Volume 4, No. 38: My Favorite Nonfiction of 2024

From basketball to Audre Lorde

Greetings, book and treat people! Next up in my series of Favorite Books of 2024: nonfiction! I read a ton of great nonfiction this year. These books expanded my world and made me laugh, challenged me and soothed me. They got me riled up and calmed me down.

My final Best of 2024 list will come to you on Monday: fiction! Do you have any idea what will be on it? Is there a small chance you might have an inkling which I novel I loved the most this year? You will have to wait till Monday to not be surprised!

In the meantime, please come talk to me about the best nonfiction you read this year in the comments. I’d also love to know if you’d like to hear more about any of these books. I wrote reflections about EVERY SINGLE BOOK I READ THIS YEAR. But I posted very few reviews. I may send out some single-review newsletters next year, so please chime in about the books you’re most intrigued by!

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Some notes on the list:

• It includes the best nonfiction I read in 2024, not just books published in 2024.

• It’s organized by moods and themes.

• It includes 25 books, which is a very reasonable number, wow.

• An asterisk indicates books I loved on audio. This includes more than half of them—I really love nonfiction on audio!

• Clicking on a title will bring you to Bookshop. Clicking on linked text in the description will bring you to my review.

• It’s only mid-December, so this list is not definitive. It also doesn’t include rereads.

“We are all certainly going to die, but we are not dead yet, so have you ever considered the sunset?”

The above is a quote from Hanif Abdurraqib, from a conversation he had with Ross Gay about There’s Always This Year in April.

*Wild & Precious by Sophia Bush & Mary Oliver (2023): I cannot explain what this celebration of Mary Oliver’s life means to me. This is a perfect book. It’s a collection of interviews with people who knew and loved her and people who have been affected by her work. She reads a lot of poems, and other people read her poems. I sobbed in many parking lots and on many walks while listening to it. It is a profoundly moving and joyful book. I will be thinking about this quote from Ross Gay forever: “There’s this impulse to kind of misread Mary Oliver as simply glad or sweetly wise. She’s mainly talking about death, it seems to me.”

Our World by Mary Oliver with photos by Molly Malone Cook (2009): I sobbed through this book, Molly Malone Cook’s photographs paired with Mary Oliver’s writing about their life together, some of Molly’s journal entries, and some of Mary’s poems. It is one of the quietest and most profound books of love I have ever read. A gift of grief and joy, braided into words and photos. I don’t know how to be coherent about it.

*There’s Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib (2024): This is an epic poem disguised as a book-length essay. It’s a heart on a page. Abdurraqib is so serious about what he loves. He knows the stakes, and that makes this book big. Reading it, I felt it all in my bones—how much he loves what he loves, how much he grieves what he grieves. It’s a book about flight and Blackness and poetry and basketball and Columbus, Ohio, and home and ascension and failure. It’s all just a way to say: I love this place and I want to tell you about it. I want to love this place and my people as best I can, and here is how. Here is how I’m trying. There’s a line in a Kaveh Akbar poem I think about constantly: “It’s a serious business, this living.” This book is that. Heart in words.

Form, Exploded

Spellbound by Bishakh Som (2020): This memoir consists of many autobiographical comics that Som began writing in 2012, before she transitioned. It opens with a direct address to the reader, where she explains that, when writing the comics, she drew herself as a cis woman, Anjali. It ends with some musings on this choice from the vantage of the present. It’s about how we perceive ourselves and how the world perceives us. How mutable we are, even to ourselves. How much of what we experience is tied to our bodies, how much isn’t. It’s about what storytelling can and cannot do, what storytelling hides and what it reveals.

*A Last Supper of Queer Apostles by Pedro Lemebel, tr. by Gwendolyn Harper (2024): This recently published translation of some of Lemebel’s chronicas is wonderful. These were essays he published in Chile throughout his career, many in the 1990s. They take all forms: stories, poems, fiction, nonfiction. They are about the lives of locas and travestis, AIDS, Pinochet, resistance, life on the streets, art, the violence of assimilation. Lemebel’s sparkling language comes through in the translation. It’s sharp and campy, a mix of tenderness and bitchiness, anger and delight. Irreverent, flamboyant, vivid, vital.

*Survival Is A Promise by Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2024): This is an incredible work. It reads to me like a biographical poem. It is about Lorde's life, of course, but it is also a close read of her poetry. Gumbs uses so many lenses to look at Lorde's life and work and lineage and legacy—whale songs, crystals, earthquakes, black holes, typewriters, specific words. It is expansive and full of portals. It is also full of Gumbs—as a writer and scholar and Black queer woman, she is so deep inside these pages. She isn’t outside of Lorde's legacy, but inside of it. The book is so raw and relational. It feels like a new genre. It dazzled me.

Faltas by Cecilia Gentili (2022): This slim book is a collection of letters to (as the subtitle declares) everyone in Gentili’s hometown in Argentina except her rapist. Mostly, she writes to women: her grandmother, her mom, a rival who hated her, an older friend whom she loved but who wronged her. I’ve been thinking a lot about what kind of queer and trans magic letters might hold, what kind of specific queer and trans power might live in this form of address, this reaching back to older versions of self in the service of story. There’s something about a letter that feels like a spell, and spells, to me, feel distinctly queer. In letters, relationships can be muddled over, remade, transformed. Faltas is deeply relational—Gentili is seeking to understand herself by speaking to other people. She’s talking to herself by talking to the people who made her.

Give Trans Elders Their Flowers

*I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sante (2024): This is a quietly beautiful, sad, and funny memoir about Sante coming out and transitioning in her 60s. It’s really about layers of self and all the ways the world (read: transphobia) so often makes uncovering those layers hard or impossible for trans and queer folks. I loved her brashness, her honesty, and the way she writes about who she is and was—versions and revisions of self. It made me think a lot about how slow and unpredictable change is. Sante knew she was trans from a young age but denied it for most of her life for a whole slew of complex reasons reasons. In a lot of ways, this is a story about timelines—queer timelines and normative timelines and where they intersect.

*Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein (1994, 2016): Oh, I adored this. It’s funny, warm, sometimes absurd, and so open and playful. Bornstein is very theatrical. There’s some theory, and it’s smart without being dry or perspective. I love how willing she is to say, “I’ve changed,” or “I was wrong,” or “I don’t feel that way anymore.” Mostly this is a book about making a life that centers and celebrates joyful queer and trans gender play.

Poetry School

My Trade is Mystery by Carl Phillips (2023): Carl Phillips is so smart and I love his work so much and getting to think with him is an honor and a joy. I read all of his books of prose this year, and this is my favorite—a slim, wise, vulnerable collection of essays about ambition, craft, silence, community, change, queerness, audience, fluency. It’s about poetry and it’s about being a human in the world. I underlined at least 50% of it.

Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle (2012): This is a collection of lectures about poetry that Ruefle gave to her grad students over a dozen or so years. It’s about poetry, which means it is really about mystery and life and sweetness and the act of creation, about connection and grief and death and loss and rapture. The way Ruefle writes about poetry excites me and makes me feel alive. She’s obsessed with it, for starters. She can’t stop thinking about it. She approaches it like a delicious, unsolvable mystery. She writes about how important it is and about how useless it is. In one essay, she explains that she has no idea what poetry is. And then she gives a lecture on what it is. It’s a book of contradictions. I felt it everywhere. The titular essay is one of the best essays I’ve read in a long time.

America Has Always Been This Way

*We Refuse by Kellie Carter Jackson (2024): A brilliant history of all the ways Black people have used refusal to resist white supremacy, from slavery through the present day. It’s broken into five chapters, each one focusing on a different kind of refusal: revolution, protection, force, flight, and joy. In each chapter, Jackson shares stories about how these various tactics have been used, from global events like the Haitian Revolution to more intimate stories about Black women using guns to protect their families. She eviscerates binaries and offers a brilliant analysis of why the violent/nonviolent binary is often meaningless and often serves white supremacy, and not liberation.

*How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith (2022): This is a shattering, brilliant book. If you, like me, have somehow not read it until now, please fix that immediately. It is required and essential reading. Smith travels to various locations around the country, from Monticello to Angola Prison. Through the lens of these places and their histories, told and untold, he illuminates not only how close we are to slavery we still are, but how deeply the denial and rewriting of mythologizing of history goes. Nothing I write can do this book justice. Read it and read it again (I plan to).

Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison (1993): This slim book contains the smartest scholarship on American literature I have ever read. I’m so glad I own it because I will be returning to it. If you live in America and you read, I implore you to read this book.

Bad Indians by Deborah Miranda (2012): This is a stunning memoir/family history/history of Native California/history of colonization. It includes photographs, poems, oral histories, letters, the transcribed tapes of Miranda’s grandfather speaking, newspaper clippings—stories upon stories upon stories. Miranda doesn’t try to weave anything whole. Instead, she exposes all the threads. How do you tell a story that has been broken so many times? How do you tell a story that has been forgotten and mythologized and reworked and hidden so many times? How do you tell a story that had to be made invisible for the people whose story it was to survive it? What’s most incredible about this book is what it makes visible.

Look Closely at One Thing & the World Reveals Itself

*A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib (2022): Abdurraqib is brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, happily we can all agree on that, right! The subtitle, of this book, Notes in Praise of Black Performance, captures the heart of this book. It’s a collection of odes to Black performance. Abdurraqib moves through history, exalting and interrogating so many different kinds of performance: music, of course, but also dance, play, grief, language, poetry, magic. He is curious about how Black people have survived the hellscape of America, but also—more—how Black people come home, love, celebrate, make worlds. His understanding of performance is vast and gorgeous.

*The Age of Deer by Erika Howsare (2024): I’ve had a pretty antagonistic relationship with deer throughout my life, and this book made me think about them in so many new ways. It is fantastic. Howsare explores the relationship between humans and deer from so many different angles. She writes about the history of humans and deer, deer in various mythologies, deer as symbols of the hunt and of prosperity. She writes about hunting, animals rights activists, conservation. There are sections on Bambi, on people who rehabilitate injured deer, on deer farming, on ticks. She talks to gardeners, farmers, artists, Department of Transportation employees, primitive skills practitioners. Through all of this, she troubles the line between between human and nonhuman, wilderness and pastoral landscapes, made and built environments. Again and again she can’t answer the questions she asks. Deer are continue to change the American landscapes in complex ways we still don’t understand. Our relationship with them is fraught, deeply entwined, and not binary. This book is so brilliant.

Holy Wow These Authors are Smart!

*How to Live Free in a Dangerous World by Shayla Lawson (2024): A wonderful essay collection about Blackness, gender, travel, sex, desire, disability, aging, being creative, making art, teaching. Lawson is smart and curious, but she’s also calm, steady, measured. It felt like she was asking me to slow down, to listen better, to linger with each idea or thought, to not rush on from them. I was riveted by the quality of her attention.

*You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker (2024): I loved it. So much to love about it but what I love most about Parker's writing/thinking is how she insists on addressing the systemic in everything. Many of these essays are personal about dating, therapy, mental illness— but she foregrounds systemic problems because her personal problems as a Black woman in America are systemic. This seems obvious but she is just so smart and clear about it. It reminded me in some ways of ANOTHER WORD FOR OVE-different tone and subject matter but shared insistence on collective liberation/ change as a requirement for healing from trauma.

*Creep by Myriam Gurba (2023): I thought this book was very good until I read the last essay, which vaults it onto a different plane of brilliance. The last essay changes everything that comes before it and expands the container of the book. It’s astonishing. The essays are about various kinds of patriarchal and racialized violence, ranging from astute analysis of Joan Didion and Alice Sebold to intimate reflections on Gurba’s family history and life as a Mexican woman living in California. There is so much in here about the hows and whys of storytelling, both collectively and individually, and wow, that last essay.

Juicy Queer History

*Carson McCullers: A Life by Mary V. Dearborn (2024): First of all, so much gay drama! Riveting. On a more serious note, this is a devastating book. Carson’s life was full of alcoholism and addiction and pain and repression. Still: so much lived queerness, despite. I appreciate how Dearborn approaches Carson's queerness—it’s central, and also kind of banal, and also feels limitless. There is also a lot in this book about Carson's illness and disability. She was chronically ill for most of her life. She had multiple disabilities. She relied on other people for basic support (and was often incredibly demanding). It me think a lot about how we view illness/disability, especially in women, queer folks, and people who don’t preform gender “properly.” A lot of people speculated that Carson wasn’t really sick or paralyzed or in pain, which is rage-making—and also, there is so much complexity in all these intersections. I loved the fullness of the portrait.

*Bad Gays by Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller (2022): A series of profiles of “bad gays” from throughout history: people who did terrible things or were terrible people, sometimes in obvious ways and sometimes in more complex ways for complex reasons. They talk about several gay Nazis, Roy Cohn and J. Edgar Hoover, Lawrence of Arabia, Margaret Meade. The authors argue (brilliantly) that the project of male homosexuality as its been defined in the west (which is quite new) is inextricably linked to colonialism and white supremacy. In profiling these various figures they show, over and over again, how white gay men (and some women) have not always been in opposition to the state, but have worked for the state—sometimes not in spite of, but because of, their homosexuality.

When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan (2020): This is a wonderful history of queer Brooklyn as well as a history of the progression of ideas about gender and sexuality in 20th century America. What I love most about Ryan is his historiography. So much of the recorded queer history of Brooklyn in the 19th and early 20th centuries comes from police records and medical establishments. The archive itself is hostile. Ryan is so thoughtful and compassionate in his approach. He not only thinks about what his sources are, but about how they came to him. So many of the stories in this book are about the people who got noticed—the people who were breaking gender and sexuality norms. Ryan tells these stories, but he also makes space for unremembered queer life. I also love how deeply he considers the built environment of the city and its infrastructure, and how that affects queer life.

On Healing

*Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace (2024): A beautiful and earnest queer love song about surviving, about choosing to survive. About loving long and truly, which means loving brokenly. About how healing is collective, is deeply intertwined with collective liberation, is not something that happens in isolation. It is about music and cooking and sex and parenting and making beautiful art and how all of those things, all of those places and people and moments and ideas, are what has kept Wallace alive, over and over again.

*Thunder Song by Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe (2024): This is a short but powerful book of thoughtful, emotional, intimate essays. I especially love LaPointe’s writing on salmon and veganism, her great grandmother's stories, queerness, her relationship with her mom, and her love for Coast Salish land. She writes about both racism and finding belonging in the punk scene with a lot of nuance. There is a lot in here about sexual violence and abusive relationships, but there is also so much about her love for her partner, family, community. A lot of this book is joyful.