This is a survey of the books I have read in 2024. It may not be complete, but I think it is close. It does not include any books that I have dipped in and out of like volumes of poetry or reference books and it contains only books that I have read for the first time this last year.
There are quite a few Irish novelists on the list this year and I think that this is combination of my visiting Ireland (you can read about that trip and my visit to Joyce’s Martello Tower here) in January and two Irish writers making the short-list for the Booker Prize in 2023. Paul Lynch won the Booker for Prophet Song (which I bought in New York City and read in Dublin) and Paul Murray was shortlisted for The Bee Sting (which I bought in Dublin and read in Cork). Whilst Lynch was a worthy winner, I could equally imagine Bee Sting picking up first prize and it was my favourite of the two books. Since then, I have read a number of books by both Lynch and Murray. I had started to read John McGahern last year. His books are hard to come by, but I managed to pick up a couple of them in Charlie Byrne’s bookshop in Galway. Byrnes has its own little literary footnote in that it is mentioned many times in Ken Bruen’s series of crime novels featuring the character Jack Taylor who likes to buy second hand books from Charlie Byrne’s. On the way back from Ireland, I popped into City Lights in San Francisco and picked up a few books including Foster by Clare Keegan that had been republished based on the success of her brilliant little novel, In Praise of Small Things, that I read in 2023.
I haven’t read the winner of this year’s Booker but did read a couple of the nominees and two of these would have been deserving winners. One of the nominees was a first novel for the Irish short story writer, Wild Houses, is set among young people in Ballina in County Mayo and is the story of crime, love, loss and revenge. Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake is a spy story with a difference, told in the first person by an intriguing young woman who might not always tell the truth and can be both boastful and self-deprecating as she infiltrates an environmental activist commune in the south of France. I haven’t read any of Kushner’s other books but will look out for then in the coming year.
My favourite of the three Booker nominees I read this year was Held by Anne Michaels. Anne Michaels is a poet, and this is a poet’s novel. It is beautiful, dreamlike and elegiac and it moves back and forwards across time, with each movement opening up some more of a story of loss, heartbreak and war and how these things reverberate across the decade. It might be the finest book I read this year and perhaps for the last few years.
A couple of Australian books stood out for me this year – my favourite was by one writer I have been reading for forty years and that is Brian Castro whose work The Chinese Postman is everything one would come to expect from such a fine novelist. Jack Serong’s Cherrywood was interesting and its fantastical elements was a departure from his earlier books and finally, another favourite and a more recent addition to my list of authors whose books I enjoy was Robbie Arnott whose fourth novel Dusk was as powerful piece as any of his work if a little more muscular than Limberlost (which I still consider to be the best of his novels – maybe this is because I read it in Tasmania where it is set and could lose myself in the landscape and still had the smell of Huon Pine from Macquarie Harbour in my nose.
Anyway – here is my 2024 Reading List.
| Title | Author | Genre |
| The Chinese Postman | Brian Castro | Fiction |
| Wild Houses | Colin Barrett | Fiction |
| The Echoes | Evie Wyld | Fiction |
| Dylan Thomas | Andrew Lycett | Biography |
| Caledonian Road | Andrew O’Hagan | Fiction |
| The Bee Sting | Paul Murray | Fiction |
| Skippy Dies | Paul Murray | Fiction |
| The Mark and the Void | Paul Murray | Fiction |
| The Leave Taking | John McGahern | Fiction |
| Amongst Women | John McGahern | Fiction |
| The Barracks | John McGahern | Fiction |
| By the Lake | John McGahern | Fiction |
| A Memoir | John McGahern | Fiction |
| Foster | Claire Keegan | Fiction |
| Antarctica | Claire Keegan | Short Stories |
| Walk the Blue Fields | Claire Keegan | Fiction |
| Ordinary Gods and Monsters | Chris Wolmsley | Fiction |
| Cherrywood | Jock Serong | Fiction |
| Cold Enough for Snow | Jessica Au | Fiction |
| Held | Anne Michaels | Fiction |
| Only Sound Remains | Hussein Assgari | Fiction |
| Killing for Country | David Marr | History |
| After the Wake | Brendan Behan | Short Stories |
| Trilogy | John Fosse | Fiction |
| Scenes from a Childhood | John Fosse | Fiction |
| A Shining | John Fosse | Fiction |
| God’s Teeth and Other Catastrophes | James Kelman | Fiction |
| Young Hawke – the making of a larrikin | David Day | Biography |
| Barcelona | Mary Costello | Fiction |
| Long Island | Colm Tóibín | Fiction |
| Bad Blood | Colm Tóibín | History/Travel |
| Vortex | Rodney Hall | Fiction |
| Dusk | Robbie Arnott | Fiction |
| Day | Michael Cunningham | Fiction |
| Morning and Evening | Jon Fosse | Fiction |
| Scenes from a Childhood | Jon Fosse | Fiction |
| A Shining | Jon Fosse | Fiction |
| A Tale of Two Cities | Charles Dickens | Fiction |
| James Joyce – A Life | Gabrielle Carey | Biography |
| Creation Lake | Rachel Kushner | Fiction |
| Belfast – the story of a city and its people | Feargal Cochrane | History |
| After the Fire – A Still Small Voice | Evie Wyld | Fiction |
| Midnight and Blue | Ian Rankin | Fiction |
| Prophet Song | Paul Lynch | Fiction |
| Black Snow | Paul Lynch | Fiction |
| Wifedom | Anna Funder | Biography |
| The Idealist | Nicholas Jose | Fiction |