As the year 2024 draws to a close, I think it's a good time to look at what we've read in the last twelve months and share what we think is the best book we read or the greatest literary discovery we made through Literature Stack Exchange.
We learn about books and authors through topic challenges, new questions, research we do to answer questions, discussions in chat and reviews on our Tumblr blog. These don't need to be new books; they can be as old as the epic of Gilgamesh.
My main discovery was Ségou, a novel in two parts of Maryse Condé. Before I suggested Condé for a topic challenge, she was just a name I had come across. I both enjoyed reading the novel and learnt a lot from it about West-African history in the last part of the 19th century. See my reviews on Tumblr: Ségou: Les Murailles de terre and Ségou: La Terre en miettes.
During the Cheese topic challenge, I also rediscovered Willem Elsschot's work, which I enjoyed much more now than I could remember from my schooldays. (I think I abandoned Villa des Roses after a few pages at the time.)
This is not to say that I didn't read any other interesting authors, but these two just stand out more.
I've read a lot of great books this year, but the best - by a hair - was likely Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. This is the review I left for myself:
This is a terribly bleak novel, and it's bleak because it's true: it unearths the awkward intersection between race and poverty that most people would prefer to forget and exposes it to ruthless light, forcing us to examine the brutal injustices and injuries it creates. It does so with such believable characters and richly poetic prose, peppered with occasional moments of real tension, that it elevates it beyond a political polemic and into a work of literary art.
After reading it, Morrison joined a very small group of authors who, for me, have written more than one truly top-tier novel.
The book I read this year that stood out the most is Starling House, by Alix E. Harrow. It’s a Gothic-adjacent fantasy (or maybe magical realist) novel. It’s set in a town called Eden in Kentucky, which is loosely based on the real town of Paradise, KY., and whose history in the novel is as repellent as the real history of Paradise. Eden is run by the Gravelys, a family who made their money from a coal mine near the town, and now runs a huge, polluting, coal-burning power plant. The heroine, Opal, is a young woman in her 20s who lives in a room in a dilapidated hotel with her teenage brother. Opal is trying desperately to get enough money to send her younger brother, who is very smart, to a good boarding school.
Meanwhile, Arthur Starling is a young man who is the only inhabitant of a large, decaying mansion in the forest, built 150 years ago by Eleanor Starling, a woman who made her fortune from an extremely creepy children’s book. Everybody in town believes that Starling House is haunted—the townsfolk stay as far away from it as possible. Arthur gives Opal the job of cleaning Starling House, which has accumulated several generations worth of grime and junk. She is desperate for money, so against her better judgment, Opal takes the job, and this sets the plot in motion.
The characters are generally well-developed. Almost all of them have secrets, and the plot goes through a surprising number of twists before wrapping itself up. I really liked this book.
This might be a bit of an anticlimactic answer, as I haven't read as much in 2024 as other people here (and especially haven't read as much new stuff, since I spent time on re-reading old favourites too), but here goes.
New books: El Llano en llamas by Juan Rulfo.
I've already reviewed this on our Tumblr blog, but an even briefer summary is that I love to learn about new cultures, current or historical - this comes out IRL in my love of travelling, and also in my reading when I get the opportunity to sample literature from a country or period that I'm not very familiar with. That's why I enjoyed Malgudi Days some years ago, and El Llano en llamas this year. Thanks to Tsundoku for proposing Juan Rulfo as a topic challenge!
Re-reads: Momo by Michael Ende.
I always enthuse about The Neverending Story, which I've re-read several times over the years, always finding new layers of storytelling and interpretation in it. But Michael Ende's perhaps lesser-known novel Momo is also a great piece of literature which hits differently when you read it as a child and as an adult. Is it a social commentary about the unhealthiness of modern life, a satire about bankers and their role in society, a psychological deep dive into time management and the meaning of life? All of the above and probably more. These stories make me wish I knew German so that I could pick up on all the subtle things that probably didn't survive translation.
Of the 70 or so books I read in 2024, here are the ones I enjoyed the most.
This novel pulls off an amazing high wire act: it's laugh out loud funny while being dead serious, even tragic, in its import. The premise is that victims of racial violence resurface as ghosts or zombies. The metaphor is that the United States, having yet to reckon with its history of slavery and exploitation of Asian laborers, remains haunted by its past. Stated in this way, the theme seems ponderous, yet the novel is hilarious even as it is horrifying. Everett's control of tone is superb, and his plotting is as deft as his prose.
I read this as part of the May/Jun 2024 topic challenge. I had not heard of Elsschot, so I had no idea what to expect. It shares with The Trees the quality of surface comedy with sadder undercurrents, but this was a much lighter read than Everett's novel: the humor is ironic rather than slapstick, and the sorrow more absurdist than tragic. For example, the hapless hero loses his mother at the very beginning of the novel (shades of Camus!), and when he is encumbered with several tons of cheese to sell, he sadly thinks that had she been alive, she would have helped him out by buying it all. The sadness and the humor are beautifully balanced.
I enjoy reading the literature of the English Renaissance. The combination of blood-bespattered melodrama and breathtakingly beautiful poetry makes Jacobean tragedy particularly appealing, so with the Jun/Jul 2024 topic challenge I was glad to have an excuse to read a play that I had been intending to for years. The central pair of Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores are wonderfully characterized; they manage to elicit sympathy even as they commit the most horrifying crimes.
The only Baldwin work I had read before was Giovanni's Room, which I enjoyed very much. So I was glad that he was chosen for the Nov/Dec 2024 topic challenge. The two essays comprising The Fire Next Time are searing yet clear-eyed. Baldwin links the civil rights movement in the US to the decolonization of Africa that was occurring at roughly the same time, yet speaks movingly and eloquently of the displacement African Americans feel vis-à-vis decolonization: unlike native Africans, they are not automatically assumed to belong by birthright to the land in which they live. He also examines Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam sympathetically yet critically, arguing that casting white and black Americans as ineluctably opposed to each other is no way forward. He argues that building a free and strong nation requires equality rather than hostility between the races, but he also points out that liberal "colorblindness" merely assumes that blacks should be or become more like whites, rather than considering how whites themselves need to change to become more like blacks. His teenage grappling with his own sexuality and turn to Christianity as a result is also deftly recounted. Baldwin writes with anguish, passion, and intelligence about race relations, and the essays forced me to re-examine my own beliefs and attitudes.
