Curated reads.

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Favorite Essays:

• My unraveling. I had my health. I had a job. And then, abruptly, I didn’t. (The unraveling of our bodies can happen to any one of us, at any time. I remember the haunting images in this haunting essay.)
• Ghost dogs (I want to read this one again but I’m scared because the dog scenes are heartbreaking. A moving essay on the love of a human for a dog and a dog for a human.)
• My name is a mountain
• We were being boys
• The shapes of silence
• Does my love for a straight man change my queer identity?
• What happens when we stop remembering
• Chaos and noise
• My body remembers the story you want to erase
• Why A.I. isn’t going to make art (the best critical essay I read on A.I. this year)
• The bullet in my mother’s head
• Transvestite freak
• Black negation
• The butterfly redemption, Brian Payton (best memorable ending scene in a reported essay)

Favorite Short Stories:

• Presence, Gina Chung
• On the Origin of an Ending, Electric Literature
• Elbow in Zulu, Dara Kell
• An account of the land of witches, Sofia Samatar
• Among the remains, The Forge Literary

Favorite Novels:

• Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
• All the Colors of the Dark, Chris Whitaker (Oh, my goodness, the pacing in this novel is breathtaking. And the prose made me wish I could write that way. )
• The White Book, Han Kang
• The Book of Love, Kelly Link
• The Language of Dying, Sarah Pinborough (This is a novelette. Detailed emotions and beautiful prose.)

Favorite Short Story Collections:

I learned something important about short story collections this year. While I was studying how to arrange my short stories for my debut short story collection, I came across On Writing Fiction by David Jauss. There’s a chapter called Stacking Stones: Building a Unified Short Story Collection. Before reading this chapter, I used to think, and even told friends, that I read the stories in a short story collection in any order I like. I’ve done this for years. I learned, after reading this chapter, that this was wrong. There’s an art to the arrangement of stories in a short story collection. By reading the stories in any order I like, I was losing meaning. I was treating a story collection—not as a book. A story collection is a book. Would you read a novel beginning from the middle or the last chapter? I wouldn’t. A short story collection should be read the same way, unless you’re okay with losing the meaning of the whole book.

“If the collection is well constructed, reading the stories out of sequence is like listening to the movements of a symphony out of order—we do violence both to the parts and the whole.” –On Writing Fiction by David Jauss

These story collections, I read them in the order in which the writer arranged them:

• In This Ravishing World, Nina Schuyler (My review of this remarkable book)
• A Kind of Madness, Uche Okonkwo
• Green Frog, Gina Chung
• Ghostroots, Pemi Aguda
• Roman Stories, Jhumpa Lahiri

Favorite Memoirs:

• Here After, Amy Lin
• Frighten The Horses, Oliver Radclyffe
• We’re Alone, Edwidge Danticat (I devoured the essays in this book. Essential.)
• Somehow, Anne Lamott

Favorite Books on the Craft of Writing I Read in 2024:

• Truth Is The Arrow, Mercy Is The Bow, Steve Almond (Writer friends have been nudging me to read this book for almost a year, and I finally picked this book last month that’s been sitting in my TBR list. I’m so glad I did. I especially like the chapter titled The Price of Entitlement & The Wisdom of Failure. That last phrase, the wisdom of failure, I can’t stop thinking about it. Wisdom and failure, together, making up a phrase. If you’re a writer and you’ve ever felt like giving up, because of rejections, read this book.)
• Blueprint for a Book, Jennie Nash (There are 14 fundamental questions in this book as an exercise to make the stories you write better. This book is so good that I’ve made notes of these questions—to answer them for every story I write.)

Favorite Books on Prose I Read in 2024:

This year, I read more books on writing good prose than any other year. I researched on the best books on writing good sentences. The following are good books for writing good sentences, sentences that sing.

Spellbinding Sentences, Barbara Baig

The Anatomy of Prose, Sacha Black

Building Great Sentences, Brooks Landon (I like the examples of great sentences in this comprehensive book. I especially liked the chapter on cumulative sentences that seem to go on and on, taking your breath away. I like reading sentences that just run, stealing my breath. There’s a whole chapter on how to write these kinds of cumulative sentences.)