The Millions

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For obvious reasons, I spent a lot of time this past year reading and rereading and rereading some more Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. (Hang on, maybe it’s not obvious: I have a new book out called Didion & Babitz.) Reading, as well, writers in the Didion-Babitz orbit. Key husbands: John Gregory Dunne. Key brothers-in-law: Dominick Dunne. Key nephews and/or barely-legal sex partners: Griffin Dunne (Didion’s nephew; Babitz’s barely-legal sex partner). Key boyfriends: Dan Wakefield, Grover Lewis

Books come to me seemingly at random, spontaneously, serendipitously—they find me and strike me down. Like divine intervention. Like falling in love.

2024 was a year when I could never write quickly enough and there was always something overdue. For the first half of the year I was revising Health and Safety. For the second half I was doing presidential campaign coverage for The New Yorker and promoting the new book after it came out in September. I was traveling more than I was home and I didn’t get a lot of reading done, but this is what I can recall…

One of the greatest pleasures of my reading life this past year was consuming what I’ve been calling “snackable” books—books you can read in one or two quick delicious sittings, which is not to say they lack nutritional value. I usually find that I wish I had more book left by the time I reach the end, but I also know that their brevity is part of their power; that the desire to keep reading is partly why I like them so much.

Many of the books I read this year were connected in one way or another to the horrors unfolding in Palestine. When details began to emerge of the torture and rape of Gaza prisoners at the Sde Teiman detention facility, I turned to Primo Levi ’s Survival In Auschwitz for his devastating depiction of human cruelty and the logic of tyrannical rule. A book that could not be more different in tone but shares a similar anti-totalitarian spirit is the great Palestinian satirist Emile Habiby ’s The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, a long-delayed and deeply rewarding experience.

I published a book of essays two months ago, which I realized only in retrospect is a collection of meditations on pain, and since then I have been parsing reader reactions in an anecdotal sort of way. Here are some things that people have said about the essays: they are “harrowing” and “blunt”; “clear-eyed” or “unsparing.” They examine “hard truths” and “facts”; they force us to “see things not as we wish them to be, but instead as they are.” They offer “no false solace.”

I have long made lists of my favorite cultural artifacts of the year—as a college blogger blathering about movies to a single-digit readership, as a Pitchfork voter trying to advocate for Fred Thomas

The book that held my attention through most of the year, that I went back to again and again—perforce, it is a very long book—was Volume 1 of Capital, the only volume of his magnum opus that Karl Marx

A mortifying admission in light of my 2023 Year in Reading: in 2024, I fell in love with a man. I also fell back in love with making music. Both developments shifted my priorities and altered my reading practice (I read more while in transit, to and from dates or practice). As a result, I admittedly read less for pleasure than I would have liked to. But I managed to squeeze in some extraordinary books: here are my standout reads of the year—including my three favorites—in no particular order.