The Millions

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.

It’s cold, it’s grey, its bleak—but winter, at the very least, brings with it a glut of anticipation-inducing books. Here you’ll find nearly 100 titles that we’re excited to cozy up with this season. Some we’ve already read in galley form; others we’re simply eager to devour based on their authors, subjects, or blurbs. We’d love for you to find your next great read among them.

Halfway through Over to You, the painter Yves Berger recounts a meeting with university students interested in his creative process. The meeting, he feels, was a “failure,” in part because of the inadequacy of his visual aid—photographs of three of his works in various stages of completion. The photographs “gave the impression of a linear process, as if Time were an arrow, whereas the real experience we have of it is made of folds, and folds within folds, sometimes touching one another.”

Elegy, Southwest, Madeleine Watts’s sophomore novel, follows a young married couple from New York City on a two-week road trip across the American Southwest in November 2018. As wildfires rage and the Colorado River faces ecological collapse, the couple grapples with personal turmoil—Lewis mourns the recent loss of his mother, while Eloise slowly begins to suspect she might be pregnant—that unfolds against a backdrop of environmental decay. Eschewing the futuristic, sci-fi renderings of climate change, Watts depicts a contemporary version of cli-fi, in which the routines of everyday life—falling in love, navigating loss, getting pulled over for speeding—endure even as catastrophe looms.

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