Some not-very-deep reviews of books I read in 2024
Because I'm sick and don't want to work
My first week back at work has been a shocker. I’ve had that terrible 8-day cold everyone’s been wanging on about. I’ve been curled over my computer like a prawn, open-mouthed and dead-eyed. You’re telling me I have to write about health insurance? On a deadline? But I’m just a baby.
I should at least get to write something fun first, so here are some not very deep reviews of fab books I read in 2024. This was the year I finally broke through my years-long reading slump. It was also the year I realised Spotify gives the policy holder 15 hours a month of free audiobooks and rejigged our whole plan to make myself the big cheese.
Here are some good books I read in no particular order.
The end: Surviving the world through imagined disasters
Katie Goh
This was a very small nonfiction book about apocalyptic and dystopian fiction and why we like to imagine the end of the world in fiction, even while it plays out in front of us IRL. I've read a few 404 Inklings books and have never been let down. They’re long essays that you can read in an hour or two. This is the best of the ones I’ve read, even better than Now Go about grief and Studio Ghibli.
Orbital
Samantha Harvey
Ugghh perfect book. I’ve recommended this to a few people with the caveat: ‘nothing happens and you might not like it.’ I also can see why a lot of people didn’t vibe with it. I think the key to Orbital is when and how you read it. It would have passed me by if I’d tried to dip into it before bed or on lunch break. There’s really nothing to hook onto to remember where you were or what was happening (nothing was happening). I smoked the whole thing in one plane ride back from holiday with nothing else to pull my focus, so I stayed with this slow thoughtful float around the globe. I’m also now obsessed with the International Space Station and making a plan to visit the observatory in Greenwich.
Fleishman is in trouble
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Loved this, couldn’t put it down, BUT it did make me wonder why Americans are so obsessed with analysing heterosexual marriage as though it’s something separate from a long-term committed relationship. I can’t think of British or NZ writing that does the same, except for perhaps the early seasons of The Crown. Leave a comment if you can think of anything though, maybe I’m completely wrong.
Take this quote:
A wife isn’t like an ultra-girlfriend or a permanent girlfriend. She’s an entirely new thing. She’s something you made together, with you as an ingredient. She couldn’t be the wife without you. So hating her or turning on her or talking to your friends about the troubles you have with her would be like hating your own finger… you’re hating your creation. You’re hating yourself.
As much as I loved the book, it didn’t convince me that marriage is anything other than what she says it isn’t: a permanent girlfriend. Perhaps mid to younger millennials aren’t as hung up on this because marriage seems optional. It’s possible to have a committed, legally recognised, socially accepted relationship without it, so if marriage does happen, it changes very little about your relationship and doesn’t warrant analysis. I recently had an argument with someone at a party (rather, I was argued at) about why anyone would get married. My defence was security, commitment, etc. He counterargued that you get those things from co-signing a mortgage, which can just as easily be undone and therefore means nothing. In the end, the only answer I could defend was ‘because it’s nice’.
373 pages of Fleishman didn’t convince me there was much more to it.
I’m a fan
Sheena Patel
I borrowed this from a neighbour and returned it two days later, read to death. This is about a woman having an affair with someone who is also having an affair with someone else, referred to by the narrator as ‘the woman I’m obsessed with’. This is for anyone who hate-follows people on Instagram. I will say though, it’s three-quarters excellent and one-quarter not very good at all. I don’t know, I’m a bit tired of authors wagging their fingers at readers. Even a hot take I fully agree with can be boring and annoying if it’s as direct as they often are nowadays, and I’m tired of being scolded. Books are and should be political, but being so explicit about it flattens the power they have to change and open minds. I wish authors would let the story do its work without feeling they need to turn to the reader and explain things to us like we’re stupid.
Fourth Wing
Rebecca Yarros
Life is too short to not embrace commercial fiction. Is the prose in Fourth Wing pretty bad? Are Gaelic names bastardised? Is there an embarrassing dragon sex scene? Yes three times. But could I put it down? No.
I have a deep and abiding respect for writers of commercial fiction, and the criticism of them often fails to understand the metrics by which they’re valued. Familiar plot lines and tropes aren’t a failure of these books, they’re the entire point - the joy and comfort of them. There’s more to say about this, but these are not deep reviews so I’ll just say: it’s OK. Let your hair down. Read a book about horny dragons.
I will always have the memory of listening to ‘the throne scene’ on audio in a small yarn shop, giggling in between rows of wool. IYKYK.
Love Marriage
Monica Ali
It’s hard to describe this book because I read it early in the year and therefore can’t remember a thing about it except how it made me feel. It’s about love, identity, family - but also so much more than that. If there’s a modern anxiety, Love Marriage deals with it. It’s about two people from different cultures who get engaged and their families get tangled up together in various complicated ways. This slipped under a lot of radars when it came out, but it’s a banger.
There were so many good reads this year that I need a special mention category.
Yellowface, R. F. Kuang – I’m so late to this, but wow, what a book.
Picnic at Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay – This was SO spooky and hasn’t received the recognition it deserves outside Australia.
Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe – I thought a doorstop nonfiction book about The Troubles would be hard to get through. Not the case. I flew through this.
I’m Glad my Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy - Wow. Astonishing memoir. Wow wow wow.
2025 is going to be the year I read books as they come out so I don’t always feel like I’m falling behind. But I’m already breaking that rule. My first books of 2025 have been Kick the Latch and The Line of Beauty. Both fire.
Happy reading everyone.
Have only read ‘I’m glad my mom died’, so this list is giving me lots of inspo