Books of 2024

Well, sharing my love for Storygraph was the last thing I posted about books here... Funny how that works, as with finishing a book on Storygraph I also fill out a short review, which apparently fulfills my need to share anything about what I've read anywhere else. Let's see if I can fix this in 2025!

For although I did not post about them here, I did read loads in 2024, with a grand total of 43 books. That is the same amount as I read in 2023, which amazed me then and it amazes me again. Several of the 43 were library books, proving once again that joining your local library is one of the best things you can do to read more. 

I am currently in the middle of reading 3 other books, but since I probably won't finish any of them before midnight, now is the time to share the list:

1 The Whalebone Theatre

2 The Instant

3 Kaas uit eigen keuken

4 Astonish me

5 I know why the caged bird sings

6 Looking for Alaska

7 Cat's Cradle

8 Loathe to love you

9 The Singer's Gun

10 Turtles all the way down

11 Voor ieder wat waars

12 Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

13 Love, theoretically

14 Day

15 Waarom vuilnismannen meer verdienen dan bankiers

16 Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

17 The Firm

18 Childern of Time

19 De Onmisbaren

20 High Fidelity

21 De terugkeer van de wespendief

22 Skippy dies

23 Yellowface

24 The Lola Quartet

25 Persuasion

26 Morele ambitie

27 The five dysfunctions of a team

28 De supermarktsurvivalgids

29 Armoede uitgelegd aan mensen met geld

30 Chain-Gang All-Stars

31 Atalanta

32 The Wake-up Call

33 Circe

34 Station Eleven

35 We are all completely besides ourselves

36 Simon vs the homosapiens agenda

37 The Hours

38 Good Material

39 The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

40 The Bone Clocks

41 The Duke and I

42 The Pier Falls

43 Everything I never told you

Lots of Dutch non-fiction and also lots of rereads (7 in total), which partially might explain why I didn't post anything about them here. But still, 36 new books to break down into neat little lists!

Best English novel

1 Chain-Gang All-Stars

2 Day

3 Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

I read Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah in 2019 (how time flies), when I said I hoped he'd write a novel. Well, he did. Chain-Gang All-Stars is a horrible book. It's also a great book. It's one of those books that tells you things you don't want to know about, but you want to keep on reading anyway, because some part of you does want to know how it ends and hopes for the best. The end left me somewhat shattered, as only great literature does. This is one of those books I wanted to post about, but couldn't get my head around to actually start writing, as there is just too much to say about it. Read this book, if you haven't.

All the other new novels this year somewhat pale by comparison, but Day by Michael Cunningham was another good read. His stories are always small, centering on a single day and a few characters (as in The Hours) but in that smallness they tackle the big things in life. This novel was started before covid but changed by it. I think it is a testament to the strange times we lived through, as are Ali Smith's seasonal novels.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is a library book from the beginning of the year, which was somewhat eclipsed by later reads. It was a nice read; it is always difficult to create neurotypical main characters without at some level also making fun of them, but Gail Honeyman managed that nicely, especially as more and more details of Eleanor's past are revealed. In the end, the story turned out to be more uplifting than I expected from the outset.

Honourable mention to Skippy Dies by Paul Murray. This somewhat felt like a Secret History make-over, but turned out to be completely different. His The Bee Sting has been on all the top 10 lists this year and has also found its way to my bookshelf, so we will see about that next year.

Best Dutch novel

Did not ready any of these this year... There was a graphic novel (De terugkeer van de wespendief) but that deserves its own category when I actually read more than one.

Best classic

I read a couple of books that are considered classics, such as I know why the caged bird sings, Cat's Cradle and The Firm, but I wouldn't put any of them in a 'best classic' list. I also read a couple of books that are retellings of actualy classical stories, namely Atalanta and Circe. These obviously don't count as 'actual' classics, but they were better reads than the 'real' classics nonetheless. So the only book that I would put down as best classic is one of my rereads; Persuasion. This has been my favourite novel by Jane Austen for a couple of years and reading it again proved to me once again why.

Best non-fiction

1 Waarom vuilnismannen meer verdienen dan bankiers

2 Morele ambitie

23% of the books I read this year were non-fiction, again mainly thanks to the library. Some of these were very practical (cheese making) but most were concerned with social or moral issues. They were informative, but not the best. The two books mentioned above, both by Rutger Bregman, stood out in that they had some original ideas and practical tools to get started. Interestingly, I also read two books by Rutger Bregman in 2015, the year of my original 52 book challenge. He is apparently still very current almost 10 years later.

Best autobiographical

1 The Instant

The Instant is the follow-up to Amy Liptrot's autobiography The Outrun, which I read in 2017 and wasn't too positive about. Having just seen the film adaptation, I am now curious to read that first book again. In The Instant, Amy leaves Orkney and moves to Berlin. Although it is supposed to again be autobiographical, some of the details struck me as a bit too fanciful. The blurb describes it as giving us an 'unapologetic look' at her addictions (firstly to alcohol, in this sequel mostly to love), but to me it felt a bit too good to be true sometimes.

The only other book I read that could be considered autobiographical is I know why the caged bird sings, which I did not care for at all. This might be an American thing I fail to understand, but I couldn't make anything of Maya Angelou's story. Maybe if you've read some of her other works, this reads as a rags-to-fame narrative, but now knowing a lot about here, it was mostly confusing.

Best short story collection

1 The Pier Falls

Only read the one, but it deserves mention here. The Pier Falls by Mark Haddon has sat on my bookshelf for at least a decade, but I finally got around to reading it. It is dark, it is suspenseful, it is populated by characters who have lost any sort of light in their lives, although not for lack of trying. Some of these stories have stuck around in my head for the last couple of weeks, although they are also starting to blend into each other in their bleakness. Maybe not the best thing to read in the dark final days of the year.

Best scifi/fantasy

1 Children of Time

I would always put Station Eleven and The Bone Clocks here (in that order), but those are very fond rereads, so we'll go with the only other real scifi book I read, Children of Time. This took me a while to get into, mostly because Adrian Tchaikovsky insists upon making everything scientifically explainable, and not in the way of Andy Weir. So that made for tough going, but it was a gripping story nonetheless. I have the two sequels ready on the shelf, hopefully I'll get around to them in the coming year.

Best 'new' author

1 Gail Honeyman

2 Joanna Quinn

3 Dolly Alderton

Again, not a full list, and sadly not the quality of authors I put here last year. Gail Honeyman only wrote the one book so far (see above). Joanna Quinn almost made the list below this one, but honestly, she shouldn't. I hope she can redeem herself with another novel soon. Dolly Alderton has written a couple more, one of which I got for Christmas, so we'll see whether that makes any of the lists the coming year. Good Material was a nice read, but not the best.

Most disappointing novel

1 We are all completely besideds ourselves

2 Yellowface

3 Astonish me

I was somewhat tempted to put The Whalebone Theatre here at first, but rereading what I wrote about that in January, and looking back on the other novels I read, it is nowhere near making the cut for most disappointing. It wasn't all it could have been, but it was so much better than some other novels.

So the ones that are on this list are books that I had high expectations of, but which failed me miserably. We are all completely besideds ourselves is written by Karen Joy Fowler of The Jane Austen Book Club, but it is nothing like that. In fact, I found it a horrible read, depressing and sad. I won't go into too much detail why, as it will give away one of the main plot points of the novel, but I really did not like the characters, the plot or the stance it takes on a couple of moral issues.

Yellowface is quite popular in the bookshops, but I am glad I got my hand on a library book. The story was very thin and flat, the main character completely unlikeable and the whole point of the book is seeped in American attitudes. I can see how it works well on BookTok, which is all about sharp opinions and lack of nuance, but I am not a fan.

I wrote on Astonish Me in February. I think this may not be a disappointing book in and of itself, but my expectations of it were just so much higher after the joy of reading Great Circle. I hope Maggie Shipstead returns to the greatness of that book soon.

Authors I read more than once:

- Emily St. John Mandel (3x)

- Ali Hazelwood (2x)

- Rutger Bregman (2x)

- John Green (2x)

- Michael Cunningham (2x)

Last year, there were a lot of new authors in this category, most of whom I did read more of this year. This year, I've read all of them before. Emily St. John Mandel will stay a firm favourite, as the only author to appear in this list 3 years in a row. I enjoyed The Singer's Gun and The Lola Quartet, but compared to her later novels, they don't make any of the lists above. I hope she'll have a new novel out soon. On the other hand, I am now quite done with Ali Hazelwood and John Green, these are typical library snacks that you read once and never look back to.

I was tempted to put a 'Best romance' category, since I borrowed quite a lot of those from the library, but non of them actually were all that good, so the honest top 3 would have been mostly rereads, with again Persuasion as the top book. As I probably only reread books I enjoyed the first time, they give a somewhat skewed perspective. So let's hope that in the coming year, I will read some more great new books!

Books of 2023

Yes, it is that time of the year again! Looking back on all I have read this year and planning ahead for my 2024 reads. Last year around this time I was in the middle of what turned out to be the best book I would read the entire year (spoiler alert!) and this year might possibly be the same. But we'll find out about that next year around this time.
Amazingly, I read 43 books this year. That is 2 more than in 2015, when I was actually attempting to read 52 books in my books challenge. Turns out that joining the local library will give you access to a massive amount of books, some good and some not so good, some of which you'd never thought of to read by yourself, others you're sure you'll never read again. Added to that, 2022 was quite a poor year in reading so I still had loads of books waiting to be read (including 3 Man Booker winners, as it turns out).

So, without further ado, let's look at the list:

1 Great Circle

2 The Last White Man

3 Flights of Fancy

4 Faalmoed & andere filosofische overdenkingen

5 Sorrow and Bliss

6 Men without Women

7 Little fires everywhere

8 Altijd iets the vinden

9 The No-Show

10 De Kooi

11 The Color Purple

12 Wall and Piece

13 The Miniaturist

14 Welkom bij de club

15 Gegijzeld

16 The Secret History

17 You have a friend in 10A

18 Sea of Tranquility

19 Monet - Op zoek naar het licht

20 Love Marriage

21 The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

22 Monet - Een feest voor het oog

23 The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

24 The End of the World is a Cul de Sac

25 Becoming

26 Liefdesbang

27 The Long View

28 Parable of the Sower

29 Foster

30 Parable of the Talents

31 Crying in H Mart

32 Daisy Jones & the Six

33 Companion Piece

34 Trespasses

35 Love on the Brain

36 Last Night in Montreal

37 Our Missing Hearts

38 The Love Hypothesis

39 Shuggie Bain

40 Birnam Wood

41 Project Hail Mary

42 The Switch

43 The Promise

Just two rereads in the entire pile; a children's book (Gegijzeld, which would now probably be labelled 'young adult') that I wanted to reread and a Beth O'Leary snack (The Switch) during NaNoWriMo. That makes for a total of 41 entirely new books, fiction and non-fiction, English and Dutch, in a year. This may well be my best reading year of the last 10 years, if not more.

Best English novel

1 Great Circle

2 Trespasses

3 Sea of Tranquility

Not surprisingly, I've written about all these three books earlier, as they made quite an impression. Great Circle is just one of the best books I've ever read; wholly fictional, but it feels like you've lived an entire life with these characters. Trespasses feels equally real but is rooted in a past not all that long ago, which makes the impression it leaves somehow feel more real. Sea of Tranquility is another one of Emily St. John Mandel's best works, although nothing will ever top Station Eleven.

But this was a hard choice to make. The good thing about GoodReads is that it tracks your reviews, so I've ended up with the books that I gave five star reviews when I just read them, but honorable mentions must go out to Project Hail Mary (see also below), Companion Piece, Little fires everywhere, The Last White Man and Love Marriage. All great books that made a lasting impression this year.

Best Dutch novel

1 Welkom bij de club

So Thomas van der Meer calls his book a novel, and I will treat it as such, but it feels more like an autobiography of the author in his transformation from woman to man and from office worker to healthcare professional. He faces so much judgement and prejudice, it is a miracle this story is as light and funny as it is.

Best classic

Well... I read a couple of novels that could be considered classics this year; The Color Purple, The Secret History, maybe even Parable of the Sower? But I wasn't really overwhelmed by any of these books, especially the first two, which have become quite famous. I enjoyed Parable of the Sower for the most part, but then at the end it fizzled away into nothing much and the sequel, Parable of the Talents, didn't improve much. So despite actually reading some classics for the first time in years, I won't be appointing a 'best' among them.

Best non-fiction

1 Faalmoed  & andere filosofische overdenkingen 

2 Liefdesbang

3 Altijd iets te vinden

The library has a wealth of non-fiction books I would never actually buy but enjoy reading very much. These three books al taught me something in their on field; philosophy, relationships and art. This is no strict order, I enjoyed and learned from all of them, and several of the other non-fiction books I read too. 

Best autobiographical

1 Becoming

2 De Kooi

3 Crying in H Mart

It's been a while since I could actually separate non-fiction and autobiographical into two piles, but here we are. I very much enjoyed Michelle Obama's autobiography, although it could have been a bit shorter. But it gave a good insight into her life and the process of running for president of the United States. De Kooi is written by a special forces man who is famous because of a tv programme he participates in. This book felt like a covid-project; not much else to do, so time to put your memories to paper, but it gave an interesting insight in a small group of specialised agents who keep society safe. Crying in H Mart has become somewhat of a BookTok phenomenon and as I didn't really know the author I couldn't really relate to it all that much, but it was an enjoyable read.

Best short-story collection

1 The End of the World is a Cul de Sac

2 You have a Friend in 10A

3 Men without Women

I read The End of the World is a Cul de Sac before reading Trespasses and I was a bit confused about what Louise Kennedy was on about. Some of these stories were great, some not so much. But this was the right way around, as reading You have a Friend in 10A, the story collection of Maggie Shipstead, sent me into doubts about her writing. Some authors just excel in writing longer stories, although again some of the short stories were really good. I've written about Men withouth Women before and it only made the list because it does contain some nice stories. But none of these collections are really that great, especially compared to last year's 'winner' Story of your life and others.

Best scifi/fantasy

1 Project Hail Mary

2 Sea of Tranquility

3 Parable of the Sower

I've written about Project Hail Mary and about Sea of Tranquility before; they are that wonderful combination of great writing, smart plots, interesting characters and a wholly new setting, which the author created just for us. Parable of the Sower is the last on the list because as a scifi novel, especially a dystopian one, I did enjoy it. It just left me annoyed at the open ending and religious overtones. But it is one of those novels that has been around for ages and you wonder how you never knew it existed (until someone metioned it in a conference talk, in my case).

Best 'new' author

1 Maggie Shipstead / Louise Kennedy

2 Celeste Ng

3 Taylor Jenkins Reid

I'm putting two authors on the first place here, as both produced a wonderful novel and a somewhat mediocre short story collection. Can't really decide between them. I am looking forward to reading more of their novels, as that is apparently where their strenghts lie. 

Celeste Ng's Little fires everywhere must have been on my to-read pile for literally years before I picked it up and then I was mad at myself for not doing so earlier, because it is a great story. I then read Our Missing Hearts, which made less of an impression than I would have thought given the subject matter. Taylor Jenkins Reid is another BookTok phenomenon; I enjoyed both of her novels but they seem a bit too catered to the current sentiments in young adulty reading; I hope to find something that has truly 'her' voice in the coming year.

Most disappointing novel

1 The Color Purple

2 The Miniaturist

3 Birnam Wood

As mentioned above, The Color Purple is now considered a classic and even won the Pullizer Prize, but I'm afraid I'm missing the hype here. I didn't care for any of the characters, the style felt stilted and the plot really wasn't going anywhere. The Miniaturist was one of those novels that spent a lot of time in the 'top 10' piles in the book store but I'm happy I didn't buy it, because it was a silly story, set in an unrealistic Amsterdam of the seventeenth century. It feels like a book Americans would read to 'understand' the Netherlands or the Dutch somehow. Both these books were among my firsr library readings, which just goes to show how easy it is to borrow something you're not entirely sure you will actually like.

I wrote about my disappointment with Birnam Wood earlier; I probably would have rated it a lot higher if it hadn't been written by Eleanor Catton, which just proves that writing one good book is no guarantee for further success. There were books I disliked far mor than Birnam Wood, such as The Love Hypothesis (which is basically Ali Hazelwood's earlier novel, Love on the Brain, in another jacket) or The Long View (which is Elizabeth Jane Howard's least rated book) but since my expectations for these books were so much lower, they just receive an honorable mention here.

And as a special bonus category:

Best Man Booker winner

1 The Promise

2 The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

3 Shuggie Bain

I had quite a pile of Man Booker winners still to read (2020, 2021 and 2022), and despite the large number of other books I read this year, I fitted them all in. All of them felt like 'real' Man Booker winners in their own rights, although I probably would have picked other books from the short list in these respective years (Maggie Shipstead! Claire Keegan!). But I can see why they won. I enjoyed The Promise best of all; a well-structured plot without it being too obvious and a nice tie-in between the novel's events and historical milestones. I look forward to reading other books by Damon Galgut, especially if they have the same stream-of-conscious-like writing style. The Seven Moons... took me a while to get through, but it shed light on a part of the world, and on a history of that part of the world, which I'd never read about before. Shuggie Bain I wrote about before; I still haven't fully made up my mind about that one.

Authors I read more than once:

- Maggie Shipstead (2x)

- Celeste Ng (2x)

- Beth O'Leary (2x)

- Emily St. John Mandel (2x)

- Louise Kennedy (2x)

- Taylor Jenkins Reid (2x)

- Octavia E. Butler (2x)

- Ali Hazelwood (2x)

Apart from Beth O'Leary and Emily St. John Mandel, these are all new authors I read for the first time in 2024. And apparently, their first novels gave me an appetite for more. And next year I will probably read more from all of these authors and many more, although I don't think I will ever manage 43 books in one year again for quite some time!

Sea of Tranquility

The nice thing about GoodReads is that it stores all kinds of data about the books you read. For example, the date on which you finished reading a particular book (if you enter the date correctly, of course). This means I can see that I finished reading You have a friend in 10A on April 9th and Sea of Tranquility on April 11th. Which means I read Sea of Tranquility in just two days.
This may not be that surprising, since Emily St. John Mandel was my favourite new author of 2022 and I couldn't wait to get my hands on a paperback copy of her newest novel (which I surprisingly did not find in the biggest European bookstore in London but in my own local bookstore-around-the-corner). And I was on holiday in early April, so plenty of time to read. But the novel that originally drew me to her work, Station Eleven, was one of those that I like to spread out over as much time as possible, just for the story not to be over. I would have thought Sea of Tranquility would have the same effect, but somehow, I flew through it. 

The reason I haven't written about it earlier is that I still can't fully make up my mind about the book; how much do I like it?

The novel takes a similar pattern to Cloud Atlas, with several interconnected stories set apart in time and featuring different protagonists. We first travel forward in time from 1912 to 2401, and then back again to 1918. Just like David Mitchell, Emily St. John Mandel has recurring characters in all of her novels, which gives another layer of interconnection. Even thought it is executed well, it sometimes made the whole thing feel like a bit of a combined copy of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks (added to which, while David Mitchell's novels lean more towards fantasy, there is an apocalyptical undertone to both authors).

Although the interconnection is a nice element, it can become somewhat of a lazy read because you already know some of the main characters or the people they interact with. Ah, yes, the guy who stole his sister's videos and has now become a big artist by setting them to music. We know the guy, we know his sister Vincent, we know how their stories end. There are new things to learn of course, like how Mirella's story ends after Vincent looses sight of her in The Glass Hotel, but those chapters somehow feel like a sequel to that novel, knocked out to cash on something that already worked before rather than an original new story.

Added to that, some parts of the story seem too easily autobiographical. One of the protagonists is a female author on a book tour after the success of her novel on a post-pandemic apocalyptical world. She has repeated discussions with readers concerning a death scene it that novel, which is eerily familiar to exactly that scene in Station Eleven. The descriptions of a book tour, the people met and the loneliness felt, clearly tell us something about the author's experience after her novel became a big seller. Added to that, several parts are again set on Vancouver island, albeit in the distant past, but it felt like things I had read before, places I had already been.

Which is maybe why I liked the chapters that included wholly new storylines and characters better. Especially the parts set in space, where man has colonised the Moon as a trial version of later colonies further away, with the trial now having become redundant and the Moon colonies just another sad backwater to grow up in. The theme of time travel runs throughout the novel, with its own mind-bending puzzle at the end; if they had not travelled in time, would the need to travel in time actually have been there, causing the whole story to unravel? I can never get my head around these things, but in this novel it felt neatly wrapped up.

And as always, the writing is beautiful. Sometimes just two or three sentences suffice to set an entire scene or describe an entire personality. Sea of Tranquility felt a lot shorter than the other novels, as thought the writing was a bit lighter, less filled with meaning. That is to say, the meaning is mostly in the plot and the musings on time travel, and less in the words on the page.

All in all, I enjoyed reading the book immesely. It has made me buy all three books published before Station Eleven, just to have the matching set. But I do hope that in a next novel, we get to meet new characters, discover new places, discuss new ideas. For even though this book does not feel like the same trick all over again, there are many fresh ideas and new angles, it does start to feel a bit stale around the edges. 

Books of 2022

Despite all of my best intentions, 2022 was not the greatest reading year by a long stretch. I was hoping to finish a couple of books (one fiction and one non-fiction, coincidentally both about flying) before the end of the year to add some volume to the list, but the last week of December proved to be a short version of the entire year; wanting to read more, but not actually reading more.
So I ended with a total of 25 books, my lowest since 2017 (23 books). Some of them were really great, reminding me why I love to spend time reading, while others were pretty big disappointments. I somehow managed to avoid any of my favourite go-to auhors (Atwood, McEwan, Mitchell Swift) and read a lot of new authors, which may have come at a cost in quality. Since reading so few books I would have liked for all of them to be great, but in a year with lots of changes and big events (all on a personal level, so I will not get in to these here), picking the right book is somehow more difficult. Also, NaNoWriMo in November always halts my reading pace and drives me to reread old favourites, since writing something new and reading something new at the same time doesn't work well in my head. These are, of course, all excuses.

Let's get on with the full list:

1 The Every

2 Breakfast at Tiffany's

3 Harlem Shuffle

4 Are you experienced?

5 Story of your life and others

6 Wake

7 The Roadtrip

8 Eight Detectives

9 The Constant Rabbit

10 Beartown

11 Station Eleven

12 The Song of Achilles

13 Grimm Tales

14 There but for the

15 The Reading List

16 The Ladies Midnight Swimming Club

17 Mr Salary

18 The Flatshare

19 The Glass Hotel

20 First Person Singular

21 West with the Night

22 Small Things Like These

23 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

24 What If? 2

25 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

So three rereads, the two Harry Potters (NaNoWriMo time) and The Flatshare, since I had read Beth O'Leary's The Roadtrip earlier in the year and was in the mood for more of the same.

I read only one 'classical' novel, or rather short story collection, Breakfast at Tiffany's. You could count the Grimm's fairy tales as classical literature, but Philip Pullman has edited them to his own taste, so we will not. No books in Dutch at all, either fiction or non-fiction. Only two non-fiction books in total, come to that. But on the other hand, many more short story collections than the past couple of years.

Best English novel

1 Station Eleven

2 The Constant Rabbit

3 The Song of Achilles

If I had finished the novel I am still reading this might have been a harder choice, but as it stands, Station Eleven is hands down the best thing I read in 2022. Maybe even the best thing I read in 10 years. I wrote a gushing review about it when I had just finished it, so I will not repeat that here, but I do want to add that maybe I am now actually ready to watch the tv series that has been made about the novel. If only just to return to that universe afresh one more time.

The Constant Rabbit is the newest novel by Jasper Fforde, one of my favourite authors who should really hurry up and get that sequal to Shades of Grey (not Fifty Shades of Grey) underway. But in the meantime we got this bizarre novel in which due to some mishap a couple of rabbits have been changed into human-size, intelligent creatures. Everything is completely absurd, with a serious undertone concerning segragation, exclusion of others and the will to reach across a divide and connect. Coupled with big-company greed and the destruction of the natural environment, there are so many current themes packed into what on the surface just appears to be mad scifi, it deserves a second and third look before you make any conclusions. I loved it, which was a relief after the disaster of Early Riser in 2019.

Which brings us to number three. I would not have expected the Song of Achilles to be third in this list, reading so many other great novels; Harlem Shuffle, Wake, or Beartown by earlier year favourites Colson Whitehead, Anna Hope and Frederik Bachman, an Ali Smith novel (There but for the), new stories by new writers (The Reading List or The Ladies Midnight Swimming Club) or even the other Emily St. John Mandel book that I read, The Glass Hotel. But, most of these disappointed or annoyed in some way or another. Maybe it was the overall sense of this year not being a really good reading year, but I couldn't get myself to put any of those in third place. So the Booktok sensation Song of Achilles, which I got as a present from a friend who teaches secondary school and assured me all the teens are loving it, gets the trophy. I didn't do Latin or Greek in secondary school, so most of this story was new to me, apart from a badly remembered evening of watching Troy. I was surprised by how well the story was written, how the perspective of Patroclus changes your view on the events, and how much the characters come to life. It is, of course, very much a product of its time in the changes Madeline Miller made to her source material, but that doesn't warp the story beyond recognition. If I were in secondary school now, I would be happy to study the classical tales with books like these.

Best Dutch novel 

None of these. I have just joined the local library, so I might actually start to read these a bit more often, but in 2022, nope.

Best non-fiction (including autobiographical)

1 West with the night

2 What If? 2

I cannot actually believe I forgot to write about West with the Night when I read it, but it must have been the NaNoWriMo craze coming on. So let's set things right here. West with the Night is the 1942 memoir by Beryl Markham, who has led at least four lives combined. She grew up in Kenya running wild on a farm with Masai, went on to train racehorses, then she became one of the first bush pilots, culminating in the first east to west non-stop solo flight across the Atlantic. Then she became a society lady. Now we cannot be sure everything she wrote about actually happened (apart from the records, of course), but the way she writes, the way the language flows from the page, is simply magical. It is a shame she didn't write more, but then her book wasn't really a raving success when it came out in the middle of WWII. Bizarrely, it took Ernest Hemingway to pull the book from oblivion. I am very glad he did, for it was a marvel to read, and has sparked some interest in other flying related novels and books which I am currently reading.

What If? 2 is obviously the sequel to What if? in which Randall Monroe from xkcd (which I visit almost religiously on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays for new comics) answers scientific questions in a surprising way. Somewhat like the Ig Nobel prizes, it makes you laugh before it makes you think.

Best short-story collection

1 Story of your life and others

2 Breakfast at Tiffany's

3 Grimm Tales

It has been a while since I actually have some choices for this category, and I actually got to let one out as well (First Person Singular, which I discussed earlier). So Story of your life and others was a big surprise early in the year. The title story is the inspiration for the film Arrival, but differs so much from it that only the bare essentials remain the same. That actually made for a very nice reading experience. The other stories in the collection are a mixed bunch, as I wrote earlier, but the better ones have stuck with me for a while.

Breakfast at Tiffany's was happened upon me when I finished The Every while staying at a friend and had no other book to read. It was a fun read, the 'short novel and three other stories', although I can't actually remember anything about the latter. It made me think I should read more by Truman Capote, although I couldn't actually name any of his other works apart from In Cold Blood, which I read years ago. Grimm Tales are retellings of fairy tales by Philip Pullman, who added some clarification notes at the end of each one. I never really warmed to any of his other books, so I was a bit tentative about reading these. Most of them were nice, although it got a bit repetitive towards the end. But then again, these fairy tales are filled with almost interchangeable stock characters, so maybe that one isn't really Pullman's fault.

Best scifi/fantasy

1 Station Eleven

2 The Constant Rabbit

3 Story of your life and others

See above for more on these books, but I'll say here it was nice to have such a mixed bunch of 'literary' works that are also intertwined with scifi elements. Maybe genre boundries are disappearing somewhat?

Best 'new' author

1 Emily St. John Mandel

2 Ted Chiang

This one can't really come as a surprise, reading everything above. Can't wait to get my hands on the proper edition of Sea of Tranquility and love that too. Ted Chiang doesn't seem to have any other collections out apart from the one I've already read but I'll see what I can do to find any of his other work.

Most disappointing novel(la)

1 Small Things like these

2 The Every

3 Mr Salary

I wrote a lot about Small Things like these and The Every earlier, which I won't repeat here. I just reread my disappointing novels from 2020 and I think The Every suffers from the same problem as The Testaments; the author just wanted to give their audience more of the same, to expand their world, when they should have just stuck to the one brilliant novel. Tacking new things on the sides doesn't help and in some cases even detracts from the original. Both novels do of course adress very relevant social issues, which I fully agree should be put into literature, but let it at least be good literature.

Maybe I shouldn't put the very short story that is Mr Salary in with this bunch, but it was yet another case of Sally Rooney disappointment. I read it in under an hour and forgot about the whole thing in less time than that. Really, why put these things out there? I hope to see better works from her in the coming time, but landing in the 'most disappointing' category two years running doesn't bode well...

Authors I read more than once:

- Beth O'Leary (2x)

- Emily St. John Mandel (2x)

- J. K. Rowling (2x)

The Glass Hotel

While in Portland I bought Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, which I read immediately and enjoyed immensely. At the same time I bought another of her novels, The Glass Hotel, which I saved for later. But with great new authors, later always comes sooner than I expect, so when the weather turned grey I turned towards her fifth novel.

Now Station Eleven is set in a post-apocalyptic dystopian future, but The Glass Hotel stays closer to home. We meet a couple of characters, who all at some point find themselves in the same hotel (mostly made of glass) on Vancouver Island. Afterwards they go their separate ways, but their lives remain interconnected less obviously but tied in nicely towards the end of the story.

Now apparently Barack Obama included the novel in one of his recommended reading lists, so it must strike a chord with some people, but it sadly left me a bit underwhelmed. I liked most of the characters, but I couldn't really sympathise with them. Some of them disppeared for long stretches of the novel, which made it unclear who exactly were the main characters. Also, most of them don't get a happy ending, but I wasn't particularly interested in their fates. 

Apart from the characers, the language and writing style were good, but the themes and subjects just didn't really grip me. Two searching millenials, trying to achieve something but at the same time trying to hold each other back doesn't make for happy reading. The most enjoyable part was the collapse of the business of one of the other characters, which is probably not supposed to be the high point of the novel.

I read somewhere that St. John Mandel is working towards an inclusive universe, where all her novels are interconnected and characters can be found in several places, like David Mitchell does in his works. In this novel, the Georgian Flu that wipes out most of the population in Station Eleven is quickly quenced, and we meet a couple of characters from that novel in more detail. However, they didn't strike me as the most interesting characters then, and they weren't that special here. It is a nice touch, but it doesn't give you the surprise element that often happens in David Mitchell novels, where you meet the grandson or best friend of a character from an earlier novel, and a throwaway remark suddenly brings the two together. Here, it was more on the nose, which clashes with her otherwise pretty subtle style.

So all in all, it left me underwhelmed. It is always hard to follow-up on a very good novel, as the recent example of Sally Rooney also proved, so maybe my expectations were just too high. Luckily, St. John Mandel already has a new novel out. The only annoying thing is that I now have these two novels in a specific edition and want to buy all her other novels in the same edition. Which are nowhere to be found. I may have to travel back to the US, possibly even Portland, to locate the right versions...

Station Eleven

A couple of weeks ago I found myself in the largest independent bookstore in the world (in Portland, Oregon) and despite the weight limit on my already pretty full suitcase, I was determined not to leave without buying a book. I had a list of books that I maybe somewhat wanted, and as I walked past the shelves stuffed with books, I managed to locate all of them. This was surprising in itself, since a couple of weeks earlier a bookstore in London (England) managed to contain exactly zero of the books on the list.

So which to choose, with so much to choose from? 

I will not bore you with my entire thought process, but in the end I walked out with Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel (which actually took the longest to locate, as her name gives you so many options to place it). In the beginning of the pandemic, Station Eleven became a small hit because of its supposed prophetic qualities: we witness a global pandemic that quickly wipes out more than 99% of the world's human population. The novel describes the inevitable steps of food hoarding, the flickering out of the Internet, the beginnings of violence, until not much of civilisation is left

Luckily for us, covid proved to be less fatal than the fictional virus in the novel.

Also luckily for us, the pandemic brought to the limelight this beautifully crafted story, with its clever jumps in time, its well-crafted characters, its philosophical musings and its overarching plot that in the end combines all the threads of the story, all the lives of the characters, to Station Eleven. It is hard to write anything about the story without giving away major plot points. The character I loved best, Kirsten, finds herself some time after the pandemic travelling the world with the Travelling Symphony. They perform Shakespeare and musical pieces to the newly developing hamlets under the motto 'Survival is insufficient'. Just that image, of art being created in a world that is almost devoid of anything that we would call civilisation, is so beautiful. They are haunted by a Prophet and his gang, who proclaim to know the real truth about the pandemic and its cause, another chilling reflection of forces at work during the pandemic's worst times.

I loved every part of this novel, even when things turned very dark. It was one of those books which I wanted to finish to find out how everything connected, but didn't want to be over at the same time. Only the very best books bring this dual longing.

Luckily, I bought The Glass Hotel at the same time. And there are many more to read, including the just published Sea of Tranquility. 

I read somewhere that St. John Mandel is creating an interconnected universe in her novels, with similar characters appearing in different novels. I can't wait to find out how all of her novels are part of this greater world, and how many pieces we can puzzle together while reading.