The first time I heard Linda Emond’s voice, she was playing a Swedish Interpol agent on the series “Death and Other Details.” Maybe it was the faux Swedish accent (I’ve had a thing for Ingrid Bergman and Greta Garbo since I was a teenager), or maybe it was just that it was a voice with some consequence. We saw her next in “Only Murders in the Building,” and by then I’d discovered that she narrated the audiobooks for Kathy Reichs’s Temperance Brennan series. I don’t think I have a thing a particular thing for murder mysteries. I do have a thing for voices, or, rather, a thing for narrative voice—the way the words on a page take shape in character and drive forward a story.
When I first started running longer distances many years ago, I coached myself to go out on training runs with the promise of enticing audiobooks. I listened to a variety of things, but what stuck was the work of Toni Morrison. Hers is the voice—both literary and human—that I hear when I think about running. Hers was the voice that narrated so many hundreds of miles, the voice that coaxed me out on frigid days and humid ones. Then for a while I shelved the habit, convinced that listening to audiobooks slowed me down. But lately, maybe this year, maybe earlier, I found I didn’t care whether listening to books made me run more slowly. Slow running was better than no running, and I wanted to multitask two of my favorite activities: running and reading. I also wanted to habit stack, bundling reading with chores I needed to tackle whether I liked them or not. Enter Linda Emond’s voice. Enter a whole host of other voices, both literary and human, that were new to me. Enter Ann Patchett’s voice at the end of the year, with her familiar-to-me mantra, nudging me always to consider, “What now?”
Like Toni Morrison’s work, this is a question that has shaped my outlook on the world. “What now?” is what I asked myself throughout the year, sometimes in excitement, sometimes in exasperation. And in the face of exhaustion, sometimes, or in search of exhilaration, I reached for a book to comfort me, to inspire me, to help me find my own voice. I listened to Kate DiCamillo’s The Puppets of Spelhorst while making my son’s whale-shaped birthday cake. I listened to Ian Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as I reframed my daily exercise routine. I listened to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass in moments snatched between other obligations, moments of calm in a sea of chaos. I didn’t listen to a single Toni Morrison book this year, and that was perhaps in part because I feel like I need to ration out her work across the course of my life, give it my full attention or risk not respecting its full power.
Of course, I didn’t just read audiobooks this year. I read books that helped me listen to the voices of people who are different from me, and I read books that reflected back to me the lives of people who are not so different. I embraced my own representation, and did not care so much about reading only literary fiction. I read three graphic novels in French because I wanted to, and I read whatever young adult fiction came recommended by trusted sources. It was not an easy year, but it was a year when I went easy on my usual self-imposed pressure to read in a particular way.
I read 48 books in 2024. Eleven of them were audiobooks.
Cookbooks
The Harry Potter Cookbook, Warner Brothers
Snacking Bakes, Yossi Arefi
Novellas
The Snow Queen, unknown
Once Upon a Time in the North, Philip Pullman
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
Novels
George/Melissa, Alex Gino
The Puppets of Spelhorst, Kate DiCamillo
Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, Jesse Q. Sutano
The First State of Being, Erin Entrada Kelly*
The Bone Hackers, Kathy Reichs
Terrace Story, Hilary Leichter
Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan
We Dream of Space, Erin Entrada Kelly*
Percy Jackson: The Sea of Monsters, Rick Riordan
An Unlikely Friendship, Ann Rinaldi
A Thunderous Whisper, Christina Diaz Gonzalez
Cold, Cold Bones, Kathy Reichs
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Ian Fleming*
Make the Season Bright, Ashley Herring Blake
The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette, Kate McKinnon
Memoir
Disability Visibility, Alice Wong
Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity, Ellen van Neerven
Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad, Tamara Walker*
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer*
Inciting Joy, Ross Gay*
A Year in Provence, Peter Mayle
Tomorrow Will Be Different, Sarah McBride
My Twenty Five Years in Provence, Peter Mayle
Savor, Fatima Ali
What Now, Ann Patchett
Nonfiction
Bearing Witness: The Wounds of Mass Trauma at Memorial Museums, Dr. Stephanie Arel
Charmian Kittredge London, Iris Jamahl Dunkle
The Day the World Came to Town, Jim DeFede
The London Scene: Six Essays on London Life, Virginia Woolf
How-to
How to Keep House While Drowning, KC Davis
The Art of Happiness, The Dalai Lama
Atomic Habits, James Cleer
Graphic Novels
Everything is Ok, Debbie Tung
We Are Not Strangers, Josh Tuininga
Blue is the Warmest Color, Julie Maroh
Transitions, Elodie Durand
Brooms, Jasmine Walls and Teo DuVall
Mimosa, Archie Bongiovanni
This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America, Navied Mahdavian
Fire on the Water, Scott MacGregor and Gary Dumm
Confessions of a Shy Baker, Masaomi Ito
Anne Bonny, Matteo Mastragostino
Toute l’eco en BD: La monnaie
* my favorite books this year
Grey Sea & Sky 