Books that made my world go round in 2024

COMPILING my list of Best Books makes me uneasy, as if someone is looking over my shoulder. It's based on personal taste, subjectively skewed and can seem a bit one-sided to some – no science fiction, detective stories, novels or romances. Because I'm writing from the cold northern hemisphere – and in the absence of a Kindle or such – I can't include South African or African writers. The year was also short on outstanding short story collections, which I made up for by reading classic short story writers like Flannery O'Conner and John Cheever.

The books I mention are not necessarily the “best" but they are timeless, and each one has touched me and stayed with me.

Society’s absurd expectations

Experimental writing is often frowned upon. Moreover, if you, like Sarah Moss, write a memoir about anorexia in the aforementioned experimental style, quite a few readers will run for the hills. At first I tried to quickly scan My Good Bright Wolf, but next thing I knew, I was immersed in it, and having a good read. It's written in a second-person voice, leaving enough emotional space for the reader not to have to squirm through each page. What it ultimately was about for me is how society indirectly supports and even encourages eating disorders by linking absurd expectations to gender roles.

Call yourself Jane [Eyre]. Call yourself Esther [Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar]. Call yourself Virginia Woolf or starving-herself-to-death Simone Weil or emaciated Simone de Beauvoir. You’ll be the skeleton at the feast, the clever one in black.

My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and costs $20.95 (~R378) at Amazon.

As personal as change can be

This author I first read as Luc Sante, a complex smart guy and hard-nosed reviewer whose essays, Kill all your Darlings (2007), interested me. Nineteen Reservoirs was released in 2022 under the name Lucy Sante, leaving readers to wonder if she was a relative of Luc's. But Luchad become Lucy, and I Heard Her Call My Name is the memoir of how, at the age of 66 – after a lifetime of gender dysphoria, two marriages and a son – Luc changed his gender to that of a woman.

It's far more personal than politically written, honest and accessible, and as a bonus, a few names like Jim Jarmusch, Patti Smith, and Elizabeth Hardwick are dropped against the backdrop of New York in the 1980s.

I heard her call my name: A memoir of transition by Lucy Sante is published by Penguin Press and costs $18.00 (~R325) at Amazon. 

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Knife by Salman Rushdie

The cover is reminiscent of a Lucio Fontana painting – the clean cut of a knife that deftly splits through paper. Of course, Knife is about August  12, 2022, when a man with a knife attacked Salman Rushdie during a gathering. He's been waiting for this for 33 years, he thinks, since he first received death threats with the publication of “that novel", The Satanic Verses (1988). “So it's you. Here you are."

The horrific incident leaves him nostalgic, and he examines his early life – there's his childhood with a bully and alcoholic for a father, his friendships with writers such as Martin Amis and Paul Auster, and a sugar-sweet chapter about his relationship with his fifth wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

It is precisely these personal musings that make Rushdie, who often appears haughty and aloof, more human to the reader. “Maybe now people like me a little bit," he hopes.

Yes, he's still snobbish at times with an ego like a hot air balloon, but for once you can forgive him.

Knife by Salman Rushdie was published by Random House and costs R496 at Loot.

The position of spoons and other intimacies by Deborah Levy

This is Deborah Levy's first book since the publication of her autobiographical trilogy. It is a collection of essays, thoughts, letters, musings on art and literature, alphabet games, poems, anecdotes, vignettes, a real this-and-that book.

She inspired me to read Marguerite Duras right away, go looking for Ann Quinn, drive more carefully, and call my mother. Freud's psychoanalysis is resurrected with the “smoky voice of the id", full of death wishes and streams of consciousness, “... living in your mind is probably the best place to be".

For the most part, the book feels like you're hanging out and chatting with Levy and a few friends late into the night, but at some point you realise Levy is so much smarter and sharper than you and all your friends combined.

The position of spoons and other intimacies by Deborah Levy was published by Hamish Hamilton and costs R410 at Loot.

Singing seals and elderly sharks

The same sharks that swirled quietly deep under the sea during Shakespeare's lifetime could still be swimming around somewhere today. Greenland sharks can live up to 500 years. After 150 years, they are ready to mate for the first time. And a swallow flies the equivalent of five times around the Earth during a its lifetime. They sleep in the air, a dark swaying cloud, during which one half of their brain shuts down and rests while the other part remains conscious.

Come on, who wouldn't want to know?

Katherine Rundell writes in short chapters about astounding natural facts spiced with literary and historical references for context. Every chapter astonished me. Seals have amazing verbal abilities, can say certain words clearly and one has already been taught to sing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star". And crows ... I could go on and on.

Vanishing Treasures by Katherine Rundell was published by Doubleday and costs $20.67 (~R373) at Amazon. 

The language of rocks

“I feel lucky to have spent enough time in the company of rocks to understand their language." In rocks and stones, if you know how to look, Earth's 4,5 billion year history is encoded, a story of a troubled past, ruptured by earthquakes and volcanoes, shaken around by meteorites, honed by wind and water. Marcia Bjornerud, a geologist, translates these stone-and-rock stories for us – the secrets of basalt and quartzite, dolomite and sandstone. As a woman, she regularly faces discrimination in the rocks-for-jocks world of geology and constantly has to prove herself to male colleagues. Meanwhile, her marriage falls apart.

But she has good advice for all of us – “… all we can do is get up every day and join the biogeochemical festivities, the sweet monotony, the ebb and flow, the sacraments of Earth and Life.”

Turning to Stone: Discovering the subtle wisdom of rocks by Marcia Bjornerud was published by Flatiron Books and costs R427 at Amazon SA.

 Dawkins’s twilight tome

On his recent world tour, The Final Bow, Richard Dawkins, 83, the rockstar zoologist, announced that these would be his last performances. Along with this tour, he released his latest book, The Genetic Book of the Dead, which is mostly a compilation of his Greatest Genetic Hits. He describes the book as a palimpsest, “... a manuscript in which later writing has been superimposed on earlier (effaced) writing".

There's no reference to his mega-seller, The God Delusion, and New Atheism, nor is he his usual shit-stirring self – for example, he doesn't call anyone a “pathetic wimp" or “utterly, blindingly, flat-footedly, downright wrong". It's all about his constant wonder at nature, illuminated with photographs and colourfully illustrated. This book should be on your shelf so you can flip through it every now and then, in order to understand your place on Earth again.

The Genetic Book of the Dead by Richard Dawkins, illustrated by Jana Lenzová, was published by Head of Zeus and costs R610 at Amazon SA.

So, I wish us all a liberating, safe, resourceful, hopeful, book-obsessed path filled with interesting stones in 2025.

♦ VWB ♦

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