Books of the Year 2024

Books I rated five stars in 2024

2024 has been one of the best reading years of my life, and that’s largely down to having become a BookTuber and launching this Substack. Reading has always been my biggest passion in life, and making book content has enhanced it enormously. I’m looking forward to improving my content in 2025 and reading even more books!

I present here the books I rated five stars in 2024.

Fiction

Odyssey / The Odyssey
Homer / Emily Wilson / Stephen Fry

I read Homer’s The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson and Odyssey by Stephen Fry at the same time. It was a perfect way to read this epic tale for the first time and it was a highlight of the year. I read it because I’m following Ted Gioia’s Humanities List, and it’s an excellent example of why following that list is such a rewarding experience for me.

Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson

A reread. I bought this because I was sure my son would enjoy it. He didn’t. But I sure did. I tandem read this with the audiobook narrated by Jonathan Davis on Audible and their version of it was really enjoyable. I particularly enjoyed the info dumps on ancient Sumer and language this time around, when the protagonist (natch!) asks questions of an AI librarian. It led to my reading Inanna, also on this list.

Inanna
Emily H. Wilson

This one has a bit of a funny story. I’d gone to a book launch event at Worldcon because I’d seen the name Emily Wilson, thinking it was the translator of The Odyssey that I’d just bought. Apparently Emily H. Wilson gets that a lot and she was very sweet about it, but I was still rather embarrassed after boldly announcing that I’d bought her book. So what else could I do but… buy her book?! It turned out to be a good move because it was really good. It’s a retelling of the Epic of Gilgamesh told from the point of view of three characters, including the titular Inanna, a goddess. I have the sequel, Gilgamesh, on my TBR for this year and book 3, Ninshubar, is due out in August.

The Tainted Cup
Robert Jackson Bennett

It took me a few attempts to break through the comfort barrier with the audiobook. Does anyone else get that with new books? I ended up having to buy a physical copy to start again with my eyes after I’d listened to about 90 minutes of the audiobook. But once it got going, it was utterly brilliant. A murder mystery in a fantasy world, with excellent characters, a weird magic system and a very interesting relationship between investigator, Ana Dolabra, and her apprentice, Din. Also that murder scene that they were investigating at the beginning was both gruesome and grotesque. The audiobook narration by Andrew Fallaize was superb. I will be following up FOR SURE!

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
Susanna Clarke

I read this with Ross and Laura of Hardy’s Books / Station Books. This was my second time reading this wonderful novel, with the first’s being back in 2009 when it was recommended on a podcast by journalist Andy Ihnatko. If you enjoy Dickens or Austen and also enjoy fantasy, this will work for you. If you’re not into classic 19th century English lit, it’s still worth trying but might not slap in quite the same way for you. It makes magic feel like it could actually be real, something which I yearn to be true. But then I read this and I’m like, ‘hmmm… maybe it wouldn’t be such a good thing after all.’

Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy

I read Tess back in the 90s and enjoyed it. It’s a real buzz returning to favourite literature in my 50s and discovering it all over again. The language of this novel is hauntingly beautiful, conjuring up images of pastoral England and summer. I plan on reading Jude the Obscure this year for the first time.

War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy, (tr. Anthony Briggs)

I read this in my final year at university in 1998 and wrote a dissertation in Russian comparing it with the 1968 movie adaptation by Bondarchuk. I hadn’t reread it since then, so when I saw that Simon Haisell of Footnotes and Tangents was doing a slow-read, I jumped right in. He’d been running the group since 1 January and I didn’t find it until April, so I had some catching up to do; but with the group’s reading just one chapter a day, I was able to catch up around the end of July. It was an incredibly rewarding experience and I wholeheartedly recommend that you join Simon’s group this year as he’s going it again.

The Years of Rice and Salt
Kim Stanley Robinson

I finished this in December 2023 and then read it again in 2024 because it was such a deep novel and I couldn’t get it out of my head. It’s a work of speculative fiction that’s based on the premise that the black death wiped out most of Europe and we’re left with a world where western hegemony never happens. It’s broken into ten books that span hundreds of years of history in different regions of the world, and uses the plot device of reincarnation to bring back the same souls in each book, identified by their names’ beginning with the same initial throughout (K, B and I for the main characters). Between books, the souls enter the bardo, a sort of limbo where they can recall their past lives, knowledge doesn’t go with them as they become new people. It’s a challenging read, but utterly fascinating and very rewarding. It made me think of Cloud Atlas, which I then went out and bought another copy of because I’d lost mine, then I found it so now I have two. But the new one was the anniversary edition and is signed, so yay!

The Revolution of Marina M
Janet Fitch

This was my third time reading this historical fiction novel. It follows a young poet, Marina Makarova. She’s the daughter of a liberal, middle-class family in St Petersburg and it starts just before the revolution when she is 16. We follow her story as the revolution goes on around her and it’s fascinating. Fitch has clearly done her research, both historical and cultural. If ever a historical novel were written just for me, this is it. It features my favourite Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, as well as Blok, Mandelstam and Gorky. Marina hangs out amongst the artists of the day and her journey is fraught with peril as she ends up spying on her family for the cause and gets caught up in the criminal underworld of St Petersburg. This and its sequel, The Chimes of the Lost Cathedral, are among my favourite novels.

And I must give a shout-out to the Audible narrator, Yelena Shmulenson. Having a bilingual narrator makes all the difference in the world. Russian names and place names are tricky and there are a lot throughout this novel. Excellent choice Audible!

Golden Fool
Robin Hobb

This is the third book in the Tawny Man trilogy and follows the story of Fitz, the main character from Hobb’s first series, The Farseer Trilogy. I’ve read that trilogy three times now, and the follow-up trilogy, The Liveship Traders, twice. These three trilogies form part of the overarching series, The Realm of the Elderlings. I set a goal of reading one Elderlings novel a month until I was done, but ended up reading only eight over ten months. Still decent!

I tandem read The Golden Fool with the Audible book, narrated brilliantly by Nick Taylor. It was utterly enthralling. Hobb’s writing just gets better and better. It’s quite a slow-paced novel and that gives it space to breathe. The characters are so well written that I find myself worrying about what I’ll do with myself when I’ve read the last book. I suppose I’ll just read them again.

I also gave five stars to Royal Assassin, Ship of Magic and The Mad Ship. Hobb wins the year!

A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess

This was my second time reading this novel. I’ll never be able to read it without knowing Russian, so my experience of the novel is probably quite different from anyone who doesn’t know Russian. The characters use their own slang and it’s heavily based on the Russian language, so I was able to follow it without any bother. For non-Russian speakers, it’s probably a bit of a head-scratcher until you get the hang of it.

As social commentary and dystopian sci-fi go, this novel has a lot to say. It’s dark and (ultra) violent and leaves you with questions rather than answers. Loved it!

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Non Fiction

Natasha’s Dance
Orlando Figes

If The Revolution of Marina M was written just for me, in Natasha’s Dance we’ve got the same for non-fiction. I’d read a Figes (pr. Fi as in Fee Fi Fo Fum and Ges as in Jesus) book before so I knew that his style was nice to read. The titular Natasha refers to Natasha Rostova of War and Peace, specifically the scene where she dances a folk dance in the old peasant shack. It illustrates Russianness perfectly: Natasha knows how to do the dance as it’s part of her soul, and although she’s of noble birth, she’s able to connect to that folk idiom effortlessly because it’s innate. We follow the cultural history of Russia from the laying of the foundation stone of St Petersburg in 1703 right through to Stravinsky’s return to Russia in 1962 after many years in exile. I particularly enjoyed reading about three of my favourite Soviet-era artists, film director Andrei Tarkovsky, poet Anna Akhmatova and composer Dmitri Shostakovich, but there are so many other cultural icons covered that I’m sure your favourites will be in there too.

This is a book I will almost certainly reread, and probably soon!

A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924
Orlando Figes

I read this after Natasha’s Dance and it did not disappoint. It’s a hefty tome for sure, but the way Figes presents the information, the pages just flew by. If you’re looking for just one book on the revolutions, this would be the one. Figes’ style is accessible, though I would recommend making at least some notes if you’re not familiar with all the historical figures. There are a lot!

It was not Marxism that made Lenin a revolutionary but Lenin who made Marxism revolutionary.

The Anxious Generation
Jonathan Haidt

I knew of Jonathan Haidt’s writing through his Substack, After Babel, and had read a few of his articles around this topic. As a parent of two late teens, it’s probably a bit late for me to be reading this, but I’m still hopeful that we’ll start to see a reversal of the mental illness epidemic as we learn more about its causes. The one line that hit me between the eyes from this book was this one:

Social media use is a cause of anxiety, depression, and other ailments, not just a correlate.

A bold statement to be sure, but the author then backs it up with data. And let’s be honest: we all kind of knew that already, right?

Man’s Search for Meaning
Viktor Frankl

This was a reread. Viktor Frankl is a holocaust survivor and a philosopher. The first half of the book outlines his time in the concentration camps and how he survived; the second half covers his philosophy called logotherapy, or meaning therapy. The basic philosophy follows Nietzsche’s idea that “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.”

Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.

I bought this copy to give to a friend and haven’t had the opportunity to do that yet, because every time I’ve arranged to meet him there’s been a storm and I’ve not been able to get off the island where I live. I hope to see him very soon.

It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfil or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it.

I could riddle this entry with quotations, but I’ll leave it there and hope that it has whetted your appetite to go and read this amazing book.

So, a good year! What were your favourite reads of 2024? Let’s have a discussion in the comments!