It’s cold, it’s grey, its bleak—but winter, at the very least, brings with it a glut of anticipation-inducing books. Here you’ll find nearly 100 titles that we’re excited to cozy up with this season. Some we’ve already read in galley form; others we’

By the time the English poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney was felled by a bullet among the low, frigid marshes of Zutphen in October of 1586, where he was fighting on behalf of Dutch independence, he had already spent quite a lot of time thinking a

A mortifying admission in light of my 2023 Year in Reading essay: this year, I fell in love with a man. I also fell back in love with making music. Both developments shifted my priorities and altered my reading practice (I read more while in transit,

The book that held my attention through most of the year, that I went back to again and again—perforce, it is a very long book—was Volume 1 of Capital, the only volume of his magnum opus that Karl Marx saw into print. It is a long book and an essenti

I published a book of essays two months ago, which I realized only in retrospect is a collection of meditations on pain, and since then I have been parsing reader reactions in an anecdotal sort of way. Here are some things that people have said about

I have long made lists of my favorite cultural artifacts of the year—as a college blogger blathering about movies to a single-digit readership, as a Pitchfork voter trying to advocate for Fred Thomas’s “Cops Don’t Care Pt. II” for the Best of 2010s L

When I moved to Montreal last August to begin doctoral studies, I gave myself a personal assignment to sift through Canadian literature. Elizabeth Hay’s 2006 novel Late Nights on Air stopped me, just like how a voice on the radio stops a character na

One of the greatest pleasures of my reading life this past year was consuming what I’ve been calling “snackable” books—books you can read in one or two quick delicious sittings, which is not to say they lack nutritional value. I usually find that I w

Many of the books I read this year were connected in one way or another to the horrors unfolding in Palestine. When details began to emerge of the torture and rape of Gaza prisoners at the Sde Teiman detention facility, I turned to Primo Levi’s Survi

2024 was a year when I could never write quickly enough and there was always something overdue. For the first half of the year I was revising Health and Safety. For the second half I was doing presidential campaign coverage for The New Yorker and pro

Books come to me seemingly at random, spontaneously, serendipitously—they find me and strike me down. Like divine intervention. Like falling in love. I’ll mention just a few standouts from this year, in no particular order at all: Just today, I finis

My father died on January 10, 2024. In the first couple of weeks after that, I couldn’t read at all. I couldn’t write, watch movies, or think much. Then, I reached out to my poet friends and asked them to send me their favorite poems about grief. I h

For obvious reasons, I spent a lot of time this past year reading and rereading and rereading some more Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. (Hang on, maybe it’s not obvious: I have a new book out called Didion & Babitz.) Reading, as well, writers in the

Sometimes, what I read for pleasure turns into the germ of an assignment I then hound an editor to let me write. I began this year preparing to interview my friend, the brilliant critic Becca Rothfeld, about her first book, the essay collection All T

An Emerging Cosmos I read books is small clusters. Sometimes I pretend I’m reading and naming new constellations, new myths to live and die by. After all, isn’t that what humans have always done? The year 2024 brought with it brutalities and calamiti

This year I wanted to read the last six Philip Roth novels I hadn’t read yet. While I wouldn’t call it a mistake, I will say it was like eating a six-pack of paper towels, and I say this as a longtime Roth head (Rothster? Rothario?), though he doesn’

How is fiction like music? As I consider my reading practice over the last year, I feel compelled to ask that question. Reading: that is, listening. I’m a music critic, so my life revolves around processing and interpreting sound; sometimes, though,

Earlier this year, I stopped writing down the titles of the books I read. It seemed that I had been living one drawn-out period—a very long day—because I have a baby and the days repeat, in strict routine and exhaustion, and also because I have spent

Grief came at us with a hammer this year. I moved across the country for work and every week there’s another bit of news from the end of the world. Through several bludgeons of change and loss, I walked, a lot, and wondered whether the part of me tha

Some years my reading list is more structured and thematically tied than others, some years (particularly when I’m actively researching and writing), my list of recreational reads is embarrassingly thin. This gap year between finishing my first book

I wish I had thought to keep a log of the books I read. But I didn’t, regarding book reading as my life of pleasure, not the calling for account. I’ll reform next year, for 2025 is going to need a list of what my country allows me to enjoy. But here,

Most of my reading this year went towards studying fairy tales. I know, I know—the fairy tale has fallen out of favor. There’s a naive domesticity associated with its tales of marriage and castles and princes. Still, I found that learning their struc

Against all odds, this year gifted me a remarkable sense of stability and peace. It’s hard to tell if this came from all the reading, or if the reading was facilitated by the calm, but I give much credit to the clarifying work of Christian anarchists

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: this year, my debut book was published, but I also contracted thyroid cancer and a number of autoimmune ailments, which ranged from aggravating to genuinely alarming. Suddenly, my life was an exerc

Welcome to the 20th (!) installment of The Millions’ annual Year in Reading series, which gathers together some of today’s most exciting writers and thinkers to share the books that shaped their year. YIR is not a collection of yearend best-of lists;

I read and loved a book called The Disordered Cosmos by Chanda Prescod Weinstein. My physics major daughter has recently taken an interest in quantum mechanics, and I can’t think of any better father/daughter activity than contemplating the scientifi

We parked in a dusty lot off the hill city of Kastro, a village on the Greek island of Sifnos. We were there to see the Church of the Seven Martyrs, a little chapel sited on a spit of land in the middle of the Aegean. We wound our way down the cliffs

Two years since becoming that much-elegized category of expat—the American in Paris—I’m starting to come off an early obsession: the near-constant comparison of my new cultural environment to my former one. It started benignly enough, as in my manic

No quote from antiquity sums up the metaphysical challenge of being a surfer more aptly than this one, from Marcus Aurelius, the last Emperor of the Pax Romana: “There is a river of creation, and time is a violent stream. As soon as one thing comes i

McNeal, the new play by Ayad Akhtar, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Disgraced, focuses on an egocentric, self-destructive white male novelist, played by Robert Downey, Jr. The fictional Jacob McNeal—think Mailer or Roth at their worst—wins the Nobel