book grapples with questions such as how cruel is too much? Does the art justify the cruelty? Where are the boundaries in engaging audiences in cruel art practices? Instead of trying to give hard and fast answers, she shares her own changing opinions and tries to help the reader gain a bit of a rubric for forming their own, knowing it may only ever be a one person consensus.
Non Fiction - Crippled by Frances Ryan
Okay, I’m not going to lie this is a Hard Read™️ which I would def not really recommend to anyone who has lived experience of disability or extreme poverty because it is really intense to see everything you knew about how disposable your life/the lives of your disabled community and family are. But for those who don’t quite understand the benefits system, austerity, or have only really heard the propaganda the gov, schools, and the NHS throw at us about how great the UK is for disabled people, this is an ESSENTIAL read. To understand these systemic issues can feel difficult and Ryan does a brilliant job of dividing the issue into understandable segments using personal individual stories as a clear explanation of the scale of the impacts of our government’s attacks on disabled rights.
Graphic Novel - Prokaryote Season by Leo Fox
Okay that was a few heavy ones in a row so let’s finish on something GORGEOUS! Leo Fox is my pick for most exciting emerging comic artist and this book is just a brilliant example of his work. A really relatable story of unrequited messy longing is worked into a sort of post apocalyptic fairytale, a neuroqueer love story (not really) about bodies and self perception and magic and transgression that is illustrated amazingly! Like seriously he puts so so much into every possible space on the page, they heave with decorative borders and characters in great clothes and foliage and weird, satisfying shapes. He’s also only 23 which is WILD and makes me so excited to see where his work will evolve in the coming years. I got Boy Island for my birthday and plan to crack it open on the holidays. It also just feels nice after a lifetime of being really into weird indie graphic novels to find some I like aesthetically that aren’t by self pitying apologetically pervy cishet men lollll.
And that’s all folks! Nothing groundbreaking here tbh, it’s all stuff that is widely recommended by many other people in many other places but yeknow what, I wanted to throw my hat in the ring and maybe inspire some folks to read something next year!
I hope you’re all doing beautiful things in whatever form they take.
Love
From
Lydia
Full 2024 book list in order of completion below :)
Jan-March 24:
📚
Lanark - Alisdair Gray
Milk Teeth - Rae White
Her Body and Other Parties - Carmen Maria Machado
The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Going to Meet the Man - James Baldwin
The Vegetarian - Han Kang
Autobiography of Red - Anne Carson
🎧
Poor Things - Alisdair Gray
Yellowface - R. F. Kuang
Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stuart
The Waves - Virginia Woolf
Frenchman’s Creek - Daphne DuMaurier
Empire of the Sun- JG Ballard
Rocannon’s World - Ursula le Guin
Children of Paradise - Camilla Grudova
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
The List- Yomi Adegoki
Apr-Jun 2024
📚
Greasepaint - Hannah Levine
All About Love - Bell Hooks
Janine 1982 - Alasdair Gray
Blue Horses - Mary Oliver
Notes from a Native Son - James Baldwin
My Work - Olga Ravn
Giovanni’s Room - James Baldwin
The Penelopiad - Margaret Atwood
If Beale Street Could Talk - James Baldwin
Something Leather - Alasdair Gray
The Moon Spins The Dead Prison - Ed: Thomas Abercromby, Rosie Roberts
Kelvin Walker - Alasdair Gray
Old Men in Love - Alasdair Gray
The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson
Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami
Decreation - Anne Carson
Bluets - Maggie Nelson
Spring and All - William Carlos Williams
Wise Blood - Flannery O’Conner
If Not, Winter - Sappho, Anne Carson
Jazz - Toni Morrison
Red Doc > - Anne Carson
The Beauty of the Husband - Anne Carson
🎧
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro
Young Mungo - Douglas Stuart
Pinball 1972 - Haruki Murakami
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Satsuma Complex - Bob Mortimer
July- Sept 2024
📚
Teneu - Rosie’s Disobedient Press
The Plummeting Old Woman - Daniil Kharms
High Rise - JG Ballard
In the Dream House - Carmen Maria Machado
The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
Harsh Cravings - Jason Haaf
Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead - Olga Tokarsczuk
Suppose a Sentence - Brian Dillon
Food - Gertrude Stein
Wrong Norma - Anne Carson
The Years - Annie Ernaux
Polysecure - Jessica Fern
Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer
And Away… - Bob Mortimer
Intervals - Marianne Brooker
The Last Sane Woman - Hannah Regel
Disquiet Drive - Hesse K
Coasting - River Macaskill
Ham on Rye - Charles Bukowski
Will I Ever Have Sex Again - Sofie Hagen
Eros the bittersweet - Anne Carson
Abolition Revolution - Aviah Sarah Day & Shanice Octavia McBean
Ripcord - Nate Lippens
🖍️📕
Monica - Daniel Clowse
Prokaryote Season - Leo Fox
I Am A Bell Maker - Rob Bidder
Oct - Dec 2024
📚
Paradise - Toni Morrison
This Golden Fleece - Esther Rutter
The Book You Want Everyone You Love to Read - Phillipa Perry
Poor Artists - Zarina Muhammad & Gabrielle De La Puente
Memoirs of a Beatnik - Diane Di Prima
Crippled - Frances Ryan
The Latest Winter - Maggie Nelson
I Must Be Living Twice - Eileen Myles
Revolutionary Letters - Diane Di Prima
FLECK - Alasdair Gray
The Female Man - Joanna Russ
A Shining - Jon Fosse
100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
All Fours - Miranda July
The Art of Cruelty - Maggie Nelson
Blood and Guts in High School - Kathy Acker
🎧
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
In Progress
Against Landlords - Nick Bano
Confessions of the Fox - Jordy Rosenberg
Prokaryote Season destroyed me, you’ll definitely love Boy Island, too.
thank you Lydia, you write so generously! 💗