The best things I read in 2024
This year, despite my brain not exploding noticeably less than last, I managed to do some reading. Go me.
The tally as I write this is 41 books, biased as ever to novels. There’s some food history, business wank, the odd comic, and some other titbits of nonfiction mixed in, too. Some of them were even quite good. I’ve picked some to talk about.
As ever, these are in the order I read them. Although by pure coincidence my favourite is at the top.
The Darkness Outside Us - Eliot Schrefer (2021)
What feels like a queer teen rivals-to-romance rework of 2001 opens up into something much more compelling and intricate. It's hard to summarise this one without giving spoilers, and it’s a joy watching it unfold so for once I’ll respect that.
The best thing I read this year. The sequel is also pretty good.
Boy Like Me - Simon James Green (2023)
Oof. Yikes. Right in the feels.
A bookish nineties sixth former with a knack for self-humiliation wrangling with his sexuality under the shadow of Section 28 struck a nerve, I won't lie. The archly talking to the reader stylistic conceit does get in the way a bit at times.
Invitation to a Banquet - Fuchsia Dunlop (2023)
The cover price is £12.99, but factor in a couple grand for the food tour of China this will make you want to take. A gastronomic geography and history that balances narrative and detail and makes you want to eat everything. Yes, even that.
Candles and Water - Timothy Thornton (2024)
A beautiful, difficult collection in fragments. Candles and Water calls itself “a queer pillow book: a document of wreckage, haunting, and survival.” and I’m not sure I could improve on that. Ghost stories, imaginings, sensuality, dreams, all flecked through addiction memoir and defiance. It’s an astonishing piece of work.
HERC - Phoenicia Rogerson (2023)
I didn’t actually like this very much but it’s on the list because I think a lot of people will, and I could absolutely see why.
It’s such a great exercise in voices. It’s also the story of Hercules as told by the other people in his life and/or the human wreckage in his wake. It’s arch, fun, queer, and well researched, and I don’t know for the life of me why I didn’t click with it, but if you’re reading this the odds are you will.
Flux - Jinwoo Chong (2023)
A glorious style piece. After some time to think about it, I honestly admire the brass of having the time travel unexplained, and heavily implying it's caused by the breakfast cereal. Oddly, the book would barely work without the (initially odd seeming) device of interwoven recollections of an eighties detective show.
What happens and what is this about? Yes. Did this resonate because it lampoons tech hucksters parlaying VC credulity into imaginary valuations while they shit all over people? Look over there!
Embassytown - China Mieville (2011)
A gallop of breathless what-if extensions from the idea of talking to a race with entirely non-figurative language… and then doing an opium wars to them. Has the feel of a missing Iain M Banks. Great fun. How did I leave it this long before reading it?
Less - Patrick Grant (2024)
The lovely sewing man radicalises the nans. Just the cuddliest reasoned counter argument to the current configuration of capitalism. Yes, it’s a bit misty eyed about the past, but it doesn’t go full retvrn. No it doesn’t have a full answer to reconciling the price rises we need for sustainability with the relative poverty of the populace. But it does outline a vision of better employment and meaningful work that might take us some of the way. And there are some fun interludes about Savile Row and Sewing Bee.
Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon - Wole Talabi (2024)
A disgruntled Yoruba nightmare god and a succubus attempt a mystic heist at the British Museum, against a background of pantheons as boardroom bickering corporate raiders. What's not to love. Also Aleister Crowley turns up being a grotty little prick.
A History of the World in 47 Borders - John Elledge (2024)
This is just quietly lovely. It’s almost as though John sat down and reasoned that if taking any fleeting conversational hook as an excuse to talk about your hobby horse - in this case borders - would be insufferable pub chat, then working out from borders to a vast array of other topics would be an avuncular second pint delight.
Far from the Light of Heaven - Tade Thompson (2021)
This begins feeling like a noir-inflected country house murder mystery but in space, and expands rapidly to something a little odder, richer, and at the end more chaotic and manic. It’s pacy and fun with plenty to guess about. And a wolf.
Notes, thoughts, stuff
For completeness, here’s the full year’s list:
Very few comics this year. Unusual for me. The Power Fantasy is out in trade paperback next year, which might be a nice kickstart.
Only two abandoned book this year, too. The Happiness Advantage, which felt like it was wasting ink over-explaining itself by page ten, and smelled like reproducibility crisis, and Black Leopard Red Wolf, which is quite possibly a dreamy disjointed fantasy masterpiece but just wasn’t what I was in the mood for at the time, then never made it back to the top of the pile.
I finally read a John Scalzi novel! Two, in fact: Starter Villain and The Kaiju Preservation Society. They’re fun. I’ll probably read more. Will appeal to fans of Charlie Stross, Adrian Tchaiovsky, and that whole stratum of I don’t want to call them geek beach novels because it sounds dismissive, but you’d mostly know what I meant if I did.
But what’s the best thing I didn’t read in 2024? What did I buy for 99p on Kindle or back on Kickstarter or grab at Gay’s The Word and just not get to?
Taking stock of the physical and digital unread pile for 2024, I’m most disappointed not to have got to:
Butter, Asako Yuzuki
The Pale House Devil, Richard Kadrey
A Power Unbound, Freya Marske
English Food, Diane Purkiss
There’s always next year.