Another year on the (note)books

Last Friday newsletter of 2024 + favorites worth sharing

My logbook, my pocket notebooks, my commonplace diary, and my diaries

Hey y’all,

It’s the last Friday of the year. Here’s a list of some of my favorite things from 2024:

1. The best of the best: G.C. Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books, written over 225 years ago. Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, a marvelous little book about a bedridden woman who observes a snail while she slowly convalesces from a debilitating illness. Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, a book that felt like it was written just for me. Charles Portis’s novel Gringos, which I read for the third time. The just right Goldilocks joy of quarterly-ish magazines like The Believer and The Idler.
   
   

2. Non-fiction: Elisa Gabbert’s outstanding essay collection, Any Person Is the Only Self. Ted Gioia’s How to Listen to Jazz. Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Brian Dillon’s book of essays about essays, Essayism. Jesse David Fox’s Comedy Book. John McPhee’s Oranges. Katherine Rundell’s Why You Should Read Children’s Books. Nick Hornby’s Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius. Bassist Stuart David’s memoir In the All-Night Café: A Memoir of Belle and Sebastian's Formative Year. Psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s A Life of One's Own, a very strange and interesting book published in 1934, about her using seven years of diary writing to investigate what she really wanted out of life. Timothy Denevi’s Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson's Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism.
   
   

3. Helpful self-help: W. Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis. Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals. (Oliver supplied me with the most helpful question of the year: “What would it mean to be done for the day?”) Katherine Morgan Schafler’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control helped me finally understand perfectionism. Matt Farley’s book about creativity, The Motern Method, which made me think a lot about quality and quantity.
   
   

4. Novels: I started the year off right with Matt Bucher’s The Belan Deck — a mediation on A.I. and powerpoint and life that reads like David Markson’s commonplace notecard novels meets Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine. Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel’s Dayswork, a fragmentary novel about a woman during the pandemic writing facts about Herman Melville on sticky notes. Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things was weirder than the movie. I read Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac after visiting Los Alamos. Jen Beagin’s novel Big Swiss didn’t quite stick the landing for me, but it made me laugh a bunch and I think it could make an outstanding TV series. (I was about to lament how little fiction I read this year, and then I remembered I spent a month reading freaking Middlemarch.)
   
   

5. Art books: Adam Moss’s The Work of Art. Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Datebook Volume Three, the final installment in his sketchbook series. John Hendrix’s graphic novel biography about the remarkable friendship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, The Mythmakers. Cartoonist Edward Steed’s collection, Forces of Nature. Amy Sillman’s Faux Pas. Amos Kennedy’s Citizen Printer, the most lavish book yet published with my name on the cover.
   
   

6. Music: Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee, which I downloaded off a Geocities website and burned onto two CDs. Owen Kleon’s TECH. Four Tet’s Three. Geese’s 3D Country. Waxahatchee’s “Right Back to It” was the best song I heard all year. I also loved Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” and Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” Tommy Flanagan’s Overseas got me through writing a book proposal. I overplayed Jazz at Massey Hall, a 1953 recording of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach. We drove around New Mexico listening to various Yellow Magic Orchestra records. Syro low-key became the Aphex Twin record I reach for the most. I’m starting to think Siamese Dream is the best-sounding guitar record of my youth. (Here’s my gigantic day-by-day 2024 playlist and a playlist of all the mixtapes I made this year — hit shuffle!)
   
   

7. Radio: I listened to KMFA almost every morning on the way to drop my kid off at school. (This is partly because I can’t stand the stuff the morning DJ plays on KUTX, which is usually my default.) I listened to every episode of the Walter Martin Radio Hour and Courtney Love’s Women. The kids and I listened to a bunch of The Joystick Jukebox on KOOP, and Owen even suggested a bunch of tracks for one of the shows and got a shoutout. I went back and re-listened to a bunch of old episodes of Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour.
   
   

8. Movies: I loved Hundreds of Beavers, Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, Gary Hustwit’s generative documentary Eno, and Harmony Korine’s The Beach Bum. I liked Richard Linklater’s Hit Man. Meg and I had fun date days to see The Fall Guy, Dune: Part Two, and ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! at the Alamo Drafthouse. I caught up with last year’s favorites — I couldn’t resist the artsy/trash mix of Saltburn and quite liked The Holdovers. I’m always up for a music documentary, like 32 Sounds, Stax: Soulsville, U.S.A., Hans Zimmer: Hollywood Rebel, The Greatest Night in Pop, Music by John Williams, and Yacht Rock. I laughed a bunch at Jacqueline Novak’s Get on Your Knees and various Jim Gaffigan specials. We watch a movie every Friday night with the boys, and we all liked Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, What’s Opera, Doc?, Air Bud, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, The Sandlot, The Birds (!!!), The Little Rascals, and Beetlejuice.
   
   

9. TV: We watched so, so many seasons of Below Deck. We liked the Mr. and Mrs. Smith reboot, Black Doves, Rivals, Shogun, Ripley, Detroiters, Bad Monkey, Somebody Somewhere, Fallout, and Hacks. With the kids: The Olympics, The Simpsons, Carl the Collector, and the 28-minute Bluey special, “The Sign.”
   
   

10. Things I published in this newsletter: all the typewriter interviews, adventures in making mixtapes, finding joy in repetition, interviews with Sam Anderson and Stephanie Zacharek and Dwight Garner, a big batch of gardening metaphors for creative work, tips for looking at art at a museum, thinking about how to draw time, a list of 21st century books with pictures, and my own motto for this newsletter: “Newsletters should be letters!”

Thanks for reading. If you want to hear from me one more time this year and every Tuesday in 2025, take advantage of the holiday sale and become a become a paid subscriber:

I’m always looking for good things to read, watch, and listen to, so tell me your 2024 favorites in the comments:

Hope Santa brought you some goodies and that dead week is what you want it to be.

xoxo,

Austin