Not necessarily released in 2024, but, of the books I read or listened to during the year, these are the ones I particularly enjoyed.
Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America, A Memoir
Julia Lee
Lee's story of growing up in LA as the child of immigrant parents - exploring the complications of that, and trying to be a USAmerican (and what does that even mean?). Grappling with questions about how Asians fit in to the racial fabric of the US, the "model minority" trope and internalizing white supremacy, getting into an Ivy League school, but on scholarship, the "quota" thing (there can only be one Asian woman in a space). Reckoning with her own personal experiences and larger societal questions.
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands
Kate Beaton
Beaton, from the economically limited Cape Breton on the east coast of Canada, goes west to Alberta's oil rush to make money/pay off student loans. This graphic novel relates her experiences in the oil fields, and the myriad complicated issues of being part of an itinerant, predominantly male, workforce in an extractive industry. Intense, really well done.
Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life
Lulu Miller
Audio book, read by the author. Partly a biography of David Starr Jordan, a taxonomist credited with discovering nearly a fifth of fish known in his time. Jordan's collections kept getting destroyed, but he kept rebuilding them. Also part memoir - as the author's life collapsed, maybe there were things to be learned from Jordan's persistence? Great weaving of science and life, history, and the personal.
Leaven: the baker's journal
Volume I: Summer
Green Blade Bakery
I've been following the Green Blade Bakery on Facebook since we found them on a train delay in Klamath Falls, seeing pictures of the baked goods kills me since they are so far away, but they also share slice of life stories that are well written and share a deep sense of place, humanity and community. They collected some of those stories into a book! I meant to savor it, but once I started I couldn't put it down and read through the entire book in one sitting. (Authors have since retired and sold the bakery.)
Properties of Thirst
Marianne Wiggins
Beautiful writing. Set during WWII, mostly in the Owens Valley, a transplanted Easterner "Rocky" Rhodes is holding out against LA Water buying up property and water rights. Then there's a wartime incarceration camp being built across the road from his place. The backstory of the family, and the (Jewish) Department of the Interior man tasked with building the camp who becomes entangled with the family. Big historical events, but also the intimacies of family life, and love.
The story of an estranged brother and sister, brought back together (to the same physical space anyway) by their mother's death. The mother has left a voice recording that the siblings listen to together, and find that she had many secrets. A story of family, memory, choices. What you say, or not. Second chances, loss, love, expectations/what we do 'for others'.
Native Guard: Poems
Natasha Trethewey
Exploring the legacy of the South, at both a national and personal history level. The Louisiana Native Guards, one of the first black regiments, was called into service during the Civil War - but their story had almost been written out of history. Trethewey's parents were not legally allowed to marry, her mother was later murdered, so also tribute to/remembrance of her mother.
The Mercies
Kiran Millwood Hargrave
Audio book. Inspired by the real events of the Vardø (northern Norway) storm, where all the men of the village were out fishing and perished. The story of what the widows and women of the village did in the aftermath to survive - taking on the "men's work," and then a new lensman (governor) came to oversee the area, resulting in witch trials in 1621.
Set in 1977 Del Norte county - last of old growth redwood logging, families that had made their living doing that for generations, now there isn't much to cut anymore, plus there are more regulations. Also environmentalists are raising concerns about the herbicides the logging company has been spraying. Questions about go along/get along, how to support your family, work as identity, taking sides, making difficult choices.
Audio book. Checked this out for our road trip to Texas for the total eclipse. Story of two former Texas Rangers on an epic cattle drive to Montana Territory. Really involving story that pulled me into the world of the characters and their experiences.
Swimming Studies
Leanne Shapton
Graphic memoir of her swimming life (life as a swimmer?) - taking it up, sort of randomly, with her brother - the brother quit, she stuck with it. She turned out to be quite good, going to the Canadian Olympic trials twice. Sketches of the experiences of all that, and other swimming experiences and pools/bodies of water encountered later. Also some images - her paintings of swimming, color swatches of odors, other swimmers, photos of her swimsuits. About swimming but also about life, the disciplined pursuit of something, comparing athletic and artistic endeavors.
The Keeper: Soccer, Me, and the Law That Changed Women's Lives
Graphic memoir of growing up playing on a top soccer team in the 1980s - not really realizing what a Thing that was - the changes Title IX enabled for girls'/women's sports, also her coming of age, and position as goalkeeper - being somewhat removed from the action, stories of other writers who were goalkeepers.
Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future
Lauren Redniss
Love Redniss' style, both the pictures and the text and how she combines them. Her Radioactive was on my 2022 list. Thunder & Lightning includes a wide variety of stories: factual weather info and then also random stories about particular storms, or the very cold islands of Svalbard and how people go there to work and earn money - many of them Thais, of all people... weather forecasting, the Old Farmers Almanac. Also talks about the use of weather - making rain in the Vietnam War!
California Coast Trails
J. Smeaton Chase
The book that inspired my parents' California Coast Walk! A fun read, both for that reason and to read about places that I've been to, years later. Chase has a very personable style, interested in the countryside and people along the way, seems like he would be a good travel companion.
War and Peace (Maude translation)
Leo Tolstoy
This book had not been on my radar, but somehow I got on the Footnotes and Tangents slow read - one chapter a day! (which I didn't always do - sometimes I would be pretty good, other times not so much - but at least tried to keep on the weekly schedule to keep up with what Simon wrote about in his weekly emails.) Anyway, it was surprisingly entertaining and readable (which maybe says more about my expectations than the book?) but yeah, all the characters and the whole different world (worlds) they lived in but I really did get pulled in to what was happening there.
Other audio books (titles you’ve most/more likely heard of, so probably don’t need any props from me, but I did also enjoy them):
an Emily St. John Mandel kick:
Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell - includes a gripping, hold-your-breath and get swept along description of the spread of the plague
Thank you for reading The Wrack Line! I appreciate your spending some of your time here in this wild wonderland of a human created newsletter. All writing, photos, and art by me, Megan A Arnold, unless otherwise noted.
If you would like all this juicy goodness to appear in your inbox on a semi-regular basis, Subscribe! Subscribing also lets me know there’s folks out there that appreciate my work.
If you are already a Subscriber, you can also …
let me know you enjoyed this post by clicking the heart
share the post with a friend, or an enemy, or ?
support me by making your online book purchases from the kid sister press shop.
do that Thing you’ve been putting off
Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase from the kid sister press shop.
What did you enjoy reading in 2024? Please share in the Comments!
Thanks for this list! A few look interesting to me, particularly the ones involving environmental issues and the personal relationships of those in the stories. I loved Lonesome Dove! I read it in 2024, as well as the 2nd and 3rd books in the trilogy. Larry McMurtry has a son James, who's one of my favorite singers, too.