A Year in Words: What I Read, What I Wrote, and What Moved Me in 2024

Plus a bonus tip for reading more in 2025

Dear Living Dark reader,

With the New Year bearing down on us, the time has rolled around again when we tend to reflect on the year that has passed and how we spent it. For me, this often takes the form of reviewing what I read and wrote during those twelve months. Today I share the results of that review and reflection with you.

I frequently enjoy perusing other people’s year’s-end reading lists, and I invite you to use the comment section to share some of the books and things that you read yourself in 2024.

What I Read in 2024

As always when I’m not compelled by external forces to follow a particular course of reading (such as when I had to study a prescribed curriculum while pursuing my bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees), in 2024 I gave my readerly spirit free rein to follow the track of its own fascination. This resulted in a spontaneous and discernible thematic track making itself known, particularly in the areas of nonduality and manifestation or New Thought. Both of these have long fascinated me, but the latter has generally sat quietly at the margins of my focus. By contrast, this year it stood up and strode to center stage for a while.

In addition to listing the books that I read or started, I have assembled a list of notable articles and essays. It is of course impossible for me to track all the various items like this that I read or skimmed during the past year, given the virtually infinite supply made available by the Internet. There’s also the fact that, although I had meant to keep fairly good track, somewhere along the way I lost most of those records. So the short list of articles and essays below simply represents some of the more memorable ones that entered my world this year.

Books in BOLD represent standouts, ones that I found particularly striking.

Books I Read in Full

• The Zen Teachings of Jesus (1995) by Kenneth S. Leong

• Sense of Self: The Source of All Existential Suffering? (2020) by Art Ticknor

• Clear in Your Heart: The Radiant Mirror of Self-Shining Awareness (2010) by John Wheeler

• Full Stop: The Gateway to Present Perfection (2012) by John Wheeler

• Misquoting Jesus: The Story behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (2005) by Bart D. Ehrman

• Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout (2024) by Cal Newport

• A Guide to Awareness and Tranquillity (1967) by William Samuel

• The Awareness of Self-Discovery (1970) by William Samuel

• Cosmic Habit Force: How to Discover and Use Nature’s Superpower (2022) by Mitch Horowitz

• Awakened Imagination (1954) by Neville Goddard

• Five Lessons: A Master Class (1948) by Neville Goddard

• The Zen Teachings of Huang Po: On the Transmission of Mind (1958) translated by John Blofeld

• The Surrender Experiment: My Journey into Life’s Perfection (2015) by Michael A. Singer

• The Panic Broadcast (1970) by Howard Koch

• The Way of Liberation (2013) by Adyashanti

• Choose Freedom (1983) by Virginia Lloyd

• Master Your Emotions (1986) by Virginia Lloyd

• The Ease of Being (1984) by Jean Klein

• I Am (1989) by Jean Klein

• The Eternal Verities (1962) by Frank Lester (Lester Levenson writing under a pen name)

• Death of the Actor: Everything I Never Learned about Nothing (2021) by

  Kyle Secor

• The Conscious Creator’s Guidebook (2023) by

  A.C. Winklier

• How to Manifest: 25 Inspiring Essays on Manifestation, Happiness, and Personal Transformation (2024) by

  A.C. Winklier

• Drill (2024) by Scott R. Jones (I also provided a blurb for this wild and wonderful book)

• Essential: Essays by the Minimalists (2012) by Joshua Fields Milburn and Ryan Nicodemus

• This Was Radio: A Personal Memoir (1975) by Joseph Julian

Books I Read in Part (and will continue reading into the new year):

• The Art of Slow Writing (2014) by Louise DeSalvo

• The Book of Listening (2008) by Jean Klein

• I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj (1973), translated by Maurice Frydman, revised and edited by Sudhakar S. Dikshit

• Happiness Is Free: And It’s Easier Than You Think by Lester Levenson and Hale Dwoskin (2020; 2001). This is actually a reworking of Levenson’s Keys to the Ultimate Freedom: Thoughts and Talks on Personal Transformation from the late 1980s or early 1990s, with new material added by Dwoskin. I first read that original version in 2020–2021.

• The Personality of Man: New Facts and Their Significance (1948) by G. N. M. Tyrell

• An Anatomy of Inspiration (1940) by Rosamund Harding

• Real-World Nonduality: Reports from the Field (2018) by Greg Goode

• Liberation beyond Imagination: Discovering Spiritual Freedom through the Truth of Experience (2024) by Peter Brown. I’m only about 30 percent into this one, and it’s already one of my new favorite books on reality and waking up. Surpassingly powerful and brilliant.

• Releasing Your Unlimited Creativity (2008 and earlier) by Kenneth Ferlic. Actually, this isn’t a book but a website with a virtually infinite supply of articles on conscious creation, nonduality, awakening, ultimate freedom, and related matters. I read maybe two books’ worth of posts and essays here, finding the high level of bizarre textual errors in most pieces to be outweighed by the general insightfulness of the content.

Notable Articles and Essays

As a reminder of what I said in my prefatory comments above, this list is highly incomplete and partial. There are probably twenty more items that I could and should have added to it, but sometime during the year I lost track of them.

• “Who Wants to Believe in UFOs?” by Clare Coffey, The New Atlantis, Summer 2024

• “Norman Maclean Didn’t Publish Much. What He Did Contains Everything” by Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker, July 1, 2024. Consider this one in tandem with the item directly below, for reasons indicated in the long accompanying note by me.

• “The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster” by Karl E. Weick, Administrative Science Quarterly vol. 38, no. 4 (December 1993). This brilliant academic essay/paper by a noted academic psychologist and organizational theorist uses the notorious 1949 Mann Gulch fire in Montana’s Helena National Forest—in which thirteen firefighters, including a dozen smokejumpers, lost their lives—to examine the ways in which chaos can erupt in the “sensemaking” function of organizations during times of acute crisis. The concept of sensemaking was introduced into the field of organizational studies by Weick himself to refer to the way people give meaning to their collective experiences. The collapse of this function can lead to a “cosmology episode”—a term also coined by Weick—in which, to quote Weick from the paper at hand, “people suddenly and deeply feel that the universe is no longer a rational, orderly system.” Weick goes on to point out that “what makes such an episode so shattering is that both the sense of what is occurring and the means to rebuild that sense collapse together. . . . [T]he orderliness of the universe is called into question because both understanding and procedures for sensemaking collapse together. People stop thinking and panic. . . . The mutual ties have ceased to exist, and a gigantic and senseless fear is set free. . . . The world rapidly shift[s] from a cosmos to chaos as it bec[omes] emptied of order and rationality.” For his primary source of specific information and reflection on the Mann Gulch event, Weick relies on Norman Maclean’s posthumously published Young Men and Fire (1992), in which Maclean, a native Montanan, tried to understand the meaning of this devastating event. Maclean spent well over a decade working on this book without feeling that he had successfully cracked the Mann Gulch event’s central mystery, leaving the thing unfinished when he died in 1990 at the age of 87. Kathryn Schulz very briefly notes the place of this project in Maclean’s overall life and career in her New Yorker essay listed above. For my money, a potent passage in Young Men and Fire that Weick quotes in his paper on the collapse of sensemaking sounds like it may have accomplished Maclean’s goal without his noticing it: “[R]eality almost anywhere [has] inherent in it the principle that little things suddenly and literally can become big as hell, the ordinary can suddenly become monstrous.” (It may not surprise you, my reader, to hear that this line of thought and this kind of language, especially as quoted in a paper by a noted scholar of organizational studies, deeply stimulates the heart of this particular religion-and-horror writer who also happens to have a Ph.D. in leadership studies, which is organizational studies’ academic first cousin.)

• “Multiple Worlds Vying to Exist: Philip K. Dick and Palestine” by Jonathan Lethem, The Paris Review, November 14, 2024

• “The Great Abandonment: What Happens to the Natural World When People Disappear?” by Tess McClure, The Guardian, November 28, 2024

• “Basements Are Scary” by

  Georgia B.
  , florilegia mea, November 24, 2024

• “It’s Not All about the Money: Why Meaning and Purpose Should Be at the Center of the College Experience” by Scott Carlson and Ned Laff, The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 15, 2024

• “In Defense of Imagination” by Rose Casey, Public Books, March 27, 2024

• “Why Universities Should Be More Like Monasteries” by Molly Worthen, The New York Times, May 25, 2023

• “The Call of the Weird: Last Gasp Apparitions” by Michael Ledger Thomas, London Review of Books, April 2024

• “When Reality Came Undone: 100 Years Ago, A Circle of Physicists Shook the Foundation of Science. It’s Still Trembling” by Philip Ball, Nautilus, August 24, 2024

• “Sorting the Self: Assessments and the Cult of Personality” by Christopher Yates, The Hedgehog Review, Spring 2024

• “What Will Become of American Civilization? Conspiracism and Hyper-Partisanship in America’s Fastest-Growing City” by George Packet, The Atlantic, June 10, 2024

• “Seeing Through Curative Fantasies” by

  Joan Tollifson
  , Right Now, Just as It Is, July 26, 2024

• “We Asked for It: The Politicization of Research, Hiring, and Teaching Made Professors Sitting Ducks,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 18, 2024

• “The Executable Dreamtime: Language, Magic, and the Universe as Code” by Mark Pesce, The Daily Grail, January 5, 2018

• “All Dreams Naturally Cease” by

  Shiv Sengupta
  , Dark Knight of the Soul, November 20, 2024

• “The Unconscious in Zen Buddhism” by D. T. Suzuki, in Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis by Erich Fromm, D. T. Suzuki, and Richard De Martino, 1960

What I Wrote in 2024

Books

• Writing at the Wellspring: Creativity as Refuge and Revelation for an Age of Upheaval. I have previously been using the subtitle “Creativity, Life Purpose, Nonduality, and the Daemon Muse” for this one. I spent the first half of this year realizing that I had the makings of a new book on my hands from previously written material, some of which I had published here. I devoted time and attention to the project intermittently. Then I spent most of the summer in a haze of two different illnesses that hit me successively, the first an unspecified digestive and overall systemic ailment that lasted for weeks, and the second my first bout with COVID-19, which knocked me clean off my feet. Somewhere in there, during the depths of my COVID experience, a veritable volcano of inspiration erupted, and the book created itself mostly within the span of a single month, from July to August. Then I ended up teaching a course for Weirdosphere that used this new work as one of the two primary texts, the other being my A Course in Demonic Creativity. The enthusiastic response from the eighty-plus students was bracing. As you know if you’ve been following along here at The Living Dark, for the past handful of months I have been serializing Writing at the Wellspring for paid subscribers while looking for an agent and/or publisher. Or actually, the latter activity has fallen recently into abeyance, even as I have assembled a list of several likely publisher prospects. Right now I’m waiting idly and, as it happens, rather contentedly for a new spark of inspiration to reignite my desire to find a publishing home for this book.

Most Popular Living Dark Posts

The following essays that I published here during 2024 were the most popular as judged by likes and comments—which I know are an incomplete metric since there are other measures of popularity, including the things that some of you have said to me privately about other essays that you found meaningful and impactful. Also see the note on the last item below.

• “What No Eye Has Seen or Screen Has Shown.” On spiritual sight in the age of saturation.

• “Writers: Embrace the Unknown.” On the creative miracle of submitting ourselves to an unknown fear.

• “When Science Meets the Supernatural.” On brains, dreams, and the boundaries of reality.

• “Art as Trap and Transcendence.” An autobiographical meditation on creativity and disillusionment.

• “The Devil’s Diagnosis of Disenchanted Modernity.” Cinematic reflections on our modern malaise.

• “Beyond the Matrix of Language.” On writing as a portal to a wider reality.

• “Why Ray Bradbury Still Haunts Me.” Whispers of October in a Fahrenheit 451 word.

• “The Deeper Magic of Reality.” On emergent phenomena, scientific reductionism, and the living mystery of everything.

• “The Consolation of No Exit.” On finding heaven in the middle of hell. This one is an interesting case study for illustrating the fact that the number of likes and/or comments isn’t always an accurate gauge of how many people found a given essay to be meaningful. Though its like-and-comment count is relatively low, this post resulted in more new subscribers signing up for The Living Dark than anything else that I published this year.

On Moving Forward into 2025

Now hear this: In 2025 I will not be continuing my regular schedule of publishing a new post every weekend. Or rather, I’ll use that pace and timing as a loose target. It has been a good discipline for me to follow such a schedule throughout the present year. It’s also time to shake it up and deliberately follow a more organic model for the next twelve months, with “organic” meaning a schedule at least partly dictated by whatever the natural rhythm of my creative relationship with my daemon muse turns out to be. I look forward to interacting with you here throughout the year.

More immediately, and as I mentioned at the top of this post, I’ll also be interested to hear about your own reading life and path during 2024, if you feel motivated to share it here in the comments.

Bonus: A Technique for Reading More in the New Year

If you’re like me, you frequently find that you become buried under a mounting (and even mountainous) backlog of compelling essays and papers that you’d like to read. Aside from the fact that you can simply and perhaps profitably choose to read less, here’s my new favorite technique for handling this issue:

I have started electronically printing/saving items of interest as PDFs. This retains nice page formatting with headings, pull quotes, and so on. I save them until I have a hundred or more pages batched. Then I combine them into a single pdf, to which I give the filename “Reading Digest” plus the date of creation. I transfer the file to an e-ink device, in my case a reMarkable 2. And voila, I have my own self-curated magazine of ideas and culture. Reading e-ink is a joy anyway, far better than backlit screens, and with my reMarkable I can highlight, annotate, and otherwise mark the texts to my heart’s content. I have been finding that I consistently read a thousand percent more of the items I want to read by using this approach. If it proves helpful you as well, I’d love to hear about it!

Warm regards,