Favorites of 2024: Books
Fiction Favorites of 2024
This week LitHub published a list of its editors' favorite stories of the past year. The first entry on the list was Bradford Morrow's "In Search of the Rarest Book in American Literature." You might suspect that first editions of Walt Whitman's self-published Leaves of Grass (1855), Herman Melville's Moby-Dick; or The Whale (1851), L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), or F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1928) in dust jacket would top the list of the rarest volumes in American letters, but no. While they are all extremely desirable (and costly), the rarest book in American literature is Edgar Allan Poe's 40-page-long first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), published in an edition of perhaps 50 copies when Poe was only 18.
Cover of Susan Jaffe Tane's copy of Edgar Allan Poe's Tamerlane (Calvin Thomas, 1827). Image source: Wikimedia Commons (erroneously identified there as the Cornell University Library copy)
Only eleven copies are known to have survived; a twelfth was stolen from the McGregor Room rare-book collection in the University of Virginia's Alderman Library in 1973 and may never be found.
One of the two known copies of Tamerlane in private hands recently came up for auction at Sotheby's. At the sale in June of this year Tamerlane was bought by the premier Poe collector today, Susan Jaffe Tane, who already owned the only other copy of Tamerlane in a private collection; she told Morrow that she plans to donate one of the two copies to "the right home."
The auction was the subject of Morrow's follow-up story, "What's worth more than the rarest book in American literature? The answer may (not) surprise you." As the title of Morrow's piece implies, Tamerlane, despite its rarity, did not sell for the highest price. In fact, though astronomically expensive, it was a relative bargain: when this copy had come up for auction in 2009 it had been bought by Dr. Rodney P. Swantko for $682,000 (the equivalent today of U.S. $1 million). But another item from Swantko's library sold for
a higher price than Poe’s Tamerlane ($420,000), a first edition of Melville’s Moby-Dick in the rare blue first binding ($21,600), a first issue of Leaves of Grass ($132,000), Lolita inscribed by Nabokov to Graham Greene with a butterfly drawing ($264,000), Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol inscribed to his close friend Walter Savage Landor in the year of publication ($228,000), The Great Gatsby in its rare and iconic dust jacket, gifted to Zelda’s sister and brother-in-law ($336,000), an inscribed first edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz ($108,000), Kerouac’s On the Road inscribed to [his lover] Joyce Johnson ($120,000), and the earliest known Poe autograph manuscript in private hands, "In an Album—to a River" ($216,000) combined.
The priciest item? Thomas Taylor's original cover art for the first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Bloomsbury, 1997), which sold for $1,920,000.
Thomas Taylor’s original cover illustration for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Courtesy of Sotheby’s Books & Manuscripts Department. Image source: LitHub
I bring up Morrow's LitHub pieces because in them he mentions that he first met Tane while researching his 2020 novel The Forger's Daughter, "which centers on a complex scheme to counterfeit a thirteenth Tamerlane. . .[and] involves in-the-weeds details about Tamerlane's printing and hand-stitched binding."
Cover of Bradford Morrow's The Forger's Daughter (Mysterious Press, 2020). Image source: BradfordMorrow.com
This, I instantly thought, is a novel that I have to read. But The Forger's Daughter is the sequel to The Forgers (Mysterious Press, 2014), and so I thought I should read the series in order (the third and final volume, The Forger's Requiem, will come out in 2025).
Biggest disappointment
I picked up The Forgers in a state of high anticipation, and at the very first sentence was immediately dismayed. The book opens with a description of a gruesome murder scene: the victim, book collector Adam Diehl, has had his head crushed with a marble rolling pin and his hands severed. It's a graphic introduction to the bibliographic mystery I was expecting, and I felt my heart sinking at its generic conventionality. The novel also ends with a violent and bloody scene, and—although this doesn't necessarily destroy my enjoyment of a mystery—I was pretty sure I'd guessed the murderer on page 4. I turned out to be right.
Cover of Bradford Morrow's The Forgers (Mysterious Press, 2014). Image source: BradfordMorrow.com
But even more disappointing than the generic elements of the plot, the brutal but undermotivated violence, and an occasional "because the plot requires it" implausibility is the quality of the prose. Perhaps this was a deliberate attempt on Morrow's part to make his narrator sound like a real person, but I don't know anyone who speaks or writes like this, with one cliché thudding after another:
Once we're dead, secrets that we so carefully nurtured, like so many black flowers in a veiled garden, are often brought out in to the light where they can flourish. Cultivated by truth, fertilized by rumor, they blossom into florets and sprays that are toxic to those who would sniff their poisonous perfumes. While I did my best to shelter Meghan from certain unsavory discoveries that were made about her brother's life. . .some damning details would soon enough vine their strangling way into the light. Details that, as fate would have it, I had already surmised about Adam but could not before his death practically or honorably reveal to her. Details that I myself was duty bound to help transit from that darkness of secrecy into truth's awkward glare. Salt on the wound, I know, and yet it would prove to be an unavoidable seasoning. (p. 13)
So are secrets poisonous flowers, strangling vines, or salt on wounds? And should "vine" ever be used as a verb? And this is hardly the only passage of metaphor run wild. From just a few pages later:
. . .as in any vocation, those who truly love their work would embrace it with every fiber of their being even if there were nothing but a plug nickel at the rainbow's end. For me, the pot of gold was in the act itself, even if the act produced but fool's gold. (p. 25)
And yet the narrator is someone who is supposed to be able to produce forged inscriptions and letters by well-known and stylistically distinctive writers—in The Forger's Daughter he names "Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, W.B. Yeats" as his specialties—that are accepted as genuine by experts.
He also sprinkles his text with technical terms such as "holograph manuscript" (one in the author's handwriting) and "eidetic memory" (which before Photoshop commonly used to be called photographic memory). But here's his description of his parents' house in Irvington, New York:
A classic brick Tudor whose upper story was fashioned of white stucco with traditional wooden crisscross decoration. . . (p. 154)
Does our super-sophisticated narrator really not know the standard architectural term "half-timbered"?
Although The Forgers improves a bit when it focuses on the details of rare book collecting and dealing, it feels emblematic of the disappointing year it's been for me in fiction reading. So my apologies that the list of favorite fiction that follows is shorter than in some past years. In alphabetical order by author:
Alasdair Gray: Poor Things (1992)
Cover of the paperback of Alasdair Gray's Poor Things (Harcourt Brace, 1994).
It had been many years since I'd read Scottish writer Alasdair Gray's Poor Things, and so when I re-read it after seeing the Yorgos Lanthimos film it was like reading it anew. Poor Things is narrated by a Glaswegian doctor who describes reanimating a pregnant suicide victim by giving her a transplant of her own unborn baby's brain. He then describes "Bella"'s rapid mental development from infant to adult woman, and her traumatic encounters with exploitation, injustice, and man's inhumanity to man. It's a brilliant twist on the coming-of-age novel.
A minor caveat is necessary: the novel has one metafictional frame too many. Gray's "editorial" Notes Critical and Historical at the end of the book, after Bella/Victoria's own version of her story, are distinctly anticlimactic. Also, there is nothing in the text to indicate when there is an associated note, so if you read straight through you encounter the notes as a block. If Gray felt the notes were integral to the novel, they would have worked better as footnotes placed throughout the text than in their own 30-page section as endnotes.
Haruki Murakami: Manga Stories, Volume 1, adapted by Jean-Christophe Deveney, illustrations by PMGL (2021/2023)
Cover of Haruki Murakami's Manga Stories, Volume 1 (Tuttle, 2023).
Despite the title, these adaptations are actually bandes dessinées (French/Belgian comics) rather than manga (Japanese comics). Adapted by writer Jean-Christophe Deveney and artist PMGL (Pierre-Marie Grille-Liou), the stories contained in Volume 1 include "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo" (from after the quake, 2000/2002) and "Where I'm Likely To Find It," "Birthday Girl," and "Seventh Man" from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2009/2006).
Panels from "The Seventh Man."
As I wrote in my full review of Manga Stories, "Comics are a perfect medium for representing the sudden shifts in Murakami's fiction between everyday life and an alternate reality."
Volume 2, containing the stories "The Second Bakery Attack" (from The Elephant Vanishes, 2005/1993), "Samsa in Love" (Men Without Women, 2014/2017), and "Thailand" (after the quake), was issued this year. Volume 3, with "Scheherezade" (Men Without Women) and "Sleep" (The Elephant Vanishes) is scheduled for publication this spring. "Scheherezade" is one of the stories on which Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's film Drive My Car (2021) was based.
Zadie Smith: The Fraud (2023)
Cover of Zadie Smith's The Fraud (Penguin Random House, 2023).
The case of the Tichborne Claimant, a man who presented himself as the long-lost heir Roger Tichborne, fascinated 19th-century London. As I wrote in my full review of The Fraud, Zadie Smith "explores the idea of fraudulence as it relates to multiple characters, on stages both public and private. If you're wondering which character the title refers to, the answer is pretty much all of them."
The Tichborne Claimant, c. 1872. Photo credit: Maull & Co. Image source: National Portrait Gallery, Australia
The review went on, "The Fraud is almost compulsively readable. Its short chapters of, at most, a few pages—very un-Victorian—jump back and forth in time over the nineteenth century, and take place in both England and Jamaica. As expected and hoped-for from Zadie Smith, the novel is very much alive to the class, racial, and sexual dynamics of that time, and ours."
Fiction: Honorable mention
Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two (2024)
Cover of Emil Ferris's My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two (Fantagraphics, 2024). Image source: Bookshop.org
Book One of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters came out in 2017, seven years after Ferris started working on it. Its long gestation was due in large part to the intricacy of its story and artwork, rendered as the sketchbook of its 10-year-old narrator Karen growing up in 1960s Chicago. Its many layers include Karen's own coming-of-age story, her homage to the horror comics that constitute her main reading, a diary of her mother's decline from cancer, and the slow uncovering of the mystery of the violent death of her Holocaust-survivor neighbor Anka.
As I wrote in my full review of Book One, "To encompass such a wide range of narrative registers and tones Ferris deploys an equally wide range of drawing styles: highly detailed and finely cross-hatched realism, comic-book fantasy, corrosive Weimar-style expressionism, dashed-off sketches, and renderings of famous artworks." The latter derive from her trips with her older brother Deez to the "art castle," the Art Institute of Chicago. Deez is hiding his own secrets, including his possible involvement in the events surrounding Anka's death.
Book Two was originally and optimistically scheduled for publication in October 2017. The publication date kept getting pushed back, and for some time no expected date was given at all. (It turned out that Ferris and her publisher Fantagraphics were involved in a lengthy legal dispute.) Finally issued last spring, Book Two picks up where Book One left off. It's 1968, and Karen is experiencing an awakening of both her sexual identity and her political consciousness. She participates in the tumultuous protests at the Democratic National Convention that are violently attacked by the Chicago police, and continues her investigation into Anka's death.
Panels from My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two. Image source: Cărturești Carusel
The artwork is as rich and varied as in Book One. However, the storytelling felt less taut to me. The narrator keeps breaking off various subplots and saying that she'll return to give more detail later, and never does. Despite its 400-plus pages the book ends without any major new revelations, and with Deez and Karen planning a road trip. So clearly we can await My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Three. Let's hope it doesn't take seven more years to appear; given the transitional nature of this volume and the success of the series so far, there's a good chance that there's also a Book Four on the distant horizon.
Nonfiction Favorites of 2024
Jane Glover, Mozart in Italy (2023)
Jane Glover, Mozart in Italy: Coming of Age in the Land of Opera (Picador, 2023). Image source: The Hanbury Agency
Between the ages of 13 and 17 Mozart made three journeys to Italy with his father Leopold, and sought permanent employment there. Although during these journeys he composed his early operatic masterpieces Mitridate, re di Ponto (1770), Ascanio in Alba (1771), Lucio Silla (1772), and the sacred motet "Exsultate, Jubilate" (1773), all for Milan, he ultimately failed to find the court appointment he sought. Had he succeeded, the history of music would be profoundly different.
"Al destin che la minaccia" (From the fate that threatens me / Free, O God, my oppressed heart) sung by Yvonne Kenny accompanied by the Concentus Musicus Wien conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, from the 1986 film of Mitridate directed by Jean-Pierre Ponelle:
(For more on the opera and film, please see "'The insane frenzy of an illicit love': Mitridate, re di Ponto.")
In my review in Part 5 of my series Mozart in Italy, based on my reading of her book (and other sources), I wrote that although Glover sometimes opts for a simpler version of events rather than a more complex one, she "knows how to tell a good story, and Mozart in Italy—in which we see a teenaged musical genius trying to make his way in an adult world of politics, money, favoritism, and social and artistic hierarchies—is packed full of them."
Deirdre Le Faye, Jane Austen's 'Outlandish Cousin' (2002)
Cover of Deirdre Le Faye's Jane Austen's 'Outlandish Cousin': The Life and Letters of Eliza de Feuillide (British Library, 2002). Image source: Abebooks.com
Eliza Hancock, later de Feuillide, later Austen, was Jane Austen's cousin and sister-in-law: Eliza (after much hesitation) married Jane's brother Henry. She was born in India as the result of her mother's adulterous affair with Warren Hastings, who was the East India Company's Governor-General. Eliza was a flirtatious, pleasure-seeking, harp-playing, and theatrical-loving woman who lived a "gay," "dissipated," "racketing" life. She may have served as a model for several Austen characters, including the foundling Eliza of "Henry and Eliza" (ca. 1787), the attractive but self-interested and manipulative Lady Susan of Lady Susan (ca. 1794), the attractive but self-interested and manipulative Isabella Thorpe of Northanger Abbey (completed 1803, revised and published 1817), and especially the flirtatious, pleasure-seeking, harp-playing, theatrical-loving but self-interested Mary Crawford of Mansfield Park (1814).
Eliza never stopped flirting, even after her marriage to Henry Austen, then a militia officer. As she wrote to her cousin Philly Walter,
I have not yet given you any account of my brother officers of whom I wish you could judge in person for there are some with whom I think you would not dislike a flirtation—I have of course entirely left off trade but I can however discover that Captn. Tilson is remarkably handsome, and that Messrs. Perrott & Edwardes may be chatted with very satisfactorily, but as to my Colonel Lord Charles Spencer if I was married to my third husband instead of my second I should still be in love with him—He is a most charming creature[,] so mild, so well bred, so good, but alas he is married as well as myself and what is worse he is absent and will not return to us in less than a month.
As I wrote in my review of Jane Austen's 'Outlandish Cousin,' "Le Faye's book draws heavily on Eliza's letters to Philly Walter (as well as other sources) to tell the story of her life and its many intersections with the Austen family. As I hope the excerpts I've included show, Eliza's letters are thoroughly delightful and just a little bit wicked, as she must have been in life." And as I also wrote, Eliza lived to see the publication of Jane Austen's second novel, Pride and Prejudice (1813): "That novel features Jane's liveliest, wittiest, and most resolute heroine. Her name, of course, is Elizabeth."
Lucy Worsley, Jane Austen at Home (2018)
Cover of Lucy Worsley's Jane Austen at Home: A Biography, 250th Birthday Edition (Hodder & Stoughton, 2024). Image source: Jane Austen Centre, Bath
In my review of Jane Austen at Home I wrote that it is a "highly entertaining, vividly written, and deeply researched biography. . .one of the best biographies of Austen I've read. Her emphasis on Austen's different homes over the course of her itinerant life is a fascinating framework through which to view her experiences and her fiction. Worsley's book also silently corrects some errors in Claire Tomalin's Jane Austen: A Life, which on its publication in 1997 was widely regarded as the definitive Austen biography. Even if you've read Tomalin's excellent book, Worsley's Jane Austen at Home will provide many additional insights and pleasures."
Lucy Worsley: Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (2010)
Cover of Lucy Worsley's Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (Faber, 2010). Image source: Historic Royal Palaces
The King's Grand Staircase at Kensington Palace in London is lined with murals depicting 45 men, women, and children looking down over a railing at anyone climbing or descending the stairs. The mural's figures, painted by William Kent in the mid-1720s, are all thought to depict actual members of the royal households of George I and George II (Kent even included himself and his mistress, the actress Elizabeth Butler). In Courtiers Lucy Worsley, chief curator of the Historic Royal Palaces, provides the stories of sixteen courtiers. These include Peter the Wild Boy, an autistic feral child captured in the woods near Hanover, Germany, and his guardian, the physician and writer Dr. John Arbuthnot; two of George I's most trusted servants, Mustapha and Mohammed; the pretty Mrs. Elizabeth Tempest, milliner to Princess Caroline, and, hanging off the painted balcony railing, a mischievous page boy of George II's mistress Henrietta Howard.
It's a fascinating glimpse of the society that developed in and around the Georgian court. Since each courtier's life intersected with those of many others, Worsley is able to give a cross-section of court life, from the servant's quarters to the King's Gallery. Because she focusses on particular courtiers in turn, a certain amount of repetition is inevitable—but also helpful, as there's a large cast of characters. The book is thoroughly researched but Worsley's style is engaging and unacademic.
Nonfiction: Honorable Mention
Lucy Worsley, The Art of the English Murder (2014)
Cover of Lucy Worsley's The Art of the English Murder (Pegasus Crime, 2014). Image source: Simon and Schuster
I haven't yet found a subject that Lucy Worsley can't write a highly entertaining book about. The Art of the English Murder is a companion volume to her BBC series A Very British Murder. Bookended by two essays, Thomas De Quincey's "On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts" (1827) and George Orwell's "Decline of the British Murder" (1946), Worsley's survey covers the continuing public fascination with murders, murderers and detectives both factual and fictional, such as:
- the Ratcliffe Highway Murders, which inspired De Quincey's essay;
- the Elstree Murder, whose sites were visited by "murder tourists" including Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton;
- the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's Waxworks, a hugely popular display of historical and contemporary murderers (Dr. Crippen remains on display to this day);
- the Bermondsley Horror, whose married perpetrators were hung at one of the last public executions in Britain;
- the development of crime, detective, and sensation fiction by writers such as Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Arthur Conan Doyle;
- the Golden Age of crime fiction created in the 1920s and 30s by women writers such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh;
- and the early films of Alfred Hitchcock such as The Lodger (1927), Blackmail (1929), and Murder! (1930).
Given its 150-year span, both real-life and fictional scope, episodic structure and intended audience, Worsley's book can't go into great depth on any particular topic. But it's a lively and very enjoyable survey of the place of British crime in the collective imagination, as I'm sure is true of the television series as well:
My Favorites of 2024:
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