My Favorite Things: 2024 Edition

An incomplete list

Here we are, gliding headlong into the last days of 2024. Where did the time go? It seemed only yesterday that we were all innumerating the various things that floated our collective boats in 2023, and here we are, assessing the ballast once again. These are ten of the things that carried me through this year of wreck and ruin.

My Cassette Player

I think I documented this journey in a previous post — I recently purchased a refurbished cassette player and went about digging all my old tapes out of storage. I wondered if this wasn’t just some procrastination tactic and that the novelty of playing cassettes would wear off in time — but no, it’s been a bit of a revelation this year to go through and listen to the music of my youth (much of which is still my go-to music of today) and enjoy the pleasures of the magnetic medium. We even got a subscription to Chances With Wolves, a New York based collective that sends out mixtapes every other month or so containing music that will challenge the vast databases of Shazam as well as your mind. Dig!

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

This was my first Rachel Kushner book — though it turned out I had bought her novel The Flamethrowers some years back and had shelved it, unread. Not so this time! I listened to this one on audiobook, which totally counts, and I really enjoyed it. It’s about an undercover operative infiltrating an activist collective in the south of France, but it’s also about Paleolithic man and the evolution of the dominant species. Kushner’s writing is wiry and smart; the book is deceptively deep. The audiobook is read by the author. I suppose her delivery is not for everyone, but I got into the vibe of Kushner’s rather deadpan reading.

Starve Acre by Michael Hurley

This is not a 2024 book; it was originally published in 2019. I don’t keep much of finger on the pulse of contemporary horror, but I do occasionally like to dally there. I grabbed this one because it was recommended as a newer entry into the folk-horror genre, something which has been having a bit of a moment in the last few years. This short novel, while not quite being don’t-read-at-night material, was very unsettling in its horror, following a grief-stricken husband and wife who retreat to rural England after the death of their son.

The Movies of Celine Sciamma

I kind of missed the boat on Portrait of a Lady on Fire, this French filmmaker’s breakout movie, but fully got on board after seeing her 2021 masterpiece, Petite Maman. During my downtime on the road this year, I set about watching all the Sciamma films I could get my hands on. There are a handful on the Criterion Channel — you should definitely check them out. For whatever reason, I feel like Sciamma and the Janet Planet director, Annie Baker, are kindred spirits. They both have a knack at showing the humanity in their characters and finding poignancy in stillness and silence. Slow burns, but good ones.

Marina Allen, Eight Pointed Star

I read somewhere that Marina Allen worked for a time as Terre Roche’s assistant, uploading Roche’s CD collection into iTunes for her. This scans because this record, which came out in June, sounds like it is the amalgam of Terre Roche’s CD collection. That’s a good thing; Allen sounds like she knows her 70s singer-songwriter forebears inside and out and uses them to good effect; there are shades of Judee Sill and Joni Mitchell all over this record. The songs are spare and pretty, but Allen’s got a wry voice inside all that prettiness.

Daisy Rickman, Howl

You could do worse than listen to Daisy Rickman’s new record while reading Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre — the one would be an apt soundtrack to the other. I think I’ve sounded off about the general vibes this album sends out into the universe, but here I am, months later, still wanting to shout that to the heavens. This is some spooky, ancient stuff here from this resident of Mousehole, Cornwall.

Thelonius Monk, Solo Monk

When I’m writing or reading, I cannot listen to music that has discernible lyrics. I spent a lot of time writing and reading in 2024, so I was constantly seeking out instrumental music to accompany these activities. I landed on Solo Monk, Thelonius Monk’s 1965 album, and found it really charming. I’m such a jazz dilettante, I won’t even try to go into why this record is good — though I think there is some genetic connection between Monk’s deliberately ham-fisted plunking and punk rock’s embrace of naive musicality. I wrote a lot of my novel listening to this record and I came to associate the music with Barnaby, the main character of my book.

Cara Beth Satalino, Bright Star

2024 was a shining year for women’s voices in music — from the residual afterglow of BoyGenius’s conquering the world in 2023 and Taylor Swift’s forever omnipresence — so much so that I think some of those lesser known voices got outshone a little bit. Satalino’s record, which I discovered randomly from an online mixtape, was a sneaker hit for me. I spent all day on a day off in Toronto, wandering around town, listening to it. It was quite lovely. I was particularly moved by the story in Wheel Song, a reflection on the narrator’s selling her grandfather’s guitar to pay the rent — but it ends up being about so much more.

Whatever should happen
I’m a fish out on the line
I fell for it and now I’m sick
It happens all the time

Oh it may be I’ll be set free
It may be I’ll flail
In the hands of some proud angler
Who’s got me hangin’ by the tail

Shadow of the Erdtree

I happen to be a devotee of FromSoftware’s video games — I got hooked after playing Dark Souls back in 2011 and now have to play everything they make. While I don’t think that Souls-like games tend to shine in open world environments, all the stuff that makes a FromSoftware game ticks is here in spades in this expansion of 2022’s Elden Ring. One of the things that’s so great about these games is their generosity — I can remember playing Dark Souls and thinking I was close to the end when all of a sudden I was lifted by some imps into Anor Londo and the game seemed to just open up all over again. Similarly with Shadow of the Erdtree: you’d be forgiven to think this expansion was a game unto itself, the scope is so massive.

On The Road (The Original Scroll) by Jack Kerouac

I don’t know what inspired my returning to this book — I’d read the original published version of Kerouac’s classic in my early twenties, when, I imagine, it should be read. I suppose it’s because got into a Beat kick a few months ago after reading Malcom Lowry’s Under the Volcano — and assuming Lowry’s singular novel must’ve been an urtext to the Beats, I dove into some Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. I remember when this “original scroll” version was published back in 2008 and I’d assumed, I think, that it was a kind of publishing novelty — something only for the die-hards and academics. Turns out, though, that it is a better version of the book IMHO. It might be that it lives more comfortably in our contemporary literary world where the idea of a novel written in a single unbroken paragraph doesn’t feel so revolutionary — not to mention our evolved sensibilities about peoples’ drug use and sex lives. You really do get better sense of the book’s frenetic rhythms with the unbroken text, unspooling out before you, as Kerouac intended, like a road.

Those are the things that, for me, gave 2024 its shine — how about you? What did you love? What got you through it all? Sound off down below!