Best Books I Read in 2024
- Not a River by Selva Almada, trans. Annie McDermott (2020)
Synopsis: Two men and their dead friend’s young son go out on a fishing trip, but get in trouble with the locals.
Less than 100 pages, yet densely packed with details that immerse you in every scene, every character. A ghost story where it feels like everyone’s a ghost and everyone’s haunted.
- The Game Changers: How Playing Games Changed the World and Can Change You Too by Tim Clare (2024)
Synopsis: A survey of games from The Royal Game of Ur to The Game of Life to Live-Action Roleplaying, exploring the history and meaning behind one of humanity’s oldest pastimes.
Clare makes a convincing argument (not that I needed to be convinced) for games as a fundamental part of the human experience, and covers such a wide range of games in such detail that even the most ardent gamer will be sure to come away having learned something (and with some new games to try).
- The Honours by Tim Clare (2015)
Synopsis: A young girl discovers that the cult her parents have joined up with isn’t even the weirdest thing going on at this old English country manor.
For the first book of a series The Honours is incredibly confident in its worldbuilding. No lengthy exposition, no momentum-killing lore dumps—told in a very close 3rd-person, we see only what Delphine sees and we have only the context she has. Even the few moments that we get outside of her perspective offer no explanations but merely tantalizing views of a more complex world beyond what we’ve seen so far. There’s almost something funny about it, that our protagonist is exactly the kind of character who would normally be having things explained to her constantly, but here no one can be bothered.
This all leads to a delightfully tense slow build of a novel, as Delphine painstakingly investigates the goings-on at Alderberen Hall (so well-realized in Clare’s richly descriptive prose that I never once lost my sense of place) and pieces together bits of the puzzle (albeit often incorrectly). As the reader we may occasionally get out ahead of her, but without any external confirmation we can only make educated guesses at the true plot until it’s finally revealed in the most page-turning climax I’ve read in a while.
All of this comes with the caveat, though, of my one major criticism: the prologue should’ve been cut (or rather, moved). It’s not that it’s poorly written, the hunt is an excellent bit of drama and there’s some great character stuff after, but it undercuts, even if only slightly, everything I just highlighted about the worldbuilding and pacing. It’s not like it gives everything away, but it does reveal just enough to loosen the mystery’s grip on the reader, to have them looking for something instead of everything, if that makes sense. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, and even without it you’d have to go into the book not knowing anything about it to really achieve the effect I want, and how often is that true? Still, I feel like the opening chapter serves just as well to start, and reveals nothing. And I think the prologue would be able to slot into the narrative in Act 3 without a problem, so it’s not like we’d be losing what it does well.
Anyway, my biggest takeaway is now I really want to read book 2.
- Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara (1964)
Synopsis: Poems about New York City and the people in it and the things they do and say and feel and whatnot.
You might say no one’s ever read the same book as anyone else, no matter what the title on the cover is, because a book is not a static artifact but a conversation between the author and the reader. You bring your own mind, your circumstances, associations no one else has and the author could not have anticipated, to everything you read.
For me, I brought a lot of sadness and guilt to Lunch Poems. Sadness, because I was gifted the book by someone I deeply respect and admire, who a couple years ago unfriended me on Facebook (which was our primary method of communication, is why that matters) and I’ll probably never know why; we’d never fought, and our last exchange was me congratulating them on a new poem. Guilt, because when they gave it to me about 8 years ago I tried to read it too quickly and sort of skimmed the surface, then told myself I’d try again soon and didn’t until now, which feels like a shitty way to treat a gift (to be fair, they also gifted me Richard Brautigan’s An Unfortunate Woman which I immediately devoured and have returned to frequently).
So anyway, Frank, no pressure right?
But honestly I was pretty quickly distracted by how good the book is. I’m not gonna say I got much more than I did the first time—if I got maybe 20% then, then I got maybe 50% now—but I felt better able to appreciate what I did get. There’s humor and deep emotion and an excitement and anxiety about life all in cacophonous mix. O’Hara’s language has the rhythm of the city, at times breathless and at others contemplative, each line conveying the reader to the next like a subway train or a taxi or a drizzly walk under streetlights.
His images, too, are the stuff of the city—well, not just the city obviously, but Manhattan, 1956-1964, and it’s this specificity, maybe even more than his bespoke grammar and tendency to elide his ideas without any clear logical connection, that I think lends the whole thing a certain impenetrability to a modern reader not native to that time and place. It’s the kind of book you’d have to read other books to get the most out of if you weren’t there.
Of course distractions are only temporary, and my mind inevitably drifts back to the conversations we could have had and never did because I was lazy and unappreciative. It’s even clearer now how thoughtful a gift this was—as much as there’s stuff here that I already gravitated toward, there’s even more that they clearly knew I could learn from.
But not, unfortunately, how to end a review with a confused premise. Alas. C’est la vie.
- Songs on Endless Repeat: Essays and Outtakes by Anthony Veasna So (2023)
Synopsis: Essays on pop culture and being gay and Cambodian in America, and excerpts from an unpublished novel about family and friends reuniting at a funeral.
I kind of assumed going into this that I would mostly be interested in his pop culture essays. And certainly the essays on Queer Eye and Crazy Rich Asians are good. In fact for the first half or so of the book if you’d asked me I would’ve said he’s better at non-fiction than fiction, that his essays feel more cohesive and true to his voice while the fiction, though compelling due to its well-sketched characters and rich depiction of their community and Cambodian-American culture, feels bogged down by attempts at self-consciously novelistic pontificating that seem in stark contrast to both the voices of the characters and of So himself.
But those last three excerpts from Straight Thru Cambotown, despite having all those same problems, had me completely hooked. I don’t know if I can point to anything those do better than the other excerpts—indeed, I can definitely point to yet further examples of those awkward, reaching-for-profundity moments—but I think that I’d just gotten absorbed in the stories, gotten attached to those characters, and by that point I was more willing to forgive the flaws. While during the first half of the book I found myself thinking “Man, I’m glad these excerpts are spread out, it would be tedious to read these all in a row,” by the end I was glad there were no interruptions, that I could read them like the novel they never were.
And now this is going to be a weird complaint to have, but I wish that’s how the book ended. Not that I think “Baby Yeah” undeserving of inclusion, but I was (and still am) so caught up in the world of Straight Thru Cambotown, so lost in the what-ifs of its incompleteness, that I don’t think I really gave “Baby Yeah” all the attention, or really, all the emotional space it deserved. I don’t know, it’s probably just me.
There’s always a weird feeling when you discover an artist who recently died, but who you’re encountering for the first time. Add to that that he died tragically young and the first work of his I’m reading was published posthumously, and there’s all sorts of emotional valences here that might not be applicable to all readers.
But it’s a good book, in case that wasn’t clear.
- The Suicide Museum by Ariel Dorfman (2023)
Synopsis: After befriending a mysterious billionaire, writer Ariel Dorfman returns to a newly-liberated Chile with a mission: discover the true story of Salvador Allende’s death. I mean, that is technically the plot of the novel, but it’s also only like 30% of it.
My first impression of the novel was that the narrator (who I didn’t even realize was a lightly fictionalized version of the author until about 20 pages in) was kind of annoying. From a literary perspective I was annoyed at how often he would say something like “I didn’t know it at the time, but…”—he does this like 10 times just in the first chapter, and keeps doing it right up until the end. From a character perspective, I found Ariel (the character) to be at times overly ingratiating and at other times too easily offended, and later in the novel there kept being these moments where he would refer to his billionaire benefactor as his friend immediately before or after thinking about how he was going to manipulate him. Even in the final chapter, of which Hortha is the emotional core, I can’t tell whether Ariel actually likes him.
Though for that matter, I can’t tell if I actually like him. From the moment the character of Joseph Hortha is introduced, I couldn’t help but picture Corey Stoll as Mike Prince in Billions. Like Hortha, Prince is presented as “the good billionaire,” who wants to use his wealth and power to improve the world. Like Hortha, he has grand plans for how to do that. However, Prince (and this is a spoiler for the last two seasons of Billions but I don’t think it will make it less enjoyable and you should watch it, it’s a great show) is eventually revealed to be a megalomaniac whose high-minded ideals vanish in the face of his own ambition. And like, yeah. That’s who that character would be in real life, because it is impossible to be a good person and a billionaire.
But Joseph Hortha isn’t in real life. And the portrait painted of him in the book suggests that, for all his flaws, his ideals are real. His interrogation of the role of capitalism and his own accumulation of wealth in the slow destruction of the human habitat is…lacking, but his heart does seem to be in the right place. And he has gone through some shit, and it’s hard not feel for him in that last chapter.
The YouTuber Steve Shives has an excellent series of video essays I like to call The Cardassian Trilogy, each one of which focusses on one of the three main Cardassian characters in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, exploring how we relate to fictional characters who in real life we would never have anything to do with. In his essay on Garak, Shives says, “The fact that Garak is a fictional character is the very thing that allows us to forgive him, to offer him a second chance, to appreciate the conflicts and ambiguities that define him, to enjoy his considerable wit and charm while knowing full well what he’s capable of. We can get close to Garak, because he can’t hurt us. He’s just like the rest of Star Trek: a fantasy. He lives in our imagination – the only place a person like him can ever really be redeemed.” Hortha, “the good billionaire,” is good only because Dorfman wrote him that way. I just don’t know how useful it is to buy into that, especially right now.
But setting aside Hortha’s character, he’s also serving as a vehicle for one of the two big themes of the novel, our impending doom due to climate change. Keeping in mind that this novel is set largely in the 90’s. Fun times! And what’s the other major theme? What to do when your country is taken over by fascists! So, a depressingly relevant book, it turns out.
And ultimately, though I still occasionally would find myself getting annoyed at Ariel, as the novel progresses and we learn more about him, see Chile through his eyes, the pain he feels coming back and the pain he feels when he ultimately decides to leave, I did end up really connecting with him as a character (and, I suppose, as an author). And he does present the death of Allende as a compelling mystery.
So, all my frustrations and hedges aside, I think there’s a lot to like about this novel, and its themes will (or at least they should) resonate deeply.
Honorable Mentions
Certain of Eventual Failure 