2024 By The Books

It's the start of a new reading year (that's the main purpose of a year, right?), and time for my annual January tradition of looking back at the books I most enjoyed in the year just ended.

In 2024, I read 59 books. This number fits into a general upward trend of recent years, but I'm not specifically aiming for my book count to keep increasing. While I do think I've finally become a slightly faster reader and able to squeeze more books into my reading time, there is only so much time. It might even be sensible for me to spend less time reading in favor of more time writing (or some of those other things I hear time can be used for).

I've maintained my practice of writing descriptions and impressions of books I read and sharing those reviews on Goodreads and in my monthly reading recaps. (Very close observers will notice a few rereads in 2024 that I omitted from the monthly roundups.) I like figuring out how to present and explain my experience with each book, but it's time-consuming, and the more I read, the more I have to review. I'm considering switching up my strategy, but I haven't settled on anything for now.

A year ago, I noted changes to my reading habits that shifted me away from focusing quite so heavily on new releases. That trend also continued, and while I did read (and anticipate) many brand new books, more of my reading was from the previous few years and decades. I've been making even more use of my local library, both borrowing digital books from Libby (still highly recommended!) and checking out paper ones.

I started 2024 by taking a class on the work of Ursula K. Le Guin, and that set me on a project to read more of her work. (Probably a lifelong project: She wrote a lot of books!) I especially loved THE BIRTHDAY OF THE WORLD AND OTHER STORIES (from January), a collection that shows off her talent for approaching science fiction anthropologically. I was excited to spend more time in Le Guin's imagined cultures and the universe of the Ekumen in FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS (March) and THE TELLING (November). It was also great to see her pull off a very different sort of story in the surprising turns of THE LATHE OF HEAVEN (January), where a man's dreams change the world around him.

Another reading project I've theoretically had for a while is to read earlier books by authors whose work I've started following. In 2024, I finally got to Emily St. John Mandel's backlist, and I'm so glad I did. Her pre-breakout work all exhibits her familiar narrative style of shifting time and perspective, compellingly flawed characters, and a sense of mystery. THE SINGER'S GUN (October) and THE LOLA QUARTET (December) are both tense stories about people hiding secrets and making terrible choices, and I particularly recommend them to those who liked Mandel's THE GLASS HOTEL. (I wasn't quite as into her first book, which I could have sworn I read this year, but it was actually in 2023.)

The book club I'm in continued meeting for most of the year, though we're on hiatus now. I enjoy our discussions, as well as the motivation to pick up either books I wouldn't have chosen on my own, or ones I've been meaning to read. In the latter category is my favorite book club selection of the year, FIGHT NIGHT by Miriam Toews (September). It's an unusual, darkly funny family story with a hilarious narrative voice. Several people had already recommended it to me, and I'm passing that recommendation along.

Many of my other favorite books from the year fall into the category of "speculative fiction that manipulates time":

→ THE OTHER VALLEY by Scott Alexander Howard (June) provides a new twist on time travel, with carefully developed character dynamics and a satisfying plot.

→ CAHOKIA JAZZ by Francis Spufford (November) is a brilliantly rendered alternate history (a form of playing with time!) and a compelling noir detective story.

→ LIFE AFTER LIFE by Kate Atkinson (a reread that I reviewed back in 2013) features a main character who keeps repeating her life, witnessing several major historical events of the first half of the twentieth century.

→ THE MINISTRY OF TIME by Kaliane Bradley (August) uses a time machine to pull characters from the past into the modern era and watch the amusing antics that ensue, but there's also more to the story.

→ THE ANOMALY by Hervé Le Tellier (December) involves a variety of characters who all experience the same turbulent transatlantic flight, and time strangeness I won't specify further.

December Reading Recap

I closed out 2024 with a final great reading month. Next week, I'll round up the highlights of my reading year.

→ THE ANOMALY by Hervé Le Tellier, translated from French by Adriana Hunter: The story opens with a hitman in the middle of a job that required traveling to New York from Paris. The transatlantic flight encountered terrifying levels of turbulence that left him fearing for his own life. We meet a number of other characters, mostly in France and the US, and learn about their lives and problems. All were on the harrowing flight in March, and some made big changes as a result of feeling so close to death. Still, the experience is far from their minds by June, when federal agents arrive to take each of them into custody. Something very strange has happened, and that flight is at the center of it.

I knew the premise before I started reading, but nonetheless, much about this excellent novel came as a surprise. I wasn't expecting to meet so many characters, and I enjoyed encountering each of them and learning their widely ranging stories. I didn't anticipate how deep we'd get into the book before the initial reveal, and though it would have been fun to go in unspoiled, I also liked being able to recognize the hints and foreshadowing. And I was happy to discover there's another whole level of premise I knew nothing about. This is a delightful read that's full of surprises!

→ THE LOLA QUARTET by Emily St. John Mandel: Gavin is a newspaper reporter in New York City, the life he dreamed of while growing up in Florida, but that life hasn't turned out the way he imagined. Things are already going badly when he's sent to Florida for an assignment and his sister drops some shocking news: She encountered a ten-year-old girl who might be Gavin's daughter by Anna, his high school girlfriend who disappeared. Soon Gavin's New York life is over, and he's back in Florida, on the hunt for Anna and the girl. As he searches, it becomes clear that the other members of Gavin's high school jazz quartet are all involved in the story of Anna's disappearance and return, and there's far more to their histories than he ever knew.

I'm so glad I went back to read Mandel's pre-breakout work, because I love her writing style and characters (plus the subtle ways her books are tied together). This third novel is immediately Mandelian, with time shifts, secrets, and a gradual unfolding of the plot as both reader and characters come to understand what's going on. Part of the fun of this story is figuring out how the different storylines connect and staying several steps ahead of Gavin. Everyone in this novel makes terrible decisions, and I really felt for them anyway.

→ THE DAZZLE OF DAY by Molly Gloss: The Dusty Miller left Earth 175 years ago, holding a community of humans and an ecosystem of other species prepared for generations of travel. Now the ship is approaching a new planet that could support human life, but the conditions are harsh, dominated by cold weather and rocky soil, and there's uncertainty about whether to settle there or journey for generations more. Juko is one of the sailmenders who does the risky work of performing maintenance on the outside of the aging ship. Her husband Bjoro is in the midst of an even more dangerous job as part of the advance crew landing on the planet to gather more information than can be gained from probes. Their experiences and those of other family members show the complexity and constraints of life on the Miller in the months before that life may change unimaginably.

The generation ship that Gloss imagines is a fascinating one where much of daily living appears low-tech, with most people focused on farming and crafts. The ship was launched by Quakers and is governed by those principles, so decisions are made in meetings involving long stretches of silence and a goal of consensus. These meetings, and neighborhood life in general, are a major focus of the novel, and I generally enjoyed the intricacies and logistics. The planetary details are also well-imagined, and Gloss does a great job depicting the disorienting experience of being on a world after a lifetime inside a ship.

The characters in the story's central family experience a number of difficult changes during the novel, not always as connected as I would have expected to the massive change facing the whole community. I was occasionally frustrated when the story turned away from the questions that interested me most, and some threads felt unfinished to me. What the characters experience is sometimes hard to read about, because there's quite a bit of tragedy and trauma. Not everything about this book worked for me, but it was an engrossing and thought-provoking read.

→ DISPOSSESSED by Desiree Zamorano: Manuel is a small child when, one day in 1939, his parents are gone. He's too young to comprehend why he and his older sister are suddenly being moved between the homes of strangers. He isn't even old enough to grasp that he can only understand his sister because she speaks Spanish, while the strangers they encounter all speak English. And then his beloved sister says goodbye, and he's alone in the incomprehensible world. At last Manuel is placed in the home of a kind, Spanish-speaking older woman, and he has a chance at growing up with some happiness. But nobody explains what happened to his family until he's much older and learns that his parents, Mexican nationals, were caught up in a mass deportation. Manuel would like to search for his parents and sister, but he has so little information that the quest seems impossible. The anger and pain of their loss is always on his mind as he makes his difficult way into adulthood and imagines making a new family of his own.

This novel about the consequences of mass deportations is tragically timely, and the story is often a tragic one, though there is joy at the end of it. Manuel's story covers decades and intersects with many heartbreaking events in the history of Mexican-Americans in Southern California. The way the opening chapters capture young Manuel's disoriented perspective is especially effective, and the book continues to be at its best when the narrative goes deep into Manuel's feelings.

→ LOST ARK DREAMING by Suyi Davies Okungbowa: Following an apocalyptic ocean rise, hundreds of thousands of people spend their entire lives inside a massive skyscraper off the coast of now-flooded Lagos. The wealthy enjoy luxury in the upper floors, while in the lowest third of the tower, submerged beneath the water, residents are crowded into dark, poorly maintained spaces. Yekini is a midder, grateful that her grandparents managed to ascend and that she holds a decent job, a junior position in the tower's bureaucracy. But it's unclear whether she's being punished or rewarded when she's sent to an undersea floor to investigate reports of a leak. To Yekini's horror, she realizes the breach might be the work of the mysterious Children, rumored to be part human, part aquatic creatures. What she discovers changes everything.

This is a short book that moves along fast, unfolding in the span of a day. The major characters are portrayed well, and the ideas are fascinating, but I wished both had more room to develop. Like many novellas, the story left me with a frustrating number of questions about the world and the concepts. I also wasn't as interested in the mystical aspects of the story that ended up getting much of the focus by the end. So the book wasn't a great match for me, but it has a lot to offer different readers.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Reactor, Molly Templeton has advice on finding small press science fiction and fantasy: "Anyone who reads small press work will cite their own favorites. And because the world is so wide, and publishing so specific, and distribution so complicated, you may or may not have heard of them. It'll take more work to find their books, maybe. But it's also kind of fun. If you have a certain kind of temperament—the kind that liked hunting down obscure albums in the pre-internet age, say—it may be a familiar sort of work. It is the work of trying to find art outside the larger corporate sphere."