2024 was a year of re-reading for me. This was partly because I taught two courses that allowed me to revisit favorites, but mainly because I spent most of 2024 in novel-drafting mode and so obsessively re-reading the work of my two prose benchmarks, Bryher and Glenway Wescott. As a result, I read less new fiction than usual: 10 books from 2023 and only 13 from 2024.
Beyond Bryher and Wescott, the writer I spent the most time with this year was A.S. Byatt (6 books). She’s a remarkable stylist, especially of ekphrasis and color, a nuanced observer of character, and a stalwart defender of the arts. I’m not sure she’ll ever be one of my favorites, though. While her writer’s sympathy is enormous, it’s also conservative in a brittle way that limits how she writes women.
Among 2024 releases, my favorites were Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall and Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin. Among new-to-me books, my favorites were Magda Szabó’s The Door and Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road. All four are remarkable (and very different). I also found Simone Weil’s unfinished treatise The Need for Roots compelling, if sometimes unconvincing.
As always, the list below is in rough reading order, with exceptions made for writers of whom I read multiple works.
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George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (novel, 1860). Excellent as always, a masterful portrait of a small town and small minds.
Edith Wharton, The Wharton Gothics (short stories, various). Surprisingly creepy, these tales deliberately refuse to offer answers. Here Wharton transfers the complexity and unsummarizability of her characters to her plots.
Erin Slaughter, A Manual for How to Love Us (short stories, 2023). A poetic account of the desires and frustrations women live (and sometimes die) beneath.
Susan Stanford Friedman, ed. Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D. Bryher, and Their Circle (nonfiction, 2002). A well-edited volume of letters documenting H.D’s sessions with Freud in the mid-30s. I read mostly for Bryher. My favorite line in the whole volume comes from a letter Freud sent to her, presumably in response to letter Friedman, unfortunately, can’t excerpt because it’s lost: “Everything you wrote about the valuable effects of penis envy is true” (262).
Kafka, The Trial (novel, 1925). Even more unsettling than expected.
Kaveh Akbar, Martyr! (novel, 2024). A novel that loves its characters for daring to desire meaning; even its gentle laughter at their pretensions is a sort of love. As good as Akbar’s poetry—better even, because its earnest romanticism is leavened by the irony and humor of narrative (which is to say, time).
Jordy Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox (reread; novel, 2018). Good theory, unsteady fiction.
Shola von Reinhold, LOTE (reread; novel, 2020). LOTE remains one of the smartest and loveliest books on loveliness I’ve read. Into a poignant archival mystery it smuggles a scholarly monograph’s worth of thought on the interrelation of aestheticism, gender, historical longing, and the racist erasures of the archive.
Annalee Newitz, The Terraformers (novel, 2023). Lively, wacky novel about a privatized terraforming project whose enslaved workers free themselves over a span of centuries. I listened to the audiobook, whose reader was good but whose labored FX didn’t trust listeners to use their imaginations. The book’s most sublime moment—a canticle of living trains—was ruined by the audiobook’s decision to foley it. One glory of fiction is its power to evoke experiences that can’t be perfectly reproduced by our other senses. Adding sound effects to an audiobook numbs this power, reducing a novel to a script in the expectation that most readers would prefer the TV adaptation.
Renee Gladman, Event Factory (novella, 2010). A Borgesian novella about a city composed of uncanny, highly particular abstractions.
Robert Frost, A Collection of Poems (poems, various). I’d never read much Frost before so was delighted to find he’s like an American Browning: dramatic monologues in plainspoken free verse, recounting little moments in rural New England when daily life presses, momentarily and mysteriously, up against the absolute.
Robert Frost, New Hampshire (poems, 1923). Warm, wry portraits of contented outsiders at home.
Amina Gautier, The Best That You Can Do (short stories, 2024). Spare glimpses of black family life in the late 20th century.
Shirley Hazzard, Collected Stories (short stories, various). Melancholy stories of disillusionment, whether with a love affair or the United Nations, which Hazzard calls “The Organization” and whose mission she depicts as both laudable and laughable.
Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus (novel, 1980). Iffy story aside, Hazzard’s cold elegance is compelling.
Tacey M. Atsitty, (At) Wrist (poems, 2023). Sharp, imaginative poems that swap out parts of speech—verb for noun, adjective for verb—to ambiguous affect. Sometimes it’s brilliant, sometimes naïve, like a new poet omitting articles because it sounds poetic. My favorite poems were those where the swaps got so thick they strained sense and the whole became aural and impressionistic.
Travis Chi Wing Lau, Paring (poems, 2020). A cogent, exploratory chapbook about what needs preserving, what doesn’t, and what’s deepest that still bears cutting away.
Travis Chi Wing Lau, Vagaries (poems, 2023). A collection of precise poetic theses about how pain drives, warps, and exceeds language. My favorites, dialogues with Harriet Martineau and ACT UP, examine how the body tips over into history.
Margery Latimer, Guardian Angel and Other Stories (stories, 1920s-30s). Latimer was a Wisconsin modernist who died in childbirth at 32. These stories are Geiger counters that neatly record the radioactive undercurrents of midwestern women’s lives.
Willa Cather (novel, 1918). My Ántonia. Rough, big-hearted romance of plains life.
Jeanne Thornton, Summer Fun (reread; novel, 2021). Still my favorite novel about trans people’s relationship to art.
James Frankie Thomas, Idlewild (reread; novel, 2023). Still the trans novel by which I feel most witheringly read.
Justin Torres, Blackouts (novel, 2023). Heartfelt and delightfully bitchy, but didn’t need all the formal play to get where it was going.
Juhani Karila, trans. Lola Rogers (novel, 2023). Fishing for the Little Pike. Odd, delightful.
Anthony Oliviera, Dayspring (novel in verse, 2024). A commonplace book of Christian mysticism that hits its stride when it shifts from quoting Milton to quoting Marguerite Porete. Despite all the gay, the book’s point is not that Christianity is queer (it’s been queer, as Oliviera knows) but to advance the mystic’s transcendent reading of Christian love as all gratulant, if rightly understood. Extra points for having the Son fuck not Judas but John of Patmos.
Glenway Wescott, The Pilgrim Hawk (reread; novella, 1940). A little pearl of a novella, perfect and opaque.
Glenway Wescott, Goodbye, Wisconsin (reread; short stories, 1928). Wescott’s brutal, affectionate, but never nostalgic elegies for Wisconsin, which he left as a young man.
Glenway Wescott, A Visit to Priapus (reread; short stories, 2013). Contains the transcendent essay of Wescott’s 60s, “The Valley Submerged,” a tour-de-force meditation on loss.
Glenway Wescott, The Apple of the Eye (reread; novel, 1924). Unsparing, tightly-observed linked tales of rural life.
Glenway Wescott, The Grandmothers (reread; novel, 1927). Astonishing portraits of middle-westerners and the middle-west in the early 20th century.
Karel Hynek Mácha, trans. Marcela Sulak, Máj (poem, 1836). Romantic melodrama, nationalist and a bit saccharine; the facing-page translation, while I couldn’t read it, underlined how much I was missing.
Adalbert Stifter, trans. Isabel Fargo Cole, Motley Stones (short stories, 1853). Uncanny pastorals; brief, sublime glimpses of the abyss that gapes beneath nature, human and non.
Dezsö Kostolányi, trans. Bernard Adams, Kornél Esti (novel, 1924). Modernist picaresque.
Magda Szabó, trans. Len Rix, The Door (novel, 1987). An unsparing account of bourgeois self-deception, and maybe the best book I read this year.
Randall Kenan, A Visitation of Spirits (novel, 1989). Mystical and gratifyingly uneven.
Peter H. Wilson, The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy (nonfiction, 2011). A magisterial attempt to see the war without teleology, its primary effect is to underline how confusing the Holy Roman Empire was in the 17th century.
Sofia Samatar, The Horizon, The Practice, and the Chain (novella, 2024). Knows that all revolutions have lyric endings.
A.S. Byatt, The Children’s Book (novel, 2009). Rambling doorstopper about English fin de siècle malaise, with some startlingly beautiful ekphrastic descriptions of pottery.
A.S. Byatt, Ragnarok (novella, 2011). Elegizes the sixth great extinction via Norse myth.
A.S. Byatt, Angels and Insects (two novellas, 1992). As in Possession, Byatt pries back Victorian propriety to expose its seamy, steamy underbelly.
A.S. Byatt, The Matisse Stories (short stories, 1993). Gorgeously-wrought jewels of ekphrasis.
A.S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (short stories, 1994). The title story is a moving account of a woman in middle-age recapturing her desires—for story, for sex, and for her own beloved body.
A.S. Byatt, A Whistling Woman (novel, 2002). Thoughtful if ultimately unsympathetic chronicle of an anti-establishment movement at a north-of-England university in the 1960s.
Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (nonfiction, 1949). This unfinished treatise’s account of why fascism succeeds, and what we’d need to do to offer a viable alternative, could have been written in 2024.
Fiona McFarlane, The Sun Walks Down (novel, 2023). Intimately-interwoven portraits of settlers in an Australia whose pitiless grandeur they fatally fail to understand.
James Merrill, The Seraglio (novel, 1987). Whatever I expected from this acerbic, damning roman a clef, it certainly wasn’t the lead character castrating himself at midpoint.
Vajra Chandrasekera, Rakesfall (novel, 2024). Philosophical SFF at its absolute best, and like its predecessor The Saint of Bright Doors, easily the best SFF book I read this year. This brilliant allegory follows a set of reincarnated resistance fighters whose malleable relation Chandrasekera uses to tackle a stunning breadth of ideas: historical complicity, trauma (colonial, familial, ecological), truth (mythic, mimetic, aesthetic), the corruption of power, and the strength and betrayal found in kinship and art. Alas, Tor did this book dirty by marketing it as genre-romance-adjacent and giving it a hideous cover.
Susan McCabe, H.D. and Bryher: A Modernist Love Story (reread; nonfiction, 2021). Oddly-written for an academic monograph, but worth it for its richly-detailed life of an extraordinary Modernist pair. McCabe was also done dirty by her publisher: Oxford’s cover is unforgivably heinous, especially given the wealth of stunning open-access photos of H.D. and Bryher in the Beinecke archives.
Jac Jemc, Empty Theatre (novel, 2023). At once too weightless and insufficiently baroque, given its subjects (Sisi and Ludwig II).
Thomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark (novel, 2020). Broody, somewhat overwrought tragedy about queer love in soviet Poland.
Ali Smith, Autumn (novel, 2016). More sentimental than I was expecting, this book read like an underedited draft by an excellent writer—which, when I looked it up, I saw it was. I probably won’t read the rest of the Seasons cycle, though I’ll certainly read more Smith.
Sarah Thankam Mathews, All This Could Be Different (reread; novel, 2023). Remains juicy and bracingly hopeful.
Percival Everett, The Trees (novel, 2021). Gonzo revenge fantasy where the US’s lynched POC serve up a tiny bit of reparative justice; my favorite stupid-white-name was Sheriff Chalk Pellucid. I do wonder if Everett, one of the country’s most gifted writers, has grown tired of watching his books not about the Black experience fail to hit the white media stratosphere and has simply decided to pull a career-long Erasure on all of us.
Bryher, Beowulf (novel, 1946/1956). Interlocking journalistic studies of Londoners’ reactions to the Blitz, understanding and compassionate, if not quite sympathetic.
Bryher, The Fourteenth of October (novel, 1954). Initially blundering, this novel matures into a quiet elegy for pre-Norman England, and what’s lost in the inevitable human compromises of conquest.
Bryher, The Heart to Artemis (reread; memoir, 1962). Bryher’s voice is spry, gutsy, judgy, and more alive than anything in her fiction.
Bryher, Days of Mars (reread; memoir, 1972). A salty memoir of the Blitz.
Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn (novel, 1977). A bemused, unsentimental portrait of four lonely pensioners too timid to feel their own desperation.
Barbara Pym, An Unsuitable Attachment (novel, 1982). One of those novels about people almost having affairs on the continent, enlivened by Pym’s quiet wit.
Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana (novel, 1990). Immensely satisfying second-world fantasy.
Pat Barker, The Ghost Road (novel, 1995). Even better than the first two books in the Regeneration trilogy, transforming a lament for WWI into a sober argument about how ritualized cruelty helps us confront death.
Tessa Hadley, Free Love (novel, 2022). A briefer take on Byatt’s A Whistling Woman, which allows more grace to the destructive impulses of ‘60s idealism.
Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built (novella, 2021). This was my first encounter with cozy SFF, and I learned it’s not for me.
Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (novel, 2022). A bit too much like a police procedural for my taste.
Jane Austen, Emma (reread; novel, 1816). Still the smartest Austen, where she frogmarches us winkingly through a marriage plot she never lets us believe in.
Jane Austen, Persuasion (reread; novel, 1818). Still my favorite Austen, where she wears her metaphysics most openly on her sleeve, right next to her heart.
Yasmin Zaher, The Coin (novel, 2024). A surrealistic account of a young Palestinian woman’s unraveling, and one of my favorite reads this year, despite my usual dislike of the genre (bourgeois person wrings hands in Brooklyn).
Nicola Griffith, Ammonite (novel, 1992). Sociological SF done right.
Graham Smith, Waterland (novel, 1983). Postmodernism done right.
Marie Ndiaye, The Cheffe (novel, 2019). Like Ladivine, an ambiguous fever-dream of a book, completely seamless. I hope Ndiaye has a cult of genius around her in France. She deserves it.
Susanna Clarke. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (reread; novel, 2024). Holds up, in part because Clarke understands that the allure of the English fantastic is rooted in landscape.
Henry James, The Bostonians (novel, 1886). Remarkable character portraits, so realistic that I had trouble finishing it because I found Basil Ransom so insufferable.
Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall (reread; novella, 2019). A quietly horrifying story of how abusive men convince others to collude in their abuse.
Sarah Moss, My Good Bright Wolf (memoir, 2024). Repetitively defensive in its first two thirds, nuanced and profound in its third, it was as if the Moss of Ghost Wall, a writer of brute sensitivity, only dug herself out from the blunting trauma of reliving her eating-disordered childhood when her memoir let her be an adult.
Ling Ma, Severance (novel, 2018). Cannily uses zombies to figure the mingled allure and horror of nostalgia, even for the (equally zombiefied) late capitalist hellscape of bullshit jobs.
Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night (novel, 2020). Poetic, if rather edgeless and pedagogical.
Laird Hunt, Zorrie (novel, 2021). Contemplative ode to the transcendences of rural life.
Jokha Alharthi, trans. Marilyn Booth, Silken Gazelles (novel, 2024). Layered cross-section of the lives of three Omani women who discover why childhood memories are at once a source of strength and a dangerous quicksand.
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That’s it for 2024. Until next year!