Lists are so random and yet we love them.
I put together a top ten consisting of books that I couldn’t stop talking about, or thinking about.
Possibly Number Ten
Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights: Essays was the tenth book I read this year, so I’m staying on trend. I love how Gay works hard to stay uplifted. He’ll describe exactly how a praying mantis crunches down on a dragonfly or how he woke up from a dream that he had been fucking his mother. Yeah, that’s what the writing is like: always keeping you on the edge, and always staying delightful.
Probably Number Nine
I read several very thick nonfiction books this year and thought they were all worth it, this was both the easiest one to read and felt the most essential: John Ghazvinian’s America and Iran: a history, 1720 to the present, all 600 pages.
Ghazvinian writes with a great sense of humour and a canny knowledge of how to build suspense. You will learn words like ‘slumgullion’, and ‘pelf’, and how Iran became a pariah nation, and who is interested in keeping it that way, and why. The name Netanyahu crops up quite a bit.
Most likely Number Eight
I talked about this collection of essays just before New Year’ s countdown last night: Traumascapes by Australian-Ukrainian writer Maria Tumarkin.
Tumarkin is deeply interested in how we humans deal with tragedy. She visits the locations of the hostage-taking during the musical Nord-Ost in Moscow; the fall of the Twin Towers; the explosions at night clubs in Bali, and others. The writing is always deeply personal, even self-critical. Psychogeography rules.
More than Number Seven
I would miss my subway stop to read Some Unfinished Business by Antanas Sileika.
Baltic voices deserve to take more space in the global imagination and this story takes you straight into Lithuania, cutting back and forth between the period right after WWII, and ten years later, when the country is firmly yoked to the Soviet Union. There’s a tight plot, and great characters, especially the alcoholic teacher-writer based on a successful Soviet Lithuanian children’s author.
Potentially Number Six
Irish authors are having a glorious time, and we haven’t heard the end of it.
Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These won the 2022 Orwell Prize for political fiction, and was my friend Maureen’s best book of last year. I’m so glad she recommended it. Given how abortion rights are under siege these days, it’s good to be reminded how bad things can be when young mothers have nowhere to go.
Could Be Number Five
I’m not in the least objective regarding Martha Baillie’s book about her parents and the death of her sister, There is No Blue.
The engine of this memoir is Martha’s unstinting interrogation of what happened. Any suicide weighs upon the survivors. Christina paints her suicide note on the wall and leaves a wrecking ball of guilt.
Inevitably Number Four
People are raving about the film Zone of Interest and my first response is that I don’t want to see it because it is about Auschwitz. Yet everyone insists and so I will definitely see it. I was also reluctant to read Tadeusz Borowski’s novel Here in Our Auschwitz, yet it blew me away, not least because of the wit and the colour of the sky and his worries about his lover.
Magic Number Three
I read a ton of Percival Everett this year and I’m glad to say one of his books is my favourite, and no, it’s not Erasure, though that’s a close second, and I can’t wait to see the movie. Glyph is uproariously funny. FUNNY, if you have an inner egghead and mocking Roland Barthes will make you laugh.
Too Good to Have a Number (Two)
Before you say to yourself ‘well I’m not gonna read that, that’s fer sure’, let me tell you that I couldn’t put the book down. I even got my boyfriend to read Legends of a Suicide by David Vann, a collection of stories prompted by the suicide of Vann’ s father. The scenes are so gripping and so true and so godawful grotesque. Vann’s passion for the forests of Alaska is also seductive. This book was also suggested by a bookish friend, thank you, Graham.
Finally, Number One
I read Anna Burns’s novel Milkman early in the year and I never stopped talking about it. I read it as a dystopia about our current maladies, set in a country where everyone is spying on everyone else, and people are being murdered or ostracized for saying or doing the wrong thing, or for not saying or not doing a thing, or for it not occurring to them to say a thing or not say a thing or do a thing or not do a thing. Burns is another Irish writer, for feck’s sake, and her wordplay falls ferocious and thick. Man Booker beat me to it, but she’s my winner. Crack open the champagne and pour it over your head.
Most of my reading choices are haphazard and chance-driven, and last year’s top ten was more literary while 2023 is more political. Whatever 2024 will bring, the number of subscribers to my substack has nearly tripled this year, and I thank every bookish follower very much. Tell all your friends.
With greetings from Melbourne where I get to celebrate New Years’ before everyone else does.