Best Books of 2024

2024 started off pretty well in terms of what I was reading but then I found quite a few books that didn't live up to the hype, including Koestler's Darkness at Noon.*

Top books for 2024:

Lucia Berlin A Manual for Cleaning Women
Tim O'Brien America Fantastica
Dawn Powell The Golden Spur

These two are just on the cusp, but I didn't really care for the way they ended:

Salman Rushdie Fury
Joy Williams The Quick and the Dead

Here are a baker's dozen of other novels that I found somewhat interesting and/or enjoyable throughout the year:

I.B. Singer Scum
Eric DuPont Songs for the Cold of Heart 
John Steinbeck East of Eden 
James Baldwin Go Tell It On the Mountain
Edna O'Brien August is a Wicked Month
Mary McCarthy The Group
Naguib Mahfouz Fountain and Tomb
Margaret Drabble The Ice Age
Camilo José Cela The Hive (perhaps a bit unfair to place it here as this was a second reading, though the first time reading the uncut version of the text)
Rebecca Rosenbaum These Days Are Numbered (more of a Facebook scroll/journal than a novel)
William Kennedy Ironweed
Kathryn Ma The Chinese Groove/Gish Jen Typical American (these two are almost the same novel!  I liked The Chinese Groove better)

The best book re-read was Barbara Pym's Excellent Women.

However, I also enjoyed going through Boccaccio's Decameron for a second time at least most of the time.  Some of the stories are very amusing, though if I recall it ends with Patient Griselda, and this is a tale I don't care for at all (nor does Margaret Atwood for that matter...).

I'm going to start off 2025 with Rulfo's Pedro Páramo after all, as I was able to dig it out of a box in the basement without too much trouble.  I'm also going to be alternating the 7 books of Mutis's Maqrol with short stories, wrapping up Munro's Runaway and then turning to Joy Williams's Taking Care.  

* I actually just wrapped up Yasmin Zaher's The Coin, and I did not like this at all, much like Han Kang's The Vegetarian, which was grossly overhyped and made for an extremely unpleasant read.  In both cases, they are at least were short novels.  In a general sort of way, I am glad to run across an immigrant novel that takes chances and shows the main character not as sort of a secular saint, but a fairly pathetic, often petty person, who in this case suffers some weird psychic meltdown generally reserved for WASPS.  To be completely fair, this passage near the end is solid:

I guess it {the button} had found its way into the locked park, into the roots of the bush, and then back to me. That’s what it was all about. It was karma. It was spiritual, but also physical. Whatever you put out there in the world, it came back to you. It was a closed system, a reinforced planet. Garbage circulated, the same people kept showing up on the subway platform. We think the possibilities are endless but it’s an illusion. The Federal Reserve keeps printing money, but otherwise there are a finite number of particles in this world. We are mortal, but matter is constant.