It’s that time of year when I tempt you to obliterate what remains of your savings.
Hey, it could be worse. At least you’re not pissing it away on unoriginal streaming music or vapid superhero rehash.
I’ve got some great books to recommend this year.
As usual, I read and re-read a lot of travel literature to prepare for Personal Landscapes podcast conversations. I also have a few essential history reads to share, and some truly outstanding nonfiction, memoir, and fiction.
Each of the books below made my list because it was memorable, important, or just thoroughly enjoyable, and each is worth your time. I hope you’ll track them down.
Okay, first up, my Top Pick of the Year…
TOP PICK: Light Years by James Salter
James Salter is the best American writer you’ve probably never read. I’d come across his name many times over the years, but it wasn’t until I picked up a copy of Light Years from a used bookshop in February that I realized what I was missing. The first page blew me away. His sentences were fractured jewels. The details were closely observed, the imagery poetic. Every page contained an observation that I wanted to write down. By the time I’d gotten 30 pages in, I was emailing my best bookish friend to tell him he must read it.
Of course I set out to track down every Salter book I could find. I also read his brilliant memoir Burning the Days, which talks about his time at West Point, and his service as a fighter pilot in the Korean War, where he flew more than 100 combat missions in an F-86 Sabre.
I loved A Sport and a Pastime, a novel about an affair between a young American and an eighteen year old French girl, set in a small provincial town in the 1960s. It is dreamlike, erotic, exotic and doomed, and it captures the excitement of being young in a foreign country.
Pick up Salter’s late novel All That Is if you loved the three book I mentioned above. It’s less successful than Light Years, but it’s still a joy to plunge back into his prose.
His short stories are masterful; I read and loved Dusk and Other Stories. I also read There and Then: The Travel Writing of James Salter but a significant number of those stories were incorporated into Burning the Days, so there was less new writing there for me.
My discovery of this remarkable writer coincided with the publication of James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist by the prolific biographer Jeffrey Meyers. Jeffrey was kind enough to join me on Personal Landscapes to talk about his friendship with Salter, and the writing.
Click the links above to get copies of these essential books. And listen to my podcast conversation with Jeffrey Meyers on Personal Landscapes.
Okay, moving on.
In the category of travel literature…
A Race to the Bottom of Crazy by Richard Grant
The British writer Richard Grant has lived in Arizona for more than twenty years. It’s a place where social guardrails are weak, and outlandish behaviour is the order of the day. It’s also a place that doesn’t just reflect national trends, it exaggerates them. His new book mixes memoir, research and reporting to get to grips with the strange place he calls home. From the lure of the desert to existential questions about Arizona’s southern border and water shortages, to the bizarre spectacle of the world’s biggest machine gun shoot, there’s so much here for the curious reader.
Richard has become one of my favourite current writers, and I’m busy tracking down the rest of his work. I also read Crazy River this year, his book about a river journey in East Africa that also took him to the backstreets of Zanzibar, Rwanda and Burundi.
Richard came on my podcast last year to talk about Ghost Riders: Travels With American Nomads, his exploration of the “roadside culture of wandering rootlessness” at the heart of the uniquely American view of freedom. You can listen to that episode here.
Click the links above to get copies of these essential books. And listen to our podcast conversation about A Race to the Bottom of Crazy on Personal Landscapes.
Undefeatable: Odesa in Love and War by Julian Evans
Julian Evans’ lyrical new memoir weaves the history and literature of Odesa into the story of his marriage to a local woman, the birth of their children and their eventual divorce, painting a vivid picture of life in this fascinating city.
When Vladimir Putin launched his ten-year war, Evans ventured to the front lines with combat medics and drone operators, raising money for the defence of his adopted homeland and bringing badly needed supplies like tourniquets and donated trucks. He has given us a remarkable eyewitness account of the struggle that puts a human face on the largest armed conflict in Europe since the Second World War.
Get your copy of Undefeatable here. And listen to my podcast conversation with Julian Evans on Personal Landscapes.
Anima: A Wild Pastoral by Kapka Kassabova
Kapka Kassabova is one of today’s most interesting writers on place, and one whose work will stand the test of time. Her newest book completes a four-volume exploration of the Balkans. She explored the story of her own family’s past in Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe and in To The Lake, her book on Lake Ohrid in Macedonia.
The next two books deal with the societal level: how people in this corner of the Balkans connect with the natural world. She wrote about the world of plants in Elixir, and now she explores the world of animals in Anima. It’s the story her time with Europe’s last nomadic pastoralists, a group of shepherds in the Pirin Mountains struggling to hold on to a vanishing way of life.
Get your copy of Anima here. And listen to my podcast conversation with Kapka Kassabova on Personal Landscapes.
Hidden Japan by Alex Kerr
Japan is a country I know fairly well. I lived on Tokyo’s western edge in my late twenties, and I go back every couple years to visit my in-laws. I love Alex Kerr’s writing because his books explain so many things that I find strange about the country, and they open my eyes to so much more. His newest book (in English) takes us to remote, little-known corners where pockets of traditional culture and nearly extinct nature can still be found. It’s a book that helps you look beyond the hyper-modern to connect to the country’s essence.
I also re-read two of his earlier books that are longtime favourites of mine: Lost Japan and Dogs and Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan.
Get Your Copy of Hidden Japan here. And listen to my podcast conversation with Alex Kerr on Personal Landscapes.
From Heaven Lake by Vikram Seth
Vikram Seth spent two years as a postgraduate student at Nanjing University in 1981. Travel in China was strictly controlled and the country’s hinterlands were seldom visited by outsiders but he was able to use his student visa and fluent Chinese to hitchhike home to New Delhi on his summer vacation. The result is a remarkable story filled with hardships, bureaucratic hurdles, gruelling rides over three major mountain ranges, and the kindness of strangers.
I’ve had this one on my list for ages because I traveled through some of that same territory — Xinjiang and Tibet — in 2002, and I was revising an old manuscript about it.
Get your copy of From Heaven Lake here.
Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi
Carlo Levi was exiled to a remote and barren corner of Italy in the mid-1930s for his opposition to Mussolini. His account of those years is part diary, sketchbook, political essay and sociological study about a place strictly bounded by custom, cut off from the state and even from history; a poverty-stricken place where peasants live brutally hard lives of privation, enduring as they have always done with quiet dignity and humour.
It’s a fascinating tale of how people adapt to difficult circumstances. Levi grew so attached to the region and its people that he asked to be buried there, though he died in Rome.
Get your copy of Christ Stopped at Eboli here.
In history…..
Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949 – 1990 by Katja Hoyer
Katja Hoyer tells the story of East Germany’s rise and fall, from its idealistic beginnings and early success to paranoid police state under the thumb of Stalin’s USSR. — but her DDR is nothing like the grey, monotonous blur I remember from teenage media portrayals. She shows us a place where people shaped their own destinies in a rich political, social and cultural landscape, where everyone was employed and had their basic needs met, and where the status of women in the workplace was much higher than it was in the West.
Her retelling of the rise and fall of a Cold War state was fascinating, but it is her interviews with ordinary East Germans that stay with me. They put a human face on a place we’d all been taught to fear.
Get your copy of Beyond the Wall here.
Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane by S. Frederick Starr
Ever heard of the Central Asian Enlightenment? Me neither. I first encountered the term in Uzbekistan last year, and I tracked down this book as soon as I got home. It’s a fascinating tale of a lost age when Central Asia led the world in trade and economic development, the size and sophistication of its cities, and the refinement of its arts.
Brilliant scholars working in the libraries of forgotten desert cities like Khiva and Bukhara built a bridge to the modern world between 800 and 1200, and came up with many of the mathematical and astronomical concepts that make our high tech lives possible, like algebra and algorithms. Lost Enlightenment is also a cracking good read. I couldn’t put it down.
Get your copy of Lost Enlightenment here.
Islamic Empires: Fifteen Cities that Define a Civilization by Justin Marozzi
Marozzi tells the story of some of history’s most remarkable dynasties — the Abbasids of Baghdad, the Umayyads of Damascus and Cordoba, the Merinids of Fez, the Ottomans of Istanbul, the Mughals of India and the Safavids of Isfahan — through the lens of their greatest cities, spanning fifteen centuries from the beginnings of Islam in Mecca in the seventh century to the rise of Doha in the twenty-first.
Each of these cities rose under dynamic leaders who made them bastions of tolerance and harmonious coexistence between people of different faiths. Their decline always began when the heterogeneous gave way to the homogeneous and the culture turned inwards, retreating to some increasingly narrow version of its beliefs. It’s a fascinating read that sheds light on the world we’re living in now.
Get your copy of Islamic Empires here. And listen to my podcast conversation about Tamerlane with Justin Marozzi on Personal Landscapes.
After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations by Eric Cline
The Late Bronze Age Mediterranean was globalized and cosmopolitan in a way that feels very familiar to us today — and then something terrible happened that brought it all to an end. Large empires and small kingdoms that had been flourishing for centuries all collapsed at around the same time. It was as though civilization itself had been wiped away. What caused it? And could it happen to us?
That’s the subject of archaeologist Eric Cline’s fascinating new book. It’s the sequel to 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, which I read at the same time. That earlier volume lays out the best theories for the Late Bronze Age collapse and paints a vivid picture of the world we lost. In this new sequel, Cline tells us which civilizations made it through, and why. The reasons he uncovered may be directly relevant to us in 2024.
Get your copy of After 1177 B.C here. And listen to my podcast conversation with Eric Cline on Personal Landscapes.
The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World by William Dalrymple
William Dalrymple coined the term “The Golden Road” for the trade routes that spread Indian ideas to ancient Rome and Europe in the west, and Japan and Southeast Asia in the east. Its remarkable influence was overshadowed by the better known Silk Road, but the reach of the ‘Sinosphere’ was basically limited to Korea and Japan. India transformed the known world.
The religions that spread outwards from this centre of civilization gave us the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat in present day Cambodia, and the magnificent Buddhist temples of China, Japan, Burma, Thailand, and Indonesia’s astonishing Borobudur. Trade from this region helped fund the Roman Empire, and the creation of the numerals we use today — including zero — transformed culture and technology. This is a remarkable story about one of Asia’s intellectual and philosophical superpowers.
I also read and enjoyed two of Dalrymple’s earlier books this year: Return of a King and White Mughals.
Get your copy of The Golden Road here.
The Albigensian Crusade by Jonathan Sumption
I picked up this short history of one of Europe’s most brutal episodes of medieval religious persecution before traveling to the Cathar regions of southwest France this past summer.
The persecution of the Cathars was a sordid tale of massacres, sieges, the sacking of towns and the ruining of lands at a time when what we think of as southern France wasn’t yet France at all. The Languedoc was a land apart, civil power was weak, and the feudal nobility who controlled their respective territories had little reason to cooperate with the arrogant demands of the Catholic church in Rome.
This was a world before printing. Full copies of the Bible were rare and alternate versions of scripture circulated freely. The Albigensian Crusades were triggered by a desire to control ideas — to ensure the version of Christianity endorsed by the pope in Rome would be the only version — and by a relentless greed for territory. The story of how it all played out will make you want to go there to see those ruined mountaintop fortresses for yourself.
Get your copy of The Albigensian Crusade here.
In biography and memoir…
Ian Fleming: The Complete Man by Nicholas Shakespeare
Ian Fleming was overshadowed by the fictional character he created in the final decade of his life but his own story is far more interesting than his fiction. Earlier portrayals characterized him as an obscure desk jockey during the Second World War, but new information reveals a man at the centre of a spider’s web, a “war winner” who helped shape the future of British and Allied intelligence work. This masterful new book by Nicholas Shakespeare is the definitive Fleming biography. It’s a page-turner that I couldn’t put down.
I also reread a small stack of Fleming’s James Bond books this year, including Moonraker, Diamonds Are Forever, From Russia With Love and The Man with the Golden Typewriter: Ian Fleming’s Bond Letters. I forgot just how good he was at writing this kind of novel.
Get your copy of Ian Fleming: The Complete Man here. And listen to my podcast conversation with Nicholas Shakespeare on Personal Landscapes.
Father and Son by Jonathan Raban
Jonathan Raban wrote about human landscapes rather than uninhabited ones, and the borderlands between what a place professes to be and what it is. An Englishman who emigrated to Seattle at the age of 47, his status as an outsider gave him a unique perspective on America as the land of perpetual self-reinvention. His final work was this posthumously published memoir about his 2011 stroke and his father’s Second World War service. Raban died at the age of 80 in January 2023.
I also read Raban’s wonderful Passage to Juneau earlier this year.
Get your copy of Father and Son here. And listen to my podcast conversation with the author’s daughter Julia Raban and his editor John Freeman on Personal Landscapes.
In fiction…
Burma Sahib by Paul Theroux
Long before George Orwell wrote Animal Farm and 1984 — and long before he was even George Orwell — Eric Blair was a nineteen year old policeman in Burma serving the British Raj. Biographies skirt over this five year period, in part due to the absence of letters and diaries, but it was the making of the writer he would become. Paul Theroux set out to imagine those years in this wonderful novel, leavened by his deep reading of Orwell and coloured by years of travel in Burma.
I reread George Orwell’s Burmese Days and several of his essays before digging in to it.
I also reread a lot of Theroux in the lead up to a trip to Oahu: the Hawaii section of The Happy Isles of Oceania, the Hawaii pieces in Fresh-Air Fiend and other collections (which led to rereading all the pieces about writing and reading), Hotel Honolulu, Sir Vidia’s Shadow, Picture Palace, My Secret History, and a brand new short story collection called The Vanishing Point that will be published in late January 2025. All are very highly recommended.
Get your copy of Burma Sahib here. And listen to my podcast conversation with Paul Theroux on Personal Landscapes.
Recapitulation by Wallace Stegner
This wonderful novel by Wallace Stegner tells the story of Bruce Mason, an elderly ex-US Ambassador who returns to Salt Lake City — a place he fled in bitterness forty-five years earlier — to oversee the burial of an aunt he barely knew. The realities of the present recede in the face of the ghosts of his past as he comes to understand how his life has been shaped by experiences that seemed remote and inconsequential.
Stegner is one of the great chroniclers of the American landscape, and this novel will make you look at the topography of your past in a fresh way.
Get your copy of Recapitulation here.
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
This remarkable globetrotting novel encompasses the literary, moral and social history of the twentieth century, from the Great War to the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, World War Two and post-colonial Africa, as told by its 81-year-old hero, the writer Kenneth Toomey. He’s an unreliable narrator, and so Burgess inserted deliberate factual errors throughout as he plays on the margins of history using characters who never existed but might have. Fascinating in its exploration of moral issues, it’s also brutally funny. An absolute tour de force, unlike anything else I’ve read.
Get your copy of Earthly Powers here.
Angel by Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor’s novels are overlooked today because she shares her name with a much more famous actress, and that is a shame. Angel tells the story of Angelica (“Angel”) Deverell, a stubborn and determined writer of popular romance novels, from her adolescence and first attempts at writing, through the course of her career as a successful novelist, into her decline, old age and death.
Although she finds fame and wealth and marries the love of her life, critics regard her work as absurd and her closest relationships are doomed by the inability of others to conform to her unrealistic view of life. Paul Theroux told me he’s never read a Taylor book he didn’t like. This is my first, and it won’t be the last.
Maigret’s Memoirs by Georges Simenon
Georges Simenon published something like 400 novels, 21 volumes of memoir and many short stories. His most famous creation is the fictional detective Jules Maigret. In this highly entertaining short novel without a plot, Maigret writes about his own life and work, and about his relation to the novelist Georges Simenon. The fictional character talks about himself as though he were real, and the real author is introduced as a character in this fiction.
It’s a great place to start if you’ve never read this wonderful writer. I also enjoyed reading The Brothers Rico and The Little Man From Archangel this year.
Get your copy of Maigret’s Memoirs here.
The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence
I picked this up because I heard it discussed on the Backlisted podcast. I’m embarrassed to say I had never read this wonderful classic of Canadian fiction by Margaret Laurence. It’s the best-known volume in her series of novels set in a fictitious Manitoba town, and it’s a wonderful look at the cruelty of getting old.
The Stone Angel tells the story of 90-year old Hagar Shipley as she fights against being put in a nursing home, which she sees as a symbol of death. The narrative alternates with her looking back at a hard life of struggle and loss, made worse by stubborn pride and class prejudice. She’s a difficult woman to like, but as a crotchety old lady, she’s also very funny. I’m glad I read this now at age 52, and not in high school. I wouldn’t have appreciated it back then.
Get your copy of The Stone Angel here.
In poetry…
Collected Poems by Philip Larkin
Larkin is probably my favourite twentieth century poet. He wrote about commonplace experiences with remorseless clarity, revealing deep truths about our lives.
Take ‘Aubade’, about the existential dread of death. A man lies awake at night thinking about the certainty of his own demise: “Most things may never happen: this one will, And realisation of it rages out, In furnace-fear”. He tries to find ways to cope, but there are none. “Being brave, Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood.” Dawn eventually ends his sleepless night, and he gets up to trudge off to work, enduring it all as we each have to do.
It isn’t all gloom. Larkin is also intensely funny. Here are the opening lines of ‘This Be The Verse’: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.” This is a volume I love to leaf through on those rare occasions when I’m struggling to get started with writing.
Get your copy of the Collected Poems here.
And finally, in general nonfiction…
Sun Dancing: Life in a Medieval Irish Monastery by Geoffrey Moorhouse
I grew interested in the strange world of medieval Irish monasticism after spending a rainy Christmas week wandering the countryside of Co. Kerry and Co. Tipperary, searching for Iron Age ring forts and abandoned abbeys.
Moorhouse brings that world to life with his vivid account of the monks’ isolated life on remote Skellig Michael: their spiritual struggles and triumphs amidst unbelievable physical hardships, and their role in preserving Western Civilization through the Dark Ages. It’s a fascinating read, and a period I’d like to learn much more about.
Get your copy of the Sun Dancing here.
Those are my main picks.
I also did a lot of rereading this year, including a thoroughly enjoyable plunge back into volume one of The Complete Sherlock Holmes, stories I loved so much as a child.
I was also able to treat myself to more of William and Ariel Durant’s epic Story of Civilization — Volume 3: Caesar and Christ and Volume 4: The Age of Faith. I look forward to continuing this journey next year.
So there you have it. My top reads of 2024, narrowed down with great difficulty from a rewarding 12 months of reading.
I hope you’ll share it with others who might enjoy these recommendations.
One last thing, since it’s that time of year…
If you’re looking for a book for Christmas, why not consider mine?
Here’s what Paul Theroux said about it in a recent email:
“I finished “A Sunny Place…” and I greatly admire it. As a destination to write an affectionate Durrellian tribute to, probably the worst choice on earth. As a subject for a book, absolutely great. […] I think whenever the subject of Malta arises, your book will be referenced. I was struck by how just about everyone in power seemed to have been involved in Daphne’s murder.. Your untangling the whole business was masterful and persuasive, and one ends with the impression that the entire island is cursed.[…] Such wicked places also produce rebellious clear-sighted singular people like Daphne, just a few pearls in all the grit, and good books like yours, because instead of fleeing you stayed the course and wrote about it.”
A Sunny Place for Shady People is available in North America, Europe and Australia from Trinity University Press. If you’re in Malta, you can buy a paperback edition locally, published by Midsea Books.
What stood out for you in 2024?
Please share your best reads in the comments below. I’m always eager to add to my list, despite a struggling bank balance.
[Please note: most of the links above are affiliate links. Purchasing a book through those links will (hopefully) support my work with a few fractions of a penny. Your support is greatly appreciated.]
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