Ciao 2024!
Hello friends! Once again wanted to share some books that haven’t made their way into anything I’ve written this year but have been important to me. I hope one or two click with whatever’s lighting you up these days.
Fiction
Before Murakami became the go-to for surreal Japanese fiction Yashimoto was blazing the trail. There’s something about her gentle, minimalist style that I adore. This is a book that’s dealing with characters at risk of losing themselves or perhaps lost already in grief. The tone of it is somewhere between dissasociation and innocence; stripped back, straightforward observations of life and the people in it; a model of mindful attenttiveness as a response to trauma and escape from cycles of doom; but something else as well which I don’t fully understand.
Han Song is one of a rising tide of Chinese sci fi writers using the genre to explore the dramatic changes (and stagnation) facing the country. In a review someone compares Han Song to Ursula le Guin but he’s definitely more Kafka. This book is the first in a trilogy about a hospital as an allegory for an all controlling and confusing state, enter at your own risk.
Hari Kunzru is one of those writers whose books I’ll buy as soon as they come out. They’re consistently intricate and get my brain moving in exactly the right way. This time of ours with weird tech, unruly billionaires, and so much fear driving people to demagogues is strange as hell and Kunzru helps make sense of it without flattening it. This is a book about class, art and what it means to be alive today.
Okay pretty bait to have the Booker Prize winner on your end of year recommendations but I think this book is a masterpiece in fictionalised ethnography. That Harvey’s not lived on the International Space Station is truly unbelievable. The level of detail, the vivid interior worlds, the constant proximity of the banal and the awesome… this book is a testament to human powers of dreaming and empathy, while also just being a view of the earth that we rarely get: a sense of our continous, streaming, flowing, pulsing alive planet, our home.
Nonfiction
The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies- Andy Beckett
This book is a look back at the interweaving years of those who led the parliamentary left’s resurgence in the UK from 2017-2019: John McDonnell, Diane Abbot and Jeremy Corbyn, as well as their formative comrades Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone. If you’ve ever been curious about the radical work of the Greater London Council before it was abolished or how the small group of socialists in the UK’s parliament have survived so long, give this a read. I was left with an overwhelming feeling of gratitude for these diligent souls who’ve stuck it out for us and grief for the intransigence of this system. It was also new to me just how much the anarchic and democratic values of 1968 street politics influenced these folks.
Solidarity: The Past, Present and Future of a World-Changing Idea - Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix
Astra Taylor is a legend in my mind. If you’ve not come across her I particularly enjoyed her reflections in this podcast on organising. This book, written with Leah Hunt-Hendrix, is an exploration of solidarity as an idea. What is it? Where’s it come from? And why will any chance of a transformative movement depend on it? It’s a glorious trek through 20th century social movements and a persuasive case for how this idea can offer an anchor for our age.
Kingbird Highway - Kenn Kaufman
Random, but I loved this strange memoir of a young bird-crazed boy hitchhiking the US to try and beat the birding record. (Yes birding as in bird watching.) An easy, playful read with a suggestive blend of frontierist, kerouacian freedom and a deep love of land and connection with its people.
Bjarki, Not Bjarki: On Floorboards, Love and Irreconcilable Differences - Matthew J. C. Clark
Another memoir from a white American guy (note to self to read a bit more widely in 2025). I found this one a totally captivating work of auto-ethnography about what it means to be a middle class university addled man trying to reconnect to his body and the people who make things with theirs. It’s also Trump, self doubt, sexism, difference, romance, grief and craft.
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Okay that’s it for 2024, thanks for reading along with me this year. As ever, I’m moved by your comments and likes and shares, by those who send me messages to tell me they like what I’m writing and those of you who speak to me about any of it! I’m also especially grateful to those friends and comrades who chip in a little each month, it might not seem like much but it’s a huge emotional boost and support.
Der Zauberfisch - Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern 1954
I would read all of these, if you didn’t keep them privatised on your kindle
What’s so bad about white American guys?