Listen up! An audiobook of my 20 favorite essays from 2024

It's been an eventful, gratifying year. And I have some big plans for 2025.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

I have had an idea for a year-end post for several months, so naturally I waited until the final days of 2024 to pull it off.

But here it is: A best-of-the-year post, like you have probably seen a lot in the last week or two, with a twist.

There’s something new!

Instead of just making a list of my favorite essays of 2024, I decided to record them in audio form. The length is a little less than three hours, so you can think of it is somewhere between a long podcast and a short audiobook.

You’ll find the audio player embedded below, in addition to a track listing and, yes, links to the 20 selected essays in case you would rather just go back and read some of them.

Briefly, before that, I wanted to do two things: Offer a sincere thanks to all of you and give you a preview of what is to come in 2025.

The very first post on this site went up on Jan. 1, 2024. I didn’t really know what to expect, but it’s safe to say my squishy/modest expectations have been exceeded.

More than a thousand of you routinely read what I write. Several hundred of you are either free or paid subscribers. We’ve exchanged countless wonderful emails and texts about particularly resonant topics or passages.

So thank you. I would keep writing even if nobody was reading because this is fun and necessary for me. But readers like you make it even more special.

Second, I am planning to introduce some new features and paid subscriber benefits on the site in 2025. Among them:

• A regular podcast (frequency TBA), to which subscribers (free and paid) will have first access.

• Quarterly virtual writing workshops, with priority registration for paid subscribers.

• A quarterly book club, open to all subscribers, with paid subscribers having a chance to win a copy of the book.

• A monthly opportunity for paid subscribers to link to or share something they have created. It could be a link to your own writing, a podcast, art that you make, or really anything. (I am borrowing a variation on an excellent idea from Freddie deBoer’s site).

As I considered these things, my motivation went two places: Expanding the community on this site and offering perks beyond “I like you/your site and want to support you” to those of you who have become paid subscribers, even if I appreciate that you would subscribe for that single reason.

If you are not yet a subscriber, it’s a great time to become one! A portion of every paid subscription is donated to worthy causes; as a result, I was able to donate more than $500 in 2024 to various organizations, including the Multiple Sclerosis Society, ThinkSelf and Gamblers Anonymous.

If you already are a subscriber, Substack makes it easy to give The Friscalating Dusklight as a gift. Maybe you totally biffed it during the holidays and want to make it up to someone? Now is your chance.

But of course the main thing on this site is the writing. That will always be free to everyone.

If you read every single thing here in the last year, it added up to about 100,000 words.

Narrowing things down to my 20 favorite pieces wasn’t easy, but I actually enjoyed the process (not to mention it was necessary or I might still be recording the audio version deep into 2025 if I had tried to do all 60-plus essays).

I have some topics in mind for the next year already. And I was recently either gifted or cursed an idea in my head for another crack at a novel.

We’ll see. For now, here is my reading of those 20 essays (I compiled them in chronological order from the start of the year), with the track listing and links to the pieces below.

1. What are we doing here? Track starts at beginning.

2. What’s lost and found: The cat sweater story. Track starts 11:36.

3. The data says I'm at the peak of unhappiness, and I couldn't be happier. Track starts 20:47.

4. Conversations with a 4-year-old at bed time. Track starts 27:20.

5. The 'mid' life crisis: Zero, infinity and nothing in-between. Track starts 34:38.

6. I’m sorry, I forgot what I was going to say. Track starts 41:14.

7. In false spring, do you have a minute for lemonade. Track starts 49:00.

8. A short drive to a faraway place. Track starts 57:07.

9. Everything is great and nobody is OK. Track starts 1:05:23.

10. AI and the big hurry to make ourselves less useful. Track starts 1:12:08.

11. Why we left Minneapolis for the suburbs. Track starts 1:17:29.

12. The things we almost forgot. Track starts 1:34:34.

13. A complicated, love-hate relationship with WordleBot. Track starts 1:42:38.

14. An ode to the Minnesota State Fair. Track starts 1:52:32.

15. The apple and the tree. Track starts 2:02:12.

16. All your memes will come true. Track starts 2:11:01.

17. A day in the life of a year. Track starts 2:17:35.

18. The long, hard fall. Track starts 2:26:57.

19. The outsourcing of our American lives. Track starts 2:34:17.

20. Why can’t I say it if it’s true? Track starts 2:41:49.

Thank you again, and let’s all have the best 2025 possible!