Story joy 2024

My year in books

In 2024 I read 64 books. I’ve cobbled together my reviews of a good portion of them below, in case you’re book-curious too. :)

Top five

It was a decent year of reading, but with few clear standouts. If you’re into favorites, here’s a shot at my top five, arguably the books that I enjoyed the most or will stay with me the longest. I’ve stuck the individual reviews in other categories.

• Letters to a young poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

• The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

• Emma by Jane Austen

• North Woods by Daniel Mason

• Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Solid rereads

I reread more books this year than I have since childhood. It was very rewarding—maybe I’ve been reconverted to rereading.

The Cromwell Trilogy by Hilary Mantel

I reread this masterwork over the course of the year via the slow read with

Footnotes and Tangents

. How could I not?

Some notes: Relentlessly masterful, gorgeous language: intrigue + memory turned poetry. Despite the intricate—exquisite—sensory and interpersonal detail, not a wasted or a cheap word, and despite the length, no lack of subtle structure. Masterful interweaving and reweaving of images; vivid and often complex characters, especially Thomas Cromwell, whom Mantel’s done an impressive job making into a protagonist; immediacy of the historical figures and setting—they don’t feel antiquated, even though their context is so different. They’re foreign, but three-dimensional and entirely recognizable.

On this reread, I appreciated how Cromwell carries his memories and values and failings through his peak and fall in such a painfully lifelike way, and how closely we’re woven into his mind. We are he.

Also, all the ghosts.

The works of Jane Austen

This was such a delight. Rereading Austen was especially enlightening for the volumes I hadn’t read since high school, Emma and Sense and Sensibility. Don't get me wrong, my palate was pretty refined for a high schooler (and I certainly loved Pride and Prejudice at the time), but I suppose I was looking for plot in a way that the gentle irony and superb character sketches and skewers didn't quite match; now, I relish them. And there are lovely character arcs and a gratifying, light-touch romance to boot. Reading Sense and Sensibility, Austen's earliest, and Emma, published near the end of her life, back to back was also interesting: Emma is more assured, tighter, funnier. In fact, it moved from near the bottom to the top of my Austen rankings. But S&S was neverthless a treat, as were they all.

Biggest undertaking

Reading The Magic Mountain felt a bit like hiking a mountain in patchy mist, impossible to see the mountain itself beyond the closest slope, with occasional glimpses of the surrounding vista; sometimes lost, sometimes entranced, always aware that it’s an Important Mountain, even if you never quite reach the summit, because that wasn’t the point.

This long-haul consists of roughly three alternating modes: 1) realist set pieces describing life in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the first decades of the 1900s; 2) lengthy philosophical monologues and debates pitched between characters; and 3) fever dreams, both literal and metaphysical. Hans Castorp, who comes to visit and stays seven years, gradually giving himself over to the mountain outside of time, is the thread weaving through them all. The book is saturated with allusion and a complex political-cultural milieu that is often beyond me, a 21st-century American, and yet simultaneously feels rivetingly relevant.

Incidentally, it was a delightful serendipity to pick this up two weeks before visiting its setting, Davos, Switzerland, including one of the iconic sanatoriums there. I still plan to write a post here integrating this visit with more reflections on the book.

Full review here.

Most transcendent

Ah, Rilke, what a way with words you have, and not just words, but feeling and sense of self, which together round out into the kind of metaphysical resonance I normally associate with scripture. It's stunning to me that Rilke wrote these letters when he was around my age (late twenties); they have the weight and assurance-yet-humility of a much more experienced person. Above all, Rilke is serious. Yet Rilke's gentle references to his own struggles with his development¹ tip us off that he's not writing from a place of fully-received answers (i.e., he's still living his questions). By the last few letters I felt more of a sense of searching, as if he was writing circles around the themes he was continually revisting in his own life, knocking to see if they were sound.

Some of those themes:

• Everything is gestation: let yourself and your creativity unfold with patience and without too much external force.

• Embrace your inner introvert; solitude is necesary and great (especially if difficult) and the ultimate way to truth and art.

• Find beauty in the everyday and insignificant, in nature and objects

• Dealing with the cramping of professions and society

• The beauty of beginnings and beginner's mind

• Ancestors, being part of a chain of experience and begetting

Literary treats of storytelling

North Woods by Daniel Mason

“The only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.”

In a parallel universe there’s a version of this book that’s shorter, more symmetrical and evenly paced, with every story as taut as the paciest chapters in our version, but I’m not sure it would be the same book. The loose, rambly, sometimes indulgent storytelling is part of its character, just like the messy history of its patch of land and cross section of lives. Alongside the lyrical flights of ecological fancy and passion, the delicious streak of supernatural that somehow makes the book even earthier, and the hearty human (or not) helpings of love, lust, loneliness, aging, and death. And oh the apples, beetles, trees, fungi, unseen stalking panther…

Good option if you’re looking for a less political and pessimistic take on the themes of The Overstory, or a more varied and impressionistic multi-generational memory-artifact story than Cloud Cuckoo Land, with hints of Wallace Stegner.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

It’s a bit strange to call this a delightful romp given the heaviness of some of the subject matter—poverty, drug addiction, abuse—but the same could be said about Dickens. You don’t have to have read David Copperfield to enjoy this book, but it’s overflowing with easter eggs and clever spins on the source material, while having its own deep heart and distinctive narrative voice. Probably Kingsolver’s best recent novel.

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

A gently quirky community story that, while pulling no punches, is more about hope than suffering. What's fascinating to me about this book is how it sidesteps conventional sources of tension and plotting, even while lightly threading through those very tropes. It could have been a courtroom-style drama; a gritty reckoning with poverty, racism, and abuse; a sticky web of love triangles and retribution; a haunting wreaking havoc on the living. There are elements of all of these stories, but they're held loosely within the fabric of a community bonded by love and tradition, and the truly dark and horrific undercurrents of their lives are overpowered in the narrative by the straightforward, often humorous details of living. In other words, the story of trying to save a community is the community itself.²

Full review here.

Pretty Magical

Harry Potter et l’ecole des sorciers by JK Rowling

translated by Jean-François Ménard

This was French practice via audiobook which means I missed things (still working on the thorough-but-slow printed read), but was pleased to find that I was never totally lost (it helps I read the book in English at least 11 times between the ages of 7 and 14). I don’t love the translation, to be honest. The French is often more roundabout than it needs to be and it’s probably impossible to capture Rowling’s idiomatically clever narrative voice. But it’s still a fun way to practice.

Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor

Here is worldbuilding as poetry, and a story that immediately got its claws in me; emotion fused with whimsy; constantly unfolding and heightening mystery. While the prose was robust and beautiful, the book’s YA did start to show in heavy-handed character exposition and corny dialogue (some of my biggest pet peeves). But as a compelling, imaginative read, it overcame those weaknesses for me. (The sequel, sadly, did not live up to this standard.)

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K LeGuin

More worldbuilding as poetry, with overtones of fable, an archetypal spine, and the honor of having pioneered the children’s fanatasy genre. Strong nature vibes.

“It was only the dumb instinctive wisdom of the beast who licks his hurt companion to comfort him: And yet in that wisdom, Ged saw something akin to his own power, something that went as deep as wizardry. From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not. And in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.”

The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart

A poetic, historically rich and obviously fanciful retelling of Merlin’s role in the Arthurian legends. The potent presence of 5th (?) century Britain, with its Roman iteration still echoing while Bretons, Cornish, Welsh, and other tribal kingdoms unite against Saxons and their allies under the Pendragons, with characters traversing the whole map from Stonehenge to York to Tintagel, was thrilling—at least if you have a sense for that geography already, otherwise it’s head-spinning. Above all, it helped me appreciate the vividness of this proflic legendarium that has been treasured for so many centuries, and makes me want to read the source material (Geoffrey of Monmouth). Recommended for Mantel fans.

Full review here.

Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M Boston

Truly lovely, saturated with cozy British creatures, ghosts, landscape, architecture and tangible echoes of history, written in singing prose and boyish energy and the poignant yearning for magic and companionship so familiar from childhood. Also Christmas. I was frequently stopped in my tracks by passages like this:

“He heard the final syllable of Toby’s voice slipping in a whisper down the wall from the roof of the east end where he stood himself. It was queer to think of it traveling silently like a butterfly across the immense length of the honeycombed vaulting to fold its wings and drop there in a half-breath of sound to his ear.”

Grabs you by the collar

The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

My response to this book was visceral, and has come in waves. I can’t say how long I’ll still be chewing on the story and my own reactions to it, but I think it will remain a touchpoint.

This book isn’t post-apocalyptic, it’s mid-apocalyptic. There hasn’t been any sudden collapse, only a (relatively) gradual, still unfolding decline. The seeds of this decline—economic disparity, climate change, water and resource shortages, racial strife, the desperation of poverty, and unscrupulous corporations and politicians—are so starkly germinated in our current world that it’s impossible to separate yourself from the picture Butler paints of 2024, even if the extremes of it are not (yet) arrived—at least not where I live, perhaps not where you live, at least not in our circles.

Full review here. (There are mild spoilers.)

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Oof. So good. Every character is fully alive, and as Morrison described her intent to be, their complexity creates a scaffolding for the total vulnerability at the center of the story, Pecola. I don’t know if I’ve read a book with quite the same structure, a first person narrative threading through with feistiness and hardscrabble love as a foil to the disintegration of Pecola’s family and life, while only occupying a small portion of the narrative. But even the disintegrating characters are rich with detail and personality, or at least story.

Erasure by Percival Everett

The overriding quality of this book is meta-ness. In the midst of an otherwise rather straightforward, character-driven story with all the pathos of family tensions and love and grief and questions of identity, the main character, an author resembling Percival Everett, inserts (or does Everett?) excerpts from his eccentric projects and experimental novels, explanation-free. One of these is, of course, the central artifact on which the plot turns, the novel within the novel, a parody of the reductive, fetishizing ghetto lit that he sees dominating the publishing industry.

The ferocity of his satire, while justified in many ways, is delivered by a flawed, unreliable narrator whose hot takes reveal his own subjectiveness as much as anything about the objective world. He is inescapably a product of the world he's raging against. The broader point is still, of course, that there is no monolithic Black experience, and yet the dominant popular portrayals seem to insist on one, putting suffering at its core.

Full review here

Engagingly quirky

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

This was a TRIP. Sort of like even more psychedelic and metaphysical Alice in Wonderland meets The Little Prince meets The Railway Children, told via bits of British Isles mythology and Greek philosophy and other bits and bobs. The disjointed narration style and 1940s slang didn’t settle for me right away, and the fable-ness of it and quirky vocab sometimes felt a bit gimmicky, but it hit its stride maybe halfway through and I do love me some folk-inspired surreality and pondering on the meaning of time. I read it in one sitting but it definitely bears rereading and digesting.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

Treacle Walker inspired this reread, and it was all more jolly and cheerful than I remember, the weirdness being almost hard to fully appreciate because it’s so familiar. I think this is because there’s so much of Alice’s plucky Victorian narration with only some inconsequential tears (other than the ocean they create) and comical consternation at missing logic and linguistic knots, rather than any real sense of being lost in a dark and bizarre alternate reality.

Through the Looking Glass, on the other hand, was the surrealist gold I expected Alice in Wonderland to be. Maybe simply because it was less overfamiliar, but also because there’s even more abundant dream illogic in the mirror world, a lot more spatial distortion, total non-sequiturs of setting and behavior, and EVEN MORE wordplay and semantic pondering. There’s still a lack of overt emotion at the deep eeriness of it all—it’s just a fun adventure with some annoyances along the way. But the reader can sink between the lines into the dream of the Red King if she so desires.

Slightly longer review here

21^st Century Yokel by

Tom Cox

Companionable, somehow both affectionate and sardonic, a love letter to landscape; learned new things such as that scythe festivals exist, and was inspired by the Norfolk chapter to become temporarily obsessed with reading the collected ghost stories of MR James (featured below).

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

A very economical book, stylized and almost abstract in its bold strokes of characters arranged just so, and yet fully formed as a portrait of middle class pre-WWII Edinburgh, and the maturation from girlhood to prime and past, and the tensions between group and individual identity. It’s more clever than moving, but I was enthralled.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams

I last read Hitchhiker’s Guide in high school, long before I had lived in the UK. I thought it was funny then, but had no real idea just how BRITISH it is. This book is not really much about space or aliens at all, it’s about humans, and especially British ones.

Restaurant continues to be fun and often insightful in that roundabout way of absurdist satire. Sometimes the arbitrariness of ridiculous scrape after ridiculous scrape starts to take the edge off the ride, revealing the machinations of the writer fitting together the loose plot and the gags and the commentary. But still fun.

High-powered short story collections

Bliss and other stories by Katherine Mansfield

My first Mansfield, and I was not disappointed. She has a way of combining lyrical imagery, vibrant semi-stream-of-consciousness, and irony that make these stories hyper-charged. This collection leans cynical, and the fraught relations between often naive women and often selfish (or reprehensible) men/patriarchal society were sometimes a bit fatiguing, but there's enough variety and complexity to the characters to make it worthwhile. I was especially taken with the title story, Bliss, and the final story, A Dill Pickle, both full of subtle shifts of mood and perception and striking images.³

Friend of my Youth by Alice Munro

Munro has a genius for fleshing out nuanced characters with emotionally sophisticated arcs in a small space—the definition of short stories, I suppose. Landscape is important too, always a plus for me. This collection had more affairs than I would have liked (can’t relationships be interesting without infidelity?) but the writing was just so good.

Liberation Day by George Saunders

It’s amazing how Saunders can fuse such off-the-wall, potentially corny sci-fi technology-scapes with such poignant, deeply felt, universal human stories. Some of the stories started to feel a little stylistically formulaic, given how specific his style is, but the collection is easily carried by the title story, which blew me away. Another that will stay with me is Love Letter. Way too close to home.

Political-adjacent memoirs

Doppelganger by Naomi Klein

Klein is a very engaging writer, blending an impressive number of topics (some say too many, but I didn’t mind) both personal and analytical under the theme of the “mirror world” to handily articulate what is so bewildering about our current political and culture war landscape. I related very personally to a lot of what she described, even if her parting political manifesto was rather specific. She has her convictions sorted out.

Knife by Salman Rushdie

Slim, less politcal than personal, but inevitably dealing with the cultural-political tides Rushdie has been caught up in and nearly didn’t survive. I can’t say much will stay with me beyond the description of the attack and recovery, but it was moving, especially his relationship with his wife.

Ghost stories deep dive

The Ghost Stories of MR James

This was a bit of a mixed bag, but overall I was fascinated by the window into British folk horror and period details. Even if formulaic (someone messes with a medieval artifact or manuscript, proceeds to be haunted by eldritch demon), there were some compelling premises and interesting characters. The writing leans Dickensian, if you like that sort of thing—on the wordy side but atmospheric, often incisive and funny. Only rarely truly creeped out. Ask me for my favorites if you’re looking for just a sample.

The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton is one of my favorite authors, so I was a bit surprised these stories aren't more widely discussed. I was a bit less surprised once I read them and found them, although often arresting and lyrical, quite uneven relative to my high expectations. But it was interesting to read them at the same time as MR James's ghost stories, written around the same time, and recognize in many of Wharton's stories much deeper concerns of relationships, class, wealth, and female autonomy than in James's academic, flashy, and trope-oriented stories. Wharton can weave a spell around a landscape, handily turn stories of abusive and jealous husbands into ghost stories without necessarily even reverting to the supernatural, render an ancient house haunted only by the ghosts brought along by modern residents, and reach a fevered gothic pitch with the best of them.

Favorites: Afterward, The Triumph of Night, Kerfol, Miss Mary Pask, A Bottle of Perrier

Hidden gems

The Playground of Europe by Leslie Stephen

A highly readable book for being so obscure—wryly humorous, lyrical, philosophically and geographically interesting, a fascinating Victorian timepiece from the Golden Age of Alpinism by the father of Virginia Woolf. The tone is somewhat like if Bill Bryson was an athletic Victorian gentleman gallivanting around the Alps. It helps to have visited some of the locations he describes, and the details of navigating arêtes and watching local guides hack steps in ice walls sometimes get tedious for a non-mountaineer. But it’s highly evocative travel writing.

Flush by Virginia Woolf

A fun, multi-layered romp, kind of like a miniature, more accessible Orlando with a dog for a hero. Under the guise of a light, charming story about a dog, we get the impressionistic, emotional sensory flow of world that Woolf already specializes in and which is perfectly suited to this protaganist, plus social commentary on class and poverty and feminism, an evocation of 19th century London (and Florence by contrast), and an oblique biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her romance. It seems to be quite thoroughly researched and documented, too.

For me personally there's the added layer that my mom wrote her English Literature Master's thesis about Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning's courtship correspondence that is so central to this story.

Full review here

Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M Boston

Reviewed above—but I thought it also deserved to be in this category, at least from an American vantage point.

Fascinating despite flaws

A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle

I agree with critiques that the pacing and structure of this book are pretty terrible—I enjoyed the introduction to Watson, Sherlock and his methods and their friendship, in a setting where Doyle was clearly in his element, but the melodramatic backstory (while fascinating as an artifact) and abrupt tying up of Sherlock’s role in the mystery afterward left much to be desired from a narrative point of view. There are MUCH more satisfying and interesting murder mysteries out there than a dressed up, exoticized revenge story that stopped making sense as soon as they were parachuted from the Wild West into England. I imagine many of the later Holmes stories are among them—I haven’t read them yet.

Villette by Charlotte Bronte

Lucy Snowe is a fascinating protagonist, self-effacing, emotionally repressed, and yet her rigid principles shore up an intense personality with capacity for the deep emotion and romantic disposition she disavows. For some readers she’s an unlikable narrator, but I found her consistently three-dimensional and interesting. The supporting characters are equally distinct and memorably flawed, and the setting (based on Brussels) provides an interesting window onto Bronte’s attitudes about European culture and religion. The reason I put it in this category is because it’s just way too long.

The Aeneid by Virgil

Translated by Cecil Day-Lewis

"Is it god who makes one burn to do brave things, or does each of us make gods of his own fierce passion to do them?"

This story is many things, but what perhaps struck me the most was the tangled web of impetus woven between gods and humans like mycelium. In the world of mythical antiquity, everything humans feel and do is writ large in (and explained via) the petty vendettas and griefs of the gods, but even while they worship and supplicate the gods and are reduced to pawns, the humans (and reader) recognize that their own agency interacts with this greater sphere. Anyone can be manipulated. Anyone will eventually compromise. But there will be suffering, you can be sure of that. It’s one of the most poetically gory works I've read, and yet I was fascinated by how clearly, at least in this translation, war is treated as a tragic waste of life.

And of course, there is the storyteller, who is smelting all these old materials into a cast of national identity, broadcasting a sort of auto-fiction from an empire (Rome) still on its ascent.

While the final, "Illiad-ic" battle-driven half was honestly quite gripping, the first half or so felt more archaic, the episodic nature more similar to (and literally tracing the path of) the Odyssey, though with lots of literary and cultural interest.

Full review here

James by Percival Everett

As a response to Huck Finn, such a fraught and well-loved story so deep in our American psyche, I thought James was effective and interesting. But for me, that was about it. In other words, what I liked about it owed a lot to the contrast with and riffs on Huck Finn—if I believe my most cynical impulse, more an exercise and topical discourse than an enduring literary work.

Full review here

Mostly vibes

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

A lot of people complain about the pacing and bloatedness of this book undermining its otherwise rather elegant and arresting story. I observed this as I read, but apparently style can make up for a lot for me, because I was never bored enough to put it down. The writing is agile and vivid and the tension between personalities is addictive. Although plot and character is important in a sort of arms-length way, it’s mostly a study in evolving perception, as well as setting and aesthetic. The dark academia aesthetic was really a veneer; the general gothic aesthetic was more pervasive: psychological hauntings, houses full of baroque clutter, ambiguously hostile landscape. That’s what I’ll remember.

Full review here

Trust by Hernan Diaz

This may not deserve the label of Mostly Vibes, but to me it felt like a postmodern exercise in style more than anything else. Several contrasting styles, not all of which worked equally well, but which layer on each other in interesting ways. The 1920s aesthetic is the main vibe that sticks with me.

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

I enjoyed this, but would have enjoyed it significantly more without the excessive mooning over a jerk (even if that was partly the point). I’m also not totally sure how I felt about the play by play, diary-level detail, but the writing was good and varied enough to go along with it. Related an uncomfortable amount with not knowing what I want to do with my life 🙈

Biggest DNF

The Idiot by Dostoyevsky

I debated about calling this a “did-not-finish” because I think with boundless energy I would find it worth finishing at some point. However, I decided to free myself from the obligation to Dostoyevsky, having read his other two most famous works already, and having felt the same sense of exasperation at his characters (unpredictable, full of rage, or else the exact opposite) and narration style (often either emotionally or chronologically disorienting).

Anyway, it was kind of empowering to DNF a major classic.

2025 prospects

The time has come, for whatever reason, to read Moby Dick, which I’ve just started. I’m also hankering after some more literary fantasy and magical realism, mountain writing (e.g. Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane), and Rilke’s poetry (I’ll start with The Book of Hours). I think I’ll try L’Etranger by Albert Camus in French (there happens to be a copy in my apartment), and Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) primarily in English but with a French copy to hand. And I’ll be reading Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety and a few supplementary books with

Simon Haisell

’s latest readalong!

Happy reading in 2025!

1. "Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he never would have been able to find these words."

2. Also, I would love to know how Erdrich came up with that cursed sexy underwater blue rubber ox suit. My imagination could never.

3. Btw, I listened to Bliss (narrated by the GOAT Juliet Stevenson) and a few other books this year via a cool app called Audrey, which provides audiobooks with extra commentary and resources.