The 12 Classic Books I Read in 2024

One of my new year's resolutions for 2024 was "learn about the real world". I guess working at the bookstore made me feel woefully ignorant. How is it that I know more about the history, geography and lore of Robin Hobb's Six Duchies than the actual world I live in!?

I started with light reading, like A Short History of the World in 50 Places, Prisoners of Geography and A History of the World in 6 Glasses, but these were merely amuse-bouches for the main course: J.M. Roberts and Odd Arne Westad's The Penguin History of the World and Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace.

I took nearly 9 months to finish them. But I am afraid that the combined 3,000 pages about wars, invasions, exploitation, colonisation etc. did not enrich my soul much. Both left me with the horrible feeling that humanity is not able to transcend its propensity for violence. We are, it seems, another destructive species of animal, no different from (say) killer algae, practically biologically determined to destroy. Does that make me a Hobbesian?

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 hesitant to read any more high-effort literary works, so I chose low-effort ones: Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Guy de Maupassant's Bel-Ami.

Wildfell Hall is a tale as old as time: young and dumb Helen gets seduced by a useless rake's promises, marries him, regrets it forever. 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 she leave her abusive husband, she even turned to trade (painting pictures) to make a living! Unthinkable!

I'm not sure if it's because I read Anne considerably later in life than Charlotte and Emily, but I think that Anne is the most skilled of the Bronte sisters. She writes deliciously bad characters like 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 Helen’s husband under her roof, oh my god).

Bel-Ami is also 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.”

Following Theroux, I read Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. It’s scary shit: thirst, delusion, fever, madness, cannibalism, sharks, stench of death, white mists, Tekeli-li! It is not an "enjoyable" book; it's unsettling and unsatisfying. I read up on it for days afterwards.

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. Some of my favourites:

• (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."

• (on why opulent tradesmen irritate 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 gold, 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 - sublime.

Margareta's plaintive verses are some of the most chilling I've ever read:

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 what 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 Thomas Hardy book binge: Far From the Madding Crowd. It's light where Tess is dark. That said, out of Bathsheba Everdene's 3 suitors, one dies and another goes to jail - Bathsheba is basically Henry VIII. But I couldn't help rooting for Gabriel Oak and Bathsheba - a coworkers-to-lovers slow burn.

So that was my year in books!

Next year: the rest of Thomas Hardy’s major works (Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Return of the Native), James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (and maybe a collection of Samuel Johnson’s Essays), Fernand Braudel’s A History of Civilisations, Rousseau’s Confessions and Goethe’s An Italian Journey.