Some books I read in 2024
I read 87 books in 2024. There are reviews of sixteen of them on this blog, including four books about books and eleven popular classics of wildly varying quality. Of the latter, my favourite new-to-me books were Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton; Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner; The Quiet American by Graham Greene; The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath; and My Ántonia by Willa Cather. (My least favourite was H. Rider Haggard's She) Just before New Year I posted a review of Ray Newman's excellent story collection Intervals of Darkness.
My major 2024 reading project was a little book called the Bible, which I read over several months in various translations, in particular the King James, NRSV, and Robert Alter. In typical fashion, I hadn't intended to read the whole thing when I blithely sat down one night to poke about in Genesis, but it's a very moreish book. Actually, that's not at all true - a lot of it is unbearably dull, not to mention morally repulsive, and I only got through it by sticking to a schedule. On the plus side, it's often very weird, and of course it's one of the foundational texts of world civilisation, so, you know, worth looking into.
I read six books by Ursula K. Le Guin, plus her "version" of the Tao Te Ching. The early trilogy of Hainish saga books - Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions - are entertaining and worth reading, but it was The Left Hand of Darkness and particularly The Dispossessed that converted me into a major Le Guinian. I also enjoyed her lighter, funnier, PKD-inspired novel The Lathe of Heaven.
I read several books by Junji Ito, the best of which was the classic spiral nightmare Uzumaki. Tomie and Gyo were also fun, but repetitive. Ito's talent is clearly better suited to short, sharp shocks: The Enigma of Amigara Fault, which is included as an extra in the Viz edition of Gyo, is considerably better, and scarier, than the main story. I didn't read as many comics as I would have liked, but I did finally get to Alan Moore's Miracleman and I started Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima's Lone Wolf and Cub saga.
Other fiction I enjoyed: Tayeb Salih's novel of post-colonial Sudan Season of Migration to the North (translated by Denys Johnson-Davies); Horace McCoy's bleak noir classic They Shoot Horses, Don't They?; and Percival Everett's highly unusual campus comedy/grief study/sort-of-thriller Telephone. I also reread Middlemarch and realised that I could probably spend the remainder of my life reading Middlemarch, on a continuous loop, and always find new things to delight in.
Non-fiction highlights include Midnight’s Furies by Nisid Haraji, a pacy and broad-strokes account of the 1947 partition of India; Lawrence Rees' concise The Holocaust; Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's somewhat dry but informative The Occult Roots of Nazism; and a reread of Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower, which remains a masterful, gut-punch of a book. I also enjoyed brain surgeon Henry Marsh's curmudgeonly memoir Do No Harm, while Gut by Giulia Enders (translated by David Shaw) was an unexpectedly fascinating exploration of that complex and troublesome organ.
Finally, two related books that held me entranced. Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain - written in the 1940s, published in the 1970s, and recently "rediscovered" - is a slim yet brimful book, a meditation on the Scottish Cairngorms written in ravishing, at times ecstatic prose. I immediately bought everything Shepherd published, which turns out to be precious little. The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane explicitly follows in Shepherd's footsteps, tracing various natural and man-made pathways across land, sea and sky. I have read Macfarlane's cultural history of mountaineering twice, and I'm not sure why it's taken me so long to explore more of his work, but I finally got there. There are plenty of writers doing this kind of hybridised, essayistic, post-Sebaldian writing, but few have Macfarlane's intelligence, learning, and grace, not to mention his way with a sentence.