Twelve Favorites
The books that stuck with me in 2024; the best movie I saw all year
I’m very happy that Small Rain has been longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction. You can find the full list of nominees here. It’s an honor to be among these writers.
Small Rain was among the Best Reviewed Fiction of the year, according to LitHub, which also included the novel on their Ultimate Best Books of 2024 list.
On January 18 and 25 I’m offering an online seminar on writing sex. Over two two-hour sessions, we’ll consider great sex writing by DH Lawrence, Philip Roth, James Baldwin, Miranda July, Raven Leilani, and others, and think about how they use sex to further character, conflict, theme. (An earlier iteration of this class was called “What Sex Can Do”; the answer turns out to be: pretty much everything.) I’d love to have you join us. Full info and registration here.
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Hello from Iowa City—where, barring anything unexpected, I hope to spend all of 2025. (I’ll be back at NYU for the first half of 2026.) This newsletter is coming later in the month than intended, in part because of the move, in part just because, as I may have mentioned, it has been a particularly exhausting semester. NYU’s schedule doesn’t have a fall break, which meant no chance to recover from combining book tour with teaching for the first months of the semester, something I will try hard not to do again. I feel a little like I’ve been sprinting since mid-August. I’m ready for a rest, and my hope is to spend the next three weeks or so on the couch, book in hand, cats in lap. This fall was the first significant period I’ve spent away from the cats; I’m so relieved to be with them again.
So this may be the only post for December, though if I can manage it I’d like to write one more, about what turns out to be the best movie I’ve seen all year: Payal Kapadia’s pretty much miraculous All We Imagine as Light. I saw it twice in New York, and it just opened here in Iowa City, so I’m hoping to see it a third time before trying to put together some thoughts. If you have a chance to see it in theaters, run don’t walk.
It has been a weird year for reading. Given how busy things have been, I’m surprised I’ve read as much as apparently I have: about 120 books, according to the reading journal I keep. But most of my reading this year was rereading, including all of Baldwin (for an essay) and much of James (for teaching). And my reading has been less wide-ranging than in prior years, in part because so much of it has been project directed. Another ambition for the next few weeks is to read diffusely, widely, without any program at all. I’ve missed most of the big new books of the year—I’ll try to pick up a few of them before the year ends. (Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings is at the top of the pile.)
So nothing about this list claims to be the best of anything. But below, in no particular order, you’ll find the twelve new, or new to me, books that have stuck with me this year, novels and poems and one book of nonfiction. (As usual, I’ve excluded books I wrote about at length for the newsletter—otherwise Miranda July’s All Fours would have made the list. I’ve also excluded books I blurbed.) I hope you’ll find something you want to pick up yourself.