Best Books of 2024
Blindness, egg freezing, and building to last
Every year, I go through my Goodreads and make a list of my favorite books I read this year. (In practice, it’s Dec-Nov, so people have a chance of finding a perfect gift recommendation for a fellow weirdo).
This year, I had an unusually long list of excellent books, and I’m very grateful for them! The full list is here, but I wanted to highlight three books that I think are a particularly good fit for Other Feminisms.
The first two books are (as far as I can recall) both cited in my forthcoming The Dignity of Dependence (now in copyedits!).
The Country of the Blind
by Andrew Leland
A memoir of preparing to become completely blind due to degenerative illness. It wound up getting cited in my forthcoming The Dignity of Dependence (coming in the fall!) due to Leland’s fascinating discussion of ideological splits between using a guide dog or a cane. Does depending on a living being versus using a tool make someone more disabled (pejorative) in the judgement of the surrounding culture?
Motherhood on Ice
by Marcia C. Inhorn
An ethnography of egg freezing! Well reported and more interested in truth seeking than in laying up ammunition for the culture war. One of those books you borrow from the library and order your own copy midway through chapter two. I drew on this book for my Lamp feature on infertility, IVF, and fairy tale bargains.
The third book I’m going to highlight from my list isn’t as obviously on Other Feminisms topics, but I think you guys will get the connection.
How Buildings Learn
by Stewart Brand
I’m only seeing this listed used, and you’re going to want it in print, not as an e-copy. Brand offers detailed drawings of how building can be designed from the start to have room to flex and grow with the needs of their occupants. The object level details are fascinating, but floating above it is a guide on how to live with humility.
Apply Brand’s guidance to your own life and you have a good middle way between a shrinking false humility that shirks the responsibility to build and a controlling pride that assumes your idea for now should stand forever. Genuinely an aid to prayer for me.
How Buildings Learn is an excellent complement to Sara Hendren’s What Can a Body Do? (which is a previous best book of the year for me, and which I reviewed for Plough here). Both are about approaching design with real curiosity and an openness to change. It’s design as past of a conversation between humans and the material world—a comma, not a period.
And I’ll throw in one favorite essay, as a coda. I loved Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s “The Body She Had” for Plough. Garland-Thomson is a theologian with a specialty in disability.
The difference between this girl who is not in the world and my friends and me who are in the world is that before we were born into the world, our parents did not know what kind of bodies we would have. We were born, for the most part, before the profiles, information, and images of the prenatal testing era sketched out our being and future for waiting parents. Now the bodies we have are named as medical conditions: syndromes, rare diseases, skeletal dysplasias, genetic anomalies, and more pathologies. These descriptions of our bodies pin us to the world like specimens in museums. Yet in truth we are the flesh and bone and blood that have lived our lives, done our work, thought our thoughts. With these bodies, we have loved and been loved by many others along our way.
I always enjoy your book recommendations! I read George Saunders' Tenth of December collection this year. The eponymous story touched me so deeply in light of recent discussions about MAID around the world. I've almost committed this quote to memory and felt it resonated particularly well with your work on the dignity of dependence:
"Why should those he loved not lift and bend and feed and wipe him, when he would gladly do the same for them? He’d been afraid to be lessened by the lifting and bending and feeding and wiping, and was still afraid of that, and yet, at the same time, now saw that there could still be many—many drops of goodness, is how it came to him—many drops of happy—of good fellowship—ahead, and those drops of fellowship were not—had never been—his to withheld."
I also really enjoyed How to Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold Story of Beauty & Female Creativity by Jill Burke. A really fascinating dive into the world of Renaissance cosmetics with recipes included!
The Body She Had was a wonderful essay. I sent it to 3 young women that I love (my 23 year old daughter who teaches 'special ed', my 15 year old granddaughter who lives with a brother with 'special needs', and my grand niece who works in an 'woman's assistance' non-profit). As a retired physician I connected very strongly to several different aspects of this difficult topic...