2024 was not a good year for me with regard to reading books. While my reading consumption has plummeted over the decades (I used to be a voracious reader) I could always count on getting at least 30, and up to 50 in a good year, books read. This year I only read 21 books. Less than two books per month. I can do better. It’s my one real resolution. Read more books. I’m off to a good start. I began a book on December 23, expecting it to be the first book I completed in 2025, but I finished reading it on December 30, so I was able to count it in 2024, and it even made my list of top books.
As far as trends, with so few books read, all I can really say is that my pursuit of memoirs by female rock & rollers is still going strong with four books read this year representative of that genre. I expanded a bit into film as well with two additional memoirs, and also a novel written by a female rock & roller, and a brief treatise on a rock & roll album. Music has indeed come back into my life fairly strongly since the pandemic. But this is about books, and here are my #’s 12 & 13 from my Top 13 books read in 2024.
#13 – Honeybees & Distant Thunder by Riku Onda (2016)
Riku Onda has constructed a novel around an international piano competition in a town outside of Tokyo. The top young pianists from around the world come together in a week-long competition. Each competitor the novel follows has their own unique story; a consummate performer, handsome, talented and beloved Masaru; Aya, child genius whose career evaporated after the death of her mother, making a comeback; Akashi, the oldest competitor at thirty-years old who hopes to finally achieve his first moment of glory; and the mysterious youth, Jin, secretly mentored and taught by a Japanese master who recently died, whose playing confounds as much as it exhilarates.
Onda’s take on all the performances exalts and pays homage the power of music as a life-altering mystery, but the detailed descriptions of each piece does begin to get repetitive as the competition proceeds. She excels at some of the gorgeous descriptions, as she delves deep into the personalities of each spotlit performer, and how their experiences evolve throughout the week. Sadly, by the time she reaches the final days of the competition, she has little new to say, and the conclusion is a bit of a let down. Still, there were passages describing the music, the way people interact with music, and the individuals making the music that were so uplifting and powerful I was moved to tears. A mixed bag, but one that ends up anchoring my Top 13.
#12 – Face It by Debbie Harry (2019)
Debbie Harry’s Face It: A Memoir delivers on what a good memoir should be. Someone who has led an interesting life, looking back from a vantage point with experience and wisdom in a way that’s engaging and revelatory. It’s not a tell-all, but a curated story that paints a picture of a fascinating person during a pretty amazing time and place. After reading this memoir, Harry comes across as someone who I would enjoy spending time with; someone who has seen and done a lot, and who’s ups and downs through life balance the potentially mind-warping fame she experienced as the front-person and persona for the hugely successful band, Blondie.
While the book is a fairly chronological account of Debbie’s life, I enjoyed how she would sprinkle stories throughout where relevant, regardless of timeframe. Starting with childhood, her young, punk life in 79’s New York City, the meteoric success of Blondie, the struggles after the band broke up, the successful return to the spotlight, and her life today, Face It covers a lot of territory. Because of this, we get a broad overview of Debbie’s entire ife, rather than a deep dive into specific parts. It works, precisely because Debbie’s entire life provided an interesting read. Through it all, the love for her friend, business and creative partner, and former lover, Chris Stein, is the strongest throughline.
That and the sharing of dozens of portraits painted/drawn by her fans and given to Debbie, underscoring the challenge of owning an iconic look that many people simply equate with the person herself make for a fascinating rumination.
An interesting note about these two books. Face It was the first book I completed in 2024, and Honeybees & Distant Thunder the last.
Still riding high on my women in rock memoirs, the talented Tracy Thorn came in at #3 with Naked at the Albert Hall. Ms. Thorn also topped my list of books read in 2023 with her outstanding work, My Rock ‘N Roll Friend. This is certainly quite a feat for any author, especially one who is mainly known for being the lead singer and songwriter of the band Everything But The Girl, who, incidentally, released their first album in 23 years last spring.
Ann-Helén Laestadius is a lauded author from Sweden, of Sámi and Tornedalian descent: two of Sweden’s national minorities, and in tackling this multi-faceted novel, she barely misses a step while addressing the bigotry, cruelty, and casual indifference that plagues a community. Sadly, the novel is based on hundreds of police reports the author reviewed. The story revolves around Elsa and her family, of Sámi descent, and reindeer herders by profession. When Elsa is just a young girl, skiing to their reindeer corrall on her own for the first time, she stumbles across on of her own reindeer calves, slaughtered by a man from a neighboring village. Caught in the act, the man threatens Elsa for her silence. Despite reporting the murder of their property, Swedish law only considers this kind of slaughter as theft and do very little to investigate. This dark scene kicks off a decade long struggle that Elsa, her family, and her fellow Sámi villagers face time and time again as their livelihood is destroyed, and their reindeer are tortured and butchered unlawfully. 
I don’t think there’s a better memoir writer than Everything but the Girl’s Tracey Thorn. Ironically, the second of her three books (and the third that I read) focuses on the skill that she is better known for, and that’s singing. In Naked at the Albert Hall: The Inside Story of Singing, Thorn focuses on the the physical requirement of singing, the relationship between the singer and the listener, and the tools that a professional singer might use to enhance or alter their singing ability. Along the way she includes stories about her life as both lead vocalist for Everything but the Girl, and the struggle she has had since 2000 when she sang her last public concert. Included in the book are brief interviews with other singers, such as Linda Thompson, Kristen Hersh (author of my #4 book, Rat Girl) and the marvelous Alison Moyet, asking the to provide their points of view of how singing impacts their lives. She talks about many of the singers she admires and her relationship with them as a listener. 
Another great entry in my new favorite genre: the rock ‘n roll memoir by women. Kristen Hersh details a year in her life; modified entries in her diary, just as her band, Throwing Muses was about to take off. Along the way, there’s a bipolar disorder, a friendship with an icon of the golden age of Hollywood, and a pregnancy. This is what I look for in a rock ‘n roll memoir: reading about life as a working musician, while commenting on the larger world and the personal idiosyncrasies that make up a personality. Hersh’s observations about life and her unorthodox childhood are abstract, atonal, and whimsical, reminiscent of her music, but the deep bonds of friendship between her and her bandmates shines through.
A.M. Homes fascinates me as a writer. Her novels are usually heavily satirical, and rarely tackles subjects I would predict would be interest to me. Yet her sharp-eyed take, often on middle America is often bold, insightful, and entertaining. In her latest novel, The Undoing she focuses on a singular moment of a behind-the-scenes power broker for the Republican Party known as the Big Guy. It’s election night 2008, and things definitely go as planned. Shaken to the core as Obama is announced President of the United States, The Big Guy and his family experience the upheaval in radically different ways, with our wealthy, rich patriarch setting in motion a super secret cabal of similarly wealthy, aging, white Republican that will secretly and slowly return America to it’s former greatness over the coming decades.