2024

1. The Hearing Trumpet, Leonora Carrington (p). Wonderfully bizarre saga told from the perspective of an imaginative ninety-two year old woman losing her outer senses.
2. White Cat, Black Dog, Kelly Link (p). Modern twists on seven fairy tales. Creepier, but felt like a natural follow up to Carrington’s absurdism. My favourites were ‘Prince Hat Underground’ and ‘Skinder’s Veil’, but overall I had the feeling I was missing things, perhaps from not knowing the source material well enough, perhaps from not knowing how much of a “lesson” to expect at the end of fairy tales.
3. Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri (p). Short stories about Indian characters caught between India, the UK, and the US. Recurring themes of loneliness and disconnection, especially marital. (“Perhaps they, too, had little in common apart from three children and a decade of their lives.”) “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar” (spoiler: that title is a pun) was a nice combination of disturbing + some laugh out loud lines: “She was not allowed to watch the television (Haldar assumed its electronic properties would excite her),” “‘Apart from my x-rays I have never been photographed,'”, “Haldar placed a one-line advertisement in the town newspaper, in order to solicit a groom: ‘GIRL, UNSTABLE, HEIGHT 152 CENTIMETRES, SEEKS HUSBAND.'”, “It was rumored by many that Bibi conversed with herself in a fluent but totally incomprehensible language, and slept without dreams.”
4. Outlive, Peter Attia (a). There are value judgments about health and aging, e.g. that living a long life where you feel healthy is a good thing (agree), and that being able to swim considerable distances into your 70s is desirable (I’m less moved). Then there are judgements of facts or predictions, e.g. that strength training three times a week will extend the average person’s life by months to years, or that LDL cholesterol levels increase your risk of heart disease. I did not find much to complain about in the second bracket, in the evidence on longevity as Attia presents it here. In fact, I liked it quite a bit. I appreciated his approach of making best guesses in areas where causal evidence is hard to come by but the answers matter (e.g. arguing exercise matters more than nutrition) then staying agnostic when the effect sizes are small so answers matter less (e.g. average differences between diets if you hold calorie intake constant). But more of the book’s umph, as I read it, comes from the value judgments — ultimately that one should live a vigorous life, stave off death, and be a top physical performer (often phrased in comparative terms and percentiles). My version of a vigorous life sometimes involves ambling to a diner with a new friend at 3am, a three-part crime against Attia — sleep deprivation, alcohol, and grilled cheese. I mostly do not resonate with Attia’s particular throb. I also wish he’d brought some of the lessons from the end of the book to the front. This quote in the epilogue should give pause to rethink the whole framework: “Zl bofrffvba jvgu ybatrivgl jnf ernyyl nobhg zl srne bs qlvat.” (Decode with rot13 if you don’t mind the spoiler.)
   • I found some ideas in this book helpfully provocative, such as the idea that your cardiovascular fitness and muscle mass decline 5-10% per decade from your 30s onwards, so you can already predict the things you won’t be able to do by a certain age (e.g. walk up a hill) if you don’t take action. But as far as I can tell Attia’s recommendations would add up to spending ten hours a week exercising, largely in service of health in my final decade. I want to spend eight of those hours differently, e.g. reading books.
5. The Charioteer, Mary Renault (p). More addicting than other 1950s British novels I’ve read (Lucky Jim was a slog, #18). The first chapter is written from the perspective of a five year old boy overwhelmed by his surroundings, and is special on its own. All chapters after that are subtle and indirect to the extent that I’ll probably have to read the book again to get it all. If you’re not British it may be fully impenetrable. (Here’s some sample dialogue: “‘He may be a drip, but he isn’t absolutely ravers.'”) Yet the heart thumps. There are many sentences and phrases where Renault captures the essence of something nicely. Here are some: “Her real-good-sort façade was not so much false as slovenly, like a cover flung over an unmade bed.”; “‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ said Nurse Adrian correctly.”; “Willis always made him feel uncomfortable. One felt he should have been given a choice at the outset, whether or not to be born.”; “Between [spoiler name] and [spoiler name #2] there began to weave the first fine filaments of a dislike mutually known.”; “he had a digestive look” (I chuckled); “His throat tightened; he wanted to take her away and cherish her as if she were about to die” (she was about to leave for a bit); “At twenty-three, one is not frightened off a conversation merely by the fear of its becoming intense.” — what a great measure for youth, and one you can live up to as you age; “Sometimes one can get one’s mind straight but one’s feelings take longer.”; After hanging out with his crush: “He felt absolute, filled; he could have died then content, empty-handed and free. … This, he thought with perfect certainty, this after all is to be young, it is for this. Now we have the strength to make our memories, out of hard stuff, out of steel and crystal.”; “‘Yes we talked plenty about you.’ Andrew smiled, and settled his head back on his arms. ‘We were in favour of you,’ he added sleepily.”; “‘Cheer up, cock,’ said Reg in a leading voice. ‘All the same in a hundred years.'”; “It was a vivid dream, and too direct to fascinate an analyst.”; “The out-patient departments of general hospitals do not conduce to a thoughtless optimism.” (incredible); “No one could be expected to talk of such [intimate] things except to strangers.”; “I’d been trying to work up what I was [= being gay] into a kind of religion. I thought I could make out that way.”; “A leisured view of the room yielded so many awful little superfluities, so many whimsies and naughty-naughties, tassels and bits of chrome”; “[it] gave him the feeling one can have with a dying dog, that one is being trusted like God and is going to fail.” (what a description!); “‘Don’t you see, some things are too important to be tampered with for any reason at all.'” (indeed); British people… “in his heart he was deeply hurt that she had taken him at his word”; an Aunt who likes to help: “she was always overthanked and underloved” (brutal).
6. Train to Pakistan, Khushwant Singh (p). Novel written in 1956 about a fictional border village during the partition of India and Pakistan. The story grounds the incomprehensible hundreds of thousands of deaths in a set of characters you can get a grip on. Some humour but overall not for the faint of heart. The final paragraph made the whole book worth it; I had full body chills.
7. The Room on the Roof, Ruskin Bond (p). Coming of age novel about a British-Indian boy, written when the author was seventeen, strangely enough also in 1956. Sweet, simple, short.
8. Sita: An Illustrated Retelling of the Ramayana, Devdutt Pattanaik (p). I knew little of the story of the Ramayana before reading this. It’s thrilling to read something that so many people have watched, listened to, read for thousands of years, and feel some continuity and glimmer of connection. I am not sure how much to trust this particular version, since there seems to be so much variation on what to include from different regional tellings, different time periods, etc. But it’s a start. Thanks Shruthi for the recommendation (and, indeed, buying me the book during our wanderings).
9. The Bachelor of Arts, R. K. Narayan (p). Another coming of age novel in India, this time written in 1937. It felt more than twenty years different from the other two novels given everything that happened between them (e.g. the university where he gets his BA feels like Oxford or Cambridge). Unlike The Room on the Roof, there’s plenty of self-awareness of the follies of youth from the narrator, and overall more irony. Some chuckles.
10. Vulgarian Rhapsody, Alvin Orloff (p). San Francisco novel following similar themes to Orloff’s memoir Disasterama! I read last year (#22). I liked Disasterama! better.
11. The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm (p). About journalistic ethics, and the writer<>subject relationship. I loved it — what a writer, what a subject — though found the reveals in the Afterword whiplashing. Some quotes I liked: “the subject is worriedly striving to keep the writer listening. The subject is Scheherazade. He lives in fear of being found uninteresting,” / “a truth that many of us learn as children: the invariable inefficacy of the ‘Don’t blame me–everyone does it’ defense. Society mediates between the extremes of, on the one hand, intolerably strict morality and, on the other, dangerously anarchic permissiveness through an unspoken agreement whereby we are given leave to bend the rules of the strictest morality, provided we do so quietly and discreetly. Hypocrisy is the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way, by allowing for human fallibility and reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable human needs for order and pleasure.” / “For while the novelist, when casting about for a hero or a heroine, has all of human nature to choose from, the journalist must limit his protagonists to a small group of people of a certain rare, exhibitionistic, self-fabulizing nature, who have already done the work on themselves that the novelist does on his imaginary characters–who, in short, present themselves as ready-made literary figures.” / “the writer’s identification with and affection for the subject, without which the transformation [from real life to a literary character] cannot take place.” / “When McGinniss said he was trying to get MacDonald to ‘start talking like a real person,’ he could only have meant that he wanted him to start talking like a character in a novel.” / “The therapy of psychoanalysis attempts to restore to the neurotic patient the freedom to be uninteresting that he lost somewhere along the way. … to transfer the patient from one novel to another.” / “It is like looking for proof or disproof of the existence of God in a flower–it all depends on how you read the evidence.” / Here’s the thesis of the book: “the falseness that is built into the writer-subject relationship, and about which nothing can be done. … Unlike other relationships that have a purpose beyond themselves and are clearly delineated as such (dentist-patient, lawyer-client, teacher-student), the writer-subject relationship seems to depend for its life on a kind of fuzziness and murkiness, if not utter covertness, of purpose. If everybody put his cards on the table, the game would be over. The journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberate induced state of moral anarchy.” / “What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject’s blind self-absorption and the journalist’s skepticism.”
12. Time is a Mother, Ocean Vuong (p). I read Vuong’s novel when it came out (#30), but had never read his poetry. Lines I liked: “red April rain”, “The day wasted/ save for the cobalt haze”, “It was perfect/ & wrong, like money/ on fire.”, “his teeth already/ half-gone, as if someone/ wiped them away”, “His eyes: raindrops/ in a nightmare.”, “I want to/ take care of our planet/ because I need a beautiful/ graveyard.”, “just two boys lying/ in the snow”, “If I nationed myself”, “I promise you, I was here. I felt things that made death so large it/ was indistinguishable from air”, “I used to cry in a genre no one read.”, “There is so much room in a person there should be more of us in here.”, “But to live like a bullet, to touch people with such intention.”, “towns whose names you hear only when a hurricane passes through”, “His heart a fish tossed into the wooden boat inside him.”, “red and ochre” and “amber …/ … dust” (hi Richie), “fixed glitch”, “Because this mess I made I made with love.”, “bald head ringed with red/ hair”, “I saw my reflection in the/ cup of coffee”, “you said you named me/ after a body of water ’cause/ it’s the largest thing you knew/ after god”, “reader I’ve/ plagiarised my life/ to give you the best/ of me”, “I remember my life/ the way an ax handle, mid-swing, remembers the tree.”
13. Trust, Hernan Diaz (p). Overall enjoyed, in particular parts 1 and 3.
14. A Shining, Jon Fosse (p). I forced myself through these 60 pages and felt they’d never end. I dozed off on my sofa at least once. My thinking was that realistically I will not make it through Septology, Fosse’s 7-volume, 1-sentence novel series, so this was my best shot. Nope. That said, Gilead remains my favourite novel a decade since reading it (#27), and Septology apparently has some similarities, so perhaps one day… For now, I’ve only read two Norwegian novels (#10), both short, both of which I struggled with. I’m unnskyld!
15. Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo (p). New translation by Douglas Weatherford. This novel is tightly packed and I need to reread it to appreciate (or even understand) it properly.
16. A Life’s Work, Rachel Cusk (p). My Cusk ration for the year. I’ve been saving this one up for a while — Cusk’s autobiography of early motherhood from 2001 that received vicious, personal reviews. “I regretted, constantly, the fact that I had written A Life’s Work.” Well, I loved it. It is, indeed, brutal: “the hardship of parenthood is so unrelievedly shocking that I feel driven to look deeper for its meaning, its cause. … I often think that people wouldn’t have children if they knew what it was like”. But it is also funny, and Cusk is such a good writer it’s ridiculous. Some quotes: “As more time passed this elaborate spectre [hallucinations due to lack of sleep] faded, and the muddled nights began to attain an insomniac clarity. My insides grew gritty, my nerves sharp. The baby continued to wake three or four times each night, and each time I was ready for her, trained and vigilant as a soldier. I no longer, it seemed, slept at all in the intervals, but merely rested silently like some legendary figure, itinerant, doughty and far from home.” / “For almost a year of nights I have gone to bed as one would go to bed knowing that the front door was wide open” / “Sometimes, if I lie awake long enough she will wake too and cry, as if I gave her the idea. Usually, I suspect that I did.” / After a friend is worried her baby might stop breathing: “I did not think to investigate the bureaucracy of breath. I laboured under it and expected my child to labour too.” / “There was something even about Miranda’s [the other mother’s] vulnerability, her fear that struck me as official and endorsed” / “Motherhood sometimes seems to me like a sort of relay race, a journey whose purpose is to pass on the baton of life, all work and heat and hurry one minute and mere panting spectatorship the next; a team enterprise in which stardom is endlessly reconfigured, transferred. I see my daughter hurrying away from me, hurtling towards her future, and in that sight I recognise my ending, my frontier, the boundary of my life.” / “I often hear people say that they really understand their parents now that they have become parents themselves, and the sentiment fills me with unease and foreboding, with the sense of some wrong being passed down the generations like a disease.”
17. From Breakthrough to Blockbuster, Donald Drakeman (a).
18. The Wood at Midwinter, Susanna Clarke (p). Who am I to say a single sentence to Susanna Clarke, but… I needed more here.
19. There Is No Antimemetics Division, qntm (p). Ironically, I can’t remember where I came across this book. It arrived on my doorstep, and here we are. (Great premise, less great execution for my tastes.)
20. Our Young Man, Edmund White (p). See below.
21. Nocturnes for the King of Naples, Edmund White (p). I got halfway through this book then put it down for a month. In the meantime, I read Our Young Man. After finishing that, I looked up the author, and realised… it’s the same guy! In my defence, the books were written 38 years apart (1978 and 2016), and stylistically could not be more different. OYM is clean and dispassionate; Nocturnes is ornate, first person, full of regret. Nocturnes is written by a younger man about older men, and Our Young Man the reverse. Nocturnes will presumably stand the test of time and OYM, which has a trashier plot and set of characters, won’t. Only one of the characters in OYM is likable, so it’s hard to recommend. And yet… I read it in a couple gulps, and was affected. “Guy was a beautiful dumbbell. How many weeks had he been reading that novel, Sapho? And why a novel? You couldn’t learn anything from a novel.”
22. Private Government, Elizabeth Anderson (a). Exploration of a political philosophy/economy lens I hadn’t thought about, that workplaces in the U.S. and other democracies are kinds of authoritarian private governments. You can get fired for political speech, often have to wear particular clothes, can’t vote out the boss, and can even have your diet regulated for the sake of health insurance premiums. I’m a susceptible audience, since I am, personally, extremely sensitive to domination in the workplace (with apologies to people in either direction of reporting chains I’ve been in). And who wants to be on the side of employers? Yet my reactions to the arguments were more of a mixed bag than I expected. The “bad guys” in the book are large faceless corporations, but I would have been more persuaded if the authoritarianism of those corporations was compared to small employers (tyrannical owners can be harder to escape than tyrannical managers) and large public employers like the military or school systems (which sometimes have even more rules to abide by than large companies?). There are villainous forces lurking around the topic of employment, I just want to make sure we get the right ones! All that said, wherever the villain lies I imagine Anderson and I would agree on lots of specific policies, e.g. around workers’ speech protections vs company limitations of it, against non-competes, etc.

Some honourable mention books abandoned halfway this year: Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth (eh); Banal Nightmare, Halle Butler (in the name); Synthetic Biology: A Very Short Introduction, Jamie Davies; Jaya, Devdutt Pattanaik’s version of the Mahabharata (liked it and I’ll pick it up again some day); Krishna, Kevin Missal (nope); Parfit, David Edmonds; Story of a Poem, Matthew Zapruder (thanks for the recommendation, Travis Nichols — wasn’t the year for me but I may return to it); On Writing Well, William Zinsser (loved!); Admiring Silence, Abdulrazak Gurnah (couldn’t tell you why I didn’t finish, guess I just stopped picking it up?).