To Conclude
A Year in Review: What Was Worth Its Weight in Words?
My top fiction, non-fiction, publications, and miscellaneous ‘Hots’ of 2024.
See the 2023 list here.
Fiction:
1) 2666 by Roberto Bolano.
This is the most perfect work of fiction I have ever read. Its 800 pages took me 6 weeks; I have thought about it every day since.
2) Stoner by John Williams
I first heard about this book on the side of a mountain when two very different people realised that they shared it as a favourite. It turns out that this is not a weird coincidence, it’s because Stoner is universally excellent.
3) The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg
“It seemed to me that I had discovered how people in books should be—funny and at the same time sad.”
4) How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto.
I finished How I Won a Nobel Prize (a novel, not an alpha self-help book) on an outbound plane. During the trip, my friends read this book in succession, and we discussed it every day. There is so much to wonder about. I emailed Julius Taranto with the questions we couldn’t work through, but he was clearly not on holiday.
5) Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
“Chloe was the way Joni Mitchell’s skeleton would look if you made it smile and walk around a party being extra special nice to everyone. Picture Chloe’s popular skeleton the size of an insect, running through the vaults and galleries other innards at two in the morning. Her pulse a siren overhead, announcing: Prepare for death in ten, in nine, in eight…”
6) Up Your Ass (or, From the Cradle to the Boat, or, The Big Suck, or, Up from the Slime) by Valerie Solanas
A radical feminist play by the lady who shot Andy Warhol
7) By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept by Elizabeth Smart
“My love, why did you leave me on Lexington Avenue in the Ford that had no brakes?
It stalled in the traffic and broke down outside her window. She was writing a letter: I love you very much.”
Non-Fiction:
1) The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli.
This is an accessible book about Quantum Gravity. I listened to it during a week in the summer whenever I walked on the river path between Abingdon and Oxford. I felt worried about the movement of time until this book explained how the present, past, and future coexist.
2) Into The Wild by John Krakauer
“He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wild hearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the sea harvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.”
3) The Gentle Art of Tramping
4) The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer
An introduction to meta-cognition.
“The truth is that most of life will unfold in accordance with forces far outside your control, regardless of what your mind says about it”
5) I Can’t Stay Long by Laurie Lee, particularly ‘Love’ and ‘Appetite’
6) Sexistence by Jean Luc Nancy
“Fatality reveals itself to be ambiguous: love promises everything—along with sex; sex promises an end while hiding that it might become infinite”
Podcasts
Once Upon A Time at Bennington College
James Low: ‘Everything As It Is’
Alan Watts’s lecture recordings
Substacks:
MISC… (En 2024, les filles qui vivaient dans l'appartement des filles aiment) :
Guinness & Black
Permethrin & Fucibet (although they played hard to get at first)
Sticky toffee pudding
e. e. Cummings’s love poetry
Malapropisms (“Let’s go out with a bong”)
Gingham
Puff pastry
The way Jerry Seinfeld stresses the second syllable of 2 syllable words
Having enough faith in the universe to make big life decisions using a Magic 8 Ball
Crab meat sandwiches
Wild geese
Roberto Bolano
Fireworks
Anagrams
Green Wine
Object impermanence
Getting back into bed on sunny afternoons
My Bike
Galicia
Insisting that Adam and Eve discovered gravity
Confusing ‘alter egos’ with ‘alter boys’
Eating in the garden
Swimming in the sea
The Medina
Iambic names
Doing things for the sake of making a secret with yourself
Handwritten letters
Kings College chapel
Grappling
One Paloma fizz
Reading a book set in the place you’re on holiday
Tramp stamps that aren’t mirrored
The Olympics
Admitting that you don’t know
Walking until the problem is solved. Then getting a train back.
Honesty boxes outside farms
Iced lemon buns
Altitude slickness
Violating John Lewis employee laws
Barmaids
Reuniting with the girls
Showering with the girls
Being told by older women that the only certain thing in life is the girls
Speaking sentences that have never been said before
doing hard things whilst remaining gentle.
We get it you have a bike!!