my year in novels: part i

or, trying to learn how to have fun

At time of writing, I have read 70 books (for leisure, not for work) this year. This was partly because reading is how I spend my spare time and partly because I was running a sort of experiment in getting myself to loosen up and have fun.

For context, at the beginning of 2024 I was forced to take stock of myself and my values. Cut down by physical and mental health concerns that had become too debilitating to ignore, I had to admit that the harsh, even extreme judgments that I was prone to pass on myself and the world were no longer helping me and were, in fact, doing the opposite. For years I have cultivated what I now realize was a puritanical (and kind of worryingly Platonist?) mindset about how one should engage with art — if a work of art is not Good, it is not only not worth engaging with, but also corrosive to the project of living.

I have always thought of my discernment as a core element of my identity, so it was very hard to realize that my harshness was, essentially, destructive. I still think bad art can be a bad thing, a waste of resources and time, or an escapist reflection of the reader that leaves them ill equipped to interact with the world. However, my position has changed in a few ways. The first is that the focus should not be on the art itself, but instead on the reader, and the lens that the reader brings to the art. There is bad art, yes, but there are also bad lenses. My second is that it is good to read things that are fun, that the experience of ‘having fun’ is just as useful as the experience of ‘thinking really hard’, or ‘encountering despair’. This might seem obvious, but it really did take me some time to get to this insight. I’ve struggled to have fun in any way for years, and although I have always loved to read, ‘love’ and ‘fun’ do not always coexist.

In light of these revelations, I decided to spend the year exploring ‘fun’ books, and trying to figure out what this alien little word means. I started by reading very popular books that I knew other people found fun — romantasy, Liane Moriarty, a ‘cozy’ mystery. I hated all this. What I eventually found was that, when reading for fun, I choose different books than I would otherwise, but that these books are not at all bad — a fun book can be really good!

So, I am going to list, in this post and the next, the books I liked this year, separated by theme. I have two broad categories: books that were fun and books that were not fun. I’m hoping that this list might help others who are looking for the same sort of things that I am. Also, please tell me about what you read this year in the comments, if you want.

I’m going to star the books that I think people are unlikely to have heard of. This post is long, so if you don’t want to read the whole thing, just skip to these ones! Please read them, they’re really good and I recommend them wholeheartedly.

FUN BOOKS

Category 1: Good Plotting

A focus on plotting is often associated with genre fiction. Anecdotally, I often see literary fiction described as ‘character driven’, or even ‘no plot, just vibes’. It’s taken me a long time to get to this point, but I’ve realized that a successful character driven novel will often be tightly plotted, and a lack of this tight plotting will often make me feel as if the novel is slack, as if it’s wasting its page space. This is because meaning is often communicated by plotting — seeing how people react to events is a good way to get a sense of their character (the Woman of Letters substack discusses the importance of good plotting often, far more eloquently than I ever could). The wonderful thing about good plotting is that it’s an efficient way to communicate this kind of information, but it’s also often really fun. Good plotting facilitates dynamic situations, twists, double binds, consequences.

This year, I read three books by John LeCarre (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and The Honourable Schoolboy). LeCarre is a genre titan (spy novels!!) and an excellent plotter. The reason his books work so well for me is that he is capable of facilitating distance between character and reader without losing the reader’s interest. We follow his characters along, but their motivations are often closed to us, at least until the end of the book when the mystery unravels. This makes for a lot of suspense, but also creates a space to meditate on motivation and agency. He’s also a really good writer, in a quiet way that you hardly notice until it hits you. Read him if you want to like genre fiction, but often find yourself frustrated with it. If anyone knows of any other writers of spy novels who are anywhere near this good, please tell me.

Sarah Waters’ books (Fingersmith, The Paying Guest) got me through this nightmare of a term. Waters makes great use of historical pastiche, and I mean this as a compliment. She writes what are essentially historical pulp novels — twist-filled crime narratives inspired by historical popular fiction. Fingersmith (by far the better of the two novels of hers that I read) made me appreciate the art of the twist, which was not something I ever valued before. I love its quiet, perverse atmosphere and audacious plot. It’s a wonderful play on the Victorian penny dreadful (i.e. Sweeney Todd). Read her if you like a strong sense of place and a story that is truly surprising.

☆ Good Behavior, by Molly Keane, is a character study of a delusional, unloveable, and ultimately pitiable woman named Aroon, the daughter of a dying aristocratic family in early 20th century Ireland. The remarkable thing about the way that this book is plotted is that lots of things happen, but we see them through Aroon’s perspective, and she has no idea what is going on. There is the delight and pathos of experiencing two narratives — Aroon’s, and what is clearly actually happening past the lens of her delusion. It’s masterful, nearly every character is despicable (if complex), it’s very funny, and it’s bleak. All characteristics I enjoy in a book.

In this category, I also read:
- Bleak House (Charles Dickens): nobody makes a book feel alive like Dickens.
- Small Things Like These (Claire Keegan): simple, powerful moral fable.
- The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. LeGuin): a reread. One of my favorites.

Category 3: Weird, Lurid Books about People Behaving in Extreme Ways

Plotting is fun, and artifice is also fun. Artifice is a great tool for creating layers of narrative that interact with each other, or exploring how performativity is a part of character. What I love about high artifice is that it forces me to acknowledge that there is no ‘authentic’ way to act — we are all working with layers of artifice, all the time, and this does not make our personas ‘fake’. Reality (especially interpersonal dynamics) can feel more or less fictionalized, or more or less performative, at any given time. It is very cool when novels explore this head on, as they are well situated to do so. I might as well call this the Iris Murdoch category, as reading her spurred me to develop a taste for this kind of thing. However, I am afraid to say that the two Murdoch books I read this year (A Severed Head, The Flight From the Enchanter), disappointed me. I felt, alas, that they were not tightly plotted enough.

Good Behavior probably could also be characterized here.

☆ A Green Equinox, by Elizabeth Mavor. Please read this book, it made me feel crazy. I wrote a post about it here:

… an excellent novel about a woman, Hero Kilhoun, who falls in love with [various people throughout the book, spoilers in the original post]. Each new infatuation brings about a new style of narration, a new landscape that the protagonist inhabits. What is most striking about this book to me is that Hero’s three infatuated states are used to explore her relationship with the past and the future. In the book’s first scene, she tells us that she harbors an unhealthy obsession with the past, which she shares with her lover Hugh – throughout the book, both characters encounter various new approaches first to the future and then, finally, to the present. Landscape, time, and love are blurred together, to the extent that love is construed as a sort of colonization, exploration or cultivation process across space/time.

Depending on how you look at it, and, indeed, depending on which part of the book you’re reading, the book is either aesthetically lush or aesthetically repulsive, sometimes both. It’s excellent and very strange. Obligatory ‘the characters are unlikable’ warning.

☆ The Doll’s Alphabet (reread) and The Coiled Serpent, by Camilla Grudova, are two obsessive short story collections about people in alienating, sometimes dystopian landscapes who are obsessed with the debris of the past. The stories are very funny, often nightmarish, and often disgusting. Each collection feels complete and somewhat claustrophobic, as Grudova returns almost senselessly to certain motifs, allowing patterns to build across stories in a sort of eerie, almost fungus-like way. Reading Grudova alongside A Green Equinox might actually be an interesting project — both Grudova and Mavor take unexpected, audacious approaches to interacting with the past, and both have unusual ideas about the role of desire in people’s’ lives and, by extension, in narrative.

In this category, I also read:
-Lost in the Garden (Adam Leslie): Unsettling fever dream of English country life.
-Bad Behavior (Mary Gaitskill): I think people actually act like this.

Coda: Historical Detail

I find historical narratives really absorbing and calming, especially in the winter. If you, too, are like this, this is what I liked this year, although there’s not much new information to glean, as half of this list is Hilary Mantel, whom I very much regret not reading sooner.

Talleyrand, by Duff Cooper, is a very intimate, lovely portrait of Talleyrand, the French statesman whose career spanned multiple regimes. I love a bastard who refuses to die. Also, this book unexpectedly made me cry.

On that note, the first two books of Michael Broers’ Napoleon trilogy did not make me cry, but they did give me a massive amount of information about Napoleon’s life (including his association with Talleyrand). I really enjoy these — they are meticulously researched and very readable, if dense.

Finally, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies are beautifully written, simultaneously somber and action-packed, and feature one of the greatest main characters ever written, Thomas Cromwell.

Those are the fun books! I will post part ii as soon as I have the time. Please tell me what you enjoyed reading this year!