Reader's Report 2024

Books of the Year

These books either consumed me or captured my curiosity in some way in 2024:

* Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep
* Benjamin Moser, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters
* Patrick Grant, Less: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish
* Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
* Barbra Streisand, My Name Is Barbra
* Fiona Erskine, Phosphate Rocks
* Samantha Harvey, Orbital
* Joel Lane, Where Furnaces Burn

The Safekeep was my novel of the year. I found it gripping. Plot, setting, character, little details, big picture, unexpectedly relevant in a very important way. I also liked that I knew nothing about it. It gave surprises – so I’ll say no more.

The Upside-Down World: Meetings With the Dutch Masters is a thoughtful and reflective set of essays about painters and paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, interwoven with the author’s personal experiences and insights. I found it beguiling and took my time reading it. In this vein I also enjoyed Thunderclap by Laura Cumming. We made a trip to Amsterdam this year and maybe I’m impressionable enough to let that guide my reading. Maybe more field trips are required.

Less by Patrick Grant is a serious and well-informed investigation of what we buy and what we throw away. It has much to say about the pseudoscience of economics and the drug of consumerism, and it made me want to shop better and shop less and learn how to sew and repair. He’s also my author crush of the year.

I really enjoyed how both Orbital and Phosphate Rocks were doing something different with the form of the novel – in different ways each felt like hybrid forms of creative nonfiction, and though I read both of them early in the year they stuck with me. Lots of good science to digest in accessible ways, plus important political dimensions. I also enjoyed Fiona Erskine’s procedural thriller Losing Control too.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is a graphic novel that I got lost in. I love good hatching, and I love monsters. I have to read Book 2. And wow – what a story for author Emil Ferris too. After all the delicately observed nature writing and haiku that I’ve read in recent years, where I perhaps got distracted ‘finding beauty in the everyday’, it reminded me also to look out for the monstrous and the grotesque and relish them for what they are.

Keeping that strand of the ugly alive, Where Furnaces Burn just pipped in during the last week of the year. Like a cult literary X Files, it’s the Black Country weird noir that was written just for me. I also appreciated its structure as connected stories that are linked in some deeper way. I can’t believe it’s taken so long for me to read Joel Lane – look forward to reading more next year. All credit to Influx for bringing him back into print.

I listened to My Name Is Barbra, asides and all, and it was a feat. I only grew impatient when the namedropping of world leaders grew too too, and then when she started day trading tech stock so she and Donna Karan could rent yachts. Otherwise it’s a remarkable insight into the lives and works of a multitalented genius – singer, actor, director, producer and especially, I discovered, an editor in her capacity to feel her way into the bigger vision for a story as well as pay attention to all those important details.

(Btw are we *still* having the conversation about audio counting as reading? Everyone who naysays sounds like the most mimsy of commenters on the Guardian books page.)

There were other books I liked, but not so many that I really loved. I love to love a good book, so the absence of a few more books to be passionate about perhaps made 2024 slightly disappointing as a year of reading. So I just chose eight this year. I mean, we can add twenty pictures to an instagram carousel now, but it doesn’t mean we have to.

I also read a number of this year’s hyped and widely reviewed novels. They had their moments, but most felt predictable. I’m still waiting to read someone’s book about sisters and mothers, which I suspect could really strike home; instead I grew just a bit bored (again) of ramblings on the mating habits of heterosexuals, and was more interested in what became of the whippet, who turned out just to be a plot point. No! That’s not how we treat whippets – or draw them either: the one on the cover looks more like a greyhound or a lurcher. Then after a very good start I grew just a little bored of another writer’s furtive perving to the gallery of heterosexuals, and wondered if writing about lesbians might in fact be that writer’s forte, as that part was really well done and enjoyed a degree of inquiry and empathy. I found another blockbuster state of the nation novel bloated and cartoony. I did not enjoy Jane Austen’s Emma – I just wasn’t in the mood for it and will come back another time, or maybe it really is reactionary twaddle.

It has to be said that disliking books does give me a lot of pleasure. I try to be careful where I do it, and it’s always for books that are published and could have been edited or were just overmarketed. Manuscripts: you are safe. You still show promise and prospects. Perhaps there is no greater and more exciting reading than a manuscript that’s yet to be pinned down.

I reread The Grapes of Wrath for book club, and wondered where are the books writing about today so urgently. I am sure they’re there. Maybe they need to come to me, or I need to look harder.

Perhaps related to that, for some reason I didn’t read much in translation this year. I did resume Duolingo and am on day 38 of a streak.

I continue to do well with Twickenham library. I began reading most of the above titles as library loans, and also borrowed and enjoyed and appreciated many more: James, Stoneyard Devotional, Creation Lake. I read all of the Booker shortlist for the first time – thanks to the library.

Library books have loan periods, and I have developed a practice of skimming. At a certain point, if a book’s not biting I skim to the end. I might, for example, read the first lines of every paragraph or every page, and go further if something grabs me. Sometimes that’s enough, isn’t it?

I also buy books, especially to support indie bookshops and publishers. I think it’s important to support the indies, though some could be more helpful in supporting the customer, e.g., when the book you ordered six weeks ago finally comes in. Just saying.

I thought this Bookseller article rating editors on the basis of the prizes and bestsellers accrued by authors was a sign of much that’s clumsy and disappointing about the industry. Why measure the immeasurable?

I see continuing evidence of checklist publishing. ‘We’ve already got our gay book for the year’ – insert other identity categories to understand something of how both publishers and reviewers often operate. Publishers and reviewers need to do better. So could book influencers, who at times sound like deranged AI. I’ve come to realise a lot of BookTok and Bookstagram people don’t actually read the books. I’m so naive.

However, there are many good reviewers whose judgement I trust in both traditional outlets and especially social media. I’m not always sure about the ecosystem of Substack, but I read plenty of good criticism there, and I value the judgement of a lot of people on Instagram.

Many of the books that interest me most are published by indies, of course. I’m also thinking self-publishing looks increasingly attractive relative to the way some books get published without trace by the big houses.

I was lucky enough to see my goddess Robin Wall Kimmerer not once but twice. The Serviceberry is out now too. And though I haven’t finished the books yet one of the other great events this year was attending a British Library talk for Some Men In London edited by Peter Parker – it was sponsored by Gay’s The Word, and it was good to be in such a large space with my people, a space where we can enjoy different gay books plural every day of the year.

I was also pleased to attend good events for Ian Russell-Hsieh’s I’m New Here and Edward Carey’s new novel Edith Holler, both at Waterstones Trafalgar Square, where the staff seemed clued in and friendly.

I am most glad that Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft finally has a UK publisher and is available easily for British readers. It’s the craft book I recommend most.

Next year I’m going to try to remember to keep a record of the most interesting short stories and essays that I read, because they are so often the best writing. A few from this end of 2024:

* What Alice Munro Knew by Giles Harvey
* Between the Shadow and the Soul by Lauren Groff
* The Kidnapping I Can’t Escape by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
* For Isabella Rossellini, Acting Goes Beyond Words by Michael Schulman – because Isabella Rossellini
* Stories I Can’t Tell Anyone I Know by Bhanu Kapil in Best British Stories 2024

Telly provided some good fiction: Somebody Somewhere, Ripley, Girls, Shōgun, Interview With the Vampire, Slow Horses, English Teacher, probably others I should have noted down. Drag Race continues to be my soap opera. I can’t remember all the films I saw but right now La Chimera and Dune 2 stood out.

Books that are coming in 2025 that I am excited about:

* Jo McMillan’s The Accidental Immigrants – a most timely tale for right now (23 January)
* Eleanor Anstruther’s In Judgement of Others – finally coming in print, this darkly comic novel outdoes other treatments of its subject matter with wit and depth (28 January)
* Fiona Melrose’s Even Beyond Death – epic and funny and heartbreaking (6 February)
* Essie Fox’s Dangerous– an historical thriller about Byron in Venice (24 April)
* Antonia Hodgson’s The Raven Scholar– the first in a most promising fantasy series from the historical novelist (24 April)

The above are all pals. I’ve read the first three and can vouch for them enthusiastically, and I’m looking forward very much to the other two. I’m also very keen to read the new novel by Ocean Vuong in May.

I go back to the fact that my favourite book of 2024 was written by someone I’d never heard of. At a time when so much is marketed and prepared for us, I feel that process of discovery has become a rare thing. More curiosity and imagination in 2025, please.

(Books mentioned here are also linked at Bookshop.org: Andrew Wille’s Reader’s Report 2024.)