2024 Reading Recap

Welcome, friends, to my favorite post of the year! This is my tenth year doing a reading recap like this, and I still love looking back on the books that stood out to me each year. Here are the ground rules:

• I include any book I read for the first time this year (no rereads!), regardless of when it came out.

• The lists are in no particular order.

• Links to my longer goodreads review of each book are linked in the title.

Last year was a feast for reading but this year, I must admit, felt a bit lackluster. I found a lot of solid three- and four-star reads but wasn’t knocked off my feet by as many books as I wanted. I know every year can’t be a feast, so I’m content with that. (So I try to console myself.)

For the first time ever I set up a reading plan for myself at the beginning of the year with titles that I wanted to read, broken into various categories (fantasy, sci-fi, novels, devotional, theology, generic non-fiction, poetry), plus a “stack,” a long list of other books high on my tbr to pick from.

It wasn’t supposed to be a rigid, guilt-inducing regimen but rather an aspirational orientation that would remind me what I really want to do. Too often I find myself grabbing whatever book happens to be most easily accessible while my tbr list, full of books I know would grow, inspire, and delight me, stretches tottering toward the moon. I’m all for serendipity within reading, but I believe the best serendipitous finds occur within some general guardrails.

In the end I read twenty of my planned books, plus three from the stack. That’s out of the 47 total I read, which feels like a good balance, and it’s a ratio I’m aiming for in 2025.

But enough chatter about my various lists and schedules—let’s get to the good stuff! This year I’m highlighting two books from each category, fiction and non-fiction, plus honorable mentions and a poetry shoutout.

At the end, do share: what were your top reads of 2024? Have you ever set up a reading plan for yourself, and have you found it to be helpful or discouraging? And of course, any favorites, big flops, or quotes you can’t forget?

Fiction

1. Red Rising series | Pierce Brown

   Red Rising | Golden Son | Morning Star | Iron Gold | Dark Age | Light Bringer

   I have missed diving into a rich, exciting saga like this, and Brown’s combination of sci-fi space travel and ancient Greek and Roman references is pure epic. The way I got totally absorbed into this world reminded me of reading Brandon Sanderson for the first time. Beyond the names of characters and places, there’s something deeply classical (in the sense of the Greek philosophers) in these books—a pursuit of virtue in the midst of impossible decisions and ethical dilemmas where it seems like there is no right choice. Something, dare I say, Christian too. Highly recommended for fans of Brandon Sanderson, Rick Riordan, Orson Scott Card, and Suzanne Collins.

2. The Sparrow | Mary Doria Russell

   I cannot get this book out of my mind. I rated it four stars originally because of slight pacing and plot quibbles but I might need to increase that because I can’t stop telling people about it. Another sci-fi book (this was my year for sci-fi), it puts a motley team of atheist geniuses and Jesuit monks in space to chase the source of alien music. It’s also the story of a man who longs to be in love with God but can’t feel Him. Several trigger warnings here (I’m happy to elaborate if you want more specifics) but it’s a brutal and beautiful story that won’t let me go.

Honorable mentions: The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy by Gary D. Schmidt

Non-fiction

1. Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus, Become Like Him, Do As He Did | John Mark Comer

   This is best read in community, which I was lucky enough to get to do this year. It’s an incisive and winsome diagnosis of the restlessness and defeat a lot of Christians feel, solved by a call to “go back, go back to the ancient paths,” in the words of Andrew Peterson. JMC reminds us of our centuries-old heritage of spiritual disciplines and a rule of life, not to saddle us with more rules and guilt but to free us to be who we really want to be—and who we can be, in the power of the Spirit. He is truly a prophet for my generation, and this book has already changed how I think of the Christian life and live my own. “Apprenticeship to Jesus is less like learning chemistry and more like learning jiu-jitsu.”

2. Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy | Matthew Scully

   I never would have expected a book exposing animal suffering and advocating a meat-free (or at least, commercially-raised-meat-free) diet to be one of my top books of the year, but here we are. Scully has some of the most beautiful prose I have encountered, and this book is equal parts mind-blowing journalism, sharp philosophy, and profound moral analysis, complete with humor, deep feeling, and quotes ranging from Pope John Paul II to Sigmund Freud. Even better, he proposes a wealth of practical policy ideas to solve the problems he identifies. From whaling conventions to pig farms to big game conferences, Scully took me places I never expected to go, much less care about. But now I do, and I’m still wrestling with what that means for my life.

Honorable Mentions: The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker, The Home of God by Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, Ghosted by Nancy French, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes by E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien

Poetry

For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio | W. H. Auden

An 80-page, nine-part poem of various poetic styles and prose starting with the concept of Advent, moving from the annunciation to the flight to Egypt through the eyes of the historical characters of the nativity story blended with critiques and images of the modern post-Enlightenment world, ending with a reflection of someone packing away Christmas decorations … how else should I describe this? So much reminded me of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets (which also moved me despite me understanding less than half of it), and I want to reread it each Advent.

Honorable Mention: Change of State by Hannah Hodgson

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In Other Words…

Writing

This year was really fun for me writing-wise. First, here are some of my favorite posts on here:

• rendenzvous (the last ten years) | a personal recounting of my last decade or so

• streams in the desert & spring in the wilderness | two springtime poems

• 44 Reinhold-Friedrichs Strasse | a poetic reflection on what the room in my mansion will be

Second, I submitted my poetry several places (more on that below) and pitched some essays, which I’ve wanted to do for a while. After years of all my writing attention going to school assignments, it felt so good to spend time and care on longer prose pieces on topics I chose—and even better, to find homes for them. I feared after college that I would forget how to write or that I’d never be able to work up the discipline to sit down and craft a piece without some external deadline or expectation. I could have written more—couldn’t we all?—but I did some, and I’m grateful I proved that to myself. I’m even more grateful to the friends (you know who you are) who held me accountable and cheered me on through my various projects. We really can’t do anything worthwhile alone, can we?

One of those essays is What Station Eleven and All the Light We Cannot See Reveal About Art and Loneliness in Reactor. Another one is coming out in 2025 in a magazine I’m very excited about, so stay tuned!

For poetry, I was so honored to have poems published in beautiful collections by:

• Calla Press ('“Upside Down and Inside Out,” which I’ve also published on here, and “Recovering Gnostic,” which is one of my personal favorite pieces) and

• Vessels of Light (“The Dog Days Are Over”)

One of the most fun parts of these submissions has been the community of writers, poets, and readers that I’ve found through them.

Looking ahead, I’ve got an upcoming piece in Prosetrics’ Apricity issue this winter (thank you Rosa Gilbert for sharing this opportunity!). I’m also honored to have received second place in Fare Forward’s poetry contest which I’m excited to share soon.

For a good dose of realism, I also received nine poetry rejections, and the first magazine I pitched an essay to wasn’t a good fit. Ah, the artistic life!

A Tangent - Why publish poetry at all?

I’ve been pondering this activity of submitting my work places. I wonder at times what the point of it all is—why try to get my poetry published? For that matter, why share it on here? Is the goal to simply reach more people? By “reach” I imagine “bless in some way,” but when do numbers become more important than blessing individuals?

Sometimes I wonder if the artists and the audiences, especially in small Christian art spaces, are all the same people—which can still be encouraging and lovely, but who is actually interested in the art itself and who is trying to cement themselves in a community to promote their own work? And is the latter wrong or lesser somehow? How do self-promotion and genuine community get tangled up, and am I operating under some false dichotomy (that some element of self-promotion is opposed to genuine community)?

Money muddies the waters because it is so nice to get paid for doing what I love, not only to boost the monthly budget a little but because, for better or worse, money does signal some kind of worth or merit. If someone is willing to shell out cold hard cash for something, it feels like it legitimizes the object I produce. I never want my art to be all about my money but I also resist the impulse to say factoring in money is all wrong.

I have this ideal that my writing will be so good that I never need to promote it but I’m not naive about how this world works. I work in fundraising—I know how many emails and ads people get a day. I struggle too because poetry especially demands attention, time, slowness, space. It feels antithetical to the mindset and habits that social media especially inculcates. I am all for harnessing tools to serve us, and I have been blessed many times by people and words I have stumbled across on Instagram, substack, and internet rabbit trails. But at what point does the inherent design of a tool work so against the way you want to use it that the effort is no longer worth it?

I don’t know. I might write something longer on this, but I’ve struggled this year to figure out how to steward this immaterial but still real space and my own time and resources. To be honest, I hate posting on Instagram and would love to just send out these posts—but I also know there are people on Instagram whom I care about connecting with who won’t migrate over. I also enjoy the ability to create smaller interactions like polls or quotes in Instagram stories that I can’t do here.

For now, I’m sitting with this: To write and to share some of what I write feels like an act of obedience. I also simply enjoy it—which is not so far off from the call to obedience. I am committed to not adding too much noise to your life, so I want to maintain my every-other-week poems, and let the post-often-to-keep-their-attention advice be damned. I might experiment migrating some of my other writing, like goodreads reviews and “English classes” on Instagram stories, over here in special posts.

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The final line is this: Thank you for being here, truly. Here’s to 2025—a quarter century into this new millennium! May it be full of good words—in books, songs, films, online messages, and face-to-face conversations—that fill us with joy and courage.

~ Aberdeen

P.S. As I shared last week, I’m collecting my earlier poetry into a manuscript to self-publish soon. As I work on it more, I’m getting quite excited about it, and I can’t wait to share it with you all. Please keep sharing if you have any tips or tricks about self-publishing—it’s a whole new world to me!