A Year of Travel in 50 Books

I read 50 books and traveled for 8 months in 2024. Here's a diary of that year, one book at a time.

When I was a kid I was an unstoppably voracious reader. I would devour books in one sitting, perched on my pink princess-themed beanbag chair in the corner of my bedroom. I read fantasy books mostly, taking surreal journeys through Otherworlds and haunted graveyards and elite boarding schools inhabited by vampires and angels. Witch trials and 16th-century boarding schools were the fabric of my universe. Greek gods and errant spirits were my closest friends.

Yet somehow, somewhere between the rise of cell phones and my journey into my English major at Barnard, I stopped reading for pleasure almost entirely. At some point, I realized I was basically only reading what I’d been assigned. I didn’t even enjoy reading anymore.

So I hopped back on Goodreads and vowed to start reading again.

At first it was slow-going. I tried to read classics. Heavy, dense books. Some were life-changing — 100 Years of Solitude, The Eternal Lightness of Being. But often I would start hefty nonfiction books that I would abandon halfway through. In 2020, the year after graduating, I read only twelve books.

But now it’s the end of 2024 and I’ve managed to complete my goal of reading fifty books this year. I did it by getting a Kindle, signing up for my public library’s e-reader loan system, and, mostly and above all else, choosing to read books I truly love. I am honestly really proud of myself for reaching this goal, because books enrich my life and make me a better writer and human and writing is the center of my life, and to write, well, it’s a damn good idea to read.

Since it’s also been a wildly transformative year — in which I traveled to five countries and spent eight months backpacking in Asia — I figured I would relive it with a recap of the books I read throughout it all.

1. Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno

My first book of the year, mostly read curled up in a bunkbed on a family vacation with my cousins in Vermont. A peculiar book about old horror movies and outdated formats and best friendships and long-simmering romance. Not particularly deep, but the kind of spooky, character-driven story I love.

2. The House in the Cerulean Sea by T. J. Klune

Also started this book by the fire in Vermont based on my cousin’s fiancé’s very strong recommendation. Cozy and sweet, as promised, and yet I felt a vague sense of unease due to the association between monstrousness and queerness/non-white identities? But mostly, quite quirky and quite sweet.

3. Out There by Kate Folk

Right after seeing Sleep No More in NYC in December, I happened to run into a poet friend from California in the Twin Peaks-esque bar by the exit. That was extremely weird and felt like a cosmic synchronicity. As we walked to have a late dinner in a nearby diner, he recommended this book, and I fucking LOVED these short stories. Futuristic, heartbreaking, and perfect for our AI-saturated times. And I am still thinking, and will never stop thinking, about the Moist House.

4. The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time by Alex Korb

As January set in, I was feeling depressed again. I had been dealing with depression for a long time and this book featured a few tidbits I hadn’t encountered before. The most interesting revelation, I think, was that depression can apparently cause us to see negativity on other people’s faces when it’s not really there, which probably explains my lifelong, as-yet unfounded and frequently disproven suspicion that people hate me.

I started this while on the Peloton in a dual Hail Mary effort to fight off depression at the gym at my mom’s apartment complex. But I have to say, it was very science-y and did not particularly help my depression all that much. Sometimes, reading is just not enough.

5. The One-Way Ticket Plan: Find and Fund Your Purpose While Traveling the World by Alexa West

This is self-explanatory. I was laid off in November and had been preparing to head off on a trip around the world for several months, and in between getting my vaccinations and doing last-minute freelance job applications, I read this. It was fairly basic but also cute and inspiring.

6. Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarrow

My typically very erudite New York book club chose this book mostly for the bit, so I read this on the plane to Thailand in solidarity even though I was leaving New York for the next year. I finished it not long after in a Bangkok cafe as rain poured down. Loved it. Trashy and extremely sexy. Lots of dragons. Extremely violent also, which I didn’t love. Made me think a lot about fantasy archetypes, including the classic brooding, dark-haired, older (often much older) romantic hero who turns out to be extremely kind and madly in love with the hapless, absurdly brave, equally highly ethical heroine. I’m not going to read the sequels but I’ll still be watching the series if it comes out, mostly for the sexy leather outfits and the dragons.

7. If Cats Disappeared From the World by Genki Kawamura

Also read during my first week in Thailand, mostly in cafes. Bittersweet and sparse and spare meditation on death and meaning. The main character wasn’t the most likable but I still enjoyed this, mostly because of the cats.

8. Without and Within by Ajahn Jaysaro

I read this because it was on the table at the Buddhist nunnery where I was staying for a month, and am glad I did. Extremely comprehensive and yet easy to read description of the basics of Buddhism.

9. The Madonna Secret by Sophie Strand

One of the best of the year. A life-changing book that should be a classic. This is a retelling of the story of Mary Magdalene, who in this story is Jesus’s wife and partner in wisdom. An ecological, rich, sensuous book that felt like a real world unto its own. Its landscapes are still vivid in my mind. This is the kingdom — I still feel a catch in my throat when thinking about that line. I read it at the nunnery, and it was fascinating to read this while meditating and working with Buddhist nuns and diving deeply into spirituality.

10. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

I had been reading a lot of books and content about death at the start of the year for some reason, and this was one of them. I read it in a few hours on a hot afternoon at the nunnery. It’s about a brain surgeon who’s diagnosed with incurable cancer. The next day, I learned my grandmother had cancer, and and I might need to go back home from Thailand to see her because she was probably going to die of it.

11. Brother & Sister Enter the Forest by Richard Mirabella

Brutally depressing. A story about terrible trauma, queerness, and sibling relationships that probably wasn’t the best thing to read after finding out my grandmother had cancer. Sort of a much slimmer A Little Life, so this should work for you if you enjoyed that. Read at the nunnery kitchen table.

12. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

Also borrowed from the nunnery’s library because I wanted something light to read. I enjoyed this, mostly because I related to the main character’s lostness and adventurousness, and we were the same age (26).

13. Discourse Summaries by S. N. Goenka

I read this because I knew I wanted to do a Vipassana retreat later on in my travels and wanted to prepare. Later, when listening to the actual Discourse Summaries during the retreat, I realized I had not internalized or understood one word of this and it did not prepare me in the least for the actuality of 10-hour meditation days. Sometimes reading about spirituality and healing is not, surprise surprise, actually a way of practicing spirituality or actually healing. But it was still pretty nice to read this while sitting by the lake at the nunnery as the sun set.

14. Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado

I’d been slowly making my way through this for a few months, reading most of it way too late at night in my bed in Brooklyn. I’d spent a lot of time reading books about women in various stages of mental breakdowns over the past year before I started traveling, which probably did not help my own state of mind (!) but I was really always looking for another In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, probably my favorite book of 2023. This was really a disturbing read — bloody, visceral, deeply unsettling. The Law & Order story, in particular, was a literal fever dream and I will never get some of those images out of my head.

15. The Topeka School by Ben Lerner

Strongly recommended to me by a friend/lover I met in Thailand, so of course I had to read it. I read this on my way back home to see my grandma, who we now knew was definitely going to die of cancer. This is a very verbose, knotty novel about privilege, whiteness, masculinity, politics, and memory, and it reminded me a lot of the place I grew up in, especially the privilege part. Definitely sparked some reflection and had some moments of genius between the excess verbosity, though of course the verbosity was intentional. We are all, after all, still in the spread.

16. This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Another wordy book, this time comprised of letters between two rival time-travelers who fall in (passionate, extremely long-distance, queer) love. One is from an ecological futuristic world and the other is from a technological one. Unfortunately, these authors copied a novel I have been working on for over 10 years which also follows two artificial intelligences — one from a forested, ecological world and one from a brutally digitized one — who fall in (queer) love. I may have to sue. I did enjoy this but also somehow wanted more. Read mostly at my dad’s kitchen table.

17. The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise by Martin Prechtel

Read directly after my grandma died. I’d first encountered it in a moon circle led by a dear roommate and loved it at the time. This is a strange book. It has passages that I didn’t entirely resonate with and also passages of absolutely miraculous, stunning beauty — particularly a section on oceans and how they represent birth and death. Go to the sea to heal, it said, and I would, but it would take months and a lot more time on dry land before I made it there.

18. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Unfortunately, as my grandma was dying, I also learned I had some new and concerning health issues that meant I couldn’t just head back out on my trip just yet, which is great to learn after your grandma has just died of cancer. I found this at my dad’s house on the shelf and read it at my mom’s as I waited for concerning test results. A genius book, and yet the protagonists are simply awful.

19. A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

I had enjoyed Fourth Wing and at this point I really desperately needed a distraction, so I picked this romantasy classic right up and absolutely devoured it. I read it at the same time as Wuthering Heights, which was highly concerning and really set me thinking about toxic protagonists and toxic relationships. Reading these two books together, combined with the death and health issues I’d just experienced, inspired me to write my own book about perhaps the world’s most toxic relationship — this book was about a suicidal girl and a serial killer who fall madly in love and eventually start a cult. I wrote the entire book, over 100,000 words, over the course of my two-month stay at home waiting for my health issues to resolve. It was cathartic and messed up and I do not know if I’ll ever revisit it, but I owe it all to Wuthering Heights, ACOTAR, and the whims of the universe.

20. A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Mass

Definitely the best of the ACTOAR series. Cabin chapter forever. I simply had to read it; I was too hooked at this point. I read this in one week while still at home feeling terrible and watching a shit ton of Netflix amid writing my novel. Maas’s writing is weirdly addictive and while these books are not the best, they are really, really fun to read and I love the Hades/Persephone influence here in this one.

21. A Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J. Maas

Also read in about a week as I worked on my own book. A weak follow-up to ACOMAF honestly, and I stopped reading after this.

22. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Finally I had clearance to get on the road again! I read this book on the way to Nepal, finishing it in my Kathmandu hotel room. A truly magnificent work of literature that threads timelines together in a revelatory way.

23. Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer

I read this on the bumpy ride into Pokhara on my way to the Annapurna Mountain and my trek. This book had a weirdly big impact on me — I found myself concerned for the characters and thinking about it long after it ended. It also made me decide to do an easier trek than I’d originally planned. Human hubris and the desire to summit mountains are one dangerous combination.

24. Wild Mercy by Mirabai Starr

Inspired by The Madonna Secret, I’d also been slowly reading this book for the past month or so starting back in New York, and it was a beautiful and gentle way of transitioning out of the fairly hellish few months I’d had and into my new journey. This is an overview of the wisdom of some of the most famous female mystics, and some of its passages really moved and stuck with me — specifically Starr’s insistence that we don’t need to have just one path, that our spirituality can be a fusion of many different lineages. We can live in a more open, less binary and linear way, with love and expression at the forefront, and still reach transcendence. It mostly made me want to learn more.

25. Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chögyam Trungpa

This book was on my bedside table in the house in the Pokhara Valley village where I stayed for ten days, and I read a few chapters of it in the morning with my instant coffee before writing songs. This was a blissful time, and the wisdom of this book seeped in quickly and inspired to open my heart wider. However, as always, implementing these tactics in the long-term is very different from reading about them.

26. The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

As I trekked through the Himalayas, I read this book, which is about another trek through the very same Himalayas in the 1970s. I had some issues with the author’s depictions of the Sherpas (who today are still underpaid and used as mountain guides for hapless white people, as I read about in Into Thin Air). But there were also staggeringly beautiful passages in here, and the author’s braiding of Buddhism and Nepalese history and ecology was fascinating. I finished it in a hotel room in the windswept city of Mustang, snow-streaked mountains looming in the distance.

27. Educated by Tara Westover

Another book that came highly recommended, about a girl who grew up in a very abusive home led by hardcore doomsday prepper-parents who wouldn’t let her go to school only to become a Harvard-educated, heavily lettered academic. Shocking, if true, and incredibly inspiring — Westover’s story is one of massive resilience that oddly also made me feel a bit bad about my own lack of drive and lack of accomplishments.

28. The Guest List by Lucy Foley

I decided I needed another quick, brisk read for my bus back to Kathmandu from Pokhara and this one fit the bill. A salty, windswept mystery that took place on a mysterious island, with unique and memorable characters and a few surprising twists. Not a work of staggering genius, but it definitely held my attention.

29. Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko

I still feel a little chill when I think of this unsettling, brilliant, and challenging book, which feels a bit like a lucid dream. It tells the story of a girl who is recruited by a mysterious school that uses extremely evil and manipulative tactics to force her to study a form of esoteric magic. The whole thing is loaded with complex descriptions that interrogate the nature of reality itself. I started it before my Vipassana retreat and finished it afterwards, and I honestly, really think it harmed me during the retreat. This book was all about being forced to study advanced, potentially reality-dissolving mental skills in an absurdly military-style environment, which is exactly what Vipassana sometimes felt like to me (sans the death threats, of course). Weirdly, I stopped reading before Vipassana at a point where the main character falls into a massive sleep and undergoes a huge metamorphosis, and when I opened it upon my return, she and I had both just awakened, present in our lives again yet massively changed.

30. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

After Vipassana, I left Nepal for the familiar comfort of Thailand, and read Klara and the Sun at a sweet cafe in Chiang Mai. This is about an AI who cares for a sick child in the near future, and I think it’s a brilliant depiction of robot ethics and robot-human love. I really enjoyed this book, particularly the ending, and highly recommend it.

31. UFO of God: The Extraordinary True Story of Chris Bledsoe by Chris Bledsoe

Wanting to read a spiritual book that could illuminate some of what had come up for me during Vipassana, I somehow found this one online. Around the same time, I found out I got COVID and spent most of my 10-day quarantine in a Chiang Mai hotel room, reading this book, thinking about aliens, and watching videos about NDEs. All this eventually inspired me to start Cosmic Junkyard, so I’m forever grateful for that alone. All I have to say about this one here is that if anything in this book is true, that changes everything we know about reality.

32. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Fresh off Klara and the Sun, I wanted to read Ishiguro’s Pulitzer-winner, but was not emotionally prepared for this one. It’s about an English butler grappling with his employer’s Nazi ties following WWII, and man, is it devastating. There was actually a passage in there that felt a bit like a shot to the heart. I’ve always enjoyed post-WWII literature that grapples with the existential vacuum that horrific conflict opened up in the world, but this probably wasn’t the best choice to read during my sensitive post-Vipassana, post-COVID state.

33. Lilith by Nikki Marmery

I really wanted to love this book more. It tells the story of Lilith, Adam’s allegedly scorned proto-Biblical first wife. In this narrative, she journeys around the world meeting everyone from Noah (of the ark variety) to Mary Magdalene. Lilith has always been a love of mine and I love contemporary rewrites of Biblical stories, but this one just didn’t quite feel infused with enough of the wildness and lushness that could’ve drawn this story to the level Lilith deserves. It took me a few months to finish, but I finally finished it in the little A-frame cabin I stayed in when I arrived in Pai, Thailand.

34. Down the Drain by Julia Fox

I saw this book on Chappell Roan’s Instagram and, successfully influenced, decided to buy it, mostly because I wanted a distraction and a fast-read. What I got was a pretty brutal description of Julia Fox’s absolutely wild, heavily drug-addled, grief-filled life, and I stayed up until four in the morning finishing it in one day. Fox has gone through so much, and I think this book actually helped me get out of my own head a little bit by helping me to keep everything in perspective. Fox has endured a ton of tragedy and writes brilliantly, and this book was part-pure electric gossip and part-heartbreaking trauma dump. If you have any interest in Julia Fox, NYC club culture, dominatrixes, sugar daddies, Kanye West, and anything vaguely in or around that realm, I think it’s worth a read.

35. The Immortality Key: Uncovering the Secret History of the Religion With No Name by Brian C. Muraresku

This book was recommended to me by my situationship in Pai, and I read it in his gigantic house which he rented (the entire thing!) for about $50 per month as he brewed cacao or something. It came up because of our shared interest in psychedelics — he facilitates mushroom ceremonies — and because I had played a song called Persephone during the open mic we met at. This book basically proposes that the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were rituals that honored the seasons and the death and rebirth of the goddess Persephone in ancient Greece, actually involved psychedelics that helped participants experience a glimpse of the transcendent, immortal reality — the deathless unity that actually is — while they were still alive. It even proposes Jesus and many of the great religions may have been psychedelic-inspired and suggests that psychedelics may be returning to the fore as our planetary disaster calls us to return to ecological, ritualistic ways of being and seeing. It made me really want to revive the Mysteries (or something like them) for our modern, aching era.

36. You Can Heal Your Life by Louise L. Hay

While I had COVID (and was reading UFO of God), I booked a mental health retreat, and while there we were only supposed to read the books the therapist had recommended. This was the first he suggested. It is a relentlessly optimistic ode to the power of affirmations and positive thinking, and I really do feel like it did help me change my life. I read it for two hours a day during the retreat and still say some of the affirmations featured within it in the mirror regularly. While I honestly don’t think it’s fair to say that all health issues are caused by patterns of thinking, I definitely feel like many of them are, and changing our thoughts really does change our world.

37. Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers

This was the second recommended book I read at the retreat, and the title is pretty self-explanatory. For two weeks, every single day, I looked at myself in the mirror and told myself: There will always be fear as long as you continue to grow. And I have felt myself growing every day since.

38. Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda

This one actually doesn’t really count, to be honest. I read 95% of it about two years ago, but somehow never finished its last chapter, and always assumed maybe I wasn’t ready for its final bits of wisdom. Well, like UFO of God, if 1% of what’s in this book is true, magic/God is indisputably real and what we typically think of as reality is as pliant as putty. This book is a journey through India with Paramahansa, a yogi who began his life in India and started the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles. Along the way he meets his guru and countless other saints capable of performing miracles ranging from surviving on no food to predicting the future. A truly magical and paradigm-shifting text. I finished it in the adorable cafe I went to every day while at my tantra/Osho meditation/yoga retreat on Koh Phangan, which felt like the perfect place to finally close it.

39. Mabon: Rituals, Recipes & Lore for the Autumn Equinox by Diana Rajchel

While in the aforementioned adorable cafe in Koh Phangan, I was inspired to launch my Mabon Challenge, and so I read this book while on the journey from Koh Phangan to Koh Samui and finished it in Krabi. I wanted to study up on Mabon, and this was an informative way to learn about it and to make sure I wasn’t missing anything major (though honestly, I’ve learned more from Substack).

40. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

This came heavily recommended by Reddit, and I finally got it off the holds list when I arrived in Cambodia, so I read most of it while on a day trip to Kulen Mountain and its river of 1000 lingas. I honestly skimmed through a lot of its math-heavy content, but it was a fun, engaging read and I really enjoyed its main character and Rocky the alien. Mostly, reading this just made me really excited for the movie starring Ryan Gosling, who is absolutely perfect for the role.

41. The Four Agreements by Miguel Ruiz

I grabbed this from the beautiful library of spiritual books I was lucky enough to have access to during my time at Hari Hara Center For Awakening in Cambodia. It’s wonderfully simple yet immensely powerful — potent, simple, and timeless wisdom one can return to over and over again, forever and ever.

42. The Prophet by Khalil Ghibran

This was another book I read at Hari Hara. (I also read many, many excerpts from texts by various sages and spiritual leaders, from J. Krishnamurti to Osho, though those aren’t exactly the sort of books you finish — they’re more books you let find you when you need them). I did read this magnificent, enigmatic work of poetry all the way through, though. There were some passages that seemed to stop time, they were so beautiful, and others seemed to contain all of time within them. This is a book everyone should read.

43. Doppelgänger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

As I was reading all these potent, ancient spiritual texts, I was also making my way through Doppelgänger, Naomi Klein’s absolutely modern and ingenious dissection of America’s rightward shift and the rise of the conspiracy-fueled right. From vaccine skepticism to Twitter wars, she tackles it all brilliantly. I would highly recommend this to anyone interested in modern American politics today; I highlighted about half the book and generally agree with most of what Klein says.

Mostly, it’s a great reminder that the right’s insanity also reveals huge cracks in the left, and that we really are never as distant from those who we perceive as our enemies as we think. It also gets to the core of another theory I’d been thinking about for a while — how conspiracies can sometimes act as new forms of mysticism in a society largely divorced from sacredness, and how they function as incorrect manifestations of correct paranoia (yes, the systems are broken, but there’s no top-secret cabal — the corruption is literally right out there in the open in the form of billionaires and the complete societal failure to stop the onslaught of climate change). It was interesting and refreshing to read such a hyper-rational text that heavily dived into the misguided nature of the whole Q-Anon/quasi-spiritual “new right” while I was also deep in the belly of a spiritual community, and possibly kept me a little more grounded-slash-skeptical than I may otherwise have been, for better or for worse.

44. How to Stop Time by Matt Haig

In the midst of all the heavy spiritual reading and reflection I was doing, I also wanted a light, quick fiction book, so I also grabbed this from the Hari Hara library. I had enjoyed Haig’s The Midnight Library, but this one was a bit of a disappointment — too similar to other secretly-immortal stories, maybe, but also just a bit trite, it followed a man who can never die and so spends his life in agony, losing everyone he loves, until (surprise!) he finds a possible new love. Still, it was sweet in a way and did sort of help remind me that life really is very, very short, and it’s always worth it to love anyway.

45. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Another book from the Hari Hara library. I’d been thinking about reading this one for months and had already downloaded it on my Kindle, but when a new friend (ok fine, lover) recommended it to me, I couldn’t help but read it. And wow… I don’t know where to begin. A blurb is not enough. This book transformed me — transcended all typicalities and practicalities and taboos — and took me somewhere completely outside of space and time. It follows a boy who runs away from home, and a man who speaks to cats, and yet really is a deep dive into the most repressed parts of the human psyche. Reading this felt like I was walking through one of my own dreams or hallucinations. I want to write a lot more about this book, but I will say instead that I lost my copy of this book after I was arrested in Cambodia. Here is the short version of story: the same lover who recommended the book to me later took me on a motorbike trip up north — and apparently it was illegal to take the bike outside of our province — and subsequently the bike shop owners called the cops and forced us to stay in a tiny rural police station all night until they arrived — but the cops were very nice and I read this book in a hammock while they drank beers with us and brought us food and puppies. Unfortunately I did leave the book behind in the chaos, but the cop later sent a photo of it to my companion (they exchanged contact information, and let us off scot-free in the end), so I know it’s in good hands. I finished the book (on my Kindle this time) among the abandoned seaside hotels of Kampot just after saying goodbye to the object of my new romance, and it all felt very fated and cinematic. I will have to write more about it someday.

46. The Occult Control System: UFOs, Aliens, Other Dimensions, and Future Timelines by Daniel Pinchbeck

I read this on a beach on the island of Koh Rong Sanloem, Cambodia just before taking a bunch of mushrooms. My path to this book was a bit labyrinthine: I found Daniel Pinchbeck because I once wrote a musical about his mother, Joyce Johnson, and her time in the heady heyday of the Beat Generation in New York in the 1950s. I’d been meaning to explore most of Pinchbeck’s work, so I grabbed this one, ready to continue down the alien-UFO rabbit hole that Chris Bledsoe’s UFO of God had opened in my soul. This short text presented a counterpoint to Bledsoe’s aliens-as-angels theory, arguing that possibly aliens could be covertly leading a nefarious control system meant to brainwash and disempower us all. I sort of prefer Bledsoe’s angle, but I guess it’s good to entertain things from all sides? (If I had to guess there are probably many different types of aliens and maybe some are controlling us, but most likely, we humans are sabotaging ourselves perfectly fine on our own).

47. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

I really did not want to finish Kafka on the Shore, but after finishing it, missing my Cambodia fling, and wanting to stay in Murakami’s dreamworld a bit longer, I picked this book up — which was a bad idea I think, as I probably should have laid off the Murakami and let Kafka simmer, but instead I dove headfirst into this very bizarre vortex of a novel. I read it while on the aforementioned Cambodian island and then took it with me to China, where I went to visit my uncle. I finished it on the bus back after a freezing-cold visit to the Great Wall the day before leaving for Japan.

Perhaps because I’d just had such a euphoric experience with Kafka and my expectations were sky-high, this book didn’t quite live up to Kafka, but it was still deeply brilliant in its own way. Wind-Up Bird follows an unemployed man who goes searching for his lost cat and dives deep into an underground world of corruption, miracles, residual war trauma, and yes, tons of Murakami’s signature brand of weird sex. Deeply uncanny, and diving into the heart of our closest relationships and the strange and shadowy forces that lie at work just beneath the facades our institutions and loved ones and selves put up, it is one of the most violent and disconcerting books I have ever read, and continues to haunt me vaguely, like an unanswered or unanswerable question of the most confounding sort, or perhaps more accurately, like the persistent memory of something I can’t quite remember I’ve forgotten.

48. The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafik

This book was recommended to me by someone on Substack after I wrote about my experience with Sufi whirling, and I happily took that as a sign to leap in. I carried it with me through my travels in Japan all the way back to California, and settled down and finishing it at my aunt’s house, where I first really fell in love with Rumi’s poetry years ago while dog-sitting in the Marin hills. It was in that very house where I had the idea to start the blog that would become Cosmic Junkyard, and my first post idea (which I still haven’t written!) was a dive into the mysterious, majestic love between Shams and Rumi.

This book alternates between the story of an American housewife assigned to read a manuscript about Shams and Rumi, and the text of said book, which takes readers back to the 12th century when Rumi — then a respected religious leader and patriarch — met wandering dervish Shams and fell head-over-heels. Many of Rumi’s poems are addressed to Shams, who would become his confidant but also his love. And what a love it was; so earth-shatteringly powerful, it created poems that I am convinced are literal keys to the infinite, if you can find the locks within yourself. This was a beautiful, heartbreaking tribute to their love, and to the way love can destroy and alter the trajectory of our lives in the most mystifying, chaotic, and wonderful ways.

49. Neon Gods by Katee Robert

I admit — I really wanted to make the 50 books deadline, so I picked this one on December 30, thinking I could finish it quickly before the year ended. I was also drawn to it because it’s a retelling of the Hades and Persephone story, and Persephone has been one of the main recurring themes and guides of my life of this entire year; I really resonate with her in so many ways, as someone who also walks with a great deal of duality and contrast.

I did finish it this book in one sitting, but was surprised to quickly learn that it’s, well, straight-up erotica — admittedly the first time I’ve read one of those. It was fun to read but not actually all that sexy or romantic or well-written. But hey, I picked it up and didn’t put it down once until it was over, so that has to say something.

50. The Power of Intention: Learning to Co-Create Your World Your Way by Wayne W. Dyer

I’d steadily been reading this book throughout all my travels, because it was recommended to me while I was at New Paradigm in August. Each time I read it, it felt like I was receiving a jolt of pure insight straight to my veins, which is why I almost never read more than one chapter at a time. Dyer’s positivity and steadfast belief in the power of intention is infectious, dynamic, and deeply powerful, and I can really say that out of everything I read, I think this book changed me and changed my life the most.

It’s the Law of Attraction on steroids — all about the idea that we can call anything we want to us if we can align to the infinite abundance that is the nature of the universe. The most intoxicating part of this whole idea is that it actually works; when I truly used it on my life, I saw miracles almost immediately. The problem is maintenance, which is why I actually want to read this book again next year and probably every year forever.

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And that’s a wrap! What books should I read in 2025? Have you read any of these books? Let me know in the comments!