2024 Books

As I did last year, I'm posting the books I've read this year...mostly as a time capsule for myself, but also to share a very little bit about myself with my friends.

It's been a difficult year, but I've read a surprising number of books, some of which were quite spectacular.  Overall, I'd say it's been an excellent reading year for me.  Unfortunately, a few books by authors I'd previously read and enjoyed, but didn't love this year.  A couple of unintentional (though perhaps subconsciously driven) themes include ghosts and  menopausal/postmenopausal women.  Oh yeah... and there was an unusual amount of revenge fantasy.

Here's what I've read in 2024.  As always, * for recommended, X for avoid.

• Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe - Fannie Flagg; I'd read it many years ago, but it was worth the second read.  Very sweet portrayal of a lesbian relationship in a don't-ask-don't-tell we'll-all-pretend-we-don't-know-whats-going-on-and-be-friends environment.  Kind of implausible how accepting everyone is about gender and race issues.  But definitely feel good.
• Ella Enchanted - Gail Carson Levine; I'd read it many years ago with the kids and enjoyed it greatly.  I still enjoyed it, but maybe I've outgrown it a little.
• * The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern; Loved it.  It's kind of fluff, but very beautiful, dark fluff, with a little metafiction to weight it a tiny bit.  The imagery and general sensory experience is very intense.
  
• The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende; Started it and didn't manage to finish it (it got recalled by my library)... didn't get so into it that I went back to it.  I know I should, and probably will at some point.
  
• * Boy, Snow, Bird - Helen Oyeyemi; Started it and didn't manage to finish it (it got recalled by my library).  I will say this... the writing is TRULY SPECTACULAR.  I don't often say this.  I know it sounds terrible, but I don't often notice writing quality.  If it's good writing, I get sucked into the story and that's it.  In this case, the writing was just sparkling.  It's a complex story, and if I haven't gone back to it, it's simply because I feel like I need to dedicate quality time with the book to give it the attention it truly deserves.  I fully intend to.
• The Lost Apothecary - Sarah Penner; I think you can safely skip this one, though I won't give it an X.  The premise was good, poor execution:  wronged housewife goes on her very first mudlarking tour and discovers a 200 year old artifact belonging to a woman who doled out poisons for wronged women.  It could have been quite good, but I think I found it implausible, heavy-handed and a bit heavy on the deus-ex-machina.
  
• The Divine Comedy - Inferno prose translation by John Aitken Carlyle; Started but not finished.  I've tried a few times over the years, but can never quite get through it.
• On Earth as It Is on Television - Emily Jane; Fluff...kind of sweet...aliens secretly live among us and LOVE television and calorific food.  Basically go native.  And then the spaceships come to bring them back. To their consternation.
  
• * The White Lady - Jacqueline Winspear; Fabulous story. Woman trained to be James Bond-caliber wartime spy is no longer needed post war.  Turns her attention to domestic violence, organized crime and corruption.  Which, of course, are all overlapping.
• * Victory City - Salman Rushdie; really entertaining and interesting story.  The very light, fairy tale-like, almost frivolous tone belies the Indian history lesson and parallels to current events.  Many of the characters and events described in here are historically accurate, even some of the quite outrageous ones.
• Transcendent Kingdom - Yaa Gyasi; I read this on Annapurna's recommendation.  I wasn't as fond of it as she was.  An addiction story with immigrant experience twist.  Not sure why I didn't find it super compelling.
• The Street of a Thousand Blossoms - Gail Tsukiyama; Interesting from a historic point of view.  What it takes to become a Sumo wrestler.  With World War II in the background.
• * Lessons in Chemistry - Bonnie Garmus; Very sweet book;  Nice reminder about what it was like for women with scientific aspirations (or even aspirations to be not infantilized) in the times of tradwifeworld.  
• A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon; Slowly making my way through the Outlander series.  Another entertaining actiony bodice ripper.
• * Erasure - Percival Everett; Very thought provoking story, basis of the movie American Fiction.  On our society's tendency to boil individuals of color down to a simplistic poverty porn/racial oppression porn narrative, rather than seeing them as complex individuals who experience their own human drama that may or may not overlap the standard narrative.
• My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante; It was OK, but I don't really understand all the breathlessness about Ferrante's work.
• An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good - Helen Tursten.  Hilarious, but I won't give it a * because it really is not for everybody.  Let's just say an elderly lady really was up to some serious no good, but... well... they had it coming.
• The Vanishing Half - Brit Bennett; A novel on passing (as white).  I liked it, but found it a little overly melodramatic.  
• People of the Book - Geraldine Brooks; another one that had an interesting premise that didn't deliver as much as it should have. About the Sarajevo Haggadah, which is a real thing - a haggadah that was made in the renaissance, apparently for a wealthy Spanish Jewish family, which was rescued from destruction several times by some very unlikely actors.  The story imagines its journey to recent times during the war in the 1990s.  Because the novel attempts to be faithful to the known history and because the known history has many gaps, the story feels a bit choppy.  And where characters have been invented to propel the plot, there is a fair bit of melodrama.  As is there in the framing story.  But it was very interesting from a historical perspective.
• The Magicians - Lev Grossman; Didn't care for it.  Execution is ok, so I won't give it an X, but really didn't do much for me, even though I like fantasy.
• * Killers of a Certain Age - Deanna Raybourn; Just loved this one... a bunch of retired professional assassin women become the targets of assassination attempts. 
• The Empress of Salt and Fortune - Nghi Vo; Started it and dropped it fairly quickly.  I had read The Chosen and the Beautiful by Vo, which I loved.  This one I did not enjoy, and found somewhat hard to follow.
• Castle in the Air - Diana Wynne Jones; Started it and got maybe halfway through;  I loved Howl's Moving Castle, so thought I'd try this one. It's kind of an Arabian Nights wannabe novel.  Didn't love it, and felt slightly uncomfortable with some fairly cringey lazy/sneaky Arab trope content.
• * Stone Blind - Natalie Haynes; Similar vibe to Madeline Miller's Circe - a retelling of Medusa's story from her point of view.
• The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs - Katherine Howe; Another one you can probably safely skip.  Generations of women who can do magic... at the expense of the weather.  I didn't find any of the characters terribly compelling.
  
• Moby Dick - Herman Melville; I'd read it many years ago and remembered it as a really interesting story.  It stood up to that memory.  I liked it a lot...it's a slog, and I wish I knew the bible references better to understand the story better, but it was pretty fascinating. I won't give it a * because it is a slog and it is not likely to be for everyone.  I tried to get my cousin, who is a voracious reader and IS more familiar with the biblical references to read it and she gave up. I was particularly surprised by the gay vibe that I hadn't previously picked up on.
  
• Beautyland - Marie-Helen Bertino; Strange little story... sleeper alien gathers information about human behavior and faxes it back to her home authorities.  I feel like it's maybe some kind of fable about being neurodivergent.  I enjoyed it. Probably not for everyone.
  
• The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne;  They made us read this in high school, but it didn't make a huge impression on me.  Then I read it when Annapurna was a toddler, and it felt much more relevant in many ways.  I don't remember why I decided to read it now, but I did enjoy it.  Including the framing story.
• Land of Milk and Honey - C. Pam Zhang; Another strange story.  Dystopia of when we destroy the environment so badly that we cannot support normal crops or livestock, but the tech bros MUST have their delicacies from the secret stash.  The secret stash is...mouthwatering.
  
• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee - Dee Brown; A very important book but very hard to read.  It documents many, many injustices that have been wreaked upon Native Americans over the centuries.  Unfair treaties.  Bait and switch treaties.  Out and out reneging on treaties. Outright theft of land and resources.  Instigation of violence.  Random violence.  I started the book but could not finish it.  Partly because depressing, partly because it is so densely packed with names and dates and facts that it becomes a little hard to follow.  It did motivate me to read more about Native American history and experience.
• * The Personal Librarian - Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray; Novelized biography of Belle da Costa Greene, who passed as white, but long after her death was discovered to have been classified as black on her birth certificate.  She was instrumental in making the JP Morgan Library the institution it was.  Fascinating story.  The passing plotline had to have been invented from whole cloth by the authors, but was well done, I think.  Her contributions to the Princeton and Morgan libraries must have been well documented, and are quite breathtaking - this plotline could stand on its own.  
  
• Goddess of the River - Vaishnavi Patel; I loved her book Kaikeyi, and was looking forward to this one.  I read part of it and was not as impressed.  I will go back to it at some point.
• * The Fraud - Zadie Smith; I just loved this one - the events surrounding the Roger Tichborne Trial of the 1860s described in here are fascinating.  The national hysteria about whose narrative to trust in that case is not unlike our current national gaslighting about the media, in the age of the orange man.  
• X The Great Divide - Cristina Henriquez;  this one was such a major disappointment.  Fascinating premise... what would life have been like for the people impacted by the construction of the Panama Canal?  Including for laborers who traveled from surrounding countries, people displaced by the construction, workers doing the backbreaking work, and technical experts.  Unfortunately, while there are tidbits touching on each of these in the book, the plot is very melodramatic, full of implausibilities, and key details you'd expect to see are completely missing.  Forced feel good.
  
• The Alienist - Caleb Carr; I'd read this a long time ago and really enjoyed it.  This time, I felt like the pace was a bit rushed, and after I was done I realized that it was a very abridged edition...so...there's that.  Interesting from a historical point of view.
• Razor Girl - Carl Hiaasen; Entertaining, as always.
• The Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley; I've always kind of hated a lot of the King Arthur mythology - at least the stuff that came out of Malory's Morte d'Arthur.  It feels like a lot of Big Thuggy Guy fights with Other Big Thuggy Guy because I'm right, No I'M right. On Lather-Rinse-Repeat mode.  The Mists of Avalon is a refreshing change from that, and provides an actual coherent narrative full of political exploits, with the added interest of being from the point of view of some powerful women.  I haven't finished it - it's very long and keeps being recalled by my library.
• The Change - Kirsten Miller; Talk about revenge fantasy and middle aged women!  A group of women track down the killers of young women, using tips provide by the victims' ghosts along with their new found menopausal don't-give-a-fuck hormones.  I mostly enjoyed the book a lot, except for this one weird plotline that seems to be a kind of strange fictional reflection (or perhaps apologism?) on how Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell got that way.
  
• ***The Ghost Map - Steven Johnson; FASCINATING and accessible discussion of how the London cholera epidemic of 1854 unfolded and how cholera's waterborne transmission was proved in its wake (as opposed to the prevailing "miasma" theory).   There was no public health methodology in 1854, but the techniques used to track down the source of this outbreak ended up laying foundations for modern public health analysis.  The story has, in many ways, so many parallels to our covid experience, though it was written about a decade earlier.  Such a thought-provoking book.  YOU MUST READ IT.
  
• Anita de Monte Laughs Last - Xochitl Gonzalez; I'd read her book Olga Dies Dreaming last year and LOVED it.  This one was quite good and interesting, as well, but I didn't enjoy it as much.  It felt (justifiably) angrier, and maybe therefore, just more exhausting.  On the topic of the difficulty of being an extremely talented woman (specifically a woman of color) and breaking in to the (white) boys club.  One plot line is loosely based on the life of Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, who may or may not have been pushed out of a window by her artist husband, Carl Andre (in real life).
• The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store - James McBride; still working on it - jury's out.  It's been recalled by my library
  
• * The Sentence - Louise Erdrich; Wonderful story, somewhat metafictiony, on the Native American experience in the time of covid in Minneapolis.  Also a reflection on the incarceration experience.  With a couple of ghosts and Native American spirits. 
• The Vegetarian - Han Kang; Very strange book, and in a weird way, a little too close to home in my current life situation.  On the topic of control and personal autonomy, even when the autonomy is to be used self-destructively.  Thought provoking and disturbing.
• *** How to Build a Girl - Caitlin Moran; It's not for everyone, but I don't care...I'm still giving it 3 *...it's the second or third time I'm reading this book,and I just LOOOOOVVVE it.  Absolutely filthy and cringey and hilarious and insightful coming of age book.  Everything you don't want your daughter to go through, but much of which she probably will go through, and live to prevail.  Was a great mood improver in the immediate aftermath of my mother's passing.
• The Good Lord Bird - James McBride; Novelization of the events at Harper's Ferry.  Currently almost done with it.  I'm not sure how I feel about it.  It's a very irreverent view of John Brown, making him look kind of silly and clueless and almost willfully obtuse about information that is right in front of him.  Told from the point of view of a slave boy who is reluctantly freed by Brown.