The 12 Classic Books I Read in 2024
The two doorstoppers formed the bulk of my reading diet for something like 9 months this year. I know they are very different books, but because they were the same thickness and were equally horrible to read, I can't help lumping them together.
After a combined 3,000 pages about wars, invasions, exploitation, colonisation etc. I'm afraid my mind has hardly been enriched. Rather, both books left me feeling that history is painfully repetitive and that humanity is not able to transcend its propensity for violence. I am more ashamed than ever to be part of the human race. Humans, it seems, are just a horribly destructive species of animal, no different from, say, kangaroos in Australia or killer algae in waterways around the world. We're practically biologically determined to destroy. Does that make me a Hobbesian?
Also, both books gave me wrist sprains. I actually bought a Kobo Libra to help me get through War and Peace without further tendon damage. War and Peace, by the way, is awful disappointing after the joyful romp that was Anna Karenina. I just wanted to smack Pierre and Natasha and Andrei and Helene and all the rest of them. The only character I liked was lisping Denisov. (Jon has a similar complaint about Anna Karenina; the only person he likes is Oblonsky.)
After struggling through The Penguin History of the World, I wasn't expecting to enjoy my next non-fiction read: Robert Heilbroner's introduction to the classical economists, The Worldly Philosophers. But I loved it!
Apart from writing in an enjoyable style (I learnt the word "pusillanimous", which means cowardly - which made me wonder about the etymology of "pussy") Robert Heilbroner is also a proper old school socialist and I appreciate that perspective. Economics is an attempt to explain capitalism. It's striking that, to date, there still isn't a satisfactory explanation.
Like any good introductory text, The Worldly Philosophers has an excellent further reading section. My list is now filled with (sociologists, historians and philosophers) Weber, Braudel and Polanyi in addition to (the economists themselves) Veblen, Keynes, Marx, Smith and Mill.
After my Tolstoy trauma I was a little hesitant to read any more high-effort literary works. But I read Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Guy de Maupassant's Bel-Ami strictly for their entertainment value.
Wildfell Hall completes my Basic Bronte Sisters collection (Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights). I'm not sure if it's because I read Anne considerably later in life than Charlotte and Emily, but I think that Anne's the most skilled writer.
The story is in 2 parts: Part I consists of the epistles of Gilbert Markham (dumb dudebro type courting the mysterious titular lady tenant, Helen), while Part II tells Helen's backstory. It's a tale as old as time: a young and dumb girl gets seduced by a useless rake's promises and marries him. She actually stands by her husband for years, trying to cure him of his alcoholism and violence, before finally running away with her child. In this book's time (1848) this turn of events must have been shocking. Not only did Helen leave her abusive husband, she even turned to trade (painting pictures) to make a living! Unthinkable!
My favourite characters were the uber-bitches Eliza Millward (slutty daughter of the village vicar, gets ignored by Gilbert and decides to take her rival Helen down with vicious gossip) and Annabella Wilmot (Grade A society bitch, makes Helen's life hell, sleeps with her husband under her roof oh my god). More of them, please.
Likewise, Bel-Ami is populated with rich bitches. It's total Netflix material: the story of a rustic but wealth-maddened country boy clawing his way to the top of society by pretension and seduction. Juicily escapist for 1885. But in 2024, I am sorry to say, the plot has lost much of its shock value. Such cynical social climbing is merely par for the course in any modern meritocracy.
I read Paul Theroux's The Old Patagonian Express. Starting from the a southbound commuter train in Boston, Paul Theroux travels the length of the Americas and winds up in South Argentina. The way is littered with horrible modern-day white colonists, poverty and squalor, rat-chewed hotels and arduous train rides. Every time I read a Paul Theroux travelogue I feel deeply validated. The way he's attracted and repelled by people in equal measure, how the books he reads are characters in the story, his lack of interest in checking off any sightseeing boxes: "I was more interested in the going and getting there, in the poetry of departures."
Then I read Samuel Johnson's and James Boswell's twin travelogues about their tour of rural Scotland in 1773. At 63, Johnson is the typical grumpy old man in Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, complaining about the dearth of trees, lack of shoes, inns with dirt floors, week-long rainstorms with no books for solace. He is a different creature in Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, which documents what the Great Lexicographer did and said on the same journey. My favourite quotes:
- On writers not practising what they write: "People are influenced more by what a man says, if his practice is suitable to it, because they are blockheads. [...] I have, all my life long, been lying till noon; yet I tell all young men, and tell them with great sincerity, that nobody who does not rise early will ever do any good."
- Meanwhile, in Dr Johnson's harem: "If I kept a seraglio, the ladies should all wear linen gowns, or cotton - I mean stuffs made of vegetable substances. I would have no silk; you cannot tell when it is clean: it will be very nasty before it is perceived to be so. Linen detects its own dirtiness."
- On men vs women: "Men know that women are an over-match for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or most ignorant, If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves."
- Why conspicuous consumption irritates us: "Why, sir, the reason is, we see no qualities in trade that should entitle a man to superiority. If a man returns from a battle, having lost one hand, and with the other full of fold, we feel that he deserves the gold; but we cannot think that a fellow, by sitting all day at a desk, is entitled to get above us."
And then I read Goethe's Faust. I was a little scared of the verse/drama format, but there was no need. Goethe uses a different tone for each scene and character, so it never gets boring, and his poetry is full of everyday things like shoes and pie crusts. I guess everyone knows the story (Faust sells his soul to the devil and ruins poor Margareta), but having it unfold in Goethe's words - oh my god, fucking sublime.
Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles is tied with Faust (part I) as my book of the year. It is problematic, perhaps, that I love stories about fallen women. But oh! What beauty and pain!
Tess is likeable for her nobility and strength of will. She only visits the rich d'Urbervilles out of guilt for killing the family horse, she astral-projects while being raped by Alec, she refuses his hand even though she bears his child, she baptises the baby ("Sorrow"!) herself when her father refuses to admit the village parson into the house. In the end she kills Alec - not in order to be with Angel Clare, but to avenge her rape - and gets hanged for it.
Book 2 of a 5-part Thomas Hardy book binge: Far From the Madding Crowd. It's light where Tess is dark - although, out of Bathsheba Everdene's 3 suitors, one dies and another goes to jail - Bathsheba is basically Henry VIII. I couldn't help rooting for Gabriel Oak and Bathsheba - a coworkers-to-lovers slow burn, akin to Emma.
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