I read many books this year, though nowhere near as many as last year. I’ve spent much more time reading books as a tool for language acquisition, which has eaten into my luxury reading time, unfortunately. Still, I feel like I’ve outgrown the cloying year-end list of literary conquests. It’s time I adopted a new method. This is a weak, prototypical version of what I’d like to start doing on a more regular than annual basis. Every book needn’t be catalogued completed. Rather, I should be pointing out the ones that were important to me and writing about that significance. Here’s that list for 2024, cobbled together from my often sparse notes.
The Fall of Hyperion
I was upset when I started reading this for the obviously idiotic reason that it wasn’t composed like the first, an anthology of tales shared among a group of pilgrims, of unreliable narrators. The original was such an engaging, pseudo-mystery novel but this left the second to accomplish something more significant. I think it generally succeeded even if it wasn’t a carbon copy of the original. Perhaps only because it wasn’t.
I think what appeals to me most about the Hyperion arc of Simmon’s universe is its strong messaging about - effectively - environmentalism and more specifically the perpetual encroachment of development. Humanity quests ever to reduce the distance between spaces which results in the destruction of what made said spaces special and worth the trials of distance. This is something I had ample opportunity to ponder every time I lamented during my contemporary travels how difficult the journey between points A and B were, or conversely how the simplification of such sojourns had cheapened, commodified and gentrified the once-wild and foreign places I had sought.
I was also deeply touched by the universe’s pseudo-religious war of inscrutable intellects: humanity versus its creation. In all our modern fretting about the downfall of humanity and our species at the hands of AI, it’s satisfying to read some works that address the fears, if even from three decades prior to their manifesting. From the hive mind of the TechnoCore and the short socio-political chains of the Hegemony, individuals rise, almost never by choice, to become heroes. Around these characters entire universal power structures turn. I sometimes mock our human fondness for this trope, but still I value being reminded that the sum of the parts is not the value of each, that every human has a unique role despite seeming an undifferentiated fragment of the species' whole. We are not only responsible for our own destinies but that the world. Afterall, in a system where we often feel manipulated like meek pawns, it’s easy to forget that all hope of victory can be placed entirely upon any piece given the right circumstances.
Although whenever I consider these two books, I’m reminded much to my disappointment that I have never, ever read anything by Keats.
Steppenwolf
Creighton translation, revised by Sorell
I loved this novel. I also read it at a fittingly difficult time in my life where I was questioning the prospects of starting over. Of learning to live again. I think a very important lesson in the book is about the dangers of narrativizing rather than experiencing our lives, as evidenced by this quote:
What does not stand classified as either man or wolf he does not see at all
What did not fit into his dichotomous vision of his character was outside his reckoning about his life and self entirely. Sometimes enshrined ideas deprive us of the evidence necessary to dismantle them, to lead a life beyond them.
It’s also lovely to see Hesse’s transcendentalist tendencies on full display in the discussion of the immortals, such as
Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke
Which was uttered by the immortal Mozart in a lengthy dream sequence. Not to mention the way it weaves the lessons of the immortals into the words of Hermine’s rebukes of Harry’s philosophy.
One of the drug-laced fever dreams near the end produces perhaps my favorite exchange on the theme of anti-techno-utopianism:
“We are destroying all motor cars and all other machines also”
“Your rifles too?”
“Their time will come, granted we have the time.”
The last line of which plays quite humorously with these other two claims about time and our occupations, first from the aforementioned immortal:
Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don’t mind telling you, in putting too high a value on time.
And from Hermine:
To be religious you must have time and, even more, you must be independent of time.
The ideas float relaxedly in the current of Hesse’s philosophy, that put quite plainly near the climax of Siddartha through the metaphor of the river. It’s also a wonderful reminder to me right now, as I feel the doom of encroaching middle age and a maddening impatience at my ability to achieve what I fantasize shall be made of my life. The clock is a torture we inflict upon ourselves. Time is not a resource to be maximally utilized, it is a mere medium on which we paint our experience.
The Gods Themselves
I loved the three books of the Foundation series I read, but this one was amazing as it was almost nothing like those. The first book of the novel is an interesting setup, and the third a somewhat satisfying and often humorously executed conclusion to the conflict created in the first, but the second book was one of the most beautiful love stories I’ve ever read. Creating a completely new species existing under foreign physics but somehow making the challenges of their alien courtship methods and society applicable to human relationships and our search for meaning was an incredible feat. I’m not terribly familiar with sci-fi, so it is entirely possible that Asimov has stood on the shoulders of giants or been the giant for works still greater in this regard, but reading this was a revelatory experience for me.
It’s funny how my favorite book of the novel speaks to the core of humanity despite being about melty shapes, but the lesser two books speak to society as whole, as in this gem which summarizes one of the central narrative conflicts:
It is a mistake to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved … What the public wants is their own individual comfort.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that so many books in the genre contend with resource scarcity and problems related to extraction or usage, when it is the key to determining our destiny: stars in the sky or dust on the wind.
Galapagós
I really like Vonnegut but I’ve almost exclusively read his books by serendipity: one comes into my life by strange means and I’m grateful for the opportunity. This may be my second or third favorite, and is good enough that at some points in my life since reading it I have described it superlatively. As an example: the pacing was nearly perfect. As in many of his books he jumps back and forth in the chronology using a timeless narrator, to bait and bat the plot forward at a jaunty clip. But on top of being an example of a writer at the peak of their capabilities, it makes observations that seem fascinatingly prescient, such as this clip which describes (“that”) an early Siri/Alexa/LLM prototype:
What is that but an excuse for a mean-spirited egomaniac never to pay any human being with knowledge of languages or mathematics or history or medicine or literature or ikebana or anything?
And from just a few pages later, describing a reason for the downfall of humanity:
More and more people […] had found ensuring the survival of the human race a total bore.
Perhaps it all seems so plausible because it plays on still contemporarily relevant anxieties about economic destruction, nihilism, pandemics, and socio-political systems that have become focused on perpetuating themselves rather than serving humanity as was their design’s intention.
Klara and the Sun
I’d read some things about this book before reading it, but something I never saw anyone draw attention to was how Klara, an android, builds a faith system out of her observations of the world. There are scenes of divine revelation and deep spiritual significance, and Ishiguro makes it understandable to the reader.
I didn’t actually say the words out loud, for I knew the Sun had no need of words as such
When reviewing the plot to write this I discovered Taika Waititi is adapting it to film, and given the tone and content of the novel, I can’t think of a more appropriate filmmaker for the task. It is suffused with comedic tones for which Waititi is well-known, and is the sort of gently potent emotional tale he’s often succeeded at putting to screen. Still, I am skeptical of the capacity for anyone to recapture the subtly religious nature of Klara’s powerful character arc.
The Sandman
Books 1 and 2
I love the world Gaiman builds (on) in this series. I love the The Doll’s House arc, probably because I’m drawn to “center of the universe during armageddon” type tales. We’re all a sucker for those, aren’t we? But the way Gaiman weaves so many disparate-seeming tales together in the episodic format of comic books is excellent. The musings of the Endless (among others) are occasionally sprinkled with such paradoxical wisdom as this gem:
The price of getting what you want is getting what once you wanted
And the artists do an impeccable job rising to the task of illustrating often irrational and highly symbolic metaphysical landscapes. While I greatly enjoy the dense allusions, and of course the product as a whole, I don’t think it’s an unfair criticism to suggest Gaiman has said so little with so much.
Akira
I feel like I understand the movie so much better now! I also respect the film that they managed to produce from such dense source material. The characters were so wonderfully fleshed out, the relationships complex and the situations always explosively intense, especially from book 3 on.
There’s quite a bit written about the theme of frustration with the government especially through the lens of disaffected adolescents, and this is certainly something that drew me to the anime in the first place. I believe I was specifically seeking films featuring what I had dubbed “riot porn” during this punk-infused era of my youth. Something else that struck me about the manga compared to the film is Tetsuo’s journey as an allegory for the journey of young men through adolescence: the violent rage and disaffection coupled with a desire for self-mastery, and the grasping need for connection, intimate and platonic. Tetsuo is a young man coming to terms with a world that has no place for him, and dramatically trying to make his own space despite the many societal forces actively pushing back on his self-actualization. I don’t say this to glamorize him, like the romantics did Milton’s Lucifer. It’s clear from the manga, despite the sense of superiority he evinces during confrontations, that Tetsuo frequently doesn’t believe in himself or the validity of his aims. He’s a lost boy through and through, and all of Neo-Tokyo and beyond are his struggle’s collateral damage. I think it’s another poignant exploration of life’s turning points in this list, though placed in the turbulence of youth rather than the ennui of middle age as in Steppenwolf.