This year Granta invited contributors to reflect on what they read in 2024.
Allen Bratton
Natasha Brown’s Assembly was one of the first books I read this year and I am still thinking about a description in it of a character chewing and swallowing. Having been familiar with the ‘grin and bear it’ approach of Oscar Moore’s collection PWA: Looking AIDS in the Face, I was impressed by the brutality and cynicism of his first and only novel, A Matter of Life and Sex (both are out of print and should be reissued). I borrowed my boyfriend’s copy of Conventional Weapons by Jocelyn Brooke and found that my boyfriend and Anthony Powell were right, Brooke really is good. Sick in bed this summer, I listened to the audiobook of Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me and had fever dreams about Ted Bundy. I’ve enjoyed some recent novels in translation (S.J. Naudé’s Fathers and Fugitives, tr. Michiel Heyns, and Hanna Johansson’s Antiquity, tr. Kira Josefsson) and some less recent (Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, tr. John E. Woods, and the charmingly archaic C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation of Proust’s Swann’s Way, with all of its ‘shewing’ and ‘for the nonce’). I have occasionally consulted Alban Butler’s Lives of the Saints: sometimes I read the entries of whichever obscure saints are celebrated on a date of personal importance, sometimes I browse via the table of contents (‘martyr’, ‘virgin’, ‘bishop’, ‘virgin and martyr’, ‘bishop and martyr’ – no martyrs who were both virgin and bishop).
Kevin Brazil
Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes, for its combination of beauty and brutality; László Krasznahorkhai’s Herscht 07769, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, for being in one long sentence a hilarious and moving picture contemporary European disillusion; Lauren Oyler’s No Judgement, for the smartest reflection of autofiction I’ve come across; Vigdis Hjorth’s If Only, translated by Charlotte Barslund, for making self-destructive love into an addictive literary style; Robert Plunket’s Love Junkie for being filthy and funny; Rachel Cusk’s Parade for continuing to show how much writing can do with so little; Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall translated by Shaun Whiteside, again doing so much with so little!; Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, translated by Sophie Hughes, a deliciously icy portrait of Berlin life both cruel and tender; Shelia Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries discovering a whole new way to write about one’s life; and Vera Mutafchieva’s, The Case of Cem, translated by Angela Rodel, for reminding me how wild the novel form can be: dear publishers, translate more experimental Communist-era women writers, please!
Sophie Collins
Of the things I read this year that weren’t for research, Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann, was probably my favourite. Anything about the GDR is catnip to me, so a novel set there, pre and immediately post the fall of the Berlin wall, tracking the stages of an abusive relationship, just couldn’t have been any more ideal/closer to my interests. I was so impressed by the lyrical realism of Erpenbeck’s work and by the amount of cultural material she’s able to bring into the narrative – not just stuff by other writers – references to other books and poems – but music, plays, East German designers and their work . . . I’ve also thought a lot about The Sound of My Voice, a 1987 novel by a Scottish writer called Ron Butlin. I think it was his first novel, and by all accounts his best (though I haven’t read his other work – it seems he was/is very prolific). This book is entirely in the second person, which is unusual and, in this instance – especially taking the title into account – haunting. It’s about an alcoholic who works in a biscuit factory, and it is so incredibly sad, scary and moving. I also think it says a lot, albeit implicitly, about Scotland and the UK under Thatcher. I’ve never read anything like either of these books.
Zoe Dubno
If the best book I read last year was The Golden Notebook, then it should come as no surprise that my favorite book this year was The Mandarins. Simone de Beauvoir and Doris Lessing are obviously two very different chicas, but many of their preoccupations were the same: political commitment, questioning Marxist orthodoxy, being extremely horny for men we might now call ‘softboys’ who screw them over again and again. My New Year’s wish is for someone to reprint The Mandarins with a better-looking cover because that study-abroad in Paris black and white photo does not do The Mandarins – which is seriously a formal masterpiece and contains weighty political and philosophical commentary – justice.
What else? I dipped a toe into Balzac’s universe and read Père Goriot, and Lost Illusions, which are the kinds of books that make you totally forget about your own life. Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country were similarly all-encompassing – every night I dreamed about Lily Bart’s money troubles, so I slept easy as literature’s coldest bitch Undine got everything she wanted.
I would be remiss and a liar if I didn’t mention reading every Nancy Mitford ‘Radlett’ novel while on vacation. I had brought Love in a Cold Climate and I was laughing so hard that I downloaded the others onto someone else’s iPad so I could read the rest of them.
Also, let me tell you, nothing feels so good as a reread of some Grace Paley stories just about now.
Lillian Fishman
I’ve ended up reading and re-reading Henry James all year – starting with The Princess Casamassima, with a dip this summer into The Lesson of the Master and the New York Stories, and then a romance this fall with The Portrait of a Lady. I was so entranced with The Portrait of a Lady that I couldn’t believe it had to end after 600+ pages. I think I’m hungry for stories about how people influence each other, in secret and profound ways, especially how under the influence are those of us who imagine we’re independent, solitary, and forthright. We’re inundated with solipsistic books describing the experience of solitude and loneliness, as though it’s a contemporary phenomenon; yet we don’t find anyone much lonelier than Isabel Archer, and that loneliness is so exquisitely felt because we see the hands of God and other players pulling the strings of her life while she’s unawares. My craving this year has been for books full of people whose choices actually reverberate for each other, and not by accident: two wonderful finds on this front were Harry Matthews’ Cigarettes and Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head. Another great read, which is also, I think, paradoxically and astutely about loneliness among a great web of people, is Brittany Newell’s Soft Core, forthcoming early next year.
Camilla Grudova
This year, I was terribly excited to discover my favourite New Yorker cartoonist, Edward Steed had a book out, Forces of Nature, which collects some of his best work from the past decade. Ticklish drawings, with a perfect dark cleverness, it delivers endless chuckles. Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst, and Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Shaun Whiteside, both moved me deeply. Though completely different novels from opposite ends of the political spectrum, they both deal with the romantic and sexual lives of the old and/or infirm with exceptional heart. Lisa Tuttle’s surreal and Leonora Carrington-tinged My Death utterly delighted me. I also fell hard for Celia Dale’s A Spring of Love which captures perfectly how we can delude ourselves. When I was in my twenties I was obsessed with Virginia Woolf, and decided to put one of her books aside to enjoy when I was older, especially if life didn’t work out how I wanted it to. Well, it didn’t, but thank goodness I had the joy of reading Jacob’s Room. The immediate and melancholy beauty of it fed directly into my ongoing and unhealthy state of being unable to get over the death of so many men during WW1, something I think about basically daily. This year, I was felicitously introduced to the immutable Janets: Janet Malcolm and Janet Frame. I wolfed down The Silent Woman and Faces in the Water. Avril Horner’s Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence was illuminating and tragic on a favourite writer. I am ending the year on a Jamesian note, an until now unexplored territory for me, The Portrait of a Lady might have been too terrifying for a younger self, but now is the perfect company.
Guy Gunaratne
It has been a year when much of my reading has been accomplished with assorted stationery, producing extensively inky marginalia and quizzical notes. A lot of theory, plays and only a few novels. Fred Moten’s landmark trilogy on the poetics of blackness ‘consent not to be a single being’ is as intensely beautiful as it is rigorous and provocative. My copy of his Black and Blur lies destroyed. As is Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake and Ordinary Notes which I re-read this year and it still is a revolution page to page. I spent some time puzzled by Bruno Latour’s ecological intervention Down to Earth, but now the US election has come and gone, his mad ideas have started to cohere. I also finally sat down and studied Black Marxism by Cedric J. Robinson in a helpfully disordered shuffle. And besides poetry (Gboyega Odubanjo’s Adam lit up the skies above London), I’ve found the plays of Robert Icke so fluid and enjoyable, each one like a rattling poem. This was the year I found Jon Fosse – a recommendation from dear Chris Power. His Trilogy translated by May-Brit Akerholt, and Aliss at the Fire and the coda to Melancholy translated by Damion Searls and Grethe Kvernes were enormously satisfying. I am savouring his Septology for next year. I read everything re-issued from Percival Everett this year and my standouts were his most formally playful Telephone and Percival Everett by Virgil Russell. I also read Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum and Irmgard Keun’s After Midnight in quick succession, both of which I’d recommend. I remember Anton Jäger recommending Eric Hobsbawm’s Interesting Times in the roundup from last year, so I decided to make time for his Age of series and so far, two down, two to go. And if there is a book I’ve returned to almost daily this year, it is Thomas Merton’s Contemplative Prayer.
Rahmane Idrissa
I recently ventured into the works of Yambo Ouologuem, a Malian author who died for literature in January 1974 – he stopped writing at that point, as far as we know – even though he lived in the flesh until October 2017. He’s best known for Le Devoir de violence (two English translations, Bound to Violence and, more recently, The Duty of Violence), but until this year, I had not read his other great work, Les Mille et une bibles du sexe (I am not aware of an English translation), out in 1969. I had tried before but failed. It is one of those unidentified literary objects one gets into only by submitting to their weirdness, not as extreme as Finnegans Wake, but on that side of writing. It begins innocently, if one may say so, like a Marquis de Sade book updated by Pauline Réage. But the sex, eroticism, pretend pornography, are soon beside the point. What one gets into is pure poetic delirium, where sex is at best a thread that keeps us from getting lost in the flowing succession of images born, it seems, only from a radical investment in the powers of language, of French words, untethered from the formalities of narrative. It is more music than prose, or it is trance prose. Even if one does not know French, one can feel the syncopated laceration of the sibilants in a bit like this: ses vêtements eux-mêmes étaient transparents, tant était serpent de sexe le corps ferme: plein, et comme surgi de quelque sublime affiche érotique (and here, English affords the same outcome at exactly the same spots and some more: ‘her clothes themselves were transparent, so snake-like of sex was the firm body: full, and as if sprung from some sublime erotic poster’). Flaubert said that the novel is like a mirror that the writer carries along a path, it sometimes reflects the stars, sometimes the slush. With ‘The Thousand and One Bibles of Sex,’ the path ends up leading, very gradually, from the initial banal French landscapes, Paris, the métro, down (or up?) into a surreal sea where everything obeys laws that are both familiar and strange, and are subject chiefly to an intoxication of language. The last line (or verse?) says, ‘Along four eyes with a water-lily sun gaze’. Once you’ve lost or found yourself in this sea of sex and words, this inexplicable image is full of unforgettable truth.
Benjamin Kunkel
Like many of us distracted from distraction by distraction, I’ve been wishing to improve the quality of my attention. One book that seems to have done me some good in this respect is Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti. By rearranging sentences from her diaries according to their first letter and wrenching them out of chronological sequence, Heti rescues the moments these sentences describe from the tyranny of narrative, so that each perception gets to shine in its isolated self-sufficiency rather than be defined by what comes before or after. The result is some sort of democracy of expiring instants, an alphabetical Zen. And while sitting in our electric car at the charging station, I’ve been reading the elemental poetry of Gabriela Mistral, born in 1889 in the foothills of the Chilean Andes. Mistral knows how to look simply at simple things: doors, tools, landscapes, bread, birds. Here she is (in Ursula Le Guin’s translation from the Spanish) on the harsh sunlight of the mountains: “Scorch away my stupid fears, / dry up my mud, blow away my lies, / bake my speech, burn my eyes, /scrub my mouth, breath, song, / clean my hearing, wash my seeing, / purify hands and senses.”
Karan Mahajan
Metafiction’s back, baby! Two of my favorite books of 2024 – be Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte and Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu – take pleasure in dismantling the fourth wall. Tulathimutte’s Rejection is a suite of linked stories about raging losers in the Internet era, with the prose-dial turned up to gasp-inducing Nabokov and Amis levels. In one long story, we meet a bullied, reclusive genderless character named Bee who has engineered a multiyear bot operation on Twitter – and who might in fact be the alias of a Thai-American writer named . . . Tony Tulathimutte. The last ‘story’ is a publisher’s rejection of the entire book, taking Tulathimutte to task for using fiction to put ‘yourself at a defensive remove’ and ‘[smuggling] your own hangups into’ the characters ‘while scoring brownie points for imaginative empathy.’ This bit of knowingness is its own defensiveness, of course (see: Philip Roth/Nathan Zuckerman) but it also permits Tulathimutte to move beyond the confines of memoiristic, identity-constrained autofiction and to create one of the boldest works in recent memory.
Mengestu’s writing is quieter than Tulathimutte’s but he too pulls off an impressive postmodern trick in his long-awaited fourth novel Someone Like Us. The novel is narrated by a drug-addicted Ethiopian-American journalist who is suspicious of the white reader’s hunger for yet another immigrant story. Toward the end of the book, when we learn that the most moving section is an invention, we feel Mengestu has found a way to convey his character’s deepest fantasies without violating his (or his author’s) privacy.
I loved both these books and can’t wait to watch their authors continue their (un-Trumpy) assault on realism.
In nonfiction, meanwhile, nothing came close, for me, to Ross Perlin’s superb, award-winning Language City, a polymathic tour of the endangered language ecosystem of New York City. 700 of the world’s 7000 languages can be heard on the streets of New York. Many of them are vanishing. Perlin’s genius lies in communicating the city’s diversity while honing in on six representative languages and speakers. Language City is a book that will last.
John-Baptiste Oduor
As the prospects of anything resembling political transformation have receded from view, I’ve read mainly to retain in my mind the idea that such things do occur. Christopher Goscha’s The Road to Dien Bien Phu and Elizabeth Perry’s Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845-1945 are books I read this year that I continue to think about. Both treat with seriousness the question of what could provoke people to not just episodic but sustained violence and resistance. The final chapter of Perry’s book, where she traces the encounter between Communists and peasants from the Hua-pei area, a land in which ‘banditry was rife, underground religious sects plentiful, and memories of massive rebellions fresh and vivid’ is wonderful. Wolfgang Streeck’s Taking Back Control helped me think of what a politics beyond liberalism could look like and expanded my sense of what is possible.
I also read a lot of Anita Brookner’s novels this year. She manages to bring into view a perspective which, for whatever reason, I find compelling. Not that of an insider or an outsider, but the insider who has deceived herself into thinking that she is an outsider. She’s a master of writing the kind self-loathing characters who know but can’t do better. Family and Friends is her best, I read it twice this year. Finally, I read, for the first time, Washington Square. Its last lines offer the most arresting image I’ve ever encountered of the closing off of possibilities. Against the backdrop of the current moment, they felt especially apt: ‘Catherine, meanwhile, in the parlour, picking up her morsel of fancy work, had seated herself with it again – for life, as it were.’
K Patrick
I was given Hasib Hourani’s rock flight, and I’ve read it again and again, finishing it in one sitting each time. I say finish, but in a bullshit publishing landscape that often tries to insist – ridiculously and dangerously – that art and politics ought to be separate, this book-length poem doesn’t stop. Hegemonies disintegrate with birds, with rocks, with the ceaseless language of both. A reckoning with ‘history’, how we are complicit in what we neglect to question, it asks the reader to get fully physical, to watch, to build, to throw, to remember what it is to have a throat.
I recently picked up the pamphlet published by Wendy’s Subway containing the essay ‘Like a Bag Trying to Empty’ by Kaleem Hawa and have been recommending it to anybody I come across (an online version is also available here.) It charts the resistance of Palestinian prisoner and martyr Walid Daqqa: ‘At the moment of his arrest, he was about to eat a labneh wrap his mother had made. “One can associate that memory with occupation or with something else,” he recalled decades later. “I chose to associate it with my mother.”’ I also loved Isabella Hammad’s Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, the text of Hammad’s Edward W. Said lecture at Columbia University delivered nine days before 7 October 2023. When wondering how to read and why, in an era like this, I found it essential.
Finally, I had the pleasure of seeing Harry Josephine Giles perform work from her genius collection Them! and was changed by it. It’s another book I have since bought for everyone I know and love. Just this (from the poem ‘May a Transsexual Hear a Bird?’): ‘I tilt the window/on its catch so I, a transsexual,/ may hear the birds singing. If I/ may hear the birds singing the sound/may lift me from myself and my/working conditions.’ When it comes to an audience, we should never be afraid to make demands.
James Pogue
The single book I enjoyed most and learned the most from this year was a mostly-forgotten popular history of the ‘conquest’ of California, called Bear Flag Rising, by Dale L. Walker. I’m aware this isn’t the kind of book that would draw many casual readers these days. But reading it was, first of all, a reminder of the simple elegance of style and descriptive writing that marked even relatively-unknown American nonfiction writers, from magazine reporters to now-forgotten historians during the latter half of the twentieth century. Every time I pick up a book by people like Bernard DeVoto or Marshall Frady – names hardly remembered in American letters today – I am astonished by the quality of the prose and breadth of knowledge about the world they exude. But the more interesting thing about this particular book, and about the genre of history from which it emerged, is that it evinces a deep fluency with the ways that material and geographical reality influence human events. The vast expanse of Alta California was wrested into American control by an unbelievably small and ragtag band of people – the official American military detachment that participated in the fighting consisted of sixty dragoons, fighting mostly with sabers – and is only comprehensible if you understand how these rebels and profiteers were able to control mountain passes and ports of ingress and supplies of food and fodder. This kind of knowledge began to feel irrelevant to many readers (and policymakers) in the West, during the age when rapid growth, cheap energy, and a Pax Americana seemed to have decoupled our societies and policies from the basic fact that we are small, needy, organisms on a rough and variegated planet. Today we seem to be reawakening to this fact, and in writing this year about wars in Africa and Europe I’ve found that lessons I’ve learned from America’s frontier history have given me invaluable lessons for understanding the world we live in today.
Snigdha Poonam
Most John Mortimer fans know him as the creator of Horace Rumpole, the indefatigable defense barrister of the Old Bailey. So did I – until I recently discovered a surprising connection that links us beyond the usual reader-writer bond. Mortimer spent much of his life at a country estate in Turville, a scenic village near Henley-on-Thames, which has been my home for over a year. Locally, he is celebrated not only as the iconic writer and playwright he was but also as a fierce champion of Henley’s heritage.
In the 1990s, Mortimer led a spirited rally through the historic market town to protest a controversial proposal by Waitrose – the height of genteel villainy – to expand its store by demolishing a beloved old cinema. Waitrose retreated; the Regal still stands.
Intrigued, I revisited the ‘Rumpole’ series, seeking a deeper understanding of a man whose life was as richly textured as his writing. I’ve just finished Rumpole Returns, one of his cleverest plots, which finds the barrister returning from retirement in Florida to defend a man only he can. An accounting clerk stands accused of stabbing a minor aristocrat at a tube station, leaving behind what appears to be damning evidence: a note written in the victim’s blood.
He comes back also because for all of Florida’s sun-soaked appeal, he finds himself miserable away from the grey, rain-drenched skies of his homeland. Home has been on my mind as well, though in a contrasting way. Having made a similarly drastic leap – from the heat and cacophony of northern India to the tranquil mildness of Oxfordshire – I am struggling, just like Rumpole, to adjust to a life far from familiar ground.
Rumpole hurries back to London on a budget airline to apply his expertise in bloodstains – an arcane but critical area of forensic science. Blood, as it turns out, behaves unpredictably as a stain, and it’s often the nerdiest detail that can tip the scales between freedom and the gallows. Bloodstains were more than mere plot points in the Rumpole books; they echoed Mortimer’s real-life achievements as a barrister. He was known for defending murder suspects by exploiting the peculiarities of blood evidence, as the annals of the Old Bailey will show.
But can Rumpole save his client – and what remains of his own career? For that, you’ll need to read the book. Meanwhile, I must contend with my husband’s complaints that our Waitrose, charmingly compact, lacks many essential items on our shopping lists.
Ryan Ruby
This year, for an assignment, I had a sublime reading experience that would be likely to top the list of anyone’s reading experiences in any year: everything Emily Dickinson is known to have written, including her Complete Poems, the envelope poems collected in The Gorgeous Nothings, and her correspondence, which is now available in a handsome new edition from Harvard University Press. Staying with past masters, I also enjoyed Elizabeth and Robert Chandler’s newly-released translation of Andrey Platonov’s epic Chevengur, the picaresque tale of a twentieth-century Don Quixote traveling through the Russian countryside during the delirium following the Revolution. Moving into the present, 2024 was another excellent year for reading new poetry: the exquisite and precise lyrics of Richie Hofmann’s collection A Hundred Lovers; Mirror Nation, the outstanding conclusion to Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Trilogy; and Zoë Hitzig’s groundbreaking second collection Not Us Now, which, in my view, points the way for the poetry of our algorithm-dominated future. In prose, I was particularly impressed by two experiments in autobiographical writing: Sheila Heti’s constraint-based Alphabetical Diaries, which shows that, for all her well-deserved fame, the Canadian author is never content to rest on her laurels, but is always charting new courses for her work; and Candles and Water the ‘pillow book’ of short prose pieces on ghosts, alcohol, walking, and madness by the British poet Timothy Thornton, whose work deserves to be far better known than it is. But I could not end this short synopsis of my year in reading without the fiction: David Leo Rice’s speculative historical phantasmagoria The Berlin Wall, Seth Rogoff’s riff on Kafka for the 100th anniversary of his death The Castle, and – my book of the year – Elle Nash’s Deliver Me, the story of a slaughterhouse worker who fakes a pregnancy for attention from her sadistic mother, self-involved boyfriend, and siren-like high school best friend, sparking a series of events that satirize the gothic horror at the heart of contemporary American life.
Kathryn Scanlan
Some of the books that were important to me in 2024 – that I read or re-read in 2024 – include Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko (myth and earth and community as weapons against the destroyers of the world); Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams (stories of the Devil and Azrael, angel of death: peculiar, funny, sobering, dire); Cannery Row (granular portrait of a community and its eccentrics, including the local animals) and The Grapes of Wrath (granular portrait of a family and of poverty) by John Steinbeck; Ordinary Notes and In the Wake (essential, foundational texts about the ongoing catastrophe of chattel slavery and beauty as a method of resistance) by Christina Sharpe; Alma Cogan by Gordon Burn (a truly strange first-person inhabitation of the darkness of celebrity); In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (I continue to be deeply chilled and impressed by, and skeptical of, this book); I Am Not Ashamed by Barbara Payton (an interview-as-autobiography of/by the actress at the end of her short, wild, devastating life); The Wellspring by Sharon Olds (poems that render the almost unbearable physical intensity of birth, death, family, bodily life); The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley (the heroine’s journey into the underworld to kill the killer, told with a compelling formal use of quotes); and Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip (the singular and untranslatable text, a visual chorale, drawn from a legal document in which the murder of Africans aboard a slave ship was debated for insurance purposes).
Lynne Tillman
I’ve wanted to make lists of what I’ve read but have always failed. For Granta I looked at my shelves and spotted some titles. Pierre Clémenti’s A Few Personal Messages, a written-in-prison spiritual and political polemic against the state that jailed him. Five novels: Nicole Flattery’s surprising, inventive Nothing Special set in Warhol’s Factory when two young women transcribe Warhol’s taped conversations that become a, A Novel (it decimates what purports to be a realist novel). James W Jennings Wings of Red, a fascinating, charged diary of a substitute teacher, a young, straight Black man, homeless, not friendless, dedicated to his students, and resilient. Maeve Brennan’s The Visitor, a family story composed by a steel mind and with a sharp pen. Colm Tóibín’s Long Island follows Brooklyn’s Lacey, who leaves her Italian American husband and returns home, a complex adventure when many kinds of love are tested. Natalia Ginzburg’s first bold novel, The Road to the City, beautifully translated by Gini Alhadeff, a stark, dark work of interiority and difference.
For nonfiction, excluding many essays: Randall Horton’s Dead Weight: A Memoir in Essays, an intellectual’s telling of his life – from a young Black man doing jail time to a tenured professor considering its trials – as a microcosm of America’s social, racial and cultural problems. Rachel Aviv’s Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, an unusually perceptive study of categorizing people, when who or what you are may lie outside the realm of settled names. Christine Smallwood’s La Captive, a uniquely written analysis of Proust’s La Captive through Chantal Akerman’s film of it, done while mothering and daily life intrude. Nate Lippens’ My Dead Book, a memoir, reflections of a rough, young life, tricking, drugging, with remarkable clarity and economy.
Ralf Webb
I started the year with ambitions to read Zola’s entire Les Rougon-Macquart, to prove to myself that my attention span hasn’t been permanently maimed by social media. But I quit halfway through La Curée, which means I still have seventeen and a half novels to go. I haven’t read much other fiction this year, excepting a couple of John Grisham page-turners (The Firm and The Client), which were fine, and Don DeLillo’s Libra, which was pretty fucking cool. Oh, and I read Robert Harris’ Pompeii after visiting Pompeii, which has some excellent descriptions of ancient aqueducts and the sexual mores of Roman noblemen.
I also thoroughly enjoyed How to Leave the World by Marouane Bakhti (translated into the English by Lara Vergnaud), which I picked up after listening to Bakhti give a wonderful reading from the text. I admire its refusal of genre and the vivid, lyrical prose.
And I found Philippa Snow’s illustrated essay Trophy Lives: On the Celebrity as an Art Object exceptional: rigorously researched, entertaining, and intellectually enriching, like all of Snow’s writing.
Image © clevelandart
