My Year in Books

Looking fondly back at 2024

My New Year’s Eve dragon hoard

For me the allure of end of year book tallies isn't the numbers game, but the thrill of going back over the list at the end of the year and remembering all the book-friends I've made that I've already half-forgotten: Oh, last year was the year I read Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God and No Longer at Ease-- way back in January. I'd almost forgotten.

It's similar to looking at the year's family photos and recalling family field trips and vacations and museum outings. I'm such a sucker for book lists lined up neatly by year.

According to my Goodreads list I read 63 books in 2024— and it’s really hard not to tell you about every single one here. But I shall try to restrain myself. I’m pretty sure there are a few more that didn’t make it to the list— especially read alouds with the kids. And of course there were some great books that I’ve started but still not finished, so they’re not on the list either.

As I mentioned, I started off 2024 finishing the less-well known sequels to Chinua Achebe’s classic Things Fall Apart— Arrow of God and No Longer at Ease. I think I actually liked both of them better than Things Fall Apart. Achebe is a trailblazer and reading his work makes me want to read more fiction by African novelists. I think that should be a goal for 2025.

Author Binge

This year’s author binge was Emily St John Mandel— I read all of her novels starting with a re-read of Station Eleven with the Close Reads Podcast and then checking all the others out from the library in rapid succession after that— most of them as audiobooks. With the exception of Last Night in Montreal and maybe The Singer’s Gun, where I didn’t notice any overlap, all her other novels are linked by minor characters who pop up in small ways— this makes for a very satisfactory reading experience. For example, the reporter in The Lola Quartet reports on the Ponzi scheme featured in The Glass Hotel. Miranda’s boss from Station Eleven reappears in The Glass Hotel as a minor character. A band is mentioned in both The Glass Hotel and The Lola Quartet. A time traveler in Sea of Tranquility visits a character from The Glass Hotel. And a character in The Glass Hotel musing on the way history might have been different, mentions the Georgia influenza that becomes the pandemic in Station Eleven, but in that world the virus is contained and does not become a cataclysmic event.

Mandel’s books all have an aura of loneliness and isolation. Characters seeking connection, a bleak modern landscape of people seeking meaning. Where people find meaning, it’s in relationship, not in transcendence. And yet… it’s not existential despair. There’s a quiet hopefulness, a beauty, grasping at art, especially music.

Last year’s author binge was Kazuo Ishiguro. I wonder which author I will feel a need to binge in 2025.

Re-reads

This year’s re-reads included Kristin Lavransdatter, which was even better the second time. Sigrid Undset is a genius. Also, I binge-listened to the audiobooks of all of the Murderbot Diaries just because a friend was reading them for the first time and I wanted to remember how much I enjoy spending time with Murderbot.

I re-read Death Comes for the Archbishop, Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Summer Book— all of them are so good!

And then with my 16 year old I read Emma, Persuasion, Jane Eyre, and Shadows on the Rock and O Pioneers by Willa Cather.

With the whole gang I read Ivanhoe and The Iliad (Catherine Alexander translation) and A Tale of Two Cities.

Also The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison is a perennial favorite. I listened to the audiobook at least once, but probably more than that.

Poetry

My poetry reading never really seems to make my lists because I never really feel like I’ve *finished* a book of poems. I seldom read them from cover to cover and even when I’ve read all the poems, I still don’t feel done in the same way I feel done when I turn the last page of a novel. But I spent New Year’s Eve in my bed surrounded by books of poems that have meant a lot to me in the past few years and which I could probably consider as having been completed because I’ve probably read every poem at least once or twice. These include Ted Kooser’s Kindest Regards, Where Horizons Go by Rhina Espaillat, A.E. Stalling’s This Afterlife, The Essential Haiku edited and translated by Robert Hass, and Clasp and Lies and To Star the Dark by Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa. Seamus Heaney’s 100 Poems wasn’t in the stack, but that has been a frequent companion this year. So was Ada Limon’s The Carrying.

Most of New Year’s Eve day was spent reading one book cover to cover, just because it’s that good: Lies by Doireann Ní Ghríofa poems in Irish with English translations by the author.

Lies is a gorgeous poetry collection. My Irish isn't good enough to do more than pick out a few words here and there of the original poems. But the English translations are worth the price of the book. My favorite poems tend to be the ones about motherhood-- some about the loss of a child-- and about domesticity; so if you ask me what the major theme of the collection is, that’s probably what I’d say; but that’s not really a fair representation of the breadth of the themes. Still, they are my favorites: I love it when a poem like “Homework” muses about explorers while doing housework, or when “Static Electricity” mourns her child pulling away from her at school drop off but then finds their socks clinging to her when she does the laundry. Or when “Selfie with Lines” pauses while gathering washing from the clothesline to contemplate night and electricity, or ““Noctuary: Dishwasher” finds her turning off the dishwasher in the middle of the night while thinking about the nightclubs that the speaker no longer goes to. My favorite poem in the collection is “Tinfoil,” which imagines rolling out sheets of aluminum foil down the stairs and through the house which turns into a river.

Favorite Books

If I had to choose my favorite books in 2024, I guess it would be these:

1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Read with the Close Reads podcast. I was a bit nervous and wasn’t sure I wanted to read a book that has been described as really dark. Ok, it was dark and there was one scene I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to bring myself to read a second time— I immediately started re-reading as soon as I finished, but I skipped it. But it was also gorgeous. No one told me how breathtaking McCarthy’s prose is. This one goes on my list of favorite novels.

2. Vipers' Tangle by François Mauriac

Read during Lent. (Close Reads also covered it in the fall, but I didn’t re-read it completely.) This is also a beautiful novel of faith and redemption, though it’s told from the point of view of a terrible sinner who has wasted his life being selfish, miserly, and sowing seeds of discord among his family. And yet it is also shot through with glimpses of light and grace.

3. What Monstrous Gods by Rosamund Hodge

I will read anything Rosamund Hodge writes. This novel begins with the story of Sleeping Beauty, but the retelling of that myth takes up only the first couple of chapters. The novel really begins with the aftermath: what happens after you wake the people who were put to sleep for very good reason? But the real heart of the story isn’t the sleeping beauty story at all, rather, it’s the story of the monstrous pagan gods whose cults the awakened royal family intends to restore. The monstrous gods who torture their devotees with unspeakable horrors.

4. The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo

My sister introduced me to The Fox Wife, a beautiful novel about a Chinese were-fox. It’s actually two different stories intertwined: a revenge story about the eponymous fox wife, Snow, trying to find the man who murdered her child. And also the story of Bao, a detective who is obsessed with fox lore, who has a supernatural ability to know when someone is lying, and who is trying to find out the name of a murdered courtesan so that her ghost can be laid to rest.

After I read The Fox Wife I also read Yangsze Choo’s first two novels, The Night Tiger and The Ghost Bride. Both were quite good, but neither enthralled me quite as much as The Fox Wife. I highly recommend the audiobooks of all three, which are read by the author. She has a lovely reading voice and it’s nice to have all the Chinese and Malaysian words and names pronounced correctly for me.

5. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

I wrote about here.

6. The Dean’s Watch by Elizabeth Goudge

Oh I just love Elizabeth Goudge! The Dean’s watch is a lovely story about a cathedral town in the English fens. The cast of characters includes a clockmaker who is terrified of the cathedral; the Dean who loves people, but whose ugly face and fierce voice scares them away and who has become stuck in his routines and complacent. There is also a saintly old lady who is mostly confined to her house, but who pulls the strings to draw people together. There is a boy who was stolen by gypsies when he was quite young and who has a talent for working with his hands but is apprenticed to an abusive fishmonger. A young girl who cooks for the watchmaker who is tender and kind, the watchmaker’s sister who doesn’t know how to love, the Dean’s beautiful wife who doesn’t love him but who he adores. a little girl with a talent for refusing to move the granddaughter of his lawyer, who falls in love with the Dean. This is a story of love and redemption and community.

7. The Blackbird, a collection of short stories by Sally Thomas.

These stories are gorgeous. I’m not usually a short story reader, I prefer longer narrative forms where I can really get to know the characters. This collection was the perfect balance because several of the stories are linked, with overlapping characters. Not enough to make a novel, but making the collection as a whole feel a bit more cohesive than the typical short story collection. I’ve long loved Sally Thomas’ poems, but between last year’s Works of Mercy and this book, she’s also blossoming as a prose writer.

8. Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench

I listened to the audiobook of this delightful memoir. It’s not read by Dame Judi, but the actress who reads the book sounds very much like her so sometimes I forgot that it wasn’t Judi speaking. It’s very funny. Also incredibly insightful Dench’s discussion of the plays is very much not an academic take, but that of an actor who has spent her entire working life performing and watching others perform the plays. Some of her insights are profound.

When I was in college I spent a lot of time hanging out with the drama majors and had a longstanding argument with one friend in particular who insisted that Shakespeare isn’t meant to be read in a classroom but must be performed to be understood. I’m still enough of an English major to feel that there are true insights to be gained from reading the text of the plays, but more and more I agree that the performance is primary and if you have to choose between watching a play and reading it, then watch it! Especially with kids and teens. When in doubt, just watch the plays, don’t worry about reading them with resistant readers. And start kids early. Don’t worry about it going over their heads. I wish there were more books like this out there, Shakespearian actors just talking about the plays.

9. Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

Since I loved A Gentleman in Moscow, I decided to give Amor Towles’ first novel a try. Set in 1930s New York City, it’s a delightful exploration of classic mobility, a variation of the rags to riches story, a novel of manners and society. It opens in the 1960s with the protagonist and her husband in an art gallery looking at photographs. She recognizes the subject of two of the photos, a young man whom she knew in her youth. In one photo he is well dressed, in the other he’s dressed like a bum. What’s surprising is that the rich young man is the earlier photo and the bum is later— his story unspools slowly. But at the same time it’s also the story of the narrator, a young woman who is a successful social climber, working class daughter of immigrants who finds herself rubbing elbows with New York’s elites. Somehow my summary makes it sound like a dull story, but it isn’t. I quite enjoyed it. And there’s a character here who reappears in the hotel in Moscow— Again, I love it when an author’s books connect like that.

Honorable mention goes to:

• The Earthseed Series: Parable of the Talents and Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

  I am a sucker for post apocalyptic fiction and Butler creates a compelling character in a believable world. While I don’t actually like Lauren’s Earthseed philosophy, the process of its becoming was fascinating. I found the Christianity in these books to be shallow and something of a straw man, however. Lauren’s father, a Baptist minister, is earnest in his faith; but it lacks a comprehensive understanding of the meaning of suffering. I couldn’t quite blame Lauren for rejecting it because it didn’t answer her questions or provide her with meaning. There wasn’t really a God there for her to have a relationship with— and I found that incredibly sad. I feel like I’m going to be wrestling with these books for a while. Butler is definitely an author worth reading and pondering. I still think Kindred is her best book.

• The Great Passion by James Runcie

  This is a beautiful historical novel about a boy who spends a year as a student of The great composer, Johann Sebastian Bach— the year which culminates in Bach writing his masterpiece, the St Matthew Passion. This was a very good book and I want to revisit it because I think it wasn’t the right time for *me* to read it. The timing was determined by my trying to keep up with the Close Reads podcast, but my heart wasn’t quite in it. I’m thinking I might listen to the audiobook during Lent, several people have recommended it. And this seems like a Lenten book.

• How It All Began by Penelope Lively

  The novel begins with a mugging in London which impacts a collection of people who don’t even know the mugged woman. Their inter-related stories weave in and out of each other. My favorite was the story of the retired teacher who has been teaching adult literacy classes and her student, an immigrant from some unnamed Eastern European country who is struggling to read— I was charmed at how she uses picture books to help him find his foothold.

Close Reads

This year I read most of the Close Reads podcast books, many of which I’d never have picked up if not for the podcast. I’m grateful for the chance to read in community, to ponder, and to share the experiences.

Some of them are books that will stay with me even if they might not be on the favorites list. These include Trust by Hernan Diaz, Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward, and Mrs Palfrey at the Clairmont by Elizabeth Taylor.

Onward and Upward

I want to tell you all about the rest of the books I’ve skipped and about my unread books, but this post has already got so long that most people won’t finish it. And it’s already January 6! So I will stop looking back into the past and turn my face into the future to think about what I want to read next.

My Epiphany book-haul, looking forward to reading all of these in 2025.