Against all odds, this year gifted me a remarkable sense of stability and peace. It’s hard to tell if this came from all the reading, or if the reading was facilitated by the calm, but I give much credit to the clarifying work of Christian anarchists, especially founding father Tolstoy’s My Religion and The Kingdom of God Is Within You. His diaries, edited by R.F. Christian, are also nourishing, albeit in an entirely different (hilarious, relatable) way. I read at least a dozen Daniel Berrigan books and didn’t regret any of them, though I find his poetry intolerable. Isaiah, A Book of Parables, and Absurd Convictions, Modest Hopes have my unqualified recommendation, and Lamentations is painfully relevant/eternally germane. He’s extremely not an anarchist but I read a lot of C.S. Lewis, too. The Narnia series is still something special, and his Christian apologetics feel worth the attention despite pissing me off. Randomly, God Now: Christianity and Heresy by C. Fred Alford, really hit the spot.
A slew of old fantasy novels delivered welcome medicine: Margaret Mahy’s The Changeover, Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series, Meredith Ann Pierce’s Darkangel Trilogy, which gets very good in books two and three, and Cynthia Voight’s entire Kingdom quartet but mainly Elske and The Wings of a Falcon, which has my heart in its talons. (The new covers and titles are an offense.) Gregory Maguire’s Hiddensee had a lasting, hypnotic effect despite being muddled and Roderick MacLeish’s Prince Ombra—the original version—was a fortuitous discovery. These have the satisfying, mythic feel of fairy tales but are rendered with more sophistication and emotional insight.
The book of the year for me, with apologies to my own, was Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection, which is so wild, hilarious, and singular that I repeatedly texted my group chat pictures of choice passages. Some other fun though less timely reads: Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, which is like a trashy version of Mary McCarthy’s The Group, Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel, and Sophie Kinsella’s everything. (I’ve Got Your Number, Remember Me? and Love Your Life were particularly cute.) I treated myself to a lot of manga, including Chainsaw Man, The Girl from the Other Side, Ouran High School Host Club, and of course Jujutsu Kaisen. The best among them, by a wide margin, was Ai Yazawa’s unfinished classic Nana.
Though it won’t be out until early next year, Brittany Newell’s Soft Core was haunting and vivid, an excellent surprise. Other 2025 releases I must plug are Haley Mlotek’s No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce (tender and original), Jamie Hood’s memoir Trauma Plot: A Life (astonishing, unforgettable) and Harron Walker’s poignant, hilarious essay collection Aggregated Discontent: Confessions of the Last Normal Woman.
Speaking of Harron, on the night of my book release she gave me Anne Bancroft’s Women in Search of the Sacred, which contains the most impactful sentence I read in all of 2024. But that’s a story for 2025.
