2024 Reading Goals?

New music from Waxahatchee & Julia Holter, interviews with Lisa Robertson & gglum, an excerpt from Marie-Helene Bartino's new novel, and more

The new year has started, and with it another year of new books. Are you approaching 2024 with any reading goals? Will you be concentrating on a specific genre?

This year I aim to read more books in translation across fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry.

What are you looking to read this year? What are you avoiding?

A Playlist of the Week’s Best New Music (3 albums, 42 songs, 3 hours and 20 minutes)

This week’s new music releases include a new EP by “@” and new albums from Nailah Hunter; Surya Botofasina, Nate Mercereau & Carlos Niño; Vacations; and Folly Group.

Largehearted Likes:

1. Boy Swallows World

   The Netflix adaptation of Trent Dalton’s 2019 debut novel is the best television I have watched in years, the story of drug dealing in 1985 suburban Brisbane evocatively told through the eyes of a perceptive child then young man.

   Bonus: read and stream Dalton’s playlist for the book at Largehearted Boy.

   

2. Pink Slime by Fernanda Diaz
   Fernanda Diaz’s dystopic cli-fi novel is powerful and incredibly moving.

Largehearted Book & Music Links:

1. For the Love of Plants: 11 Books on Nature and Conservation Coming Out in 2024

2. When Making Music Breaks Your Body
   Hearing loss and tinnitus, tendonitis and arthritis, mouth calluses and vocal cord nodules: These are only a sliver of the vast collection of maladies a musical life can bring. A 2017 study of more than 700 orchestral musicians in Germany found that two-thirds of them endured chronic pain, many for at least five years. And while it's fairly well understood that music careers are an endurance sport, requiring rigorous practice and few days off, the physical consequences often go unadvertised, hidden from fans for the sake of shows that must go on.

3. Libraries for the future: Europe’s new wave of ‘meeting places for the mind’
   All also built in the past seven or eight years, Helsinki’s Oodi central library, Dokk1 in Denmark’s Aarhus, and Deichman Bjørvika in Oslo share much the same vision of the library: in effect a living room for the 21st-century city.

4. New music from Julia Holter

5. An excerpt from Marie-Helene Bartino's new novel

6. A live performance and interview with the Allah-Las at KEXP

7. Celine Saintclare Writes Her Sex Scenes to Tchaikovsky
   What do you look for in a reading experience?

   Humor and wit, original characters, an exciting plot, lots of delicious description of clothes, makeup and jewelry—that certainly helps. I like to read about subversive female experiences. I fell in love with Anaïs Nin when I read Henry and June. It seemed to be the truest analysis of secret feminine desire that I’d come across, that and desire for an experimental and artistic life.

8. A profile of singer-songwriter gglum (aka Elle Smoker)
   “Once you start performing, you quickly realise you don’t want to spend a whole set moping around,” Smoker grins. “When I started gglum, I was this angsty teenager but as I’ve grown up, I do feel a lot more optimistic. I do think it’s very funny that the project is called gglum but the music is only getting happier.”

9. The Observer’s 10 best new novelists for 2024

10. New music from Waxahatchee

11. In Conversation: Lisa Robertson & Kate Briggs

    Lisa Robertson: For thirty years I’ve defined myself as a poet. I’ve been stimulated and supported by small-press poetry communities. At this point in my life I’m less interested in self-definition, and the move from poetry to the novel feels like an immense, unexpected opening to new thinking. The challenges are very different: sheer duration, for one, at a time of life when duration takes on intimate dimensions, and also the question of voice or tone.

    
    

Last Week’s LHB Feature Posts:

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s playlist for her novel The Waters

Katia Lief’s playlist for her novel Invisible Woman