End of year review 2024

You don’t need to tell you what a grim year it has been so I won’t. Fortunately there have been some interesting books to keep us going. I have read fewer books this year which I expected as I had other things going on. I did add one new country – Vanuatu, apparently the only Vanuatu novel and only available in French. Palestine was my country of choice for my annual marathon for obvious reasons and, though I have been tempted by Lebanon – I seem to have twenty Lebanese novels, I shall back to that country later and resume my normal routine with a less controversial and war-ridden country next year. I enjoyed the Palestinian novels but, inevitably and sadly and , most of them focussed on the same theme, namely Israel (and, to a lesser extent, going back in time, the British mandate and the Ottoman rule.)

Other less frequently read countries included Abkhazia, Denmark, Finland,Iran, Luxemburg ,Mongolia, Mozambique, Rwanda and Senegal.

I read only 87 novels this year at an average of 261 pages. There were a total of 35 different countries. Numbers by country of the most read : Palestine 20 ; Japan 9 ; Argentina 6 ; France 5 ; Hungary 3 ; Italy 3 . 41 were by women, my highest percentage yet. As an aside I would mention that figures show that there are more and more women producing quality fiction and. of course, more women reading quality fiction than men. It is clear that more books are being written by women – the Booker Prize was won by a woman, for the first time for a while -, and more women read books. I have seen various articles on this topic from one bemoaning the fact that publishers are not catering for teen boys (perhaps because they do not buy/read books) to an article about how the large majority of the worthwhile books to be published next year are by women.

I would mention that the vast majority of novels read were published by small independents who, as always, are the ones publishing the most interesting fiction. Many, however, are struggling as can be seen by the increase in crowd funding so please help if you can and where possible, buy the books directly from the publisher rather than from online behemoths.

Long time readers will know that I do not do a best of lists – I will leave that to others – but I shall mention a few highlights. I enjoyed the first two book of what will beSolvej Balle‘s seven part series with the strange name On The Calculation Of Volume . It tells of a Belgian woman who, everyday she wakes up it is 18 November. She remembers the previous 18 Novembers but no-one else does. By the beginning of the book she has had almost a year’s worth of 18 Novembers.

Paolo Giordano‘s Tasmania is not about Tasmania or, rather, only tangentially, but it it is about climate change – sadly I seem to have relatively few climate change novels on my site- but also about various other things, including terrorism and the atom bomb and is a very intelligent novel on these and other topics.

I have very few Iranian novels on my site so was glad to read the first book of Ghazaleh Alizadeh‘s he House of The Edrisis (second part coming soon) set not in Iran but in what we now know as Ashgabat, in Turkmenistan and dealing with a well-to-d family who are facing a revolution.

Another multivolume novel I enjoyed, also not set in the author’s native country, was Radwa Ashour‘s Granada Trilogy. This trilogy is set in Spain. starting at the end of the fifteenth century when the Castilians, as they are called in this book, are taking back Spain from the Arabs. It is told entirely from the Arab point of view and shows the Arabbs ahaving a high level of civilisation – culture, political freedoms and so on while the Spanish bring the Inquisition, break promises and generally are not worthy of taking back the country.

Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill, usually known just as Fogwill, is an author who is very well-known in his home country of Argentina but barely known in the English-speaking world. Only one of his novels has been translated into English and that is the one I read and reviewed though I do have a couple of his untranslated novels which I may or may not get around to one day.

This one concerns the Falklands War and is about a group of Argentinian deserters who are trying to evade both the British and their own side.

I also enjoyed Jaroslav Rudiš‘s >Winterbergs letzte Reise (Winterberg’s Last Journey) about a91 year old man who makes a train journey through central Europe to visit famous battlefields.

I read two novels by László Krasznahorkai this year – (War and War and Herscht 07769, both about a loner against the world but also against his own demons and, of course a whole lot more. I shall certainly be reading more of his work next year.

Michael Orthofer at the Complete Review linked to a listing of the worst books of 2024. Michael mentioned he had read and reviewed three of them. I do not read Knausgaard and cannot understand why anyone does but I did read and review the other two he mentioned – Murakami‘s The City and Its Uncertain Walls/ which I found very disappointing and Olga Tokarczuk‘s repurposing Thomas Mann in Empuzjon (Empusium) was not her best but nor was it one of the worst novels of the year. Talking of famed novelists slipping up a bit, I was not overly impressed with Gabriel García Márquez‘s posthumous En Agosto Nos Vemos (Until August) .

We need to talk about Elon

You do not need me to tell you what a thoroughly obnoxious person Elon Musk is – a jumped-up, super-rich, spoilt brat who all too often behaves like a naughty- seven-year old rather like his best buddy. I could go on for pages on this but I am going to talk about Twitter (he can call it what he likes; I call it Twitter). I have been on Twitter for quite a while and I find it very useful as a way to announce a new review and, as I follow many authors, translators, publishers, bloggers and other book people, in several languages, I learn a lot about new books and other bookish news and comment. I keep away from Mush and his merry band of right-wing nuts and conspiracy theorists. However there are issues. Firstly, by staying on could one seen as supporting him and his friends? I think not but many have decided this is the case. Secondly, as a result of this many worthwhile twitterers have jumped ship, mainly to BlueSky. I have had a BlueSky account for a long time but have not used it. If I did jump, I would risk losing all my many wonderful followers but also many of those that I follow. I would have to manually hunt down those that have jumped, So, for now, I am sticking but giving him no money and blocking as many ads as possible. Apparently Twitter has 500 million subscribers, BlueSky 20 million. We will see what happens when he becomes Secretary for Getting Rid of Things and when he has his inevitable bust-up with his buddy.

Deaths

The following authors on my website died this year:

José Agustín
Paul Auster
John Barth
Maryse Condé
Robert Coover
Robert Irwin
Ismail Kadare
Walter Kappacher
N. Scott Momaday
Alek Popov
Christopher Priest
Jacques Roubaud
Márcio Souza

And, finally,may I wish you a Happy New Year and lots of good reading.