What did you read in 2024?

I need a bookshelf!

Here’s what I read—with a few stand-outs bolded—and including the worst book I’ve ever read (almost) cover-to-cover, Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender?

• Misunderstanding Cults: Searching for Objectivity in a Controversial Field, Benjamin Zablocki & Thomas Robbins (editors)

• Individuation in Fairy Tales, Marie Louise von Franz

• Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine, Jack Pressman

• Stranger in My Own Body: Atypical Gender Identity Development and Mental Health, Domenico di Ceglie (editor)

• Germany 1923: Hyperinflation, Hitler's Putsch, and Democracy in Crisis, Volker Ullrich

• Sybil Exposed, Debbie Nathan

• Free, Lea Ypi

• The Sleeping Beauties, Suzanne O'Sullivan

• Recovery from Cults, Michael Langone (editor)

• Splinters, Leslie Jamison

• The Vital Spark, Lisa Marchiano

• The Thirty-Years War, C. V. Wedgwood

• Trouble with Gender, Alex Byrne

• Lies and Sorcery, Elsa Morante

• The Recovering, Leslie Jamison

• The Wonderful O, James Thurber

• Radical Departures, Saul Levine

• Heartburn, Nora Ephron

• Bad Therapy, Abigail Shrier

• Coercive Persuasion, Edward Schein

• Desperate Cures, Andrew Scull

• A Straight-Talking Guide to Psychiatric Diagnosis, Lucy Johnstone

• The History of the World in 100 Objects, Neil MacGregor

• The Memory Wars, Frederick Crews

• Middlemarch, George Eliot (re-read)

• Everything/Nothing/Someone, Alice Carriere

• Under the Skin, Alessandra Lemma

• Victims of Memory, Mark Pendergast

• The Cambridge Companion to Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar (editor)

• Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America, Barbara Ehrenreich

• The Kremlin Ball, Curzio Malaparte

• Surgery Junkies, Victoria Pitts-Taylor

• Kudos, Rachel Cusk (re-read)

• A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin

• Grief is for People, Sloane Crosley

• Missing Persons, Clair Willis

• August Blue, Deborah Levy

• The Starlight Years, Joscelyn Godwin

• Women Won't Wheesht, Lucy Hunter Blackburn and Susan Dalgety (editors)

• Cloistered, Catherine Coldstream

• Native Realm, Czeslaw Milosz (re-read)

• Trans, Alessandra Lemma

• The Forgotten Language, Erich Fromm

• Matrescence, Lucy Jones

• The Morning After the Revolution, Nellie Bowles

• The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt

• Who's Afraid of Gender? Judith Butler

• The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig (re-read)

• Free to Be, Jack Turban

• Parade, Rachel Cusk

• Story of a New Name, Elena Ferrante (re-read)

• Swimming in Paris, Colombe Schneck

• Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, Gregor von Rezzori

• Totalitarianism: Proceedings of a Conference Held at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, March 1953, Carl Joachim Friedrich (editor)

• The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin

• Light Years, James Salter (re-read)

• Second Place, Rachel Cusk (re-read)

• The Shaking Woman, Siri Hustvedt

• The Story of the Lost Child, Elena Ferrante (re-read)

• Jigsaw, Sybille Bedford

• American Originality: Essays on Poetry, Louise Gluck

• A Legacy, Sybille Bedford

• Toxic, Sarah Ditum

• Flesh Wounds, Victoria Blum

• A Life's Work, Rachel Cusk (re-read)

• Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy

• What are children for? On ambivalence and choice, Anastasia Berg & Rachel Wiseman

• Making the Body Beautiful, Sander Gilman

What were the best—and, if you wish, the worst—things you read in 2024?