My charitable 2024 book retrospective
your quite useless wrapped
Hello friends,
Don’t worry, I’m kidding about being charitable—mostly. This will be as honest as usual, if via a slightly different tack to avoid feeling the need to paywall like I did last year.
Happy holidays, and as always, thanks for reading quite useless. Austen Math will return with Pride & Prejudice sometime in the new year.
The wrap
I’m going to start with the books that made a strong enough impression for me to write about them at length already: Masters of Atlantis; Status Anxiety and Slow Productivity; The Guest Lecture; The Elephant in the Brain and All Things Are Too Small; All Fours; and Sense and Sensibility. Follow the links for more. Similarly, No Judgment got the full-glam Insta treatment before I banished the app from my phone:
Some others warranted this sort of attention but didn’t get it, and a few of these I discuss below. The remainder I’ll simply list to close out, with paid subscribers welcome to solicit my no-holds-barred opinions in the quite useless chat.
I read
’s Social Creature in advance of our Interintellect salon in February, and enjoyed it so much I read Here in Avalon as well shortly thereafter. Social Creature is chock-full of mimetic desire, New Yorky in the best way (The Carlyle!), and Ripleyesque without feeling derivative—probably the reason I got a hankering and picked up The Boy Who Followed Ripley, Highsmith’s fourth in the series, later in the year. I also recommend Tara and Dhananjay Jagannathan’s joint Substack, aptly named The Line of Beauty! To satisfy my Hollinghurst craving, I read The Stranger’s Child this year.The Ladies’ Paradise amazed me in its simultaneous historical specificity and thematic contemporaneity (did T.S. Eliot write about Zola? I have to think he would approve). In this 1883 origin story of the modern department store, you will also find the more enduring dynamics of commercial innovation on individual lives—and a rags-to-riches narrative of, like, quintessential, morality-tale-level purity. It probably captivated me more than any other non-Austen, non-Proust classic novel I read this year, though I also devoured Passing and Mrs. Dalloway. (Having finished Within a Budding Grove, I am still on track to finish Remembrance of Things Past by 2030!)
I read Elaine Kraf’s The Princess of 72nd Street, which seems to be experiencing a bit of a renaissance; I want to say it is this year’s Cassandra at the Wedding. Really good! I love when novels approach dark/taboo subjects with nuance and humor, and Kraf nails this balance in depicting Princess Esmeralda in her “radiance.” Also very New Yorky, obviously, but West Side.
If you are a writer who reads a lot of “craft” books, I recommend leveling up to Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. I think I already mentioned in another newsletter its most enduring distinction—that of “flat” and “round” characters—which he notably presents without their subsequent popular value disparity:
One great advantage of flat characters is that they are easily recognized whenever they come in—recognized by the reader's emotional eye, not by the visual eye, which merely notes the recurrence of a proper name. In Russian novels, where they so seldom occur, they would be a decided help. It is a convenience for an author when he can strike with his full force at once, and flat characters are very useful to him, since they never need reintroducing, never run away, have not to be watched for development, and provide their own atmosphere—little luminous disks of a pre-arranged size, pushed hither and thither like counters across the void or between the stars; most satisfactory.
It’s not just the Russians now—we need more flat characters! Everyone has over-indexed on that made-up internet word “sonder” or something. I love the “little luminous disks of a pre-arranged size.” Love to see them “pushed hither and thither.” Great flat characters forever.
Halle Butler’s latest, Banal Nightmare has more and better flat characters than you usually see these days—it’s a group portrait—and as vicious and caustic as I expected it to be. I mean this as a high compliment:
As a bonus for (secular) parents: you gotta pick up Yuval Noah Harari’s Unstoppable Us, Volume 1: How Humans Took Over the World and Volume 2: Why the World Isn’t Fair. My six-year-old has shown a catastrophic preference for non-fiction this year, and these have been my consolation prizes.
Here are the rest of the books I read, in no particular order (I enjoyed many of them, some unequivocally):
If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga
Henry Henry by Allen Bratton
I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai
Come and Get It by Kiley Reid
I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel
The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy
Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel
Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss’s Glossier by Maris Meltzer
The Book of Ayn by Lexi Freiman
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt
The Touchstone by Edith Wharton
Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman
Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter
Second Place by Rachel Cusk
Truman by David McCullough
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil by Paul Bloom
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
If you have recommendations for 2025, please tell me!
Merry merry & cheers,
ANJ
I'm reading once again A Dance to the Music of Time. Powell is a great writer, under appreciated. Like Proust he builds an entire world.
I'm so glad you read (and wrote about) "Masters of Atlantis."
A recommendation: Paul Fussell's "Class: A Guide Through the American Status System." It is witheringly, wickedly funny, absolutely and exactly correct, and guaranteed to offend everyone. Only problem is it's forty years out of date; our time desperately needs an up-to-the-moment new version of Fussell's observations, so we can know how to look down our nose at other people more precisely. Despite being old it's still an excellent book, though.