29 Books I Do (And Don't) Recommend
The big end of year reading wrap up
My goal was to read 36 books this year (three a month) and I fell QUITE short. Partly this is because I am nearly finished with no fewer than six books right now (I like to read several at a time), but feel that it would be cheating to say that I read them this year when technically I did not finish them this year.
But it is also true that I am behind because I was distracted by shinier things like social media feeds and click-baity news headlines. My reading rate improved drastically after I got off Instagram in June. Still, even that wasn’t enough to keep me from falling down the digital instant gratification rabbit hole more often than I would have liked.
Sitting with this list of books, I’m also noticing some important things making me feel a little cringe-y about my 2024 book habits. Mainly, I read way too much non-literary writing.
I know, I know, this makes me sound like a snob, but the book market has been shifting toward more “easy reading” over the last decade and I’m growing concerned that we’re losing our capacity for deep, complex reading. You can blame The Big Five publishers for killing this deeper kind of writing (and don’t worry, I will), but as Courtney Maum pointed out recently, there is also a level of personal responsibility to show The Big Five we, as a public, are willing to spend money on this deeper kind of work. (Perhaps it’s also worth stating that this applies to lots of other kinds of art. What kinds of music are you listening to and demonstrating to the algorithm overlords that they should make more of? What art are you spending money on? Spending time on?)
The truth is, the light, easy, fluffy stuff is SELLING. If people weren’t buying it in droves, The Big Five wouldn’t be pushing it.
As someone who is pulling together a book proposal RIGHT NOW on a very complex topic that absolutely cannot (and will not!) be broken down into “12 tips to reclaim your life, blah, blah barf, barf, barf,” I can see that I have an obligation to do better by my industry in 2025 in terms of my reading habits.
So I’ve created a key to my reading recommendations to help you navigate what you should and shouldn’t add to your list:
🌟 - The book was deep, complex, beautiful, and the publishing industry will be better off if you pay for and read it
🟡 - I unfortunately enjoyed the book, but it wasn’t very deep
📰 - Great read. More on the journalism/academic side of things.
❌ - Good for the industry or not, the book wasn’t great and isn’t worth your time
With that, here’s my quick review of everything I read in 2024! Happy New Year everyone – I hope you read so many yummy, deep, complex things in 2025.
29 Books of 2024
1. 🌟Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon
Melissa L. Sevigny
Stunning, adventurous, and not just another white dude’s tall tale of rafting the Grand Canyon.
Even if you thought you knew how sexist the world was to women in science, no you didn’t.
2. 🌟The Ninemile Wolves
Rick Bass
A short, beautiful book that will make you deeply frustrated with the generally stupid public who think wolves are a serious danger to their way of life (SORRY MY WOLF ELITISM IS SHOWING).
3. 🌟My Inner Sky: On Embracing Day, Night, and All the Times in Between
Mari Andrew
I generally love everything from Mari Andrew and this book continued to hit the mark! It’s got art, reflection, beauty, life, mundanity, adventure – all the perfect things.
4. 🌟The Book of Delights: Essays
Ross Gay
If you want to develop a gratitude practice but get stuck being like, “um, I’m grateful for air to breathe? I guess?” then this book will really help you see more everyday things to be thankful for.
5. 🟡The Gifts of Imperfection
Brené Brown
I know Brené Brown can be a bit divisive in the self-help circles (people seem to really love her or really hate her), but what I liked about this book is that it wasn’t a bunch of mushy, “OMG you need to be gentle with yourself babe! Life is so hard! You’re amazing! Everyone who wrongs you is a narcissistic asshole who doesn’t deserve to live on this planet!” I actually felt like she delivered some tough truths that made me want to be less combative in my relationships. That being said, it was just another self-help book.
6. ❌Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough
Michael Easter
This book was interesting, but I think you should just read The Comfort Crisis (next on the list) instead because it covered most of the same topics and was a better read.
7.🟡The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self
Michael Easter
As someone who’s not real big into the whole “be gentle on yourself” movement, this book makes a really compelling case for why we should bring more discomfort into our lives.
Great on audiobook (kind of like a really long podcast).
8. ❌Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land
Amy Irvine
I’m probably going to get shit for this one, but I was really turned off by this book. There was something gate-keepy and blame-y about it that just gave me the ick. Don’t get me wrong, I’m here for trashing Mormonism as an extremely fucked up religion (a major part of this book) but just can’t get behind the whole, “If you’re not living in a cabin in the middle of nowhere absolutely suffering your brains out, you don’t care about the environment as much as I do and don’t deserve to live in this place then!” vibe (also a major part of the book).
9. ❌Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
Cal Newport
Unless you own your own business or are a high up leader at your place of work, you basically can’t implement ANY of the suggestions in this book.
10. 🌟Instructions for Traveling West: Poems
Joy Sullivan
An absolutely breathtaking first collection of poetry that will make you itch to quit your desk job.
11. ❌Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Loving and Living Alone
Amy Key
I think I had an idea in my head of what this book would be like and when it wasn’t that, I just kinda speed read it to get through it. It wasn’t a bad book, but it also wasn’t a great book.
12. 🌟You Better Be Lightning
Andrea Gibson
I read this book while quietly crying to myself on the back porch in the first weeks of summer. Fantastic.
13. 🟡Big Magic
Elizabeth Gilbert
A few writers told me this book changed their writing life, so I decided to give it a go, and I totally see what they were getting at. I opted to listen to it on walks around the neighborhood, but think it would be better read so that you can underline things and come back to sections easily again and again.
14. ❌Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
Ugh, I’m sorry! I know this book has completely altered people’s spiritual lives and I just…couldn’t get into it (even though it’s a tiny book!). I found it too heady and it gave big mopey sad boy vibes.
15. 🟡Eat Pray Love
Elizabeth Gilbert
Let me say that I fully expected this book to just be early 2000s white girl wanderlust garbage and I am pleasantly surprised to say that it was absolutely worth reading and very fun to listen to Gilbert read it.
16. ❌Unwinding Anxiety
Judson Brewer
Brewer kind of branded this book as a completely new way to think about anxiety, but as someone with anxiety I was just like, uhhh yepp, been using these tools and thinking about my condition this way for at least the last decade.
17. 📰Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth
Darcia Narvaez, Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows)
My friend and I decided to read this book together imagining some Braiding Sweetgrass vibes but it was VERY different from Braiding Sweetgrass and I think that surprise initially made us question if we should continue with it.
It’s very academic but offers lots of really compelling explanations for the way the world is and is done in a really novel conversational style.
18. 🌟Little Weirds
Jenny Slate
This was by far the best book I read all year and you should really do yourself a favor and listen to Queen Slate herself read this to you.
19. 🌟The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating
Elisabeth Tova Bailey
This book moves VERY slowly (which is unsurprising given the title) so be ready to sit with things for a while, but it’s also thoughtful and playful and opens the door on chronic illness.
20. 🌟Happy-Go-Lucky
David Sedaris
David Sedaris is one of the first essayists I ever read. His work has this magical way of making you laugh and cry within the same paragraph and also allows you to relax a little and think, “Wow, I’m so glad someone else has had even more fucked up thoughts than me! And HE put them in a book!”
Would recommend listening to this collection. Some of the essays are even read live which brings a whole new feel to them.
21. 🟡No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters
Ursula K. Le Guin
Look, all I’ll say is these little essays from blogs were fantastic to reconnect with the now deceased Le Guin. However, if you’ve only got time to read a few things a year, I’d spend it on her fiction or her other essay collections. The blogs were great, just a little on the light and airy side of things.
22. 🌟The Book of (More) Delights: Essays
Ross Gay
See his first book above. Literally just a second book of (more) delights!
23. ❌Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted
Suleika Jaouad
Another one I’ll probably get shit for. While I think someone who gets nearly fatal cancer in their early 20s has every right to share their story however the fuck they want, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Jaouad hadn’t given herself enough space from the trauma to write about it in a way that wasn’t centered around self-victimhood. And I know how that sounds! If you get cancer, you’re most definitely a victim! But at the same time, I still felt like I was reading the diary of a 20-year-old, not a 30-something-year-old who’d reflected on this time in their life over the last decade plus and come away with some deeper sense of understanding about the whole thing.
24. 📰Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
Anne Helen Petersen
If a boomer has shouted at you, BACK IN MY DAY MY MORTGAGE RATE WAS 13 PERCENT AND YOU DON’T SEE ME WHINING ABOUT IT! You’re going to really appreciate this book.
25. 🌟Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen
Suzanne Scanlon
A truly wonderful, literary reflection on living in a New York mental hospital for several years.
26. 🌟American Bulk: Essays on Excess
Emily Mester
These are creative essays, but they are woven together in a way that creates a more complete story. An utterly fascinating personal reflection on class, wealth, and consumerism in America.
27. 🌟The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
Robin Wall Kimmerer
If you’re sick of the market economy and want a different way to see the world, you’re going to love this book.
28. 🌟Lifeform
Jenny Slate
All I’ll tell you is at one point Queen Slate refers to a woman as “Garlic Chicken” for an entire essay and I’m still giggling thinking about it.
29. 🌟The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
Sofia Samatar
This little novella can be read in an afternoon and will make you think extensively about the castes we create in society. Plus, Samatar never names the two main characters (it's its own kind of distancing from castes, if you will) which I think is incredibly impressive that the whole thing still worked.
Oh my god I LOVED Little Weirds. I listened to it on audiobook and I think having Jenny Slate read it made it even better. I read a review from someone at NPR claiming it "just wasn't weird enough" and I reacted as if someone was talking shit about my best friend lmao. The "sad boy vibes" review made me lol. I just really enjoy this list and the reviews you gave...added several of these to my "to read" list on StoryGraph!