A Year in Reading with Sarah Rose Sharp
A 2018 awardee
Tell us what you read in 2024 that …
… was so beautifully written that you were envious
Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans by Dan Baum
… you’d recommend to other arts writers.
The Believer, Summer 2024 (#146), various
... had you rethinking art history.
Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer
... was a guilty pleasure.
Processing: 100 Comics that Got Me Through by Tara Booth
... was old, a little obscure and absolutely delicious
Real People by Alison Lurie
My longest-standing subscription is to The Believer, an incredible index of literary, arts, culture and humanist politics, written by people who are obsessed with that stuff. Everyone should be reading The Believer. The summer issue (#146) had a really great piece on Michael Heizer's "City" by Ahmed Naji, and an interview with Eileen Myles that I found most inspiring. This is great arts writing from 2024.
Real People (Open Road Media, 2018) by Alison Lurie is a read that unfolds deliciously. I found myself at the Surf Point residency in Maine this April, and it made me interested in writers-on-residencies. I also read The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth, but Lurie's book was way more engaging and dramatic. Her narrator seems superficial at the outset, but becomes increasingly and terrifyingly self-aware by the novel's end, bringing high stakes to the relative calm of an artist-in-residency setting.
Then I eloped to New Orleans in May. Whenever I travel, I try to find something to inform that process, and Dan Baum's book, Nine Lives (Spiegel & Grau, 2009), that follows nine lives through NOLA over the course of generations, into Katrina, and its aftermath, is just so incredibly well balanced and interesting and genre-breaking. It made my teeth ache with jealousy.
Monsters (Vintage, 2023), Claire Dederer's book grappling with what to do with the art we love that is made by bad people, is a timely read and an intelligent reflection on a difficult topic, not so much a meditation on the bad people, but the fan's position and how to grieve losing art we love.
I always feel a little guilty when I read books-with-pictures, like I'm cheating if 100% of the page count is not words. But in the case of painter-illustrator-hilarious person Tara Booth, her narrative of early sobriety is beautifully realized in words and images, and in truth, I feel not-at-all guilty. I adored it. Processing: 100 Comics that Got Me Through (Drawn and Quarterly, 2024).
