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WHAT I READ IN 2024

This year I have read 79 books, the most since 2011. I was surprised; it didn’t feel like any more than normal. Though there was a Greek beach vacation in there where I was reading about a book a day, so perhaps that’s where the numbers come from.

In real life I read in 6 countries, but all in just the one year, of 2024. In reading life I went everywhere, Cairo in the 1950s, Polynesia with Captain Cook, medieval Norway, the Spanish Flu in Connecticut. Looking at this list, I realize what I read shapes what I think about to the point where I do sort of wonder who I’d be without it. Horrifying prospect.

Example, I can hardly look at a plate of food at the moment without thinking of William Woodruff’s memoir of his impoverished 1920s childhood, THE ROAD TO NABEND, in which he explained that they were so hungry that “all meals were our favourite meals.” I don’t think I’ve complained about a dinner since.

Best of the year this year: I have to give it up to Peter Carey’s THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG, a book about Australian outlaws that is a triumph of narrative voice; SEVENTEEN by Joe Gibson, a really sad memoir about a teacher grooming a male student, and the loss of his twenties to her narcissism; and PRAIRIE FIRES by Caroline Fraser, an unexpectedly wonderful biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder (a writer I don’t even care about). This is my first year ever I think where highlights were more non-fiction and memoir than fiction. Honourable mentions have to go to LOVE LESSONS by Joan Wyndham, astonishing diaries about a young woman’s sex life in the second world war, and don’t laugh, but to THE WOMAN IN ME by Britney Spears, a book that has left me amazed no one has gone to jail yet for what they did to her.

Here’s the list:

THE SINGULARITY IS NEARER by Ray Kurzweil
PRIVATE CITIZENS by Tony Tulathimutte
TROUBLES by JG Farrell
THE SEIGE OF KRISHNAPUR by JG Farrell
WIGS ON THE GREEN by Nancy Mitford
THE EMPEROR by Ryszard Kapuscinki
GERMINAL by Emile Zola
THE MAN OF PROPERTY by John Galsworthy
DINNER WITH VAMPIRES by Bethany Joy Lenz
TOM LAKE by Ann Pratchett
PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK by Joan Lindsay
WILD by Cheryl Strayed
INTERMEZZO by Sally Rooney
A CONSPIRACY OF PAPER by David Liss
THE MARS ROOM by Rachel Kushner
NEVER LET ME GO by Kazuo Ishiguro
THE STRANGER AT THE WEDDING by AE Gauntlett
LITTLE BASTARDS by Mildred Kadish
TOWELHEAD by Alicia Erian
THE DAIRIES OF MR LUCAS: NOTES FROM A LOST GAY LIFE edited by Hugo Greenhalgh
PRAIRIE FIRES: THE AMERICAN DREAMS OF LAURA INGALLS WILDER by Caroline Fraser
DOGGERLAND by Ben Smith
AN HONEST WOMAN: A MEMOIR OF LOVE AND SEX WORK by Charlotte Shane
NEVER SAW ME COMING by Tanya Smith

SHEEP’S CLOTHING by Celia Dale
LIVES OF GIRLS AND WOMEN by Alice Munro
ENEMY WOMEN by Paulette JilesTHE WIDE WIDE SEA by Hampton Sides
ORDINARY HUMAN FAILINGS by Megan Nolan
THE MINISTRY OF TIME by Kaliane Bradley
BANAL NIGHTMARE by Halle Butler
LONG ISLAND COMPROMISE by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
THE FUTURE by Naomi Alderman
THE ROAD TO NAB END by William Woodruff
THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI by Pierre Boulle
THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG by Peter Carey
THE FLATSHARE by Beth O’Leary
CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE by Johann Peter Eckermann
SEVENTEEN by Joe Gibson
ALL FOURS by Miranda July
GREEN DOT by Madeleine Gray
THE INHERITORS by William Golding
SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW by William Maxwell
SMALL FRY by Lisa Brennan-Jobs
PROMISE AT DAWN by Romain Gary
SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING by Alan Sillitoe
THE WALL by John Lanchester
FUNNY STORY by Emily Henry
MONEY by Martin Amis
YOU AND ME ON VACATION by Emily Henry
YOU, AGAIN by Kate Goldbeck
ADVENTURES IN MASHONALAND by Rose Blennerhassett and Lucy Sleeman
COLD CREMATORIUM by Jozsef Debreczeni
THE RECOLLECTIONS OF AN ELEPHANT HUNTER 1864-1875 by William Finaughty
SALLY IN RHODESIA by Sheila McDonald
A YEAR ON EARTH WITH MR HELL by Young Kim
HELP WANTED by Adelle Waldman
SUPER-INFINITE by Katherine Rundell
STRAIT IS THE GATE by Andre Gide
LOVE LESSONS and LOVE IS BLUE by Joan Wyndham
SALEM’S LOT by Stephen King
DIRTBAG MASSACHUSETTS by Isaac Fitzgerald
WEIRDO by Sarah Pascoe
THE MANDIBLES by Lionel Shriver
WITH LOVE, FROM COLD WORLD by Alicia Thompson
TRAVELS INTO THE INTERIOR OF AFRICA by Mungo Park
THE PUMPKIN EATER by Penelope Mortimer
CHARLOTTE GRAY by Sebastian Faulks
THE SUITCASE by Sergei Dovlatov
BEER IN THE SNOOKER CLUB by Waguih Ghali
THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS by William Maxwell
SOUTH RIDING by Winifred Holtby
AT FREDDIE’S by Penelope Fitzgerald
OLAV AUDUNSSON: VOWS by Sigrid Undset
THE WRONG KNICKERS by Bryony Gordon
THE WOMAN IN ME by Britney Spears
NORMAL WOMEN by Ainslie Hogarth
POOR THINGS by Alasdair Gray
THE TRIO by Johanna Hedman

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK by Joan Lindsay

The author described writing this book very quickly after a particularly vivid dream, and I totally get it.  It tells about some girls at an Australian boarding school in the late nineteenth century who go to a picnic at a local beauty spot.  Three of them plus a teacher go on a short walk, and SPOILER ALERT   only one of them returns. They are searched for, but never found.  That’s pretty much it.  

This sounds kind of annoying – you never find out what happened, it is like an open-ended mystery – but it is actually weirdly compelling, and the images have stuck with me for a long time since reading it.  Kind of like a dream. 

ORDINARY HUMAN FAILINGS by Megan Nolan

I enjoyed this author’s first book, ACTS OF DESPERATION, and read an interview with her where she denigrated it, saying this one – ORDINARY HUMAN FAILINGS – was in her opinion much better.  I am amazed.  ACTS OF DESPERATION was grippingly grim, but had a enjoyably comic energy and a general direction towards sanity.  ORDINARY HUMAN FAILINGS on the other hand is just grim.  Like, so grim it starts to feel kind of ridiculous.  It’s about child murder (beloved topic of UK cultural life), so obviously I did not expect it to be cheerful, but wow: every single person in it is a venal and depressing failure. I mean all of them.  From the damaged mother, to her brother, the tragic alcoholic, to the money-grubbing journalist who writes about them – they are all victims or perpetrators. The only person who actually tries to do something positive is the gran, but don’t worry, there is a long explanation of how she only does this because she was not loved enough as a child.  I mean, okay.  I just had to quit it. 

BANAL NIGHTMARE by Halle Butler

I liked this author’s last rage-filled book, THE NEW ME, and I like this one too. THE NEW ME was about an angry woman in Chicago who concludes she has wasted her twenties. BANAL NIGHMARE is about a pretty similar woman in her early thirties who has left Chicago to return to her hometown.

The main character is recovering from a break-up, and I guess the book functions as a prism for looking at the particular unhappiness that comes with deciding in early mid-life that you are going to have to start again. Every romantic relationship in the book is a mess, which makes it pretty depressing (and unlikely) reading. But I still enjoyed the miserable, defeated energy of the book.

ALL FOURS by Miranda July

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book about the menopause before, but here we are.  Enjoy this, the protagonist on her age, which is in many ways the central problem of the book:

“I was no closer to being sixty-five than twenty-five, but since time moved forward, not backward, sixty-five was tomorrow and twenty-five was moot.  I didn’t think a lot about death, but I was getting ready to.  I understood that death was coming and that all my current preoccupations were kind of naïve; I still operated as if I could win somehow.  Not the vast and total winning I had hoped for in the previous decade, but a last chance to get it together before winter came, my final season” 

‘The vast and total winning,’ we’ve all been there, LOL. 

She decides to go on a roadtrip from California to New York, which her husband thinks will be a good challenge for her.  About a half hour in, she checks into a motel and just impulsively decides to hang out and decorate the room.  She doesn’t tell her husband.  This part I loved.  The protagonist feels no need to explain or pathologize why she is doing it: she just follows her impulse. I found this wonderfully fun and free-ing.  She then SPOILER ALERT falls for a young guy who works at the local Hertz.  At this point, things get a bit more predictable, as we get into how she navigates having an open relationship.  I found this part a bit slow, maybe because it’s a story I feel I’ve heard a few too many times before.  Poly people are much like vegans in being overly willing to tell you all about it.   But even this was enlivened by the intense amount of menopause and more general midlife panic she weaves in.  It shows how few women have really been allowed to write across history, that this experience should be so rarely described.  I love the idea that it might be an opportunity to be more free, possibly even wildly more free.  Though I’m not sure I’m signing up for an affair with the car rental guy. 

SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW by William Maxwell

A few pages into this book, I started to wonder if I’d read something by this author before. And indeed I had, THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS, a memoir about the author’s mother dying of the Spanish Flu. What tipped me off was first the style, and second the fact that the narrator’s mother had just died of Spanish Flu.

Bizarrely, what the child narrator is narrating to us is a real-life murder from his home town. A man’s wife falls in love with his best friend, and leaves him in an ugly and very public divorce. He murders his friend, cuts off the corpse’s ear (?) and then drowns himself. The perspective changes from the child’s, to various of the adult’s, to a dog’s. The dog’s part is by far the saddest.

I admired this book greatly, but at the same time didn’t enjoy it. It was just kind of sad and I wasn’t sure what I gained from it.

PROMISE AT DAWN by Romain Gary

There are plenty of memoirs from people with daddy issues; here is one from someone with mummy issues. To give you a sense of the scale, please enjoy this section, which is where the book’s title comes from:

“In your mother’s love, life makes you a promise at the dawn of life that it will never keep.  . . You will go hungry to the end of your days.  Leftovers, cold tidbits, that’s what you will find in front of you at each new feast.   . . You will walk though the desert from mirage to mirage, and your thirst will remain such that you will become a drunkard, but each sweet gulp will only rekindle your longing for the one and only source. “

I have not Wikipedia-ed Gary, but I will be amazed if he has been married less than three times.  His mother is truly a titanic figure.  A penniless Jewish actress from Lithuania, she got pregnant outside of marriage, then drags herself and him across Eastern Europe for many years, determined that he will become a Frenchman, and not just a Frenchman, but a famous Frenchman in the best tradition of the nineteenth century novel: a famous artist (exact artform TBD), a decorated soldier, and a diplomat.  Incredibly, he is all those things, winning both the Prix Goncourt (best possible literary prize) and also the Croix De Guerre (major military medal). 

She is so sure of his destiny that I can only call her unhinged.  At one point, when the neighbours in their dodgy tenement in Poland get her in trouble with the landlord, she drags her son around to each one, haranguing them about how sorry they will be when this 9-year-old is an Ambassador.  Can you imagine: he has to go to school the next day with these people!  She is just utterly sure that his success will make up for all she has suffered.  He says:

“I had always known that my mission on earth was one of retribution; that I existed, as it were, only by proxy . . “

There is much to enjoy outside his mother.  At one point, he gives a little girl he has a crush on three apples, without ever having spoken to her, and then:

“She accepted my surrender as though it was the most natural thing in the world, and announced: ‘Janeck ate his whole stamp collection for me.’

Such was the beginning of my long martyrdom.  In the course of the next few days I ate for Valentine several handfuls of earthworms, her father’s collection of rare butterflies, a mouse, a good many decaying leaves, and, as a crowning achievement, I can say that at nine years of age . . . I took my place among the greatest lovers of all time and accomplished a deed of amorous prowess no man, to the best of my knowledge, has ever equaled.  I ate for my lady one of my rubber galoshes!”

I can’t even get into his time in the WWII AirForce, it being utterly hair-raising as he lays out how all his friends die in various crashes.  He also gives this awful snippet of the red-light district in Marrakesh, where he says it was not unusual for women to be subjected to a hundred men a day; and that “sometimes a girl, half-hysterical from over-work or hashish, would rush naked, screaming, into the alley .”  This is haunting, and I can only hope he is exaggerating.

SPOILER ALERT.  All through his three years in the war, he gets undated letters from his mother.  After the liberation, he goes to see her as quickly as he can, so she can see he is returning a second lieutenant, with a medal, and a book deal (i.e, he has finally succeeded, her life has meaning, etc). He finds she has been dead almost all the three years, and spent the last days of her life writing him hundreds of letters that could be sent on, so he wouldn’t know she was gone.

FUNNY STORY by Emily Henry

This is fun genre romance. I have never been much of a reader of genre fiction, but I like this lady Emily Henry. She writes quick, funny novels that make a vacation fly by. She is an enormous best seller, and I was interested to read how she thinks about the ‘romance genre’ tag. See below, from CBC. It is continually weird that somehow Stephen King (genre: thriller) is so much more respectable than any female genre writer I can think of

For Henry, it’s important to call herself a romance writer because she’s tired of people looking down on the genre and dismissing its value. 

“There is still a lot of snobbery around the genre and I find it really bizarre because it’s one of the very few genres that is so centered on women,” she says. “Obviously, it’s not just for or about women, but the authorship is dominated by women, the readership is dominated by women and I just don’t think it’s really a coincidence that it’s the genre that gets dismissed so readily…. Romance is so significant because it values women’s stories.”

MONEY by Martin Amis

This was one of the more famous books of the 1980s. I cannot say I am feeling it. It tells the story of an author whose book is being made into a movie. He has an alcohol problem and rolls joyfully/miserably through various excesses of his private and professional life. It is a novel of voice, the exuberant voice of the alcoholic, and I think we are supposed to be shocked and titillated by how transgressive he is. A woman at a bar is a ‘big bim,’ he has lots of thoughts on black New Yorkers, etc. I just found it kind of snore.

SIDE BAR: I am 100% sure that this author has daddy issues, just on general principles, because men like this always do. I note that Martin’s father, Kingsley Amis, was also an author and wrote the book LUCKY JIM, also a novel in the voice of a disillusioned man. This one, just as transgressive, is wonderful and heart-warming and made me feel free to hate my life. I am sure these two books are in some kind of dialogue, but can’t be bothered to Google to find out how.