Best of 2024: Books

I remember very clearly when I started reading more non-fiction than fiction. It was in 2017, shortly after Trump’s inauguration. I started with Bruce Catton’s trilogy of books on the Civil War to better understand how and why a country could turn against itself. Sure, I still read fiction now and then, but for the most part I found it more practical to read about history and sociology.

That trend has held for most of the past seven years. However, I was really surprised when putting this list together that the majority of titles are fiction. My top three are all non-fiction, but the other seven are fiction. I’d like to think that’s because, as a whole, this year was a little more calm. I was feeling optimistic about Harris’ chances of winning the election and finally putting an end to the Trump nightmare.

Guess I shouldn’t have lowered my guard.

10. Happiness Falls by Angie Kim

Another reason why I stopped reading as much fiction is because I’m a fiction snob. Since I wrote fiction for a very long time, I’m extremely particular about the type of fiction I read. On top of that, I scrutinize fiction in a way that I don’t when it comes to non-fiction — namely, the craft of it.

Happiness Falls is the story of a Korean-American family whose father unexpectedly disappears. Is he dead? Has he run away? These are the main questions that drive the narrative, which is told from the point of a view of a recent college graduate, Mia. Mia’s younger brother Eugene was with their father the morning of his disappearance, but he has a disability that prevents him from verbally communicating with others.

I’ll be honest, the book really hooked me in. It’s long — almost 400 pages — but I tore through it. So in that regard it’s an easy recommendation. However, the way the story is structured annoyed me a bit. See, Kim chose to tell the story in the past tense, meaning where Mia is now, as she narrates the story, is enough in the future where she knows everything that eventually transpires. We know this from the many instances of lines like: “It was only later that we realized…” or “If only we knew then what we know now….” And, in fact, when you reach the end (no spoilers!) you find out more information about the narrative device that makes me question why Mia even had to make those ominous disclaimers in the first place. (Obviously, I know why — because Kim is writing a mystery novel and she wants you to get invested in the story.)

Anyway, it’s one of those things that I doubt many people would notice or think about at all, but as a former fiction writer (who I believe was once told: “Why withhold information from your reader?”), it rubbed me the wrong way. Still, very gripping and engrossing!

9. A Cage Went in Search of a Bird by Various Authors

Short story collections are always a bit of a grab bag, let alone short story anthologies, where each story is written by a different author. On top of that, this anthology has a theme: Ten Kafkaesque Stories.

As with any collection of short stories, YMMV. There were only two that I didn't care for, while I found the other eight anywhere from fine to really great. For my money, the authors who best understood the assignment were Elif Batuman, Leone Ross, and Charlie Kaufman.

Batuman’s story takes the absurdity of finding a co-op apartment to new heights (or lows???), Ross’ story follows a woman who is simply trying to find a cause for her frequent headaches, and Kaufman’s story is as funny, weird, and meta as you’d expect from his movies. The prose reminded me a lot of his debut novel, Antkind, but in a much more condensed form. So if you like this ~30 page story, then I highly recommend you check out his novel.

8. Erasure by Percival Everett

We were lucky enough to see Percival Everett in Charlottesville earlier this year as part of the Virginia Festival of the Book when he was promoting James. This was a couple months after we had seen American Fiction (my favorite movie of the year), which is adapted from Erasure. Those two events inspired me to read the book, my first Everett.

I’m really impressed! There are some extremely beautiful moments of prose, and it’s pretty funny throughout. That said, there are some small and big differences between the book and the movie — one of the main ones being that My Pafology, the book Monk Ellison writes in frustration, is presented in Erasure as an entire novella. In the movie you really only see one scene of My Pafology, which I think is a better choice, as the novella can feel a bit like a one-note joke after a while.

Again, I really enjoyed the novel, but I think what Cord Jefferson did with the source material is incredible. While I like the book, I love the screenplay. Still, if you enjoyed the movie as much as I did, then I definitely recommend you check out the book.

7. Spadework for a Palace by László Krasznahorkai

Hungarian author (and frequent Béla Tar collaborator) László Krasznahorkai is known for writing books that are basically one long sentence. Spadework is a novella that’s a little over 100 pages, and even that was a little exhausting given the style. However, I ultimately give Krasznahorkai a pass because the story and the narrator’s circumstances warrant the frenetic, one-long-sentence choice. I’m very curious to read more by him, though, since I feel like all of his narrators/characters can’t be in the same situation.

Spadework is narrated by herman melvill, who becomes rather obsessed with the actual Herman Melville — to the point that he retraces Melville’s steps through Manhattan going from Melville’s home to his place of work. Along the way our narrator melvill also becomes obsessed with a Melville biographer and an architect — both real-life figures as well! — and melvill finds really interesting convergences between and among the three men.

If you’re not into more experimental fiction then it’s probably best to avoid this one, but if you’re willing to read something you’ve likely never read before, then I say give it a chance. It’s short enough to knock out in a day or two.

6. Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

I wanted to read this novel before watching the Hulu limited series adaptation. Turns out that I probably didn’t need to do that since the book and the TV show are wildly different, while sticking to the same basic story: Willis Wu is a Chinese-American actor who wants to be Kung Fu Guy — what he sees as the epitome of success when it comes to roles for East Asian actors. Instead, he’s only Generic Asian Guy or other similar background roles.

The book and the show use this idea of roles in a TV show as a metaphor for being seen in real life: The stars of the show are a white woman and a Black man, two cops in a Law & Order: SVU-esque series called Black and White. It’s a clever device, although I sometimes got caught up in the logic of Willis’ world itself — is everything part of the show? Or is this actually real life presented through the metaphor of a TV show? It’s often hard to tell, and the line is — I think purposefully — blurry.

That said, the big climactic scene at the end of the book really impressed me. As of today we haven’t finished the TV show, but given how different the two are, I’m wondering if the show will go in an entirely new direction.

5. You Glow in the Dark by Liliana Colanzi

This short collection of short stories (most of which are broken up into very short sections) was a very pleasant surprise. I normally go to bed after Kaitlin, but one night I found myself getting into bed before her. She was wrapping up some work and would be going to sleep soon, so I pulled You Glow in the Dark from one of my many to-read stacks and started reading. I was hooked from the beginning.

Colanzi's voice and style is very exhilarating, even if I didn't always understand everything that was happening. Most stories end without any clear resolution, but given their length that wasn't ever really possible. Instead, each story conveys a certain feeling or builds a particular world, and the story itself is just a vessel to get you to experience those feelings or worlds.

The first story, "The Cave," is probably my favorite. If you like what's going on in that story then you will likely enjoy the rest.

4. Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte

The third — and last — short story collection on this list. The stories are all loosely connected by characters who weave in and out of one another’s lives, and the book gets progressively more meta the further into it you go, which is also pretty fun.

This was perhaps the most shocking work of fiction I read all year, for a few reasons. One, because the stories themselves are often rather lurid. Many of the characters are sexually frustrated, and we end up hearing a good deal about their disappointing/non-existent sex lives, or — in the case of one story — very in-depth sexual fantasies. So, fair warning: If you’re a prude, this book is not for you.

Another shocking aspect: Tulathimutte is actually a little older than me. This surprised me because so many of the characters feel Very Online, in a way that I tend to associate with younger folks. The characters are also all pretty insufferable people, although most of this is done on purpose (I hope?). Take, for example, the first story, called “The Feminist,” which is a very dark satire about a cis white man who professes to be a feminist but who is, in fact, extremely misogynistic. It’s a great story in my opinion, but Tulathimutte doesn’t make the satire easy to consume. It doesn’t surprise me that upon its publication, some feminists decried the story, while anti-feminists praised it. (The latter group being like conservatives who didn’t realize Stephen Colbert was putting on a character when he hosted The Colbert Report.)

Anyway, what really sold me on this book is how Tulathimutte gets inside these character’s heads. There are certain lines — even in “The Feminist” — that made me feel like Tulathimutte was putting words to the deep, complex feeling of being a person.

Lastly, I started reading Rejection before Interior Chinatown but ended up finishing it after Interior Chinatown. It was a really interesting book to have sandwiched around Interior Chinatown, since returning to Rejection made me realize how Charles Yu wrote a book critical of society but that was written in a way that made it safe for a white audience to accept. Tulathimutte, on the other hand, takes the kiddie gloves off and isn’t interested in making things comfortable for a white audience — a choice that I applaud him for.

3. Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon

This huge work of non-fiction by the brilliant Andrew Solomon was the main book I read out loud to Kaitlin this year. Each chapter is a seamless combination of research and interviews with parents and their children afflicted by a unique condition: deafness, dwarfism, transgenderism, or criminality, to name a few. Solomon gets to know these families very well, and the amount of humanism on display here is staggering.

This is a fantastic book, and Solomon is a gifted writer. That’s why it saddens me to say that we didn’t actually finish this book. See, I always had this idea in my head that I wanted to read this book before starting a family. And for a lot of this year Kaitlin and I worked with a couple’s counselor to overcome my fears and anxieties about becoming a parent. But then the election happened, and now I’m in a place where I feel very pessimistic about bringing children into the world. We’ll take it day by day and see how things go, but I think after the election we both were too disheartened to finish the book, even though we’re only about 20 pages from the end.

2. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder

This short book was the exact thing I needed to read after the election. Part history lesson, part handbook on resisting fascism, it’s concise and full of great ideas. Each “lesson” opens with a few strategies for resistance, then the lesson itself uses historical context — often from European countries during World War II — to flesh out those ideas. It has helped give me hope and a sense of control during a time when I feel very little of both.

1. Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky

I think Robert Saposkly is one of the smartest people on the planet. His 2017 book Behave is one of my favorite books of all time. In that book he kind of paints himself into a corner where he has to admit that we might not actually have free will. He voices his own discomfort about this conclusion, but he has other things to focus on. Determined, then, is his full-on deep dive into that uncomfortable world of determinism.

I’m an atheist, so free will has been an important part of my belief system. In the absence of a god, I’d like to believe that I have made my own choices and that the person that I am today is a result of conscious choices on my part. Sapolsky would beg to differ.

Now, it’s important to point out that determinism is not the same thing as destined. Sapolsky isn’t saying that the future is predictable or set in stone. Instead, the choices we make and the people we end up becoming are all influenced by factors out of our conscious control. This mostly comes down to neurobiology shaped by our environment. This isn’t to say that the nurture part of nature-vs-nurture doesn’t matter all, because it absolutely does. However, nurture does not mean that you have actually chosen to be the way that you are, it’s just how you ended up.

The first half of the book provides a pretty strong argument for determinism, and the second half goes into what our world would look like if we all accepted that there’s no such thing as free will. (One of the biggest hurdles? Our criminal justice system.)

I’ve got to say: He’s convinced me. However, while I can accept that I don’t have free will, I’m still working on accepting that’s true for other people — especially people who voted for Trump. Determined, like Behave, has made me completely change how I view the world.