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Favorite Reads from 2024
Am I an elderly British woman now?
Happy New Year! As per tradition, I’ve written about some good books I’ve read this calendar year for you. Not quite as many as usual (I blame the PlayStation), and many of them come from the same small British publisher, but let’s get into it.
Home-making
Would kill for Stephen
When I read a description of The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, first published in 1924, I had a feeling I’d love it.
It is the moving story of Eva, who is almost literally dying of boredom as an obsessively house-proud mother and home-maker… and her husband Lester, who is miserable in his job and wishes he could spend more time with his children. When Lester falls off a roof and injures himself, the couple are forced to swap roles: he is [a wheelchair user] at home and Eva goes to work in a department store. The rest of the novel explores the way their family life changes and develops in response to this very modern parenting arrangement.
I read the first two chapters this summer, but I found it so tender and sensitive I put it down, wanting to save it for another time. As the December blues hit, I reached for it. It is easily my favorite read of 2024, no question.
Mother, tbh
As the introduction to the Persephone edition explains, The Home-Maker is a book about children, but not for children. It is a plea to take children, their rights, and their worlds seriously and with patience. That D.C.F. was a proponent of the Montessori method of education shined through the book (I went to a Montessori school for preschool and kindergarten!).
While the book is 100 years old this year, I found its content extremely relevant. Just see this Cut article about family life and politics under Trump.
I’m fairly confident that Canfield Fisher would nod along with Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s analysis that:
[N]eoliberalism, as the defining secular religion of our age, has turned families into units of competitive advantage seeking, of opportunity hoarding, of malignant self-interest. I’ve said a lot of shady things about intensive parenting and how it’s a form of selfishness that puts the short-term easing of our consciences ahead of the long-term improvement of our communities.
This book hit on so many topics I’ve been curious about lately: Disability, gender roles, materialism/consumerism/capitalism, the role of community, pressures imposed by society, what makes a good father/parent, how the world might be otherwise… while also making me tear up more than once. I’m seriously considering giving a copy to every new or expecting parent I know.
(If the high price tag of the Persephone edition discourages you, there’s a free ebook version available through Project Gutenberg.)
Affairs!
Three of my favorites from ’24 happen to center around British women having affairs: Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence, To Bed With Grand Music by Marghanita Laski (another one from Persephone Books), and The End of the Affair by Graham Greene all wowed me in different ways.
Lawrence, through his manly gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, espouses some interesting views on masculinity and nature that range from quirky to down-right misogynistic, which unfortunately feel relevant in today’s political climate. (Another one that has a free ebook through Project Gutenberg.)
Laski and Greene, meanwhile, explore how social crisis like a war (World War II specifically) can lead to some moral issues surrounding marriage and faithfulness.
Thinking about space
More than once, I have dreamed I was in a strange apartment or house. I open a door and suddenly enter a much larger space: a living room large enough for a concert or a garden with a stream curving through it that I had somehow never known about.
It’s not as Wes Anderson-y as the cover
Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter features just such a magical space, a space not on the floor plan of the cramped apartment that Annie and Edward rent and live in with their daughter. One day, an outdoor terrace magically appears behind a door that had once led to an overstuffed closet.
As in her previous novel, Temporary (which I also love and recommend), Leichter doesn't worry too much about logic or timelines. We're here to move, swiftly, poetically.
Terrace Story pairs really well with The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, which I have tried to write about but can’t quite get a sufficient grip on. But my dedication to finding fancy new language to justify being a homebody remains, so I might try Philosophy of the Home by Emanuele Coccia in 2025.
Embracing the strange
Address: Centauri by F. L. Wallace is the disability science fiction book I knew existed somewhere out there, but hadn’t found till 2024. Like The Home-Maker, it feels incredibly modern for something written in the 1950s. I still don’t understand why there isn’t more stories in this sub-genre.
Of the gothic/creepy (off-putting?) books I read this fall, I’ll single out the very modern short story collection Out There by Kate Folk. You can read two of my favorite stories from the book online: “Heart Seeks Brain” and “Out There”.
Persephone doesn’t miss
8 Edgar Buildings, Bath BA1 2EE
I already mentioned The Home-Maker and To Bed with Grand Music above, but I can’t not mention a third banger from the same publisher, Persephone Books: High Wages by Dorothy Whipple, which I wrote about earlier this year. Of the Persephone books I’ve read so far, it reads the easiest and is the easiest for me to recommend to almost anyone.
Either I knocked it out of the park with my first (large) order from Persephone or I’m a sucker for “neglected fiction and non-fiction, mostly by women writers and mostly dating from the mid-twentieth century,” because I’ve loved all six(!) books I’ve read from Persephone, including The Call by Edith Ayrton Zangwill, an epic of the British suffragette movement, and Sofia Petrovna by Lydia Chukovskaya, “one of the few surviving contemporaneous accounts of [Stalin’s] Great Purge.”
Persephone has a nice page of recommendations, if you’re looking to browse.
Four seasons of books
This is also the year that I started this newsletter to share what I’ve been reading with friends like you!
I wrote about my winter with Russian fiction (The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin sticks out still), as well as my summer with British novels. Autumn, the best season, got two posts: spooky books and body horror books.