A Year in Books - Jack's Top 12 of 2024

The year is over. These are the best books from each month of 2024, a year where I read and I read, and nothing changed. 

 

January - Inland by Gerald Murnane

A book so beautifully written I actually couldn’t tell you what it was about or anything that happened in it. A series of increasing magnifications, pages full of glass and sun, motes of dust, plants in breeze, contracting stomata, expanding pupil. Like a long afternoon nap, or the vague images that pass through your mind when your colleague asks you what you did at the weekend.

February - Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin  

A novel first published in Russia in 1999, translated masterfully into English this year. In June 2002, a Russian youth activist group, Walking Together, threw portions of copies of the book into a toilet installed outside the Bolshoi Theatre, in protest of Sorokin's collaboration with the Theatre. The group accused Sorokin of writing pornography, due to the novel's inclusion of a gay sex scene between Khrushchev and Stalin. The toilet was blown up in September 2002 by a group calling itself "The Red Partisans". The contents of the novel are no less insane. 

March - The Extinction of Irena Ray by Jennifer Croft

Vladimir Nabokov and Olga Tokarczuk have a literary baby who grows up to run a podcast of some small note. 

April - Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck  

Winner of the International Booker Prize arrived in paperback in April of this year. This book exemplifies nearly everything that Sally Rooney wishes she could be. The decay of a promising relationship reflecting the decay of the German Democratic Republic. When two separate on bad terms, often what was formerly intimate and secret in their relationship, guarded by trust, will be made public in the most spiteful, ugly way. This fall back into barbarism; and, indeed, a reminder: every failed relationship is a small civilisational collapse. 

May - Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young 

Finally back in print this year after many years of being off bookshop shelves. this novel (if it can be properly called that) this like a desert mirage: the more you read, the further away the ending seems. Running at approximately 750,000 words and over 1,500 pages, when the novel was first typeset by it's publishers, it consumed 38 miles of computer tape. This fractal, picaresque, tesseract of a novel follows a young woman sitting on a bus and thinking about things. The literary twin of the much shorter and much worse 'The Girl on the Train'. Marguerite Young wrote this monster over 18 years, the time it takes to rear a child. She has described it as "an exploration of the illusions, hallucinations, errors of judgment in individual lives, the central scene of the novel being an opium addict's paradise."

June - The Seers by Sulaiman Addonia

A much shorter endeavour, but capable of filling you with a similar opiated euphoria. I see glitter and sex like strobe light through a capilleried bat wing, leafless tree canopy and lips covered with sugar. A book as boring as you are. 

July -  The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut

Published in paperback. A fictionalised account of the life of John von Neumann, told as kind of frightening origin story to today's rise of AI. The schism between the sciences and the humanities must be healed or else we will all be totally destroyed forever. 

August - Marshland by Otohiko Kaga

The unique perspective of a Japanese Catholic. An epic novel on a Tolstoyan scale, running from the pre-World War II period to the turbulence of 1960s Japan. Also really long but really good, the book flops open on your lap like a sigh. 

September- The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk 

In September we excitedly received the polish Nobel Prize winner's latest effort. Dubbed 'A Health Resort Horror Story', it reads like something written in the dark. Imagine Thomas Mann if he was less German and even more gay. 

October - Herscht 07769 by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

In our titular month we meet Florian Herscht who, after having faithfully attended Herr Köhler's classes in particle physics for two years, he is convinced that global cataclysm is imminent. And so he embarks upon a one-sided correspondence with Chancellor Angela Merkel, hoping to convince her of the imminent danger of the complete destruction of all physical matter. Written in one giant sentence. Imagine the millipede in tears surrounded by all his boots. 

November - Vacated Landscape by Jean Lahougue

A french book. 

December - Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo

A book about a troll. It's actually very good. I've run out of steam for writing this now. What a year. 

 

All of these and more can be purchased at October Books. Thank you for all your support this year. Lots of love, Jack.