Books I Read in 2024: Your Money Or Your Life

I didn’t like Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence and mostly skimmed it. Feels dated. Not the way my brain works. Hard pass.

Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life

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Books I Read in 2024: Finding Your Own North Star

Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live by Martha Beck was recommended to me by a friend. I liked this book. The author’s tone is casual and funny, and she delivers a lot of relatable anecdotes. Primarily, it’s about getting The Person You Think You Should Be out of the way of The Person You Really Are. This book got me thinking more about what I want to do, not what I think I’m supposed to do, and that’s a win in my book.

Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life

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Books I Read in 2024: Atomic Habits

My god, how did Atomic Habits by James Clear sell over 15 million copies? I really don’t like books like this. A bunch of research gleaned from other sources compiled together with a theory of how you can live your life better without going to therapy. If you think buying a book about habits will solve all your problems, you are sorely mistaken. Pretending humans are animals that can be trained, not intuitive beings, is pointless.

Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life

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Books I Read in 2024: The Money Shot

My dead mother would have called this play in the form of a book “ugly.” I picked up a copy of Neil LaBute’s The Money Shot: A Play because of the subject matter and because I have liked a couple of his movies: In the Company of Men, Your Friends & Neighbors. The premise of The Money Shot is simple. Two A-list stars looking to make a hit movie decide to co-star in a movie in which they will have actual sex. The entire play involves the two stars and their romantic partners hashing out the details—(seemingly, the characters stand in as symbols for LaBute’s barely containable rage towards the Hollywood industrial complex that didn’t recognize him as the genius he perceives himself to be)—and bantering endlessly in dumb and crude ways. This insipid, go-nowhere work is a garbage can into which LaBute dumped the intense misogyny and homophobia with which he must wrestle with containing every day. Maybe if I saw the play performed I’d like it. But probably not.

Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life

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Books I Read in 2024: An Honest Woman

I really loved Charlotte Shane’s new memoir, An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Beautifully written and poignantly rendered, it’s an evocative recounting of her life story; how she got into sex work; what she learned about men, sex, and herself along the way; and what it’s like to navigate that space and ultimately fall in love. It’s Pretty Woman without all the bullshit. I highly recommend it.

Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life

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Books I Read in 2024: End of Active Service

Have you read Eat the Apple? It’s a memoir by my friend Matt Young. It’s a wildly inventive memoir-ish recounting of his days as a Marine in the Iraq War. Now Matt has published a novel: End of Active Service. It’s an alarmingly intimate tour through the mind of a man who has returned from war—but the war rages on inside of him. It’s a really beautiful book about love, letting go, and starting over. I highly recommend it.

Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life

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Books I Read in 2024: The Valley

The Valley by Larry Sultan is one of my favorite photography books. A gorgeous, evocative, moving chronicle of life in the San Fernando Valley's adult movie industry by the late great Larry Sultan. Includes a front of the book essay by Sultan that interweaves his youth in the Valley and being on the sets of adult movies.

Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life

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Books I Read in 2024: Big Magic

I really disliked Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert. I spent a fair amount as I read it wondering why exactly I disliked it so much. Towards the end, I realized my loathing was due to its toxic positivity. While the book lacks any novel insights, or deep ones for that matter, what I find most repellent is how it boils down to a series of upbeatisms that trade in unreality. Just keep going! Just believe in yourself! Just ignore the critical voices! The whole thing just rings false. Anyway, I do not recommend this book.

Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life

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Bad Behavior

If you’re looking for something compelling and quirky to watch, I recommend “Bad Behavior.” It stars Jennifer Connelly, Ben Whishaw, and Alice Englert, who is the writer / director and Jane Campion’s daughter. The story concerns itself with a conflicted mother, her equally conflicted daughter, and what happens when you lose it at a semi-silent retreat. Connelly’s performance is a marvel. If you like stupid, you won’t like this movie.

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Books I Read in 2024: The Crying of Lot 49

I could make neither heads nor tails of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. It’s not like I don’t like literary experimentalism. I mean, I read Ulysses twice and cite it among my favorite books. But this book by Pynchon was beyond my grasp. The only part of it I liked was the part that took place in my hometown of Berkeley. From what I’ve read, Pynchon didn’t think much of this novella either so we’re aligned in that regard.

Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life

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Woman Rewatches Man Bites Dog

I wrote something for HILOBROW: “Repo Your Enthusiasm (18): Man Bites Dog.” Give it a read and share it too.

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Books I Read in 2024: My Friend Dahmer

I really enjoyed Derf Backderf’s graphic novel, My Friend Dahmer. It’s about the author’s high school relationship with the guy who would become America’s most notorious serial killer. Creepy, suspenseful, voyeuristic, savage, and peculiar, it raises interesting questions about how things might have turned out differently if you’d lived your life another way and didn’t end up murdering and eating other people.

Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life

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Books I Read in 2024: I Hate Men

I bought this book because I was in Berkeley, my hometown, and I thought it would be funny to buy a book called I Hate Men in Berkeley. The book, authored by Pauline Harmange, is thin, both physically and in its content. I don’t know why the book got sort of attempted banned, since it’s mostly the not actually very radical or provocative musings of a woman not living the life she claims to exalt. Do not recommend.

Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life

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Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade

Last year I realized I’d read, like, no books, so I thought maybe this year I would read a few. To start, I read the incredible Victory Parade by Leela Corman. You should buy it and read it. Here’s my Amazon review:

This book is an absolute masterpiece. It's an electric, searing, beyond Spiegelman's Maus anatomical and artistic investigation of the twin traumas of war and violence, the nightmares that haunt survivors' waking and sleeping lives, and the banality of evil's horrifying consequences to the human soul. I read about this book in the Washington Post and read it in one day (i had to take a few breaks because it's so powerful). I can't recommend Victory Parade enough. It should win all the prizes and praises. Congrats to Leela.

Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life

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Data Baby Reviewed in The Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism

“Susannah Breslin was indeed a data baby — twice, even. And her second time, she flaunts the role, resisting its implications and asserting her own control over it.” Read the rest of this insightful review of my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, in The Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism.

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Data Baby Is One of Five Books' Notable Psychology and Self-Help Books of 2023

“In Data Baby, Breslin reflects on her experiences: How much of her present was predicted by her past? How much of her future has been pre-ordained? How much has all of ours?” Read Five Books’ recommendation of Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment in “Notable Psychology and Self-Help Books of 2023.”

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Data Baby Reviewed in The Globe and Mail

“If, as Socrates contended, ‘the unexamined life is not worth living,’ then Breslin is living hers to the fullest. Lucky for us, she’s written a thought-provoking, ridiculously propulsive book about it.” Read the rest of this excellent review of my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, in The Globe and Mail.

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Data Baby Reviewed on CyberNews

“Ultimately, Data Baby serves as a thought-provoking commentary on the modern reality of constant surveillance and the ways in which our lives and choices are influenced by those who observe us, wielding power through the information they gather.” Read the rest of the review of my book on CyberNews.

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Data Baby Is Here

Today is pub day for my memoir, DATA BABY: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called it "fascinating" and "gripping stuff.” Kirkus Reviews deemed it "An intelligently provocative memoir and investigation.” Available everywhere fine books about being a human lab rat are sold.

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Data Baby Gets a Starred Review in Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly gives DATA BABY: My Life in a Psychological Experiment a starred review: “Unpicking thorny questions about determinism and the ethics of human experimentation, Breslin attacks her subject with verve and wit, resisting woe-is-me solipsism without defanging her critiques of the study that rocked her life. It’s gripping stuff.” Read the rest HERE. Pre-order a copy of my memoir from your favorite retailer HERE.

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