Pictured above are three of my big projects of 2024. I read The Power Broker over my maternity leave, I read Sr. Prudence Allen in the waning months of the year, and my baby I grew all year (in and ex utero). Not pictured, but also gestating last year is my own book The Dignity of Dependence, which will be out this fall.
I read 9/10 of my “to read” books for 2024. (One snuck in under the wire, finished the first week of January). Overall, I read 82 books / 26 thousand words. And I like to check how much out of the present I’m reading. Per Goodreads, my oldest reads were published in 1897 (Charlotte Mason’s Parents and Children), 1947 (The Dry Wood, by Caryll Houselander), and 1954 (Ellul’s The Technological Society). I’m going to notch something much older if I get through my planned 2025 reading!
I like to make this list as a way to choose what to prioritize in the coming year. I rarely read every book I choose to list, but I read many more than I would if I didn’t have them awaiting checkmarks. Technically, when I make this list, I am secretly choosing what I am prioritizing in the week between Christmas and New Years, when I tend to knock out one or two final books in a slightly rushed way. Ah well.
So, in alphabetical order, here’s what I hope to read this year:
- The Shield of Achilles by W.H. Auden (Alan Jacobs’s critical edition)
- Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather
- They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos Eire
- In Necessity and Sorrow by Magda Denes
- The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming
- Britain Against Napoleon: The Organization of Victory, 1793-1815 by Roger Knight
- Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
- The Walls Around Us by David Owen
- The Liturgy of Death by Alexander Schmemann
- Essays on Women by St. Edith Stein
- Anabasis by Xenophon
- Math from Three to Seven: The Story of a Mathematical Circle for Preschoolers by Alexander Zvonkin
We each read Caryll Houselander in 2024. Perhaps I will also read a book by Willa Cather this year.