Bryan Behrenshausen's public notebook. Updated irregularly.
An ongoing list of books I’ve read in 2024.
See also: The collection on Bookshop.org.
As a year in books, 2024 shall be the Year of the Essay Collection. I read four this year, including two immediately at the turn of the calendar. Another transitional year likely had me grasping for that type of personal insight, that form of pithy and poignant advice as I found my bearings.
As is typical of every year, each book has attached to it a memory of its reading. This year, those memories are commonly from airplanes, me scanning text with my elbows tucked in courteously, obediently, shoulders aching for more space. I’m squinting at a tiny phone screen, making do at cruising altitude. I flew more in 2024 than I have in the previous three years combined; I read more books this way, too.
The year’s biggest disappointment was likely The Three-Body Problem—not because it wasn’t a compelling book (it was), or because it didn’t generate fruitful discussions in my two-person book club (it did), but because I felt that by and large it failed to warrant its hype, and because I got the sense that its true narrative payoff only arrives if one agrees to plod onward to the next volume in the series. That seems like an unfair exchange for the reader’s investment. I won’t be reading the others any time soon.
The honor of Favorite of the Year would go to either Pink Slime or Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. The former was just a fantastic piece of writing—stifling and claustrophobic, hopeful and haunting. It was likely the standout took-hold-and-wouldn’t-let-go book of the year. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow best connected with me personally and professionally, a coming-of-age tale of friendship and love and loss and difficult lessons learned in devastating ways, but all against the backdrop of video games and video gaming, the practice and the culture and the industry and the medium’s artstic potential, which rekindled my love for it and transported me to an emotional place I’d forgotten. It joins my library of literary fiction about video games, sitting now alongside Weiss’ Lucky Wander Boy and Grossman’s You, both of which left their indelible marks.
# February 4, 2024