This year's books

Short reviews of the 63 books I read in 2024

[Update 24/02/2025: I forgot a book! Takes me up to 63 in total.]

This was a good year for bookish me. Keeping in mind that I didn’t always read every page of every book, and that some of the below were re-reads, nonetheless 63 books is excellent going. Lacking a Goodreads profile and all, I thought it might be interesting to a few people if I offered some brief reviews of those books.

Looking back on all the books I read, two big themes emerge: I spent a lot of time trying to make myself more conversant with poetry, previously a relative blindspot for me; and I spent a lot of time reading about witchcraft, magic, and the occult. The former was intentional, the latter very much accidental. My less naturalist friends will no doubt be very pleased with the idea that I was unconsciously led to reflect so much on the occult. A third, less prominent theme in my reading is classicism and particularly philhellenism: in hindsight this is obviously the result of a trip to Greece, but I hadn’t realised it was a trend before now. It is amazing how much the patterns in your reading, and (connectedly) your thinking, aren’t obvious until you see them written out.

If you want the headline recommendations, the three best books I read this year were: the Republic by Plato; Ulysses by James Joyce; and Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson. (Sorry that at least two of those are absurdly boring picks, but ‘great books’ are ‘great’ for a reason!) Otherwise, the reviews are below—this is a long post, so I recommend opening it in a browser and using the below table of contents to navigate to the books that interest you with Ctrl+F. In all cases, I’ve linked to the Goodreads page for the edition / translation I read, if you care about such things.

• Poetry and drama

  • Aeschylus – The Oresteia

  • Eavan Boland – New selected poems

  • Emily Brontë – Complete poems

  • Lord Byron – The major works

  • Anne Carson – Autobiography of Red

  • C. P. Cavafy – Selected poems

  • John Donne – Selected poems

  • Robert Graves – Selected poems

  • Geoffrey Hill – Collected poems

  • Margot Jane Lidstone – Sir—to begin with Sappho

  • Hugh MacDiarmid – A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle

  • George Mackay Brown – Carve the Runes

  • Sorley MacLean – Caoir Gheal Leumraich

  • Gail McConnell – The Sun is Open

  • Martin McDonagh – The Beauty Queen of Leenane

  • Paul Muldoon – New selected poems

  • Paul Muldoon (ed.) – The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry

  • Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill – The Astrakhan Cloak

  • Camille Ralphs – After You Were, I Am

  • A. E. Stallings – This Afterlife

  • W. B. Yeats – Selected poems

• Novels

  • Jane Austen – Persuasion

  • Benjamin Black – Christine Falls

  • Agatha Christie – A Murder is Announced

  • Agatha Christie – Ordeal By Innocence

  • Susanna Clarke – Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

  • Nina de Gramont – The Christie Affair

  • Alasdair Gray – Lanark

  • Mohsin Hamid – Exit West

  • James Joyce – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

  • James Joyce – Ulysses

  • Chris Kohler – Phantom Limb

  • John le Carré – The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

  • Hilary Mantel – Beyond Black

  • Alexander McCall Smith – The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

  • Zadie Smith – The Fraud

  • Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy

• Biography and criticism

  • Carrie Brownstein – Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

  • Seamus Deane – Celtic Revivals

  • Patrick Hastings – The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses

  • Stuart Kelly – Scott-Land

  • Daniel Mulhall – Ulysses: A Reader’s Odyssey

  • Andrew M. Stauffer – Byron

• History

  • Roderick Beaton – The Greek Revolution of 1821 and its Global Significance

  • Malcolm Gaskill – The Ruin of All Witches

  • Ronald Hutton – The Triumph of the Moon

  • Colin Kidd – Union and Unionisms

  • Peter Marshall – Storm’s Edge

  • David Torrance – A History of the Scottish Liberals and Liberal Democrats

• Short stories and essays

  • Sinéad Gleeson – Constellations

  • Marie Heaney – Over Nine Waves

  • Kathleen Jamie – Cairn

  • Benjamín Labatut – When We Cease to Understand the World

  • Alice Munro – Dear Life

• Politics

  • Conor Cruise O’Brien – States of Ireland

  • Alasdair Gray and Adam Tomkins – How We Should Rule Ourselves

  • Isabel Hardman – Why We Get the Wrong Politicians

• Philosophy

  • Julia Annas – An Introduction to Plato’s Republic

  • Umberto Eco – Five Moral Pieces

  • Plato – The Republic

• Miscellaneous

  • Stuart Heritage – Bald

  • Robert Bruce Lockhart – Scotch

  • Myles na gCopaleen – The Best of Myles

Poetry and drama

Aeschylus – The Oresteia (458 B. C. E.)

The Oresteia creates a challenge to all its readers: to explain the true greatness Athenian society achieved on all the metrics of ‘civilisation’, while retaining a critical distance from the political system and values of the city, where democratic decision-making and remarkably total (even by ancient Greek standards) patriarchal control of the household were understood to be two sides of the same coin. The difficulties in balancing a fair appreciation of Athenian civilisation with scepticism towards its values are reflected in the mysticism Sophocles fell back on in Oedipus at Colonus; and Plato (discussed below) could so easily and rigourously reject Athenian patriarchy and Athenian democracy only because he felt no need to admit Athens had ever been great. But for Aeschylus, Athens’ greatness just was a matter of interlinked democracy and misogyny, and he explained their connection and their supposed virtues with shocking dramatic precision. The trilogy is both an ethical shock and an analytical challenge. The Euminides clicked for me when I figured out the Furies stand for kinship obligations, not revenge.

Eavan Boland – New selected poems (originally published 1967–2013)

Boland is an Irish poetry ‘big name’, looming large in the Republic’s school curriculum for literature, and recently honoured by Trinity, who have renamed the former Berkeley library after her. Yet my impression (which I think is accurate) is that her prominence is much lesser in Northern Ireland; I’d never read her work before this year. There’s maybe an Edna Longley on Field Day–esque explanation of this, even though Boland’s cultural politics were as far from Longley’s as Field Day’s were. Works like ‘In Which the Ancient History I Learn Is Not My Own’ make it clear that Boland was, til the end, reacting against the brief time she spent in London as a child, like an expat exaggerating their accent to keep it. The poems’ ‘dailiness’ (Boland’s word for the quality she aimed for in poetry) is thus less kath’ hēméran and more épioúsion, with the oúsía given by a particular vision of Irish culture that I can’t enter into—whether because I am a Northerner or because I am a ‘revisionist’.

Emily Brontë – Complete poems (originally published 1846–1848)

The biggest difficulty with reading these poems is that many of them are set in an elaborate fantasy world, Gondal, the details of which have been completely lost, making context scarce. The notes to the Penguin Classics edition make Brontë’s poems easier to navigate, but not easy; and because evidence is so lacking, interpretation is often a matter of guesswork, and you should feel free to disagree with the editor (e.g., I think it is wrong to read ‘No coward soul is mine’ as a Stoic poem). If you know your Emily Dickinson, you should feel right at home in the thematic world Brontë builds—I had no idea that she had been such a major influence on the American, but it is clear that Dickinson’s fascination with ‘death’ and ‘immortality’ is lifted straight from Brontë. But the poems are a bit too formally pedestrian, the Gondal context a bit too ‘worldbuilding-y’, and you can see exactly why Brontë transmuted her inventiveness and philosophical insight out of these constraints and into Wuthering Heights.

Lord Byron – The major works (originally published 1806–1824)

I of course did not read every page of this OUP tome, but enough of Childe Harold, Don Juan, the letters, and the shorter poems to feel like a sufficient course in Byron after my time in Greece earlier this year. I wrote at significant length about Byron here, and I feel a further review would be a bit superfluous.

Anne Carson – Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998)

As I said above, if I had to pick the three best books I read in the last year, two of them would be recognised world classics that I’ve just never tackled before, and this would be the third one on the list. Every page astonished me—‘astonish’ is a verb that lots of people use in relation to Carson, but when I use it I mean quite specifically that I felt like I’d been on the receiving end of the namesake Pokémon move. Fragments of it have been bouncing around my head since I read it, especially Carson’s deceptively simplistic translation of Stesichorus’ palinode, and the sudden re-invocation of Emily Dickinson’s no. 1748 at the climax of the story. If you have not read it, change that as soon as possible.

C. P. Cavafy – Selected poems (originally published 1886–1935)

Purchased in Athens as a take-home present to self. This edition is selected and translated by David Connolly, and the translation is (to my ear) incredibly poor—ironic, when the introduction provided by Connolly focusses so much on how well Cavafy’s poetry survives in translation.

John Donne – Selected poems (originally published 1633)

I think of Alice Evans’ claim that romantic love is a driver of a reduction in patriarchal attitudes. Reading (say) ‘The Good-morrow’ back to back with (say) ‘Communitie’ does not quite give the lie to Evans’ thesis, but it certainly complicates it! Certainly, one of the big lessons from Donne’s life and work is that misogyny-informed ‘womanising’ can take on any and all of the attributes of romantic love: even, surprisingly enough, commitment. The other big lesson we should take from Donne (both in matters of love and matters of religion) is, or ought to be if we put enough critical distance between him and us, a version of Plato’s lesson in the Ion. I’ll warn you to keep away from this Faber selected, which is both far too narrow (it leaves out even poems cited in detail in the editorial introduction, and there’s no ‘Batter my heart’!) and really amateurishly prepared, with at least one long ‘s’ rendered as an ‘f’, the kind of mistake I made when I was 12.

Robert Graves – Selected poems (originally published 1916–1974)

My perhaps-contrarian view is that Graves’ greatest virtues lie in the outstandingly creative things he did with the inheritance he received from The Golden Bough, which he extended and reworked so imaginatively; the fantastical quasi-religious elements of his poetry appeal more to me than his ‘purer’ stuff on love and war. (With a few exceptions, especially ‘She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep’.) Graves’ incredible level of creativity in content (as opposed to creativity in form) is sadly quite rare in poetry. But I wonder. The early and mid–twentieth century was a time of great flourishing for highly speculative prose fiction, often written by relative outsiders (think Lovecraft or, to a lesser degree, Borges), and Graves’ imagination was rich enough that he could absolutely have had a place in that number. Would ‘Darien’ have been better as a short story? did Graves’ self-conception as a capital-p Poet maybe overly constrain him? Perhaps his problem was just that he seemingly Pascal’d himself into sincerely believing in the White Goddess stuff, Wicca avant la lettre.

Geoffrey Hill – Collected poems (originally published 1952–1985)

Early in the year, I made an attempt at getting into Hill, which failed thanks to this incredibly poor Penguin selected (no context at all! inexcusable for such a hard poet). But I later made another attempt, armed with a friend’s undergraduate dissertation on Hill and a different book. This mid-career collected has rather obtuse notes, but that’s infinitely better than none at all. Hill’s failure mode is writing a poem that still seems overserious and overwrought even after half an hour’s wasted labour means it’s at least no longer confusing. But in better poems (‘Ovid in the Third Reich’ is a key example) the initial confusion is the result of what, following my friend Paolo Babbiotti, I want to call Nietzschean compression. Yet Hill was no Nietzschean, and (with him more than most) the above-mentioned lesson of the Ion must be borne in mind—without necessarily following Plato, or Tom Paulin, all the way to what Bernard Williams might have called ‘counterfactual Keatsianism’.¹ The sequence ‘Lachrimae’ is absolutely stunning, among the best sonnets I know of, and I’m a sucker for sonnets.

Margot Jane Lidstone – Sir—to begin with Sappho (1993, posthumous)

A lovely charity-shop find. As best as I can piece it together, the story is that after the author was killed by a car while cycling, her friends got some funds together to publish the poems she had privately composed over the course of her life in a small-run edition. The poems are amateur, no question about it, but touching, and it’s a quite special volume that I’m very glad I found. It’s also interesting as a window into a more personal side of a movement that is often only interpreted through texts of political polemic and theory—Lidstone and her friends all had their formative experiences in the radical wing of 70s women’s lib, and while it’s not clear to me whether they were political lesbians sensu stricto, her friends describe Lidstone as a ‘lesbian feminist’.

Hugh MacDiarmid – A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926)

I came to this after reading Ronald Hutton (below): the gods chose to bless me with a perfect example of where Hutton goes wrong. MacDiarmid is working with all the elements of the late Victorian ‘pagan’ imagination: the liberating power of the moon, the great primeval goddess, the harms of Christian morality, etc. But under Nietzsche’s influence he reworks the relationships between these images. The goddess does not offer liberation: she has fed on the power of the moon and transformed it, passing its vital potential through the negative forces of shame and pity to create the ‘thistle’ of morality ‘[t]hat breenges ‘twixt the munelicht and my hert’ and creates the Jekyll-and-Hyde self-contradictoriness of the modern European soul, a sickness that is furthest developed in Scotland. Christianity, especially Presbyterianism, figures not as the antithesis of the goddess but as her tool; in the secularisation that has ‘uprooted’ the thistle, there lies some hope for its transformation (and the subsequent transformation of both Scotland and Europe), but such transformation requires terror. MacDiarmid is the best example I know of of how faithfully Nietzschean a fascist can be, and at his best he’s terrifying; only in a few places does his ignorant play with a Scots dictionary turn him unintentionally comical.

George Mackay Brown – Carve the Runes, selected poems (originally published 1954–2001)

My understanding is that Mackay Brown is to Scottish schools a bit like what Heaney is to Northern Irish schools, and indeed ‘Hamnavoe’ and ‘Them at Isbister’ have much of the teachable quality of ‘Digging’ or ‘Mid-Term Break’. But reading this collection I thought much more of Patrick Kavanagh than Heaney: ‘Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind. | He said: I made the Iliad from such | A local row.’² The conflicts in Mackay Brown’s best poems remained resolutely local and Orcadian, and he never really managed to contribute to the Catholic rebuilding of ‘Knox-ruined’ Scotland he envisaged in his earliest work; this was probably for the best. My appreciation of the poems was hugely enhanced by reading Peter Marshall (below), who provides both the conventional historiography that Mackay Brown was so often echoing or reacting against, and also a modern corrective.

Sorley MacLean – Caoir Gheal Leumraich, collected poems (originally published 1932–1989)

My Irish skills are bad, half-remembered from school, only cúpla focal. My Scottish Gaelic skills consist entirely of applying grammar and cognate recognition from what little Irish I have to speed up dictionary translation; that is to say, I have no Scottish Gaelic skills. I certainly cannot properly appreciate poetry written in the language. And yet—I may be deluding myself, but alternating between reading MacLean’s workaday English cribs of the Dàin do Eimhir and slowly trudging my way through the Gaelic with a dictionary, I think I can get just a glimpse of genuine poetic greatness. I can imagine that, if I had better Gaelic, this would be on the same level as my three ‘books of the year’. You may find yourself as frustrated as I did at the obfuscations and circumlocutions in the introductory essays about the woman known as the ‘Scottish Eimhir’, who surely cannot still be alive to threaten libel action?

Gail McConnell – The Sun is Open (2021)

I listened to McConnell talking about Louis MacNeice in an old Radio 3 ‘The Essay’ and was blown away, immediately knowing that I had to read her poetry. This long poem is about a Troubles atrocity, and I think it’s a compliment that I’ve hesitated to recommend it to acquaintances who have family history similar to McConnell’s. In her hands, I actually felt the impact of techniques that I normally, um—let’s be polite and say ‘struggle to appreciate’—especially ‘found’ poetry, which she employs quite a bit, and which feels more honest and indeed more poetic in her hands than many others’.

Martin McDonagh – The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996)

I’m glad I read this, rather than first going to see a production. McDonagh’s plays, in their seeming simplicity, are inviting to amateur companies especially who want something powerful but not too difficult. But the balance of tones in his work is in fact horrendously difficult to pull off. My first McDonagh play was a production of Hangmen that (frankly) came off as a bad farce. I wonder if he has gone into the movie business because he can forever imprint a ‘definitive’ version on public consciousness? Anyway: while reading this, I could see both how a good production could stick with you, portray the horror and claustrophobia of close family ties and keep everything taut, and also how even a middling production could undermine itself very easily.

Paul Muldoon – New selected poems (originally published 1973-1994)

Before this year I probably preferred Muldoon the sometime radio presenter to Muldoon the poet. (Muldoon the sometime radio presenter is still brilliant: look his name up on BBC Sounds.) But I undertook a project of systematically annotating the long elegy ‘Incantata’, with its ‘mirrored’ rhyming and repeated Beckett references. ‘Incantata’ is a brilliant, desperately sad poem, and it juggles emotions that most desperately sad poems from accomplished poets simply could not keep in the air: Muldoon lost a loved one as much to alternative medicine as to cancer. The project defeated in my mind once and for all the charge that there is ‘no there there’ behind Muldoon’s wordplay and references, and I’ve been enjoying him a lot more since.

Paul Muldoon (ed.) – The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1984)

As I already owned quite a lot of the stuff collected here, I largely just bought this for the selection of Louis MacNeice poems. MacNeice stands out quite a bit in the volume, not for having left (Northern) Ireland, but for his response to having left. ‘Valediction’ is representative: it contains some devastating lines, but ultimately MacNeice oscillates unstably between depression at the thought that his (Northern) Irish heritage is inescapable, and hope that maybe he can escape it. Neither perspective works as critique, and certainly not as Tara-via-Holyhead travel itinerary; it’s just rejection. Nonetheless, even if contextualising MacNeice beside Kavanagh and Heaney makes less sense today than it seemed to do in the 1980s, and even if his poems about Ireland never resolve their contradictions, it doesn’t reduce his other achievements. I am likely not the first person to tell you that ‘Snow’ is a near-perfect work of art, but ‘Epitaph for Liberal Poets’ is very underrated: ‘accentuate a thirst’ is the kind of description that just gets better the more you think it through in all its implications.

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill – The Astrakhan Cloak (1992)

A substantially slimmed down version of Ní Dhomhnaill’s 1991 collection Feis, with the addition of facing translations from Paul Muldoon for the benefit of those of us whose souls fret in the shadow of the English language. The translations are very free, with Muldoon inventing Americanised imagery for ‘An Traein Dubh’ wholesale, and even a simple ‘ar bith’ in the first line of Ní Dhomhnaill’s long poem ‘Immram’ becomes the wonderfully Muldoonian ‘of whatever kind | or kidney’. Then again, I say ‘simple’: there is nothing simple about ‘ar bith’, which is a beautifully idiomatic phrase—literally ‘on the world’, but used as commonly as the English equivalent ‘at all’, such that I would never think to translate it as anything except ‘at all’. Messing with the translation of ‘ar bith’ therefore shows an incredibly sharp ear for the resonances of common locutions on Muldoon’s part, which is evidenced throughout. My favourite in this collection is the Newgrange-themed affair poem ‘Feis’, though ‘Caitlín’ is clever enough to stick with you.

Camille Ralphs – After You Were, I Am (2024)

I picked this largely up on the strength of the title. It is a very good title, the ‘after’ is deeply provocative. And Ralphs obviously understood this, because she initially (in ‘Wessobrunn Prayer’) invoked John 8:58 with a more pedestrian ‘before’, subsequently changing it for the title. But she did not extend this to changing the poem itself, and this is pretty symptomatic. The first of the three sequences in the book is the worst, reading like snarky parody or (at best) a series of unearned sub-communitarian declarations, with no evidence of critical reflection on her words, images, and ideas. (The mention of ‘organ donor’ in a stanza of ‘Kyrie Eleison’ that positions the category flatly beside ‘sugar daddy’ frankly offended me, and made me want to shake Ralphs and ask ‘what do you mean by that?’; I expect she wouldn’t actually have an answer that goes beyond a surface-level comparison and a shrug.) I thought I enjoyed the middle sequence, about the Pendle witch trials; but in retrospect I realised this was only because it made me think about an independently-interesting issue (the intentionality of witch trials), not because Ralphs had anything to add.

A. E. Stallings – This Afterlife, selected poems (originally published 1999–2018)

In her appearance on the Spectator’s Book Club podcast, Stallings talks about how the education in classics she got in the 1980s was much more useful for understanding the nuts and bolts of meter and poetic construction than her education in English. I don’t understand, and frankly don’t want to understand, what was being said in US universities’ English departments about poetic ‘form’ during the 80s and 90s: Stallings herself has written about this craziness, and how Britain thankfully escaped it. But the story was useful context for this Irish-British reader nonetheless, because it is her classicism that comes through much more than her ‘formalism’. I had to consult my Ovid more than a few times reading this collection to make sure I was understanding the point of a given line. And even when it comes to the poems (fewer in number than I had expected) that do not make explicit reference to the classics, they are pervaded with olive oil and libations and an overall atmosphere of Mediterranean paganism. ‘The Argument’ has stayed with me.

W. B. Yeats – Selected poems (originally published 1889–1939)

I knew the very famous ones: ‘Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’, ‘Easter, 1916’, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, ‘The Second Coming’, etc. (Actually, there are a lot of ‘very famous ones’, at least if you’re Irish.) But this year was my first sustained study of Yeats, including consulting much of his prose online and reading the most important collections through. This produced, among other things, some thoughts about the relationship between Yeats’ politics and his idiosyncratic conceptions of tragedy and comedy, which I wrote about here. Underrated: ‘Red Hanrahan’s Song About Ireland’; overrated: ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’; perfectly rated: ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, which in my head is in very close competition with ‘Easter, 1916’ for the position of Yeats’ magnum opus—albeit, I think it is much more ironic than most people seem to.

Novels

Jane Austen – Persuasion (1817, posthumous)

I’d not read this one before, and I’m not sure if I prefer it to Emma, previously my favourite Austen. On the surface, Persuasion is stylistically bolder, more experimental, more exciting. But Austen’s free indirect style was not meant merely to be exciting, it had a storytelling function: allowing Austen to (pace Frank Ramsey) communicate certain things without speaking them, because they were for her unspeakable—principally (a) sexual desire and (b) devastating insults. In Emma, Austen’s self-confidence with this extends even to reproaching her protagonist for failing to observe the boundary between the speakable and the true but unspeakable, in the picnic scene. But in Persuasion, large parts of Anne’s interior life (the precise contours of her desire for Wentworth, her thoughts about the poetry she reads, etc.), including many things that are eminently speakable, remain hidden from us even in indirect discourse. I’m not sure whether this makes Persuasion even more interesting, by complicating a simple dichotomy and taking us even deeper into indirectness; or if it just renders the dazzling technicalities of the novel hollow and less purposive, delightful style conveying rather less substance.

Benjamin Black – Christine Falls (2006)

My main interest in John Banville has been in the story of the Nobel hoax he was made a victim of: it’s a powerful modern virtue story and I think about it a lot. By contrast, his major novels, from what I know of them, do not appeal to me at all. I tried this, one of his pseudonymous crime thrillers, in the hopes that it might give me a better sense of whether his literary works were for me. But it was not high-concept genre fiction, but instead very much middling-concept genre fiction with a few literary flourishes added in (not all of which were welcome). It was ok, but I don’t feel like I’m any closer to knowing whether I’ll like The Sea.

Agatha Christie – A Murder is Announced (1950)

I’ve read a lot of Christie, but somehow never before a Miss Marple novel. Marple playing second fiddle to local Inspector Craddock here reminded me of the late Poirots where Christie only stuck the Belgian in as a sop to her readership while Ariadne or whoever did the actual detecting. My copy had a couple of editorial blunders, one that was outrageous: in the very first chapter ‘mam’, meaning ‘ma’am’, was rendered ‘mum’, presumably by an automated spell-checker overseen by lazy editors. Noticing these mistakes led to me to overlook a vital clue, where (minor spoilers) one character refers to another by a name that is subtly different to what you’d expect—I just thought it was another editorial mishap! I’m quite pissed off about it.

Agatha Christie – Ordeal By Innocence (1958)

My favourite Christie is Five Little Pigs—if you’ve not read it, you owe it to yourself to pick it up. When I read Ordeal By Innocence, I felt like I was reading a trial-run for that much superior novel: both are about the retrospective investigation of a murder, after it is realised (too late) that the person who was convicted of the crime might have been innocent. But then I found out that Five Little Pigs was in fact published sixteen years earlier, and Ordeal is instead a pale imitation of an earlier success. Neither objectionable nor offensive, just inferior.

Susanna Clarke – Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004)

Strange & Norrell seems to me to be one of those books that demands regular revisiting, but which is sadly too long for that to be practical for most of us. For instance, while reading Ronald Hutton (below) later in the year, I felt a desperate desire to compare the systems of magic he discusses to the system in Strange & Norrell; but the slow drip-drip-drip of information that Clarke gives the reader—while dramatically brilliant—made it hard for me to actually compare without just reading the whole novel again. Clarke clearly has a number of interlocking theses about the nature of the English nation, but she is too good a novelist to give any of them too much didactic prominence in the text, so it would take a close reading with significant note-taking to really get at them. Still, a much more relaxed reading like the one I undertook is still very exciting and enjoyable.

Nina de Gramont – The Christie Affair (2022)

Given to me as a gift. Agatha Christie’s disappearance would not actually be a bad subject for an alt-history genre thriller; just a shame de Gramont didn’t want to write it. The book she did want to write, a rather crude historical novel about the Magdalene laundries, is the bulk of the substantial content here, and the author stretches to connect it to the Christie-themed material her editor clearly wanted her to be working on. There’s also a perfunctory murder-mystery subplot.

Alasdair Gray – Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981)

That a book that imagines hell as ‘Glasgow, but more so’ could be compared so often to Joyce’s depiction of Dublin says a lot more about the dispositions of Gray and his readers than it does about Lanark itself, which—unlike Ulysses—is fundamentally a work of moralism: not necessarily a pejorative term in the context of novels, though sometimes Gray falls into the bad kind of moralising. Much of the Lanark story is a metaphor for capitalism, at times pretty heavy-handedly and simplistically so, but other times there is more going on in the workings of the metaphor, including at one point a great synthesis of Weberian disenchantment and what István Hont called commercial sociability. This is the key for reading the novel as a whole as an apology for natural sociability, despite that it comes rather less naturally to many of us than we might hope (which puts Gray squarely in the lineage of Jacobinism via Freud), because our reliance instead on artificial commercial sociability has such dire consequences for soul and society. (Not for nothing does Gray choose to have Thaw learn how to numb his emotions from Hume’s Treatise.)

Mohsin Hamid – Exit West (2017)

Very pretty and sparse style, with a lovely relationship at the heart of it, and very ‘timely’ to 2017. Yet I’ve not thought very much about it since I put it down. Perhaps this is the philosopher in me speaking, a lack of appreciation for a story for storytelling’s sake and too much focus on the ‘ideas’ in art, but: I always feel that a properly creative response to current events should help the reader to think differently about those current events. Hamid seems to certainly have been very fired up about the refugee crisis (and rightly so!), but not in a way that illuminates the reader. Or maybe I’m just not the right reader.

James Joyce – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

A revisiting, but quite a deep one, with lots of underlining and dog-earing and thinking. I am not the person to give you an unbiased take on Portrait: every precocious Irish teenage boy is Stephen Dedalus to a greater or lesser extent, unwittingly playing out at least part of a script written by Joyce a century ago, no matter how much they insist on their individuality. I myself was such a boy, and thus (unfortunately) my love for this book is at its heart a somewhat-embarrassed ‘he just like me fr’. I wrote about the content of irony in Portrait earlier this year, here.

James Joyce – Ulysses (1922)

Sadly, it is exactly as good as everyone says. Probably better. Sorry. My two recommendations: read it with the Hastings guide (below, available online); and don’t actually read it, but listen to it, via the exceptional 1980s word-for-word (or as close as you can get with Ulysses) version produced by RTÉ, which makes it much easier to glide over difficulties and to hear the music in them. Their treatment of Simon Dedalus singing ‘M’appari’ in ‘Sirens’ (probably my favourite passage in the novel?) is a stand-out. Listening to the RTÉ version with the text open in front of you is particularly useful for hard passages. Even with these recommendations, ‘Proteus’ and ‘Oxen’ are still hard going. But I believe in you, you can do it, you have the thought of getting to the beautiful end of ‘Circe’ to motivate you. (Or the middle of ‘Circe’, if you’re a real freak.)

Chris Kohler – Phantom Limb (2024)

I don’t read many books soon after publication (relevant XKCD), so the first thing that struck me about this was the anti-AI disclaimer sandwiched between ‘all rights reserved’ and ‘all resemblance to real persons is merely coincidental’. Is that becoming common? Anyway. ‘Shows promise’ often damns with faint praise, especially when authors are so often taking a risk in writing at all and are lucky to find a publisher for one book, never mind getting a second. But here I mean it sincerely: this book’s vices are the vices of a passion project that the author was maybe a bit too close to, and its virtues are many. Great examination of how our minds can never work at the object level, we are always stuck on meta. I would certainly read a second novel from Kohler; I hope he gets one, even if the base rates are against him.

John le Carré – The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963)

I did not manage to read this one ‘cold’, I knew what the reveal was in advance. What do you expect, are kids today supposed to watch The Empire Strikes Back and be as shocked at ‘I am your father’ as audiences forty years ago? Still, the setup and the twisting and counter-twisting were done very well: I especially appreciated the controlled prose and indirect manner in which Leamas’ actions in England are narrated after his chat with Control.

Hilary Mantel – Beyond Black (2005)

It is vitally important to this novel that Alison is not merely fat, but morbidly obese, fat enough that people would want to call her ‘grotesque’. I mention this because cover artists are very inclined to reduce her to being merely ‘big-boned’, and in the process set the audience up with the wrong expectations. Beyond Black is a grotesquerie, and almost all of the things it depicts—from the psychic trade itself, to the suburban commuter-belt England of the novel’s setting, and (most importantly) the men in Alison’s life—are grotesque. That Alison has tried to physically make herself grotesque, and (crucially) that she has failed, is vitally important to understanding her character.³ I had thought this would be an easier alternative for getting to grips with Mantel, rather than ploughing through the Cromwell trilogy, but it is far from an easy read.

Alexander McCall Smith – The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (1998)

So forgettable that I literally forgot that I had read it and left it out of the first published version of this post. I could write a review but I’m not sure you could actually rely on my memory! I mean, it is what it is, I digested it and moved on, that’s all it was recommended for.

Zadie Smith – The Fraud (2023)

I really enjoyed reading this historical novel until I got to the end. It’s not just that the novel lacks a resolution to its central mystery—that’s alright, ambiguity is a useful tool in the writer’s toolkit, and Smith certainly wasn’t promising any answers—but that the ambiguity and lack of resolution did not seem to serve any thematic purpose. It seemed rather that the mystery (why did Bogle back the Claimant?) was foisted on Smith by historical reality, and she never really figured out what to do with it. Which leaves the whole thing with a little bit of a hole at the centre.

Laurence Sterne – The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767)

I have a suggestion for how to approach Tristram Shandy. Don’t try to read the whole novel at once, it’s longer than you think. Multi-volume novels from the eighteenth century are most akin to a series of sequential novels today: people would have read one or two volumes at a time, with gaps of several years. Buy a copy (of the superior Florida / Penguin Classics edition), dip into it for fifty pages or so whenever you feel it, and you will experience an unadulterated form of the book’s joy: a constant glorious sense of ‘wait, you’re allowed to do that?’, as Sterne fucks with the form and structure in ways that, even if you’ve read about Tristram, even if you think it’s all so passé now, you’re still not prepared for. Whereas, if you press ahead unremittingly, you may find yourself wearying of Uncle Toby’s games of Warhammer 1701 before the Widow Wadman has so much as laid a finger on him.

Biography and criticism

Carrie Brownstein – Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir (2015)

You know, I actually went to see Sleater-Kinney in Glasgow this year, and it was really quite disappointing. Corin Tucker is now 52 and married to a guy who was on Jackass, so I knew she wouldn’t be able to belt out ‘I NEEE-DED IIIIT’ like she did when she was a 24-year-old lesbian radical; but she seemed to actually be in pain trying to sing some of the stuff from their back catalogue, and without her voice to ground some of the less melodic instrumentals, the band were kind of all over the place. (Somehow they fucking nailed ‘Turn It On’ mid-show, the exception that just baffled me rather than proving any rule.) Still, Sleater-Kinney remain one of the greatest rock bands of all time, and nobody explains what made them work better than Brownstein herself. I wrote about one passage in the book here.

Seamus Deane – Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, 1880–1980 (1985)

Since cultural history (both in the old, narrow sense and the newer, broader sense) is at the heart of Irish historiography, this was as much an intervention in debates over Irish history as it was a work of literary criticism. In the former discipline, while Deane’s influence has clearly been felt, I’m not sure it’s been sufficiently integrated: the piece about Burke and Arnold in this volume especially is one where you can find ideas still somewhat absent from the mainstream of history, ‘revisionist’ or not.

Patrick Hastings – The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses (2022)

Deserves the definite article in its title. Not fussy, not pushy, not deep by any means (nor does it pretend to be—you can read proper criticism once you’ve actually read Ulysses), just letting you know what you are getting into and helping you ease yourself in. The substance of it is online, too, so you don’t even need to buy a copy, if you think it’s too much of an investment to pay for a guidebook to a different book that you might not even read. (But you definitely should read Ulysses.)

Stuart Kelly – Scott-Land: The Man Who Invented a Nation (2010)

Surprisingly not overblown, neither deliberately provocative nor cliché-ridden, and of obvious interest. Yet, like Walter Scott’s novels themselves, I simply could not get through it. The core question, ‘why did Scott’s reputation fall so far from such a height?’, is one that Kelly certainly asks frequently. But I don’t think he has a convincing answer, because any convincing answer has to explain why we moderns do not merely dislike Scott, but find him boring. Kelly admits, with admirable tact, that Scott has ‘a certain slowness’, but he obviously does not find him actually boring. Good for him! but I do, and I could not bring myself to keep reading about the man after a certain point.

Daniel Mulhall – Ulysses: A Reader’s Odyssey (2022)

The best craic of any Ulysses book I looked at, and thus one of the only ones I actually properly read through. Originating as a series of blog posts, it is neither systematic nor particularly helpful as a guide, more of a series of asides and musings from a very charismatic and interesting man—which I can attest to personally, having somehow managed to end up at lunch with Mulhall in Edinburgh earlier this year—who has a lot of thoughts about at least some of Ulysses. It’s clear Mulhall loves ‘Cyclops’ and does not particularly enjoy ‘Oxen’, which should give those who know Ulysses a handle on the kind of reader he is (not meant to be derogatory in any manner).

Andrew M. Stauffer – Byron: A Life in Ten Letters (2024)

I read this in conjunction with Byron’s poetry. Picked it up as it was the most recent major work on Byron published when I went looking. Interesting, well-written, yet still not what I wanted.

History

Roderick Beaton – The Greek Revolution of 1821 and its Global Significance (2021)

I read this after visiting Greece. Short, but not too short to fit in an argument for its major thesis—viz., that the Greek Revolution was internationally important because it was the first successful ‘domestication’ of the revolutionary ideal in Europe, after the failure of the French Revolution. Disappointing, then, that the author does not actually fit in a sufficiently-developed argument.

Malcolm Gaskill – The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World (2022)

The overblown praise this book got (the back of my copy describes it as a ‘bona fide historical classic… history writing of the very first class’) is not matched by what’s inside, on two levels. First, the storytelling—while certainly better than a lot of Wolfson-bait history writing—is still a bit all over the place. But second, in terms of accuracy: even without consulting any of Gaskill’s sources it is clear to me, an amateur, that he has badly garbled a lot of the Puritan theology he talks about, especially relating to the Atonement. Who knows what other errors might have resulted that I couldn’t pick up? I say ‘who knows’ because even the errors I saw have not been noticed by reviewers. Disappointing.

Ronald Hutton – The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (1999)

Hutton’s purpose is not merely to tell the story of the new religion Wicca, but to position its emergence as the culmination of British dechristianisation. He emphasises the importance to secularisation of the Romantic belief that spiritual wisdom can be found in nature rather than revelation, which came to be expressed in the language of ‘paganism’. And he largely ignores sceptical and ‘disenchanted’ trends like social Darwinism, psychoanalysis, and Nietzscheanism—even though Nietzsche was a post-Romantic figure fascinated by the lessons of pre-Christian paganism, a natural subject for Hutton’s study and someone who deeply influenced many of Hutton’s subjects. But to discuss Nietzsche, Hutton would’ve had to go into the differences between the core of British culture—which valiantly tried to synthesise sceptical and magical influences (see Hugh MacDiarmid above)—and the credulous fringes from which Wicca emerged; and this would have undermined his larger project. While the first half of the book (about the late- and post-Victorian context) is immensely fascinating and productive if sometimes frustrating, the second half (focussing on Wicca itself) is just frustrating.⁴

Colin Kidd – Union and Unionisms: Political Thought in Scotland, 1500–2000 (2008)

A bit old by now, but still a very good survey. Particularly useful for linking intellectual and political history to ecclesiastical history, which is still not done with sufficient frequency in Scottish history writing. (I think the most recent major book published about the Disruption is from the 90s—unbelievable!) MacCormick Sr does not feature enough in the last chapter for my liking.

Peter Marshall – Storm’s Edge: Life, Death and Magic in the Islands of Orkney (2024)

At some point I gave up trying to keep track of which of the Stewarts and Sinclairs and Halcros were which, and I skipped about a chapter and a half as a result. The clear highlight is the chapter on Orkney’s witch-trials, which is better than many whole books on early modern witchcraft. The chapter on the Reformation was also worth a read, and made me think again about (among other things) George Mackay Brown writing from Stromness about Scotland being a ‘Knox-ruined nation’: I’m not sure whether it is ironic or, in fact, perfectly consonant that Orkney was among the least ‘Knox-ruined’ places in Scotland.

David Torrance – A History of the Scottish Liberals and Liberal Democrats (2022)

Not recommended if you are not as obsessed with Lib Dem inside baseball as I am. (Strongly recommended if you are.)

Short stories and essays

Sinéad Gleeson – Constellations (2019)

A very eighth-amendment book: not only is the theme of the female body deliberately set up as the link between the essay, but even essays about blood or childhood illnesses or other aspects of the body not obviously connected to ‘the eighth’ end up coming back around to the Catholic Church or patriarchal control. An enlightening window into its moment, but not something (I would say) of lasting interest.

Marie Heaney – Over Nine Waves: A Book of Irish Legends (1994)

This is, in essence, a modern version of Lady Gregory’s books of myth: uncritical ‘retellings’ of ‘pre-Christian Irish myths’, as preserved (and likely altered) by medieval Christian monks, with a few ‘retellings’ of Irish hagiographies bolted on the end for good measure. I’d rather have the Lady Gregory works, which are the key conduit for the reception of these myths in modern times, but this book is still a useful enough reference document for post-Revival Irish culture.

Kathleen Jamie – Cairn (2024)

I really like Jamie, as (I think) everybody living in Scotland is contractually obliged to, but I felt this one fell a bit flat. She is clearly trying to reconcile her singular type of quasi–nature writing with her growing concern about climate change and its impact on nature; but I don’t think she manages the synthesis, and her politics come across as inexpert and sometimes unthinking, sticking out like a sore thumb against the background of her obvious intellectual abilities.

Benjamín Labatut – When We Cease to Understand the World (2021)

A wonderful, sadly rare, un–‘Two Cultures’ book. Yet I think a lot of ‘humanistic’ readers will have finished it and not been compelled to learn more about the technical details of (say) quantum mechanics; not Labatut’s fault, merely that he is working against forces of complacency and learned helplessness that are much more powerful than he is. The only solution is simply to have much more of this kind of thing: overpower the literary culture with proofs of the human depths of the scientific endeavour, while tempting the scientific culture with literary lures.

Alice Munro – Dear Life (2012)

Hmm. Hah. 2024 was perhaps not the year to decide to actually get into Alice Munro, was it? I loved this when I read it, only a month or so before her death. Like many of Munro’s readers, I found the subsequent revelations not just to be ethically revolting, but to have the effect of recontextualising her stories, with some of them now reading like sick exercises in auto-apologetics. I’m not sure how to balance that, and I’m not sure if I’ll read any more of her.

Politics

Conor Cruise O’Brien – States of Ireland (1972)

If you’ve not read it, you don’t know what you’re arguing for or against when you talk about Northern Ireland. It’s not a matter of liking it or not.

Alasdair Gray and Adam Tomkins – How We Should Rule Ourselves (2005)

As I said in a review after I read it: ‘maddeningly, completely, inalterably unzeitgemäß’. More than worth reading as a historical document, incredibly telling about the difference between the first decade after devolution and the second.

Isabel Hardman – Why We Get the Wrong Politicians (2018)

A misleading title: Hardman’s topic is MPs, not politicians in general (no Lords, councillors, or devolved representatives); and she’s not only concerned with the wrong’uns, but also with how parliamentary structures and culture can undermine even good politicians. Her account of all the different ways in which an MP’s life is shit is very good; her account of how those shit lives lead to bad policymaking is much poorer, and indeed at times seems to reflect just as much incuriosity about possible alternatives as the MPs she criticises. In general, her biggest problem is a lack of a theory of what the Commons is supposed to do in our constitution beyond truisms (‘write laws’): I’m not saying she should have tried to do a twenty-first century Present Discontents, but a better sense of the constitutional function of parliament would have led to a sharper understanding of how it fails in that function.

Philosophy

Julia Annas – An Introduction to Plato’s Republic (1981)

Fine. Suffers from the problem that Annas wanted to bring in the views of other scholars (and herself), but also didn’t want to scare away her presumably undergraduate target audience with a mass of citations; as a result, there are many locutions like ‘some people argue that…’, without much indication at all as to who the ‘some people’ are and where the scholarly debate might be found. Was useful for me to occasionally consult while reading the Republic.

Umberto Eco – Five Moral Pieces (1997)

Very different to its reputation? I expect if I knew more about the Italian intellectual context Eco wrote these pieces in, they would make more sense; but reading this book just unsettled my previously-established interpretation of The Name of the Rose, rather than delivering any philosophical or practical insight.

Plato – The Republic (c. 375 B. C. E.)

I had read a lot of Plato before, obviously, but never actually the Republic. I undertook (what was by my standards) an exceptionally close study, consulting two different translations: Grube as revised by Reeve, published by Hackett, and Rowe, published by Penguin. My progress was maybe five-ten pages a week, I annotated almost every page, and I loved every single minute. I ended up diving most deeply into four themes: book 1 as ‘the play in miniature’; the centrality of the division of labour in Plato’s principles for the city; discipline as the key desiderata for both the city and the soul; and the similarities between Plato’s descriptions of ‘corrupting’ poetry and his own practice of philosophy. The Republic is obviously one of the greatest things, in any genre or language, that any human being has ever written. Do not make the same error as me and put this off for so long: even if you are not a philosophy person or a politics person, everybody who is interested at all in books should read the Republic as soon as they can.

Miscellaneous

Stuart Heritage – Bald: How I Slowly Learned to Not Hate Having No Hair (And You Can Too) (2024)

This summer, for the first time, I found myself with sunburn on my crown, a depressing indicator of the extent of my male-pattern baldness. This came recommended so I picked it up; and put it back down again in a couple of days. Absolutely insufferable. I understand that the author’s persona was put on for comedic effect—or was it? Either way, I couldn’t finish it, no matter that it was fewer than 200 pages.

Robert Bruce Lockhart – Scotch: The Whisky of Scotland in Fact and Story (1951)

Another charity shop find. Beautiful-looking book, and actually mildly interesting as a historical document; I wrote a bit about it here. I was about to write something like ‘not worth searching out unless you’re an obsessive collector of books about whiskey’, but—if you are an obsessive collector of books about whiskey, I should really be telling you to stop, there’s thousands of them and they are nearly all shite.

Myles na gCopaleen – The Best of Myles (originally published 1940–1966)

Hilarious, as you should expect. Best enjoyed by reading any given selection out loud in the thickest, most stereotypical southern Irish accent you can muster—no matter that the man behind Myles was born in Strabane.

1. Though I agree with Paulin that Hill obviously meant to invoke Enoch Powell in Mercian Hymns XVIII: you’d’ve had to be an idiot not to understand the changed resonance of Aeneid VI.87 after 1968, and Hill was not an idiot. The problem with the argument ‘it’s obvious’, though, is that you have to be restrained with its use: Paulin’s decision to prominently declare that it was obvious not only that Hill echoed Powell in Mercian Hymns XVIII (which he did) but also that Hill echoed Yeats in ‘Idylls of the King’ (which he didn’t) allowed some of English criticism’s snidest pricks to get their kicks in, and has perhaps forever killed the ability of critics to make the Hill-Powell connection without much handwringing and defensiveness—of the kind I’m engaging in right now.

2. As an aside: while it is a lovely line, it is clearly not true. Yes, Homer lived in a world of local rows, but he built the Iliad from hazy, terrifying memories of a world where rows had not merely been local, a world of palace economies and chariots and immense wars, a world that collapsed so completely that the Greeks forgot how to write, so completely that Homer could barely conceptualise the world that had passed and even today we still don’t really know what happened.

3. I don’t take too seriously the discussion of what size clothes Alison wears. Obviously a size 20, Alison’s claimed size, is overweight but not ‘grotesque’ by anyone’s standards. (At least not today: mid-2000s British culture was really quite awful, maybe a size 20 would have been considered hideous by the tabloids of the time.) Regardless, it’s clear that Alison is underestimating by quite a bit: Colette suggests she’s really a 26, and I think that certain readings of Colette and Alison’s relationship could render even that a polite underestimation. The real point of the discussion is that Alison’s actual size is (suitably enough) ethereal, and what really matters is the intertwined shame and self-defence that orbit around her size. No matter what size she ‘really’ is, Alison is using food in an attempt to become grotesque herself, and fails, remaining—in all her humanity—the least grotesque part of the novel.

4. It is worth mentioning that I found a great many minor errors in Triumph. Most were mere typos, including many dozens of unclosed quotation marks; others were the product of sloppy revisions, like leaving in a second mention of ‘Hugh Trevor-Roper’s essay’ even though there is no first mention giving its title, date, or argument. But there were a few real howlers, including mixing up Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Overall, it is a very unprofessional volume. This I blame less on Hutton and more on his editors: small factual errors and typos are inevitable in an author’s drafts, but when we are talking about the revised edition of a well-regarded book published by a university press, it’s just editorial laziness that they weren’t fixed before the book went to print.