24 for '24: Part 1

Books I've known and loved this year.

Over the rest of the month, I’m going to post my favourite things from the year; ranging from books to albums to gigs to exhibitions to maybe standing a field with friends and warm beer. I know these kinds of lists are always hugely subjective, these are just things I’ve loved that have influenced my work in some way after, or, when it comes to music, things I’ve listened to as I’ve worked. It’s a lonely job, music is good company. If you know me, it’s probably quite predictable. I am not a surprising person. First up, predictably, BOOKS.

BOOKS

I read a lot for work this year, increasingly there isn’t time to read for pleasure. One of these, I did read for work, but it quickly became one the greatest pleasures of my reading life. Since, I’ve told nearly everyone to read it, in the evangelical way only an ex-fundamentalist Christian can. Sometimes I worry I’ve never stopped preaching. I scaled back on reading a lot of contemporary fiction a couple of years ago, the risk can be you’re trying so hard to keep up with what’s new to be seen to be reading, that you neglect reading what’s going to develop you as a writer. I’m finishing the year with Walter Scott and G. K. Chesteron - that’s the inside of my head just now.

WANDERING STARS (Harvill Secker), Tommy Orange.

Charting three generations of a Native American family and spanning two centuries, Booker longlisted WANDERING STARS is a kaleidoscopic book, each turn illuminating the Star family as it splinters, fractures, reunites. Orange uses the little known Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 as a starting gun for a book that acts as both a sequel and prequel to his Pulitzer winning debut, THERE THERE. Throughout, Orange moves through narrative modes with a fluidity lesser writers would struggle to achieve, taking the reader on a necessary journey into the heart of the Native American experience. In many ways it’s a fragmentary novel but there’s always a cohesion to it as it unfolds, we are in the hands of a master story teller here (yes, I really like it). I spent a lot of this year reckoning with my own inheritance, this came at just the right time. Interviewing Tommy at EIBF was undoubtably a career highlight.

MY HEAVENLY FAVOURITE (Faber), Lucas Rijneveld.

Any book in which an abuser talks to his teenage victim is going to provoke a reaction, and when my HEAVENLY FAVOURITE was released early this year, it did just that. I wrote about this here in an earlier post. The irony inherent in strong reactions is that they often absolutely, and accidentally, nail the point of the book, while at the same time falling wide of the mark. The danger in strong reactions is that many people expressing them have often read headlines and not the book itself; mistaking the nature of the book. And make no mistake, MY HEAVENLY FAVOURITE is a very accomplished book. Framed as a communications from a paedophile to his victim - his ‘little bird’ - it relies heavily on the second person, one of my favourite narrative modes. The deployment of ‘you’ creates a necessary distance between events and the point of narration - a sensitive authorial choice, and possibly, an editorial one, one many of the book’s critics overlooked. To so deliberately take on Lolita requires both a level of daring and talent that’s rare in an increasingly sanitised, risk averse literary landscape. It’s a bold claim to stake. If you’re taking on Nabokov, you have to deliver. Rijneveld does. Whereas Humbert’s objectification of Lolita reduces her to little more than an empty sign, Rijneveld’s unnamed narrator brings his ‘little bird’ vividly and precociously alive, although the results are no less damaging in. Thematically, My Heavenly Favourite connects well with Rijneveld’s International Man Booker winning debut, THE DISCOMFORT OF EVENING, both exploring the darker side of rural Protestantism and its effects on teenagers. MY HEAVENLY FAVOURITE goes even further than his debut, showing the vulnerability ignorance and isolation creates; while ‘little bird’ thinks of herself as worldly, this exposes a deep naivety, it’s possible to think a more knowing child would not have been as vulnerable to a predator. Rijneveld’s emerging body of work is underpinned by serious sustained preoccupations, already he’s a very good writer, I have the feeling he will remain a force to be reckoned with.

YOU ARE HERE (Sceptre), David Nicholls.

About 25 pages into YOU ARE HERE, I sent a message to a friend telling them I was experiencing something I couldn’t quite name. Turns out, it was happiness. I don’t often read books that make me happy, I might try it more often. David Nicholls is a master manipulator of readers’ emotions, consistently reflecting the human experience back through his astute observations shaped around perfectly paced stories, YOU ARE HERE is no exception. At its heart, it’s a love story between two middle aged protagonists set over the course of a walk traversing the width of the country - terrain I know all too well from childhood holidays and now watch from train windows, trains that have departed from Euston, and often late. I detest Euston, Nicholls’ observation early in the book that Euston is the worst station cemented my feelings towards the book. But really, it’s a beautiful, expansive book cut with humour and warmth and most importantly, pitch perfect dialogue. The fact that Nicholls also writes for screen is reflected in YOU ARE HERE, it never misses a story beat, the dialogue’s sharp and clean, scenes are vivid, this is a book you see as much as you feel. I’m a big structure fiend, I know some writers baulk at the idea of plot, believing it might constrain their genius or something, but I see structure as essential bones, without it, you’re often left with flab. This is one of the reasons I’ve encouraged almost everyone I’ve taught this year to read YOU ARE HERE, because if you want to see structure in action, and the flexibility it gives - yes, rules free you up - then you can’t go wrong with David Nicholls. Reading masters of the thing you’re trying to master is never a bad idea. I also became slightly obsessed with the screen adaptation of ONE DAY (more on that another time).

Ahead to 2025, a three books I’m really looking forward to next year are:

FOR EMMA (Leamington Books), Ewan Morrison. FOR EMMA is a brilliant high stakes thriller taking on AI and Silicone Valley with shades of the Unabomber Manifesto, a destabilising book perfect for fans and critics of Luigi Magione. It’s a book full of love and grief and just might be Morrison’s best, which from a writer of this calibre, is saying something.

OVERNIGHT (Canongate), Dan Richards. In OVERNIGHT, Richards brings the many possibilities of the night alive, with his usual level of attention to the human and the non-human, OVERNIGHT is a complicated, splendour of a book. Although I love the night, I’m scared of the dark, with OVERNIGHT, Richards made a convert of me.

THE PUNK ROCK BIRDWATCHING CLUB (Ortac Press), Richard Foster. Richard Foster is one of the consistently most curious storytellers I’ve come across. It is his innate curiosity combined with his curious style that gives the strength to this collection of short stories published by the increasingly brilliant Ortac Press. This collection of short stories creates a psychedelically cohesive portrait (this will make sense when you read it) of the Netherlands through a series of narrators created by Foster’s astute eyes.