every book I read in 2024

and all the books I hope to read in 2025

Dec 11, 2024

Every year, I keep a running list of the books I read. The rules are simple: I finish a book, it goes in the list. Doesn’t matter when I started reading a book, only that I finished it in the given calendar year. As of the first week of December, I am capping off 2024 having read 25 books. I might make it to 26 if I find the time to get through Touching Feeling by Eve Kosovsky Sedgewick in the next few weeks.

This my second year of keeping this list and I think it has been a major motivator. I’m a simple bitch, all it takes to get me going is the prospect of a list. I finish a book, it goes back into the bookshelf, and then I write it down on a dedicated page at the back of my journal. And repeat. Here is a scan of that exact page, listing all 25 books I read in 2024:

Every book I read in 2024, in the order I read them.

Villém Flusser’s History of the Devil

This is one of those books that is so perfectly and intricately written, that the theory comes to life in the way every word hangs onto the next. This pseudo-history of knowledge and technology, good and evil, God and the Devil calls itself a “caricature of polemic intentions.” And it is the trippiest thing I have ever read.

It is technically a book on the phenomenology of the Devil, what the Devil actually is after you strip away the theology. And indeed, reading it was a spiritual journey. As this systematic study of the Devil evolves through the seven deadly sins, every idea and argument felt completely recognizable yet utterly foreign. I’m still recovering, so I’ll leave you with a handful of my favorite lines:

“It is so lustful that it overtakes our nerves, our whole body, and we start to vibrate with an almost unbearable tension… we concentrate the vibration upon the fingertips; we direct the tension onto the keys of a typewriter, and we do what every day small talk calls ‘creative writing.’ […] We know that the act of writing links us, ever more desperately, to the world of the senses. […] Effectively, our minds are realized lust. The enormous river of life, made up of protoplasm, which flows ever more furiously against the celestial doors, is nothing but the virtual condition of the lustful reality that our minds are.”

So many moments where I thought: He took the thoughts right out of my head before I was able to string them together in coherent sentences!

“We know that we are a knot created by the spasm of language, a grammatical error, a mere noise that envelops the harmony of language… We are a Self, because we are a point in the fabric of language… We are a Self because we interrupt the flux of language in its search for zero.”

He is so good at bringing his self-consciousness into his argument. He truly takes the stakes of his writing to heart!

All of this self-knowledge, all of this conscious creation… It is the capital sin of Pride. All of this systemic evaluation of all values; all of this twisting around of the highest for the lowest, and the lowest for the highest; all of this swapping around of the intimate for the external, and the external for the intimate; all of this is the very essence of Hell.

2 books about books

Dynamic Library collects essays from an interdisciplinary symposium about knowledge classification and organization over at Sitterwerk, a library in Switzerland with over 25,000 art books. Artists are known to visit the collection and compile their own curated “stacks,” which are in turn incorporated into a dynamic digital categorization system that uses RFID technology. Publishing As Practice compiles the writing from four publishing projects that explore “publishing as an incubator for new forms of editorial, curatorial and artistic practice.”

As a duo, these books made for great parallel reading. I was reading these together around March-April when I was making and distributing my first zine. And it solidified my thinking around writing and publishing: On the one hand, it’s never been easier to self-publish. And yet, we’ve never had more businesses vying to intervene in every part of the self-publishing process (***ahem***). If you love publishing on Substack, you’ll be even more transformed by the process of legit self-publishing: Wherein you make your work, design your book object, package it, distribute it, process payment and distribution all by yourself.

3 books by Clarice Lispector

I’m not too proud to admit that the Pinterest posts of the four New Directions covers photographed together were the main catalyst for my purchase of these books. But I would give anything to read Agua Viva, The Passion According to GH and Near the Wild Heart for the first time again. Like Flusser, Lispector was part of a Jewish family fleeing antisemitic violence in Europe and relocated to Brazil. Her writing is feral, amorphous, form-defying and deeply spiritual, at least to me. It expresses something so intimate it pushes past the human before looping back into it. I also find comfort in the shortness of her speech and her evasive gaze during interviews; I sent my mother a picture of an older Lispector and she confirmed my suspicion, Clarice looks like my grandmother, Carmen.

Females by Andrea Long Chu

This is a new cornerstone of all my writing on gender and hyperfemininity. I think I’ve cited it in every essay I’ve published on this newsletter and I am not above continuing that streak.

2 film books

Nicole Brenez’s The Figure In General and the Body In Particular rocked my shit. At first I felt like I had bitten off more than I could chew, that it was too theory-based and dense even for me to slug through. But I put it down, came back to it, and started reading it even more slowly. Pausing to really define Brenez’s constellation of figure-based terms. Now, I feel so much more capable of grasping and enjoying not just 20th century film, but figurative art at in general. I wrote about my early learnings from this book for my friend Akosua’s newsletter, Consumption Report:

From Brenez I learned that the feet, the voice, and the boobs (it’s likely there were several pairs as I suspect a double stepped in for Pamela Anderson for the topless shots), can be more than just mere components of a singular character. Brenez explains that “cinema can redirect but also reopen all the notions and divisions with which we perceive the phenomena of presence, identity, and difference.” So she challenges us to “refrain from presuming coherence” of any kind.

The second film book I read this year, My Cinema compiles a lifetime’s worth of interviews, ephemera and film writing by Marguerite Duras. I wrote about Duras and this book for my first-ever newsletter essay, which you can read here. So I’ll only add that Another Gaze: A Feminist Film Journal, which published My Cinema, has long been one of my favorite magazines and publishers. I bought PDF’s of all their issues and am too excited for the upcoming book on Yoshiko Shibaki.

2025…

I only brought a dozen-ish books with me to Puerto Rico — books I knew I would need handy for my work. And while it’s nice to have a highly-curated stack of books by my desk when I work, it’s changed how I read. I’m less likely to browse through my bookcase and read through random books. Now, if I want to read a new book, I have to buy it online and it has intensified my idiosyncrasies. I’ve become even more methodical about what I read and when. Again, I’m quoting my essay for Akosua’s Consumption Report:

When it comes to produce and culture, I do my best to consume things seasonally. I assign myself a theme and I read, listen, and eat with the seasons. In my idiosyncratic way, this helps me feel attuned with my surroundings. Aesthetic coherence helps regulate my inexhaustible hungers.

My inclination is to read deeply, slowly, closely. So organizing tightly-curated reading and watchlists works really well for me. It enables my instinct to read with and against, to identify overlap, and make the most of any extracurricular research I assign myself. I’m optimizing for the cumulative, boundless quality of literature Samatar and Zambreno describe in Tone.1 When I dare call myself an artist, it’s because of those moments when what I watch, wear, do, read, write, and eat all serve a specific creative inquiry.

As I read and wrote and lived throughout the year, I accumulated a new list of interests and directions to guide my next research phases, carving out new themes and ideas to structure the following year.I want to share this list with everyone here as a way of keeping myself accountable. Let this be a teaser for the kind of writing I’m planning on sharing in the new year:

On Mysticism by Simon Critchley — La Danseuse by Patrick Modiano — The Psychic Life of Power by Judith Butler — The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis by Barbara Creed — Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Sylvia Federici — Ladivine: A Novel by Marie NDiaye —The White West: Fascism, Unreason, and the Paradox of Modernity, an anthology —Revolutionary Mathematics by Justin Joque —Unmastered: A Book on Desire by Katherine Angel 📕

Do leave a comment if you’ve read any of these books or anything else by these authors. Next week’s special newsletter will be about every movie I watched in 2024…all 200+ of them.