Looking Back on 2024: A Year of Reading
Reflections on books, book events, and what I read over the past year
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For several years now, I’ve picked a pursuit that made up a big part of the year, assembled a database of how I engaged with the pursuit, and did some sort of year-end analysis. This annual routine has shown me progress and helped me to better understand myself. In past years, I’ve focused on visual art, theater, and—last year, fittingly enough—events.
This isn’t the first time that I’ve looked back on the year through the lens of books, but it is the first time doing it as part of the Blankman List.
Last January, I decided that for one year, any time I decided to read a book, it would be with a physical book that I owned. The goal was to have a literal stack at the end of the year that I could look back on and think, wow, I read that. This effectively meant one year of ruling out a Kindle or library book, at least for anything I intended to read cover to cover.
The end goal was maybe less impressive than I was hoping for—especially given peers who humble me with their voracious literary habits—but nevertheless I made my way through a just over 17-inch stack of 18 books that ranged in topic and genre.1 This feels weirdly personal and vulnerable for me, but here’s the full list in order of date read (with date of publication indicated in parentheses):
James McBride – The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (2023)
Cornel West & David Ritz – Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir (2009)
Wendy Lesser – Jerome Robbins: A Life in Dance (1998)
Kurt Vonnegut – Slapstick (1976)
Dan Senor and Saul Singer – The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World (2023)
Alex Ross – Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (2020)
John Wyndham – Chocky (1968)
Julian Havil – Gamma: Exploring Euler’s Constant (2003)
Joseph P. Swain - The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey (1990)
Mariusz Flasiński – Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (2016)
Julia Alvarez – In the Time of the Butterflies (1994)
Alex Michaelides – The Silent Patient (2019)
Cynthia Kuhn, Scott Swartzwelder, and Wilkie Wilson – Buzzed: The Straight Facts about the Most Used & Abused Drugs from Alcohol to Ecstasy (1998)
S. E. Hinton – The Outsiders (1967)
Stephen M. Silverman – Sondheim: His Life, His Shows, His Legacy (2023)
Heather Lende – If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name (2005)
Lee Tannen – I Loved Lucy: My Friendship with Lucille Ball (2001)
David Foster Wallace – Infinite Jest (1996)
In terms of number of books read, that’s pretty typical for me—some years more, some years less. That’s obviously not even a drop in the bucket in terms of books out there. In this article I look back at a year of reading, at times specific to reading in NYC. It’s not much of a book recommendation list. There are better sources for that, such as the New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.
Tracking Books Read
For me, book reading is most closely linked to the subway. It’s a way to pass the time without relying on working Wi-Fi. It’s both enjoyable and pragmatic; it’s not only a story to read, it’s also something to focus on so I don’t have to think about the person tossing trash on the floor, clandestinely sipping on a vape, or blasting shitty music, like legit Playboy Carti at his most derivative, never a Three 6 Mafia deep cut.2
Mostly-subway reading slows me down, but I am no doubt on the subway often. This is NYC, after all, and I don’t have a car. (I don’t particularly want one either. I’d rather read, and I struggle with audiobooks.) Since 2011, I have been tracking every book finished on the website Goodreads, but last year, they no longer supported my login credential method. Suddenly, I could no longer add or edit anything to a more than decade-long book log. Amazon had purchased them; they went from indie-cool book tracker to Big Book Big Brother, and frankly I lost interest.
Now, I maintain my own private spreadsheet, which of course is ironically hosted on Big Tech software but gives me a more flexible and frankly less public way of adding another entry to the database every time I finish another book. The effort it takes to add a row of data is of course a far cry from the effort required to read the book. Yet those few seconds are deeply satisfying: the medal at the end of a race.
Lessons and Reflections of 2024
One detail about me that I must simply accept at this point in my life: I suck at remembering plots. I don’t know why this is or how long it’s been the case, but plots quickly become blurs of actions and feelings for me. I find it hard to recall what happened in not only a book but also a film, play, or any story really. I don’t feel bothered by this, however. I remember the books I’ve read no better than the meals I’ve eaten, yet they have nourished me just the same.3
My thoughts on books, therefore, have little to do with plot. I’m more attracted to themes, styles, and arguments, and it is perhaps why I love nonfiction so much—which accounts for 61% of my books read in 2024. More specifically, I really love biographies and memoirs. This year I read biographies or memoirs of Cornel West, Jerome Robbins, Lucille Ball, Stephen Sondheim, and Heather Lende.4
For the most part, I like each book I read to be as different as possible from the previous one. Following a university press biography of Jerome Robbins, for instance, I read a poorly reviewed 1976 Kurt Vonnegut sci-fi novel. Life is short though, and I do tend to stick to what interests me. For example, 21% of my books pertained in some way to musical theater, and none were romance or self-help. A lot of my reading is also left in some way to chance. Here were the sources of the books:
7 were purchased used (to the best of my recollection) while browsing what was available at a bookstore or thrift store
5 were gifts
3 were found for free
1 was found at an estate sale
That leaves only two books that I actually purchased new, and one of those was in fact a chance souvenir found at a niche bookstore while traveling. Only a single book this year was one I specifically sought out, purchased, and read (Introduction to Artificial Intelligence).5 I love this piece of trivia because it feels like a reflection of something bigger about me—it matches my love of aleatoric music and games where I must make decisions in response to random cards and dice rolls.
Favorites and Memories
Favorite Book: Infinite Jest
I touch on some problems I have with the book further down in the “book that most affected the Blankman List” category. Yet David Foster Wallace had an inimitable writing style that seems to articulate what it means to be human. Given the book’s density, I found it a surprisingly easy—albeit time-consuming—read. Plus, given my indifference towards plot, it’s actually nice for me that the plot is choppy and takes long detours into characters’ histories, appearances, and feelings. The book is often characterized as comedy, and the humor can be sharp. But between the technical writing and brutal imagery, it wasn’t the comedy that made this my favorite, rather it’s the way the novel seemed to bury life-altering truths in the middle of absurd scenarios (like the game of Eschaton portrayed in the Decemberists music video for “Calamity Song”) and slowly chisel away at my worldview.
Book That I Should Have DNF’ed: Slapstick
I’ve been a longtime Kurt Vonnegut fan and found this book buried in an estate sale basement of all places. It started out wild and on-brand with confounding names like Melody Oriole-2 von Peterswald and musings on loneliness and intelligence. Then, a pair of genius twins started to have an . . . incestuous relationship, I think? and rescue us from our godforsaken modern ways, I think? I know this book has fervent fans out there, but I wasn’t enjoying this book by the end. I also read Chocky by John Wyndham, which I liked far more as a sci-fi story.
Book That Changed the Way I Think: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
I see AI in news and media everywhere but have become so cynical of where it’s headed.6 I wanted to strip away deepfake speculation, plagiarism scares, and pop science singularities and actually learn more deeply, what is artificial intelligence? As in, what are the actual theories and methods of the computer science field? This and Gamma: Exploring Euler’s Constant were the two “hard science” books I read this year, but only this one started to worm its way into how I perceived discussions around AI and approached my own work.
Book That I Didn’t Expect to Like as Much as I Did: The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World
This book was a gift from my husband, perhaps trying to nudge me towards my Jewish roots. Books from him quickly jump to the top of my reading queue, even though the topic of Israel is admittedly not one I’d likely choose for myself. I found myself being reminded of the complexity surrounding issues of health and labor practices at a moment when Israel was dominating news stories and causing citywide protests. Most of all, I felt transported back to a formative birthright trip that’s now shockingly 14 years in hindsight.
Book That Most Affected the Blankman List: Infinite Jest
If nothing else, this novel was my biggest time commitment, and it is unquestionably virtuosic. There are a few flaws with it in my view, however. I skimmed through and at times outright skipped some of the most gruesome passages. The story’s got some serious cultural sensitivity issues that I have a hard time overlooking in the name of art. The endnotes can get pedantic and annoying. But and so the novel is affecting the way I write. I’m finding D.F.W. has blessed me with license to initiate, abbrev., and in general be willing to go on tangents and, in terms of following along, confer upon the reader the benefit of the doubt.7
Book Most Relevant to NYC: The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey
There were a few to pick from. I also read biographies of Jerome Robbins and Stephen Sondheim—both containing plenty of NYC history and lore—and also in consideration was Cornel West’s memoir Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, which shocked me when he described briefly being without a home and sleeping in Central Park. But it was a deep dive into the musical trends and analyses of the Broadway musical that really took me home sometimes. I love the feeling of reading nonfiction, leaving the subway, and being immediately immersed in what I was reading about.
Book That Most Made Me Ask, Why Did I Read That Again?: Buzzed: The Straight Facts about the Most Used & Abused Drugs from Alcohol to Ecstasy
The median publication year among the books I read was 2002. Sometimes, books age surprisingly well. The 1967 novel The Outsiders, which was my quickest read of the year, still felt fresh. The Broadway Musical, a book mostly on music theory, will forever stay relevant. Buzzed, on the other hand, felt like an unnecessarily out-of-date book to read on the topic. It is a rather technical work on different drugs and their physiological and behavioral effects. It is a no-nonsense read and in plenty of spots beyond my understanding, but having been published in 1996, also clearly misses out on a quarter century’s worth of research.
Book That I Wished Would Never End: I Loved Lucy: My Friendship with Lucille Ball
This is my fifth(!) lifetime read involving Lucille Ball. This book is fundamentally a memoir of Lee Tannen, whose showbiz claim to fame was being an unlikely and much younger close friend of Ball during her final years of life. Tannen was given near carte blanche to hang out in her LA home and was practically bullied into attending dinners and red carpets. Of all my Lucy books, this is the only one where she was human, not mythology. Bossy, mercurial, obsessed with playing backgammon, and towards the end, infirm. I was born nearly 30 years after I Love Lucy ended, but loving Lucy appears to be easy and timeless.
Looking to 2025
There’s an irony to this post in a way. Here I am singing the praises of books and of reading, and on this Substack I create a monthly list of things to do around NYC, which includes book clubs, book talks, book signings, and plenty of ways to engage with reading and authors and meet others who love to read. Yet, truthfully, I went to none of these this past year.
Events along these lines sprout up everywhere—I’ve even seen book talks in museums and large performance spaces, for example—but here are some of the venues where I’m most likely to find and promote events along these lines:
In the course of doing event research, not to mention simply going to bookstores and libraries, I continue to learn about plenty of these book-related events and plan to continue including them. One resolution for 2025: go to one!
The only real gray area here is whether to count Infinite Jest—an obscenely long book that has been tantalizing me from a shelf for years. As of this writing I’m around 90 percent through it. Given the time that that damn book has consumed of my 2024 book reading, I felt it fair to include it in the analysis. And since this data analysis is by me and about me, I get to have my cake and eat it too and include Infinite Jest in any 2025 analyses too, the year in which I’ll finally reach the last freaking page. It’s fitting that the endnote-laden IJ is the only point of contention and a shame that Substack doesn’t let me nest endnotes.
I am leery about singling out hip hop artists in what’s at best a throwaway joke, but there’s no question that among music played without headphones on a subway, hip hop is among the most played genres. I’d be equally annoyed, though in truth also intrigued, if I ever hear, say, Balinese gamelan, drone metal, or really anything sufficiently distant from modern-day popular genres like rock or rap.
I cannot claim to have thought of this sentiment myself. However, I cannot find a great source to quote either.
The list-obsessed part of me just couldn’t resist. Here are all individual people for whom I’ve read a biography or memoir of prior to 2024: Abraham Lincoln, AJ Jacobs, Albert Poland, Alexie Sherman, Anne Frank, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Britney Spears, Camille Saint-Saëns, Cheryl Strayed, Chester Brown, Chris Mitchell, Christian Hosoi, Cleopatra, Cy Twombly, Derf Backderf, Dick Cheney, Frank Capra, Frank McCourt, Gloria Steinem, Greg Louganis, Hillary Clinton, Imhotep, James St. James, Jamie Maslin, Jay-Z, JD Vance, Jennette McCurdy, Jimmy Webb, Joe Trohman, Joey Stefano, Johannes Brahms, Joseph Goebbels, Joshua Lyon, Kevin Roose, Kid Delicious, Kurt Cobain, Lori Gottlieb, Lucille Ball, Marilyn Manson, Melissa Moore, Nick Hornby, Robert M. Parker, Jr., Rodney Mullen, Sarah Perry, Sonia Sotomayor, Stefan Fatsis, Steve Jobs, Thelonious Monk, Tina Fey, Tom Daley, Tommy Mottola, and William Finnegan.
This book relates closely enough to my work that it was actually my employer who paid for it, but you get the idea.
For some real eye roll-inducing takes on the topic, check out the comments on Reddit’s AI community.
I suppose IJ also gave me license to add endnotes, but truth be told I’ve always been a fan of a good footnote or endnote, and plenty of nonfiction works that I read are rife with them. One year I read Shady Characters, a book on punctuation and typographical marks, and the discussion into the dagger was among my favorite chapters.