My most successful 2024 reading project

And a few book flights for your consideration

I started 2024 with all kinds of reading resolutions: more author projects, fewer buzzy titles, a wider reading diet, and quitting Goodreads for good. I’ll have a post coming in January about a year (mostly) without Goodreads and I think I was somewhat successful in reading more deep backlist and under-the-radar books, as well as figuring out which buzzy books might be hits for me. But the shining star of my reading goals was my author project, where I dove into the backlist of two authors I love: Louise Erdrich and Maggie O’Farrell.

Each month, I set a goal to read a book by either Erdrich or O’Farrell and as of right now, I’ve read eight books by Erdrich and five by O’Farrell in 2024. (I have vague ambitions of squeezing The Master Butchers Singing Club into the end of the month but we’ll see how I fare.) In a time when reading culture can sometimes feel hyper-focused on new releases, it felt downright decadent to go rambling through the backlist and spend extensive amounts of time in Erdrich and O’Farrell’s worlds. I got acquainted with the evolution of their writing styles, their thematic preoccupations, their favorite phrases, and their casts of characters.

My favorite of O’Farrell’s backlist is still The Hand That First Held Mine: the story of two women struggling to define their own lives decades apart, a meditation on motherood and creativity, and a bit of an old-fashioned family drama. I read it all the way back in 2022 and still think about it all the time. If you’d like to do a minimalist O’Farrell book flight, I’d recommend combining The Hand That First Held Mine with I Am, I Am, I Am, her dazzling memoir and my favorite O’Farrell from this year, and either Hamnet or The Marriage Portrait, which seem to signal a new move into historical fiction for her career. If you’d like to add a fourth, pick up her debut, After You’d Gone, which is a look at family secrets, grief, and romantic obsession. And if you’re fully on the O’Farrell train at this point, reach for This Must Be the Place, another sprawling family story that captures love and life in all its messy glory.

While I’m now an O’Farrell completionist, I still have a sizable chunk of Erdrich’s backlist left. She’s astonishly prolific, penning fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children’s fiction over a forty-year career. And she’s my personal pick for our greatest living American writer. Her books are an exquisite balance of humor, tragedy, and the sweep of history. Her writing is poetic, funny, and endlessly compelling. I reread Love Medicine to start this year, twelve years after I first read it my freshman year of college, and was amazed at how certain lines were still etched into my memory. So many hard things happen in her novels—I would definitely recommend checking content warnings if you’re a sensitive reader—but what Erdrich at the height of her powers leaves me with is hope, awe, and a kind of wonder at the small and great graces of life.

If you’re only going to read one Erdrich, I think it should be Love Medicine, the modern classic that kicks off her rich and wide-ranging Love Medicine series and tracks the intertwined lives of two families over the course of decades. Yes, I know there’s an argument to be made for The Round House, her National Book Award-winning searing coming-of-age story and exploration of the pursuit of justice. I think The Round House is brilliant but I also think it might shine even more if you read her entire Justice Trilogy, which also includes The Plague of Doves and LaRose. It’s also brutal and while Love Medicine certainly never shies away from tragedy, it might be nice to ease into Erdrich’s world.

If you’re going to read a few more, I’d add The Plague of Doves and The Sentence, both of which demonstrate her dazzling mastery of storytelling and tone. The Plague of Doves is one of those books that I want to read and reread just to see how she braids so many story threads and generations together and the writing is downright luminous. The Sentence is a portrait of an incredibly eventful year, of a marriage, and of the power of literature and it’s the most comforting book about a hard year that I’ve ever read. If you want to read more Erdrich after that—spoiler alert: I think you should—you could either dive into the rest of the Justice Trilogy or explore the Love Medicine series. My favorites in the series aside from Love Medicine are Tracks, which captures a people under siege and a moment of huge change painted in small details, and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No-Horse, a funny, heartbreaking, surprising book about faith and community. Honestly, it’s hard to go wrong.

Let me know about your favorite Erdrich or O’Farrell in the comments or tell me about an author project you’ve embarked on this year!

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Currently reading: The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman, as I attempt to squeeze in a few more of my most anticipated books before my favorite reads of the year post. (Coming next week!)

Recommendations, miscellany, and little bits of joy:

I was in France with my best friend last week so this week’s recs are travel-themed!

• One of the best things we did was a food tour with Paris by Mouth, featuring exquisite pastries, delicious wines, and copious amounts of cheese. The tour also comes with access to Paris by Mouth’s Substack and its detailed restaurant reviews, which we then used to determine 90% of our meals in Paris to great success.

• Papier Tigre, a charming and colorful stationery store in the 3rd with all the notebooks and pens your heart could desire.

• The Cluny Museum in the Latin Quarter, Paris’ medieval museum, which is a manageable size but still contains a panoply of things to admire, including the famous unicorn tapestries. They had a gorgeous exhibit of illuminated manuscripts tied to the reopening of Notre Dame this time. (It’s there until March, in case you find yourself in Paris!)