What I Read in 2024
+ Reading/writing plans for 2025
2024 was an eventful year. I had a few wins—I progressed in my career, I grew as a father, I (slightly) expanded my social circle, I got engaged, I moved into a new house—but I also had many losses, including the untimely death of a close friend. It certainly wasn’t an easy year, but I’m sure I’ll eventually look back on it as a particularly important and memorable one. If nothing else, I confirmed that my life of being a 20-something postgraduate slacker is now well-and-truly over (and good riddance!).
It was an interesting year for me on Substack, too. Mind & Mythos expanded its readership, Essay Club became a regular feature of the blog, I posted zero fiction despite promising more, and I started (and later deleted) a poetry ‘Stack. I also posted a handful of standalone essays throughout the year—
—and I found that writing these tended to be a smoother, more enjoyable process compared to writing serialised posts (e.g., The Stories We Tell). Standalone essays typically take me far less time to write, and they don’t require as much research or grand theorising. I want to write more of these in 2025, get better at them, and in the long run, reach a happy medium between the two formats. My 2023 essay In Defence of Beauty is a decent example of what I’m aiming for. I think it strikes the right balance between personal opinion, scholarly research, and philosophical speculation. In 2025, My goal is to write approximately one standalone essay per month—but, you know, we’ll see how things pan out.
I read a lot more in 2024. I began the year with a goal—familiarise myself with the Arthurian legends and develop an understanding of their mythological and psychological significance—and while I didn’t read as much Arthuriana as I originally planned, I can confidently say that I’m now on the path. This year I read Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Tolkien’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, some of Chretien de Troyes’ Arthurian Romances, and several books on the cultural and psychological interpretation of myth (Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return, Jung’s Man and His Symbols, Campbell’s Romance of the Grail). I also listened to Prof. Dorsey Armstrong’s lecture series on the history and legends of King Arthur, which has given me a solid foundation upon which to grow my knowledge of Arthur and his knights.
What have I learned so far? Firstly, there is no definitive text or set of texts that one can read to get the ‘correct’ version of the tale. Certain characters and narrative elements have been present from the start, but the earliest Arthurian stories were written around 1500 years ago, so there has naturally been some narrative development in the centuries since (e.g., Merlin and Lancelot only became key players around 900 years ago). Even so, certain works have more historic and literary value than others, and these naturally form the core of a loose Arthurian canon. Malory’s Le Morte d'Arthur and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival are two important canonical texts, and I would recommend these to anyone who is exploring this topic for the first time (though you’ll note that I did not do this myself—woops).
I also learned that, despite their various origins, these stories all seem to converge on a few key themes and narrative elements that are distinctly Arthurian. Arthur’s knights are loyal, courageous (often absurdly so), hold themselves to a strict code of chivalry, fight to defend their own and others’ honour, and exemplify Christian virtues such as faith, hope, charity, and chastity (some better than others). Arthurian stories follow certain narrative patterns, including the seeking of opportunities to prove one’s honour and prowess, professional and religious initiation, personal transformation, the overcoming of adversity and uncertainty, noblesse oblige, and the negotiation of gender roles in medieval Christian society. I will have a lot more to say on these topics in future posts, so stay tuned if this interests you.
I would have read more Arthurian stories in 2024 had I not joined a classic book club earlier in the year. This is not a complaint! This allowed me to read, for the first time, Camus’ The Stranger, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground, Kafka’s The Trial, T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and Nabokov’s The Master and Margarita. These are all incredible and important works—I’d recommend them all—but For Whom the Bell Tolls, Four Quartets, and The Master and Margarita were the works that impressed me most. I’ve been thinking a lot about Christianity recently, so I suspect that the treatment of religion in these stories was a big factor in my enjoyment of them. For perhaps the same reason, I found The Stranger and The Trial to be less interesting. It may be a shallow perspective, but I feel like I’ve moved beyond the absurdist and nihilistic ideas explored in these novels, so there wasn’t much for me to take from them. I might have enjoyed them more if I had read them in my late teens/early 20s—perhaps I’ll enjoy them more if I re-read them later in life.
There were a few other books that grabbed my attention in 2024. Most importantly, I re-read two great works of Stoic philosophy: Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and Epictetus’ Enchiridion. Meditations is the one that everybody knows, but I’ve always found Epictetus’ approach to be more enjoyable. Epictetus has a hot-tempered, ‘old man yells at cloud’ style of teaching, which is refreshing compared to Aurelius’ more serious approach. On Stoicism itself I don’t have too much to say right now—but I foresee a future essay on the connection between Stoicism and contemporary psychotherapeutic approaches, and I would really like to explore the underappreciated topic of Stoic metaphysics one day.
Looking Ahead
What can readers expect from Mind & Mythos in 2025?
If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know that I post regular ‘personal updates’ in which I discuss recent personal events, writing updates, progress toward various goals, and my recent reads. This post is the final personal update for 2024, and it looks different to the usual update post for a reason—it’s a sign of things to come. In 2025, I’ll be replacing the quarterly personal update post with a quarterly ‘what I’ve been reading’-style post. In these posts I plan to discuss, in a general way, various quotes and ideas that caught my interest while reading in the preceding months. I’ve yet to determine the exact style and format of these posts, but I think the general idea is something that will be more interesting to me (and hopefully all of you) than the occasional “I didn’t exercise again” update.
So—as we enter 2025, here’s how Mind & Mythos will look month-to-month:
One original essay per month (mostly standalones, but I still have a series to finish)
Essay Club once per month (including a live video chat)
Quarterly ‘what I’ve been reading’-style posts, which will take the place of the standalone essay for that month
If we’re lucky, maybe some poetry or fiction at some point…
Can I do all of this? Let’s find out together. See you next weekend for Essay Club!
- Dan
Reading 2024 Summary
Completed:
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind [audiobook]
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Dorsey Armstrong, King Arthur: History and Legend [The Great Courses audiobook/lecture series]
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King
J. R. R. Tolkien (translator), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Albert Camus, The Stranger
John Whitworth, Writing Poetry
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return
Epictetus, The Enchiridion
Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom [audiobook]
Current reads:
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: 235/503 pages read
Carl G. Jung, Man and His Symbols: 186/387 pages read
Tom Holland, Dominion [Audiobook]: In progress
Vladimir Nabokov, The Master and Margarita: In progress
Chretien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances:
Erec and Enide: Completed
Cliges: Not started
The Knight of the Cart (Lancelot): Not started
The Knight with the Lion (Yvain): Not started
The Story of the Grail (Perceval): In progress
Joseph Campbell, Romance of the Grail: 95/233 pages read
Numa de Coulanges, The Ancient City: 70/323 pages read.
Note that the ‘in progress’ label has been used for certain books that are currently in storage, as was unable to access these for a more specific progress update.
