End of Year List

Top Ten Books!

It was another fantastic year in reading for me! I didn’t quite make my goal of a hundred books, but of the eighty-five I read, these are the fifteen that really stuck with me.

Novels

1. Hands down winner for me: You Dreamed of Empires

   by Álvaro Enrigue, Natasha Wimmer
   This was also my favorite translated work.

2. Also in translation, I think National Book Award winning translation was just fantastic!!— Taiwan Travelogue

   by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, 楊双子, Lin King

3. It might not be everyone’s cup of tea but I loved and continue to think about: This Strange Eventful History

   by Claire Messud (also a WaPo top book)

4. The Extinction of Irena Rey

   by Jennifer Croft (brilliant!!)

5. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner—I LOVED it!

This year I wanted to write an essay about three works of fiction roughly revolving around female sexuality in middle age. In the end, two of the novels were edited out of my essay because the editor felt I was trying to do too much. But in addition to StoneYard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, I wanted to include these two that I loved:

5. The Tree Doctor by Marie Mutsuki Mockett and

6. All Fours by Miranda July

Other favorites:

5. Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (Booker Prize winner)

6. Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xóchitl González ( know there was some controversy about this one)

7. Philip Graham’s fantastic, What the Dead Can Say, which was as much an artistic event as a wildly fun novel. Here is an essay I wrote about the idea of play and Graham’s work.

Nonfiction

8. I think the most important and eye-opening book of the year for me was Kohei Saito’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, which was fantastically translated by Brian Bergstrom. I had bought the book in Japanese when it came out in 2020, but the translation out this year, did not make me even once want to run to my Japanese copy. So this was also my third favorite translated work and not surprisingly, it received an award nomination for best translation in Japan. As the Wikipedia page says: the book presents a Marxist argument for degrowth as a means of mitigating climate change. Capital in the Anthropocene was an unexpected commercial success in Japan, selling over half a million copies.
   
   Saito takes a hammer at what he calls “greenwashing” —talking about the ways that neoliberal approaches to climate change are much like Catholics buying Indulgences in the Middle Ages, whereby we buy an electric car or yet another canvas grocery bag as a way to alleviate guilt over the way our “imperial” lifestyle is based on the sacrifice of others. This is not just about the exploitation of offshore labor but about the way the majority of the true costs of our lifestyle is born offshore as well in environmental destruction that is conveniently “out of sight out of mind.” Like an Indulgence, it allows us to carry on as usual.
   HIGHLY RECOMMEND.

9. I read this book alongside The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives which was a National Book Award longlisted title.

10. Another Longlisted title (and Obama recommendation) was The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook by Hampton Sides (NYTimes Top Ten/National Book Award finalist)

    
    Other favorites in nonfiction from 2024

11. The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University, by Daniel A. Bell— playful and really interesting!

12. In the Footsteps of Du Fu, by Michael Wood

13. I read three books by Byung-chul Han this year and especially loved his latest The Crisis of Narration by Byung-Chul Han, Daniel Steuer
    
    Poetry

14. I loved Eliot Weinberger’s homage to the Tang poet, The Life of Tu Fu

15. Also loved and highly recommend the really enjoyable new translation of surrealistic poet Shuzo Takiguchi, A Kiss for the Absolute—translated by Mary Jo Bang and Yuki Tanaka, both poets I admire.

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I had such big plans to re-read Moby Dick this year and also tackle Mann’s The Magic Mountain alongside Olga T’s new novel, but instead re-read Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence amd Zadie Smith’s On Beauty

Am planning to read Richard Flanagan’s Question Seven next: Is it fiction? Nonfiction? According to Wapo it is nonfiction—it was in their top ten.)

Please tell me your favorites!!

I didn’t see any movies or TV I liked, but if you did, please give me your recommendations. In Music, two stand out: LA Master Chorale/LA Phil performance of Mozart-Handel Messiah

Definitely recommend the new book about Handel’s Messiah, Every Valley by Charles King

I didn’t even know it existed.

Also

Zubin Mehta Conducts Gurrelieder (Schoenberg at 150 Festival) Thank you, Brooks!!