Best Book You’ve Read So Far In 2024
Based on how haunted I’ve been by the settings, characters, and prose, I’d have to say The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake. I wrote more about the collection here.
Best Sequel You’ve Read So Far In 2024
I don’t spend time with many series, so I don’t have an honest answer for this one. If I stretch the concept, Dolores Claiborne, as a spiritual sequel to Gerald’s Game, is my favorite this year. Besides the feminist themes that unite them, they were also paired initially with a third story for what I’m guessing would have been a giant novel in which all the characters were connected by the experience of an eclipse. Remnants of that idea exist in both books.
New Release You Haven’t Read Yet, But Want To
I didn’t even know this was out, which makes me wonder if people got tired of waiting for it or are disappointed.
Most Anticipated Release for the Second Half of the Year
I Spit on Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies looks like a blast.
I’m also looking forward to Corpses, Fools and Monsters and anything Weirdpunk Books has coming up.
Biggest Disappointment
These are not the ‘squatches I was looking for.
Biggest Surprise
Being an Eraserhead fan and seeing “Mary X” in the subtitle of a book is going to get my attention. I have low expectations for celebrity books. I would have enjoyed the book for Stewart’s stories of her bizarre life working on Little House on the Prairie during the day and Eraserhead at night. As a bonus, I also learned more about Jack Nance’s complicated personality. I got to experience some of the Twin Peaks phenomenon from the inside (she was Mrs. Briggs). Before all this, she was drinking buddies with Jim Morrison!
Overall, I got to see how our experiences, no matter how they look, are likely experienced very differently. Stewart is open about Dionysian appetites and darknesses, but Stewart also expresses so much of the flawed beauty of being human. I was engaged in a way I rarely am with celebrity memoirs.
Favorite New Author (debut or new to you)
I loved this book and Charlene Elsby’s use of narrative voice. I’ve since read some short stories and am getting her other books soon. I wrote a little about Hexis here. I was recently re-reading Book I of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and found hexis in the wild, and I couldn’t stop smiling.
Newest Fictional Crush
Admittedly, this is an odd choice for this topic, but I just don’t read many books with crushable characters. My answer here should probably be Chuck Rainey, the studio musician who played the great bassline on “Peg,” which drove me into the Steely Dan catalog and this book, but he’s not fictional. Michael McDonald’s sweet background vocals are also crushworthy. Instead, I’ll go with Peg, an idealized beauty who can be anything the listener wants her to be.
Newest Favorite Character
My favorite character this year is the constructed persona of “A.R. Ammons” in his long poem Tape for the Turn of the Year. The work began as an experiment with materials; Ammons saw a roll of adding paper and wrote a poem within those physical constraints. He wrote on it from December 1963 until January 1964. I’m not sure how much revision was involved.
Ammons has a unique voice that often shifts tone and subject within a single poem. Sometimes it’s colloquial, sometimes it’s academic and science-y, sometimes abstract, occasionally goofy, horny, or both simultaneously. He likes coffee, fudge cookies, pork chops and ham. This poem is partially a chronicle of thoughts and actions that sometimes work together and sometimes do not, like how most days and weeks and tasks and duties crash together.
I was studying one of Ammons’s other long poems with one of his former students when we got word that he had died. I’ve since felt a peculiar connection to his poetic voice.
Book That Made You Cry
Before I had kids, books rarely made me cry, except all the dead dog chronicles like Where the Red Fern Grows, which we all seemed to have to read when I was growing up. After kids, it’s normal to cry during any Disney movie and sometimes even Publix commercials.
That said, I can’t remember crying much during my reading this year other than maybe during some expressions about love and aging in Stephen King’s Insomnia and The Green Mile.
Book That Made You Happy
I am writing a full review, so I won’t say too much. Bret Nelson’s Plan 9 from Outer Space: The Novelization blew away any expectations I had of a novelization. I love Ed Wood’s movies, and I’ve been a fan of Plan 9 since I was a teenager. Nelson is obviously a fan. He approaches the task of making a wonderful mess of a movie into a book with respect, love, and a sense of humor.
Most Beautiful Book You’ve Bought so Far This Year (or received)
While I see plenty of gorgeously printed books yearly, I don’t have the budget to get them. I might get one for Christmas or a random birthday gift. However, I am obsessed with the Anders Nilson covers for the Modern Library re-issues of nine John Wyndham novels. I finally got one of them and hope to get the others, along with a poster Nilson has made that features his designs.
What Books Do You Need to Read by the End of the Year?
Other than books I get for Horror DNA reviews or for work, I am reading through personal and group projects. I have an ongoing project based on the Great Books idea. I’m reading through significant works of philosophy–mostly chronologically–and I’m up to City of God by Augustine. I’m also chronologically working through several authors who I sometimes take years off from before I return to their corpus. That list includes Stephen King, Muriel Spark, A. R. Ammons, William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy–and maybe others.
I will start the My Novel Life Reading Challenge at some point with Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. The challenge has no time limit, and you read a novel published every year you’ve been alive.
Regarding necessary reading: I rush out and get anything new by Ottessa Moshfegh and David Sedaris. Even if I get a Sedaris paperback, I also get an audio version because hearing him read is a joy I can’t pass up.
Stephen McClurg 
Righteous
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