My Top 6 Novels of 2024

Dispatch #39: An entirely unconventional review by a lady who lives in pretty consistent sensory overwhelm & applies colors & textures to ethereal matters such as the act of reading

Hi friend, I’d like to introduce you to a few of my newest friends:

I read a lot of beautiful novels this year. Some, hauntingly, I can’t stop thinking about (All Fours; Martyr!; I Who Have Never Known Men). Some I’d been meaning to read for ages & finally picked up (The Friend; Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead). Others were excitingly fresh off the presses this very year (Beautyland; Yr Dead; Idlewild).

All year I kept an excel doc (hi, type A) with the title, author, release date, Goodreads rating (to be peeped & immediately shrugged at only after finishing the book), & then my own subjective rating (to be tallied prior to looking at Goodreads).

For each book I wrote a 5-ish word review. They weren’t meant to be seen by anyone’s eyes other than mine; they were little notes on my journey as a fascinated craftsperson in the new terrain of the novel. But I’m going to share these 5-ish word reviews with you for…drum roll please…my Top 6 novels! But first, how did I arrive at the top 6? The Top 6 rose to the top according to 2 things: my incredibly vetted, entirely objective, bulletproof rating system (eye roll slash shrug emoji) as well as the old “I really just can’t stop talking to everyone about these books” rating system.

So without further ado from sixth place to first, here are my year’s personal favorites. Plus my 5-ish word reviews annnnnnnnd because I’m feeling saucy (inventive, excited, enlivened) I’m also going to throw in some new totally objective rating systems such as: “Object-ively speaking” (If This Book Were an Object) & “Body-memory:” one memorable body-moment I had whilst reading the book, a “review” solely based on the fact that it did something to my nervous system that I feel like talking about. Because as we all know books affect not just our minds & our eyeballs but our whole bodies! Here we go, people!

THE WALL, MARLEN HAUSHOFER (Published 1962)

≈ 5 word review: Challenging. Minutiae-obsessed. Literal. Quiet. Non-spiraling survivalist story.

Object: This book is a hand shovel also known as a spade. The hand shovel is a practical tool you find yourself using to upturn the soil, to dig. You aren’t using a massive machine, no, you are close to the earth. The fact that a hand shovel is also known as a spade is important here; like the old adage of “calling a spade a spade” Haushofer uses plain-spoken language – good, simple material - to guide us. When an inexplicable wall shows up, locking her onto her farmland & blocking her from the rest of the world this daily, soilfull language is all she has. & it’s all she needs.

Body-memory: Reading this book of one woman’s mysterious & forced isolation I can’t help but see my daily companions differently. My cat is not just my cat, but a partner in crime, a devotee to the world he finds himself in (my apartment). He is a profound, earthly spectacle, that is, if I take the time to witness him. Now that I’ve read The Wall I can’t help but take his feline clock seriously, his mews & patterns rich & meaningful. What if Deuces were my only companion (as the protagonist finds herself only kept company by a cow, a cat, a dog)? How might I appreciate Deuces then?

HOW TO LOVE YOUR DAUGHTER, HILA BLUM (Published 2021)

≈5 word review: Mesmerizingly clear & insightful. Revealing. Messy/human.

Object: I want to say this book is binoculars as from the very first chapter our protagonist is a mother stalking her estranged daughter through a window. But no, this book is sadly a stethoscope. The mother thinks she’s putting an instrument to the world to gather information, to find her way out of loss; when in fact she’s got the instrument pressed to her own heart & so we readers are the true voyeurs, listening in on her escalating distress & disquieting plans.

Body-memory: As I read the last page of this book I sit in a Whole Foods dining area in Manhattan after an allergist appointment. It’s not often an ending impresses me, I usually find them forced & pandering (sorry world!) but Blum’s ending leaves me rapt in a pointed silence. My insides feel hushed as all conclusions are batted away. As I glance around the bustling grocery empire at the scrolling patrons scarfing down lunch before heading back to the office or hunched over their shared meal in seemingly casual conversation with one another, I can’t help but think of Blum’s protagonist bearing a secret both in her depths & in her quotidian movements. It’s not so much about whether our protagonist is right or wronged – something she herself adamantly grips – but that she cannot release a burden, an entirely relatable human condition. I put down my fork & look around. What might everyone here be bearing that I can’t see?

MRS. S, K. PATRICK (Published 2023)

≈5 word review: Elegant. Atmospheric. Lonely tone. Gender-wisdom.

Object: Let’s be blunt, dear reader: I go between thinking this book is a dildo left in the bathtub to ivy climbing academia’s walls. In our modern age, why pick? Let’s say Mrs. S is both. In this sensuous Mrs. Robinson for the gays there is queer desire, private & seething, at rest & yet never resting. Simultaneously there is the slow & ravenous spread of ivy, intricate and uncontrollable, refined and swarming. In Patrick’s believably rendered world, ivy finds its way across the exterior walls, around the windows, & maybe, yes, definitely, inside.

Body-memory: Our protagonist desires an ostensibly straight, older, married woman, the headmaster at the school they work at. As I navigate Mrs. S I am forced into my own sequestered earlier longings, often of straight girls & women. I often put the book down, recalling viscerally within my chest & quickened breath the “signals” straight women gave either knowingly or leakingly – without their desire’s permission, a forbidden territory they dared not turn the lights on. It is a read & a comfort to have the lights turn on by Patrick, to witness these exchanges so plainly, so complexly.

ORBITAL, SAMANTHA HARVEY (Published 2024)

≈5 word review: Meditative. Transcending. Metaphor-savvy. Touching. Perspective-shifting.

Object: Maybe you are out having dinner with friends; maybe you are running a few errands in the town over; maybe you step out of your house to mail a letter; & this alert pops up on your phone:

This destabilizing invitation prioritizes the expansion of where you imagine yourself to be. Are you in a restaurant? Widen the lens. Are you inches from “your” front steps? Widen the lens. Are you in the next town over? Next town over to who? Are the people in that town “in the next town over?” The location alert begs the question: What are we a part of, apart from, become party to? As the alert suggests, where depends on how we see it; much like in an M. C. Escher painting perspective creates relativity & vice versa. Orbital is this alert, an invitation for you to consider your up as someone else’s down, your noon as someone else’s night, your so-called selfhood & state-hood in endless venn diagram with other venn diagrams.

Body-memory: I’m in Georgia at a residency. I tell Angel I picked up the new Booker prize winner but can’t seem to focus enough to get into it. “Read it to me,” she says over FaceTime in the middle of the day. So I read her a page, I read her 5 pages, we are 10 pages in, delighting at the looping sentences, the multitudinous descriptions of the very earth we’re on, an earth I don’t think too much about through the eyes of astronauts, certainly not every day. As we delight at the text I feel weightless yet grounded, enchanted, transported, & high (in many senses of the word) – yes, I’m lifted up up up, as well as taken into an alternate state, in this case, where all is transient & precious & wowfull as a delicate, luminous beetle preserved in amber-agave, oh, look, it’s our little big planet in the cosmos as approached by Harvey’s odefull pen.

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, VIRGINIA WOOLF (Published 1927)

≈5 word review: Breath-taking interiority. Deft feminist commentary.

Object: It will surprise no one when I say waves. All matter of waves. This book is ocean waves, a sentence that seems to end but doesn’t, just rejoins the next, which only reincarnates as the next. This book is waves of emotion, curling & frothing within a body, waves washing the heart clean with muddy water, so that the more one gets clean the more one gets dirty. This book is a well-tended diary filled with these very waves of emotion, a private landing place for one who never intends to land but fills & overflows without period, without having to conclude for another’s eyes or ears or heart. This book is not just waves but the silence with which we greet the waves as we stand on shore: oh look, they break, but never end; oh look, I too am made of risings & breakings, long-winded like that wind most especially found by the sea, what is it about watching the waves that so soothes & disrupts me?

Body-memory: I first read To The Lighthouse in high school but I don’t remember it, can’t recall how it made me feel then, just that it was a mandatory element of our curriculum; even as an avid reader I most likely rushed through it as homework to be done after soccer practice. This time around I luxuriate in the high art of Woolf’s paradoxically present meanderings – or not meanderings, excavations. As she tunnels deeper into a moment it might appear like she’s going astray when in fact she is allowing her nimbleness to work through a knot with satisfaction – I know I’ll get this untangled, I know it, but even if I don’t, lord isn’t it fun to try? Isn’t the pulling & pulling its own satisfaction whether tangle be resolved or abandoned? I stand in our small kitchen reading a two page sentence to Angel containing a view of feminism I can’t believe was available to her consciousness in 1927. “Can you believe this sentence?” I ask Angel & as she puts the sizzling pan back down on the stove. “No, I can’t,” & I read it to her again & we marvel.

THE SEA, JOHN BANVILLE (Published 2005)

≈5 word review: Elegant. Satisfyingly & sensibly constructed. Never-endingly masterful language.

Object: An hourglass, but not as a keeper of time. An hourglass for the material & how it’s handled. Sand. Sand of The Sea. Sand that runs through the hourglass to suggest that something has passed, but no, it’s merely flipped; it’s the same material run through the thin portal again. Banville’s The Sea teaches me this: all of my emotional material, all of my life’s plots & plotless strands, are meant to be held, sifted through, flipped, & sifted through again. What appear to be separate, tiny, nouns is in fact a verb: upended, recycled, revisited, reawakened. An hourglass, but not for the hour it pretends to note. For the massive question of time it respects. That it flips & flips, negotiates & renegotiates, revisits like The Sea’s protagonist, grieving, flip, grieving, flip, grieving.

Body-memory: It’s 2 AM & I can’t remember the last time I refused sleep because I couldn’t put a book down. I can’t put this book down. Angel, who is obsessed with The Sea & has urged me to read it for over a decade now, stares at me from her side of the bed positively thrilled. “Hush!” I say (I get very strict when I’m on the closing pages of a book) “Be quiet!” Almost immediately I turn to her & contradict myself, sharing, “Oh my goodness this,” I read aloud a stunning sentence, a sentence like so many of Banville’s, one that feels like one is losing their step down a minor cliff, but the momentum & unwieldiness of not being able to get one’s footing transforms the moment into a major cliff.

Thank you for joining me on this trip through the cosmos that is literature. Have you read any of my year’s 18? What about the top 6? What about your own favorites? Tell me your thoughts & objects & body-memories!

Finishing THE SEA in my pajamas at 2 AM one summer night in 2024

With maple syrup,