Reading 2024

Some books that made my year

If my record keeping is correct, I’ve read more than 80 books this year. So far. As I did last year and the year before, I am sharing thoughts about a handful of those books for The Wild Card this week. Read on!

Unique Favorites

Several years ago on social media at year’s end, I started sharing some favorite books but created categories unique to me. Most Disappointing (which said more about my expectations than anything). Best Book by a Former Student (not a category I can often use).

I’m continuing that tradition this year, allowing me to highlight some books that grabbed my attention in some way. These are not necessarily recommendations, because what suits me at a given moment is not likely to strike you the same way. And there is too little space to provide robust summaries, so I’m sharing just a short explanation about why some books landed well with me in 2024.

Favorite Surprise: Lone Women

I was not entirely surprised by Lone Women, because I had read Victor LaVelle before. He is typically categorized in speculative fiction or horror, not genres I spend much time with. But his earlier book The Changeling had captivated me, and reading another book by LaVelle but set in Montana (one of my favorite book settings) seemed worth the genre excursion.

Lone Women highlights women homesteaders and presents early 20th-century Montana in compelling and historically accurate ways. Well, the accuracy only goes so far, given the genre’s conventions. But LaVelle rendered place and time well, demonstrating some of the ways the so-called frontier offered opportunities for women and people of color while simultaneously showing the limits and violence many faced. That accuracy made Lone Women’s more fantastic elements more believable—frightfully so.

Favorite Reread: Winter Brothers

This summer, I reread Ivan Doig’s Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America. I’d been asked to contribute an essay based on rereading something. After a quick brainstorm of options, I landed on Winter Brothers, authored by my favorite writer. Rereading a book is risky to the memory of the first reading. Rereading a book by a favorite author is riskier still. But Winter Brothers and Doig held up.

It’s an unusual book—part biography, part history, part diary excerpts, part memoir. But it allows Doig, a trained historian and practicing writer, to display his substantial gifts. Winter Brothers studies James Swan (who I wrote about here) and considers his place in the Northwest. It is, in some ways, the perfect book for my newsletter. It is history. It is about place, my PNW place. And it is good writing.

Favorite Experimental Form: Playing with (Wild)fire

This novel by my dear friend and mentor Laura Pritchett is lovely. (Laura and I shared a conversation in words here.) Set during a terrible Colorado wildfire, Playing with Wildfire displays Pritchett’s considerable and diverse writing talents. One chapter is a grant application. Another includes excerpts from a play. Still another is mostly lists. An obituary, equations, instructions, postcards, and just plain good stories.

Although that mish-mash might sound confusing, Pritchett is skilled and makes this work in the best ways. The quirky community she creates comes alive in these pages. That community, of course, includes the natural world beset by fire and chaos. It is a novel of our times.

Favorite Sweet Spot: In Search of Meadowlarks

Last year, my local Audubon Society hosted John M. Marzluff, the author of In Search of Meadowlarks: Birds, Farms, and Food in Harmony with the Land, for a Zoom lecture. I picked up the book and read it eagerly; it hit a sweet spot for me.

That sweet spot focused on nature, specifically birds. It also connected to agriculture, which has taken on a big part of my writing the last two years. And it highlighted conservation by which I mean solutions-oriented, against-the-current-grain practices that promised to serve values beyond the bottom line and prioritizing the thriving of the natural world. Although we can find bad news in headlines most days, In Search of Meadowlarks offered glimpses of better stories.

Favorite Book to Emulate: Path of Light

I read plenty of books that are so far outside what I do as a writer, I appreciate them solely on their own terms. Periodically, though, I read books that are close enough to what I do—or might imagine doing—as a writer that I read with special attention, taking notes about methods and grabbing inspiration from the approach. Such is the case with Morgan Sjogren’s Path of Light: A Walk Through Colliding Legacies of Glen Canyon. (I interviewed Morgan here.)

Path of Light tells of Charles L. Bernheimer’s expeditions in the 1920s through the Four Corners region and Sjogren’s retracing of those steps. It blends history and journalism with personal reflection. I am nowhere near as adventurous as Sjogren or as comfortable outdoors, but I admire the way Path of Light captures the living presence of the past on the landscape that she traveled through, as well as how she keeps a better future in mind. That blending of personal, natural, historical, and present-day political made me want to grab my boots and notebook and escape.

Favorite Novel: Joe Wilkins

When I asked Joe Wilkins if he’d sit for an interview with me, he rushed an advance copy of his new novel to me. Like all of Wilkins’s work, The Entire Sky renders a landscape and characters so vividly you are sure you’ve walked along the trail talking to them. And somehow, he can uplift heartache in its myriad forms, always with prose that vibrates with poetry.

Although there is pain in The Entire Sky, Wilkins also shows the possibility of reconciliation and friendship across generations. Repair is always a possibility, if not a certainty. That seems like a lesson we ought to take seriously as we move toward 2025.

Closing Words

Relevant Reruns

Above, I linked to several past interviews and book years-in-review from Taking Bearings. Have a look!

New Writing

I’m working on a reported piece and some history, but these won’t be ready until the new year. Stick around.

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As always, you can find my books, and books where some of my work is included, at my Bookshop affiliate page (where, if you order, I get a small benefit).

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Taking Bearings Next Week

I’m back in The Classroom next week. Stay tuned!