Books I Read in 2024, Reviewed

it took bro 33 years to read Anna Karenina smh 😂😂

I had a hard year. You probably did too. That’s the way things are going right now. I got my third concussion in four years, had to give up basketball and bouldering, worked crazy hours, dodged layoffs twice, spent less time with friends than ever, experienced deranged levels of insomnia and stress. Let’s not even get into what’s happening around the world (it’s bad folks). But you know what? My wedding was this year. That was the best day of my entire life. We went to Rome for the honeymoon. That was the biggest adventure of my life. I started a new job as the sole creative writer and narrative designer on a kickass multiplayer videogame called SUPERVIVE. Definitely my favorite job ever. I also read some great freaking books. That last part is what this newsletter is about.¹

Caveats:

I never finish a book I don’t like. I’ll stick with something difficult but interesting for a while to see if I acclimate, but if I make it all the way through, it’s because I got hooked. So I’m going to be super positive about the books on this list. I think they’re all worth reading.

I’m also out of the literary loop. I don’t read a lot of books the year they come out. So this isn’t remotely a report on the best books of 2024. It’s just the ones I happened to meander through this year.

Elena Ferrante - The Neapolitan Novels

The New York Times put two of these four novels on their only mildly hilarious “Best Books of the 21st Century So Far” list, including the #1 spot, and that’s honestly about right.

When I started this post a few days ago I’d only finished two of the four novels, but I have since binged the rest. They ripped me into a million fluttering pieces. Can’t think of a book that’s made this sort of impression on me in a long time. Probably not since I was a kid and it was possible for, like, the final Animorphs book to have such an effect. I thought I’d grown too old and jaded to have my legs taken out from under me quite this hard any more… false. These did it. I’ll likely attempt a separate post on Ferrante sometime soon.

Karl Ove Knausgaard - My Struggle, books 1-4

I finally gave these chunky autobiographical novels a real go this year and was very impressed, like everybody else, by the guy’s searing Caveh Zahedi-esque honesty, his willingness to write with such brutal transparency about his own life that he effectively blew that life up in the process. As with Ferrante, I’m planning to discuss Knausgaard in detail separately.

In my opinion the autofictive impulse is the flip-side of the “anonymous author” coin: both decisions might be viewed as self-obliterating responses to a media culture that connects the author directly to their fiction. Ferrante avoids the cult of personality/invasion of privacy/moral judgment by staying anonymous; Knausgaard bares himself completely, faces the scrutiny without even the pretense of fictionalization (and has indeed gotten his ass chewed off by a million thinkpieces about what a bad guy he is). Speaking of the NYTimes’ “Best Books of the 21st Century So Far” list—Knausgaard might be the most notable omission.² Nobody’s asking, but I’d slot My Struggle into the top 25.

Tolstoy - Anna Karenina and (maybe 2/3 of) War and Peace

The thing about having a concussion is that you can’t do much except lie in a dark room with your eyes closed. In other words, audiobooks are perfect. I started listening to Tolstoy in January, made it deep into War and Peace before I got bored of the hunting stories, then tried Anna Karenina, which was predictably amazing. I kept digging away at it, bit by bit throughout the year, switching from audiobook to ebook, and finished it in the summer. I wrote about Anna Karenina here, but suffice to say it deserves every bit of its acclaim. I think its more intimately scoped and personal storylines helped it hold my attention, whereas War and Peace… I don’t know, got monotonous? (I’ll probably still push through eventually because the character work is so good.)

After finishing Anna Karenina I felt strongly that it was one of the two or three best books I’d ever read. That feeling has faded somewhat and I think at this point I still prefer the Dostoevsky classics… but who tf cares, these novels are all way better than anything written in the past hundred years except maybe (mischievous grin) Infinite Jest.³

Cormac McCarthy - All The Pretty Horses

Another good audio book. I’d returned to McCarthy seeking inspiration for the novel I’m working on, and he did not disappoint. One thing that All The Pretty Horses makes abundantly clear is that when life or death stakes are involved, you don’t need flourishes of language to hold the reader’s attention—you just need to relay the facts in their cleanest form.

McCarthy is a poet whose primary medium is action. His stories are compelling for the same reason that Western films return to the gunslinger duel again and again. (Tolstoy couldn’t resist a good duel either. The one in War and Peace, relayed via excited audiobook narrator, had my heart absolutely stomping.) One guy is going to live and the other is going to die. A lot of modern (especially franchise-based) storytelling lacks this drama because the guardrails on the narrative are so transparent; e.g., you know the protagonist needs to appear in the next installment, or at least make it to a happy ending. Not so with McCarthy. Like George R.R. Martin, he’ll kill anybody at any time. It makes sense, because in real life there’s no plot armor, and McCarthy is trying to say something about real life. I have to speed these entries up or the newsletter is going to be 20,000 words long.

Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories

I finally read Kafka this year and, after initially recoiling, found a lot to like—there’s a whole newsletter on this over here.

T.S. Eliot - The Waste Land

When I was feeling creatively depleted this spring I turned to poetry for inspiration. As a person whose day job involves writing many very short lines of dialogue, evocative names of objects and places, and short snippets from inside speculative worlds, I have a keen professional interest in squeezing all possible juice from a few well-chosen words.

I read The Waste Land because many sources recommended it, and it definitely set my brain a-sparking, but as the months passed the memory has faded into vagueness. I will be reading more of his stuff.

Charles Bukowski - Essential Bukowski Poetry, what matters most is how well you walk through the fire

Jorie Graham - The Dream of the Unified Field, PLACE

A piece on Jorie Graham in The Point led me to impulse-buy a couple of her collections, and I liked them a lot. Graham’s poems produce searing images and sensations by juxtaposing seemingly unrelated phrases. Imagine if you’d never seen the color orange, and then suddenly you combined yellow and red for the first time: that’s what The Dream of the Unified Field felt like to me. Half the time I had no idea what was going on, but it didn’t matter—she kept putting these incredible pictures in my brain.

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic

During the interview process for SUPERVIVE I was recommended the book Roadside Picnic by Game Director Mike “Tipul” Tipul. I picked it up on Kindle and binged it in two days. Roadside Picnic concerns a mysterious Zone left on Earth by aliens, full of strange, hyper-advanced technology that usually manifests as deadly traps. The book inspired both the S.T.A.L.K.E.R videogame series and the Tarkovsky film Stalker.

What’s special about this book is its ambiguity. The things that happen in the book are fundamentally inexplicable, but people have to deal with them anyway. It’s a bit like VanderMeer’s Area X series (which I also love). Message: on a universal scale, humans are bugs. Fascinating, must-read science fiction.

Michel Houellebecq - Submission

In Submission, an Arab nationalist party takes control of France’s government and institutes Sharia law. If you read the novel as a parable about how this could totally happen and would be so bad, then yes, it’s a silly Islamophobic fantasy.⁴ And from what I can tell Houellebecq is in fact an Islamophobe. But I actually don’t think that’s the point of the book (even if it is a totally valid reason to skip it). What I found interesting about Submission was its exploration of how people behave when incentivized to go against what they supposedly believe. The protagonist of the book is a middle-aged male professor who, it turns out, finds the prospect of multiple wives and a fat Gulf-sponsored paycheck rather alluring.

This is not a book about a Good Guy the author believes we should emulate. Nor is the author a Good Guy himself. But in my opinion the main thing the novel “says,” insofar as it makes any sense to evaluate a literary novel that way,⁵ is that the garden-variety misogyny shared by many male intellectuals isn’t so different from the stuff those same guys criticize radical Islamists for. The book takes for granted a criticism of Islamic nationalists, but the people it really skewers are the hypocritical lit professors of the world, who would switch sides in a second if it aligned with their interests.

At any rate Houellebecq is an undeniably good writer and the book is a thought-provoking read.

Thomas Bernhard - Woodcutters

Sticking with the theme of grumpy European writers with a combative intellectual streak, Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters is a psychological study of an alienated and bitter man at a dinner party after the funeral of a friend who died by suicide. Despite how bleak it sounds, the book somehow manages to be quite funny and relatable. Bernhard is a unique flavor, sort of a chaotic evil Jon Fosse. If that sounds neat then this is a good place to start.

Ursula Le Guin - The Word For World Is Forest

Le Guin was an absolute master of the form. Her short novels are always so focused and powerful. I consider her the absolute pinnacle of literary speculative fiction, and this sharp, haunting novel was consistent with that thesis.

The Best American Poetry 2023

I picked up this anthology one year late and therefore heavily discounted at Portland’s famous bookseller, Powell’s. Really gave me an appetite for poetry anthologies. I struggle with short fiction anthologies because the stories I don’t like bog me down and if I skip them, well, there goes 10% of the book. But it’s a pretty amazing feeling to cruise through a hundred poems, enjoy lots of them for different reasons, see all the different ways people use words to get at your soft and vulnerable inner self.

Silly tangent—after reading all this poetry I was inspired to try some poems myself this year. It’s pretty fun, I recommend it. Here’s a representative example:

Easy

the best you can make
is never easy or
maybe what's never easy
is reaching the place
inside you where it is

---

Okay indulge me for one more:

Did It

When I write even one poem
My mind flies to international acclaim,
Awards, speeches, interviews

Best poem I've read all year
says Billy Collins.

Hefted on shoulders of burly football men
I love the poem
It is beautiful to me

A nice feeling,
while it lasts.

---

China Miéville and KEANU REEVES (?) - The Book of Elsewhere

Weird fiction legend China Miéville collaborating with Keanu Reeves on a thick-ass novel was a fairly unexpected bit of 2024 trivia. The book was indeed stubbornly weird—Miéville really thought through the superficially pulp-fictiony “immortal protagonist” concept and, in my opinion, did it justice—and the greatest pleasure of all was reading Goodreads reviews from people who came for Keanu and were confronted by a dense jungle of Miéville’s prose:

In an arts & entertainment environment where ease of consumption rules the day, it’s pretty gratifying to see a book with a celebrity’s name on it go in the opposite direction. How good was the book, actually? I don’t know, I’m way too biased, I thought the whole concept was hilarious and had decided to like the thing long before I started it.

(This was the only book I read in 2024 that was published in 2024, which should cement my status as an insufferable, out-of-the-loop contrarian.)

Joan Didion - Play It as It Lays

A long time ago I read Sex & Rage, by Eve Babitz, a mostly lighthearted depiction of a woman trying to make it in male-dominated Los Angeles in the 60s.⁶ I liked it; it was airy, poignant, and generally cheerful. Play It as It Lays is that book’s dark doppelgänger: an unremittingly bleak, cynical look at the same era, through the same lens. Both books are great.

Play It as It Lays is sharp and piercing literature that reveals the misogynist underpinnings of golden-age Hollywood. It’s the real story behind those Kerouac novels where beautiful women appear, party for a few scenes, go “crazy,” and exit the narrative. Situations that were fun and games for Kerouac and his protagonists induced bitter hardships for the women involved, as Didion shows us in crushing, painful detail. Anybody who reads On the Road should be mandated to read Play It as It Lays right afterward.

Benjamin Labatut - When We Cease to Understand the World

Meticulously researched historical fiction, or maybe creative nonfiction, about scientists and mathematicians. This book… folks… you have to read this book. It is so clean, sharp, focused, and compelling. A really exceptional piece of writing. Please read this book.

---

To 2025

Since beginning this newsletter in December 2020, I’ve published 28 posts, or one roughly every two months. I go through periods when I feel very motivated to read, and by extension write about what I’m reading; at other times I feel very motivated to write (fiction), and writing about writing starts to feel unproductive. This year was a reading year, which should have meant it was a newsletter year, though unfortunately it was also a year during which I had to work a ton of overtime. In 2025 my project is to find a sustainable balance between my narrative design career and my aspirations as a writer of fiction. The newsletter is a lower priority, though I’ll continue to post when I can.

I love you folks. Thanks for sticking around.

-Justin

1. Though I’m considering renaming this newsletter “Narrative Designs” so I can include some posts about videogame writing too.

2. Per Wikipedia, Knausgaard contributed to the selection process, but unlike Junot Diaz—whose admittedly very good novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao clocks in at a screaming-high #11—and the works of other contributors, My Struggle didn’t crack the list. I wonder if Knausgaard proposed himself and was overruled, or—with trademark self-deprecation—decided not to nominate himself. Many of the writers on the list have described Knausgaard as one of the best novelists working today (e.g. Rachel Cusk, who is also amazing), so it’s a curious omission overall.

3. Among my many unpublished Substack drafts is a lengthy essay titled “Is It Okay to Like Infinite Jest?” which I did not publish because it turned out just as annoying as it sounds. (For the record my answer is Yes. Best writing on addiction that I’ve personally encountered. Stimulus-dense, inventive, extremely funny. It’s a great novel, regardless of its reputation as The Book Annoying Dudes Brag About Reading.)

4. This seems to be EXACTLY how people on the far right in France have read it, even though Houellebecq makes extensive fun of them in the book.

5. Obligatory Sontag nod.

6. I read it because of an excellent Jia Tolentino piece in the New Yorker.