My favorite books of 2024

And how we can all make time for more reading

Welcome to Chief Complaint! For those of you who are new, this newsletter features intermittent musings about medicine, gender, parenting, and body justice — all from your friendly neighborhood primary care doc. I’m so happy you’re here.

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Happy 2025, everyone! How was your winter break, if you had one?

I was happy to have some time off work. But I was also on child care and adult care duty — it was a lot, hanging with a preschooler and orchestrating activities for older loved ones with disabilities. (Unfortunately, their favorite activities are exact opposites: slow-paced museum visits vs. scootering around the park. Very challenging to keep everyone happy.)

Yep, I’m looking forward to a vacation from my vacation in 2025.

At the risk of sounding unbearably dorky, I feel lucky that I can always take a mini-vacation by reading. I read Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner over the holiday week, and between multiple grocery trips and vacuuming and unloading the dishwasher, I’ve been thinking privately about secret agents and communes in the French countryside and Neanderthals.

Being a reader has been a core part of my identity since I was a kid. I can always count on it for a brief break from reality.

Many friends ask how I — a full-time doctor, medical educator, mom, and caregiver for other relatives, who has a labor-intensive-if-not-particularly-lucrative-side-hustle (this Substack, duh!) — can make time to read.

The simple answer is that it’s important to me, so I make it a priority in my life.

I’m not a professional critic or even a BookTok fan; I don’t work in publishing or as a full-time writer. I’m an ordinary working gal who really, really likes books.

So without further ado, I will share my top tips for integrating reading into your routine and share some of the favorite books I read in 2024.

How can you make time to read?

1. The first question to ask is: Do you really want to make time to read? I’ve found it to be a reliably positive force in my life. Reading almost universally makes me feel good: it brings meaning to my life, it makes me feel more empathy for everyone, and it’s fun. But truly, no judgment if it doesn’t serve those purposes for you! There’s some snobbery around reading, and while I generally think it’s great, I don’t think it’s a moral failure if it isn’t your top priority.

2. Keep your phone out of your bedroom. I live in a vertical city house, and my bedroom is on the 4th floor. I came up with a hack that has truly transformed my reading life, as well as my sleep: I charge my phone on the first floor. My husband and I set up a little charging station where you first enter the house, and we generally don’t bring our phones upstairs. (That includes on the second floor, where we have our kitchen and the main living space.) This isn’t a sign of how zen-like I am about phone addiction; in fact, it’s precisely because I am so addicted to my phone that I started this tradition. Now, I read before bed instead of scrolling before bed.

3. Don’t finish books you don’t like. One of the beautiful things about being a grownup is the fact that I get to read for pleasure, not for a homework assignment. If I’m not feeling a book, I usually just stop reading it. If a book has come highly recommended, sometimes I’ll push through a slow beginning to be rewarded mid-way.

4. Keep an active book in each part of the house. This is another vertical house habit I’ve developed. The book I’m most intensely reading is usually by my bed, but I keep nonfiction and short stories in other spots around the house because they’re easy to dip in and out of. If I find myself with a few extra minutes waiting for water to boil while I’m cooking dinner, I read.

5. Read while doing child care. I read all the time while hanging out with my son. I try not to spend too much time on my phone around him — I don’t love how hard it is for me to pull myself away from my phone when he wants attention, plus he always tries to grab it and I’m terrified he’ll text my boss or something — but a book is the perfect level of intensity for hanging with a preschooler. It helps me cope with the tedium of playing Spiderman Legos, but isn’t so addictive that I still look up sometimes and realize my son has done something really cool.

6. Read in the morning. Truly, the most indulgent thing in the world. Sometimes I get up early, intending to exercise, or write, or pre-chart on my patients for the day. And then I bring my coffee back to bed and read instead — on a weekday! The best.

   

7. Be honest about what you like… Like many people who fancy themselves *serious readers,* I have had Anna Karenina sitting on my bedside table for years. It has even moved houses with me, always returning to the same spot. I got into it intensely a few years ago, and then I got busy, and I had a hard time returning to it. Is it time to give up? I’m not sure (and have been recommended

   George Saunders
   ’ book A Swim in the Pond in the Rain to get inspired), but I do know that leaving it unfinished has not prevented me from reading hundreds of other books. (Closely related to #3.) I’ve gotten pretty honest with myself about what I like, which is contemporary literary fiction, mostly by women, and commercial/narrative nonfiction. The heart wants what it wants.

8. …But don’t be afraid to try new things. As I think about trying my hand at writing my own book in 2025, I’ve been reading a lot about publishing. I’ve learned that there is so much brilliant writing out there that doesn’t get a big marketing budget and isn’t reviewed in major publications. It can take some digging to find cool stuff from academic and indie publishers, but it can be very rewarding.

9. There are only 24 hours in a day. Prioritizing reading means, by definition, that I de-prioritize other things. I’ve accepted that I’m culturally illiterate about TV and movies. I don’t have a ton of other time-intensive hobbies, like friends who are in rowing clubs or play golf. Seeing my friends regularly is a high priority for me, but everyone is usually kicked out by 8pm, so I can start winding down and yes, do my bedtime reading.

10. Who cares about numbers? I do track my books on Goodreads because I like a record of what I’ve read and I have a “social network” of, say, 5 friends I know IRL and I like to see what they’re reading. But I truly don’t care about the number of books I read each year. And if we’re going for the max number of books, obviously that makes it less likely that we’ll choose long or challenging ones. It’s a strange phenomenon, the “gamification of everything” as the great

    Anne Helen Petersen
    puts it, and I don’t need it in my reading life.

In 2024, I read some truly great books. Here are some of my favorites.

The book I recommended most to others: Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. I couldn’t shut up about this book! So psychologically deft and with a page-turning plot. (I read and listened to several fascinating interviews with the author about “why plot matters,” and I could not agree more.) It’s set in New Zealand, where my family is planning a trip in 2025, and I cannot wait to read her 800+ page debut novel, also set in NZ, on the plane. Or, now.

The book that was recommended most to me: Matrescence by Lucy Jones. Several friends suggested I read this beautiful memoir + reported book, and I’m glad I did. It helped give a name to many of the physical and emotional changes of becoming a mother.

Books that most changed my professional life:

Unshrinking by Kate Manne. I knew when I interviewed

Kate Manne

for NPR (check it out here!) that this book would change the way I practiced medicine. This book is rigorous, sharp, and should be required reading for every single doctor.

Against Technoableism by Ashley Shew. My reading about fatphobia led me, curiously, to the field of disability studies, an academic (inter)discipline tasked with understanding the culture and politics of disability. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about where fatness falls on the spectrum of disease vs. disability vs. normal variation in human physiology. I bought this in an indie bookstore in Moab, Utah and thought it was an excellent primer for someone, like me, who was new to the field.

Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da’Shaun L. Harrison. This unapologetic text is so much more raw and honest than most of what I read from mainstream publishers. It forced me to think about how the profession of medicine is complicit in so much harm.

Best narrative nonfiction: In Love by Amy Bloom. Cathartic sobbing for the 5 hours or so it took me to read.

Most inspiring nonfiction: What If We Get It Right by

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

. Another book I’ve been recommending to anyone who will listen. Hopeful, actionable, and even funny. It’s structured as a series of interviews between Ayana and different climate stakeholders, so I bet it would be great as an audiobook, kind of like a bunch of podcasts strung together.

Most Philly flavor: Housemates by

Emma Copley Eisenberg

. West Philly queer group house road trip novel. Reminds me of so many parties I went to in med school. Also, fat-positive!

Wildest, weirdest storyline that made me think, “Damn I should be reading more sci-fi”: The Future by Naomi Alderman. I’ve been dipping my toes into more “speculative fiction” (which is sci-fi for people who, like me, like Oprah’s Book Club), and it’s awesome. I plan to revisit some Margaret Atwood in 2025.

Favorite children’s book that my kid actually likes: The Skull by Jon Klassen. You think it’s going to be Beauty and the Beast, and then, it definitely isn’t. My child is obsessed with this book. We’ve read it 30+ times.

Favorite children’s book that’s actually for me: All About U.S. by Matt Lamothe and Jenny Volvovski. I bought this for my kid and realized quickly that he’s too young for it, but it is a great coffee table book for adults. Such a vivid portrait of kids’ lives all over the country — it’s not sentimental or paternalistic. It allows kids to tell stories of their own lives as the full humans that they are.

So what’s on the reading agenda for 2025?

I hope my recommendations help you find some good reads for the new year.

I’m curious: what’s on your reading list for next year?