Reading highlights from 2024

A year of good books

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor

My friend Joe recommends this book and I’m not sure it’s going to be my thing: I mean, the reviews on the cover say ‘Tight’, ‘Hot’, and ‘Smut’. The book turns out to contain all these qualities, and a lot of descriptions of the kinds of parties I do my best to avoid in real life, but it’s also wildly readable, with luscious prose and a lovable and infuriating protagonist. I read most of it standing up on my desk shifts at the library, scribbling out stray excellent lines — ‘He lounged in a booth while he waited, eating pepper flakes straight just for the rush’; ‘how beautiful she was […] quietly standing in an entirely different plane from the rest of the club, one universe to the left’ — at a rate of two per minute.

Birds of America by Lorrie Moore

I have a colleague at the library named Martin. I adore Martin. He’s British and dad-aged and kind of looks like my dad too, in sensible woollen pullovers and dad shoes. He has a pile of books and some Q-tips in his locker and nothing else, and he’s always buying bulk packets of sausages for his teenage sons who, unlike Martin, are into powerlifting. One day on a desk shift it turns out we have similar literary taste, so he brings me some books. One of them is Birds of America. Reading it is incredible, like somebody has removed the outermost skin from life and you are suddenly looking at the thing itself. The penultimate story, ‘People Like That Are the Only People Here’, is one of the best short stories I’ve ever read.

Not a Novel by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Kurt Beals

Erpenbeck was twenty-two when the Berlin Wall fell, and this essay collection is largely about growing up in East Berlin and then watching it disappear. This is already a subject I’m endlessly interested in — but it turns out the book has more up its sleeve. Not a Novel contains what I can only describe as a perfect essay (‘Open Bookkeeping’) about the death of the author’s mother told through an accounting of sums and physical assets. At the end of another essay, ‘Hope’, I closed the book and hugged it to my chest. And the collection is peppered with hundreds of fascinating asides: ‘But it isn’t always the case […] that saying more brings us closer to the truth than saying less’; ‘Every text is, fundamentally, an attempt at a text’; ‘When I watch concerts on TV, I often wish that the camera didn’t always show the oboeist at the moment when the oboe enters, but instead showed someone like the 4th French horn player, waiting his turn to play again’. I return it to the library and think about it every day for months.

The Last Days of Roger Federer by Geoff Dyer

My beloved flatmates are moving to Melbourne, and in one of those fateful coincidences endemic to a library job, this book — an account of ‘things coming to an end, artists’ last works, time running out’ — comes through the returns slot. I have long been a fan of Geoff on doughnuts, but here we get Geoff on the empty loo roll as an existential symbol, Geoff on the taboo boredom of poetry readings, Geoff on the rationale for erecting a third-rate statue of Nietzsche in Turin. I laugh myself silly over his list of the Great Books he hasn’t managed to finish (sample entry: ‘The Ambassadors (gripped, each time, by the conviction, at once blurry and insistent, that my reading glasses were somehow changing prescription mid-sentence)’).

All Fours by Miranda July

Reading this novel, I experience, in exact contrast to Geoff with The Ambassadors, complete and distracting awe. I’ve never seen someone do this with language before. It’s weird and horny and poetic and hilarious; serious without being sententious, self-consciously quirky but full of heart. I recommend it to anyone who asks.

Bad Archive by Flora Feltham

Brilliant Flora releases her debut collection of essays in the middle of winter — thank God. I read it on the bus, at work, eating dinner, before bed, and it’s everything I want: hilarious, wise, ridiculously smart. I’ve said everything I mean in full in this review, but in short, you’d be a fool not to seek it out. Don’t miss ‘The Raw Material’ or ‘Bogans of the Sky’.

All Our Yesterdays by Natalia Ginzburg

I have a new job writing marketing copy; not my favourite, but it sends me to Sāmoa, which is nothing to be sniffed at. I read this, my first fiction by Ginzburg, in a hotel room in Apia overlooking a turtle-shaped pool — could she have dreamed it? The book is wonderful, probably my favourite thing I read all year. I can’t get over the seamless, musical narrative voice, which says so many morally serious things — “[i]n any case justice is not of this earth”; “no one found himself with courage ready-made, you had to acquire courage little by little, it was a long story and it went on almost all your life”— and is yet never without humour or beauty. What does it mean to be a good person? I knew, a little better, after this book.

A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam

This book is about trains, grandmothers, the Sri Lankan civil war, inarticulable loss, and what it’s like to want somebody very badly. Except that doesn’t cover it. It’s one of those books where the import is not so much in the story as in the style, which is smouldering and long-breathed — a masterclass in using pacing to build a sense of yearning and devastation. The boy I’m dating is also reading this book and says it’s so beautiful he can’t bear to analyse it at all, which kind of sums it up. We read side by side and don’t analyse it.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Travelling for three weeks, I decide I need a book to keep me company on all the planes and trains. For some reason, I choose Crime and Punishment, which I begin to regret, oh, maybe in the first half hour. It’s heavy in all senses and unforgivably missing a character list, and I haven’t read a big Russian novel in several years so I’m out of practice. But by the time I’m on the train from Birmingham to London a week later, it’s leaping by like a thriller. I would give almost anything ! to have written the final scenes.

Whaea Blue by Talia Marshall

I defy anyone to survey this year's releases and not feel that the New Zealand essay is experiencing a heyday. This beautiful and strange book — part memoir, part criticism, part poetic meditation — makes me feel there is another way of writing an essay I had not previously imagined. Every now and then there is a sentence so sharp, I read it three or four times: ‘[…] Annie, who is in her nineties, dying and crying for her mother. When I remind Annie of her age and that her mother is dead, she says So’; ‘I did imagine a battle scene at Kāpiti with the Bach cello suites on the movie soundtrack and herein lies the problem: my brain is too white to conceive of a world untouched by Pākehā for six hundred years’. I read it during my last week in Wellington, islanded on an airbed, surrounded by all my possessions in tote bags. It’s an existential time and everything I see or touch has the quality of symbol. Outside the window the wind is howling and I'm sure it portends change. The book seems to say, you hear that? Its voice is fearless and makes me want to run. And as Marshall says — was a truer line ever written? — ‘I am already deciding how I will write about this, because that reptile inside me never sleeps.’