...in which I take a page from my sister and Substack about the books I read last year...
Here’s the annotated list in chronological order:
Cloud Cuckoo Land—Anthony Doerr
This was my first Doerr and my last. I was intrigued by its Cloud Atlasy setup (interlocked stories set in widely disparate timelines) but finally it felt too tv for me. Much of the writing in the fall-of-Constantinople narrative is pitch-perfect and often stunning. He gets cornier and more predictable as he nears and then surges beyond the present moment. I’m sure the Netflix adaptation will be good.
To Hold Up the Sky—Cixin Liu
I really like Cixin Liu’s short stories. I’m grateful to The Three Body Problem and its sequels for serving as a gateway to his short work. Whereas his magnum opus trilogy was notably unhumorous (I thought racistly, while reading: Is it a Chinese thing?) his stories are frequently hilarious. One sentence I remember still from this January read went like this: “ ‘Dee-dee, doo-doo-doo, dee-dee-dee-dee,’ answered the balloon.” I giggled and giggled on the couch until A. consented and said, “What?”
A Short History of Philosophy—Derek Johnston
Autodidact’s gonna didact!
Hild—Nicola Griffith
Our best random find of the year. A. picked it up in a button-cute cafe/bookstore in Bend, Oregon, called Dudley’s. It was a staff pick and featured quite the blurb from Neal Stephenson, for whom I harbor a many-shaded affection. (“Extraordinary… [Hild] resonates to many of the same chords as Beowulf, the legends of King Arthur, The Lord of the Rings, and Game of Thrones.”) This is a historical novel revolving around the life of she who would become Saint Hild, a 7th century English seer. (In the book they say Ainglish.) Hild covers the first third of Hild’s life. Nicola Griffith is a total badass. The period detail, the pacing, the richness of the language…it’s a totally saturating world, the kind you first believe you’ll never penetrate—you’ll never keep track of all the characters—like Wolf Hall—and then of course by the end you’ve lost yourself completely and very much resent having to leave. We half-read, half-listened to Hild. The Audible reader, Pearl Hewitt, has an enchanting voice, and teaches you how to pronounce all the crazy Welsh words.
The Shadow of the Torturer—Gene Wolfe
I think this book came to me via the new and kind of underwhelming “What Our Readers are Reading” feature in the NYT Book Review. Some fellow review reader had said something brash and epic about it and I used the Books function on my iPhone to sample (one of the best things Rectangle Satan does, I tell everyone) and was sold by the introduction, which promised a cluttered, comprehensive and utterly unique sci-fi world that makes the reader work for everything. One of the very strangest things I’ve read this decade. I think it takes place (spoiler alert) in a massively distant future (so distant the moon has oxidized into a different color) amid a society no longer capable of the spacefaring and technological prowess that transformed it beyond the irl reader’s easy recognition. The version we bought is published with its sequel, which I haven’t cracked yet, and which I’ve been eyeing warily. (It made it through its first cull, though.)
Florida—Lauren Groff
My first Groff. Not my last. Short stories. Each one perfect. The talent is abundant, the voice powerful, the pen brisk and brave and sure.
The Dying Animal—Philip Roth
“More about breasts than The Breast!”
The Deep—Crowley
I love John Crowley and I loved this, his first book. Published in 1975, The Deep, not unlike The Shadow of the Torturer, plays it close to the vest. The first time you actually understand the whole megillah you’ve only got a few more pages to go. This was a beautiful puzzlebox of a fantasy fairy tale, large in scope but not in execution. The British writer Roz Kaveney once described Crowley as “a writer of surpassing, almost overweening, intelligence and cleverness.” How great is that? (I misremembered this description as pivoting on the word “hubris”, which, as everyone knows, is traditionally defined as “overweening pride.”)
The Making of the Atomic Bomb—Richard Rhodes
This was my biggest surprise of the year. It was big itself and it was a big surprise how much I liked it. Had read an article about a Silicon Valley AI start-up that had a distinctly gloomy attitude about its project. The Making of the Atomic Bomb was required reading company-wide. A technological discovery was going to change the world. The character portraits are deep and inspiring, the narrative vast and relentless, the tragedy breathtaking. Plus you’ll learn a lot of chemistry for a minute.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Being a high school dropout makes for some funny omissions. I’m planning on getting around to Gatsby this year. Last year it was Huck Finn. Elijah Wood read this to me while I drove and did yardwork. I had no idea he had such vocal dexterity in him, but he freaking did. Crazy book, lots of fun, ruined for me by the protracted absurdity of the final section, in which Tom Sawyer takes over and the edifice of the plot collapses over its beating heart.
The Fraud—Zadie Smith
We listened/read this largely during an April roadtrip to D.C. to see an Astros game for my birthday. My first Zadie Smith novel after having only read her essays. I hearted this book very much indeed. It was a delight to listen to her read it. The Trumpy aspects of the story garnered most of the notice (at least most of what I was aware of) but I was more appreciative of the long close look she took at a low-profile Victorian novelist (“low-profile” through no fault of his own) and his society. This book excelled at the authorial magic that is representing different people with such evolving complexity that by the end you realize you’ve changed your mind about everything, probably several times, only to have landed in a satisfying omnidimensional detail-splattered ambiguity.
Orbital—Samantha Harvey
If this list included books I put down, it would include the early Harvey novel The Wilderness, which had been biding its time on our shelves for a few years after I fell hard for her historical fiction The Western Wind. That novel told the story of a man’s unexplained disappearance from a rustic a.f. 15th century English village in, I think, four reverse-sequence passages. It was half The Name of the Rose and half Memento and I adored it. The Wilderness, Harvey’s first book, had dialogue so stilted I put it down after twenty pages. Orbital shocked me with its poetry and its point of view and laser-fine sentences. By now you’ve heard of it. It just won the Booker Prize for 2024, firmly placing Harvey on the map. She doesn’t show much of her improved dialogue chops in Orbital, as it’s mostly about astronauts looking and thinking. We’re on the International Space Station orbiting Earth. 24 hours pass over 136 perfect pages describing 16 complete orbits. I’d intended to dedicate a Substack to this book, so moved was I. The scene I find indelibly printed in my brain has the entire crew of the station suspended asleep in zero gravity while a sci-fi movie concludes its noisy hysterical third act on an unwatched tv. I had thought this scene ended with a passage about how, were the planet to suddenly cease its rotation, they’d all wake instantly without knowing why. But that passage is somewhere else. There are treasures everywhere in Orbital. Just a very little thing with huge, huge arms, this book.
*In our post-Orbital giddiness we found the French documentary 16 Sunrises (2018), and I can’t recommend it enough. I think it must have inspired her to write the book.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I’m a little surprised by how little of this famous slender novel I remember now. I’d never read Garcia Marquez before and I wonder if this was the best introduction. Maybe I should’ve started with 100 Years of Solitude like everybody else.
The Light Ages—Seb Falk
(Three thumbs up. Wrote about it here.)
The Discomfort Zone—Jonathan Franzen
Read this well after his most recent novel, Crossroads, which was inspired by his experience as part of a super-active hippy-Christian youth-group in St. Louis in the 70s. That same subject matter plays a central role in this memoir. Flawlessly composed, as usual, and challenging, incisive or illuminating on every page.
Dear Life—Alice Munro
What can you say about Alice Munro’s short stories that hasn’t been said a gazillion times already?
Mrs. Bridge—Evan Connell
This was a recommendation from Franzen, who penned an introduction. Before it is all said and done I’m going to have read most there is of Connell, I think. His first novel, written when he was in his 20s, tells the story of a Kansas City housewife born between the wars. Her husband and children feature prominently, including a son who is the most vivid and wonderful little boy I’ve ever read and who was allegedly based on the author (or so I read in a piece about Connell by Gemma Sieff that Harpers published in 2013 and that made a strong impression on me).
Beasts—John Crowley
Crowley indulged his overweening self here but I read every word. I liked his lion—people characters. He writes animals exceptionally well. To step into a Crowley world is to enter lucidly someone else’s dream. That’s a pretty generic statement I guess but if you’ve read him you know.
A is for Alibi—Sue Grafton
Here’s something creepy I just learned that Grafton fans have no doubt been creeped out by for eight years now: she never got to the end of her “Alphabet series” of novels starring the southern California-based private investigator Kinsey Millhone. Y is for Yesterday was published in 2017, the year she died. The next book would have been called (this was part of the public record for years hence) Z is for Zero. Isn’t that creepy? We read the first in the series for our second ever genre-themed bookclub (Mystery). Lots of fun. The last line (major spoiler alert) really underscores the tone (it’s “I blew him away”, and she means with a gun). But I most loved her easy banter with several of the novel’s colorful side characters.
Train Dreams—Denis Johnson
Our bookclub’s first genre-theme was Historical Fiction, and how grateful we are that a friend brought this to the party! Train Dreams is a novella by the much lauded Carver acolyte and Iowa graduate Denis Johnson. (Actually I don’t know if he was a Carver acolyte. It’s part of the record that he took classes from Carver at Iowa, and it’s hard to resist romanticizing these instances of literary patrimony. I still get excited that Pynchon studied under Nabokov at Cornell, though I’ve heard that Nabokov insists he doesn’t remember.) Anyway, Train Dreams is a gorgeous, idiosyncratic story of a life. It is the sort of book that turns people into ardent ambassadors. Here (with spoiler alert) is how Anthony Doerr encapsulated the narrative in a 2011 review: “The story concerns the life of Robert Grainier, a fictional orphan shipped by train in 1893 into the woods of the Idaho panhandle. He grows up, works on logging gangs, falls in love, and loses his wife and baby daughter to a particularly pernicious wildfire. What Johnson builds from the ashes of Grainier’s life is a tender, lonesome and riveting story, an American epic writ small, in which Grainier drives a horse cart, flies in a biplane, takes part in occasionally hilarious exchanges and goes maybe 42 percent crazy.”
*It’s been interesting to note that, while Orbital has been accepted universally as a novel, Train Dreams, which is 30-pages shorter, is universally considered a novella. In the days of my schooling there was frequent discussion about where the line was drawn. Interesting, too, is that so much more happens in Train Dreams.
Menewood—Nicola Griffith
10 years after publishing Hild, and several months after we read it, Nicola Griffith came out with the sequel. Jaw-droppingly lucky timing for the Walshes. It’s a direct continuation without any funny business, covering the middle third of Hild’s imagined/reconstructed life in 7th century England. A big, sumptuous banquet of a historical fiction. A third and final installment is in the offing. If we have to wait ten years, it’ll be worth it.
No Judgment—Lauren Oyler
Lauren Oyler is a West Virginia-born, Yale-educated ex-pat living in Berlin. I knew her from Harper’s magazine. This is a book of essays, some of which are very, very long. Oyler is savagely dry and intelligent. She doesn’t talk down to you and and she doesn’t pull any punches. She writes about gossip and anxiety and Berlin and writing and “vulnerability” and the ecosystem of user-reviews. She seems to me the rare sort of writer who isn’t afraid to make enemies of people outside the requisite enemies pool.
Libra—Don Delillo
Delillo’s JFK novel. His premise is that rogue CIA officers, cut loose officially from the Agency since the Bay of Pigs fiasco, livid with JFK over same and hellbent on reacquiring Cuba from the communists, invent an assassination scheme that will be pinned on Castro. The mastermind’s original idea is that they will miss Kennedy, but this is just one of those details that gets lost along the way. Delillo prismatically inhabits the perspectives of numerous players, including Oswald’s mother and sundry Agency types and paramilitary loners, but the main character is Oswald. Delillo’s Oswald is a walking conundrum: a self-taught ideological nomad, borrowed up by various world powers at various times for various ends. You can’t—or I couldn’t—help but like him.
The Quiet Americans—Scott Anderson
A history of what would become the CIA, especially during those first world-weighty decades following WWII. Anderson’s thesis is that we squandered an opportunity for a deeper and earlier peace with the Soviet Union in favor of the Cold War and nuclear brinksmanship. He shapes his argument on the life stories of four men who each had very different careers with the Agency. In the end, you fault some of them their youthful exuberance (it would appear the west never had a snowball’s chance to outspy the USSR—at least not when it was still primarily about human, rather than signals, intelligence), but the arch-villains are invariably the lofty politicos of the time, particularly Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles.
Dissident Gardens—Jonathan Lethem
I have history with Lethem, for a while hating him with the intensity that can only come from turned early love. We bring so much of ourselves into our relationships with these aloof sentence-crafters…it’s easy to lose sight of who actually owes what to whom, and so on. I was just a boy when I found Lethem. I believe it was the 20th century still. His first three or four books were seminal in forging my brain’s capacity for narrative. Then he got pretty famous and wrote some stuff that I felt was rife with betrayals. I found this book on a bargain shelf in a bookstore in Georgia where A. and I were vacationing during Covid and bought it on the strength of the first couple pages. Then I let it lie until downloading a copy on Audible this year. Mark Bramhall is the kind of reader whose portfolio I’ll track. What a great voice. Dissident Gardens is, like lots of Lethem’s work, a psycho-geographical biography of a particular place and moment of Five Boroughs history. The book’s beating heart is Rose Zimmer, an iconoclastic dyed-in-the-wool commie prole. She is my favorite single character of this year’s reading.
Foucault’s Pendulum—Umberto Eco
It’s long and a little dated, and 20-year-old Devin would’ve liked it a lot more.
When We Cease to Understand the World—Benjamin Labatut
One of the year’s coolest finds. I wrote about it some here. A weird, beautiful, mostly factitious novel in five chapters concerning destabilizing scientific discoveries and the people destabilized by them. A slide-show tour of some of the 20th century’s strangest moments in great minds. “Labatut is one to watch!” His The Maniac is high up on my list for this year.
The Last Samurai—Helen Dewitt
Less like any other traditional novel I think I’ve ever read. Thanks to my sister for putting this book on my horizon and then keeping it there with gentle reminders for several years. When I finally did get around to it I read it with I believe the word is “voracity.” That sentence was presented to you sans commas in the style of the first of Dewitt’s two narrators. She’s an American who moved to London to attend Oxford in the 90s and she’s rearing by herself a child she calls Ludo and she’s doing it her way, which was also sort of Yo Yo Ma’s parents’ way and John Stuart Mills’ parents’ way. Which is to say, she is building herself a prodigy. The prodigy takes over the narrative in the second half of the book. Now 11, he uses Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai as a template in his search for a suitable father-figure. Dripping with learning, hilarity, idiosyncrasy and feeling, this book slaps.
The Wandering Earth—Cixin Liu
(See notes on #2: To Hold Up the Sky)
The Message—Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ostensibly addressed to a specific, though never identified, writing class, The Message gets across in three sections. In the first, Coates visits Senegal, where he spends a lot of time foregoing guided tours while alone with his thoughts, gazing out at the ocean. It’s a quick trip and he’s slow to find his feet, only finally arriving at the section’s end, when a young local college student introduces herself: she’s been working on a thesis about his books. In the second section, Coates characterizes each of his individual books as particular kinds of children while traveling to South Carolina to see the impact one of them has had on a MAGA-inflected school board meeting. It all ends well and he bonds with the white lady who insisted on presenting his work to her students. In the third, he travel to Israel to confront the facts on the ground, which are devastating. Coates’s primary concern seems to be that in an earlier work he’d argued that Israel’s was a case-study in reparations done right, one other oppressed communities could use as a model for themselves. He sets out to right this wrong in The Message by showing that Israel has become the oppressor. I was annoyed early and often by his repeated unembarrassed centrality and caught myself looking for nits to pick, which is among the suckiest ways to engage someone who is so forthrightly putting himself up for inspection.
The Secret Life of Sleep—Kat Duff
A lucky find in Lawrence, Kansas’s, The Dusty Bookshelf. I was on a mission to find a book about sleep, with which to begin research for a longer project, and I maybe couldn’t have fared any better. I will be writing about this extensively in Substacks to come so will keep mum here.
The Bee Sting—Paul Murray
Last but certainly not least, this immense, present-day Irish family saga. Difficult book to handle. Murray is very good at building dread and then letting you off the hook at the last moment. The entire book is an exercise in this. But the way he lets you off, on the final page, is by leaving the book before its natural conclusion can play out. You have to imagine it for yourself, and it’s pretty fucking terrible. I think I probably don’t finish this book if I’m reading it on the page, but I Audibled it and, man, I can listen to Irish voices all day.