Mid-Year Mea Culpa: Some Regrets for Last Year’s Most-Notable Books List, and a Look-Ahead for This Year’s

 

                                                                                    

By Don Curren

It’s been a little longer than half a year since my notable books list for 2024, and it’s a little less than half a year until my list for 2025.

So, it seems like an opportune time for some retrospective analysis of last year’s list and some foreshadowing of what might come in this year’s list.

My regrets about last year’s list (you can read it here) are primarily about sins of omission rather than sins of commission. (My lists are of books I read in the reference year, regardless of when they were published.)

There isn’t anything on last year’s list that I now regret putting there, except perhaps Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, a philosophical opus by Iris Murdoch, who is at least as well known for her output as a novelist as her work as a philosopher.

I stand by my original assessment of it as a wise and insightful book. But it is a bit shambolic, perhaps due to its origins in a series of lectures that Murdoch gave.

In retrospect, it’s something of a specialist read that maybe shouldn’t have been on a list that’s basically aimed at generalist readers.

It's the omissions that I have  been regretting the most. (I know the composition of a seven-month-old books list perhaps doesn’t seem an appropriate subject for regret. But I have been accused of nursing too many regrets about trivial things – justly, I believe – so at least it’s in character.)

The biggest omission is probably the Patricia Highsmith novel I read last summer, a 1986 volume called Found in the Street.

                                                                

It’s not one of Highsmith’s more high-profile novels. As it’s not centered around crime, it’s kind of atypical of her work.

But it was an absorbing read, and it left a vivid impression in my mind for several months.

(Oddly enough, it has a tangential connection with the work of Iris Murdoch. At one point, one of the characters – an unlikely one – muses about Murdoch’s novels. It struck me at the time as quite unusual. There weren’t any other passages in the books about other writers.

But it later occurred to me Highsmith might have been trying to provide the reader with a clue about what she was attempting to achieve in Found in the Street: a book like one Murdoch might write, more about the relationships and interactions between a group of disparate people than the kind of crime-driven narrative Highsmith herself would typically pen.)

I also regret that I didn’t include The Art of Being by Erich Fromm as one of the most notable books I read in 2024.

It was a book I stumbled on in a Toronto thrift store, which I reviewed here.

The review spends a lot of time positioning the book in the context of Fromm’s career and his relationship to the thinkers of the Frankfurt School.

But what’s important about this book is its continuing relevance in diagnosing the failings of our technological society and its positive suggestions for dealing with those on a personal level.

 

                                                               

                                                      

The third and final omission is The Mountain in the Sea, the debut science fiction novel from Ray Naylor.

It was one of the most riveting and immediately pleasurable reads I encountered in 2024.

His second book, Where the Axe is Buried, which I read this April, was more ambitious than The Mountain in the Sea, but less compelling.

Which has brought me to the subject of what might make it to this year’s list.

I’ve had a very good year of reading, so far. I had read 56 books as of the end of July, which is putting me on track to substantially exceed last year’s total of 63 by the end of the year.

I’ve become a little more focused than usual, and in the spring, I read several books about fascism and authoritarianism and related topics as the situation in the US deteriorated and Trump began to cast covetous eyes on Canada.

One of them was Timothy Snyder’s justly celebrated On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the 20^th Century.

Snyder’s 2017 book has been widely read and cited and has emerged as a useful manual of how to resist Trump and other aspiring and actual tyrants.

It's a strong candidate for inclusion in this year's most-notable books list.

I was particularly interested in how it talks about ways to resist in apparently non-political aspects of life, which I wrote about in this review of Snyder’s book and Eric Larson’s In The Garden of Beasts.

Other books included in my spate of anti-Fascist reading were another Snyder volume, The Road to Unfreedom, How Fascism Works by his colleague Jason Stanley, and On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt – for what is Trump but the apotheosis and extreme empowerment of bullshit?

Another book that’s almost sure to make this year's list is One Thousand Years of Nonlinear History – Manuel De Landa. (Pictured above)

It’s really more of a philosophy book, but it includes a lot of history and offers an interesting and unusual perspective on that history. It’s definitely a contender.

Others include the book many consider Patricia Highsmith’s best, A Tremor of Forgery, which I read a few weeks back, and a short but incisive book from Canada’s philosopher emeritus, Charles Taylor, called The Malaise of Modernity.

But we live in surprising times, and I fully expect to encounter some surprises, pleasant and otherwise, as I read my way through the rest of the year.

I’m looking forward to sharing them with you in early January.