Top Five Books Read in 2024

2024 was a year that I felt like I had finally climbed back on the reading horse, as it were, after a few years in which reading anything seemed to be a struggle. Looking at the total number of books read, that seems to have been more of a matter of vibes than anything else, but I did read some absolutely fantastic books, including one that I'm pretty confident is going to be part of my personal canon for a long time. But I'll get to that.

Below are five books I read this year that I loved in one way or another. Ascending order from the fifth to the first.

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5. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

I read this in preparation for the Naked Lunch episode of the podcast I co-host, The Projectionist's Lending Library. My co-host Erik is a Burroughs fan and has done quite a bit of work on the Beats in general. I, on the other hand, have not; indeed, it took several years after my first reading of On the Road for me to warm to the Beats at all (outside of Ginsberg, who has always convinced me).

(I tell this episode on the podcast, but my first exposure to Burrroughs was kind of a negative one in that I was as a child a huge fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs, at a time when finding copies of his books in the local Books-A-Million--outside of the first Tarzan book and maybe sometimes A Princess of Mars--was very difficult. William S, on the other hand, got an entire shelf. I hated him without reading him because I was a strong partisan as a child).

Anyway, Naked Lunch. You can check out the podcast for my extended thoughts on it, but the short version is that this book is very weird in a way that I sympathize with. The plot, if there is a plot, is super thin; the characters, if they are characters, have virtually none of that roundness that we're told to expect from a novel. The content is obscene, bizarre, even sexy (in a way that makes people side-eye you if you claim to find the book sexy). It's a very bold book and one I simply can't imagine being released today; it breaks up your expectations of what a novel should be or do and forces new modes of reading on you. And that's just cool.

4. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

Here's another book I read for the podcast (actually, the next episode of the podcast, dropping later this month). Well, and for my English Language Novels class, which this year I themed around science fiction.  It's also the very first Le Guin novel I've ever read, though hopefully it won't be the last. 

(I say "hopefully" although I theoretically can control what I read...).

The plot here is simple: a man can dream dreams that alter reality. He asks a psychiatrist to help him only to find that the psychiatrist is wanting to harness his powers to change the world. Hijinks ensue.

For the record, I re-read this book while I was also reading Alan Moore's Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, which appears below, and there's a kind of occult sympathy between the two books. I don't think Le Guin was an occultist, though she was a Taoist and an Anarchist, and I rather suspect she's more interested in themes of control and resistance than she is in dreams as such​. Still and all, it's a wonderful, beautiful book and one that sticks with you.

3. The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic by Alan Moore and Steve Moore

Let me not right out of the gate that this is not a book for children. Like, at all. What it is is Alan Moore (and his deceased friend Steve Moore, no relation) laying out his particular theory of magic, one which centers the act of creation at the heart of the magician's work. Put another way, Moore seems convinced (and I'm not unconvinced) that magic ultimately boils down to art: the creation of art, the dissemination of art, the promotion of art. Moore claims at one place that he began to develop his theory of magic while writing From Hell, when he has his villain say something like "the one place where gods can be said to truly exist is in the human mind." So for Moore magic, whatever else it is, is about accessing the potential of the human mind.

Actually, I'll go further and suggest that, insofar as this book is itself a magical spell, its a spell by Moore to convince more people to create interesting art. Moore has been very open in his dismay at the trajectory of contemporary culture; this exchange is emblematic of his stance:

He's not wrong.

Anyway, this book moves well and it's compelling. If you're interested in Moore as an artist, there's a novella and several pages of comics (presumably his farewell to the medium); if you're interested in Moore as an occultist, he carefully lays out the system developed by himself and his friend Steve Moore; and if you care for neither of those things but really want to know how to do basic ceremonial magic? Well, you'll find that here too. It's a grimoire as only Alan Moore could do it.

2. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

I never read Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, though I did watch the TV adaptation a while back. It's not exactly that I didn't want to, but it just kept slipping from my attention. But I had heard so much good buzz about Piranesi--and it is comparatively short--so I decided to finally read it in the last weeks of 2024. It wound up being the last book I read that year and, let me tell you, it was a high note to end on.

As a treat, take a look at this interview with Susanna Clarke and ​Alan Moore:

This book, like The Lathe of Heaven, isn't really one that relies much on plot per se. The book is really more about mood, as the initially-unnamed narrator wanders through a vast house and describes it and its inhabiting statues. It's dreamlike and Borgesian and I really can't recommend it enough.

1. Dayspring by Anthony Oliveira

I first encountered Anthony Oliveira through his Twitter presence, and then through his Patreon-funded podcast about Milton. That project has long since moved on, but I've still kept up with Oliveira (I even bought an issue of a Marvel superhero comic because he wrote it). I bought this book when it first came out in...(? April 2024? I was sure it was longer ago). But I didn't get to it until toward the end of the year. And then, one day, I picked it up and started reading and was almost immediately in tears. I read this book, all 432 pages of it, in a single Saturday; I could not stop.

So, what is this book? It's hard to describe. On the one hand, it's a kind of historical fiction about the Beloved Disciple--here imagined as Jesus's lover (and Lazarus, incidentally; Oliveira obviously knows all the potential identities of the Beloved Disciple and he manages to use all of them). But the "historical" bit here is very loose; Jesus and his beloved are depicted as watching TV at one point, for instance. 

And it's not really a novel at all; it's more of an extended poem, or poetic meditation. It's a work of queer Christian mysticism in which union with the Divine is conceived of in explicitly homoerotic terms. It's irreverent and sometimes obscene. And it's also a grappling with disappointment--being disappointed by God, by life, by the people around you. It's amazingly beautiful and it's not only one of my favorite books I read in 2024; it's probably one of my favorite books of all time. If you're curious, here's a sample of the audiobook (which Google, inexplicably, won't let me embed).

So that's my top five reads of 2024. I'll probably get a movie list put together sometime soon; oddly, I don't seem to have gotten much done in terms of new television, so there probably won't be a list for that (Ripley was swell, though). Also, with the social media rapidly going fash, I'll probably be posting here a lot more. I know, I promise that every year, but I'm hoping that if I actually eliminate Facebook I'll need somewhere to post random thoughts, and that's exactly what this website is for.
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Anyway, happy 2025 y'all. Be safe out there.