Finding Peace & 2024 Reads
My top 5 books of of the year 📚📚📚📚
We’re back, baby!
I’m splashing into your post-holiday inbox swamp with —you guessed it — a roundup list!
You know I love to be shocking.
Provocative.
Revolutionary.
Also this👇
It’s January and I cannot bring myself to care about anything besides my weighted blanket.
10+ hours a night isn’t enough. If I could slowly press myself into a pillow panini, I would.
Anything to escape the horrors….
The fires!!! Politics!!!!! Timothée Chalamet’s tiny little moustache!!!!
It’s relentless out there.
Not to mention the softer, more personal struggles winter brings.
My skin? Dry.
My feet? Freezing.
My social life? Dwindling.
The book draft I abandoned y’all to work on? Let’s not talk about it…
I could layer a dozen duvets and still not escape the crushing reality that making my 2025 vision board wasn’t enough. I have to actually do the things on said vision board.
How unfair!
How cruel!!
They should be more upfront about that when you’re making them!!!
But, worst of all, is the recognition that I only feel this low because my body needs sunshine.
Seasonal depression has me shrivelled up like all of the houseplants I regularly forget to water.
On Friday two Jehovah’s Witnesses interrupted my morning wallowing.
“We’re polling the neighbourhood,” they said. “Do you think peace will happen in this lifetime?”
It was a great hook.
Part of me wanted to take the bait and say “no.”
Have they not seen the news!?!
Do they not know about the Wirkin???!?!
Did they not read this bleak, albeit hilarious headline from the Guardian: I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers???!?!
The world feels hopeless enough that I almost trapped myself in their elevator pitch for post-death bliss (aka heaven).
But, despite the above moaning, my day-to-day life is peaceful.
I feel tranquillity when I eat an edible and vacuum the house.
…When 212 by Azealia Banks comes on my gym playlist.
…When I open a new notebook.
…When a friend fully grasps my party vision before seeing the Pinterest board.
…When I sip tea that’s the exact right temperature.
…When a client says they never received a document, but I have the email receipts that prove I did, in fact, send them the document.
…When I take my brain out, leave it in a bowl of salty water, and read about sexy vampire men fighting in a competition to the death.
…When a random teenager on TikTok (RIP) says something so outlandish, so bold, so brave, that I actually laugh out loud.
…When our cat does a big stretch.
…When my husband inevitably comments on the cat doing a big stretch, and I tear my focus away from the sexy vampire book or TikTok teen to agree, that is quite a big stretch, and ohmygoodness can you believe how cute that cat is??
Those are all moments of peace.
Not world peace, but something.
Enough for me to banish the Jehovah’s Witnesses without falling for their sneaky ‘lil trap. (You have to be decisive about it, or they will come back. Like 80’s fashion or the Lachey’s…. )
It turns out that telling missionaries you’re an atheist comes with its own serenity: I might be depressed, but I’m not depressed enough to take up religion.
Amen.
Back to the books!
It’s all about the scripture, after all.
🚨But first! Some shelf-keeping🚨
The My Side Plot book club will pause in 2025.
You will still receive monthly Substack book reviews and recs, but the 7 of you who follow me on Fable will no longer have to politely ignore my club updates.
📊 Annual Book Report:
Last year I read 54 books and over 20,000 pages.
Those numbers are impressive, but nothing is as telling as this StoryGraph mood map:
Yikes.
You can take the girl out of the darkness, but you can’t take the darkness out of the girl….
Anyway! Here is everything I read in 2024:
🏆 My Top 5 Picks of the Year
Drum roll, please…
✍️ Yellowface, R.F. Kuang
Coming in at #5, this satirical masterpiece is tense, moody, and equal parts hilarious and horrific. This is a one-of-a-kind book.
🌊 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin
One of our first book club picks! This kinda-sorta love story spans thirty years of an intimate creative relationship between video game designers. I cried a lot. Like a lot a lot.
🌙 Talking At Night, Claire Daverley.
Another My Side Plot read! This book reads like poetry — mostly because Daverley doesn’t abide by grammar rules. She is lawless. She does not use quotation marks. She uses run-ons. There are probably 100 commas on each page. The results (imo) are a lyrical masterpiece, but it’s not for everyone.
⛓️ Chain-Gang All Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Holy hell. I still haven’t recovered from this one. In fact, it might be to blame for my January blues… Imagine The Hunger Games, but making a larger point about prison reform, and even more twisted because it’s undeniably plausible. Yeesh. What a book to end the year on!
🍊Worry by Alexandra Tanner.
My fave book of 2024! An absolute doom scroll brought to life that I cannot — no matter how hard I try — stop thinking about.
Last Thought:
Literally this whole blog…
Epilogue
What should I read this year?
What were your top reads from 2024??? Did you like any of mine?
What brings you peace?