Twenty-Four Highlights From 2024

A truncated recap because we all have stuff to do.

At first I told myself I wasn’t going to do a 2024 recap, because EVERYONE was doing a 2024 recap, and then I realized that EVERYONE was doing a 2024 recap and I didn’t want to be left out. So here we are. Since this could very easily devolve into a screed lengthy enough to be rivaled only by the “recently unsubscribed” list, I’ve limited myself to just 24 share-worthy items and divided them into six categories.

Also, yes, I realize it is February 2025 by now, but that will make my recap of 2024 stand out from the crowd. So, not really like EVERYONE else after all.

Four Books I Loved

1. The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow

I am very, very picky about Jane Austen adaptations, and even more picky about Jane Austen novel spin-offs. It is hard enough to put her brilliant prose on screen; it is an even more Herculean task to write about her characters in a manner worthy of her genius. So it was with some skepticism (despite the urging of many literary-minded friends) that I picked up Hadlow’s very long novel. And I was absolutely delighted by it. Though it gives breadth and depth to a much-maligned character (come on, whomst among us has NOT despised Mary Bennet at some point? SLUMBERRRRRRRR DEEEEE-EEEEAR MAID!) and completes her story (the second half of the book takes place after the events of Pride and Prejudice), it doesn’t undermine the original text nor give motivations to characters that contradict what Austen wrote. I don’t want to spoil anything but I will say Mary gets a happy ending AND I think the average Janeite will feel satisfied and delighted by the journey Mary takes to get there. Plus, the narrative and dialogue did not jolt me out of the Regency period— which is more than I can say for many historical novels.

(Sorry for the weird bold text but now that I’ve deleted my Twitter I can only take screenshots of banger tweets by accessing my downloaded archive and capturing images of my search results.)

2. Gilead by Marilyn Robinson

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Gilead, but nonetheless I was not disappointed. A sort of epistolary novel with diary-form influences, it tells the gently-flowing life story of John Ames, an elderly minister who is trying to leave a record of his unusual life for his young son. Ames is a Congregational minister, third in a line of ministers who lived through tumultuous times in American history and worked for the abolition of slavery and the well-being of their small, struggling community in rural Iowa. Though the story of Ames’ life is full of themes of faith, doubt, family conflict, racism, vocation, theology, forgiveness, betrayal, and ethical dilemmas, it’s never preachy. It’s the kind of writing that seeps into your thoughts throughout the day even when you put the book down; not a page-turner, but a paragraph-underliner. I loved it.

It won the Pulitzer Prize (no wonder!) and even as I’m struggling to describe it, I felt as I was reading it that it embodied so much of what I want to write and what I want to read. Isn’t that the best kind of book, after all? It can’t be consolidated into an elevator pitch; it’s not a pithy back-page summary; it’s a novel that explores all the scope of longform literary fiction and plumbs the human condition in fifty thousand well-chosen words. If I could break it down in a short paragraph then it wouldn’t have done its job.

3. Going Postal by Terry Pratchett

My dear friend Stephanie introduced me to Terry Pratchett’s works in 2023 and I was hooked from my very first read (Wyrd Sisters). I’ve never been much for fantasy or science fiction (I still haven’t read Lord of the Rings) and I was nervous about plunging into the Discworld novels. I shouldn’t have worried. Discworld is a little bit complicated but the explanations given at the beginning of each book to orient the reader on the Disc are very clear, and the dialogue and narrative and character interplay are so funny that I would forgive even the most maladroit worldbuilding. An avaricious and charming swindler, Moist von Lipwig starts out his story by being hanged within less than an inch of his life and then secretly spirited away, revived, and given a new lease in life by Lord Vetinari, the enigmatic ruler of Ankh-Morpork. Moist finds himself assigned to the role of postmaster in Ankh-Morpork’s nearly-abandoned post office. Things are not as they seem in the defunct and pigeon-infested post office, which is a pretty good metaphor for the book as a whole.

Going Postal actually isn’t my favorite of all the Pratchett books I’ve read thus far (that honor goes to Hogfather, I think) but it was the best one of the year, full of wit and warmth and whimsy. Such a funny little work of fantasy with no bearing on the real world whatsoever. Pure escapism!

“What a place! What a situation! What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.”

*coughs in dramatic irony* This brings us to…

4. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristen Kobes du Mez

I don’t usually listen to nonfiction, but I listened to the audiobook version of this title which had been on my TBR list for far too long. (KK du Mez and I even followed each other on Twitter!) I was embarrassed that it took me so long to actually read this book which I knew had made such an impact in the evangelical world. I think I was putting it off because I knew it would be a difficult read, and it was. But it really helped me to understand how we got to where we are today both politically and culturally. Seeing the rise of Christian nationalism and the ugly spread of unChristlike machismo in the American church— a “God, guns, and country” ethic that is antithetical to Jesus’ teachings—spelled out in such a clear historical record was both sobering and clarifying for me. I highly recommend this book if you’re wondering how the white American church could possibly have voted Trump into office yet again. I recommend it if you’re a Christian who wants to untangle the Biblical principles you hold dear from the cultural hegemony that has overtaken evangelicalism. Heck, I recommend it if you don’t subscribe to any faith and just want to read a good book on the 20th-century cultural and political zeitgeist! It’s well-written, engaging, and painstakingly researched.

Four Articles I Wrote and Am Proud Of

I wrote a lot in 2024! It feels like I didn’t (because there were so many topics I wanted to delve into but didn’t have time) but it took me a while to scroll through the year’s archive. That’s something, isn’t it?

I'd Rather Elevate the Good Than Play Whack-a-Mole With the Bad

If I Only Had (More Than) a Brain

Why Don't People Talk About Parenthood The Way I Want Them To?

The People Who Saw George Bailey (Even When He Was Kind of a Jerk)

Four Articles I Read And Now Recommend

This was so, so hard to narrow down. I just want you to know that.

“Like people in the past, we can use our words to curse others. Or we can speak up for what is right. To living artists, we can cordially reach out, offering a better way as Eliza Davis did, even to those like Dickens who will not change immediately. When speaking of artists in the past, we can tell the truth, acknowledging a gift for rhyme or chiaroscuro or argument, even as we confess their vices.”
—Art and the Difficult Artist by

Melody

“Even if I was going to quit, I couldn’t quit at the top of the bridge. It was too dangerous for anyone to park, for one thing; for another, I’d either have to roll over the cement barricade or be hauled over it. That sounded harder than making down the bridge itself. Much better to roll down and call someone at the bottom. After all, if I was quitting, I had plenty of time.”
—Sometimes You Have to Lie Down on a Bridge and Cry by

Ruth

“Whole portions of War and Peace that I didn’t even remember from my first reading stood out to me as I read it aloud: the way different stages of one person’s life can seem as if they happened to different people, the changing relationships between aging parents and adult children in the prime of life, the fragility of peace.”
—Reading “War and Peace” In War and Peace by

Lucy S. R. Austen

And for some comic relief—

“I get the restraint it took for you to calmly send Kevin to his room after he called you a dummy and said he never wanted to see you again, because I know in moments like those, the natural maternal urge is to follow the offspring up to the third floor and toss it out the window.”
—A Letter to Kevin McCallister’s Mom by

Kristen Mulrooney

Four Personal Life Highlights

1. The JASNA AGM!!!!!! In October I went to the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Annual General Meeting, and I wrote about it in great detail here. This trip was sponsored in no small part by many of you, and for that I am so grateful. Writing about Jane Austen this summer was a sub-highlight of this lovely experience and I appreciate every single person who read my posts about my favorite author. I also greatly appreciate each one of you who aren’t Janeites but who kept subscribing to Something Funny, Something True anyway. You’re troupers.

2. Escaping to the seaside for some rest and renewal. We had a wonderful time in Ocean City, New Jersey and I got some ***uninterrupted reading time*** which made my review of The Other Bennet Sister possible.

3. I continued with part-time college classes, and I am now halfway through my bachelor’s degree in English and creative writing (with a 3.98 GPA, not to brag—okay, totally to brag. Listen, I’ve worked hard for those grades). I will be going to school full-time in August this year and I’m both nervous and filled with effervescent excitement about this new opportunity. I’m not sure which direction my personal writing may need to take while I’m balancing a twelve-credit class load with arranging childcare and taking care of my household, but I will be thinking about lots of literary-adjacent topics and opening many Google Docs, which totally counts as writing.

4. Speaking of writing, another huge milestone was starting The Pomegranate! Technically this Substack launched in 2025. But the idea was conceived in 2024 and all the website building took place in that year, so it totally counts. The backstory here is that last winter Lucy Huber gathered me, Lauren Ahmed, Sarah Radz and Kristen Mulrooney together into a group chat after we all met via viral tweets about being a mom, and after many months of zillions of texts we decided to try our collective hand at longform writing. Go subscribe to The Pom!

Four Things I Did Not Regard With Great Affinity

1. My children’s recalcitrance toward trying new foods. Food is delicious, you little gremlins. Children cannot live upon peanut butter sandwiches and bananas and oranges and pinto beans and ice cream and candy alone. Well, I suppose they can, but the diaper situation may become dire. I jest, but child comestibles have always stressed me out and I may write about this in more depth at a later date. If you’re thinking about commenting to say, “just feed them what you’re eating! Eventually they’ll get hungry enough,” don’t.

2. So many of my good friends live far away from me. This is sad. I am so grateful for the internet bringing us together but I’m not a huge fan of the fact that the earth is such a colossal globe. Maybe a Discworld would be a good idea, actually.

3. Elon Musk turned Twitter into X (okay, technically I think that happened in 2023… it all blurs together after a while) and my experience there went down the toilet, not to put too fine a point on it. The most noxious factions of the political right wing have set up camp there AND Musk decided to start scraping all content on the platform to train AI. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me and I left. It was just a social media platform but I still felt sad about it. I made a lot of wonderful friends there (most of which I still keep in touch with!) and I’m not gonna lie, it was fun going viral every few weeks. There’s something validating about having twenty thousand people like and share something you said. But social media “fame” never translated to people actually reading the stuff I spend time writing thoughtfully so… maybe I am better served channeling my creative energy here.

4. Honestly, November overall really sucked, iykyk. We also got hand-foot-and-mouth disease. That was not fun. In fact, my family was sick off and on from about mid-November to mid-January, and I do not recommend this. It’s been a rough year for child-borne illnesses (even when you have all your shots!). There’s a scene in the canceled-too-soon TV series Terra Nova where one of Jim Shannon’s coworkers asks him if he has a cold, and as he fiercely wipes snot away with the heel of his hand, he says, “I HAVE KIDS,” like it’s the most self-explanatory thing in the world, and you know what? I felt that.

Four Items I Made

Because two hobbies (reading and writing) are simply not enough for one busy mother who also works and volunteers part-time and is in school the rest of the time, I also sew and knit and crochet, and in 2024 I made some stuff.

1. My very favorite and best project was the alteration of my husband’s grandmother’s wedding dress, which my sister wore when she got married in January. I guess technically this was also a 2023 project but I’m going to count it for 2024 because that’s when it got to live its life and have its photo taken. #GirlMath I wrote about the process in some detail on Instagram.

2. These darling little dresses for the daughters of a good friend! I didn’t have a pattern so I’m extra gratified with how they turned out, but I think in future I’ll be a bit less ambitious and stick to commercial instructions.

3. My dress for the JASNA AGM, which did not really turn out as I would have liked and was in fact barely functional! You can read about that in my post about the AGM.

I didn’t do as much sewing and knitting as I would have liked in 2024 because my left arm was taken hostage by tenosynovitis, but I’m slowly getting back into it! I suppose the tenosynovitis can be item #5 for Things I Didn’t Like, and we’ll just swipe the fourth installment from Things I Made to make it all come out even. #MoreGirlMath

Once again, thanks for reading all this, and I hope you’ll stick around for 2025.

And if you paid attention, you will also see that I sprinkled 24 robust vocabulary words— or perhaps we should call them pretentious fifty-cent words— into this piece. Oh, you only counted 23? Anagnorisis. There.