My 2024 books of the year

 

And the books keep piling up ... some of the books I haven't even started yet

2024 has been a good year for books. I’ve written separately about my two favourites, The Voices of Morebath, by Eamon Duffy, and Witold Rybczynski’s Home: a Short History of an Idea. Both these books continue to resonate several months after I finished them, the first helping to answer the question “What is religious belief and how was it manifested in the common people in pre-reformation England?”, and the second the equally fundamental question, “What does home mean now, and when did it start having the present-day associations we have with the term?”

More light-heartedly, the discovery of the year was E F Benson’s Mapp and Lucia (1931), a truly comic novel that had me in stitches. Perhaps it’s easier to write social satire about a distant generation to our own, but it certainly seems difficult for comic novelists to achieve with the present day (at least, if Nina Stibbe’s Reasons to be Cheerful and Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia are typical). Benson is mercifully free of any self-importance, and his premise of elderly society women attempting to gain or maintain top social status in a provincial town is a perfect one: this is a novel of triviality, but written with such verve, and with such awareness of conversational put-downs, that you begin to anticipate the next social catastrophe. Elizabeth Mapp fails to respond to Lucia’s application for the annual art show, and whole chapters are devoted to the build-up, and consequence, of such a faux pas. It sounds insignificant, but in the hands of a skilled writer like Benson, who reminds me of Evelyn Waugh at his most satirical, it  has a glorious verve to it. 

I read that Miranda July’s All Fours, a novel that appeared on several critics’ books of the year, has comic elements, but for me any comedy was outweighed by the narrator’s monstrous egotism. Except, perhaps, for the joke that by the end of the novel, she hadn’t even reached the menopause she so dreaded. 

In complete contrast, Fin de Siècle Vienna, a series of essays by Carl Schorske, was heavy going (no reading aloud!) but rewarding. I bought it to accompany a trip to Vienna during the summer, and it added a whole dimension. I am no expert in the complicated emergence and fortunes of Austria-Hungary during the 19th- and early 20th centuries, and I needed to create my own notes of terms, people and events, to make sense of it, but it was worth the effort. Schorske has the knack of taking two historical figures, such as the writers Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal, and finding remarkable similarities and differences between them, such that these contrast build up an impression of the society and politics of the period. The crucial comparison is the essay on the Ringstrasse, the famous circular road around the historic centre of Vienna, and two of the urban designers involved in its construction, Camillo Sitte and Otto Wagner, the former a traditionalist, the latter a modernist. Similarly, Schorske’s chapter on the early years of the state of Austria finds unlikely parallels between three contemporaries, Georg von Schönerer, Karl Lueger, and the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, as he charts the tragic decline of democratic institutions and thinking during the early 20th century. One of the most impressive tools Schorske uses is the apposite quotation. Quotes appear in one location, then are recalled in a different context where they become hauntingly significant. Thus, Hofmannsthal: “Politics is magic. He who knows how to summon the forces from the deep, him they will follow.”; or Freud’s “If I cannot bend the higher powers, I shall stir up hell” (the epigraph to his The Interpretation of Dreams, a quotation from Virgil; Virgil was referring to the River Acheron). A haunting book, Fin de Siècle Vienna depicts the steady descent of a nation to some of the most shocking events of the 20th century.

Of course, all my efforts at reading were dwarfed by Jane’s completion of A la recherche, by Proust, all seven volumes and 1.5 million words of it (not all in 2024, I hasten to add). I’ll leave to her the task of formulating a critique, and I look forward to it.  

The Future of Dinosaurs (David Hone), an interesting overview of the prehistoric animals, by an academic palaeontologist, was enjoyable, but read like a research proposal (“If only we had more specimens, more evidence”) rather than an attempt to tell us what we do know. Nonetheless, it contained some interesting details, when the author managed to get over his excessive qualification of results. Some dinosaurs had lips, but no ability to move them. We have more specimens of Anchiornis (a feathered troodontid) than any other dinosaur, but that doesn’t stop the world writing about Tyrannosaurus, with (according to the author) only 12 good complete specimens found, which means that a lot of what is written is guesswork.  

In summary, I’ve learned during 2024: something about dinosaurs, a lot about Austria-Hungary, the English Reformation, even something about the back-stabbing that takes place in a small English coastal town. But I can’t say I’ve learned much more about the menopause.