I did my first yearly reading round-up about five years ago. It was a way for me to catalogue my year in reading and think deeper about the books that had an impact on me over the course of the year. I did it, primarily to make my Christmas shopping easier. I decided I would gift my favorite books of the year to the people in my life. I remember I selected a work of fiction that I thought would resonate with the person, and then gave everyone a copy of a collection of Emerson’s essays.
This list is a more in-depth round-up. I thought, while launching this substack it would be a good thing to include. You’ll find a mix of non-fiction and fiction along with some poetry and drama. I tried to, in creating this list with the idea of sharing it, choose works that I wanted to talk about and that still resonate with me long after I have read them. In 2024, I read a lot of non-fiction; in some sense, this was due to my habits and the things I was interested in writing about. I was researching topics for writing projects, and the majority of the fiction I was reading were books I had previously read and was re-reading (which tends to be the case with my fiction habits). In an effort to avoid redundancy, I have left those titles out, apart from one that is still a relatively recent novel. I also left out some of the more esoteric books I read which applied to research for a screenplay I am writing, and further research pertaining to my fiction work. My hope is that I have included a list of titles that some of you might not be as familiar with, but that is also reflective of what I aim to do in my non-fiction writing here on Substack.
The titles are in no particular order, but instead are grouped by genre.
Non-Fiction:
Karmic Traces by Eliot Weinberger
I discovered Eliot Weinberger through another writer on this list, Benjamin Labatut, the wonderful Chilean novelist. In interviews, Labatut frequently praised Weinberger and cited him as an influence. I think I ordered Karmic Traces sometime in the summer but didn’t get around to reading it until December of 2024. It was a book that blew me away almost instantly. Immediately upon reading the opening essays on Iceland, I knew Weinberger was someone I would enjoy. I devoured the collection and still return to it frequently. The third essay in the collection (a prose poem really) about the various dreams that are presented in the Icelandic Saga’s illustrates the wonder of his unique form and is cause enough to pick up a copy. Weinberger is sharp, pointed, and has a mysterious ability to make the dullest subject interesting (his essay on naked mole rats is proof). Beyond anything stylistic or formal, I was in awe of Weinberger’s curiosity. I think it is the thing that attracts me both to writing and writers more than anything else. Weinberger is full of it, and you can sense it. He has said that everything in his work is “independently verifiable,” and I tend to believe him. Yet, there is still something about his essays and this collection that speaks beyond our simple taste for truth. He awakens us to the wonders of this world and makes the esoteric, the difficult, wondrously joyful. The highlight for me was the titular essay, Karmic Traces, which is encyclopedic (like all of Weinberger) but which resonates with a sense of sublime illumination that forces you to put the book down at moments.
I also have to say, after finishing the collection, I wanted more and have since read a few other books by Mr. Weinberger, but I also found, perhaps his most famous essay, “What I Heard About Iraq,” online, and it is well worth the read. You can find it, here.
The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World by Dr. Iain McGilchrist
I lack the words to describe such a book, or really books. The Matter with Things is a two-volume set by Dr. McGilchrist that explores in-depth his hemisphere hypothesis, and its epistemological, philosophical, and metaphysical ramifications. I have to say, I did not start these volumes in 2024, but I finished them in 2024, so I figured they belong on this list. I want to say it took me about two years to complete them. Dr. McGilchrist’s work is something I turn to frequently. Actually, I’m not certain a day goes by now, having read these books, that I don’t think about the wonder they contain.
Dr. Iain McGilchrist is a British psychiatrist, neuroscientist, philosopher, and literary scholar known for his work on the divided brain and its implications for culture and human understanding. His major works include The Master and His Emissary (2009) and The Matter with Things (2021).
The Master and His Emissary is a great starting place for those who wish to encounter his work. The book explores the main focus of his work and the differences between the brain’s two hemispheres, emphasizing that they do not simply perform distinct functions but approach the world in fundamentally different ways. The right hemisphere provides a holistic, interconnected perspective, while the left focuses on analysis and control. McGilchrist argues that Western society has become dominated by the left hemisphere’s worldview, leading to an imbalanced understanding of reality. He traces this imbalance through history, suggesting it has contributed to cultural and civilizational crises. My own understanding of our current crises is, I think, always somewhat in reference to it.
The Matter with Things: This two-volume work builds on McGilchrist’s earlier ideas, offering a comprehensive (and I do mean comprehensive) critique of scientific materialism and advocating for a richer understanding of reality. The book examines:
1. Means to Truth: How perception, attention, intuition, and imagination contribute to understanding reality.
2. Paths to Truth: The interplay of reason, science, and intuition in grasping deeper truths.
3. Nature of Reality: Exploring fundamental questions about consciousness, time, space, matter, value, and the sacred. (His chapter on the coincidence of opposites is one I have returned to very frequently).
McGilchrist challenges the now-dominant, but hopefully fading, reductionist view that reality consists only of inert matter and instead proposes that consciousness is primary and that relationships are foundational to existence. He calls for restoring balance between the brain’s hemispheres to avoid intellectual and cultural collapse. Both works highlight McGilchrist’s central thesis: humanity must integrate both scientific reasoning and intuitive wisdom to achieve a more profound connection with nature, each other, and the sacred.
I honestly can’t say enough about Dr. McGilchrist; his work has been perhaps the most illuminating contemporary stuff I have encountered. I truly believe he will be someone we will talk about for eons. I think his insights are that fundamental and his thinking that holistic.
His work is exceedingly challenging, but luckily for us, he spends a lot of time discussing it on the internet, and there are plenty of YouTube videos of his various lectures and podcast appearances. I suggest starting there and then diving into his books if you aim to seek more.
Some suggested videos:
Dr. McGilchrist is also now on Substack, you can find his work, here.
Savage Gods by Paul Kingsnorth
Paul Kingsnorth is someone I actually learned about in late 2023 right here on Substack. Since encountering his work, I have become a huge fan. Kingsnorth has recently become an Orthodox Christian, and his writing on the subject has been extremely illuminating to me. Despite the fact that I still personally wrestle with topics of theological significance outside the bounds of the Church, I find his insights extremely prescient. His series on “The Machine” is absolutely wonderful, as is a recent lecture he gave for First Things, which you can find here. I highly recommend checking out his Substack, which you can do here.
Savage Gods, was the third book I read by Kingsnorth. Upon discovering his writing, I read two of his novels: The Wake and Beast, both of which are wonderful. They are extremely imaginative in both style, form, and scope, and I’d encourage anybody to check them out. Savage Gods came to me at a particularly prescient time. Savage Gods is a deeply introspective and philosophical memoir that explores themes of belonging, creativity, and the limits of language. After moving with his family to rural Ireland, Kingsnorth traces the challenges he faced in finding a sense of home and connection to the land, challenges which led him to experience a profound existential crisis. Throughout the book, he questions not only his place in the world but also the value and purpose of writing itself. I found the book while I was going through my own sort of existential crisis in much of the same way. Jumping between housing, no longer certain I felt any belonging toward my home, and the struggle with the reality that nothing was coming from my writing or its pursuit, a crisis I’m not certain I’ve surmounted, but one which caused Paul’s memoir to deeply resonate with me. I found it extremely insightful and encouraging in a very kind of morbidly strange way. I think in some way, I have to credit Paul (without actually knowing him) with the encouragement to start this substack. So thanks, Paul!
The Way Home: Tales From a Life Without Technology by Mark Boyle
Mr. Kingsnorth’s writing actually led me to encounter Mark Boyle. I learned in the reading of The Way Home that the two are actually friends and share pints at a local pub, or did? (the pub closes in the book; it’s a bummer). There was something serendipitous about these two books and my encounter with them last summer. I read Boyle’s memoir while building out a cabin to live at in the rural mountains near my home of Aspen. (Unfortunately, the cabin did not work out, but the reading experience and the work I was doing at the time paired very well).
Mark Boyle, also known as “The Moneyless Man,” is an Irish writer and advocate for simple living who gained prominence for living without money starting in 2008. The internet tells me that he was inspired by Gandhi’s philosophy and decided to experiment with a money-free lifestyle. He ended up living entirely without money for three years, beginning on Buy Nothing Day in 2008. He relied on bartering, foraging, growing his own food, and using sustainable technologies to get by.
The Way Home, his most recent book, is the only one of his I have read, and takes a different focus. It is a memoir chronicling his first year living entirely off the grid in rural Ireland. Having previously lived without money, Boyle takes his philosophy further by giving up all modern technology, including electricity, running water, phones, and computers. In a cabin he built by hand, Boyle grows and forages his own food, and adopts traditional skills for sustenance. The Way Home is a wonderfully sincere book, and it had me absolutely bustling with ideas and longing. For those with any interest in alternative or the more primitive aspects of living, I highly recommend it.
Around the same time, I also encountered John Zerzan, an American Anarcho-primitivist philosopher, who is best known for his critique of agricultural civilization, which he views as inherently oppressive. Zerzan advocates for a return to hunter-gatherer ways of life as a model for a free and egalitarian society. His work challenges domestication, symbolic thought (e.g., language, mathematics, and art), and concepts like time. For those interested in such topics, the two pair very well together.
Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich (1926–2002) was an Austrian philosopher, Catholic priest, and social critic renowned for his radical critiques of modern institutions and industrial society. I encountered his work somewhat randomly, and I’m certainly glad I did. Illich’s work is primarily focused on how modern institutions—such as education, medicine, and technology—often undermine human autonomy and dignity. He argued that these systems create dependency, alienation, and inefficiency by institutionalizing basic human needs. I found Illich at a time when I was thinking through many of the questions he poses, and his words were nourishment for my soul.
Deschooling Society, probably his most famous work, is a critique of institutionalized education, proposing informal and self-directed learning as alternatives. As someone who hated every minute they spent in school, and never became quite accustomed to its necessity, but who was absolutely curious about the world and desperately wanted to learn, I found Illich’s book a bit sad. I say that because it was published in 1971, and despite its popularity at the time, did little to effect change. For anyone interested in the conversations surrounding education and institutions, I would say Illich is an essential disruptor to read.
I also found David Cayley’s biography, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, a wonderful pairing. Illich lived one of those lives that no matter what you think of his ideas, you have to be amazed by. Cayley, a friend of Illich’s, chronicles his intellectual developments alongside biographical details, and it is quite an amazing read.
Fiction
Abysses by Pascal Quignard
Like Eliot Weinberger, I encountered Quignard through Benjamin Labatut. I am very glad I did. Quignard might be the most unusual writer I have ever encountered. I put him on the fiction list, but he might deserve a category of his own. I still don’t know what to make of anything I have read by him, but in my soul I am glad that I did read it. Despite his work leading in so many strange directions, and at moments only classifiable by the sheer incomprehensibility, there is a synthesis that happens in your soul when reading one of his books that blends the multiplicities he forces you to encounter into a single unified whole in a way that is so masterfully done it exceeds any explanation as to how he does it. If you like fiction that challenges, that explores the abyss, that seeks out meaning in the ether of our experiences then I highly recommend Quignard.
Abysses, is his latest addition to his Last Kingdom series, a body of work that defies conventional genres. Quignard describes the series as neither philosophical argumentation nor traditional narrative but rather a unique exploration of timeless themes through a mix of aphorisms, reflections, anecdotes, and quotations. In Abysses, Quignard delves into the concept of “the Erstwhile,” representing the forgotten or unknowable past that haunts the present. This theme is central to his exploration of time, loss, and memory. I’d encourage anybody to pick up any of the books in his Last Kingdom series and simply let them wash over you again and again.
The Maniac by Benjamín Labatut
Now to Benjamín Labatut, the author responsible for adding a significant pile to my 2024 reading list. I first read Labatut a few years ago at the behest of a colleague in my writing workshop cohort. I’m usually shy to take on recommendations (that I’m offering them is somewhat ironic), but I quickly picked up a copy of When We Cease to Understand the World, Labatut’s first book available in English. I read it while on a plane to Austin in 2022. The short collection of stories, like Quignard, do not meet traditional genre conventions, but it immediatley took me in. I had to be asked to exit the plane upon landing while I turned the last pages of the final story.
When The Maniac came out in 2023, I lined up to get it. I too read it in a single sitting. It’s on 2024’s list because I re-read it in the fall for the… third/fourth time?
The Maniac is a wonderful book that poses daring questions about the present while re-introducing the causation to certain preeminent topics through the biography of John von Neumann. It explores the profound and often troubling relationship between human ingenuity and its consequences, particularly in the realms of science, mathematics, and artificial intelligence. Structured as a triptych, the book doesn’t just focus on von Neumann but examines pivotal moments in the development of modern thought and technology through the lives of those associated with their development. (Though the primary focus is von Neumann.)
The novel builds on themes from Labatut’s earlier work, When We Cease to Understand the World, and delves into how scientific breakthroughs can lead to both enlightenment and existential dread. It interrogates the double-edged nature of technological progress, suggesting that humanity’s pursuit of knowledge often comes at great moral and psychological cost. It is absolutely masterful how Labatut uses historical figures to explore broader philosophical questions about reason, chaos, and the limits of human understanding. I honestly can’t say enough good things about Labatut. He is one of a few contemporary writers that I am truly in awe of.
I will also mention that he has some great interviews that engage the imagination and, like his writing, introduce themes of awe and uncertainty into the discourse that I believe are very needed.
A few links:
The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
The final author on this list who I encountered through Labatut is W.G. Sebald. The Rings of Saturn was the third work in a series by Sebald that I read, and my favorite, the other two being Vertigo and The Emigrants. First published in 1995, The Rings of Saturn is another almost unclassifiable work that blends memoir, travelogue, history, and philosophical meditation. The book follows a nameless narrator (closely resembling Sebald himself) on a walking tour through Suffolk, England. While ostensibly chronicling the journey, the narrative branches into reflections on history, art, literature, and humanity’s destructive tendencies.
The book is deeply meditative, exploring themes of historical decay and human suffering. Sebald was born in 1944 in Germany and grew up in the shadow of World War II. The impact of such history is seen scattered all over his work and makes it profoundly engaging for anyone who wishes to reflect on such events. The Rings of Saturn draws inspiration from Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia (Urn Burial), reflecting on the impermanence of civilizations and the fragility of life, and it’s not difficult to see how the history manifests in the literary explorations which Sebald leads the reader through. Sebald’s use of an impersonal, detached narrator allows him to weave his personal concerns into a broader tapestry of history and memory. This narrative distance reflects his skepticism about fully articulating traumatic experiences, a tension rooted in his own grappling with Germany’s past and the limits of representation. Additionally, his integration of photographs and historical fragments creates a collage-like structure that mirrors the fragmented nature of memory and identity and turns the work into something that echoes with sublime beauty and pain. It’s a truly beautiful book.
Poetry & Drama
Selected Poems by Jorge Luis Borges
I have long been a fan of Borges. Ficciones is one of the fundamental books to my becoming, and to my desires, but until 2024, I had never read any of Borges’ poetry despite him producing a considerable amount, perhaps more than any of his fiction or non-fiction. I am sure glad I did. I find it hard to speak about poetry, and often find it unwarranted. Thinking, rather, that poetry should be an encounter with language and not something to be discussed or pulled apart. So I might just say: read Borges’ poems. If you enjoy his fiction, or even non-fiction, it will be a great addition to your knowledge and understanding of his work.
A favorite: The Labyrinth from “In Praise of Darkness” which I found a link to, here.
The Greek Plays edited by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm
This anthology features sixteen of the most celebrated works of ancient Greek drama. It includes plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, presented in new, accessible translations by prominent scholars such as Emily Wilson, Sarah Ruden, Frank Nisetich, Rachel Kitzinger, and the editors themselves. Emily Wilson led me to this anthology. I read her new translations of both The Iliad and The Odyssey and was blown away. Wanting to stick to that period and read more, I found she had participated in the translation of this work and picked it up.
There is too much that can be said about reading these dramas. So I will limit it to saying that if you haven’t, this anthology is a great place to start. My favorite was Antigone, translated by Frank Nisetich. I absolutely love this play. The moral connotations and consequences and the relationship it frames in regard to obligations fall in step with much of what keeps me up at night. There’s also a great modern staging you can find from the National Theatre which is very much worth the watch and features Christopher Eccleston as Creon and Jodie Whittaker as Antigone.
The reader also benefits from short biographies of the playwrights which provide historical context. Introductions to each play which offer insights into its themes, characters, and cultural significance. Annotations that clarify references and enhance understanding and help contextualize the plays within ancient Greek culture. The appendix also includes essays on topics like “Greek Drama and Politics,” “The Theater of Dionysus,” and “Plato and Aristotle on Tragedy.” There is also a very interesting timeline of Greek drama and a list of adaptations that trace the influence of these works from antiquity to modern times.
I haven’t yet read each play, but it’s one I keep close and love to revisit continually.
That rounds it out. These are my Top-10 books of 2024. My hope is that by sharing these works and my reflections on their presence in my reading life, they might inspire your own reading. If that’s the case, or you have any thoughts, please share them. I’d love to hear if you’ve read any of these works or if you are planning to. As well, if you enjoyed this, stay tuned. My plan is to do something similar each month, rounding up the books I read and sharing various insights into my reading process. If you’d like to follow along on my reading journey, subscribe below.
BM