This has been a good year for reading, maybe not as good as the Covid year or the two that followed, but still pretty good. In my case, it included some great re-reads, notably the two Michael Chabon masterpieces included in this end-of-year post.
Not included here, but also revisited in 2024: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, William Gibson’s The Peripheral and Agency (I had hoped the third book of Gibson’s planned “Jackpot” trilogy would come out in 2024, but alas it did not). I started re-reading the nine novels of James S.A. Corey’s “The Expanse” series last year and finished in 2024, along with a first read of Corey’s The Mercy of Gods, the first book of “The Captive’s War,” a new series.
Inspired by Amazon’s excellent streaming TV adaptation, I’ve been working my way through Michael Connelly’s “Harry Bosch” series. I include a representative review of one read this year (not the best, not the worst); also, a representative review of one of Mick Herron’s “Slough House” novels, a series of espionage thrillers I committed to after watching Apple TV’s Slow Horses.
I use a simple rating scale:
- 0 stars — didn’t finish it
- 1 stars — didn’t like it
- 2 stars — it was okay
- 3 stars — liked it
- 4 stars — really liked it
- 5 stars — it was amazing
I’ll bump books up or down by half a star if they hit me somewhere in between; I’d also add that books I rate at 4.5 to 5 are ones I’m very likely to re-read; books I rate at 4 often get another read as well. Over the years I’ve been posting reviews here and on Goodreads, only 4 of the more than 1,000 books I’ve reviewed got 5 stars: to me, “it was amazing” means “greatest book ever,” a pretty high bar.
My long-time interest in banned books continues, and I’ve included a review of The 57 Bus, the best such book I read this year, a nonfiction account of the brutal burning of a transgender-presenting teen minding their own business on a public bus (I’ll leave you to guess why red-staters don’t want their kids reading it … or you can read my review, which leads off this post).
So without further delay, my top reads of 2024:
The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives
by Dashka Slater
The 57 Bus is young adult non-fiction. The narrative, in true crime tradition, opens with a shocking and brutal act, the intentional burning of one teenager by another on a cross-town bus in Oakland, California. The crime, widely reported at the time, took place in 2013. Dashka Slater recounts the facts and consequences of the crime while also exploring the backgrounds and lives of both teens, Sasha and Richard. Because Sasha, the victim, was a white agender teen wearing nontraditional clothing (“a dude in a skirt,” per one of the friends who egged on the attacker) and Richard was a Black teen with a criminal history, the book takes a deep dive into race, gender, sexuality, and the criminal justice system.
How and why did The 57 Bus wind up in the crosshairs of book banners? The reasons are obvious: it deals with the aforementioned disturbing topics of race, gender, sexuality, and justice. In a 2022 interview, Dashka Slater said this:
As of this writing, The 57 Bus has been banned or challenged in more than nine states, including Idaho, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, Kansas, and Tennessee. The reasons given vary, but usually the book is accused of being “obscene,” despite the fact that there isn’t any sex in it at all. So why is it being challenged? Well, it’s about a nonbinary kid and a Black kid, and it talks about race and gender and justice.
Organized groups of parents (and in many cases literal outside agitators, censorious adults with religious and political axes to grind but who neither reside nor have children in affected school districts) are besieging board meetings to demand books be stricken from the curriculum and removed from library shelves. Targeted books often have LGBTQ and racial themes, and many contain words and sentences that taken out of context seem obscene or pornographic … or, worded another way, can be made to seem obscene or pornographic. Book banners have taken to standing up at school board meetings to read passages from books they’re targeting, often resulting in shouting and chaos.
Everyone knows that protesters who disrupt school board meetings by shouting out the dirty parts of books they want to ban have not read the books they’re after. They’re quoting out-of-context lines and paragraphs shared on Facebook and email by book-banning groups like Moms for Liberty. One of the sources for such quotable material is an online organization called Book Looks, which invites visitors to “find out what objectionable content may be in your child’s book before they do.”
Here’s Book Looks on The 57 Bus:
It rates the book at 2/5 on its “teen guidance” scale (0/5 being unobjectionable, 5/5 being burn it). Book Looks’ summary of concerns states this:
The book contains references to sexuality, alternate gender ideologies, profanity and inflammatory political commentary.
This is followed by eleven printable PDF pages of quoted material from the book, indexed by page number, starting with the first line of the introduction, “The pronouns and names used for gender-nonconforming people were approved by the people in question,” to the closing sentence of the final appendix, which lists gender-neutrality milestones in American law and society: “[In 2015] The MTV Movie and TV Awards become the first major acting awards to eliminate gendered categories for performance. Emma Watson won the all-inclusive category Best Actor award, which was presented by nonbinary actor Asia Kate Dillon.”
Eleven full pages, virtually a Readers’ Digest condensed version of the book itself, with nearly every quoted sentence or paragraph touching on race, gender, sexuality, or justice. Here’s a sample page from Book Look’s summary:
And let us not forget the dirty word count at the end, which cites 8 uses of the word ass, 12 fucks, 8 shits, and 5 niggas.
In the minds of Book Looks’ intended audience, simply seeing words like “gay,” “transgender,” and “sex” in print will lead to pansexual orgies in the halls of middle and high schools, turn your kids queer or trans, and what’s worse, liberal. And who wants to hear about racial economic and social divides … why do you want to dredge up all those painful memories, which the Civil Rights Act fixed for all time anyway? And what’s this about bathrooms?
Okay, then. What did I think about The 57 Bus?
I was surprised by how much I learned. I harbored preconceptions going in, including reactionary thoughts about race and crime in Oakland, confused notions on the variety of sexual and gender identities people adopt, and discomfort with unconventional pronouns. Dashka Slater walked me through these minefields, patiently explaining how Sasha and their friends came to be the people they are, why Richard grew up the way he did and why Sasha and their parents didn’t want them tried and punished as an adult. I, as I suppose many readers did, went from reflexively hating and condemning Richard for lighting Sasha’s skirt on fire, to seeing both teens as sympathetic characters. As true crime reporting goes, Dashka Slater’s is first rate.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
by Michael Chabon
Inspired by a recent re-read of Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, I took another look at Kavalier & Clay, a lovingly-remembered novel. Apparently I first read it in my drinking years, because I recalled only that part the story took place in an Arctic ice tunnel (and even that detail I had wrong … it was Antarctica). Oh, if only I had enough time left to revisit all the books I first read in an alcoholic fog (not to mention movies seen through same). Kids, don’t take up drinking. Just don’t.
Chabon here builds an alternate history founded on the true history of the Golden Age of comic books, which ran from the late 1930s through the early 1950s, including the era’s demise with Senate hearings prompted by public hysteria over false charges brought by anti-comic book crusader, Dr. Fredrick Wertham. The fictional K&C play pivotal roles in that era, in a story that doesn’t deviate all that much from the history we know today.
The detail of Chabon’s alternate world is so rich it almost beggars description, and includes insights into the construction and management of the Empire State Building, the Nazi persecution of the Jews of Prague, the comic book superhero publishing business (natch), a hilarious peek at New York socialites’ embrace of Salvadore Dali and the Surrealist movement, the Roosevelt government’s shameful refusal to admit Jews fleeing Europe, America’s reluctant waking up to Hitler and eventual entry into the war, the anti-homosexual police and FBI witch hunts of the pre-Stonewall era, even a bit of U.S. Navy war-fighting strategy you probably never heard of (but which actually happened). Actually happened? Just about anything you might care to fact check online after reading this novel has a foundation in fact.
But the characters! Joe and Sammy and Rosa live, breathe, and read over your shoulder as you turn the pages. You get to know them well enough to anticipate their actions and thoughts. You come to care deeply about them. They age, realistically. The atmosphere! You can almost feel the cold clay of the Golem in its packing crate coffin, smell the gasoline- and tobacco-laden air of New York City, taste the coffee, feel the Bristol board on which Joe Kavalier draws his superheroes, hear Walter Winchell on the radio.
Marvelous writing, all 600+ pages of it. All of it, including the obviously fictional parts, ringing true. No wonder Chabon won a Pulitzer for this novel.
p.s. I don’t believe the four short stories, only a page or two each, appended to the end were there in the novel I first read 20 years ago, but that the author added them to a later edition. In any case, they help scratch the itch you’ll feel for more K&C. But like me, you’ll still want more, and we can only hope Michael Chabon, as he hints in his afterword, might carry on with his fascinating alternate history.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
by Michael Chabon
My original review, posted 13 years ago:
Great writing. And a great story too. I really love these “what might have been” stories, and interestingly enough, the relocation of European Jews to Sitka actually is one: it was a serious proposal considered by the U.S. government in 1940, with support from cabinet members and looked on favorably by Roosevelt himself, opposed and shot down by the non-voting delegate of the Territory of Alaska.
On re-reading, I’m more impressed than ever. The world-building is meticulous, rich, deep, and detailed. Paying attention to those details pays off in spades, making the tale believable and pulling you in. Meyer Landsman is a piece of work. I cared about him … that Chabon can do that to a jaded reader is testimony to his greatness.
I had to remind myself from time to time that the day-to-day speech of Sitka’s Jews is Yiddish, and than when they speak or curse in “American,” Chabon means English. So immersed am I now, I’m likely to start dropping words like schlemiel and shtarker into daily conversation, and asking for a Philippine donut next time I’m in the drive-thru at Dunkin’.
Cahokia Jazz
by Francis Spufford
This is a detective novel set in the alternate reality of Cahokia, capital of the city-state of Cahokia, populated by a mix of takouma (indigenous), takata (white), and taklousa (black) Americans, governed by takouma rules and law. This is not to say the racism that stains us as Americans, present day and historical, is absent: underlying the action of this novel is a sinister plot to create a race war that will result in a white takeover and the elimination of takouma governance and laws; the KKK is alive and well in Cahokia. Also alive and well: many aspects of our own 1920s America: President Harding back east, the recently-concluded Great War, the railroad empire (this time majority-owned by the red man), sunny California and the movie industry, jazz.
I love serious world-building, and Spufford takes his very seriously indeed. The historical differences that create this version of the United States — Cahokia occupying what in our timeline is southern Illinois, the Dineh governing a vast area in what we know of as Arizona and New Mexico, the separate Mormon nation Deseret covering most of our Nevada and Utah, a British Oregon where our Washington State sits, a Russian Alaska called the New Siberian Territory — are explained with enough detail to be plausible, shown to us through the eyes and ears of Joe Barrow, the Cahokia detective at the center of the story, a transplanted orphan of mixed takouma and taklousa parentage. A jazz pianist in his off-hours, no less, and through this part of his life we learn of another major difference between his world and ours: the nearby existence of Mississippi, a state where post-Civil War reconstruction held, a refuge and home to the taklousa, with its own thriving culture.
It is the takouma we learn the most about, through Barrow’s sudden immersion (and near-adoption into) in Cahokia’s indigenous culture. The takouma are a people heavily influenced by Aztec, Spanish, and Catholic culture, a religious people who respect and practice both old ways and new, a people who own land in common, members of a matriarchal society where the women take over when shit gets serious … and boy, does it.
In an afterword, Francis Spufford explains the speculative historical fork in the road that allowed him to construct the world of Cahokia Jazz: a less lethal strain of smallpox introduced to the Americas by Spanish conquistadors; a century or two later, as European settlers move westward, the indigenous populations they encounter are thriving, robust, armed, and resistant to genocide, resulting in a quite different country than the one we know today.
Ministry of Time
by Kaliane Bradley
To paraphrase another reader’s review: The Ministry of Time is equal parts entertaining and profound. I saw the inevitable romantic sub-plot coming from page one, but the time-travel angle was different enough to engage my attention. Who among us has not imagined trying to explain our culture and way of life to a visitor from some distant past … or am I just weird?
The Franklin Expedition, about which I’ve read historical accounts, was another draw, and later in the novel a tale of espionage, but what really kept me going was the friendship of Maggie, Arthur, and Graham, three well-developed characters from different eras. Least favorite moments? The big reveal about Adele, and the beginnings of war with the future.
More than enough about this time-travel story is fresh and different, and readers inured to the genre will not be bored. I would love to see this story televised!
Fever House (Fever House #1)
by Keith Rosson
I don’t read a lot of horror, but this was first-rate stuff and I enjoyed it. Imagine a horror story with well-developed characters! I mean, how often do you ever get that?
The combination of believable, relatable characters and oh-my-god-what’s-gonna-happen-next kept me turning pages, and I want more.
Maybe what impressed me most, if you’re not tired of me mentioning well-developed characters, was seeing how these characters, most if not all of them wrapped up in their own lives, occupations, and problems, none of them particularly religious, spiritual, or superstitious, dealt with the undeniable presence of supernatural evil that’s thrust upon them. Great question! How would everyday normies deal with a sudden, nightmarish zombie outbreak? Probably a lot like the characters in Fever House. Ditto the government’s reaction and response … I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Keith Rosson’s nailed that too, supposing I’m not one of the first casualties and survive long enough to see it.
Keith Rosson really thought this story through. I’m almost afraid to read the next novel in the series, lest it be even slightly less good than this one.
The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands
by Sarah Brooks
I saw mention of this book in, I think, The New Yorker, and immediately put a library hold on it. I suspected it would be my kind of story, and it was … my most exciting and fascinating read of the year.
Some say steampunk science fiction, but I disagree. The locomotive of the Trans-Siberian Express, the mighty machine of an alternate world at the dawn of the 20th century, is necessarily steam-powered, but otherwise the story and its setting is far more reminiscent of Area X in Jeff VanderMeer’s “Annihilation” trilogy, and no one would ever call that steampunk.
The Train Girl got her hooks in me right off and pulled me in, as did Marya, and later Elena, the Not Quite Girl of the Wastelands … and this, in turn, reminded me of Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy. Every page, train-like, pulled me on to the next. The suspense is of course built in, given the scenario: a 15-day crossing of Siberia, a terra incognita in which mysterious changes are constantly occurring, sealed at its borders with Russia on the west and China on the east (readers will likely think of the Wall separating Westeros from the north, and Winter). Life and society outside the Wastelands is very much the way it was in our world in Victorian times (although one gets the impression the seats of civilization are Beijing and Moscow, with London a close third).
Mysterious, suspenseful, and enthralling. I loved it.
Iron Lake (Cork O’Connor #1)
by William Kent Krueger
I saw comments lauding Krueger’s “Cork O’Connor” series in an online discussion of Michael Connelly’s “Harry Bosch” novels. Thought I’d give him a go, chosing the first installment to start.
While Harry Bosch brought me to Cork O’Connor, when I recommend the series to others I’m more likely to mention similarities with Tony Hillerman’s Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, or Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache. Iron Lake is less a police procedural than the Bosch novels I’ve read and more of an atmospheric story bound up with flawed characters (two of whom happen to be cops), a strong sense of place (an exotic one, at least to this desert dweller), and Native American/north woods lore.
The crimes at the heart of the story are somewhat slow to unfold, but the strong writing, really flawless throughout, kept me going. I didn’t have a single “no way” moment; everything was quite believable. Corruption runs as deep in backwoods towns as it does in the big city, and human nature is human nature, even on the reservation.
A great read and a nice contrast to the other series I mentioned. I’ve already put a library hold on the second Cork O’Connor novel, Boundary Water.
Same Bed Different Dreams
by Ed Park
The experience of reading Same Bed Different Dreams was, for me, like dropping a dense little cube into a bowl of water, watching it unfurl into a complex origami crane with tiny Dr. Bonner’s Soap-style text on every surface, then fold back in on itself until only the original cube remains.
As three distinct narratives weave together, connections emerge, all of them leading back to Korea. I suspect re-reading the novel will reveal even more.
What is history? Yes, there was a Korean Provisional Government. Yes, there’s even a Parker Jotter, though it’s a pen, not a Korean War POW and science-fiction author (and speaking of science-fiction authors, Ed Park’s writing very much reminds me of Philip K. Dick’s … an author cited more than once in Park’s narrative).
My itch to understand Korea stems from the time I spent there while serving with the U.S. Air Force. Same Bed Different Dreams scratched that itch more effectively that the many nonfiction books about South and North Korea I’ve read over the years.
Thanks to my dear friend Abby for recommending this enthralling, fascinating book.
Slough House (Slough House #7)
Mick Herron
I have arrived at the most recent Slough House installments, the seventh and eighth novels in the series. I finished Slough House yesterday and will start Bad Actors next, wrapping up the novels (for now) in a rush. Which is not like me at all, but these are so good I can’t stop, never mind that my copy of Bad Actors has a due date.
Slough House re-introduces a couple of characters from the first novel, Slow Horses. One I remembered but one I didn’t, so I brushed up by rewatching Apple TV’s Slow Horses, season one, episode one, the televised adaptation being so faithful to the books I figured I wouldn’t miss anything. Now, in addition to reading the most recent novels, I’ve started a complete rewatch of the TV series.
The action in this seventh novel is set in the time of Brexit and the divisions it created in British society and government. Herron explains in an afterword that it’s also set in the immediate pre-Covid period, and I expect the pandemic will provide part of the backdrop for the eighth novel, Bad Actors. I haven’t decided whether the topicality Herron introduces into these novels is important or not, but with this novel it’s beginning to seem more central to the plot and I’ll pay closer attention when reading the next. Beyond which, I pray there will be more.
I regularly comment on the opening and ending of every “Slough House” novel, a solo journey through Slough House itself, guided by wandering cats, mice, tendrils of London fog, etc. In this novel it’s a real estate agent, an exemplar of the breed, who leads us up and down the narrow stairway. That everything is for sale is a recurring thread of Herron’s, as is the requisite cliffhanger ending.
The Last Coyote (Harry Bosch #4)
by Michael Connelly
When I reviewed The Wrong Side of Goodbye, the 19th Harry Bosch novel, I assumed this applied to all of them:
“As always, Connelly’s refusal to include contractions in his characters’ speech makes the dialog somewhat wooden, but at least that dialog is crystal clear. As many have observed, when it comes to police procedurals Connelly is the best explainer in the business, laying everything out in A to B to C to D fashion. His novels are always satisfying — dare I say educational — reads.”
Well. I was wrong about contractions and dialog, and maybe the A to B to C to D thing too, because the dialog in this novel, both Harry’s and others, is far more realistic, and the case — the most personal to Bosch of the by-now 13 Bosch novels I’ve read (plus one Mickey Haller) — unfolds in anything but a linear fashion.
This is a tense and struggling Bosch, barely in control, frequently an asshole to colleagues and friends, never mind enemies. And not just an asshole — he commits a horrific wrong against another cop in this story, adding a dark layer to his character I’m not certain he’ll ever overcome through penance. The differences between Bosch’s character here and in other stories are stark. The differences between what you’ll read here and the coverage of the same case in the Amazon streaming TV series are equally stark.
I regret initially reading Bosch novels out of order. His character development over time is clearly important, and I’m frequently confused by the younger Bosch’s behavior and actions, having first met him as an older man. I’m reading the unread ones in order now, and may have to re-read the already-read ones when I get to them. No problem … Harry Bosch, young or old, in print or on TV, holds up.