2024: Reading in the Rear Review

2025 came in the night, as the new year always does.

I wish I could say it was peaceful and quiet but it was accompanied by about an hour’s worth of fireworks before and after the clock struck midnight. I listened as I lay there, waiting for the noise to subside so I could sleep.

I finished my final book for 2024 yesterday afternoon, Jo Scott-Coe’s Unheard Witness, about Kathy Leissner Whitman. It’s a little eerie that I began and ended my reading this year with books about mass casualty events, only to wake up today to another which happened in the earliest hours of the new year in New Orleans. And yet, even knowing this, I’m watching the Rose Parade and drinking my coffee.

Is it apathy or an act of defiance to continue with business as usual?

The television just flashed up a message of condolence to the victims in New Orleans, just as the Louisiana float takes the stage with a song and choreography about “Louisiana Saturday Night” which takes on new meaning this morning, even as the performers smile and sing their way through their segment.

For my reading, I picked a variety of books this year. Memoir, straight nonfiction, essays, novels, chapbooks, craft books, poetry, anthologies, science fiction, classics, and trendy current reads. I’m not counting the books I picked up but didn’t finish.

Here’s my list. What should I read in 2025?

Happy New Year! This was our first NYE in this house. Now, the kids are all grown.

Columbine by Dave Cullen
A Mother's Reckoning by Sue Klebold
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
The Wanting Was a Wilderness by Alden Jones
Two Women by Cheryl Strayed
Superfreak by Arielle Greenberg
Kindred by Octavia Butler
Lift by Rebecca K. O'Conner
Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert
My Dead by John Brantingham & Jane Edberg
Runaway by Erin Keane
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr
Rise by Rebecca K. O'Conner
Untamed by Glennon Doyle
Journey to Merveilloux City by Stephanie Barbé Hammer
The King and Queen of Malibu by David K. Randall
In the Field Between Us by Molly McCully Brown and Susanna Nevison
Flare Corona by Jeannine Hall Gailey
Auto Body by Vickie Vertiz
Museum of Missing Things by Ellen Estilai
The Absurd Man by Major Jackson
How to Know the Flowers by Jessica Smith
Side Notes from Archivist by Anastacia-Renee
Dear Selection Committee by Melissa Studdard
The Oregon Trail by Rinker Buck
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman
Sylvia Plath "best poems"
Frank: Sonnets by Diane Seuss
The Hurting Kind by Ada Limon
The Circle Game by Margaret Atwood
You Could Make this Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith
Man Years by Sandra Doller
Bright Felon by Kazim Ali
The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch
Dialogues with Rising Tides by Kelli Russell Agodon
Oh Memory You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! by Judy Kronenfeld
This Is the Honey ed. Kwame Dawes
Memorial Drive by Natasha Tretheway
Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks
Negative Space by Lilly Dancyger
Exhalation by Ted Chiang
Know My Name by Chanel Miller
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
Gabi, a girl in pieces by Isabel Quintero
The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. by Lee Kravitz
The Message by Ta-Nihisi Coates
The Library Book by Susan Orlean
Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
Wednesday's Child (short stories) by Yiyun Li
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li
Stories All Our Own by Tisha Marie Reichle Aguilera
Unheard Witness by Jo Scott-Coe