2024 in Books

As in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, I logged the books I read. Here's the 2024 list, followed by some brief comments.

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1. Crossing to Safety — Wallace Stegner | 1.5
2. The Color of Money — Walter Tevis | 1.8
3. What the Best College Teachers Do — Ken Bain | 1.13
4. The White Lioness — Henning Mankell (Trans. Laurie Thompson) | 1.20
5. Sputnik Sweetheart — Haruki Murakami (Trans. Philip Gabriel) | 1.21
6. The Unlimited Dream Company — J.G. Ballard | 1.26
7. Grit — Angela Duckworth | 1.30
8. The Shallows — Matt Goldman | 2.3
9. A Dog in a Hat — Joe Parkin | 2.6
10. Never Let Me Go — Kazuo Ishiguro | 2.10
11. Mockingbird — Walter Tevis | 2.11
12. Dead West — Matt Goldman | 2.17
13. On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House — Peter Handke (Trans. Krishna Winston) | 2.19
14. Cities of the Plain — Cormac McCarthy | 2.20
15. Sovereign — C.J. Sansom | 3.8
16. Free Love — Tessa Hadley | 3.9
17. The Real Deal — Caitlin Devlin | 3.10
18. Very Good Jeeves — P.G. Wodehouse | 3.11
19. It Can’t Happen Here — Sinclair Lewis | 3.19
20. The Vulnerables — Sigrid Nunez | 3.21
21. Baby Steps Millionaires — Dave Ramsey | 3.28
22. Walking Practice — Dolki Min (Trans. Victoria Caudle) | 4.3
23. Kudos — Rachel Cusk | 4.22
24. A Little Life — Hanya Yanagihara | 4.22
25. The Natural — Bernard Malamud | 4.24
26. Kindred — Octavia E. Butler | 4.26
27. Children of God — Mary Doria Russell | 5.13
28. Open City — Teju Cole | 5.14
29. Chasing Shadows — Tom DeLonge and A.J. Hartley | 5.20
30. Thank You, Jeeves — P.G. Wodehouse | 5.21
31. China Dream — Ma Jian (Trans. Flora Drew) | 5.27
32. A Fire Within — Tom DeLonge and A.J. Hartley | 5.31
33. Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart — Carrot Quinn | 6.10
34. The Secret Garden — Frances Hodgson Burnett | 6.13
35. Death Without Company — Craig Johnson | 6.17
36. The Road — Cormac McCarthy | 6.21
37. The Duke and I — Julia Quinn | 6.24
38. The Bear — Andrew Krivak | 6.25
39. Kraken — China Miéville | 6.28
40. Altered Carbon — Richard K. Morgan | 7.4
41. Norwegian Wood — Haruki Murakami (Trans. Jay Rubin) | 7.4
42. No Country for Old Men — Cormac McCarthy | 7.8
43. Pushing Ice — Alastair Reynolds | 7.13
44. The Universal Baseball Association — Robert Coover | 7.15
45. Bookshelf — Lydia Pyne | 7.16
46. Harrow — Joy Williams | 7.17
47. Kindness Goes Unpunished — Craig Johnson | 7.18
48. All Systems Red — Martha Wells | 7.20
49. Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft — Janet Burroway | 8.6
50. Blue Ruin — Hari Kunzru | 8.7
51. Master and Commander — Patrick O’Brian | 8.11
52. Artificial Condition — Martha Wells | 8.12
53. Rogue Protocol — Martha Wells | 8.14
54. A Darker Shade of Magic — V.E. Schwab | 8.21
55. Exit Strategy — Martha Wells | 8.22
56. From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction — Robert Olen Butler | 8.25
57. Double Whammy — Carl Hiaasen | 9.2
58. A German Requiem — Philip Kerr | 9.13
59. Network Effect — Martha Wells | 9.14
60. Dialogue — Robert McKee | 9.22
61. Hummeldumm — Tommy Jaud | 9.22
62. Something Fresh — P.G. Wodehouse | 9.28
63. Things I Don’t Want to Know — Deborah Levy | 9.30
64. Fugitive Telemetry — Martha Wells | 10.4
65. The Memory Police — Yōko Ogawa (Trans. Stephen Snyder) | 10.5
66. Another Man‘s Moccasins — Craig Johnson | 10.8
67. The Hollow Land — Jane Gardam | 10.18
68. A Short History of Russia — Mark Galeotti | 10.18
69. Native Tongue — Carl Hiaasen | 10.21
70. The Year of Less — Cait Flanders | 11.5
71. The Elementary Particles — Michel Houellebecq (Trans. Frank Wynne) | 11.16
72. A Walker in the City — Alfred Kazin | 11.20
73. Nick & Norah‘s Infinite Playlist — Rachel Cohn and David Levithan | 11.27
74. Broken Angels — Richard K. Morgan | 11.27
75. Thinking in Bets — Annie Duke | 12.12
76. 11/22/63 — Stephen King | 12.13
77. Welcome to America — Linda Boström Knausgård (Trans. Martin Aitkin) | 12.21
78. Stormy Weather — Carl Hiaasen | 12.24
79. Fathers and Sons — Ivan Turgenev (Trans. Constance Clara Garnett) | 12.28
80. Dandelion Wine — Ray Bradbury | 12.31

Free Love is fantastic. Hadley is expert at personification, deftly matching the mundane things in a character’s environment to their mood and psychological state. The book also does what novels do better than any other art form: distill the bewildering complexity of cultural and social change so that we can grasp it and follow it through the ordinary lives of characters.

On April 8th (a Monday), I sent this link to my friend Monty, From the kindle community on Reddit: What book did this to you? and the message: “I’m about 60% through this one atm." The link takes you to a video of a young woman reading the final pages of A Little Life on a train, stifling tears. Here’s the exchange from there:

• Monty: Is it getting to you, too?
• Me: Not in that way, no. But I can imagine some endings that might be tough.
• Me: That book is pretty polarizing in the bookish communities I follow on Reddit.
• Monty: Why? And would you recommend my reading it?
• Me: Because it deals with the complexity of abuse in a way only a novel can, which is to say: in detail, in the everyday decisions and affects and moods that make a life.
  • For that reason, many people love the book. For that reason, many people feel it’s gratuitous (“torture porn” is a common complaint).
  • If you like things that plumb the delicate and bewildering complexity of human existence, it’s worth reading. If you like things that provide no easy answers for the central problems of identity, subjectivity, and situatedness, it’s worth reading.
  • Can’t recommend it because I haven’t finished it.
• Then I added: (Think I’ll use this exchange when I write up this year’s books list!)

I finished it in late April. Would I recommend it? See the above exchange.

My second time through The Road. This is, in part, about how two people can have wildly different understandings of empirical reality. The entire cultural and ideological edifice of the man‘s reality moves with him into an upside down world, but the boy has few such conceptions and so his understanding of reality is completely different. This is pronounced in the exchange with the old man (“Eli“) and when they subsequently find the diesel locomotive and train. The boy lacks understanding of even the sounds it could make. “What you put in your head is there forever“ is a mantra the man gives the boy. But there are shared realities, too: the charred, gutted human infant roasting on a spit, the horror plain to them both, a different order of reality for the others along the road. The whole discussion of stories at the end illustrates and extends this theme.

By the end of Kraken, the keen reader will understand that the book is about how writing and words and metaphors literally create the world, create worlds. If you'd like to do a little self-study on the relationships between language, truths, and realities (what we call "epistemic rhetoric" in my line of work), I'd suggest reading Dark Eden (a novel), then Sorting Things Out (sociology), then Kraken.

I'd like to read your 2024 list, if you have one. Find me on Instagram (@bmcnely) and share!