2024 Reading List

2024 was a good reading year. I suspect 2025 will be even better, as I'll be diving into fiction to avoid reading any news about you-know-who.

Highlights of my 2024 reading year include:

• Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon, his first novel, which I read on the basis of a review in The Guardian. The idea is brilliant, a story of a war in ancient Greece made real and relevant by the present tense narration of two characters with funny Dublin accents. It's truly glorious from beginning to end. 
  
  
• The 19th century Russian short stories collected and analysed by George Saunders under the title A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. The stories are really good, but my appreciation of them was doubled by Saunders' explanations. This is such an enjoyable read, but also so insightful for an aspiring writer. 
  
  
• A memoir that was assigned in a writing craft class, Splinters by Leslie Jamison. It's fair to say that I wasn't looking forward to reading yet another divorce memoir, but Jamison's writing is sharp, insightful, and often extremely witty in an understated and subtle way, a pleasure to read.
  
  
• Orbital. It's wonderful, but everybody knows that already. 
  
  

I was a bit disappointed by Mike McCormack's This Plague of Souls. I was so looking forward to it as Solar Bones is one of my all-time favourite novels, but it didn't quite land for me. It felt unfinished. McCormack has said that these books are part of a triptych, with Solar Bones as the centre-piece, so maybe this will all come together in the end when the third novel is published.

I was quite underwhelmed by Sally Rooney's Normal People, just as I was underwhelmed in the past by Beautiful World, Where Are You. I'm ready to accept it's my fault, not Rooney's, but I've given it a good go now so Intermezzo is not in my plans.

Here's the complete list of what I read in 2024:

Fiction

Amis, Martin: The Zone of Interest

Arikha, Alba: Two Hours

Barry, Kevin: That Old Country Music

Boyne, John: Water

Cusk, Rachel: Transit (2nd reading)

Dutton, John B: 2084

Ephron, Nora: Heartburn

Ferrell Carolyn: Dear Miss Metropolitan

Fosse, Jon: A Shining

Harvey, Samantha: Orbital

Keegan, Claire: Foster (2nd reading)

Lennon, Ferdia: Glorious Exploits

McCann, Colum: Thirteen Ways of Looking

McCormack, Mike: Solar Bones (3rd reading)

McCormack, Mike: This Plague of Souls

McLiam Wilson, Robert: Eureka Street

Mitchell, David: Slade House

Murray, Paul: The Bee Sting

Richler, Mordecai: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

Rooney, Sally: Normal People

Saunders, George (editor): A Swim in a Pond in the Rain - stories by Chekov, Tolstoy et al

Thúy, Kim: Ru (en Français)

Non-fiction

Balinska, Maria: The Bagel

Cohen, Richard: How to Write like Tolstoy

Dyer, Geoff: The Last Days of Roger Federer

Ho Davies, Peter: The Art of Revision - The Last Word

Jamison, Leslie: Splinters

Olen Butler, Robert: From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

Poetry

Mandelstam, Osip: Stolen Air

Pinsky, Robert: Proverbs of Limbo

Roeser, Dana: All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts