A Year in Reading: Sophia Stewart

3 days ago 1

A mortifying admission in light of my 2023 Year in Reading essay: this year, I fell in love with a man. I also fell back in love with making music. Both developments shifted my priorities and altered my reading practice (I read more while in transit, to and from dates or practice). As a result, I admittedly read less for pleasure than I would have liked to. But I managed to squeeze in some extraordinary books: here are my standout reads of 2024—including my three favorites—in no particular order.

At the start of 2024, in my mother’s backyard in Los Angeles, I devoured Sheila Heti‘s Alphabetical Diaries, an engrossing portrait of the uncompartmentalized mind. It captures consciousness better than any other book I’ve read: everything all at once, shaken like a snow globe, banal complaints commingling with profound concerns, meditations on Art and Love and Life scattered among the quotidian, the frivolous, the tactical.

Sensing that my relationship with ambition was changing form, I read Jenny Offill‘s How to Do Nothing, first in the lush, sun-drenched backyard of a local cafe and then, when lunchtime came, at a burrito place around the corner. For a book with “How to” in the title, it was a bit less actionable than I’d anticipated, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Later, in a single sitting in bed, I read Charlotte Shane‘s An Honest Woman and admired its candor and narrative approach: steady and somewhat removed, observant without trying too hard to extrapolate.

I read Becca Rothfeld‘s All Things Are Too Small in the park, on the train, and on the shore of Coney Island. It’s an invigorating, formidable read—even when I didn’t agree with the arguments—and particularly compelling (to me) for its explorations of sex, love, and romance, as in the essays “Ladies in Waiting” and “Only Mercy: Sex After Consent.” Rothfeld is one of our best working critics, and I hope this is the first of many such collections she gifts us.

After more than a year of starts and stops (not for lack of interest!), I finally finished Rachel Cusk‘s Outline, which was just what I’d hoped: smart and elegant and edifying. Cusk writes with an authoritativeness and fluidity to which I aspire. I’m excited to read the rest of the trilogy, though nervous they will pale in comparison to such an achievement.

Elisa Gabbert‘s Any Person Is the Only Self brought me a lot of joy on a sunny, noisy coffee shop patio. The best essays, I believe, are the product of obsession: that thing you can’t stop thinking about, for which you harbor endless curiosity. Gabbert gets this intuitively, and it’s why her essays are so consistently great. Another writer from whom I have much to learn.

I stumbled on Michelle Mercer‘s 2009 Will You Take Me as I Am: Joni Mitchell’s Blue Period in the used book/record store above Tarrytown Music Hall, which I always peruse before seeing a show. I started reading it on my birthday, on the patio of a sushi restaurant, and finished it within a week. This was one of my favorite books of the year—one of my favorite books ever, for that matter; a gem that I’ll reread often. Fun anecdote: when Mitchell first played Blue for some male songwriter friends, the room went silent except for Kris Kristofferson, who just said, “Jesus, Joni. Save something for yourself.” (“Jesus Joni” is now a common refrain in my two-songwriter household.)

My other favorite books from this year I inhaled back to back: Naomi Klein‘s Doppelganger (belated, I know!) and Leigh Eric Schmidt‘s 2010 Heaven’s Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman—both are now also all-time favorites of mine. The former is a master class in the kind of clear-eyed rigor and interpretive insight that are intrinsic to great nonfiction; I thrust Doppelganger into the hands of my parents, friends, anyone who wanted to understand why everything feels so stupid now. The latter is a riveting, indelible portrait of Ida Craddock (who first caught my eye in Amy Sohn‘s The Man Who Hated Women, which I read last year), a 19th-century visionary who has not left my mind since I read Schmidt’s book—a master class in biography and history—over the summer in a cabin in Canada.

I rounded out the year with some exceptionally nourishing nonfiction: Rachel Aviv‘s brilliant Strangers to Ourselves, Annie Earnaux‘s lithe The Young Man (translated by Alison L. Strayer), Oliver Burkeman‘s heartening Meditations for Mortals, and Rachel Wiseman and Anastasia Berg‘s smart and ambitious What Are Children For?

Currently, I’m halfway through Han Kang‘s Greek Lessons (translated by Deborah Smith and e. yaewon) and M. Leona Godin‘s There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness. Both are research for a book project I’m working on about speech and disability, to which I hope to dedicate even more of my reading and my time in 2025.