I always appreciate lists like this that don't *just* focus on books that came out *in* 2024, partially because newer books are not necessarily better than older ones, but more because there tends to be a sameyness to year-end lists when you limit the contents to 2024 releases. I think this is going to be the list that convinces me to read "The Last Samurai," which a lot of people in my orbit have been reading as of late, but "Agency as Art" also strikes me as really interesting.
My personal list of "books I read this year" only has between a dozen and twenty titles on it - which puts me well above the median American but still feels like too few, especially when I consider how many of those books I picked up almost entirely because I've had coffee with the author. Not that those books were bad, mind you. (I think most people on this corner on Substack are wise to the brilliance of Naomi Kanakia, but I'll stump for Anna Shechtman's "Riddles of the Sphinx" - a compelling memoir, but also probably the best book ever written about puzzlemaking, and I've read a lot of 'em.) On the other hand I really liked all the late 20th century lit-fic-adjacent titles I read and am now actively seeking out more books by their authors.
Perhaps my list is thin enough that I can and should do write-ups on all of those books. (It'll be a nice break from writing about all the films I saw this year... which I am going to have to limit to 2024 releases I saw at the multiplex, to keep the number down to just double digits... gurkk...)
Thank you for reading, Quiara—and for this really lovely comment! And yes, I basically think that no one reads JUST new books…plenty of people are going to pick up Sally Rooney's Intermezzo in the next few months (and talk to their friends about it, post on Instagram/Tiktok, etc) and it will feel new, even though there won't be any major press coverage about it. Basically anything from the last 2 years is new-ish to me
Also, I added Schechtman's Riddles of the Sphinx to my list…I love extremely niche histories! Thank you for sharing.
And if it helps you decide what to read in 2025…here's one quote from Nguyen's Games: Agency as Art which I found very revelatory and useful:
"John Dewey suggested that many of the arts are crystallizations of ordinary human experience (Dewey [1934] 2005). Fiction is the crystallization of telling people about what happened; visual arts are the crystallization of looking around and seeing; music is the crystallization of listening. Games, I claim, are the crystallization of practicality. Aesthetic experiences of action are natural and occur outside of games all the time. Fixing a broken car engine, figuring out a math proof, managing a corporation, even getting into a bar fight—each can have its own particular interest and beauty. These include the satisfaction of finding an elegant solution to an administrative problem, of dodging perfectly around an unexpected obstacle. These experiences are wonderful—but in the wild, they are far too rare. Games can concentrate those experiences. When we design games, we can sculpt the shape of the activity to make beautiful action more likely. And games can intensify and refine those aesthetic qualities, just as a painting can intensify and refine the aesthetic qualities we find in the natural sights and sounds of the world."
Debré is my favorite new to me author of 2024. I just love a fuck-you attitude and a relentless pursuit of authentic selfdom but what I think she does so differently is that she shows that ALL THAT comes at a cost. Lauren Elkin is translating the third book in the trilogie and I just can't wait for it.
It seems like there’s been so much talk about Madame Bovary here—it’s shot up my TBR now. Also interested in checking out Status Culture, A Year With Swollen Appendices and the works of experimental fiction. My TBR for 2025 is ready, but I’m going to keep these in the ‘maybe’ section and pray I have time to read them next year. Too much to read and too little time, I agree!
also been thinking about reading The Other Significant Others…and I liked your closing note about not trying to fit a lifetime’s worth of reading into a year!
I remember you posted about Klinkenborg's book once. Then I saw it elsewhere and I was like, "Ok, intriguing enough, seen it twice, will take as cosmic intervention. Gotta get it now."
As for The Other Significant Others—there are sociological and historical analyses supporting the real-life case studies. Definitely enriched the book for me.
This was incredible. I added so many things to my TBR, and thought more deeply than I have in days. (To be fair, I read it over Christmas when I was 80% mince pie!) So happy to have discovered your work, and excited to read more in 2025.
Bookmarked!! Some books in here (esp on art & cybernetics) that I really want to read next year.
I met W. David Marx at FWB Fest this year after he co-ran a workshop. He is so interesting to talk with, engaging, genuinely interested in what you have to say and easygoing! So I’m happy to see his book in your recommendations :) (I still have yet to read the book myself!)
Celine, I'm so honored that you included me in this roundup, thanks so much! I've said it many times before, but I deeply appreciate how much effort and care you put into your letters -- it's honestly quite inspiring. Also, there are some AWESOME reading recs in here, I hadn't read Stevens before, but your note about the 'Weimar Whore' story completely convinced me to pickup the story collection. I'm excited to work through the rest of the recs that you have in here! I'm excited to see what you get up to in 2025!
Michael, thank you as always!! it's always a joy to read your writing and have a feeling of actual sociability…community even?…through our newsletters
also, regarding the Stevens short story collection…there are so many other good stories and it's super varied! there's a really funny/weird one about a lonely computer nerd who loses the password to his cryptocurrency wallet and ends up making a deal with a strange gremlin who gives him the password in exchange for the next woman he falls in love with? (I can't remember the details exactly; but it's an amazing retelling of those old deal-with-a-leprechaun fables)
I'm a unabashedly huge fan of Debré, to the point where I've written three essays about her already. Yet, she also admits - reluctantly - that her writing style is very much like fellow French queer author Guillaume Dustan. Check him out; you might appreciate his work as well.
I loved Last Samurai when I read it a couple years ago. it was weird, brilliant, funny and as you say in your review, came across as life-affirming and inspiring rather than the annoying thing it could easily have been. kudos to DeWitt for managing to do something that felt unique as well.
to be contradictory, I found Madame Bovary annoying! great list generally though, thank you
yeah, I was surprised that The Last Samurai actually feels like a huge affirmation of taking your intellectual life seriously (even if you're not a genius), instead of using the child-wonder trope to create a really cliché story about inaccessible brilliance
I think books are inevitably so personal…the canonical book that others love but I hate (and in fact did not finish) is The Count of Monte Cristo!
exactly that - it's the fascinating question of whether we should just all collectively have higher expectations. I run across it a lot in this boys' literacy project I'm working on – they're given real guff to read, sense how they're being patronised and give up on it whereas they respond quite well to being challenged.
and touché from you, The Count of Monte Cristo is my favourite book!
Oh my goodness, this is zooming in on such a tiny detail but I am so intrigued by the Stevens edition of On the Marble Cliffs! Jünger really is such a fascinating, weird figure – I did some very light translation work with the various editions of Storm of Steel for a seminar I took a year ago, and I still routinely think about his work. It's so chilling.
this seminar seems so interesting—I’ve actually been thinking about trying some amateur translation next year, to practice my language skills and forcibly expand my vocabulary
tbh I didn’t love On the Marble Cliffs (Jünger’s style felt so aggressively allegorical and elaborate and not really my style…too flowery, not a lot of variation in voice)
BUT I thought Stevens’s introduction was really good and a great model for how to convey someone’s complicated legacy in an even-handed way—but still sticking to strong statements and not evasive, neutral ones! and it helped me read the novel in a richer way, which a good introduction should do imo!
Thank you for this lavish list, Celine! Can't wait to read "Museum Visits" and "All things are too small". Your blog was a favorite discovery of 2024.
I'm an SF fashion designer, painter, and weekend critic living in a sea of SaaS billboards... so I relate to your interests!
On my substack this year I wrote about O’Gieblyn in relation to the SF ballet “Mere Mortals” and about another Daniel Levin Becker translation, "Like a Sky Inside", on an illicit night spent in the Louvre, which I highly recommend. A snippet from my post:
“Moving her face up to a Renaissance painting in the half-light, she remembered that, “the eyes for which these paintings were painted were used to living lights, changing and capricious – to flames. They could no doubt distinguish shades other than ours, shades forever drowned in our glorious tides of artificial light.” The blues singer Lil Green sang that we were born to be kissed in the dark. Perhaps the masterworks were, too.”
I love his translation work which is so lyrical and swishy in English, belying all painstaking efforts! Levin Becker is a hardcore hip-hop fan (and Oulipo), which I imagine contributes to his talent as a translator with an ear for rhythm and flow.
celine i just added like ALL of these to my reading list HAHAHA!!! i love your descriptions of books it makes me want to read them SO BADLY!! i am really excited to dig into debre's books they sound so immersive... :)
Happy (belated) 2025! I’m mostly a lurker on here but, since I suppose it’s been one year since I started reading your newsletter, I wanted to thank you for the year of amazing articles!! Your writing is always a treat and honestly is what inspired me to get back to writing this year (as well as to add a terrible amount of books to my want-to-read list & start reading Proust). Much love!!
I always appreciate lists like this that don't *just* focus on books that came out *in* 2024, partially because newer books are not necessarily better than older ones, but more because there tends to be a sameyness to year-end lists when you limit the contents to 2024 releases. I think this is going to be the list that convinces me to read "The Last Samurai," which a lot of people in my orbit have been reading as of late, but "Agency as Art" also strikes me as really interesting.
My personal list of "books I read this year" only has between a dozen and twenty titles on it - which puts me well above the median American but still feels like too few, especially when I consider how many of those books I picked up almost entirely because I've had coffee with the author. Not that those books were bad, mind you. (I think most people on this corner on Substack are wise to the brilliance of Naomi Kanakia, but I'll stump for Anna Shechtman's "Riddles of the Sphinx" - a compelling memoir, but also probably the best book ever written about puzzlemaking, and I've read a lot of 'em.) On the other hand I really liked all the late 20th century lit-fic-adjacent titles I read and am now actively seeking out more books by their authors.
Perhaps my list is thin enough that I can and should do write-ups on all of those books. (It'll be a nice break from writing about all the films I saw this year... which I am going to have to limit to 2024 releases I saw at the multiplex, to keep the number down to just double digits... gurkk...)
Thank you for reading, Quiara—and for this really lovely comment! And yes, I basically think that no one reads JUST new books…plenty of people are going to pick up Sally Rooney's Intermezzo in the next few months (and talk to their friends about it, post on Instagram/Tiktok, etc) and it will feel new, even though there won't be any major press coverage about it. Basically anything from the last 2 years is new-ish to me
Also, I added Schechtman's Riddles of the Sphinx to my list…I love extremely niche histories! Thank you for sharing.
And if it helps you decide what to read in 2025…here's one quote from Nguyen's Games: Agency as Art which I found very revelatory and useful:
"John Dewey suggested that many of the arts are crystallizations of ordinary human experience (Dewey [1934] 2005). Fiction is the crystallization of telling people about what happened; visual arts are the crystallization of looking around and seeing; music is the crystallization of listening. Games, I claim, are the crystallization of practicality. Aesthetic experiences of action are natural and occur outside of games all the time. Fixing a broken car engine, figuring out a math proof, managing a corporation, even getting into a bar fight—each can have its own particular interest and beauty. These include the satisfaction of finding an elegant solution to an administrative problem, of dodging perfectly around an unexpected obstacle. These experiences are wonderful—but in the wild, they are far too rare. Games can concentrate those experiences. When we design games, we can sculpt the shape of the activity to make beautiful action more likely. And games can intensify and refine those aesthetic qualities, just as a painting can intensify and refine the aesthetic qualities we find in the natural sights and sounds of the world."
Debré is my favorite new to me author of 2024. I just love a fuck-you attitude and a relentless pursuit of authentic selfdom but what I think she does so differently is that she shows that ALL THAT comes at a cost. Lauren Elkin is translating the third book in the trilogie and I just can't wait for it.
P.S. With you re: end of year lists.
It seems like there’s been so much talk about Madame Bovary here—it’s shot up my TBR now. Also interested in checking out Status Culture, A Year With Swollen Appendices and the works of experimental fiction. My TBR for 2025 is ready, but I’m going to keep these in the ‘maybe’ section and pray I have time to read them next year. Too much to read and too little time, I agree!
I did a 2024 recap + reading reflection here: https://esharana.substack.com/p/favourite-books-from-2024
Getting to do this honestly feels like one of the most gratifying parts of reading intentionally and devotedly ✨
thank you for sharing your 2024 reflections!! I also read Verlyn Klinkenborg’s sentence book this year (discovered it from Mandy Brown’s excellent reading blog https://aworkinglibrary.com/reading/several-short-sentences-about-writing) and it was fun to see it in your list
also been thinking about reading The Other Significant Others…and I liked your closing note about not trying to fit a lifetime’s worth of reading into a year!
I remember you posted about Klinkenborg's book once. Then I saw it elsewhere and I was like, "Ok, intriguing enough, seen it twice, will take as cosmic intervention. Gotta get it now."
As for The Other Significant Others—there are sociological and historical analyses supporting the real-life case studies. Definitely enriched the book for me.
This was incredible. I added so many things to my TBR, and thought more deeply than I have in days. (To be fair, I read it over Christmas when I was 80% mince pie!) So happy to have discovered your work, and excited to read more in 2025.
thank you Clare—I hope you enjoy some of these books, and really appreciate your kind words! excited to write more in 2025 as well 🕊️
Great post. I've loaded up my "to buy" bookshelves for the next month or so.
thank you for reading!! and really hope you find a book that is a very rewarding reading experience!
Bookmarked!! Some books in here (esp on art & cybernetics) that I really want to read next year.
I met W. David Marx at FWB Fest this year after he co-ran a workshop. He is so interesting to talk with, engaging, genuinely interested in what you have to say and easygoing! So I’m happy to see his book in your recommendations :) (I still have yet to read the book myself!)
ah, that's so cool! I love Marx's writing and his newsletter—so good to hear he is delightful in person, too
Celine, I'm so honored that you included me in this roundup, thanks so much! I've said it many times before, but I deeply appreciate how much effort and care you put into your letters -- it's honestly quite inspiring. Also, there are some AWESOME reading recs in here, I hadn't read Stevens before, but your note about the 'Weimar Whore' story completely convinced me to pickup the story collection. I'm excited to work through the rest of the recs that you have in here! I'm excited to see what you get up to in 2025!
Michael, thank you as always!! it's always a joy to read your writing and have a feeling of actual sociability…community even?…through our newsletters
also, regarding the Stevens short story collection…there are so many other good stories and it's super varied! there's a really funny/weird one about a lonely computer nerd who loses the password to his cryptocurrency wallet and ends up making a deal with a strange gremlin who gives him the password in exchange for the next woman he falls in love with? (I can't remember the details exactly; but it's an amazing retelling of those old deal-with-a-leprechaun fables)
I'm a unabashedly huge fan of Debré, to the point where I've written three essays about her already. Yet, she also admits - reluctantly - that her writing style is very much like fellow French queer author Guillaume Dustan. Check him out; you might appreciate his work as well.
wow, thank you for the recommendation!!! Dustan looks so interesting; I'm going to try to find a copy of this https://mitpress.mit.edu/9781635901429/the-works-of-guillaume-dustan/
Yup, I think it’s limited that that is the only translation available in English.
I wrote a review of the similarity between him and Debré (https://open.substack.com/pub/unknownliterarycanon/p/a-dying-gay-writers-glamorous-void?r=4o2hjw&utm_medium=ios) if you’re interested.
I loved Last Samurai when I read it a couple years ago. it was weird, brilliant, funny and as you say in your review, came across as life-affirming and inspiring rather than the annoying thing it could easily have been. kudos to DeWitt for managing to do something that felt unique as well.
to be contradictory, I found Madame Bovary annoying! great list generally though, thank you
yeah, I was surprised that The Last Samurai actually feels like a huge affirmation of taking your intellectual life seriously (even if you're not a genius), instead of using the child-wonder trope to create a really cliché story about inaccessible brilliance
I think books are inevitably so personal…the canonical book that others love but I hate (and in fact did not finish) is The Count of Monte Cristo!
exactly that - it's the fascinating question of whether we should just all collectively have higher expectations. I run across it a lot in this boys' literacy project I'm working on – they're given real guff to read, sense how they're being patronised and give up on it whereas they respond quite well to being challenged.
and touché from you, The Count of Monte Cristo is my favourite book!
Epiccc list yet again. Really been meaning to get around to Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light. <3
Oh my goodness, this is zooming in on such a tiny detail but I am so intrigued by the Stevens edition of On the Marble Cliffs! Jünger really is such a fascinating, weird figure – I did some very light translation work with the various editions of Storm of Steel for a seminar I took a year ago, and I still routinely think about his work. It's so chilling.
this seminar seems so interesting—I’ve actually been thinking about trying some amateur translation next year, to practice my language skills and forcibly expand my vocabulary
tbh I didn’t love On the Marble Cliffs (Jünger’s style felt so aggressively allegorical and elaborate and not really my style…too flowery, not a lot of variation in voice)
BUT I thought Stevens’s introduction was really good and a great model for how to convey someone’s complicated legacy in an even-handed way—but still sticking to strong statements and not evasive, neutral ones! and it helped me read the novel in a richer way, which a good introduction should do imo!
I'm a fan of both Calvino and Aira, so I'll take your suggestion and check out Éric Chevillard's Museum Visits. Thank you for sharing, Celine!
Thank you for this lavish list, Celine! Can't wait to read "Museum Visits" and "All things are too small". Your blog was a favorite discovery of 2024.
I'm an SF fashion designer, painter, and weekend critic living in a sea of SaaS billboards... so I relate to your interests!
On my substack this year I wrote about O’Gieblyn in relation to the SF ballet “Mere Mortals” and about another Daniel Levin Becker translation, "Like a Sky Inside", on an illicit night spent in the Louvre, which I highly recommend. A snippet from my post:
“Moving her face up to a Renaissance painting in the half-light, she remembered that, “the eyes for which these paintings were painted were used to living lights, changing and capricious – to flames. They could no doubt distinguish shades other than ours, shades forever drowned in our glorious tides of artificial light.” The blues singer Lil Green sang that we were born to be kissed in the dark. Perhaps the masterworks were, too.”
I love his translation work which is so lyrical and swishy in English, belying all painstaking efforts! Levin Becker is a hardcore hip-hop fan (and Oulipo), which I imagine contributes to his talent as a translator with an ear for rhythm and flow.
https://threedarkmoons.substack.com/p/dancing-in-the-dark
https://threedarkmoons.substack.com/p/spiritual-machines
celine i just added like ALL of these to my reading list HAHAHA!!! i love your descriptions of books it makes me want to read them SO BADLY!! i am really excited to dig into debre's books they sound so immersive... :)
i wrote a 2024 book roundup over here! https://dessin.substack.com/p/my-favourite-books-of-2024
One word: wow!
Happy (belated) 2025! I’m mostly a lurker on here but, since I suppose it’s been one year since I started reading your newsletter, I wanted to thank you for the year of amazing articles!! Your writing is always a treat and honestly is what inspired me to get back to writing this year (as well as to add a terrible amount of books to my want-to-read list & start reading Proust). Much love!!