Star Chart

A year in reading, music, not really writing, and setting out in the next direction

I am absolutely delinquent, writing this when I should be either finishing my reading for The Best American Science and Nature Writing or… parenting. But aside from it being the absolute deadline for reflections on 2024 (no loophole like for Christmas cards that become New Year’s wishes), I was feeling so tired, so dead, and I have learned enough to know that feeling often means: write.

I posted on Bluesky earlier today a thread of pieces I published in 2024: no pieces. No thread. No links! As I wrote there, I had a little cluster of pieces come out in fall 2023, in the months after my book’s publication. I love those pieces and am proud of them and realized through that process that I vastly prefer book-writing to article-. (Or maybe it’s more the publishing process, the way a book is so much more yours.) Not that I wrote a book in 2024 either, lol. Just taught a lot and hard some hard personal times. Was tired a lot. Went not-too-far down the road of a book project I abandoned. Started bushwhacking in a new direction.

Of course I didn’t use that not-writing time to read extra much, either. In fact, my 2024 book tally is significantly lower than it has been in years past. I used to be a 50-60 girlie. This year? 21. I had a lot of slog-time and false-starts. But I also read some books that changed my brain, showed me new possibilities in writing. I also loved a lot of these books, just reading as a reader, not a writer. Even, most deliciously, ending the year with a trilogy that made me read not just as a reader but as a 14-year-old, that immersive, consuming absorption that feels like a lost dream.

Books in a bit, but I also want to celebrate that it was a rare year for music for me, in that I haven’t significantly gotten into new music much at all in the last decade, other than the last couple years’ Johnny Flynn obsession (which carries over into this year’s reading). But in 2024, thanks to my endless quest for music that will make me lift heavier weights, I got into a lot of female rappers: Doechii (yes before the tiny desk concert), Megan Thee Stallion, and most of all Saweetie. My Spotify rapped showed that I have three distinct moods: lifting (rappers), writing (the Planet Earth II soundtrack), feeling (Johnny Flynn and Robert Macfarlane).

I’m sorry I’m not dropping links for any of this, you know how to find music. Try Saweetie & Doja Cat’s “Best Friend,” you’ll add 10-20lb to your PR.

But so okay, Johnny Flynn. The line goes from the 2020 Emma to his music to his two albums with Robert Macfarlane to my Libby app and Macfarlane’s The Old Ways showing up in the nature writing available to borrow. I’ve written before about how I fell in love with his work (and the popcorn kernel stuck in my teeth as I read of “who is watching this man’s mentioned young children as he’s off rambling for research through everywhere from Scotland to Palestine to Greenland’s unexplored interior?). As I wrote then, “it gave me a new true north for my writing, how now what I have to do is figure out how to write science books like a nature writer, like this nature writer in particular.” So, that’s the most important read for me of 2024. (I’m rereading The Old Ways right now, actually, on paper this time, with pencil in hand, to try to do that figuring-out.)

Another great gift of 2024 reading was a thread of nature-and-culture writing, books that reflect on our place in the world, our entanglements with nature, etc. It started with Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn (so correctly recommended to me by my friend Steve), and then Macfarlane, Rebecca Giggs’ beautiful, brilliant Fathoms (about whales), and Emma Marris’ Wild Souls, which I’ve long been teaching a chapter of in my comp classes, but finally read whole. These books are so beautiful, thoughtful, interesting, interestingly made. I did Islands of Abandonment on audio, and it’s beautifully read by Flyn herself.

Wonderful nonfiction that doesn’t fit into a trend: Doppelganger by Naomi Klein, as brilliant as everyone says but no one mentions how fun she is; Attachments by Lucas Mann, essays on fatherhood etc. by maybe my favorite essayist; Daughterhood by Emily Adrian, a tender, immersive memoir about motherhood and, duh, daughterhood, too.

And then we get to the sci-fi. This fall first came Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. I read his Aurora last year, it’s amazing. Red Mars is just as great, like truly Great, with the bonus of wearing its philosophical inquiry more boldly on its sleeve. And that inquiry is about the ethics of interplanetary exploration, colonization, and, especially, terraforming. A sci-fi novel for my nature-reading soul. It’s tremendous. It made me read like a young teenager again. (I think it’s common, ya, that young-teendom is our best reading years? Coincident with me discovering sci-fi, it’s somewhat chicken-and-egg.)

I’m saving the rest of the Mars trilogy for next year, but my other sci-fi pleasure was a total immersion, ravenous devouring of a trilogy (even when books 2 and 3 inevitably were just good and not amazing). I know this is not news, the book is ten years old and a massive hit, but holy shit is Ancillary Justice good. It’s also the hands-down best audiobook I’ve ever listened to, brilliantly and delicately read by Adjoah Ando. I was so in love at the end that I went right into book two. Problem is, the massive, empire-scale plot and stakes become very small and personal in book two. (Not quite sure what the stakes were at all, other than setting up book three.) It felt more like an installment in a Hain-style cycle, a set of books set on various worlds across a vast empire. Rather than book two in a very intensely-plotted trilogy. Book three redeemed a lot, and I read it in two days, which however good or just okay the book is was such a wonderful feeling. To love a book and live in it.

It’s not just that it reminds me of being a kid, it’s more that it’s the rare access to the pleasures of being a kid, pleasures that are entirely lost to me now. But also the pureness of purpose, of focus, of experience. I love this book and I’m consumed in it. It’s a simpler way of being. I think classes were done by then, maybe grading, too, but I still had a five-year-old and a mortgage and a husband, so many more responsibilities and— well, no, let’s not discount the complexities of ninth or tenth grade. Social life was a million times more fraught than it is now. (I think.) Day-to-day angst was violent. I was more myself, perhaps, not pulled in a thousand caretaking directions at once, somehow more in ownership of my time and attention despite the whole “school” thing. I think. All I know for sure is back then I could read for hours at a time, and now I can’t—both logistically and thanks to the swiss-cheese porosity of my brain wrought by the internet and my own choices. It’s not just that it feels good to focus though, for all it does. It’s autonomy, to get to choose what I’m doing and where my focus is going. It’s connection, with the early sense of me I first established. It was also just a really good book. Idk.

I keep trying to think of resolutions and failing, especially when I take professional/creative goals off the table. But maybe, to set an intention for the year: to follow that sense of pleasure-in-immersion. It’s writing, it’s reading, and I’ve heard tell it can be found elsewhere, too. (Found it in the ocean two summers ago, standing waist-deep and letting the waves crash into me, lift me and set me down, lift me and set me down, for fifteen or so minutes until I felt too guilty for absenting myself from parenting.) That’s a good star to set my course by. Off we go.

photo by Dennis Barnes on flickr