My goal with this website is simple: to write about interesting books or texts and hopefully provide guidance to you, the reader, with, at times, in-depth analysis and explication. The main thing for me is to provide human curation in what is quickly becoming an AI auto-generated, confirmation biased landscape. This is problematic for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it limits what works are talked about, often serving recency bias, leaving great, older works to wither despite having much to offer.

I plan to continue doing this because it is something that I would do anyway: reading texts, taking notes, collecting thoughts. This helps me remember and understand, providing reference. Which is to say, I have no big aims or goals with this site except to provide space for ideas and to serve as motivation to write more regularly. 

Literary thought is so bifurcated and multitudinous that, rather than choosing one lens to analyze texts, I’ve chosen none, or, at times, I selectively chose one or two avenues to, hopefully, give an overall impression or understanding, in as much as that is possible, of the experience of reading a text, so that you, the reader, might be able to better decide if that's an experience that you want to participate in. 

I get no money or promotional material from this website. I buy these books with my own money and spend far too long writing these reviews in the hope that they provide guidance to a potential reader, or, just as well, maybe provide some form of small entertainment. I was able to post twenty Reviews and one Read Along, writing nearly 40,000 words for the site, and it’s all free (but, I might as well mention that if you have enjoyed it, please consider donating. Like you, probably, I am struggling to make ends meet, working multiple jobs, so it all helps immensely).

In the coming year, along with classic works, I’ll be looking at books/texts from a broader range of publishers/book presses and authors hoping to expand my own knowledge and awareness. My goal is to publish a review a month with some other features while avoiding spamming content just for the sake of making you aware that I exist. I might not be able to hit even this low bar of consistency, given the constraints of normal life, because this is purely a passion project. I will also be taking most or all of January off and maybe part of February to finish editing a book that I wrote this year. 

That said, I hope you’ll join me in 2025 and now let’s look back at the best texts (which of course means absolutely nothing and is ultimately worthless) that I encountered in 2024. 

Best Novel(s) 

Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu 

As the year has gone on, my appreciation and fascination for this work has grown. It’s the book that I think about the most since I’ve read it, and, maybe more than anything else, this will be my guiding principle when trying to settle on a top pick. I’ve been able to turn several friends onto the book, and everyone who has earnestly engaged with the work has also been captured by it, which is really the highest endorsement that I can provide. I look forward to rereading it somewhere down the line and eagerly anticipate Theodoros coming 2026(?) from Deep Vellum. Here’s a little excerpt  from the review that better captures my thoughts: 

“Finding new authors or books that blow your mind is one of the great joys of reading and what keeps me coming back year after year, always searching for that feeling. This is one of those books, and there is some intangible quality to the writing that pulled me in immediately. There are also a ton of little lines thrown in that I very much relate to, such as “This is what my life is like, how it has always seemed: the singular, uniform, and tangible world on one side of the coin, and the secret, private, phantasmagoric world of my mind’s dreams on the other side. Neither is complete and true without the other.” (71), so that the book feels almost like it was written for me. And what more could anyone ask for?”

I cannot, however, limit this to only one book. There is just too much good stuff. So here are two more novels worth your attention. 

Augustus by John Williams 

This is probably the best crafted/written book that I read all year. It is so subtly perfect that it’s impossible to describe. You have to jump in, commit to wrapping your head around the epistolary form, and get to know the characters. Doing a little bit of background research pays dividends but isn’t fully necessary. I think about this book a lot, much more than the also great Stoner, and marvel at its elegance. Again, here’s an excerpt from the review: 

“Williams is a master of subtlety. He doesn’t use big, sweeping metaphors or grand language. Rather, he hits you between the eyes with small details and phrases that slowly build until you find yourself reacting. Make no mistake, this is the work of someone who has refined each page over and over, and it is an absolute joy to read. I read this slowly, and I’m glad I did. It allowed me time to consider the narrative and its themes (of which, it covers most of the big ones) and how Williams put it all together. I couldn’t find fault with any part of it. I experienced a slightly lesser version of this same feeling while reading Stoner, and now I can’t wait to read Butcher’s Crossing.”

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young

I really didn’t know what to expect with this massive master work. It was so much more encompassing than I could have imagined, dropping more beautiful and astounding prose in its first ten pages than most authors do in their entire careers. It’s both difficult and not, full of depth and rife for analysis. Best still, you don’t need to do any of that to enjoy it. The characters are so engaging that I find myself feeling nostalgic for them, missing them from the three months that we spent together. As I say in the review: 

“I hope it’s clear at this point when I say that the book is massive, a tautology, because, rather than trying to tell you what this book is about, I want to give you a feel for the constant push/pull between grounded reality and conceptual, imaginative thought, between the possibilities of life and of figurative doors that remain open against those permanently closed (while not discounting the possibility of both being forever in contention). In the work, we experience platonic realities versus abstract sensation as interpretations of phenomenon. We see people who have all repeatedly made wrong choices in life in one way or another, people agonized by life who wonder the unanswerable: what does any of it (he winds, the rains, the dreams, the baldness, the yearnings) matter? Or, as Vera agonizes, “Where was the truth which should not fail?” (254). 

The whole book is an erasure, each character constantly eliminating themselves or a certain aspect of the other — the text as mirror. All of this leads me to want to equate metonymy (as the delay of meaning, the constant unfurling of différance) with displacement and metaphor with condensation (rhetorical/grammatical = condensation/displacement) to use as an interpretive lens, which I would suggest for this particular work because, I think, it easily asserts itself – the following passage as example (though, of course, you don’t need to do any of that): 

“Among beings strange to each other, those divided by the long roarings of time, of space, those who have never met or, when they meet, have not recognized as their own the other heart and that heart’s weakness, have turned stonily away, would there not be, in the vision of some omniscient eye, a web of spidery logic establishing the most secret relationships, deep calling to deep, illuminations of the eternal darkness, recognitions in the night world of voyager dreams, all barriers dissolving, all souls as one and united? Every heart is the other heart. Every soul is the other soul. Every face is the other face. The individual is the one illusion” (7). “

Best Non-Fiction

Though I don’t feel as though I have the chops specific for the genre, I do like to read nonfiction and have been reading more journals, diaries, and memoirs. Given that, I wanted to mention my favorite from this year. 

Memoirs From Beyond the Grave 1768-1800 by Francois-René de Chateaubriand 

Chateaubriand wrote his memoirs with the intention that they be published long after his death, but life wasn’t so kind. He had to sell whole parts while still alive, which ended up working out. I found some comfort in this, seeing the struggles of life, even aristocratic life, reflected back centuries in what has been such a difficult year for myself and so many others. 

Chateaubriand lived an incredibly interesting life during a turning point in history and modernity, as governments collapsed and new democracies were born, hobnobbing with huge historic figures like Napoleon and Ben Franklin (to name a few), traveling across Europe and the newly formed America. But it’s his intimate reflections about family, grief, faith, and his failures and successes that makes this worth reading. He was a gifted writer, and there are some absolutely stunning passages (I’ll post a few below). I absolutely cannot wait to read the next installment: years 1800-1815.

“I want to climb back up the slope of my better years. These pages shall be a funerary shrine raised to the light of my memories” (10).

“Good for anything where others are concerned, good for nothing when it comes to myself: there you have me” (165). 

“Life in an interminable plague. The chain of mourning and funerals that encircles us is never broken; it is always growing: we ourselves form one of its links. And still we magnify the importance of catastrophes that seven-eighths of the world will never so much as mention! Let us pant after a vain reputation that will never fly more than a few leagues from our grave!” (316)

“All of us, so long as we exist, have nothing but the present moment; what follows in a matter for God. Always, there are two chances that we will never see the friend we leave again: our death or his. How many men walk down a staircase never to climb up it again?” (417)

Last Notes (from the underground)

There are many things that I did not have time to review, some of which were the best things that I read all year, so I want to make space for those here. Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry is an absolutely beautiful book about the small-town life of a Southern barber. It captures so much of the hardship, joy, humor, and mundanity of life with poetic prose and small geographic scope. I’ve recommended this book to a number of friends, and now I recommend it to you. Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett and Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute were also highlights. I plan to dig into both author’s other work more in the coming months. The funniest (a rare and difficult thing)  book that I read all year was You, Me, and Ulysses S. Grant by Brand Neely. I will admit that I learned more than I had imagined, and I highly recommend finding the audio book version and laughing maniacally while doing yard work to disturb your neighbors. 

As a final note for the year, I have to express my personal gratitude for all of the hard-working translators. So much of what I have read this year and what I plan to read in the next few years is translated work. It doesn’t take long to realize that the pool of translators is relatively small, and these hard-working people do the job knowing that they will be overshadowed by the author with nary a mention of their contribution. So eternal hails and appreciation to Maria Jolas, Frank Wynne, Hardie St. Martin and Leonard Mades, Philip Boehm, Emily Wilson (whose new Odyssey and Iliad translations are excellent), Alex Andriesse, Sophie Hughes, Len Rix, Margaret Sayers Peden, Anthony Melville, Sean Cotter, and Sverre Lyngstad  for greatly enriching my year.