A quick run-down of the books I read in 2024 – counting down from the current month of December.
Total of 94 books, down from last year’s quite absurd total of 126 (!). A bit of an early summer lull? But some good ones this year!
I also published two books in ’24 – Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature, co-edited with Nic Helms, came out in March from Amsterdam University Press, and Sailing without Ahab: Eco-Poetic Travels from Fordham University Press in April!
December (9)
Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Dylan: A Biography by Dennis McDougal
To the RIver: A Journey Beneath the Surface by Olivia Laing
Hydrofeminist Thinking with Oceans by Tamara Shafer, Viv Bozalek, and Nike Romano
Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
Dylan Goes Electric by Elijah Wald
Sing Like Fish by Amorina Kingdom
November (9)
The Sea Close By by Albert Camus
Ghost Species by James Bradley
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby
The Burning Earth by Sunil Amrith
Swimming a Long Way Together by Vanessa Daws
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You by Janella Shane
The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World by David Graeber
Our Own Worst Enemy by Tom Nichols
Eat Like a Fish by Bren Smith
October (8)
Insomniac City by Bill Hayes
Department of Speculation by Jenny Offil
Slippery Beast by Ellen Ruppel Shell
The Message by Ta-Nahesi Coates
Living on Earth by Peter Godfrey-Smith
We Have Never Been Woke by Musa al-Gharbi
On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder (graphic novel version)
Playground by Richard Powers
September (4)
Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari
We Are Mermaids by Stephanie Burt
Survival is a Promise by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Every Day I Write the Book by Amitava Kumar
August (8)
On Revision by William Germano
The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet
Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? by Pierre Bayard
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
Big Fiction by Dan Synkin
Literature for a Changing Planet by Martin Puchner
Hell by Timothy Morton
July (5)
Becoming Earth by Ferris Jabr
The Language of Climate Politics by Genevieve Guenther
Deep Water by James Bradley
Sweat by Bill Hayes
Democracy or Else by Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor
June (3)
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
The English Experience by Julie Schumacher
Amphibious Soul by Craig Foster
May (9)
Environmental Humanities on the Brink by Vincent Bruyere
This is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan
Say More by Jen Psaki
A Year of Last Things by Michael Ondaatje
In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster
A Leg to Stand On by Oliver Sacks
The Disenchanted Earth by Richard Seymour
The North Water by Ian McGuire
The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim by Gabriel Brownstein
April (9)
The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides
Rendered Obsolete by Jamie Jones
A Whaler’s Dictionary by Dan Beachy-Quick
Knife by Salmon Rushdie
A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks by David Gibbens
Jump the Clock by Erica Hunt
The Invention of Prehistory by Stefanos Geroulanos
Sailing Alone by Richard King
Notes on Complexity by Neil Theise
March (7)
Changes in the Land by William Cronin
Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson
Selected Poems of Christopher Logue
The Truce by Hunter Walker and Luppe Luppen
Until August by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Super-infinite by Katherine Randell
Tides by David Georg Bowers and Emyr Martyn Roberts
February (5)
The Zero and the One by Ryan Ruby
Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh
We That Are Young by Preti Taneja
The Adventures of Amina a-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty
Courtly History by Stephanie Hershinow
War Music by Christopher Logue
January (10)
Our Moon by Rebecca Boyle
Still Waters by Curt Stager
Red Road by Clan Mother Shoran Waupatukuay Piper
Surviving in a Ruthless World by Terry Gans
On Savage Shores by Caroline Dodds Penock
Memorial by Alice Oswald
A History of Water by Edward Wilson-Lee
Drunk by Edward Slingerland
Mixing up the Medicine by Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel
The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher