To close out 2024, here are ten books I’ve read since January and a paragraph on each. These are mostly spoiler-free, but read on at your own risk. One update from last year is that if a book appears on the New York Times’s 100 best books of the 21st century (published this summer, even though we’re barely 25 years into the new millennium), I will give some meta-commentary on the Times’s assessment.
Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
A friend recommended this book to me a while ago, and this year I finally got around to it. It’s ranked 15 on the Times list, which seems high until you look at some of the other titles that made the cut. (File that under “foreshadowing.”) That’s not to say it’s a bad book. As historical fiction, it’s very good. The reader learns a great deal about Korea and Japan, and the multigenerational arc is satisfying and grounded in plausibility. One thing that particularly struck me was the parallel, in places, between progressive Japanese treatment of Japanese-Koreans in an interpersonal context and woke white (or non-black) American attitudes towards black Americans. Does this reflect Japanese importation of American ideas around race? Or is it that Harlem-based Min Jin Lee is surely steeped in those ideas? In any event, good book, would recommend. The prose is clean.
Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov
I read Lolita many years ago and was blown away. Every time I’ve gone back to Nabokov, however, I’ve been underwhelmed. (The list is: Ada, Pale Fire, and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.) He’s an extraordinarily talented prose stylist—if anyone can hold a candle to his six-word sentences, I have yet to encounter them—and a sharp wit, and along with Roth, Joyce, and a few others, he’s on the shortlist of English language novelists who missed out on a Nobel through chance more than desert. Still, his secondary characters often struggle to break free from the caricatures they grow out of, and this is as true of Pnin as of his other works. A quick read, and fun, but nothing special.
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
It’s a point of minor embarrassment that I had read no Beckett before this year, given how much influence he wields in my approach to life. (Don’t ask what I mean.) Godot was fun and extremely well-constructed, exactly what the hype and criticism had led me to expect. I found a torn paperback copy lying on the sidewalk, which would be a perfect metaphor for something if not for Beckett’s stridently anti-metaphorical approach, and read through it over the course of two or three days. Strong recommend.
Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor
Borrowed from friends. Returned a month later. Short read, well-written at the level of the paragraph. The characters are interesting, and they move with swerving purpose through an alluringly bleak semi-urban American landscape until they decide, more or less, that the bleakness is not an illusion and they might as well embrace it. I don’t regret the time I spent on this book, but I have no plans to revisit it.
Hard to Be a God, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Russian literature befuddles me. Never having set foot in Slavic territory, I lack the context to appreciate its social commentary, and translation into English is often unkind to the prose. But even when I feel lost, I am usually entertained. Whatever commentary lurks under the surface of this sci-fi novel—or above its surface—it’s a fun read in its own right. I haven’t read real sci-fi in a long time, and reading this made me think I should go back to it more.
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
I am told my take on this whale of a seminal book (get it?) is unusual, which surprises me. Melville’s magnum opus is—heavy sigh—fine. It’s not amazing, and it’s certainly not bad, but I struggle to see how anyone who’s read it could feel more strongly. The prose is decent. (A friend vociferously disagreed.) The plot is very secondary. (A different friend: But quite good, no?) The characters, I concede, are excellent, and as an inveterate nerd and neurotically beset adventurer, I feel a strong kinship with Ishmael. The reading experience went something like this: fun fun fun fun, dragging on, kinda boring, oh my god SO MANY eighteenth century whale facts that are definitely incorrect, hey this is fun again, fun fun fun, I see the ending coming, hurry up and end, aaaaand done. An older gentleman on the bus spied my copy and told me it took three reads before he fully “got it,” with the implication that I should come back in a couple years. For me, I think, once was enough.
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
Faulkner didn’t make it to my bookshelf until this year, but he’s always been one of my dad’s favorites. Now I see why. The Sound and the Fury might be the best book I’ve ever read. Is there a setting more literary than the American South? A stubborn, prideful culture that insists on looking to its brutal past with fond regret while the legacy of that brutality reverberates through the derelict present—what fertile ground for story! Faulkner knows, moreover, that good plot requires bad people, or at least flawed people, and watching his characters bludgeon themselves against their flaws is a moving experience. Read this book! It’s not an easy read, but my god is it worth it.
Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
Not quite as good as The Sound and the Fury. Still very good. Powerfully moving characters, mystery, and cutting social commentary—good choice, I say to the Nobel committee. The book drags on in places as it re-tells events from new perspectives, and some of the disquisitions cross the border into indulgence, but overall a fantastic novel by a highly talented author. And without those disquisitions, perhaps we wouldn’t get bangers like this: “He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence.” To hell with the confederate nostalgists.
The Story of a New Name, Elena Ferrante
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena Ferrante
Longtime Flotsam and Jetsam readers will remember my disappointment last year, when I reviewed My Brilliant Friend. I stand by everything I said, and it applies to the sequels as well. Where, Ms. Ferrante, is the plot? Where are the character arcs? Slice of life stuff does not merit four full books! The Times list gives top spot to My Brilliant Friend, which is ludicrous: other books much lower ranked (Never Let Me Go (#9), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (#11), Pachinko (#15), The Line of Beauty (#32), Middlesex (#59)) are eons better. (Not The Road (#13), though.) I wanted to understand what I was missing, so I asked a couple women in my family what they thought, assuming they would have a positive assessment. Nope! They agreed that Ms. Ferrante’s strategy of detailing her protagonist’s every thought is tiresome and leaves scant room for subtlety. One of them also opined (this was a revelation to me, a man) that both Lila and Lenu are classic mean girls.
I complain too much, perhaps. I don’t hate these books, only that they’ve drawn so much acclaim. I care about the characters and find the setting new and interesting. The fourth and final entry in the series is up next; I plan to start tomorrow, with my hopes appropriately measured. Maybe Ms. Ferrante will stick the landing.