Year in Review: 2024
Story collections: Coexistence (Billy-Ray Belcourt) is the kind of collection I appreciate because it’s intensely interested in being meaningful and profound, with lines like “Remember: a man is a fable that doesn’t necessarily convey a moral.”
What We Think We Know (Aaron Schneider) is a skillfully written set of stories with the right amount of experimentation: it’s the spice, not the main course. Reviewed below.
Difficult People (Catriona Wright) has one of those titles so good you wonder why you haven’t seen it before. Characters that feel quite real are in unique slices of life, so to speak.
Survivors of the Hive (Jason Heroux) is reviewed below as a story collection with a thoroughly enjoyable sense of experimentation. I imagine Heroux grew up on The Twilight Zone, like I did.
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (Raymond Carver) has a bit of a fragmented approach, but I appreciate that Carver wants to capture something real rather than provide all the answers.
Novels: Black Dogs (Ian McEwan) is concise and skillfully done, changing up the narrative a few times but always finding its way to something profound: “A crowd is a slow, stupid creature, far less intelligent than any one of its members.”
Desperate Characters (Paula Fox) has struggling, fairly self-obsessed characters I didn’t love, but moments in the writing like this: “Leon is right. When I open my mouth, toads fall out. I’m sorry.”
DeNiro’s Game (Rawi Hage) is an urgent, compelling novel about childhood friends growing up in war-torn Lebanon. Remarkable details, and if I found it a little clunky in execution, I think maybe that just added to the realism, somehow.
Piranesi (Susanna Clarke) is an intriguing and skillfully written intellectual mystery, involving identity and assorted rooms large enough to have hundreds of statues and cloud formations.
Gormenghast (Peake) is the middle part of a trilogy of novels set in a fictional world that reads a bit like Shakespeare. No dragons, just people and their own motivations, and it’s nothing short of remarkable with great moments in the writing. But start with Titus Groan.
Anomia (Jade Wallace) is reviewed below as a compelling but meaningful novel that doesn’t include gender for any of the characters.
The Road (Cormac McCarthy) immediately became one of my favourite novels for being as gripping as it was profound, with just the right amount of scattered poetic moments.
Confessions of a Crap Artist (Philip K Dick) is a pretty straight-up drama without any twist on reality, proving Dick and simply conjure up fascinating characters in a compelling story featuring “a collector of crackpot ideas,” and his impact on the world.
Mystery novels: The West End Horror (Nicholas Meyer) is a thoroughly engaging Sherlock Holmes mystery involving the theatre world with characters like Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde appearing.
Sherlock Holmes and the Great War (Simon Guerrier) was a compelling mystery but also involved a good amount of interesting historical detail that wasn’t awkwardly forced into the story.
Nonfiction: Grief is for People (Sloane Crosley) is a concise, deeply articulate memoir: “And no one is obliged to learn something from loss. This is a horrible thing we do to the newly stricken, encouraging them to remember the good times when they’re still in the fetal position. Like feeding steak to a baby.” It’s among the books I’ve reviewed below.
Best Canadian Essays 2025 (Emily Urquhart, editor) is another excellent book in the series, with relevant and skillfully written selections. It’s good to see the series going strong.
News of the World: Stories and Essays (Paula Fox) is something I read, having enjoyed Desperate Characters. As a collection, it was a bit hit-and-miss for me, but with some deeply worthy moments
Lazy Bastardism (Carmine Starnino) is a book of poetry criticism that had me reaching for my highlighter often: “The real game of writing poetry remains the part that rests entirely on a lucky break: the creation of a singular, stand-alone word structure that satisfies emotionally and intellectually while signaling itself as an artifice. Have our poets been that lucky? Absolutely.”
Boldy Go, Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder (William Shatner) features Shatner telling some interesting tales but also finding reverence, which I appreciated.
Graphic novels: I read many, but I think the best one was Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness (Kristen Radtke) which manages to slowly and carefully get at something profound.
An honourable mention to Through a Life (Tom Haugomat) which fast-forwards through the decades of a life in a way that clarifies how fleeting life can be, and how valuable.
Poetry: Like a Trophy from the Sun (Jason Heroux), A Year of Last Things (Ondaatje), Talking to Strangers (Rhea Tregebov), Ways to Say We’re Not Alone (Simon Alderwick), National Animal (Derek Webster), Ghost Work (Robert Colman). I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me? (Nolan Natasha).
And Little Poems (an Everyman anthology edited by Michael Hennessy) was an excellent collection.
