I don't regret wishing 2024 away. In between working three jobs and finding a balance with consuming news and culture, some stable books have moved home with me a number of times. Here are some books worth celebrating in 2024.
Winterson, Jeanette. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Grove Press, 2011.
"Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become. Emily Dickinson barely left her homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, but when we read, 'My life stood - a loaded gun' we know we have met an imagination that will detonate life, not decorate it." (p. 117).
Mantel, Hilary. Wolf Hall. 4th Estate, 2009.
"There were days, not too long past, days since Lizzie died, when he'd woken in the morning and had to decide, before he could speak to anybody, who he was and why. There were days when he'd woken from dreams of the dead and searching for them. When his waking self trembled, at the threshold of deliverance from his dreams.
But those days are not these days." (p. 359)
Cole, Teju. Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time. The University of Chicago Press, 2021.
"Caravaggio never painted the sea. I search his oeuvre in vain for a seascape; vistas of any kind are rare. We can address only what has survived of his work, and in what has survived, there are no swells, no waves, no oceanic calms, no shipwrecks or beaches, no sunsets over water. And yet his final years made a chart of the sea, and his ports of call were all literal ports, portals of hope, of which Porto Ercole was the final, unanticipated stop. He's buried somewhere there, perhaps on the beach, perhaps in a local church. But his real body can be said to be elsewhere: the body, that is, of his painterly achievement, which has gone out to dozens of other places around the world, all the places where wall labels say, "d. 1610 Porto Ercole."" (p. 18)
Trevor, William. Love and Summer. Penguin, 2009.
"This morning, going from one half-empty room to another, he found himself, without resentment, reflecting for longer than usual on such moments of spent time, and more reluctant than usual to accept the end that every day pressed closer. He stood in the doorway of the bedroom where his father had died while dressing himself and where - three years before that - his mother hadn't woken up on her sixty-fourth birthday. Now, only the wardrobe and the bed remained. 'Later on we'll see to the clothes,' his father had said, gathering together dresses and coats on their hangers, to be given to a charity he never made contact with, unable to bring himself to do it. His own clothes hung beside them now." (p. 31).
Ferrante, Elena. The Lost Daughter. , Translated by Ann Goldstein, Europa Editions, 2008.
"He was certainly their age: a male child, a slender nervous body to care for. The young male bodies that had attracted me as an adolescent were like that, tall, thin, very dark, like Martha's boyfriends, not small, fair, a little stocky and plump, like Bianca's young men, always a little older than she, with veins as blue as their eyes. But I loved them all, my daughters' first boyfriends, I bestowed on them an exaggerated affection. I wanted to reward them, perhaps, because they had recognized the beauty, the good qualities of my daughters, and so had freed them from the anguish of being ugly, the certainty of having no power of seduction." (p. 51).
Ignatieff, Michael. On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times. Picador, 2022.
The Psalms tell us that the makers of this tradition were men and women just like us. They knew what it was to suffer exile and loss, to fear death and dying. The worst of despair, as they knew only too well, is to feel alone. The consolation they offer is the certainty that others have felt exactly as we have done and that we are not alone, in our rage and despair, and our longing for better days. Consolation depends on this recognition. To console someone is to say, over and over: I know, I know. We share what we have suffered so others will know they are not alone. It is the most essential and difficult exercise of solidarity that ever falls to us. This is the duty that the Psalms counsel us to shoulder, in ancient but recognizable images. They tell us how to do so by urging us to be truthful. We cannot console if we are not truthful. Among the truths they counsel is to admit what it is to feel petrifying fear:
I am poured out like water and all my bones are out of joint." (p. 21).
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