2024 Year in Reading
And other accomplishments and reflections of a year gone by
I didn’t think I’d get to read much this year. The first quarter of the year was loaded the heaviness of grief. The inescapable, lingering grief of the pre-October 7 world, a turn in the calendar year that wasn’t accompanied by a global acknowledgement that Jewish lives have value, but rather, the opposite. And then the personal grief - the loss of my grandfather who had seemed so immortal for his 97 years, followed closely by the sudden loss of my father-in-law, from shiva house to shiva house. And in this grief, the hope and anticipation and physical pain of my last trimester. Who has time for reading when you’re caught in the circle of life, as close to birth as you are to death?
Then she was born, and who reads with a newborn? Turns out, breastfeeding mothers who want to be quiet and undistracting during night feeds. Some days I felt like I read the whole internet. And then books, because the sheer exhaustion of new parenthood wasn’t enough to lull my insomniac self to sleep and my trusted method of watching Friends before bed didn’t work with a bassinet in the room. Somehow, I made it through 20 books this year - not including the 60 or so board books that have become a daily staple.
I learned two things about myself as a reader as the year progressed.
First, the internet reading. Early in the war, I stopped reading any writer — even beloved writers — who spread blood libels in their work. In the attention economy, I couldn’t bear to patronize those who would use their mighty pens as deadly weapons. By June, I realized I was in an echo chamber of people who had no real connection to the war but somehow would find ways to casually interject the war — or more specifically, references to the “genocide in Gaza” into essays on totally unrelated topics.
I’d already unsubscribed from the white ex-Mormon whose newsletter was designed to focus on the culture we form in our homes and how money, feminism, and care intersect, but immediately after October 7 - before we even knew the details of what had happened in that massacre, before any women had been released from captivity - started writing about how Israel is a white supremacist state colonizing brown people’s land, justifying the attack because she was anti the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why read the work of a feminist who is okay with raping Jewish women? But then there were more. The food writer who specializes in the cultural narratives of food and often writes about the impact of colonization on cuisine who, unsurprisingly, hopped aboard the Israel-as-evil-colonizers bandwagon and, in a guest essay about Jewish cuisine, chose to highlight an anti-Zionist, pro-diaspora Jewish writer whose thesis was that Jews have no cultural foods, but rather co-opt the foods of the places we live. The feminist culture writer who championed the college protests as wrongly infantilized by mainstream media, when they were really the most adult by standing against the “inhumane Israeli assault on Palestine.” Of course, with no mention whatsoever at any point of the inhumane Hamas assault on Israelis. The tech-and-media links aggregator who linked to pieces by AI and internet culture beat writers that casually parroted blood libels apropos of nothing. The labor rights coffee industry essayist who mentioned the US’s funding of the genocide in Gaza like it was a throwaway reference to something like tax season being in April, not a hotly debated foreign policy. I felt bombarded by this rhetoric, thinking, “This is how it happens,” every time another respected intellectual, writer, or thinker would spread these blood libel talking points as if they were fact. This is how society turns on the Jews - by the cultural elite accepting a faulty premise and spreading it unchecked.
But I don’t want to stop reading the internet. I care about culture, about feminism, about food, about the changing tech landscape. I want to have interests outside of Zionism. So I stopped unsubscribing. I roll my eyes, I swallow my hurt, I know that the clock is ticking for my safety, and I try to learn what I can about the topics these people are actually experts in.
And I found new voices to read, too. I read more Jewish writers than I ever have before. One of my new favorites is Elissa Wald. She understands the struggle, writing in her latest essay:
This tension recurs every time I fall in love with a new author. I like to connect with writers I love on social media. Now I do a keyword search before sending a friend request. I search their page for “Israel”. I search their page for “Palestine”. If nothing at all comes up, I’m overcome with relief. But so many writers that I used to love — whose work I still love — have been tainted for me forever, because they’ve joined anti-Semitic boycotts or posted anti-Zionist falsehoods.
It no longer seems possible to reverse this tsunami. But I still find it therapeutic to face it head-on and refuse to be swept away by it.”
I hope to have more bandwidth to write in 2025, to continue to be a voice that counters the status quo narrative. I want to write about culture and food without referencing the war, but sometimes it feels like a tug-of-war — I will when they do.
Beyond the internet are the books. Oh, the joy of the books! This year, like last, I read less nonfiction. The only nonfiction book I completed was Dan Ariely’s MisBelief, which is an antidote to the poison of our misinformation society. I started Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, which I hope to finish when I have creative energy, and just started David Graeber’s posthumous essay collection The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World, because I missed nonfiction so much that heady anarchism seemed like the best way back in. No, really, the world is just so broken that my usual nonfiction loves in pop-sociology and leadership were too much to wrap my head around, and a burn-it-all-down approach seemed easier to stomach.
My fiction choices skewed lighter than usual, too. This was the year of the romance novel, a genre I never liked before. But as a tired new mom reading to sleep, the predictability of the romcom was soothing. I was thrilled to rediscover Sophie Kinsella, with her masterful The Burnout. I found myself swept away in mystery novels for the first time since my very brief middle school Agatha Christie phase, with The Thursday Murder Club series. Old people, multiple narrators, genius crimes, and some of the funniest prose I’ve ever read? How is everyone in the world not talking about this series at all times? It is perfect.
I also found accidental infertility narratives, which I was very much not in the market for. But somehow, three of the books I read had casual IVF/IUI references that were pretty incorrect and unpleasant, not unlike the Gaza genocide asides. Break in Case of Emergency tried to satirize too much at once, and if the baby wasn’t sleeping at the foot of my bed, it would have been slammed down too loudly each time the character’s IVF journey made no sense. Magical Meet Cute was the most out of character book I’ve ever read — I am not into witch-themed romcoms, and didn’t need the Jewish-golem-antisemitism-child abuse one - but I was most put off by the magic of two women conceiving in what seemed like a natural manner (how?!) after multiple failed IUI attempts. One thing that no one has ever said about people trying to conceive exclusively through assisted reproductive technology — that it’ll finally happen when you stop trying. ART is trying, 100% of the time. At least The Wedding People captured the devastation of failed IVF. That book was the closest read to my usual fare - lighthearted yet filled with trauma, female protagonists, and commentary on wealth and society. I’m proud that I liked that book as much as I did, given that I read it in the throws of extreme trauma and didn’t think I could process more than a Christina Lauren novel. My brain is powerful.
But the most exciting book I read this year was The Judgment of Yoyo Gold. It’s rare that I’ve seen myself represented in art, and while I'm not the kind of Orthodox Jew Yoyo is, she was one of the most well-rounded, if not the most well-rounded, Orthodox Jewish girls I’ve ever seen on the page. She wrestled with her family, her faith, and her friends in a way I could relate to, and I found myself wondering how I would have come of age if I’d had a coming-of-age novel like this when I was a YA reader. Yoyo is proof that representation matters, and that great stories can be told with Orthodox women at the center.
Which brings me to my most important reading recommendation of 2024. I had the distinct honor of consulting on the first survey of Jewish representation in scripted TV in 25 years, through my work with JITC Hollywood Bureau. The Norman Lear Center conducted a study in two parts - the first half of Jewish characters in scripted TV shows and the second of Orthodox Judaism in scripted TV shows. You can read the full study here. The findings were in some ways surprising, and in others affirming. But the end result is clear: representation matters, and we need more diverse, authentic, and humanized Jews on screen.
Note: Links to books above are affiliate links to my Bookshop “storefront and I may receive compensation if you purchase the books. You can view the full list of the books I read in 2024 here.