My Favorite Books From 2024

And my three words for 2025

This year my goal was to read less so I could write more. Instead, I read more and wrote more. It turns out, if you do less scrolling on a phone, you have more time for the things you actually want to do.

I read 148 books this year:

• 71 print books

• 73 audiobooks

• 4 graphic novels

I’ll tell you my favorites in various genres—what you should read! And then I will group these and other books I read this year into very niche categories because that is fun for me. I won’t provide much synopsis or why I’m recommending these books. I’ve done much of that in the “Monthly Updates” posts from the past year. Feel free to go back to those for robuster reviews.

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Favorite Poetry

1. Ocean Vuong, Time is a Mother

2. Ada Limón, The Hurting Kind

3. Robert Cording, In the Unwalled City

   1. Cording lost his adult son in 2017, about two months before I lost mine. We met the following summer and he was my first-year poetry mentor in my MFA program. This book of poems is interspersed with an essay and reckons with the grief of losing a child.

4. Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus (translated by Mark S. Burrows)

5. Carl Dennis, Practical Gods (reread)

6. Matsuo Basho, The Complete Haiku (translated by Jane Reichhold)

   1. This edition includes biography and analysis interspersed with the poems, which I think is a great format that more “critical editions / collected works” should employ. Instead of a lengthy biographical and analytical introduction that is a slog to get through, break it up in between the various pieces, so you can get a taste of each (bio and creative work) back and forth. Much more enjoyable.

7. Osip Mandelstam, Selected Poems

8. Louise Erdrich, Baptism of Desire

9. Stephen Dobyns, Cemetery Nights

10. Bruce Beasley, Summer Mystagogia

11. Scott Cairns, Anaphora

12. Danusha Laméris, The Moons of August

Favorite Fiction

1. Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

2. Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

3. Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph & Other Stories

4. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or The Whale

5. Julie Otsuka, The Swimmers

6. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (reread)

7. Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek

8. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

9. M. L. Rio, If We Were Villains

10. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

11. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars

12. Amy Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses

13. LeAnne Howe, Savage Conversations

14. Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

Favorite Non-Fiction / Essay / Memoir

1. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, What if We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures

2. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson & Katherine K. Wilkinson, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis

3. Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

4. Sarah L. Sanderson, The Place We Make: Breaking the Legacy of Legalized Hate

5. Sasha LaPointe, Thunder Song: Essays

6. Seirian Sumner, Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps

7. Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Reign of Mammals: A New History From the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us

8. Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures

9. David B. Williams, Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound

10. Teresa MacPhail, Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies in a Changing World

11. Heather Radke: Butts: A Backstory

12. Eric H. Cline, 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed

Favorite Writing Craft & Criticism

1. Maria Tatar: The Heroine With 1,001 Faces

2. Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing (reread)

3. Liz Lerman and John Borstel, Critical Response Process: A Method for Getting Useful Feedback on Anything You Make, from Dance to Dessert

   1. This workshop method, first developed in the dance world in the 1990s, has spread into various creative disciplines, including writing. Felicia Rose Chavez adapts it in her book, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom.

4. Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others

5. James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

6. James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

7. Farah Karim-Cooper, The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race

8. Chuck Palahniuk, Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different

9. Kavita Das, Craft and Conscience: How to Write About Social Issues

Favorite Shakespeare

I read 12 Shakespeare plays this year, one for each month. Here is my ranking of the plays I read (rankings based on my subjective “liking them”):

1. King Lear (May)

2. Hamlet (January)

3. Macbeth (February)

4. The Winter’s Tale (December)

5. Twelfth Night (July)

6. Romeo and Juliet (June)

7. The Tempest (September)

8. Antony and Cleopatra (April)

9. Julius Caesar (October)

10. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (August)

11. The Merchant of Venice (November)

12. The Taming of the Shrew (March)

Favorite Spiritual Writings

1. Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me

2. Randy Woodley, Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Reconnecting With Sacred Earth

3. Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh

4. St. Isaac of Syria, Daily Readings with St. Isaac of Syria (reread)

5. Flannery O’Connor, A Prayer Journal (reread)

6. Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) & Darcia Narvaez, Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth

7. Peter Rollins, The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales

8. Amy Kenny, My Body is Not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice in the Church

9. Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe

10. Lauren Winner, The Dangers of Christian Practice: On Wayward Gifts, Characteristic Damage, and Sin

11. Kaitlin Curtice, Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God

12. Lauren Winner, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis

Favorite Star Wars

1. Claudia Gray, Leia, Princess of Alderaan

2. Timothy Zahn, Outbound Flight and Survivor’s Quest

3. Michael A. Stackpole, I, Jedi

4. John Jackson Miller, The Living Force

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Niche Categories

And now, for more exciting book pairings. Some categories are very specific.

Pacific Northwest

• David B. Williams, Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound

• Patrick J. Twohy, Beginnings: A Meditation on Coast Salish Lifeways

• Sasha LaPointe, Thunder Song: Essays (Coast Salish)

• Sarah L. Sanderson, The Place We Make: Breaking the Legacy of Legalized Hate (Oregon)

  • Sarah graduated from SPU’s MFA program the same residency I started. Her book looks at the racist exclusion laws of Oregon, which prohibited Black people from living in Oregon in the early days of the state. Sarah also examines her own ancestors’ involvement in the creation and maintenance of these laws.

Set in Idaho

• Ruth Ozeki, All Over Creation (novel)

• Tara Westover, Educated (memoir)

Set in Texas and the Southwest

• Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

• Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek

• Sim Kern, The Free People's Village

When You Don’t Eat Animal Meat, Do You Become Vegetarian, Vegetable, or Cannibal?

• Han Kang, The Vegetarian (a novel in three parts—this author just won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2024)

  • Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life ends with a suggestion that instead of “anthropomorphizing plants”—describing plant life in human terms—we should instead “vegetalize humanity”—describe human behavior in terms of plants. This idea pairs most interestingly with The Vegetarian.

• Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: The Definitive Classic of the Animal Movement (non-fiction)

• Augustina Bazterrica, Tender is the Flesh (novel)

  • Animal meat is suddenly universally poisonous to humans. Would you become vegetarian or would you choose to eat lab-grown human flesh?

Machine Learning for Good or for Ill

• Peter Brown, The Wild Robot and The Wild Robot Escapes (YA fiction)

  • I read these with Finley (and we’re currently reading the third book in the series, The Wild Robot Protects). A robot learns to speak “the language of the animals” and helps them survive in a post-climate-crisis world (sea level rise has created many “islands” along the west coast of North America). The novel presents the story from the perspective of the robot (Roz) and the animals she lives with. The first book was just adapted as a movie in 2024.

• Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

• Dennis Yi Tenen, Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write

Climate Crisis, Climate Solutions, Climate Futures

• Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, What if We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures

  • The best, most hopeful book you will read about the future of climate solutions; a collection of interviews, essays, poetry and art.

• Ayana Elizabeth Johnson & Katherine K. Wilkinson, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis

  • Essays on climate justice written by women at the forefront of climate activism.

• Randy Woodley, Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Reconnecting With Sacred Earth

• Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) & Darcia Narvaez, Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth

• Sim Kern, The Free People's Village (novel)

• Peter Brown, The Wild Robot and The Wild Robot Escapes (YA fiction)

• Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land (novel)

• Ruth Ozeki, All Over Creation (novel)

Books That Involve Books, Particularly as Characters or Major Plot Glue

• Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

  • A lost play by an ancient Greek playwright becomes the centerpiece around which the rest of the story revolves.

• Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

  • The book is the primary narrator.

• R. F. Kuang, Yellowface

  • A white woman publishes a book under her own name—the manuscript was originally written by her dead Asian-American friend. How does the public respond when they find out?

• M. L. Rio, If We Were Villains

  • A small senior cohort of Shakespeare actors at an elite arts school start to become the characters they portray on stage. Conflict leads to the mysterious death of one of them. To best catch the allusions and connections made in this book, I recommend you familiarize yourself with the following Shakespeare plays: Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, and Macbeth.

• Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph & Other Stories

• Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Numbers in the Title

• James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

• Eric H. Cline, 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed

• Maria Tatar, The Heroine with 1,001 Faces

• Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

• Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) & Darcia Narvaez, Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth

• William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Remembering, Forgetting, and Gaslighting

• Julie Otsuka, The Swimmers

• Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police

• Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Tales from the Cafe (includes time travel)

• Etaf Rum, Evil Eye

• Tara Westover, Educated (memoir)

History, Meet Mystery

• Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

• Eric H. Cline, 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed (non-fiction)

  • The 2021 edition includes updated research and findings about “The Sea Peoples,” a mysterious group mentioned in ancient texts that destroyed every Mediterranean Bronze Age civilization between roughly 1200-1100 BCE. Eric Cline argues that the collapse of so many empires at the same time was likely due not to the attacks of a single group, but a composite group of “Sea Peoples,” combined with climate change, disease, famine, trade disputes, and internal conflicts.

• James McBride, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

• Juan Manuel Arias, Where There Was Fire

• Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Speculative Fiction That Spotlights Contemporary Issues

• Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land (climate, violence, online harassment, technological progress, space travel, extremism)

• R. F. Kuang, Yellowface (plagiarism, publishing world, social media, cultural appropriation)

• Sim Kern, The Free People's Village (climate, gentrification, social justice, racism, housing rights, capitalism)

• Augustina Bazterrica, Tender is the Flesh (meat industry, capitalism, dehumanization, violence)

• Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars (violence, televised sports, racism, mass incarceration)

• Julius Taranto, How I Won a Nobel Prize (cancel culture, academic research funding, billionaires, moral “monsters,” sexism, racism)

• Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom (academia, addiction, racism)

Encounters with Ghosts or the Supernatural

• Matt Kaplan, The Science of the Magical: From the Holy Grail to Love Potions to Superpowers (non-fiction)

• Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

• LeAnne Howe, Savage Conversations

• Amy Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses

• Banana Yoshimoto, The Premonition

• Tananarive Due, The Between

• Jewell Parker Rhodes, Ghost Boys

The Body & The Soul: Afflicted and Resilient

• Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness (novel)

• Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom (novel)

• Teresa MacPhail, Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies in a Changing World

• Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

• Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer's Life

• Amy Kenny, My Body is Not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice in the Church

• Heather Radke, Butts: A Backstory

Unconventional Devotionals

• Susan VanZanten, Mending a Tattered Faith: Devotions with Dickinson

  • Devotions alongside Emily Dickinson poems.

• Randy Woodley, Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Reconnecting With Sacred Earth

  • Meditations on Indigenous history, ecology, and lifeways. Each devotion includes an action item or question for reflection. I used this book, along with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, in my writing composition course.

• Hannah Burr, Contemporary Prayers to Whatever Works

  • Brief, open-ended, fill-in-the-blank prayers accompanied by abstract watercolor images.

• Flannery O'Connor, A Prayer Journal

  • O’Connor’s prayer journal while she was in her Iowa MFA program.

• St Isaac of Syria, Daily Readings With St Isaac of Syria

  • A great selection of passages from St Isaac’s writings. Be prepared to have your faith, understanding, and love stretched.

• John Philip Newell, Praying with the Earth: A Prayerbook for Peace

  • A seven-day prayerbook (with morning and evening prayers) for interfaith connection between Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

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My Words for 2025

My words for 2024 were: hospitality, city, and insects. I spent some time reflecting on, reading about, and writing about these words this past year. In a future post I may write about what I explored.

My words for 2025 are: Eros, healing, and swamp.

Eros (the erotic): In popular usage, “erotic” means sexual and sensual. It refers to romance, and is used to describe books, movies, images, etc. But I would like to explore the erotic from a more theological, psychological, philosophical, literary angle. Eros is primarily about desire, and the question becomes, what/whom do we desire? But Eros is also about selfhood, about self-understanding and self-confidence. My tentative formulation is that Eros begins as self-love, self-understanding that leads to self-confidence. Our deep desire is to know our true selves, and then share our true selves with others. We desire acceptance AND that others would share their true selves with us. It is in this union of selves (not necessarily sexual or romantic) that we share this erotic love, this desire to know and be known. This is the love that the persons of the Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) share between each other, and that they share with us. The desire to know and be known, love and be loved for who we are (not based on appearance or achievement)—this is Eros. Or at least, what I think about it. We’ll see how this evolves over the course of the year.

Healing: What do we mean when we talk about healing? What would “total” or “perfect” healing look like? Jesus performs miracles of “healing” in the Gospels, including resurrecting people, and yet they die again. They likely continue to face suffering and sickness and temptations of all sorts. So what was actually healed? What is the purpose of the healing miracles? In our own time, what do we mean by “healing”—medically, emotionally, spiritually? What is the relationship between “salvation” and “healing”? What will healing look like in the new heavens and new earth? This exploration will involve deconstructing the notion of healing in order to reconstruct something more robust and compelling.

Swamp: This is shorthand for: swamp, wetland, marsh, bog, fen, tideflats, etc. Wet Earth. Land inundated with water. The liminal space that’s not quite fully land, not quite fully water. The between space from the third day of creation. What role do these spaces have in the ecosystem? What role do they have in the cultural imagination?

• The book I’m starting with: Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog & Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

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A couple goals I have this year:

• Read Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote. Like I did with Moby Dick last year, I plan to read one chapter per day, slowly working my way through the 900-page book.

• Read the Qur’an. I’ve only read bits and pieces. I’d like to read it through this year.

• Read at least half the dictionary. I’ve got a Webster’s Collegiate that I’m using. I read through several letters when I was in middle school and high school, and I started reading through “A” last year. My goal was initially to read the whole dictionary this year, but I think that might be a little too ambitious. I want to record new and interesting vocab words, but also etymological insights for words I already “know.” Verlyn Klinkenborg says writers should always look up words they don’t know—and words they do know.

• Draw more cartoons. I saved up my Amazon gift cards this year, and just bought a new digital draw pad, one with a display so I can see the “ink” at the tip of the stylus, a much easier way to draw. Maybe I’ll share more cartoons here, but you can also follow me on Instagram: @hoovernathaniel.

• Work diligently and intensively on one of my writing projects. I have one primary poetry writing project, and several fiction ones. I tend to work for a while on one and switch between them. This is good for cross-pollination of ideas (working in the thicket), but it also means my progress on any project is piecemeal. So I’d like to commit to one for say, a month or two, working on it every day, and see how much I can accomplish.

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