Books I Love 2k24
Didn't read as much this year but by God I did my best
This year genuinely beat my ass but between the beatings I managed to read some great books. Started keeping track of my reads in 2020, which is also when I really started getting into books again, and since then I've been posting my favorites online every New Year. Reading regularly for reasons other than work is pretty new to me--I'm still recovering from my undergraduate history degree, when everything I read was for class--but in the last few years, I've managed to cultivate a reading habit that's rooted in curiosity, joy, and even a small but healthy amount of discipline. Here are my top five reads of 2024, plus a breakdown of my reading habits at the end if you're interested . . .
A Safe Girl to Love - Casey Plett
Read of the year for me. This one came highly recommended by 100% of the literary dolls in my life, plus Carrie, who gave me their copy. This 2014 tipping point-era short story collection is full of the kind of transfemme representation that surpasses familiarity and goes straight to the uncanny in its fidelity to real-life tgirl experience. Standouts include Lizzy & Annie (very cute t4t lesbian romance), Not Bleak (toxic open couple meets a mysterious baby trans), and easily my favorite: Winning (trans mother and trans daughter have a complicated relationship in Olympia, WA).
When Brooklyn Was Queer - Hugh Ryan
A kind of shockingly thorough investigation into gay, lesbian, and trans Brooklyn before Stonewall, this book did more than any other I read this year to reconfigure my imagination of the city. Snapshots of early queers--like Loop-the-Loop, a trans sex worker who worked in Brooklyn at the turn of the 1900s--are unbelievably fascinating. But the insight that really stuck with me is Ryan's breakdown of how Robert Moses destroyed queer life in the borough through highway development and urban renewal. (Womp womp.)
The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin
Cool thing about getting into reading after spending most of my life as a casual-at-best mostly non-reader is that I get to go through all the classics and learn why everyone loves them so much. Reading this book (my very first by Baldwin) made me want to devour everything he ever wrote so I can learn how to put together an essay like he does. I think about his insights on whiteness and the sensual on a daily basis.
Gentrification of the Mind - Sarah Schulman
Schulman's firsthand account of AIDS in the New York gay scene makes me want to be a better queer, for everyone who came before and everyone who comes after. Her insights on gentrification, while novel, don't all hold up perfectly eleven years down the line, but her perspective as an ACT UP organizer and historian makes this book required fucking reading for every queer alive in the US today. Great example of how reading history can be a medicine against the existential anxieties we're all experiencing, particularly around the ongoing pandemic and the impending tidal wave of anti-queer repression. It's not what I'd call an uplifting read. But it is a story of survival that came to me at a time when I needed one very much.
A Queen in Bucks County - Kay Gabriel
Turner, the "epistoslut" speaker in this gorgeous collection of prose poetry, is the smut artist of my dreams. Read this on a long bus ride down the northeast and felt like Gabriel did pulled off something very, very special in her capture of place. Also got me thinking about plurality/multiplicity in a way that felt very productive on a personal level.
The year's not quite over but it's looking like I'm going to clock in at around 30 books total, cover to cover. Fewer than last year, but not my worst. I make it a point to avoid comparing my reading habits to others' and would recommend that as a rule of thumb for anyone else who, like myself, loves to read but struggles to fit it into their schedule. As a library worker, I am aware these are chump numbers; as a United Statesian, I am sure I've done pretty well. The main thing for me is that I stay consistent. Even when I'm working or going to school, I'm trying to have a couple books going at any given time. That's about the best I can do.
One is nearly always an audiobook. I've found that everyone I know has a unique capacity for comprehending spoken audio. For me, I can do audio fine as long as it's nothing too dense. Most of my horror reading is done over audio. (Horror standouts this year: Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones; Out There Screaming, A New Anthology of Black Horror edited by Jordan Peele.) Ditto with the lighter lit fic I read this year, like The Sentence by Louise Erdrich and Yellowface by R. F. Kuang. I can't usually do history or literary nonfiction over audio so I save those for print or e-book.
Of my ~thirty total reads, twenty-one came from online or in-person libraries. Of the books I got from other sources, only two were books I purchased and own, and that is on the citywide minimum wage. Unless you've got the money and it makes you happy, I don't see a reason to purchase the books you read, except for the purposes of gifting, research, or habitual reference. The vast majority of the books I got from the library were through Libby, an app that lets you access e-books and audiobooks through a library card. If you're a NYC resident, you can get free library cards at each of the three separate library systems, which all have their own collection of e-resources you can access remotely.
New York is an amazing place to read and I'm grateful to live here. Minimum wage aside, I am also enormously thankful to finally work in books, after so many months and years of reading on the train only.
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your loyal friend and confidante,
evergreen