2024: A year of reading

Discovering Jamie’s Reading list 1.5 years ago blew my mind; I couldn’t believe it was possible to read as much while still leading an active life (sidenote: since I discovered it, Jamie added no less than 131 books to his list). Around that time, I had also stumbled upon Max Joseph’s BOOKSTORES: How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content and it left me with a simple question: what kind of man did I want to be? One that read books, or one that didn’t?

I started my own list partly in the goal of archiving my progress, partly for gamifying my lazy ass into reading daily, after some of my years going by without a single book read. I decided that I wanted to be a man that read books.

My 2024 turned out to be a year filled with speculative fiction. Of the 31 books I read in 2024, here are some that stay with me, have influenced me, that I think other people should read.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi is the most engaging book I’ve read in a while; I finished it weeks ago and I read two other books since then, but I still can’t stop thinking about it. It was the Christmas gift of two members of my family and my girlfriend is reading it because I can’t shut up about it.

This is a mystery book that is essentially, as Jack Edwards puts it, a study in solitude. It’s about a man that lives to explore the labyrinthian house in which he lives, whose infinite rooms are filled with mythological statues and symbols. The sea, everlasting presence of both comfort and threat, comes to submerge everything in regular, predictable patterns. What Piranesi comes to understand about The House is truly exciting.

Susanna Clarke masterfully makes you understand things ahead of the narrator, then flips everything on its head by having him surprise you back. It’s a thrilling magical-realist story that fits in only 160 pages. Seriously, just read Piranesi.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

I love unreliable narrators and exotic forms of conciousness. Stories about AI beings fit both of these descriptions. What’s interesting to me about Klara is that she is a very limited form of consciousness.

It’s not the usual trope where the personal assistant robot turns out to be extremely advanced and pushing for an incomprehensible agenda (like the very good Her (2013)). Klara is not sexualized either. We see through her eyes as we’d see through those of a child; her naivety makes us worried, her amazement gives us joy. More importantly, her false hopes make us feel helpless.

This book is focused speculative fiction that explores important and often heartbreaking questions about identity, perception and consciousness. Some of these questions won’t have clear answers, because it’s never clear if the uncertainty comes from the situation itself or from the distortion of interpreting somebody else’s senses.

The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

I finished this one on the Aegean Sea, somewhere between Naxos and Athens, in-between lessons from the outstanding Cypriot Mihalis Eleftheriou who created Language Transfer. His project, a free, donation-supported collection of meticulously crafted open-source language courses (give it a try and you’ll be impressed), was created as a form of activism to unite the Turkish and Greek-speaking people of his home island.

Addressing the same divide, Elif Shafak transposes the same chasm that has split Cyprus to a multi-generational, international, magical-realist allegory that accompanies the realist traumas of impossible love, civil war, exile, grief and integration of conflicting cultures.

This is an author that made me feel like she was a hundred percent in control. Every sentence was intentional, every image was perfect for its frame. I just had to strap in for the ride. Here’s a video of me making a wistful smile as I finish it.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

I suggest going in blind with this book. Do not read anything about it. If you are like me, you will be completely blown away and destroy this book in one or two sittings. Prepare yourself to understand nothing in the first half and understand everything in the second half.

Now that we got that sorted out, This Is How You Lose the Time War is vibrant, energetic and relentless. It overwhelms, excites and explodes. This is an intensely lyrical character story camouflaged as a time-travel sci-fi war story (no spoilers here – I mean, it’s literally the title). This is a correspondence in ever-evolving prose and poetry that tells a most focused, harrowing and satisfying tale at hyperspeed.

I can’t believe that two authors managed to form such a cohesive whole, but, given the subject matter of this book, maybe having a collaboration was the only way to produce this very unusual story.

I plan on reading it a second time this year. I think that the second reading will be the most important one.

The Books of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

I was drinking a midday beer with a long-estranged friend when he told me of his plan to read the entirety of Le Guin’s Earthsea during the summer. Having read and absolutely adored both The Dispossessed and The Birthday of the World and Other Stories I decided to give a shot to the series, which I figured was some kind of dragon-and-castle kid-friendly Harry Potter precursor.

Although this begins as young adult literature – but definitly doesn’t stay that way — Ursula wishes for her readers to do their share of the work. In her typical fashion, she will go out of her way to subvert what is expected of her and her characters.

It was also one of the first young adult series to make dark-skinned people the center of the story and spend almost an entire trilogy challenging gender roles and rooting for pacifism amidst institutionalized violence. In Earthsea, evil is not incarnate, but resides in the imbalance of power and its dynamics.

I read all can be read of Earthsea (I believe?): the first trilogy (the traditional hero arc, done well), the second trilogy (the complete deconstruction of fantasy tropes as we know them) and all collected stories. Like the rest of Ursula’s work I know of, this is a character and societal study on an otherworldly backdrop. I feel like these books improved my life. Out of Earthsea, I found many times more value than in the high-contrast, black and white fantasies that sum up the world in a tidy, unrealistic and boring equation.

All the books I read in 2024

Mille secrets, mille dangers par Alain Farah; autofiction; 350p; fini le 2024-01-21.
Cent ans de solitude par Gabriel Garcia-Marquez; réalisme magique; 450p; fini le 2024-02-05.
Le petit prince par Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; fiction; 61p; fini le 2024-02-07.
Foundation by Isaac Asimov; sci-fi; 230p; finished on 2024-02-14.
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn; fiction; 255p; finished on 2024-03-03.
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro; sci-fi; 303p; finished on 2024-03-13.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro; literary fiction; 265p; finished on 2024-03-21.
The Three-Body Problem 2: The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu; sci-fi; 512p; finished on 2024-04-11.
The Three-Body Problem 3: Death’s End by Cixin Liu; sci-fi; 700p; finished on 2024-04-22.
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu; fiction; 464p; finished on 2024-05-09.
Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky; political; 372p; finished on 2024-06-02.
The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson; fiction; 592p; finished on 2024-06-08.
Dove by Robin Lee Graham; memoir; 240p; finished on 2024-06-13.
How Not to Buy a Cruising Boat by Deb and T.J. Akey; non-fiction; 140p; finished on 2024-06-16.
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak; fiction; 354p; finished on 2024-06-21.
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone; sci-fi; 198p; finished on 2024-06-30.
Murderbot Diaries 1: All Systems Red by Martha Wells; sci-fi; 150p; finished on 2024-07-08.
Murderbot Diaries 2: Artificial Condition by Martha Wells; sci-fi; 158p; finished on 2024-07-13.
Murderbot Diaries 3: Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells; sci-fi; 158p; finished on 2024-07-17.
Earthsea Cycle 1: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin; fantasy; 183p; finished on 2024-07-31.
Earthsea Cycle 2: The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin; fantasy; 256p; finished on 2024-08-06.
Earthsea Cycle 3: The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin; fantasy; 259p, finished on 2024-08-15.
Earthsea Cycle 4: Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin; fantasy; 281p; finished on 2024-08-23.
Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir by Werner Hertzog; 367p; finished on 2024-09-26.
Earthsea Cycle 5: Tales from Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin; fantasy; 280p; finished on 2024-10-01.
Earthsea Cycle 6: The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin; fantasy; 336p; finished on 2024-10-10.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams; sci-fi; 208p; finished on 2024-11-18.
Shop Class as Soulcraft: an inquiry into the value of work by Matthew B. Crawford; philosophy; 207p; finished on 2024-12-11.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke; fantasy; 157p; finished on 2024-12-21.
Slaughtherhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut; 190p; historical fiction; finished on 2024-12-27.
En attendant Bojangles par Olivier Bourdeaut; 160p; fiction; fini le 2024-12-30.