After listening to a meditation guided by Shinzen Young in my meditation app, I wanted to know more about him. I was excited to see he’d written a book called The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works. Books about the neuroscience of meditation are my jam.

Turns out, this was not a book about the neuroscience of meditation.

Meditation has made me kinder, more grateful, more resilient. I’m a better person for it. I want to take my practice deeper, and so I’ve been meditating more, with more intentionality, and I’m trying to read more about it. I want to understand better the mechanisms behind meditation. How does it, you know, work exactly?

Young’s book does not answer that question. Instead, he uses science language and metaphors to describe the practice of meditation. There’s some cool stuff in here, but it’s not what I was looking for. And he spends most of his time talking about concepts that are beyond me. Even after six years of a daily mindfulness meditation practice, I still very much feel like a beginner.

His discussion on impermanence, for instance, went almost entirely over my head. I still don’t understand what impermanence is or why it’s important to happiness and enlightenment. Though for what it’s worth, I’m incorporating his advice on noticing when things end, not just when they begin. The sound of a passing car might draw my attention, but I’m trying now to notice when that sound fades. But I can’t pretend I understand why this is valuable, despite having read the book.

Confession: I tend not to like books about meditation. I find the concepts too abstract, the writing too inaccessible. I feel the same frustration with books about philosophy and religion. Though I can point to any number of delightful exceptions, these genres as a whole are not my favorites.

Every January, I read a George Saunders book to start the year off right. This year I chose Liberation Day, a collection of short fiction.

Saunders may be the best of the contemporary American writers. Not the main point, but because he’s so good, he gets standout voice actors for his audiobooks. If you enjoy listening to books or are merely audiobook-curious, let yourself enjoy this book aloud. The biggest name is probably Tina Fey, but everyone is superb.

Saunders is hailed as a master of literary fiction, which is true, though I wish more people would recognize him as a master of science fiction, because that’s what half these stories are. Not the kind with pew-pew-pew space lasers, more the kind with mind-wiping technology that never gets explained in detail, for which fact I am grateful.

In trying to pick my favorite element of his stories in this book, I landed on this: Saunders is so good at writing normal people failing. Bitchy colleagues, idealists who choose complicity over courage, mediocre writers and their underwhelming husbands who make a halfass attempt at vengeful masculinity: None of these characters are straight-up villains. They are ordinary people who make disappointing choices.

No, I take that back, the parents in “Mother’s Day” are villains, and so are the parents in “Liberation Day.” They just lack the introspection to see it.

If this is your first George Saunders rodeo, this is a fine place to start, though my favorite collection is Tenth of December. His novel Lincoln in the Bardo is one of those astonishing books that can change your life. And A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is the best way I know to introduce yourself to Russian literature.

Fairy Tale is one of the most satisfying books Stephen King has written in ages. If you haven’t read him in a long time, or ever, you probably think of him as a horror writer. That is accurate but incomplete. The man’s been writing professionally for over fifty years. He’s written fantasy, science fiction, Westerns, thrillers, literary fiction, historical fiction, mysteries, and probably some other fiction genres I’m forgetting, to say nothing of his nonfiction cultural criticism. Or On Writing, which endures as one of the best books for writers and would-be writers.

Fairy Tale presents us with Charlie, a boy whose mother dies young and whose father responds by diving into a bottle. Despite growing up under these difficult circumstances, by the time he’s a teenager, Charlie is a decent kid—the sort of kid who stops to help when he discovers an old man in distress, even if that old man has a reputation for being an asshole, even if his dog is rumored to be vicious.

I don’t want to spoil the plot, but this is an adventure story with a magical realm and a princess and a great evil that Charlie must defeat. And I am only slightly ashamed to say I cheated and looked to the last few pages to find out if the dog survived.

I read A Practical Guide to Conquering the World, a nominally fantasy novel by K. J. Parker, pseudonym of Tom Holt.

I love K. J. Parker to an unreasonable extent. I’m not really capable of objective criticism with his books. Sorry if you were looking for that here.

As is typical, this book is fantasy in that there geography and the cultures are made up, but there’s no magic. It’s about people in an approaching-Industrial society who make war on one another.

After something like fifteen years of my intense Parker fanhood, I think I’ve figured out why I like him so well. It’s his prose style. It’s witty and droll. Every sentence, every paragraph is an exercise in deadpan delivery. I would give my left kidney to write like he does.

The hero of this book, if that’s what you’d prefer to call him, is a professional translator. It’s not that he has political aspirations, but when he realizes a young woman is slated for execution due to a mistake in translation, he intervenes. And the young woman happens to be a princess from one of the distant, savage tribes.

Parker excels at world-building. He’ll happily go on a tangent chock full of details about the intricacies of bow design or the how the clearing of a forest affected a region’s agriculture and economy.  It ought to be tedious but isn’t.

This was a delight as an audiobook. Ray Sawyer isn’t great at female voices, but one, no one will ever accuse Parker of passing the Bechdel test, and two, the characters aren’t the main point of Parker’s novels. Sawyer’s the perfect narrator for the book because his reading is bony dry. He deadpans his way through the whole novel.

Right, so, I only read 19 books for pleasure this year, the lowest count since I started tracking my reading more than twenty years ago. I edited 22 books, but that’s work reading, not pleasure reading.

In my defense: I had to move, again, this time from Wisconsin to Minnesota. Moving is such a drain on time and energy. And here in Minnesota I don’t have a long country road to amble down with my dog, one of us listening to audiobooks, the other chasing deer.

Also in my defense, after I moved to the Twin Cities, I took up dance as a hobby. When I say dance I mean burlesque and pole dance. In November I danced on a stage, taking my clothes off for money.

Please note, my stage name is conveniently the same as my editing business: Blue Legend. Hire me for all your editing and/or erotic dance needs.

Somehow, some way, I’m going to make more time for pleasure reading this year. Pleasure writing, too. I’m itching to write a book. I resolve to find time for editing books, reading books, writing books, and stripping my clothes off.

Total books read:
19

Age levels:
All adult. No YA or children’s books this year.

Books that were published in 2024:
The Hunter, by Tana French

Total books read:
Nonfiction: 4
Fiction: 15

Genres (as some books have more than one genre, total exceeds 19):

Nonfiction

• Ecology – 1
• Feminism – 1
• History – 2
• Science – 1

Fiction

• Crime – 1
• Fantasy – 8
• Horror – 2
• Literary fiction – 3
• Romance – 1
• Science fiction – 5

Annual Russian novel:
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy
 
K. J. Parker: Is he still the best?
A thousand times yes. I love his writing so much. Normally, when I have a favorite writer, it’s because of their skill with character development and emotional resonance. With Parker, it’s a style thing. His prose is what I aspire to write.

Re-reads:
The Blacktongue Thief, by Christopher Buehlman
The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova
The Color of Magic, by Terry Pratchett
 
 Best book of the year (two-way tie):

The Daughters’ War, by Christopher Buehlman, a prequel to The Blacktongue Thief. Buehlman is my favorite contemporary horror writer, though I believe this title was marketed as fantasy. The goblins have come again. They’re calling this the daughters’ war, because most of the men were killed or maimed in the earlier war. We follow the story through the eyes of Galva, a noble daughter who has signed on with an experimental fighting unit that matches soldiers with giant war corvids.

Buehlman’s prose craft is miles beyond most other writers. He’s got the world building, the character development, and the storytelling to keep you turning pages. Or to not hit pause on the audiobook. Narrator Nikki Garcia does a terrific job with the narration.

Rosewater, by Tade Thompson, a story of alien invasion in a future Nigeria. It’s science fiction plus thriller plus horror plus adventure. One scene features a carnivorous floating alien, and it was so terrifying I went back and listened again, immediately, something I have not done since reading the basement scene in The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Narrator Bayo Gbadamosi was a pleasure to listen to.

Best audiobook narrator:
Christopher Buehlman. After reading The Daughters’ War, I headed immediately to reread its sequel, The Blacktongue Thief, both written and narrated by Buehlman. He was a stage performer for many years before shifting to writing, and his voice acting chops are superb. It’s unfair that one person can be so talented as a writer and actor too.

All the books I read, sorted by genre:

Nonfiction

Feminism
hooks, bell. Ain't I a Woman?, 1981

History
Cronon, William. Changes in the Land, 1983
Katz, William Loren. Black Indians, 1986

Science
Denworth, Lydia. Friendship, 2020

Fiction

Crime
French, Tana. The Hunter, 2024

Fantasy
Buehlman, Christopher. The Daughters’ War, 2021
Buehlman, Christopher. The Blacktongue Thief, 2024
King, Stephen. Fairy Tale, 2002
Parker, K. J. A Practical Guide to Conquering the World, 2022
Pratchett, Terry. The Color of Magic, 1983

Horror
Kostova, Elizabeth. The Historian, 2005

Literary fiction
North, Claire. Ithaca, 2022
Saunders, George. Pastoralia, 2000
Tolstoy, Leo. The Death of Ivan Ilyich, 1886

Science fiction
Butler, Octavia. Bloodchild and Other Stories, 1995
Klune, TJ. In the Lives of Puppets, 2023
Ravn, Olga. The Employees, 2022
Tchaikovsky, Adrian. Elder Race, 2021
Thompson, Tade. Rosewater, 2018