My 2024 in Reading

It was a big year

Every year, I write a piece rounding up all the books I read. I chart almost nothing in my life except reading; I’ve got notebooks listing all the books I’ve read for more than a decade, with little letter grades placed next to them. These grades are private but in my younger days I would make them public. Since 2020, all of my recaps have appeared on Substack. Here’s 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, if you are so inclined to see what’s come before.

My reading diet is a mix of fiction and nonfiction, weighted much more to the former. Since I read so much nonfiction for my journalism duties, I am less interested in the books. Current affairs books, believe it or not, are some of my least favorite. I have skimmed or completely ignored most of the 2010s Trump books. I didn’t read the few Biden ones. Unless you are tackling your subject with novelistic sweep, like Robert Caro might, I may not be that interested in your writing because it will only be serviceable, and not of the higher order I crave. As a novelist, I am on the hunt for language. To become a better writer, as I’ve argued, you’ve got to be a voracious reader. Fiction is what I am usually after and I believe, in these hyperreal times, it’s more needed than ever.

Overall, I read 58 books this year, which was the same number of home runs Aaron Judge hit, so I have to be doing something right. This was a very exciting year for discovering new writers. I read excellent novels from John Pistelli, Naomi Kanakia, ARX-Han, Andrew Boryga, Adem Luz Rienspects, Cally Fiedorek, and Caleb Caudell. What I relished was the range, both in subject matter and manner in which they came into being. Some of these books were released by major publishers. Some were the products of indies. Some were self-published. Pistelli’s Major Arcana was a Substack success story, with a strong indie, Belt Publishing, deciding to re-issue it in 2025 after seeing the attention it attracted on this platform. In January, I’ll be launching a new book review and literary magazine, The Metropolitan Review, and my hope is it will help to fill the void left by so many newspapers and magazines that abandoned book review sections over the last decade. In my own small way, with this Substack, I’ve tried to lend coverage to new books, and I will continue to do that. I do believe literary culture is having a gradual rebirth and I want to be a part of that as much as possible.

Speaking of which, Glass Century, my new novel, will be released on May 6th, 2025. “Generous and funny, this smart, expansive book kept me utterly engrossed,” says National Book Award finalist Christopher Sorrentino. It’s also, says Junot Díaz, a “marvelous paean to NYC and a spectacularly moving novel.” Or listen to Nell Zink, who declares Glass Century is “moving storytelling in the classic social realist style about the only taboo kink left, adultery.” Get your pre-order here (only get the hardcover please, the paperback was listed by mistake) and your audiobook here. If you are interested in reviewing, check it out on NetGalley.

There’s a book tour brewing! Do you want me to come talk in your hometown? Email me directly at ross@rossbarkan.com and we can coordinate with my publicist. The pandemic denied me the opportunity to tour for previous books so I am very excited to hit the road in the spring. I always envied the bands that got to tour America. There’s a certain romance to blowing into a new town and living out of hotel rooms.

I do much of my reading on the subway, shuttling from my outer borough environs to the great glassy plains of The City. I discovered Bruce Wagner, who might be one of our great American novelists, and thoroughly relished The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides and The Easter Parade by Richard Yates. It was very exciting discovering Katarina Grishakova’s The Hermit, a novel of high finance and New York manners, and I look forward to what she’s working on next. It was great, too, to read Adelle Waldman’s Help Wanted, which is one of those novels that, I do believe, will endure. There are other books I liked but I don’t have time to account for all of them!

Here’s a final word on Pat Jordan’s A False Spring, which might be, in my view, one of the greatest sports books ever written. It can be hard to recommend sports books, let alone baseball books, to those who don’t care much about those worlds. Explaining the beauty of baseball to a non-fan is a bit like a well-meaning mathematician trying to get me to comprehend trigonometry. But A False Spring does transcend the mythos of the game itself and grasp, successfully, at more universal currents. It is, first and foremost, a memoir of failure.

Baseball fans, largely, do not know who Pat Jordan is because he never pitched in the Major Leagues. Before going on to a successful career as a sportswriter for many prominent magazines, including Sports Illustrated, Jordan was a young phenomenon who may have been the best high school pitcher in the state of Connecticut in the late 1950s. He threw very hard and dreamed of stardom. His goal, beyond reaching the Major Leagues, was signing for $100,000, which was a titanic sum of money in 1959. As a pitcher, he only cared about strikeouts, and admitted he was fine with his fielders making errors behind him because it meant he’d have more opportunities to humiliate hitters with his fastball. But he began slipping his senior year, and he came to understand $100,000 was out of reach. He settled for $36,000 from the Milwaukee Braves, a nice sum that nevertheless didn’t meet his lofty expectations. He was off to the minor leagues, where he would toil for several years before giving up entirely when he was just twenty.

Most athlete memoirs have co-writers. Jim Bouton’s taboo-shattering Ball Four was brought to life by Leonard Shecter, an iconoclastic New York sportswriter who never got the credit he deserved for making Bouton a national celebrity. As much as I enjoyed Ball Four and Bouton himself, who was briefly a star for the New York Yankees in the 1960s before writing his best-selling tell-all, I always conceived of him as more a personality or entrepreneur than any kind of artist. But Jordan, who published A False Spring in 1975 when he was just thirty-four, is a writer first, and he brings an uncommon literary grace to his wry yet startlingly bleak account of his life in the minor leagues in the late 1950s and early 1960s. (Coincidentally, Jordan and Bouton would actually pitch against each other for at least one game in the minors.) In A False Spring, Jordan holds back nothing: he is dating the girl who will become his wife but writes openly about losing his virginity to someone else in the backseat of a car in the town of McCook, Nebraska. He intimates, too, he may have impregnated her. And he plumbs his loneliness and alienation, his inability to relate to his teammates or his coaches, who have little advice of value to impart. (One manager, though, does dole out graphic sexual advice to his perplexed charges.) For baseball fans, there are plenty of cameos from future stars who are then, in 1959 and 1960, barely adults. Hall of Famer Phil Niekro, a teammate at McCook, is a sleepy-eyed blonde kid seen hanging out in the balcony of a movie theater. Ron Hunt, Jordan’s roommate, relishes calling their overbearing landlady “mom.” Rico Carty is an erratic slugger who passes out in a Davenport, Iowa bar, to the consternation of the bartender who tells Jordan the patrons “don’t want no buck n— in here. Not even awake. You understand?” And there is nineteen-year-old Joe Torre, threatening to fight Jordan during batting practice. “He looked,” to the young pitcher, “like a fierce Bedouin tribesman whose distrust for everything could be read in the shifting whites of his eyes.”

Perhaps A False Spring spoke to me because I remember, on a much smaller scale, what it is like to have your body betray you. All the steely control I can bring to bear on my writing life I could never muster in athletics, especially baseball, where I was, when anything went awry, a wreck, prone to fretting and whining and furious outbursts. Jordan struggles to throw strikes and, in the spring training of his final year, fully melts down, missing out on a chance to rise higher in the minor leagues. “I sifted through the fragments,” he recalls, “[and] could not remember how to make my throwing arm move in unison with my lunging body.” He can hardly pitch at all. His terror was familiar to me. Until the eighth grade, I had been a very good pitcher, starting for my travel teams and even, as a child, landing in the local newspaper for throwing a few shutout innings. I had begun to take pitching lessons to reach the next level—to learn a good curve, increase my velocity, and try to make the high school team. One day, I took the mound against another school and found I could no longer pitch. I walked the first batter, the second batter, then the third. The ball would not travel over the plate. Body and mind were meteorites hurling in opposite directions. I suddenly had no ability to do what I had done for the last six years. The panic was unlike any I had ever known. I was struck dumb. Once the game was done, I would stop pitching altogether. I was a first baseman and outfielder from then on, and wouldn’t even stand on the mound during practice.

Jordan is a shell of himself in his final year. In Wisconsin, he is barely allowed to pitch at all. He hysterically confronts his manager, who regards him as nearly insane. He is sent down to a lower rung of the minors, in Palatka, Florida, “a suffocating place, claustrophobic,” where “everything in it emitted an overwhelming sense of decay.” A swamp sits beyond the outfield. Long vines and tendrils wind over the fence. A teammate is competing for the league batting title with a twenty-year-old from the Tampa squad named Pete Rose. Not used to pressure, the teammate grows “twitchy” as Rose narrows the gap and he pleads with the manager to take him out of the lineup. “He complained of mysterious ailments, clutching his stomach in pain or cradling his splitting head, and he accused Pete Rose of voodoo.” In his final starts, Jordan begins to feel a curious kind of liberation, knowing at least he doesn’t have to try anymore. His career will end and he can begin to focus on the rest of his life. By then, he is married, and his wife is unhappily on the road with him. He wakes her very early in the morning, before the end of the season, and tells her to pack. They are leaving for good.

In the pre-dawn, they drive north.

“We moved slowly through traffic, past motels and gas stations and traffic lights, and suddenly it occurred to me, with a chill, that I had no career,” he writes. “What would I be without baseball? I could think of nothing. I stopped at a red light, an interminable red light. And it was then, for the first time, that I began to wonder … why?”

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Here are all the books I read in 2024:

1. Disappearing Act by Jiordan Castle

2. As it Falls by Donald Breckenridge

3. The Authenticity Industries: Keeping it “Real” in Media, Culture, and Politics by Michael Serazio

4. The Hermit by Katerina Grishakova

5. Mixtape Hyperborea by Adem Luz Rienspects

6. More by Molly Roden Winter

7. Incel by ARX-Han

8. Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman

9. Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham

10. The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano

11. Jimmy Breslin collected writings, Library of America edition

12. Major Arcana by John Pistelli

13. Loner by Teddy Wayne

14. Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball by Keith O’Brien

15. Thumbsucker by Walter Kirn

16. Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates

17. Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today by Anthony Galluzzo

18. Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals by Ronnie Grinberg

19. Agonist by Udith Dematagoda

20. Son of the Great American Novel by James Fritzhand

21. The Winner by Teddy Wayne

22. Molly by Blake Butler

23. Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space by Catherine Barnett

24. My Father’s Diet by Adrian Nathan West

25. Just City: Growing Up on the Upper West Side When Housing Was a Human Right by Jennifer Baum

26. The Furies by Fernanda Eberstadt

27. The Default World by Naomi Kanakia

28. Best of the Rust Belt, edited by Anne Trubek

29. Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel

30. Bloody Panico!: or, Whatever Happened to The Tory Party by Geoffrey Wheatcroft

31. Lit Life by Kurt Wenzel

32. ROAR: American Master, The Oral Biography of Roger Orr by Bruce Wagner

33. Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan

34. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller Jr.

35. Kingdom Come by J.G. Ballard

36. Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte

37. Let Me Try Again by Matthew Davis

38. What the Dead Can Say by Philip Graham

39. Vivienne by Emmalea Russo

40. Hardly Working by Caleb Caudell

41. The Hotel Egypt by Stuart Ross

42. What the Statue Thinks by Michael Goodwin Hilton

43. Managing Mailer by Joe Flaherty

44. This is Not America: Why Black Lives in Britain Matter by Tomiwa Owolade

45. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

46. Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

47. Do it in the Dark by Gary Indiana

48. The Marvel Universe: Origin Stories by Bruce Wagner

49. Suder by Percival Everett

50. Orbital by Samantha Harvey

51. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fizgerald

52. All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews

53. The Met Gala & Tales of Saints and Seekers: Two Novellas by Bruce Wagner

54. James by Percival Everett

55. The Easter Parade by Richard Yates

56. A False Spring by Pat Jordan

57. Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta

58. Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman