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.