As I did at the end of last year, I found time before the end of 2023 to chat with Ben Lindner for a year-end special episode of his podcast Beyond the Zero. Once again, we discussed the fortunes of Splice throughout the course of the year—having published both Daybook by Nathan Knapp and In the Suavity of the Rock by Greg Gerke—and we touched on some highlights in my reading. This time, rather than sticking to five titles, I nominated my eight favourite books of the last twelve months, but only four titles I’m particularly looking forward to reading in 2024.
You can listen to my section of the podcast below, excerpted from the full episode, or you can scroll down to see what I said about my top eight and the books I’m most anticipating next year.
My five favourites of 2023 were as follows:
The Passenger and Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy… plus everything else by Cormac McCarthy: “I’ve got to cheat a little bit. One of the things that I did last year, that I should not have done, was I looked at the reviews of Cormac McCarthy’s two last novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris. A lot of people were saying they weren’t great, so I said, “All right, I don’t need to read those right now; I’ll ask for them for Christmas.” Then I got them for Christmas, and I [remembered] the reviews, and I thought, “I don’t need to read those straight away, and I left them until February.” And then in February, I read them—and I was like, “What the fuck were those reviews about?” Because I think [these two books are] incredible. I was just captivated by both of them and they sent me right back to McCarthy, so I’ve been rereading all of McCarthy this year as a result of that—which I probably wouldn’t have done without those two novels. He wrote so many incredible books. Out of the twelve he published, there are at least six bonafide masterpieces, and any of the others would be the masterpiece of most other writers if they’d written just one of those. [His body of work is] just so, so far above just anything else I can think of— accomplishment in contemporary literature.”
The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild by Mathias Énard: “An incredible piece of work. An amazing highlight.”
Lorem Ipsum by Oli Hazzard: “I want to recommend this very short book [for readers who] are enjoying the sorts of books [we’ve] seen recently from Emily Hall and Jen Craig. It’s about a person who’s new to parenthood, basically pushing a child around the Meadows in Edinburgh, and this narrator’s concerns just spool out into lots of different directions in a really beautiful, really tight way. It has a bit more of an Eastern influence [than Hall and Craig’s novels], picking up things explicitly from Japanese literature and the way Japanese narratives can be constructed and putting them into this thought process. It’s really great.”
An Ordinary Ecstasy by Luke Carman: “Amazing. Particularly the longer stories in [the collection]. I wasn’t expecting it to be as good as [Carman’s début collection] An Elegant Young Man, which I really loved, but it’s way better. An incredible maturation [of this] writer is on display in this book.”
Light Years by James Salter: “For years, people have been telling me to read James Salter, and I never have. But he’s great! I read Light Years in, like, a day, and I was just completely captivated by it. The control of language and the [temporal] fragmentation and distillation—the way he plays around with the passage of time—is quite beautiful. And also just his writing about people’s bodies and desires. It’s sometimes awkward and embarrassing, but I think he’s controlled in that way—deliberately awkward—and, at other times, so sensitive and earnest, without being like cringy. I don’t know how he does that. He walks a very fine line.”
The Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante: “I was late to [this literary phenomenon]. I’d never read [Ferrante] until this year, and basically imbibed the quartet in the blink of an eye.”
Collected Stories by Amy Hempel: “Hempel comes out of the Gordon Lish school of American fiction. Probably, stylistically, the one of those writers that she is closest to is Garielle Lutz, who I really love. There’s a joke on every page—every page of this book makes you laugh—and the [Lutzian] grotesquerie is there as well.”
The books I’m most looking forward to reading in 2024 are as follows:
Molly by Blake Butler
The Son of Man by Jean-Baptiste del Amo
Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson
Hides by Rod Moody-Corbett
And now, just like last year, I’ll end with a confession: that final title will be a re-read, not a first read, because I’ve read Hides in manuscript form already. But it really is a fantastic novel and I can’t wait to read it again, in print.