Books of 2024

I read 68 books in 2024. Yeah, kind of a lot of books! 

My name is Jane, and I am a reading addict. 

It's so easy to supply my reading habit: I always have an ebook on my phone and usually a regular one (or two) on the coffee table. I read every day, almost without thinking about it.

Also: my library card is my friend: if I had to buy all the books I read, I would be poor and my house would contain nothing but bookshelves. If you love books, I urge you to get yourself a library card! 

Anyway, I only know the number of books I've read because I keep track in a book journal like my mom did. My journal is a blank book where I write the title and author of the book, as well as a sentence or two about it, to jog my memory. 

My mom's reading journal, left, with three of mine and the kitty.

One thing learned from reading many many books in a year: there are lots of good books out there! Here is a list of 15 books I especially enjoyed and that I kept thinking about long after I read them. (Last year, I listed 10 in fiction and nonfiction. This year, I added a category...)

Fiction: 

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel: A pandemic sweeps through the world and civilization collapses. Traveling musicians and actors roam the post-apocalyptic world and fate brings people together. Harrowing!

North Woods by Daniel Mason: The stories of the inhabitants of a patch of western Massachusetts: families, apple trees, beetles. The last chapter is a moving meditation on the future.

James by Percival Everett: A retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim. A much better book than Twain's. By the author of Erasure which became the movie American Fiction

Catch and Release by Laura Farmer: Two generations of a western Iowa family, plus a cat, nuns, and the exhilaration of both letting go and holding on. Written by a former student and current colleague.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey: Six astronauts during one day of their time in a space station orbiting the earth. They are a team, yet each is solitary. Ordinary tasks and awestruck reflections.

Nonfiction

How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith: A writer visits places in America--Monticello, Angola Prison, New York City--where the history and ongoing effects of slavery can be found.

Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib: Essays about travel and tourism, seen from the eyes of a native of India. Finding joy in an activity with roots in colonialism and capitalism. 

Birding to Change the World by Trish O’Kane: A journalist becomes an avid birder. She earns a Ph.D. in biology, fights for the well-being of urban wild space, and creates nature programs for children.

The Art Thief by Michael Finkel: An art-obsessed young man steals art in Europe by simply taking it off walls and out of vitrines in small art museums when no one is watching. 

Tits Up by Sarah Thornton: An ethnographic exploration of the role of tits in (mostly western) culture--sex workers, milk banks, plastic surgeons, bra designers, and spiritualists.

Light Reads:

(Here's the additional category I added this year: light reads. I love fun books--mysteries, comic reads, etc. Everyone needs a light read now and then! But they get squeezed out of end-o-the-year lists by the heavier ones. Here are some light reads that I enjoyed this year.)

A Man of Some Repute by Elizabeth Edmondson + 2 sequels: Mysteries that take place during the Cold War in rural England. Restrained, smart, and delightful.

You Are Here by David Nicholls: Two middle-aged, recently divorced people meet on a cross-England hike and fall in love. 

Once More from the Top by Emily Layden: A Taylor Swift-ish celebrity singer-songwriter returns to her hometown and contemplates the long-ago disappearance of the high school friend who got her started on music-writing.

Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead: WASP family gets ready for a wedding and everyone misbehaves. Readers discover secrets.

Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire: Amusing tales of an apprentice in an antiquarian bookshop. 

Mandala

On a Saturday in November, we went to the woods, over next to Indian Creek Nature Center, where we usually gather for Terra Divina. This practice, similar to the ancient practice of lectio divina--the contemplative reading of texts--involves reading the natural world that we are part of. We begin by observing and experiencing the landscape, then we engage with what has called our attention. We respond in prayer or meditation, and finally rest in the connection we've found with the earth. 

We've been doing this practice monthly for more than a year now, led by Stephanie, but it always brings peace, new observations, and new insights.

As we arrive and sit at an outdoor table at the edge of the prairie, we greet one another, take a deep breath, and pause from our busy, chore-and-errand-filled Saturdays.

This week, in addition to walking slowly out into the prairies and woods for our usual terra divina practice, I am leading the group in making a mandala. I invite the other participants to notice natural objects that call to them to be picked up, held, and contemplated.  I encourage them to bring any of these objects back, and place them on the plywood board I've brought for our mandala creation.

After about 35 minutes of practice, we return to our gathering place and lay our offerings on the board. 

For me, naming natural beings and objects helps me truly see them. So I briefly named the objects on the board. As I did so, a story took shape.

There were

signs of the end of the season:

• autumn leaves of brown, red, yellow
• stems of tall prairie grasses, burned black in places, from a prairie burning

signs of winter provisions for creatures who live here:

• the white oak acorn cap, deep and round, smooth inside. 
• tiny red rose hips that have been partially eaten already by birds, the white seeds inside visible
• the leaf of a greenbriar vine, whose berries are relished by birds

signs of invasive species and items not native to this area

• a few stems of Asian bittersweet--I could have brought back an armload of these
• bright yellow, perfectly spherical Carolina horsenettle (nightshade) berries, like small, yellow cherry tomatoes
• a bright red piece of plastic ("It looked like a heart to me," someone said)

signs of resilience and tenacity:

• a piece of shelf fungus from a dead log
• lichens on a dead branch

signs of future life:

• a locust tree pod
  
• three winged ash seeds
• frothy goldenrod seed heads
• an oak leaf with an oblong fuzzy gall on the back, filled with insect eggs that will overwinter and hatch in spring.

After we talked about our mandala, we talked about another type of mandalas, mandalas made of sand. In the Buddhist tradition, monks create beautiful and intricate mandalas of sand. And then, in a quiet ritual, they destroy the sand mandalas, pouring off the sand to symbolize the transitory nature of the material world. 

Although we are not Buddhists, we thought about the transitory nature of all the items on the board, of the seasons, of ourselves. Then we walked our mandala over to the edge of the prairie and gently tipped the natural items off into the tall grasses.

Although our mandala is gone--except in photos some of us took--the experience gave us something to contemplate as we prepare for wintering and our next practice of terra divina.