B BO BOO BOOK BOOKS OOKS OKS KS S
My favorite books I read in 2024
All the news is coming at me like a battery of fists. As you may have noticed, I’ve been unable to post for months. A lot has happened in my life (a fire, my book release, I turned forty, other stuff!), and then, as though I didn’t see it coming, Trump’s executive orders began pommeling. Each blow feels like a concussion! In reality, the tangible fallout hasn’t hit me yet, but so many members of our communities are losing their jobs, their homes, their families, their health, even their lives. And it was already so bleak. It’s enough to feel braindead and violent.
Even locally, I’ve just learned about the Portland city budget shortfall of some $90 plus million. The term I’ve encountered about this budget crisis is “doom loop.” I think what they mean is this: Businesses struggle and as a result city revenue falls, giving the city less to spend on basic services, which in turn means businesses struggle more, ad nauseam right down the toilet. I’m not wholly buying this narrative because I’m not convinced dynamism in a city is based solely on a dollar figure. I think it’s also about culture. We have plenty we can and should do to make our city’s cultures more vibrant, loving, just, and alive—city budget be damned. That said, I loathe and fear seeing news about cutting funding from public transportation and community centers. We must rise to an occasion we can’t yet fully comprehend. Let us rise!
Recently, I was reading Amitava Kumar’s novel A Time Outside This Time and he talks about Ghandi’s conception of slow news and slow reading. The way I understand this political philosophy—and it is a political philosophy—is that when we enter a story and live inside of its voice and perspective for as long as takes us to read the pages, sentence by sentence, we inherently must go slowly. Even if we breeze through a novel, it still takes hours of immersion. This willingness to be with something for hours—to read slowly, to take in news slowly—counters the assault of chaotic information. Ghandi formed this philosophy because telegraphs, printing presses, trains, steamboats, and more were converging to bring a lot of news to people quickly. There’s plenty to be said for why that’s good. But as he launched his own printing press in South Africa, he cautioned against incessant shallow consumption. Fast forward to today and we face a deluge of information sources. Ten news stories can stream past our eyeballs in 5 seconds on our phone. It’s manufactured madness. I don’t plan to disconnect from the daily news cycle—I’m too intent on being involved locally—but I believe with my whole being that not all news should be scanned. There’s emotional utility to inhabiting stories slowly.
All this pontificating aside, if I could, I’d love to be a burbling, bottomless cauldron of hot takes, but currently I’m too concussed. So instead, I’m going to slow down and tell you about my favorite books I read last year. I loved these a lot. If you pick one up and read it, please let me know! I’d love to talk with you about them!
My Favorite Books I Read in 2024
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, 2017, translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette and released in the US by New Directions Publishing in 2020
Cinematic novel on the looping horrors of Palestinian womanhood
I didn’t know what I was getting into—my friend Rachael sent me a copy and I did myself the honor of ignoring the jacket. Without giving away the plot, I’ll share that this cinematic book is written in two halves. One takes place in 1949 in the Negev Desert and the second in the 2010s in the West Bank and Southern Israel. Both explore the same incident. What I want you to know is none of this. Instead, it’s that reading this book—which went by fast for me over the course of a few days—made me feel more personally committed to Palestinian lives and freedom than all the photos breaking my heart each day in my instagram feed and more than reading Khalidi’s Hundred Years War on Palestine, although I’m grateful for the history. It overtook my spirit. There’s extraordinary pleasure in the craft and soul of this book: in the layering of time, the way it exposes the sickness of repetition between history and the present, how it inhabits the viscera of life—the heat, the filth, the confusion, the insects, the sand. It’s wildly engaging, which creates its own buoyancy. This one! Read it please!
My Picture Diary by Fujiwara Maki, Chikuma Shobō, 1982, translated into English by Ryan Holmberg and released by Drawn & Quarterly in 2023
The weather of motherhood in duress, in pictures and words
Composed of short journal entries—two to three paragraphs with an accompanying drawing—Fujiwara’s graphic diary offers scenes of domestic life. Each entry opens with the date and the weather: “January 5: Clear with winds from the north.” “January 28: Spotty clouds with spring-like temperatures.” Cumulatively, these domestic moments paint a vivid picture of a difficult year when her husband, the highly regarded manga artist Tsuge Yoshiharu, fell into depression and her five-year-old son, Shōsuke, entered school. We see her son and husband asleep on futons, Shōsuke’s mouth sprawled open. Fujiwara unclogging the drain in the bath. Tsuge cooking a special old-fashioned dinner as she and Shōsuke get ready to bathe. A moment of alone time, which she uses to do a few exercises. A moment of rage when she throws the tin wastebasket and frightens her son. Tsuge, who’s been sick and dizzy, walking himself into an ambulance. Fujiwara was on a search: What stood out about today? What one reflection conveyed how she felt? Before having a child, she’d been an actress in Tokyo’s underground theatre scene, where she could never make a living. She didn’t train as a visual artist, yet her loose and loving compositions have an ecstatic power and skill. She writes with acuity, honesty, and concision. There’s an innate radicalism to experiencing someone labeled a housewife honor and share her daily observations and feelings. I read My Picture Diary from cover to cover, then lingered over the drawings without the words from front to back, then bought myself a copy so I can do it all over again! The afterward is also a marvel.
Cooking with Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson, Europa Editions, 2004
A comedy of errors fueled by bitter booze
At 1 am, I awoke my mom from two rooms away because I was laughing out loud. I was reading this outrageously funny comedy of errors. My friend Naomi passed it my way when she saw the structure of my book, Group Living and Other Recipes, which includes a recipe with each chapter. She remembered Hamilton-Paterson’s novel warmly, which does the same, and sensed I might like it. No novel I’ve ever read has made me burst into loud claps of laughter as much as this. The writing is spectacular, over-the-top, confident, linguistically impressive, irreverent, shameless, and effervescently committed to the delusions of grandeur of its two narrators—a biographer and a composer. I’ve since sought out other books by Hamilton-Paterson, who I’d never heard of. He’s a master, not only of comedy but narrative generally. I’m waist deep in his book on oceans right now, Seven-Tenths. Naomi wasn’t wrong that the repulsive, inspired recipes that accompany each chapter are what’s stayed with me. It’s good to know someone can write like this!
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, Editorial Anagrama, 1998, translated into English by Natasha Wimmer and released in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007
Ensemble novel on the absurdity and perfection of youthful poets on the run
In some ways I wish I hadn’t started reading Bolaño with his magnum opus 2666. I’ve worried his others will let me down and so avoided them. But Rachael, my book fairy godmother, sent me Savage Detectives, and I was sold from the first pages. This novel is a sandwich. The bread at the beginning and end are one story, culminating in a mystery-thriller. The top piece of bread introduces us to the narrator, a very young poet, as he encounters and then joins a poetry movement in Mexico City called Visceral Realism. We meet other members of this movement, including its ne’er-do-well leaders. The bottom piece of bread has four of these characters traveling the Sonoran dessert. They’re on the lamb, running from a Mexico City pimp, but they’re also searching for the Mother of Visceral Realism, a disappeared aging poet who they credit with founding the poetic movement they’ve committed themselves to. The middle filling of meat and vegetable and sauce, which is the bulk of the novel, are first person monologues by fifty-plus different characters sprawling across the world. It tells the story of this poetry movement through the lifespans and perspectives of its members, often long after they’ve grown old, distant, and left writing behind. It makes the case that the story of any movement—political, poetic, both, neither—can only be understood through the diversity of those it touches across the whole of their lives. I agree with this! I especially love the way Bolaño portrays self-seriousness with both affection and humor. Case in point: his loving rendering of a character named Luscious Skin. I hope one day to write a single paragraph as baldly delightful as Bolaño’s multitudes.
Other Favorites This Year
Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts by Crystal Wilkinson, Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed, 2024
Cookbook, love letter to family, and Black Appalachian foodways guide rolled into one
Wilkinson’s lush voice transports us to Indian County, Kentucky, where we spend time with her self-sufficient grandparents and their ancestors—her kitchen ghosts. Wilkinson’s family were among the last Blacks living in her part of Appalachia, written out of history, so the specifics and stories she shares preserve cultures that would otherwise disappear. I kept turning page after page, not wanting to fall asleep so that I could read every detail about her grandfather’s process growing, juicing, and boiling down sorghum; linger at the basket meeting, dishing up a second plate; and feel the connection between the ash cakes cooked by her foremothers living under chattel slavery to the variety of cornbreads she makes today. She has a fluidity with genre—she keeps slipping into fiction; the recipes read as poems; she’s unconstrained, and the effect is more honest, personal, and importantly, engaging than any food writing I’ve read in years.
A Continuous Harmony by Wendell Berry, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972, rereleased by Counterpoint Press in 2012
Ecstatically written, prescient environmental lament and call to arms
This small book collects several Berry essays written in the 1960s. If I were to try to summarize a through line of all his work, it’s his belief that we must commit ourselves to the places where we live. We must come to know them intimately, adapt ourselves to their need, caretake and love them. If we truly attune ourselves, we will live in a continuous harmony with the life teeming around us. This belief insists on diversity—a diversity of people loving and tending a diversity of places—the antithesis of blanket monolithic policies and hyper-consumption. Much of this book acts as a lament that this is not the direction we’ve headed. It’s wild to read something fifty-plus years old that remains deeply relevant today. For someone who wants to enter the world of Wendell Berry, this is a great place to start.
How to Communicate by John Lee Clark, W. W. Norton & Company, 2022
A DeafBlind poet translates how he and his friends communicate
In 2024, I took my first ASL—American Sign Language—class. My teacher was Deaf; the class was through Zoom, all of us on mute; and I rapidly found myself deeply moved by the expressiveness we channelled to communicate—an outpouring of desire to know one another and be known. This book came my way around the same time and I found it profoundly affecting. Clark, a DeafBlind poet, attempts something I’d never seen—to give others a taste of the experience of Protactile, a language that doesn’t involve speech or visual signs, but instead a lot of mutual touch. (Monmouth, Oregon has the first center lead by DeafBlind teachers of Protactile. Highly recommend this interview.) These poems are very approachable, very legible, and at the same time, deeply new and unfamiliar.
Yellow Bird by Sierra Crane Murdoch, Random House, 2020
Meticulously reported who-done-it in Indian Country during the Bakken oil boom
At first, I wasn’t sure what to make of the volume of detail and stories in this shockingly vivid work of journalism. But quickly I began to see this as two detective stories in one: an indigenous woman’s, Lissa Yellow Bird’s, search for the body of a white man named KC who went missing, and the author Murdoch’s search for Lissa’s motivations and insights, both within the brutality of the Bakken oil boom. The indefatigability of both are moving.
The Striker and the Clock by Georgia Cloepfil, Riverhead, 2024
The slog of pursuing professional women’s soccer, minute by riveting minute
Structured like a ninety-minute soccer game, broken into one-minute narratives, Cloepfil’s account is as probing, physical, analytical, injurious, and entertaining as the game she’d devoted herself to. I’d never read anyone’s honest description of pursuing professional sports, and specifically, women’s professional sports, which are so poorly funded and disregarded. Cloepfil is gifted at blending interior insights into physical scenes and descriptions. This one flew by—I read it in a sprint, the wind at my back.
Holy Land by DJ Waldie, St. Martin’s Press, 1997
The history of an LA suburb told in small parcels
I read and loved this book in college and then forgot the title and author, but the structure never left me. I googled “book about a suburban California childhood written to mimic the suburban grid” and there it was, as I’d remembered: short sections, rarely more than a page long, one after another, each some wild amalgam of prose poem and school text book. This is the only book on urban planning I’ve ever relished. Waldie offers details of how this suburb came to be in small pieces interspersed with imagistic, jagged, semi-tragic snapshots of his life—a memoir of both himself and the place. As I read, his clear, plain language liquified in my mind into unstable grounds of emotion.
Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023
Gutting fragments of text on race and racism, swirling like a murmuration of birds
This book is also written in brief pieces, usually less than a page, occasionally more. The title made me think of someone jotting down their thoughts and observations in their phone. But these notes have the density and sharp edge of diamond. Collectively, Sharpe tell a story, often anchored on her relationship with her mother, always simultaneously inseparable from both the horrors of racism and the forging of her identity as a Black writer. This book was extremely intense and upsetting—she’s so rightfully furious and unflinching. I took my time with it and felt gratitude for the concision of the sections and the invitation to pause. Sharpe doesn’t need us to rush through these tight pieces. This isn’t medicine. This is ordinary life. As a companion piece, I highly recommend Sharpe’s essay in Yale Review “The Shapes of Grief,” which is structurally similar and confronts a similar question, this time through the genocide in Gaza: “how do we witness the unbearable.” How do we process these things and become more durable and caring, not less? This question sits at the center of my ordinary life. How about you?