Another year in reading is coming to a close. There were some wonderful discoveries, most especially The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra, an incredible novel that is a collection of interconnected short stories adding up to a big picture-- there are two hubs in the book, one a Siberian mining town in the far north, the other an unremarkable 19th century painting by a little-known Chechen. Not only was its intricate structure engrossing, but the prose was sublime.
The other new-to-me novel I relished was The Sympathizer, about a Vietnamese spy living in LA in the 1970s. It's worth a read just for the first 100 pages and the fall of Saigon.
David Mitchell's Ghostwritten was a nice experiment. His first novel shows he had the chops to put together his eventual magnum opus, Cloud Atlas. And I really liked Mitchell's latest novel, Utopia Avenue, about late 60s London's rock scene. (His Japanese novel number9dream was pretty bad, but I tip my hat for having the chutzpah to write a Japanese character's story).
There was only one true disappointment, Elena Ferrente's My Brilliant Friend. This was actually listed in the New York Times as the #1 novel of the 21st century. That is an abominable selection. The story of a girl coming of age in Naples in the 1950s is as boring as any book I've read the last five years. And the prose is insipid and lazy. I'm flabbergasted and confused at the way critics approach literature today. Just skip this book, please.
Interesting that I read nearly the same number of books in 2024 as I did in 2023, 31 this year, compared to 30 last year. 21 of the books were novels, eight were nonfiction, two poetry. Nearly half of the books read in 2024 were rereads (14 in all, 12 of them novels, one a history of the spice trade to prep for my summer trip to Java, Indonesia, the other a volume of Bukowski poetry). Only one book read this year was on the kindle (The Sympathizer) and I lost the kindle returning from the Middle East.
Despite this being a presidential year and there were many temptations to deep-dive the news, I abstained enough to get long-form reading done. With the circus back in the White House, hopefully, I'll be able to remain aloof from the clickbait disasters we have coming our way. Can't say enough how much more fulfilling my days are reading novels instead of the news.
I'm not sure how many new books I will be able to get through in 2025. I'd like to finally finish David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Robert Caro's The Power Broker and Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Those three together could take six months. They are not casual reads. They are ambitions.
Here are the books read in 2024. Those with an * designate a reread.
