2024 in Books

I thought 2024 might have been my worst reading year in a decade, but with 24 books read I'm actually one book ahead of where I finished 2023. I had a good run over the summer and thought I might get back into the reading habit, but I fell off again in the fall. I could blame my failure to read more on any number of things – excessive scrolling and too much time spent on Spelling Bee are surely among the culprits – but one factor for which I feel less personal responsibility is that I had two longterm houseguests this year. I wasn't living alone for 8 months of last year, meaning there were people who I talked to in the mornings and who interrupted (even if they didn't intend to) my solitary reading time. I'm happy to have my space to myself again and I'm not expecting any longterm guests any time soon, so I hope I can get back to some of my old habits. 

The books I read last year, in the order in which I finished them, were:

• Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg
• Dark Back of Time, by Javier Marías
• Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
• Mockingbird, by Walter Tevis
• A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor
• What Have You Left Behind? by Bushra Al-Maqtari
• War, So Much War, by Mercè Rodoreda
• Our Lady of the Nile, by Scholastique Mukasonga
• Tomás Nevinson, by Javier Marías
• Translation State, by Ann Leckie
• Canción, by Eduardo Halfon
• Trust, by Hernan Diaz
• Tyrant Memory, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
• City of Laughter, by Temim Fruchter
• Vertigo, by W.G. Sebald
• The Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald
• The Emigrants, by W.G. Sebald
• Near to the Wild Heart, by Clarice Lispector
• Journey by Moonlight, by Antal Szerb
• The Third Tower: Journeys in Italy, by Antal Szerb
• Four Seasons in Rome, by Anthony Doerr
• On Lighthouses, by Jazmina Barrera
• Such Fine Boys, by Patrick Modiano
• The Word is Murder, by Anthony Horowitz

The stats: I read 7 books by women and another by a nonbinary author, meaning two thirds of the books I read were by cis men. Not great. Seventeen of the books I read last year were in translation, which I think is a high proportion, even for me. The countries, apart from the U.S., from which I read books were: Brazil, El Salvador, France, Germany (maybe needs an asterisk because it's Sebald, but maybe it doesn't), Guatemala, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Rwanda, Spain (note: one of the three books I read was written in Catalan), the U.K., and Yemen. Only Yemen is a country from which I hadn't previously read a book.

The most surprising stat in here to me is that this list includes six rereads. Two of them were for my book club: Family Lexicon and Near to the Wild Heart. Two of them were different translations than the versions I had read previously: Journey by Moonlight and, again, Near to the Wild Heart. I found myself wanting to reread beloved books this year – I considered even more rereads than I completed. There's also an unusually high proportion of non-fiction (nearly all of it memoir) in here: six books in total (and I'm not even counting Sebald). Both these stats are extra notable because in 2023 I had zero rereads and zero works of nonfiction in my read list. 

And now we are at the part of the post where I declare my favorite book of the year. Sometimes there is a clear winner; not this time. Journey By Moonlight was an easy favorite when I read it in 2019. I still loved it when I read it last year, but surprisingly (or not), it wasn't a stand-out. If anything, Szerb's memoir The Third Tower (also a reread) hit harder this time around. Senselessness, too, felt more powerful on rereading. 

I feel I should limit my favorites to books I had not read previously, and if forced to choose (which I am, by my own authority), I can narrow it down to three. A Time of Gifts was an enchanting book that captured a moment in time so vividly, and Leigh Fermor himself is such a compelling storyteller. Reading this book was simultaneously a joyful experience, and heartbreaking for the lost world it exposes. I read three Sebald books, which I've always thought were a loose trilogy, consecutively (though out of order, it turned out), and while I loved them all, The Rings of Saturn was the standout among them. The wide-ranging stories it told, the history and observations Sebald makes over the course of this unusual book come together so unexpectedly into a magical whole. It's a book that defies explanation, and it's wonderful. Finally, Anthony Doerr's Four Seasons in Rome so perfectly and beautifully captures Rome, one of my favorite places in the world. It was especially rewarding to read it before, during, and just after I paid a visit to the city, but I've since passed my copy on to my father who's never been to Rome and he is also loving the book. (My intention there was to make him want to visit Rome; I think it's working.) I'll make a closing observation about all three of these books: Two of them are straight memoir and a case could be made to describe the third that way as well. All of them are about journeys and history. As someone who has mostly stuck strictly to fiction, this makes me wonder if what I'm looking for from books may be shifting. 

Journey by Moonlight (new translation), and The Third Tower, by Antal Szerb

I heard from a friend online that there was a new translation by — Peter V. Czipott — of Journey By Moonlight and I had to get it. It was a UK publisher, but conveniently I had a scheduled trip to Scotland and I was able to get it (though I did have to have it special ordered) from the wonderful Topping & Co. bookshop in Edinburgh.

I read the earlier Len Rix translation in 2019 and promptly declared Journey By Moonlight one of my all time favorite books. In the five years that transpired between my reading of the two translations, I can't remember things clearly enough to state that one is better than the other. What did happen in those intervening years is I visited Italy four additional times, including my first (and second) visit to Venice, my first visit to Siena, and return trips to Florence, Ravenna, and Rome (twice) — each of which plays a part in the book, and each of which I had visited once before (the former two more than 20 years ago). In other words, I was much more familiar with the territory of the book than the first time around. (Though I do still need to follow Mihály's path through Umbria, which I have mapped out thoroughly.) 

It was a real pleasure to revisit Journey by Moonlight, though it was much slower going this time. Sometimes I wonder what happened to my capacity for reading, and while I think it's partly due to spending too much time scrolling, I've also had a houseguest these last couple months who frequently talks to me in the mornings right when I might otherwise be reading. (Hell is other people.) I still identified so strongly with Mihály's struggle between the attractions of the bourgeois life that is expected of him and his belief that deep inside, in his true self, he is not meant for that life. I'm articulating this poorly, but I occasionally joke that I am the token normie among my friend group. My job and my home and my lifestyle feel in conflict with my inner self. Not all the time — only when I stop to think about it, or when I read something like Journey By Moonlight that brings it to the front of my mind.

The most striking thing for me on this reading of Journey By Moonlight was Szerb's description of Rome — a city I am much more familiar with now than I was when I read the book five years ago. He spends a good deal of time talking about the Etruscans and the museum devoted to them at Villa Giulia — a museum I visited on my 2022 trip to Rome. I now think it's quite likely that it was on my to-see list because of Szerb, but if it that's true, I had forgotten. Mihály also visits the non-Catholic cemetery, a place I tried to go on my first visit to Rome (it was closed due to snow), but which I have now visited several times and count as one of my favorite places in the city. Szerb's accounts of Rome ring so true to my own experiences of visiting the city 90 years later. Of course, 90 years is no time at all in the history of Rome.

On finishing Journey By Moonlight, I decided to go right into a reread of Szerb's travel memoir, The Third Tower. Once again, it had me in tears on the second page, but it was so great to read it with Journey By Moonlight fresh in my mind. Reading The Third Tower, I I feel such a strong connection with Szerb. Like me, he was obsessed with San Vitale as a teenager (who the hell is obsessed with San Vitale as a teenager?!). On my first visit to Italy, in 2001, Ravenna was the only place that was a must-visit for me. (I found Italy disappointing on the whole on that visit and it took me 14 years to return.) I revisited Ravenna and San Vitale about a year ago, and when I read Szerb's chapters on the city and the mosaics they described perfectly my own feelings. There's a chapter of The Third Tower I had forgotten, in which Szerb talks about his own internal conflict that is parallel to Mihály's, called "The Confession of the Bourgeios." He puts it more plainly in his memoir than in the novel. He rebels against it, but he doesn't feel at home without the bourgeois comforts which he is accustomed to — and yet, at the same time, he is not really at home in the bourgeois world either. 

I will be in Rome in a few days.  This time, I'll be staying near Trastevere, a neighborhood that features prominently in Journey By Moonlight, and where I have not spent a lot of time on my previous visits to the city. I'm looking forward to seeing it with Szerb's words at the front of my mind.

Oliver VII, by Antal Szerb

I read Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight in 2019 and declared it my favorite book I read that year. With it still very much on my mind early in the pandemic, I ordered a bunch of his other books and I read two of them in 2020. That left me with two novels, a book of short stories, and a book of essays yet to read. Last week, when I decided to start on one of the novels, I realized I had been saving them. Now, having finished Oliver VII, Szerb's last novel, I have only his first left, plus the essays and stories. Plus I'm sure I'll return to Journey by Moonlight and probably to The Third Tower too. Like both of those books (the first a novel, the second a memoir), Oliver VII takes place mainly in Italy – clearly Szerb had an affection for the country, and for Venice in particular. It was published in 1942, while war was well underway throughout Europe. The book takes place before the war when, as the reader is reminded several times by the otherwise distant third person narrator, things were quite different. 

The titular Oliver VII is the young king of a fictional country whose entire economy is based on sardines and wine (the flag, which I would love to see, is two gold sardines on a silver ground). Bored and wishing to escape his duties, while also saving his country from being sold to a financier who markets innovations*, he stages a coup and escapes to Venice, where he falls in with a group of swindlers. Through a series of unexpected events, Oliver ends up impersonating himself in what is intended to be a quick money-making scam, but turns into something else entirely. 

I find Szerb's story so heartbreaking, and the fact that his writing is so lively and funny somehow makes it more heartbreaking still. When I first opened Oliver VII and saw the full page author photo facing the title page, I was gripped with sadness. I said something similar when I wrote about The Queen's Necklace, but I wonder how it could be that Szerb spent the war years writing – and not just writing, but writing this. His world was ending, and I wish I could know what he was thinking.

* The day I started Oliver VII was also the day this much ridiculed twitter thread on Web3 was posted and of course I saw parallels. Szerb's financier would certainly be a crypto bro in 2022.

2020 in Books

If quarantine was good for anything, it was good for my reading habits; particularly at the beginning. I slacked off a little in the fall, but between March and August I was averaging more than five books a month. (In March alone I read eight.) And, as is my habit, I read a bunch of books right at the end of the year: I finished seven books in December. So, I read a record number of books in 2020: 57; but Goodreads has kept me humble by informing me that I'm still a bit more than 200 pages short of my 2016 record, when I read 17,240 pages (in just 51 books). 

The books I read last year were:

• Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, by Javier Marías
• Little Fires Everywhere, by Celest Ng
• North and South, by Elizabeth Gaskell
• Butchers Crossing, by John Williams
• Night Train to Lisbon, by Pascal Mercier
• Severance, by Ling Ma
• Conversations with Friends, by Sally Rooney
• Outline, by Rachel Cusk
• Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri
• Circe, by Madeline Miller
• Bruno, Chief of Police, by Martin Walker
• Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages, by Manuel Puig
• Devil on the Cross, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
• The Underdogs, by Mariano Azuela
• Transit, by Rachel Cusk
• Kudos, by Rachel Cusk
• Chess Story, by Stefan Zweig
• The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• The Sea, by John Banville
• Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman
• The Conservationist, by Nadine Gordimer
• The Dark Child, by Camara Laye
• This Is How it Always Is, by Laurie Frankel
• Celestial Bodies, by Jokha Alharthi
• The Days of Abandonment, by Elena Ferrante
• The Hollow of Fear, by Sherry Thomas
• The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead
• The Sellout, by Paul Beatty
• Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, by Ishmael Reed
• There There, by Tommy Orange
• Breath, Eyes, Memory, by Edwidge Danticat
• Party of Two, by Jasmine Guillory
• Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, by James Baldwin
• Behold the Dreamers, by Imbolo Mbue
• Monastery, by Eduardo Halfon
• The Third Tower: Journeys in Italy, by Antal Szerb
• Romance in Marseille, by Claude McKay
• Emma, by Jane Austen (re-read)
• The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas
• Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata
• The Intuitionist, by Colson Whitehead
• Grove: A Field Novel, by Esther Kinsky
• How to Travel without Seeing: Dispatches from the New Latin America, by Andrés Neuman
• Milkman, by Anna Burns
• Disoriental, by Négar Djavadi
• Death and the Dervish, by Meša Selimović
• Luster, by Raven Leilani
• The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel
• Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan
• The Last Policeman, by Ben H. Winters
• Love, by Elizabeth von Arnim
• The Constant Gardener, by John le Carré
• On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong
• The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain
• Roseanna, by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
• Bosnian Chronicle, by Ivo Andrić
• The Queen's Necklace, by Antal Szerb

In fun stats: I read books from 26 different countries last year, including six countries I had not read previously (Cameroon, Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Northern Ireland, and Oman). I read 28 books authored (or co-authored, in the case of Maj Sjöwall) by women, which puts me at just under half. This has got to be a personal record. I also tried to read more Black writers last year, and I ended up reading 15 books by Black authors (if you accept Alexandre Dumas as one). As I did the prior year, I read four works of non-fiction last year and really enjoyed them all. Also, as in the prior year, most of them fall into in the memoir/travel journal genre, so maybe this is just a sub-genre I like. (The Camara Laye is a memoir, the Andrés Neuman and Szerb's The Third Tower are travel journals; Szerb's The Queen's Necklace would be the one novelty here genre-wise.)

I refuse to choose a single favorite, so I will give you two:

Meša Selimović's Death and the Dervish is the highest rated book on Goodreads that I read in 2020, and with good reason! (Interestingly, in looking back at my stats from 2016, which was the year I read Selimović's The Fortress, I found that was the highest rated book on Goodreads I read in that year.) It's a dense, slow book and (hardly a spoiler at all) kind of a downer. But it was filled with beauty. I marked it up like I never do. I pulled it out yesterday to take a picture for a visual year-end review and there were scraps of paper sticking up all through it to indicate passages I know I'll want to go back to. Since finishing it, I've pulled it out again and again (yes, in part this was because I decided to read another Bosnian tome -- Ivo Andrić's Bosnian Chronicle) to remind myself of little pieces.

My other favorite book from last year was Camara Laye's The Dark Child. As I wrote at the time, I've had this book since 1995, when it was on the syllabus for an African Religion class I took at Oberlin College. I was always just getting by academically in my first attempt at college (I spent 3 semesters at Oberlin before dropping out) and never kept up with my reading. Another book we were assigned for that class that I didn't read at the time was Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Weep Not, Child. I read that book a couple months later in 1996 when I was studying in Zimbabwe and found a copy at the library and I loved it so much. Maybe that's why I kept holding on to The Dark Child. I knew only the roughest outline: that it was a memoir of a childhood in Guinea during French colonial rule. I think what was keeping me from this book for all those years was an assumption that, knowing approximately the material it covered, it couldn't be a happy book. But actually it is. The bulk of the book takes place during Laye's childhood in a remote village and it gives a glimpse of life untouched by colonialism (clearly it was not untouched, but you get a sense of what that could have been). After his rural childhood, Laye moved to Conakry to continue his education and then to France for university. The book ends on his flight to France.

I'll close with some other notable mentions: I read all three books in Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy and they blew my mind. I felt like I was thinking in Cusk's voice while reading them. They affected how I observed my life. I definitely want to go back to them. With Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone I felt I was filling a last gap in my reading of Baldwin and I was so glad I picked it up; it couldn't have been more timely. Esther Kinsky's Grove was a slow, meditative, gorgeous book about Italy that got me writing. Eduardo Halfon's Monastery got me thinking about the type of writing I'd like to do (i.e., his type of writing; I love it). The Javier Marías did NOT disappoint; this might even be the perfect example of his style. My love for Antal Szerb has only grown. 

The Queen's Necklace, by Antal Szerb

Usually I use a picture I take myself of the books I read; it's never as clean, but it shows the particular edition as well as any imperfections. But for this post I'm using a picture of the lovely edition of The Queen's Necklace that I thought I was getting when I ordered it. Instead, the one I have has a plain blue cover with a white border. It's not that bad, honestly, but I love the cover with the necklace art on it.

I probably said this when I wrote about The Third Tower, but I ordered three Antal Szerb books from the UK early on in quarantine after deciding the odds of me coming across any of his books besides Journey by Moonlight by chance were extremely low. Now I'm asking myself why I didn't just order all his books that are available in English. (The third book I ordered was Oliver VII and I believe there are just two others out there.) Yesterday, as I was reading The Queen's Necklace, I found myself thinking I should learn Hungarian so I could read more of his writing, and also just more about him: there's not a lot of information out there in English. Even more than that, I felt as I was reading that there was maybe something lost in the translation, or something added. The Queen's Necklace is non-fiction. Szerb (or his translator, though I think we can assume it's a literal translation) defines the genre as "real history." It's an account of the scandal surrounding the theft of an extremely valuable necklace that two Parisian jewelers designed with the hope that Marie Antoinette would buy it. This is, apparently, a well known story and the events in the book are in retrospect considered among the turning points in the lead up to the French Revolution, but it was totally new to me. I know a lot more about what happened after the French Revolution than what happened before it. The Queen's Necklace doesn't pretend to be a straight history; Szerb's voice is strong throughout. Midway through the book, he inserts a 50+ page "Intermezzo" where he goes off on tangents about the Swedish revolution, The Marriage of Figaro, the contemporary translation of Hamlet into French (which took many liberties with the story), the invention of the hot air balloon, among other topics. 

Szerb is clearly extremely well read on his topic, and The Queen's Necklace seems to exist in conversation with his source material, in particular his contemporary Stefan Zweig's biography of Marie Antoinette (subtitle: The Portrait of an Average Woman); but also the memoir of Mme Campan, Marie Antoinette's femme du chambre, for whom Szerb seems to have a particular affection; and Franz Funck-Brentano, whose L'affaire du collier Szerb credits for the raw material for the story, though he disagrees loudly with Funck-Brentano's interpretation of the events; and Goethe, who wrote a play about the events described in the book. And reading it, one is never let to forget for long that he was writing for a Hungarian audience. There are numerous asides making comparisons to Hungarian history and any connection to Hungary (the Count Esterhazy, who was part of Marie Antoinette's circle; the Hungarian Jesuit father György Alajos Szerdahely, who wrote a poem about the events in the book) is pointed out. I'll also add that this book gave me an appreciation for the Rococo that I'd never before considered.

Reading this, with Szerb's voice so present, alive, and funny in the text, it's really hard to wrap my head around the fact that he wrote this well into World War II, at a time when, as an ethnic Jew, he was already barred from travel and from his line of work. One pictures him holed up in a library surrounded by books about France of 150 years ago, as a distraction perhaps from the world outside, though he makes connections to the present day again and again. I can't help but think also of Walter Benjamin, who didn't leave France when he could have, but stayed behind to continue his own research into French history, though Benjamin was already dead when Szerb was at work on The Queens Necklace. Stefan Zweig, too, was dead by the time The Queen's Necklace was published. Zweig did manage to get out of Europe, but he and his wife took their own lives in exile in Brazil in 1942. Szerb didn't survive the war either. A year after the publication of The Queen's Necklace he was murdered in a concentration camp. That imminent future feels impossible while you're reading the book, making the truth of it all the more painful. 

The Third Tower: Journeys in Italy, by Antal Szerb

Have you ever read just one book by an author and felt prepared to claim that author among your favorites? I wrote about it rather poorly, but that was how I felt after reading Antal Szerb's Journey By Moonlight. That book, which I read just about a year ago, went right to my heart, my mind, my inside. After reading it I started searching out Szerb's other works in a passive way; when I found myself in a bookshop, I'd usually remember to see if they had anything. They never did. Journey By Moonlight is his most well known work by a long shot. I'm not even sure there is a U.S. publisher for his other works. Early on in quarantine, remembering my luck ordering used books from the UK in the fall, I thought what the hell, and ordered 3 of his books in these pretty Pushkin Press editions.* 

I'm not sure what precisely drove me to pull out The Third Tower: Journeys in Italy this morning. I certainly didn't expect I would finish it by this evening (though it is a small book: just 105 pages and smaller than standard trade paperback size). The book is an account, told in small, episodic observations, of a trip Szerb made to Italy in August of 1936. The Spanish Civil War hangs in the background (in the first chapter, Szerb tells us he wanted to go to Spain but settled on Italy due to current events, and the situation in Spain pops up here and there). Fascism in Italy is more in the foreground; he bears witness to it in his accounts of the newspapers he reads, the people he sees on trains and along his travels. The tensions elsewhere in Europe are palpable. In Venice, he notes that hotels where French is spoken are expensive, while those where German is spoken are cheap. While I know something of the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, I don't have a great sense of Hungarian history or culture specifically. It's hard for me to wrap my head around what a vacation in Italy would be like for a Hungarian of Jewish heritage in 1936, even as I was reading an account of just that. (He does touch on the reaction he receives when he tells people he's from Hungary, which seems to be a mild fascination.) Szerb's passing references to Hungarian writers before him whose names meant nothing to me left me feeling rather ignorant. (Besides Szerb, the only Hungarian writer I've read is Sandor Marai and Imre Kertész is the only other I can name off the top of my head.)

Tracing parts of the route covered in Journey by Moonlight, in 1936 Szerb visited Venice, Vicenza, Lake Garda, Bologna, Ravenna, San Marino, Ferrara, and Trieste. Venice gets the most attention, and several of the other cities get just one short chapter. There are odd chapters on other topics too, on the heat, on the Fascist populous, on traveling alone. Unsurprisingly, that last chapter - called Solitude - struck a chord with me. 

When I started The Third Tower this morning, I tweeted, "I read the first two pages of this book and I already know I'm about to have my heart broken" with the photo at right. This journal turned out indeed to be an account of Szerb's farewell visit to Italy. War arrived in earnest not long after this. Szerb was put in a concentration camp in 1944 and was killed there in 1945. He was not even as old as I am now. 

*While you're there, I encourage you to peruse the author pictures on the Pushkin Press authors page, which I find unaccountably amusing. I was surprised to stumble across a photo of the previous author I read, Eduardo Halfon, while I was scrolling down to Szerb.