2024 was a really rough year in every regard, on a personal basis full of health problems, financial problems, disappointments and emotional lows, even outside of the terrible state of the wider world. Ever since I learnt to read, books have been my go-to activity, but I really struggled to read anything last year. Normally I read around 50-70 books a year. This year I barely managed 20. There were also a lot of books I started, and then gave up on, not because they were bad, but because I just couldn’t for some reason. I hope 2025 will be less rough, but who knows.
January
Down the Drain– Julia Fox
Autobiography of the fashion model and artist who sprung into most people’s consciousness when she briefly dated Kanye West and he played dress-up doll with her. This book is wild. She grew up semi-feral alternating between NYC and northern Italy, with awful parents, and ran away to live with a drug dealer when she was 15. Julia Fox genuinely has no idea how to have normal connections with people, despite her best efforts and good intentions, and the book is very interesting, but when you finish you’re very glad you don’t have to be her.
Mislaid in Parts Half-Known– Seanan McGuire
Skeleton Song– Seanan McGuire
In Mercy, Rain– Seanan McGuire
Seanan McGuire releases new episodes of the Wayward Children series every January around my birthday. Set at a therapeutic school, they follow up what happens to children who have had a classic fantasy portal adventure in a magic land and then have to return and adjust to cold hard reality. They’re a mixed bag, some parts are fantastic, some are filler. Often the ones that follow a child who disappeared into a magic land (usually presaged by some social, family or medical issue to explore) are much better than the episodes set at the school, which suffer from too many characters and often feel rushed and superficial. All of the books are very short and can be read in an afternoon. This time I got one main part, following up the story of the previous book’s character, and two short stories.
Ultra-Processed People– Chris van Tulleken
A study of the absolute crap modern processed food is stuffed with, and how it affects our health, which I borrowed from the library after reading an extract in the Guardian. This isn’t some crank book, the author is a proper scientist, and he also looks into the history of these ingredients. At the time I was suffering from severe inflammation, and avoiding some of the ingredients mentioned such as methyl-cellulose and xanthan gum helped calm things down a lot.
The Carhullan Army– Sarah Hall
A dystopia set in near-future Cumbria. Society has somewhat collapsed in ecological crisis, and is dreary and authoritarian in a run-down apathetic way. The main character goes to join a lesbian separatist resistance group up on a remote fell, but it’s perhaps more like a cult. I really enjoyed the first chapter or so, as the protagonist escaped and made her way through the landscape alone, but once she joined the commune the writing was incredibly flat and the author seemed more interested in putting in as many violent torture scenes as possible rather than developing the characters. I honestly could tell you nothing about the narrator character other than that she is from Penrith, and nothing about any of the commune characters, not even the love interest. The leader character’s sole trait was “capricious”. To the point where I couldn’t tell if some of the stuff that was off was intended as unreliable narrator swayed by the charismatic leader, or just plain bad writing.
April
Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990– Katja Hoyer
There’s way fewer books about East Germany available in English compared to those about Nazi Germany, and this one is accessible to non-academics, available from the average bookshop, and recent. The book got a lukewarm response in Germany, where reviewers felt it covered very basic information and sometimes let the regime off the hook, but for English language readers it gives a good basic overview. I also do agree with reviewers that she tried too hard to balance the “repressive police state” vs “people had very good childcare and sports facilities and my family did fine” arguments, but it’s still an informative and accessible read for people outside Germany or academia.
Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind– Gavin Edwards
A biography of River Phoenix. I knew that he had lots of siblings and his parents were hippies who had been in the Children of God cult, but I wasn’t aware of how terrible the parents were until I read this. The Phoenix children were basically cash cows, receiving no education, and sent out to busk on the street in the cult days, and pushed into child stardom on the family’s return to the US. The father, John, basically never worked again after leaving the cult, and there was intense pressure on River to earn as much as possible from a young age to support his younger siblings and dead-beat parents, in a Hollywood he was ill-equipped to navigate as a strongly dyslexic young man with no formal education and an isolated and abusive upbringing in a cult.
Devil’s Breath– Jill Johnson
An isolated botanist who likes to watch the world around her through binoculars accidentally becomes embroiled in a plant-based mystery. It should have been good, but it wasn’t. The “quirky” scientist character felt like a cartoon character, and the attempts to be diverse by portraying her as an autistic lesbian kind of looped back around to being offensively stereotypical (especially the way she interacted with women who interested her).
Severance: The Lexington Letter
A free Severance tie on on Apple Books. I watched Severance for the first time in the spring. When it came out in 2022 I was travelling for work and somehow got the idea it was a comedy about lawyers (I don’t know why either) rather than a sci-fi thriller. It’s probably one of the best things I’ve seen in years, and I’m annoyed I spent two years missing out on something almost custom-designed for me to enjoy.
The free ebook on Apple Books is fake letters from a whistle-blower character to a newspaper, and an employee handbook for the severed workers.
Roads of Destiny and Other Tales of Alternative Histories and Parallel Realms– ed. Alasdair Richmond
This is one of those British Library collections of short stories of the uncanny. This time the theme is alternate timelines. A solid bunch of older sci-fi and horror stories. It was funny how many of them featured Napoleon, it seems he was the go-to What If? situation before the Second World War. My favourite story involving him in the collection was the one where the narrator meets a washed up alcoholic Napoleon in a hotel in the south of France, in an alternate timeline where his family dramas had sabotaged his earlier military career.
May
Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall– Anna Funder
A re-read for research purposes. A deep dive into the paranoid world of the Stasi, and the impact on their victims’ lives by an Australian journalist. It was written just at the right point in the early 2000s when these men were still alive and willing to talk because they thought their crimes had been forgotten, and when their victims were also still alive. The author herself had to deal with a lot of stalking and harassment from former Stasi agents after the release of the book, which she has gone into in a recent article.
June
The Case of the Gilded Fly– Gervase Fen
Holy Disorders– Gervase Fen
The Moving Toyshop is a masterpiece of 1950s absurdist detective stories. I was vaguely aware that there was a whole series with the same detective, but they never seemed to be very prominent. There’s a reason for that, they’re not very good, and have weirdly misogynistic undertones. I read the first two then didn’t bother with the rest. Just read The Moving Toyshop and be done with it.
July
The Shrines of Upper Austria– Phoebe Power
A selection of prose poems written in the Austrian lake town of Gmunden, taking in family secrets, the eccentricities and dark side of Austrian society, and the landscape itself. The author absolutely nailed the place.
In the Shadow of Wolves– Alvydas Šlepikas
When the Red Army was closing in towards the end of the Second World War on the Königsberg area (now Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave within the EU) the Nazi government refused to evacuate the civilian population until the very last minute. In the chaos and confusion of the sudden and poorly-organised evacuation, a lot of children were orphaned or separated from their families. These “wolf children” lived wild in the forests and fields of East Prussia and Lithuania, the lucky ones being picked up and hidden by Lithuanian farmers, who gave them new names and identities to protect them. The not so lucky ones starved or were killed by soldiers.
Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was far too risky for most of the “wolf children” to openly talk about their past, and the author was involved in production of a documentary about their stories. In the end the film fell through, so he decided to write a novel instead, following several children from the same village as they starved, died or were rescued. It was a smash hit in Lithuania, but seems to be unknown in English, despite being published by Penguin in translation.
August
Fire and Hemlock– Diana Wynne Jones
Year of the Griffin– Diana Wynne Jones
The Pinhole Egg- Diana Wynne Jones
Mixed Magics– Diana Wynne Jones
I presented at the Diana Wynne Jones conference in Bristol this summer, and re-read both the book I was presenting about (Fire and Hemlock), and some of her books that I hadn’t read in years that were mentioned in various talks. You can read my conference paper here.
December
Starve Acre– Andrew Michael Hurley
I wanted to read the book before seeing the film with Morfydd Clarke and Matt Smith, but I basically couldn’t read between September and December and it took me weeks to finish a short novella. A 2 hour wait at A&E for an eye infection gave me the chance to finish this one off. Don’t Look Now meets the Fifth Son in 1970s Yorkshire. Well worth a read.
Slade House– David Mitchell
For some reason I missed this after it came out, maybe because I found Utopia Avenue and The Boneclocks so disappointing compared to his previous books. This was more of a return to form, but still not at his earlier level. A sinister and disorienting house appears down an alley every ninth Halloween to lure in a victim so the residents can absorb their soul to keep on living forever. Each chapter is set in a different decade told from the perspective of the person lured into the house that year, and also follows up on the impact of the previous victim’s disappearance. It’s campy horror fun, and I read it in one sitting on a plane.
Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading– Lucy Mangan
The Guardian’s tv reviewer looks back on her childhood of reading. Lucy was a timid, introverted child from a loving but eccentric family, who struggled with being around other children, and found any book that had too much adventure or fantasy daunting, but lapped up idyllic countryside stories. It was a fun, fluffy read (which I read in a youth hostel in Austria where I had a whole dorm to myself due to a lack of hotels suitable for the work budget), but certainly gives some perspective on her sometimes odd opinions on shows.
The Man on Hackpen Hill– J.S. Monroe
I was at home alone with shingles over Christmas and wanted to read a mindlessly entertaining thriller. I’d read some of this author’s books before, and they fit the bill. This one was more on the mindless side however. Crop circles, Porton Down, unlicensed medical trials, chapters that were a couple of pages long and each ended in a ludicrous cliff-hanger. Some of the things I thought were clumsy and unrealistic writing were later revealed as an awkwardly shoe-horned in part of the twist. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the author had just made a spreadsheet of the plot points and then fed it into an AI engine to get the book.
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