Month: December 2024

Melbourne novelist and short story writer is a fearless examiner of injustice and inequity in modern Australia. His latest, Women and Children, tackles domestic violence in the working-class inner city of the 1960s. An eleven-year-old boy, kind-hearted and struggling with Catholicism, oscillating between his home and that of his retired street sweeper grandfather, struggles to understand the situation when his aunt arrives on his doorstep, battered and bruised. The boy finds a weapon by chance, a weapon that now becomes an object of tension as the aunt returns to her abuser. Birch writes unadorned prose that sapped (at least for this reader) some of the narrative momentum out of a dire setup, but as Women and Children winds up toward a climax that startles and shocks, even as it feels like the only way the novel could end. A fine, understated read.

In contrast to a desultory year of reading, our viewing choices continue to be blessed with plenitude and quality. The streaming platforms are slowly raising prices or insinuating advertising while the flow of “product” (especially the best stuff) could be said to be slightly diminishing, but anyone with the ability to flit between platforms is still assured of high-quality cinematic viewing.

• Boldly unconventional yet riveting and moving, Season 3 of The Bear was the year’s highlight. Yes, we’ll need to wait for the fourth season to see if Carmie triumphs, but the slow burn of this season was exemplary.
• As striking as the first season of Kleo was, Season 2 took it to another level. A female Stasi killer as hero of a post-Berlin-Wall thriller? You bet!
• A similar “let’s take it to a new level” judgment can be cast on Dune: Part Two. Such gorgeous sci-fi drama!
• And at the risk of gushing repetition, Season 4 of Slow Horses was the most exciting, nuanced pleasure yet (to give credit where due, the underlying Mick Herron novel is also one of his best).
• The only plain movie on this list is also a controversial one, not for everyone. A portrayal of the family life of the Nazi abomination in charge of Auschwitz, The Zone of Interest is mandatory viewing. Are all of Jonathan Glazer’s films so intense?
• From one extreme to the other, the genius comedic team of Steve Martin and Martin Short shows no sign of any flagging of brilliance in Season 4 of Only Murders in the Building. Enough laughs to conquer the Trumpian blues.
• If this list sounds like retreads of stuff I’ve watched in years gone by, I had to watch the first season of Alice in Borderland (a strange, out-of-the-blue, violent sci-fi concept from Japan) before rushing through the dramatics of Season 2.
• A couple of flatter seasons of the Minnesota twisted noir of Fargo did not prepare me for the kinetics and brilliant uber-acting (Juno Temple and Jon Hamm) of Season 5.
• Perhaps the pleasure of the short, skewed episodes of Fisk is limited to Aussies, but no matter, it amazes me that Season 3 of the tale of an awkward suburban lawyer is the funniest yet.
• Clearly I must have needed humor this year because three of this Top 10 are primarily comedies and four others contained chuckles aplenty. The most unexpected joy was The Franchise, a stiletto-sharp satire of superhero movies (“franchise,” get it?). I stand by the opinion that The Bear was 2024’s peak but I think The Franchise gave me the deepest (richly deserved, I’m sure) pleasure.

Let me label 2024 the Year of Reading Badly.

I bought so many books and then shelved them unread, each time chipping off a piece of my heart. Massive themes and topics that have powered much of my recent nonfiction reading—climate change; how to live healthier for longer; artificial intelligence; current events/politics/affairs—faded in importance without replacement obsessions. My most beloved genres, the ones that assuage my itch for story, such as science fiction, mystery, and thriller, seemed flat on the page. I tried, oh yes I did, to read enough literary/serious fiction balanced between hot titles and obscure debuts, but ended up barely scratching the Booker/Pulitzer lists and finding few zinger debuts or indie releases.

Time imposts weighed heavily on the year but something else was eating away at my reading enjoyment. I’m stale and unmotivated. Hopefully 2025 lights a clearer path.

All that said, here are ten books of outstanding merit (the links are to my reviews, which themselves contain links to info about each book):

• Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road is not only superbly written and propulsive, its huge canvas of characters signals it as a modern classic in an old mode, yet set in the right-now modern world.
• I doubt we’ll soon see a more beautiful, useful, and sweetly penned survey of modern creativity, across a plethora of disciplines, than Adam Moss’s The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing.
• Long Island, the follow-up to Colm Toibin’s much-loved Brooklyn, is even more sublime. Peerless writing that sinks you into the minds and hearts of three instantly recognizable characters.
• Simultaneously a deeply felt tale of a friendship and the unraveling of a mind, Jonathan Rosen’s The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions will cling to you long after the final page.
• Rom-com it might technically be, but David Nicholl’s best rom-com yet, You Are Here, is a wondrously wrought tale of loneliness and love.
• Read Hisham Matar’s My Friends for a gentle, immersive ode to exile and friendship revolving around Gaddafi’s Libya.
• A rowboat being built by a teenager on the spectrum, his wise but lonely teacher, and an exiled woodworker … all penned sharply and lyrically: Elaine Feeney’s How to Build a Boat.
• Then inhale the ordure of 1760s London—a drunk amateur barber-surgeon battling an incompetent official surgeon—through the “playful yet dense prose” of Richard Smyth in his latest novel, Fleet Lane.
• The only genre book to make this list is the latest intoxicating, intricate, ingenious Janice Hallett mystery titled The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, in which a true-crime journalist digs into a serial killing years ago.
• So you think climate crisis mass migration is a far-off specter? Read Abrahm Lustgarten’s prodigious, approachable On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America to know it’s here now.

Legendary rock/rap producer and record label owner Rick Rubin has crafted a how-to for all of us. Its title, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, says it all, for Rubin believes in inherent creativity being unleashed by being responsive to oneself and the world. Whether this is the book for you depends on how you respond to pronouncements from high on a mountain, drawn from a lifetime of creating, a smorgasbord of quasi-mystical offerings. For this reader, the most interesting advice comes when he gives examples from his own illustrious career, but these are few and far between. Much of what he intones sounded to me like a monk’s sermon, maybe a Buddhist monk. All that said, many of his pronouncements work like incantations and can be most powerful. Approach with care but I do recommend you take a look at The Creative Act.

Novelist Lisa See mainly writes historical novels set in China and only my wife’s choice of Lady Tan’s Circle of Women persuaded me to read it, but the decision was a fine one. The novel’s plotline – a high-born young woman in 15th-century China learning medicine from her grandmother and then navigating a constrained life of marriage and helping other women – contains few fireworks but the author is a lovely, close-up stylist who immerses the reader in everything from cruel foot-binding to the strange form of medicine practised then. The result is a read that takes time to captivate but ends up as a warm-hearted immersion in a surreal, suffocating world. The author’s exhaustive research could have been tedious to read but instead forms a backbone of the book, along with fine characterisation. Lady Tan’s Circle of Women is a satisfying read that might surprise many.

We all know of Taiwan, a pimple island(s) on the side of massive China, and we all know that the West is “kind of” supporting it from getting swallowed up like Hong Kong. But most of us have a very shallow knowledge base. The Struggle for Taiwan: A History, by young American historian/analyst Sulmaan Wasif Khan, seeks to redress that gap and, fortunately, it succeeds on all fronts. The book is a blast of icy clarity, even as it reveals that the three major parties to the ongoing conflict have all been inconsistent and hypocritical. China claims historical sovereignty but Taiwan was never part of China, belonging to a kingdom that was larger than present-day China. America almost sided with communist China at its inception and has wavered often since in its support for Taiwan. Taiwan is talked of as the “free” opponent of China but was ruled by a tyrannical dictator (and then his son) for decades until 1996. Khan is a smooth stylist with a clear perspective on the various historical periods. The Struggle for Taiwan is probably only for politics/modern history buffs but deserves a wider readership. Recommended.