Category: books

  • Books of 2024 – part 2

    Yesterday, I shared my reactions to the books that the NY Times thought were notable this year. Today, I’m going to lift up some of the books I read this year that I liked the most (or had the biggest impact on me — not necessarily the same thing).

    Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch. This won the Booker prize last year. It’s a lyrical book about a mother dealing with trying to take care of her family (four kids, an aging father) in the wake of her husband’s arrest by the secret police in an Ireland moving towards fascism and civil war. I loved this, but I hesitate to recommend it to people without a trigger warning, because it broke me a little. Near the end, there’s a passage that has haunted me since I read it:

    “…the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore”

    The Power Broker, Robert Caro. This is his biography of Robert Moses. It’s the 50th anniversary of its publishing and it’s a 1000 page plus book about NY politics and power and money and how they affect land use and roads and parks. If you think you’d hate this, you’re probably right, and if you think it sounds like fun, you’ve probably read it already. But if it sounds like fun, and you haven’t read it, I recommend it. I listened to the audiobook at 1.2x speed and it still took me most of the year to get through.

    For a shorter investment of time, you could also just listen to the 99 percent invisible podcast read-along series, and get the gist. They’ve got great guests, from AOC and Pete Buttigieg to Brennan Lee Mulligan (who created a D&D campaign with undead Robert Moses as the main villain) and Shiloh Frederick (whose TikTok videos got NYC to remove the sculptures of monkeys in shackles from a Harlem playground). But if you skip the book, you’d miss out on Caro’s attention to the sound and rhythm of his sentences. (I also recommend Caro’s series on LBJ.)

    We Were Illegal: Uncovering a Texas Family’s Mythmaking and Migration, by Jessica Godeau. This book examines American and Texas history and historical myths through the lens of the author’s own family, going back to before the American revolution. It covers tough topics, including slavery, genocide, police brutality, redlining and sexual abuse. But it somehow isn’t an overwhelmingly depressing book, as Godeau highlights the people who were brave enough to tell the truth, even when it was unpopular or dangerous.

    Other favorites this year, in various genres (or combinations of genres) —

    Science fiction: The Possibilities, by Yael Goldstein-Love.

    Graphic novel: The Magic Fish, by Trung Le Nguyen

    Romance: You should be so lucky, by Cat Sebastian

    Fantasy: The scandalous confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch, by Melinda Taub.

    Ghost story/historical novel: The Reformatory, by Tananarive Due

    Mystery (and also a ghost story): Shutter, by Ramona Emerson

    SF/Mystery/Romance: The Mars House, by Natasha Pulley

    Fantasy/Noir/Romance: Even though I knew the end, by C.L Polk.

  • Books of 2024: part 1

    I used to do a thing where I’d look at the NY Times picks for books of the year, and see how many I’ve read, and what I thought of them. So here goes.

    Starting with the “10 best” books. I’ve read 2 of the 10, both fiction.

    All Fours, Miranda July. I read the reviews, didn’t think I’d like it, then kept on seeing raves for it, so put it on the hold list at the library. I was right the first time — I didn’t like it. I’m a perimenopausal woman, so I’m supposed to be the target audience, but I didn’t like the main character, found the sexual passages deeply unerotic, and generally didn’t find any of the revelations particularly revelatory. If you liked it, tell me why.

    James, Percival Everett. This is the retelling of Huck Finn from the pov of “Jim.” I liked this, without loving it. I found it both entertaining and interesting to read, but ultimately found the characters underdeveloped. (I also read Julia, by Sandra Newman this year, which is her take on 1984, from Julia’s point of view, which I liked a little more.)

    Of the additional 90 books in the “notable books of 2024 list,” I’ve read 4, and started another 3.

    The four that I read were:

    • The God of the Woods, Liz Moore
    • The Hunter, Tana French,
    • The Safekeep, Yael van der Woouden, and
    • Circle of Hope, Eliza Griswold.

    I very much enjoyed the first two, which are both mysteries of a sort, in that someone dies or disappears, but the focus is far more on the characters and their relationships than on whodunnit. I thought The Safekeep was interesting and well written, but the big surprise was obvious to me from nearly the beginning. I’m super curious whether that was the case for other readers, and how much it varies depending on whether you’re Jewish by heritage.

    I just finished Circle of Hope this morning, and really liked it. It’s about a lefty evangelical church in Philadelphia and how it was pulled apart over both generational shifts and racialized disagreement in the wake of the pandemic and the attention to race post George Floyd. There was an excerpt from it in the paper early in the year or last year, and I found the racialized disagreement utterly predictable. But with the additional space to really get to know the different people as individuals, the story gets more complicated. Griswold is a very good writer, and the church gave her amazing access during what was clearly a very difficult time. But I’m not sure what the takeaway is other than that being in community is hard, especially across real differences in life experience, even when everyone is trying. It’s worth the work, but it may not succeed. Another of the books on the list is Undivided, by Hahrie Han, which is about a conservative evangelical church struggling to address racial injustice — I’ve got that out from the library too, and will be interested in comparing them.

    I’m in the middle of Lev Grossman‘s The Bright Sword. I picked this up because of its strong reviews in spite of being maybe the only person who really disliked The Magicians. I’m enjoying it, but I got it as an audiobook, and it’s very long. And because it’s sort of meandering — it’s got one story going in the main timeline, but keeps looping back to tell individual character’s backstories in more detail — when I take a break from it, there’s not compulsion to return to find out what happens next.

    I started but ran out of library renewals on two books from the list before I could finish them. I might try again onThe Practice, the Horizon and the Chain, by Sofia Samatar. It’s very abstract and allegorical, but interesting. I just couldn’t get into Creation Lake, by Rachel Kushner.

    Part 2 will be some of the other books I read this year that are worth commenting on.