EPHEMERSON - Books

📚 5 Books I Read From 2024

Jan 16, 2025

I read more books this past year than probably any year since childhood. That said, this list would more accurately be titled The 5 Books I Read, as they’re the only ones I read and finished (one somewhat begrudgingly). I’m hoping to read at least as much this year.

Count Zero - William Gibson

I had read Neuromancer the year before and was blown away by how intricately and coherently William Gibson laid out what would essentially become the foundation of the cyberpunk genre, so I was excited to jump in Count Zero. It’s a lot of the same, but takes more narrative risks in telling three intertwining stories that span the globe. It ends up being a little less focused than its predecessor, but still very enjoyable by the end.

Chain-Gang All-Stars - Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

I’d seen this book recommended from various sources and decided to give it a try. Arguably my favorite book of the year - written beautifully and at the pace of a bingeable miniseries. The premise and characters are complicated and well-conceived, and the real-world issues the book addresses are recontextualized in a way that had me feeling genuine rage at the American prison industrial complex. I hope a day comes when this book is required reading in classrooms, but these days it seems like that’s a pipe dream.

Ambergris - Jeff VanderMeer

I started this book a couple of years prior and only last year finished it because it’s utterly massive. A complete volume of all short stories and books written by Jeff VanderMeer based in his fictional world of Ambergris. The stories take place across the strange, often violent history of Ambergris, from it’s colonization and genocide of the indigenous mushroom people that live there, through the political unrest of its anarchic industrial period, up to the days in which the tables get turned. Jeff had fun with this one. Some of the stories are written in a tongue-in-cheek academic prose, one is a detective noir. I enjoyed them all to varying degrees. It was impossible for me to not be inspired by the scale of vision that VanderMeer had for this place.

Days Between Stations - Steve Erickson

Recommended to me after I finished House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, and I was largely unimpressed despite the praise I’d seen elsewhere. The strange and dream-like quality of the world that is ours but not quite was intriguing, but felt largely wasted on a deeply uninteresting love triangle between three unlikeable people, punctuated by “love” scenes that often excluded any notion of mutual consent that made me question if the author had ever had sex before. Finished it so I could tell the person who recommended it to me that I gave it a fair chance, but would have just as easily abandoned it a third of the way in.

Absolution - Jeff VanderMeer

Another Jeff joint! I think everyone who is a fan of the Southern Reach Trilogy was pleasantly surprised (i.e. stoked) when a surprise prequel for the trilogy was announced. I preordered a book for the first time since when my mom did the same for me with the Harry Potter books in the 90s and early 2000s. It wasn’t what I expected, which in hindsight I’m glad for. It was challenging, but made for a greater sense of mystery that answers some questions while leaving others tantalizingly in the periphery. Jeff could write three more books and still keep this nightmare world of his fresh and terrifying.