Emoji-rating Every Book I Read in 2024
The year I quit my job and doubled down on sci-fi and Jewish lit
Happy Hanukkah and happy New Year! I plan to celebrate New Year’s Eve by frying up some latkes (dad’s recipe) and mandu (mom’s recipe) for a crispy multicultural treat. My family takes a maximalist approach to latke toppings, especially on special occasions–sour cream, applesauce, chives, and caviar. Make the latkes small and crispy, and it’s the perfect decadent bite to wash down with champagne. Pork and napa dumplings are likewise fried in oil; for Hanukkah, obviously.
My big personal headline for 2024:
I quit my job at the National Academy of Sciences in November and plan to take some time off of full-time work in scholarly publishing while I finish up my sci-fi novel, start a new historical novel, and develop other writing projects, including this newsletter. I feel incredibly fortunate that I’m in a position to take this sabbatical to focus on the work that feels most vital to me.
Scholarly publishing as an industry has been (mostly) good to me, and I’m proud of the work I’ve done at various journals to bring peer-reviewed research to the world, but it’s not what feeds my spirit. A previous boss, just before I left to join the National Academies, encouraged me to keep writing and not to lose sight of that dream while I was growing my career. At the time, I was ambitious; I had just won a prestigious fellowship and gotten a job offer that put me in a management role for the first time. He told me that 20 years would pass before I knew it, and that he, too, had once aspired to write and publish a novel.
I know it’s possible to hold a demanding job and write on the side, but I found that as I grew more invested in my team (and received less support after a change in management), I had less and less left over to pour into creative work. I was cynical, burnt out, and stuck with a half-finished novel draft that taunted me on weekends. Three years after that conversation with my former boss, I quit. In the words of Karen Dalton, you can’t make it if you never even try. Thank you, Mike.
My 2024 In Books
This year, I read 26 books. I know these are rookie numbers compared to some of you— most notably, at my last job I had two colleagues who read ~150-300 books every year—but I figure this is just the pace I need to read and process books.
I started the Lillian Review of Books on March 20, 2024. Initially, I ambitiously tried posting book reviews twice a week, despite knowing damn well I can’t read 104 books in a year. Now, 9 months in, I’ve settled into a biweekly-ish pattern, and I think that suits my speed much better. I don’t always review the most recent book I’ve read, and I haven’t written reviews for every book I read this year. Sometimes I just don’t think I have anything interesting to say about a book. Or, like with the third installment in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by Cixin Liu, I don’t know how to say anything without massive spoilers, which I try to avoid.
So, on to the emoji ratings. I’ve linked to every review that I published on Substack.
Rating Every Book I Read in 2024 With Emojis
Now Wait For Last Year by Philip K Dick 😃😍
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky ☺️
The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald 😃🥲
The Sands of Mars by Arthur C Clarke 🙁
Rocannon’s World by Ursula LeGuin 🙂
Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany ☺️
Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie 🙂
The Ballad of Beta 2 by Samuel R. Delany 🙂
Planet of Exile by Ursula LeGuin ☺️
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (re-read) 😃
In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway ☺️
The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu (re-read) 😁
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester 😒
A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro 😄
Indignation by Philip Roth 🫤
Death’s End by Cixin Liu (re-read) ☺️🤯
Invaders From Earth by Robert Silverberg ☺️
Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow ☺️🙃
Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth 😉
A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers ☺️
White Noise by Don DeLillo 🙂
The Iron Heel by Jack London 😃
The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield (re-read) ☺️
Good As Gold by Joseph Heller 😂😖😡
Sirius by Olaf Stapledon 🥹😄🥲
City of Illusions by Ursula K. LeGuin ☺️
Top 4 Books I Read in 2024:
Now Wait For Last Year by Philip K Dick
Out of everything I read this year, Now Wait For Last Year delighted me the most. It’s a tender and aching love story dressed up as a madcap time-traveling, acid-tripping, alien-invading romp. I finished it a couple days into 2024 and spent the rest of the year trying to catch that high.
The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald
A sad, strange, dignified set of stories about memory, history, and secrets.
A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro
A sad, strange story about memory, regret, and loss. Very different from Sebald, but I think if you like one you’ll like the other.
Sirius by Olaf Stapledon
No official review yet because I just finished it a few days ago, but this slim account of a super-intelligent Welsh sheepdog just destroyed me in the best way.
Books that made me cry in 2024:
Sirius by Olaf Stapledon
The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald
Death’s End by Cixin Liu
What’s on the docket for 2025? How do I choose which books to read? I don’t have a system. I sometimes think I should develop a system. But I am at the whim of whatever subconscious process is snagged on a cover, a first sentence, or an idea. Sometimes I read a book because I feel like I ought to have read it already, like I can’t consider myself educated unless I have. I don’t think this self-imposed pressure and judgement is necessarily a bad thing. I think it’s okay to guilt yourself into reading a book that might present a higher than usual barrier to entry. It’s how I got through The Brothers Karamazov this year, finally. I’m okay with making normative statements about the books that all self-respecting people of letters ought to read. I mean, that’s the whole concept behind the Western Canon, and I’m bought in.
“So you think you’re better than me because you read Dostoevsky and I haven’t?” I mean, yeah, kind of. I think that I’m a marginally more valuable human now, after reading The Brothers Karamazov, than I was before. I think reading literature improves people and enriches their lives. Sorry, but you should be a little ashamed if you don’t read. I don’t know if I’m ‘better’ than you, but I know that I’m better than I was before, and that engaging with stories and minds in texts is the primary driver of that improvement. (Secondary: a rigorous program of barbell training and lap swimming.)
2025 will definitely include more Sebald, Bellow, Dick, and Silverberg. I think I’d like to crack open some of the sci-fi compilation volumes I’ve accumulated over the years and read more short science fiction in general. I’d like to revisit the Greeks, maybe read some of the tragedies I never got around to in college when I was studying Classics. Maybe this is the year I finish Ulysses. Is this the year I read Proust? Probably not. But it could be. That’s what’s so exciting about new beginnings.
For SF, Heinlein’s anthology The Past Through Tomorrow: Future History Stories, collecting stories from the 1940s and 50s is pure gold. It was a favorite of mine as a teenager many years ago, and I recently read it again. It holds up, and the space faring future he predicted may be closer now than it was back then.
Now Wait for Last Year is such a banger / It might be selfish but I'm thrilled you quit your job if it means we get a sci-fi novel from you down the road 😅
Also Proust is worth it! The "toughest" thing about Search is that the chapters are so freaking long. But if you treat it as seven different books (which is what it really is imo), then it's a lot more digestable. Ulysses is far more difficult a read (altho I love that one too).