tops of 2024

At Thanksgiving, my uncle asked how I was doing. I said not much was new, and that I was old enough to understand how that was a good thing. He agreed. He’s going through treatment for prostate cancer (fortunately he has a good prognosis), and his stepson died suddenly in October. I want to be hopeful and creative and ambitious, but in 2024, I was grateful for a quiet year. If I weren’t so superstitious, I would say that I did some healing from the tumult of 2020-2023 (pandemic, adoption fails, new baby, job loss, new job). Meanwhile, it was a devastating year–yet another one of those–globally. 

And in my personal quiet, I read 60+ books. I watched and listened to some things too, albeit less rigorously. I finally discovered what the fuss is all about re: The Great British Baking Show (it’s so charming! Perhaps you’ve heard?). So here is my annual roundup, with my annual caveat that a lot of these recommendations aren’t new, just new to me. 

Books

I’m grouping my top three books together (there are no rules here at Bread and Bread) because they share a common theme: difficult childhoods with justice-minded parents. All are memoirs that deploy the language of poetry. All will stay with me for a long time.

How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair: What a stunningly gorgeous, evocative memoir. I was intrigued by the story of someone raised in a "strict Rastafarian" family, since as far as I knew (which was not far at all), that phrase was an oxymoron. But Rastafari, like nearly all belief systems, can be taken to an extreme, as Safiya's father does. He views Rastafari and especially its strict gender roles as an antidote to "Babylon" which is a catch-all term for oppressive, colonial forces, as well as anything he doesn't like. Her father has suffered for both systemic and interpersonal reasons, and is deeply, rightly distrustful of the world. But his retreat into rigidity—and his enforcement of it on his wife and four children—is a tragedy. As Safiya attempts to escape his iron-fisted, sometimes violent "kingdom," she has to reconcile the fact that the larger world which promises freedom is also the one that broke her father. Sinclair writes like the poet she is, and the book is a tribute to the healing powers of language and the power of healing within a family. I grew up with a nurturing, literary mother and a father who, though he has nothing of Djani Sinclair's explosive anger, believed in perfection. My heart ached and burst on so many pages.

Heavy by Kiese Laymon: A kindred spirit of How to Say Babylon—both memoirs are by the children of parents with righteous ideals, revolutionary beliefs, and deeply flawed and fear-based approaches to parenting. Addressing this story of intersections—of race, gender, abuse, and body—to his mother, Laymon dares to be several things that big Black men are taught not to be: vulnerable, honest about his own flaws, and critical of the people and institutions that claim him as their success. All with a poet’s voice.

Hollywood Park by Mikel Jollett: The Airborne Toxic Event song "All at Once" has been one of my favorites since I first heard it - a song about longing for safety and grieving for parents. Jollett's memoir provides a kind of backstory. He was born into the Synanon cult and spent the first five years of his life in its "school," which was more of an orphanage. After his idealistic, narcissistic mother escaped Synanon with Mikel and his brother, he bounced between her austere home in Oregon, where he farmed and killed rabbits for food, and his father's home in Los Angeles. Despite his own sordid backstory (heroin, prison), his father is a loving and stabilizing force. Jollett documents, in simple and vivid prose, how he turned his loneliness into a music career...although he is clear that being able to write songs and stories didn't cure his loneliness. This is a story of suffering and healing and artmaking, and it made me want to make art and use it to heal myself and others, as Jollett does. The accompanying album, which has songs that track with the chapters, is also gorgeous. The combination reminded me of what art can do.

Also these: more memoirs, four novels, and three nonfiction books:

To Name the Bigger Lie by Sarah Viren: Profound, innovative, AND a page-turner, Viren's memoir considers two experiences, twenty years apart: her interactions with a charismatic and beloved high school teacher who taught students critical thinking skills but oh btw was maybe a Holocaust denier, and a terrifying incident in which she and her wife are accused of sexual harassment by an academic rival. She applies journalistic rigor to finding the truth, while also shining a light on the slippery nature of memory and belief. Put another way, she doesn't think that all the people who drank the Trump Kool-Aid are haters and dunces—because she has seen how good minds can be changed for the worse with her very own eyes. She also notes key moments where she questions her knowledge.

The third part of the book, a series of letters real and imagined, and hypothetical vignettes playing with Plato's allegory of the shadows in the cave (a central motif) is more experimental and playful, and I might have struggled with it if Viren hadn't earned it with her straightforward, well researched narrative. But she did and it works.

This book pairs well with Naomi Klein's Doppelganger (see below) in its ability to consider the problems of our "post-truth" world via a crucial combination of factual analysis and empathetic imagination.

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury: A timeless story about time itself, this novel layers metaphor upon metaphor in gorgeous mid-century descriptive language. The plot is relatively spare: An evil carnival comes to town and tries to lure two almost-14-year-old boys, Will and Jim, into its chief attraction, a carousel that rapidly ages its riders or takes them backward through time, depending on its direction. Will's father—my new hero, Charles Holloway, older dad (he's 54), library janitor, amateur philosopher—is tasked with saving them. To do so, he must reckon with the disappointments and failings of midlife and accept the inevitability of death. Death, he tells the boys, is "nothing but a stopped clock," but fear of it is a tool exploited by "the autumn people," aka Cougar and Dark, the men behind the carnival. It sounds sort of simple—shun fear, accept death, embrace life. But that message, when watered down (when acceptance is made to sound easy, or fear is made to be anything less than terrifying), is the stuff of Live, Laugh, Love throw pillows. In Bradbury's hands, the battle is not easy, but it is worth fighting. I found this book genuinely scary, and genuinely helpful, as I try to navigate my own midlife and my own sizable fears.

We Were Once a Family by Roxanna Asgarian: Scouring case files and public records, and interviewing rightfully wary family members over a period of years, Asgarian depicts two families who were troubled, but not abusive or neglectful. Why, then, were a total of six children removed permanently and placed in the care of Jen and Sarah Hart, two white women who would eventually murder them? In a better universe, the two sibling groups would be alive and living with the aunt who tried to adopt them, regularly seeing the older brother who dreamed of finding them; and living with their mother, respectively.

Asgarian doesn’t villainize Jen and Sarah or their families; villainizing is a form of elevation, in a way. Her conversations with Jen’s dad are as poignant and painful as those with the children’s biological families. Instead, she asks readers to remove their gaze from the individual horrors inflicted by two white women, and to focus instead on the systemic issues that have left a far wider swath of victims.

This is an important book that underscores how the child welfare system—like the justice system—is so rigged against poor and minoritized people as to continue the work of Jim Crow. Advocates for reform and abolition look to the Indian Child Welfare Act to place appropriate scrutiny on child removal and adoption.

As an adoptive (white, queer) parent, the Hart story haunts me, and I sometimes have a hard time sitting with the fact that some of the children who are "available" for adoption really shouldn't be. (Although I do think laws in California, where I live, may be more favorable to bio families than those in Texas, where the Harts adopted from.) Of course, that's exactly why I need to read the book. It's like what comic Jackie Kashian says about gun control. "You know why I believe in gun control? Because of how much I want a gun."

I believe in the rights of bio parents because I know how much I wanted a child when I didn't have one, and how painful it is to lose a child via miscarriage or disrupted adoption (we had four of those). I can only imagine what it would be like to have a child I'd loved and parented for years taken from me, maybe permanently. Obviously no one has a right to parent in every circumstance. But the burden of proof should be on the agency trying to take away that right, not on the parents who stand to lose their rights. If that's how the law is written, it's not, as Asgarian demonstrates, how it is implemented. The result is devastating for children and for families in poor and minoritized communities.

Doppelganger by Naomi Klein: No Logo changed the way I looked at the world twenty years ago. There was a time when I attempted a mini version of "ad-jamming" by putting little cartoons with information about sweatshops into the pockets of clothes in retail stores. It's too soon to know what long-term effect Doppelganger will have on me (or the world), but it's another powerhouse of a book, combining journalism, political analysis, cultural criticism, memoir, and manifesto. Few writers could make such a meta-narrative remotely convincing, but she does.

Her thesis—if I can attempt to sum it up—is that the failures of neoliberalism and the fragmentation of culture has alienated many people and created a kind of "mirror world" in which formerly left-leaning people (like her personal doppelganger Naomi Wolf) find an all-too-enticing home on the right, swallowing and spreading conspiracy theories. The only solution, she says, is to create a culture of care, seeing people and the planet itself as disabled but deserving.

She pulls from many subject areas, but I was most blown away by her chapter about Red Vienna and Dr. Asperger (the guy whose name used to be synonymous with low-support-needs autism). After WWI and before Nazi rule, he was part of a movement that prioritized humane and holistic therapies for neurodiverse children. Think lots of outdoor time and art-making. Just a few years later, he succumbed to the influence of his new overlords, and declared most autistic children worthy of death, save for a few savants that could be leveraged on behalf of the Nazi agenda. It's this kind of mentality—that people are either winners or losers, perfect or disposable—that terrifies me and turns my stomach, partly because I can see my own inner fascist claw to land on the good side of eugenics (I am a queer quarter-Jew with anxiety disorders and a genetic predisposition for cancer, so I know where I would actually land). And that is part of Klein's point—just like in the movie Us, we are tethered to the "others." We all have shadow selves, we all live in a multiverse. We could all be fascists or victims of fascists.

This book explains better than most think pieces and hot takes what it's like to exist in the era of Trump and QAnon, and offers a hopeful if extraordinarily difficult road forward—one that requires imagination and openness, but most importantly, each other.

The Secret Place by Tana French: Reading the sections of this book that were from the POV of high school girls, I thought, "Wow, this writer writes women so well." Because Tana French writes men so well, I'd forgotten for a minute that she was a woman. And she's a master of structure AND mood. The kind of author I would enviously hate if I didn't love her so much.

In this installment of the Dublin Murder Squad series, a prep school boy has been killed and has almost become a cold case when Frank Mackey's daughter Holly pops up with a clue. The frame of the novel is tight: just over 24 hours, as Stephen Moran and his ad hoc partner interview eight girls at the school. In flashback, we see the girls' lives leading up to the murder. Both threads examine themes of friendship and loyalty, the desire for intimacy and the lengths people will go to keep it. I thought I'd guessed the killer, but I hadn't. I am a little sad every time a Tana French novel comes to an end.

My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss: Like the author, I had a very critical (though loving) parent who has taken up residence in my head as a harsh inner critic who asks me to back up every claim, especially the emotionally needy ones, with EVIDENCE. Moss cleverly externalizes this critic and slowly, cautiously, invites its alternative: a wild inner wolf mother, who trusts instinct, who IS instinct. Like the author, I grew up inhabiting Laura Ingalls Wilder's stories of frontier spirit and sacrifice, and so I appreciate the literary critiques—which apply a post-colonial context—threaded throughout. As something of an aside, this book made me consider whether I'm good at (for a white middle-class American, at least) seeing the race and class structures that have informed my life in part because of that well trained inner critic that is always saying "Is that REALLY true? Did you REALLY earn that?" Which is just to say: Dad, you tear me apart, and also thank you for helping me question things that should be questioned.

Small Joys by Elvin James Mensah: Melancholy is a staple of literature, but anxiety is represented much less often and less explicitly. This rare and lovely novel takes it on with humor and great tenderness. Narrated by a Black, queer Brit and would-be music journalist (if not for all his anxiety and suicidal ideations) who befriends a goofy, asexual white birdwatcher. I wanted to hug every character in this sweet group of 20-somethings.

The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America by Sarah B. Franklin: An intimate and fascinating look at the work of a culture-changer. A must-read for writers, editors, foodies, and working parents.

Relief Map by Rosalie Knecht: A suspenseful, well crafted, and ultimately melancholy story about the arbitrary nature of crime and punishment. Livy is a bored 16-year-old who goes stir-crazy when her town goes on lockdown to search for a mysterious international criminal. Revaz is that "criminal," a man on the run for perhaps being a little naive or lazy, but hardly an international terrorist. When Livy gets herself into trouble for equally dumb reasons, we see how those sent to impose law and order often cause more trouble. The police and FBI in the novel aren't exactly corrupt; like Livy and Revaz, they're prone to human errors and poor split-second decisions. The outcomes for each are very different. Knecht writes beautifully (see her Vera Kelly series), with subtle, deep character development and vivid sentences.

Screens

The Wild Robot: Beautiful animation, a perfect parenting story (especially for transracial adoptive parents) disguised as a kids’ movie.

My Old Ass: A tear jerker for people who’ve loved and lost, disguised as a coming-of-age comedy (although it’s also very effective as a coming-of-age comedy—this is a something-for-everyone movie). Bonus points for matter-of-fact bisexuality that doesn’t lean into stereotypes. 

All of Us Strangers: I saw this one early in the year, and my memories are a little faded, but I know I cried my eyes out. Adam Scott plays a middle-aged gay man who visits his dead parents in his childhood home. They are younger than he is, trapped in the mindsets of the 1980s but doing their best. If you, like me, have imagined many conversations with people who left the earth long ago, this is a movie for you. And/or if you are a queer person over the age of forty. 

Hacks Season 3: The season’s final plot twist is also an epic culmination of character development, as Ava pulls the ultimate Deborah move against Deborah. Megan Stalter is the star of the best B plots ever.

Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story: I feel like only Ryan Murphy could create a miniseries that deeply empathizes with its murderous protagonists, makes us question the line between victim and perpetrator, interrogates media portrayals in the 1990s…and is also an over-the-top send-up of all those things. Nicholas Chavez deserves awards for his portrayal of Lyle as both victim of abuse and delusional spoiled rich boy. He is an embodiment of tragicomedy.

The English Teacher: Brian Jordan Alvarez plays a gay high school teacher who navigates his woke-but-whiny students, administrative red tape, and weird parents. The episode starring Trixie Mattel as his drag queen friend who teaches the boys to be proper powder puff cheerleaders is genius.

His Three Daughters: Parents-dying movies are tough, but the writing (it feels like a play, in a mostly good way) and cast (Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, and Elizabeth Olsen—I mean, come on!) are worth sticking out the sad parts. 

Inside Out 2: At one point, one of Riley’s new teen emotions, Anxiety, instructs everyone to think of everything that could possibly go wrong, so that they can plan for it. Joy imagines a positive outcome and Anxiety is like WTF? My own inner Anxiety nodded along like yes, do what the girl with the crazy orange hair tells you to. 

True Detective: Night Country: Set in the sunless part of the Alaskan winter, this reboot is addictive, unhinged, and drenched in an icy teal palette. The plot seemed to jump the shark a few times, but the ending was so fucking satisfying that I forgave it all.

Woman of the Hour: Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, about that time a serial killer was a contestant on The Dating Game has a simple message—that it’s easy for dangerous men to hide in a culture that hates women—conveyed so effectively that I was kind of twitchy while watching.

Podcasts

Lost Hills: Dark Canyon: I would probably listen to any L.A.-based true crime story, but it helps that Dana Goodyear’s series is extra well reported, produced, and written. In this season—the best and most relevant yet, IMO—she investigates the death of Mitrice Richardson, a young, bubbly Black woman who was arrested in 2009 for failing to pay her bill at a Malibu restaurant and was released into the night. Her body was found 11 months later. The series is riveting, and the intersection of racism and the police department’s complete inability to handle mental health crises is nothing short of tragic.

In the Dark Season 3: What if we investigated war crimes the same way we look at mass murder stories in the U.S.? That’s the approach this podcast takes in looking at the devastating, senseless 2005 deaths of 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq.

Tested: Fascinating and infuriating, this history of sex testing in elite sports reveals how complicated biological sex actually is (it’s about intersex athletes, not trans athletes per se, but the implications are extremely relevant to anyone who is non-gender-conforming).