Haunting my favorite bookstore a few weeks ago while on an assignment in London.
Every year the same old argument about the value of book lists flares up. The purists have minor freak-outs about how lists erode the value of literature, fine-tooth contrarians wade into the comments to point out that their own personal favorites weren’t included, and everyone else just reads the damn lists because it’s nice to receive book recommendations.
I admit, I love a book list—of any kind. The bad ones, with laughable selections and click-bait headlines, are a pleasure to feel snooty about. The better ones set off conversations about what makes good literature—conversations that we desperately need to continue holding in the public sphere if fiction is to keep its tiny finger-hold in the arts. Lists are not a replacement for other forms of criticism (if they were, I wouldn’t have a job), but they do serve several notable purposes: they offer insight into what broad trends and movements are happening inside publishing and inside the institutions that cover books; they provide occasional readers with fodder for their minds; and they sell goddamn books for sometimes-deserving writers.
Now that I’ve cleared my throat, I have my own offering. My reading year was abbreviated because I took a long work sabbatical this fall. For that reason I divided it essentially in half: four books published for the first time in 2024, and five books that were either republished or that I read for the first time this year. I felt almost embarrassed at the small number of books that felt “worthy” of my list this year. But after rethinking things, I’ve realized that my “short” reading year (I’ve finished 52 books as of today) was filled with the kinds of books that have made me consider how literature can remake itself—and be remade by its readers.
Four New Books
State of Paradise by Laura van den Berg
Laura van den Berg is willing to wander into strange territory in her novels: in this case, the state of Florida and the state of genre fiction. Her protagonist is a ghostwriter who help writes cheap blockbusters; she’s living with her husband and parents in Florida, and the backbone of this novel is her search for her sister after a massive flood covers their region. But State of Paradise also features a VR-like technology called MIND’S EYE, a massive sinkhole, and a growing pouch inside the protagonist’s belly button—all, not coincidentally, areas into which people and things can disappear. Van den Berg doesn’t write narratives that fit some preordained notion of how a novel works; that’s fine, and fitting, since that our world itself no longer has a particular rhythm. We face floods and screens that also suck us in, and when we come out the other side we don’t necessarily return to normalcy. State of Paradise—and van den Berg—thrive in and reflect back our upended notion of narrative.
I’m simply appalled that dozens of literary critics aren’t coming out of the woodwork to name this book as a top contender of the year. (The Atlantic included it in their top 10 list. Although I contribute to the magazine, and gave it a glowing review in their pages, I wasn’t involved in the selection. (But I would have!)) Hamya, the author of another excellent short novel, Three Rooms, is simply one of the best young fiction writers out there today, a radical stylist who is willing to pursue unconventional narrative arcs in orders to investigate the trials—and sins—of Gen Z. In The Hypocrite, which is set over the course of one afternoon, a twenty-something playwright stages a successful show that just so happens to be about her boorish, famous father. He watches from the audience, appalled. And then the two collide. Hamya’s cardinal virtue is that she covers societal issues—in this case, the ideological and identity-driven differences, especially about men’s behavior, between generations—without an ounce of superiority or sanctimony. The Hypocrite is exceptional.
Perhaps you’ve heard of it? Last fall I was commissioned by my editors at Mother Tongue to fly out to LA and meet Miranda for a profile. Some subjects carry such an aura about them that the initial meeting feels intimidating—what if, I worried, Miranda operates on a plane of existence that I just can’t grasp? It turns out she does live in a dimension that isn’t the same as mine, but that accessing her mind and world was such an exquisite scavenger hunt that the experience only magnified her intellectually rambunctious, emotionally uncanny “great perimenopause novel” All Fours. Most fiction makes an assumption about how human beings behave, how they will respond to heartbreak or deception of jubilation. July allows her characters such a broader range of responses, such a wide world of praxeological instincts, that new ways of thinking seem to crack open on every page. All Fours, as you must know by now, is about a 45-year-old artist who takes an abbreviated roadtrip, falls in love with a young Hertz employee, and then embarks on a mission to discover whether or not life is *allowed* to change in unpredictable ways. If your tolerance for weirdos is low, I simply don’t care, you have to read this book anyway and push past your thirst for irony because All Fours’ earnestness marks it as a rare, precious piece of fiction.
The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas
Savas’ work always makes me think of fresh white paint. That’s how direct and pared back her prose is, how willing she is to let the emotional heft of her writing shine instead of flashy prose. The Anthropologists is nominally about a couple, both immigrants in an unnamed European city, who want to buy a house, have a child, and live adult lives. But Savas takes the act of noticing as her subject—Asya, a documentarian, and her husband Manu, a non-profit employee, discuss their friends’ romantic troubles, the pros and cons of apartments they view, the slow degradation of their neighbor’s memory. Without intellectualizing life they analyze it, try to see exactly how a single person moves through a day. Not much happens, but it’s all fascinating.
Five Old Books
A middle-aged woman wakes up at her cousin’s house in the Alps and heads out for a hike: she walks straight into an invisible, impenetrable force. A wall has descended in the night; it keeps her from leaving the valley and has killed every being on the other side. The Wall is her journal of life alone on our planet—her foibles growing potatoes, helping a cow give birth, and constructing a small world for just one indomitable person. Originally published in Austria in 1963, it was reissued in 2022 by New Directions, and deserves a place in the (weird) Venn diagram of exceptional novels that are somehow ecological, apocalyptic, and domestic. Haushofer’s daring decision to Robinson Crusoe her narrator in a familiar place creates an intimacy between reader and character that other novelists labor for but never achieve. Fans of Ling Ma, Emily St. John Mandel, and Jacqueline Harpman will be enthralled.
The Journal: 1837-1861 by Henry David Thoreau
It’s one thing to read Walden or “Civil Disobedience” and claim some understanding of Thoreau’s monomania for the New England wilds. But wading through his two-million-word published journal (which, long as it may be, is still only a portion of what he wrote in his lifetime) is an immersive experience, like a long soak in the brain matter of a man who could mend fences and identify tadpole species with the same facility as he could write genre-altering treatises. Thoreau simply knew as much as it is humanly possible for one human to know about their immediate natural world. And his Journal is the closest a reader can come to glimpsing the wild, buzzing, rich pre-industrial landscape of our country—along with the start of its degradation.
Instead of a Letter by Diana Athill
Why oh why didn’t I read Diana Athill when she was still alive, when I might have had the chance to stop by her care facility in London’s Hampstead and (in my dreams) befriend the nonagenarian editor and writer? Instead of a Letter is one of only nine memoirs Athill published, and it is the most wondrous of the bunch, mostly due to her gimlet eye for the hilarity and humanity inherent in the decay of old-fashioned English aristocratic life. Raised partly on her grandparents’ vast estate, but never set to inherit, Athill was like a benign but observant spy inside the upper classes, reporting on how they took their tea and reared their children and spent all that money. Instead of a Letter is divided between her Beatrix Potter-like experiences as a child at Ditchingham Hall and the love affairs and office jobs of her impoverished, bohemian young adulthood. “I am glad that I have not inherited money or possessions,” she writes boldly in this memoir, and I’m awfully glad, too. Money might have dulled the wit and whimsy of the fabulous Ms. Athill.
Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes
In 1950, an Italian wife and mother named Valeria buys a notebook she has no reason to own. She begins to fill it with her daily observations about her changing teenage son and daughter, her complaining mother, her distant husband. And the more she writes, the more she realizes how discontented she’s become—and how much she needs to keep this knowledge, and the notebook, from her family. “Sometimes,” Valeria writes, “I think I’m wrong to write down everything that happens; fixed in writing, even what is, in essence, not bad seems bad.” But the notebook, an obvious stand-in for her agency, consumes her and pushes her to take unexpected, and sometimes deleterious, control over her life. A novel about writing yourself into existence, Forbidden Notebook was first published in 1952 and reissued in 2023 by Astra House, creating a beautiful rebirth for the novel and for Valeria.
A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen
The sheer research for this collection of 36 interconnected essays about unexpected meetings among American writers and artists (Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten witnessing the riot that accompanied the first performance of The Rite of Spring; Matthew Brady taking a young Henry James’ picture; Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore going to the circus) would humble most writers. But Cohen, who has a well-trained eye for the interpersonal connections that have made American literature cohere as a whole, is also able to make the whole thing wildly entertaining, so that each new section is a tiny romp among the artist class. I’d give a lot for more books like this—no flashy publishing angle, no overemphasized thesis about the state of things, just hard-won stories told in delightful prose. (And if that’s not enough, her 2020 book Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels, is just about the smartest and most humane take on Jane Austen I’ve ever read.)
I love a book where not much happens but it's all fascinating, about to start THE ANTHROPOLOGISTS because I've seen so many raves