A New Year, and Book Recommendations
2024 is coming to a close, and it has in many ways been one of the most eventful years of my life. What stands out the most for me is learning that I am going to be a father and the journey this has been so far together with my partner, an experience nothing can compete with.
When it comes to this project, I have published 26 essays (and some other posts), totaling over 105.000 words, about one and a half to two times the ‘average’ nonfiction book word count. This has been a year of an enormous amount of learning and curiosity, and while I have yet to find a way to combine my passions with an income, I do feel I at the least am in the vicinity of where the right path is for me. Right now I’m optimistic, but I would be lying if I said I haven’t had periods of great pessimism as well. Hopefully everything will sort itself out with effort and time.
I wanted to take this opportunity to list the books I have read this year that stood out to me the most, either through their literary quality, or through the impact I feel they have had on me, this project and my thinking, an impact I hope they may have on other people as well. I have divided these into fiction and non-fiction, and in the latter I have made a further division between older (~more than 10 years old) and newer releases. Some of the fiction titles are in Norwegian, and have not (yet) been translated. I hope the list found below can be a good catalogue of reading recommendations for some of you out there! My substack page also has a separate tab where you can find more recommendations.
Finally, thank you to everyone who has supported me in one way or another this year. I wish everyone a 2025 of inner growth, outer balance, and wisdom and wonder all around.
Fiction
Carl Frode Tiller - Flukt , Skråninga and Innsirkling 1-3 (Translated as Encircling 1-3)
Samantha Harvey - Orbital
Denis Johnson - Train Dreams
Thure Erik Lund - Grøftetildragelsesmysteriet
Johan Harstad - Under brosteinen, stranden!
Benjamin Labatut - The Maniac (Partly non-fiction)
Non-Fiction
Newer
Shannon Vallor - The AI Mirror
Vanessa Andreotti - Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism
Iain McGilchrist - The Matter With Things
Hartmut Rosa - The Uncontrollability of the World and Resonance: A Sociology of our Relationship to the World
Brendan Graham Dempsey - Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics
Older
Karen Barad - Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning
Alasdair MacIntyre - After Virtue
Paul K. Feyerabend - Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being and Philosophical Papers (Vol 1 & 2)
Thomas S. Kuhn - The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview
Jose Ortega y Gasset - Some Lessons in Metaphysics
Henri Bergson - The Creative Mind and Henri Bergson: Key Writings
William James - A Pluralistic Universe and Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking