The Best Books of 2024

For the last year and a half I read short books, mostly, which was psychologically satisfying and anyway necessary to fit the available energy and concentration.  Now, though, back on my feet, I hope, I am ready to read long books again.

Long, and I mean it, like Rebecca West’s 1,150 page Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), a novelistic tour through Yugoslavia mixed with a fragmented Gibbon-like history of the region.  I am almost halfway through without losing much enthusiasm.

My chronological drift has taken me into the 1940s, and I plan to read a number of the major works of the decade.  Nothing else I am likely to read comes close to West’s monster, although The Second Sex tops 700 pages.  But in the last couple of years I passed over a number of likely books because they were too long, so now is the time to gather them up.  Is A Glastonbury Romance (1932) really almost 1,200 pages?  Was John Cowper Powys out of his mind?  Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925), under a thousand, seems almost reasonable, Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932) a breeze at 600, except I hope to read it in French, and Finnegans Wake (1939) practically a novella, except that it is written in the style of Finnegans Wake.

Yes, of course, this post is some kind of post-surgery overreaction.  Now I will read Finnegans Wake!  Now I will read The Tale of Genji!  And so on.  I am aware.  Although last summer, wondering what the first readers of Finnegans Wake saw, I read the first four or five installments published in 1924 and 1925 under the noncommittal title “Work in Progress” and found the idea of reading more plausible.

I greatly enjoyed my little immersion in Indian literature a couple of months ago, where I mixed classical epics and poetry with modern novels.  I want to do that again.  Several times even.

First: Persian literature.  Dick Davis has been publishing piece of Ferdawsi’s Shahnameh (1010) for decades.  His latest version (2016) is just under a thousand pages; I doubt that is half of the entire epic, likely the longest ever written by a single person.  Along with Ferdawsi I could read Attar’s The Conference of the Birds (1177) and the poetry of Rumi (12th c.) and Hafez (13th c.), all of which have been translated by Davis.  Maybe, looking at modern novels, I could try My Uncle Napoleon (1973) by Iraj Pezeshkzad, translated by, let’s see, Davis again.  Any Persian expedition is likely to become the Dick Davis show.  Well, it is a great lifetime achievement, and he is a fine poet in his own right, as I know from his 2009 collection Belonging: Poems.

Second: Arabic literature.  The One Thousand and One Nights, not necessarily such a long book depending on exactly which texts are included in the translation.  The 2021 Annotated Arabian Nights is a beauty.  I am not sure what else I might read.  A browse through the Library of Arabic Literature will find something.  Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley is from 1947, so that is an easy choice.  I wonder what his earlier novels about ancient Egypt are like?

Third: Japanese literature.  The Tale of Genji (11th c.) and The Pillow Book (1002) alongside Ivan Morris’s The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan (1964).  Then move to The Tale of Heike (14th c.) and some more recent works, more Sōseki and Tanizaki and Kawabata, maybe.

Fourth: Chinese literature.  One of the early novels, like Romance of the Three Kingdoms (14th c.), likely in some still enormous abridgement, followed by The Story of the Stone (1791-2).  Then, or alongside, some novels from the 1940s, Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City (1943) and Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged (1947).

For example.  Let’s say.  Maybe these are the best books of 2024 and 2025.  Or 2035.  No, look, one big book per month is twelve books.  Maybe I really get ten read, or eight.  That’s pretty good.  That’s not pure bluster.

If anybody would like to recommend a Persian, Arabic, etc. book, short or long, classical or contemporary, please do.  If anyone would like to read along with one of these beasts, please let me know. They all seem like terrible readalong books, since they are exactly the books where the pace should not be forced and the reader’s right to give up halfway – a tenth of the way – through is paramount.  Still, let me know.

Now I need to get writing about Ovid.  Speaking of whom, if anyone wants to continue reading Roman literature in my company, I am completely open to the idea.  Let’s say you have joined me with Plautus, Terence, Lucretius, Ovid, Seneca the playwright, and Seneca the Stoic.  We still have Virgil, lots of great lyric and satirical poets, Pharsalia, Satyricon, Cicero, a shelf of famous historians I have never read, and St. Augustine.  Lots of interesting things.  Julius Caesar, I’ve never read Caesar.  Let me know, let me know.

Thanks for indulging the silliest-sounding thing I have ever written here.