2024 in reading
It’s been a productive year, and this newsletter has suffered for that: a manuscript doubled in length from what my editor and I first discussed (and which I’ve just returned to at a slightly more manageable pace), a semi-regular teaching schedule at CUNY, and some union organizing in the hours before and after classes. A semester off from classes will hopefully let me finish the heftiest set of revisions, so between the absence of the second and then the first, I hope to have a bit more time to write here in the coming months.
Some part of this list is a product of lost earbuds. One day, I couldn’t find the pair I used on my walks and commutes. The only others I had were a wired pair I could never jam into my phone right. After I gave up on them, I got a bit better at bringing a book with me on my commutes. Then there’s the primacy of sleep. With a late class schedule and my eyes just a bit strained from classroom bulbs, my brain wouldn’t let me nod off for an hour or two after getting into bed. Some of these helped me fill that time.
I’ve marked a few favorites with a *.
In order of completion:
Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea by Darrin M. McMahon
Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary by Leigh Claire La Berge
Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud
*The Aspern Papers by Henry James (re-read)
*Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital by Søren Mau
The Death and Life of American Labor by Stanley Aronowitz
Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici
Class Struggle Unionism by Joe Burns
Slow Birding: The Art and Science of Enjoying the Birds in Your Own Backyard by Joan E. Strassmann
Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez
The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx (re-read)
*Aliss at the Fire by Jon Fosse
Aesthetics and Politics by Theodor W. Adorno, et al
*The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation by Stuart Hall
Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (re-read)
The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control, Vol. 1 by Theodore W. Allen
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (re-read)
Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism by Richard Maxwell Brown
The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance by Shaul Magid
Information Desk: An Epic by Robyn Schiff
The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu (re-read)
Mordew by Alex Pheby
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
*Philosophy, Writing, and the Character of Thought by John T. Lysaker
*Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee
The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo
Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz by József Debreczeni
Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser
Monica by Daniel Clowes
The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald (re-read)
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov (re-read)
*The Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst (re-read)
Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations by Jane F. McAlevey
Missing Persons: or, My Grandmother’s Secrets by Clair Wills
Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
*Under the Iron Heel: The Wobblies and the Capitalist War on Radical Workers by Ahmed White
Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable by Yosef Hayam Yerushalmi
A Critique of Pure Tolerance by Robert Paul Wolff, et al
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild
Exile by Peter Weiss
The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade by Peter Weiss
On Not Being Someone Else by Andrew H. Miller
*Dust: The Archive and Cultural History by Carolyn Steedman
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck
The Children of the Dead by Elfriede Jelinek
The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman
The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War by Arno J. Meyer
A Heart So White by Javier Marías
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor (re-read)
The Wobblies: The Story of the IWW & Syndicalism in the United States by Patrick Renshaw
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
*The Makioka Sisters by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
The World, the Text, and the Critic by Edward W. Said
Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and the Economy in the History of the US Working Class by Mike Davis
To Skin a Cat by Thomas McGuane
Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom by Maya Wind
*Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner (re-read)
Ring Shout by Djèlí P. Clark
The Historian’s Craft by Marc Bloch
By the Lake by John McGahern
*Middlemarch by George Eliot (re-read)
The Era Was Lost: The Rise and Fall of New York City’s Rank-and-File Rebels by Glenn Dyer
The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. 1 by Fernand Braudel
A Train of Powder: Six Brilliant Reports on Aspects of Our Lawless Times by Rebecca West
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
*Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño
Katalin Street by Magda Szabó
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe (re-read)
The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell
Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham
*The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza
Planet of Slums by Mike Davis
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enríquez
The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrić
Movies (top ten, no rewatches):
The Beast by Bertrand Bonello
Secrets and Lies by Mike Leigh
La Chimera by Alice Rohrwacher
I Saw the TV Glow by Jane Schoenbrun
The American Friend by Wim Wenders
The Wailing by Na Hong-jin
Menus-Plaisirs, les Troisgros by Frederick Wiseman
Evil Does Not Exist by Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Perfect Days by Wim Wenders
Sorcerer by William Friedkin