The Best Books I Read in 2024

Plus jargon, Germaine Greer and Hardy's 'The Oxen'

Hello,

Welcome to the first edition of Recommended Reading.

The plan is to recommend a book or two every week, along with interesting articles, essays and - depending on reader enthusiasm - a poem. Recommended Reading grows out of a reading diary I started keeping this year. I feel like I’ve been reading a lot of interesting books recently but have nowhere to tell people about them - its a bit obnoxious and wearying to constantly shoe horn book recommendations into a column.

I thought I’d start with a list of the best books I read last year. None of them were published in 2024. Although if you’re interested, I wrote a list of my favourite recently published “ideas” books for The Times.

PS This first newsletter is now wildly overlong because I am on holiday and wrote much of it in an unanticipated fit of enthusiasm on the train back from visiting my family in Newcastle. Future instalments will be much shorter.

The Poor Poet by Carl Spitzweg (Neue Pinakothek, Munich)

The Best Books I Read in 2024

I think everything I mention here is worth your time.

Father and Son by Edmund Gosse
This is a completely wonderful book: touching, sensitive and wise. Edmund Gosse’s father was a celebrated Victorian naturalist who destroyed his scientific reputation trying to refute Darwin’s theory of evolution. His idea - which is still notorious - was that God placed fossils on earth to test man’s faith. Edmund Gosse writes sympathetically and wittily about his father’s desperate and completely doomed attempts to mould him into a paragon of evangelical faith when he was only a small boy. The book’s success at the beginning of the twentieth century was curiously prophetic as memoirs about people raised in cults and religious sects are now a staple of publishing. I have a pet theory about the genre’s popularity which I think is to do with the fact that everyone’s family is a kind of cult, even in a benign and minor way. If you are not raised in the cult of a religion you are at least raised in the cult of your parents way of seeing the world. The process of becoming disillusioned with the inadequate world view with which you were raised is universal.

The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe by Arthur Koestler
This ridiculously readable book is a classic of popular intellectual history for a reason. I raced through it on the train from Prague to Vienna back in April. Arthur Koestler is (obviously) a brilliant narrative writer. In The Sleepwalkers he traces the development of human ideas about the structure of the universe from Ptolemy to Galileo. His most intriguing and useful argument is that people we now view as scientific revolutionaries didn’t always see themselves that way. Copernicus - at least in Koestler’s telling - stumbled into the heliocentric theory of the universe because he was trying to square ancient Aristotelian and Ptolemaic ideas about the universe, not because he was a radical visionary who wanted to reinvent cosmology for a modern age. I think that interpretation is somewhat disputed now but it’s a useful and provoking idea about where scientific insights come from.

Milton’s Grand Style by Christopher Ricks
Christopher Ricks’s best book and one of the most dazzling works of literary criticism ever written. I first read it at university when I did my “special author paper” on Milton but I got much more out of it re-reading it as real adult. In it, Ricks makes the case for Milton, defending him from the twentieth century critics who thought Paradise Lost cliched and pointlessly orotund. The momentum of his argument makes this a genuinely exciting book. It’s also just an incredible pleasure to spend time in the company of a critic as restlessly intelligent, inquiring and judiciously enthusiastic as Ricks. Paradise Lost is a difficult book to get a handle on. I think this is the best way in. And it’s short.

Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk
Before this year I was familiar with Rachel Cusk only through her recent Outline trilogy - the summit of ultra-pared-back contemporary auto-fiction. The entire plot of Kudos (which I have to say I enjoyed) is that a novelist goes to an academic conference. The earlier novels are richer and more gorgeously written. I read Arlington Park and The Bradshaw Variations (also recommended) on holiday in Lanzarote in August. Cusk is frighteningly cruel and insightful about her pathetic middle class characters. I still shiver when I think about the woman who spends half the novel having an identity crisis after realising all her friends think she’s hopelessly basic for having knocked through her kitchen and dining room . . . and that they are right! Cusk is just such a beautiful, poised prose stylist too. I love the controlled, ominous gorgeousness of the novel’s opening paragraph:

“All night the rain fell on Arlington Park. The clouds came from the west: clouds like dark cathedrals, clouds like machines, clouds like black blossoms flowering in the arid starlit sky. They came over the English countryside, sunk in its muddled sleep. They came over the low, populous hills where scatterings of lights throbbed in the darkness. At midnight they reached the city, valiantly glittering in its shallow provincial basin. Unseen, they grew like a second city overhead, thickening, expanding, throwing up their savage monuments, their towers, their monstrous, unpeopled palaces of cloud.”

I am a sucker for this sort of thing.

Political Order and Political Decay by Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama is doomed to be remembered as the man who was wrong about the end of history. This is not wholly unfair but I think his two most interesting books are The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay which, between them, provide a complete theory of the development and decline of political systems. I read both of them this year but the second book is the one that most impressed me. Fukuyama is especially good on how the historical development of democracies shapes their present functioning. He explains that if a country democratises before it develops a strong independent bureaucracy (Fukuyama’s example is Greece in the mid-nineteenth century) it can easily become mired in cronyism and patronage as politicians simply stuff the civil service with their families and supporters. You need a strong state then democracy.

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim
Something much lighter. This 1920s story about a beleaguered London house wife who rents an Italian villa with some other variously beleaguered characters (bored socialite, domineering old Victorian etc) gets a bit toe-curlingly twee by the time the happy ending hoves inevitably into view. But its perfect for what it is. I read it after The Sleepwalkers and it was a welcome change of pace.

Darwin by Adrian Desmond and James Moore
One of the most enjoyable and interesting biographies I’ve ever read. It reminded me a bit of Koestler’s book because Darwin was a reluctant revolutionary who wasn’t particularly thrilled that his theory of evolution would undermine the foundations of the religious establishment. Two things stuck with me from this book. The first is that it is a complete nightmare when science becomes politicised. Darwin prevaricated about publishing The Origin of the Species for so long because evolution was regarded as a dangerously radical, anti-establishment position and therefore the nineteenth century equivalent of “politically incorrect”. The second is that a lot of intellectuals had become secular long before society in general. In some of the scientific circles Darwin moved in at Edinburgh University in the early nineteenth century atheism (or at least deism) was almost taken for granted. It just took the rest of us a century and a half to get there too. Ideas trickle down from the top…

The Irresponsible Self: Laughter and the Novel by James Wood
James Wood is our greatest living literary journalist. The other great collections of his journalism are Serious Noticing and The Broken Estate. To my shame I had not even heard of The Irresponsible Self until the critic Leo Robson recommended it to me a few weeks ago. It’s not really themed around “laughter and the novel”. There are superb essays here that made me desperate to read writers as diverse as the Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal and the Italian modernist novelist Italo Svevo. There are also some brilliant, intelligent and stunningly sensitive pieces on modern writers, on Coetzee’s Disgrace for instance. It contains Wood’s most famous essay, Hysterical Realism. There is almost nothing I would rather read than a really good book review. These essays were pure pleasure to me.

Three Critics of the Enlightenment by Isaiah Berlin
You have to accustom yourself to Berlin’s woolly, circumlocutory style (weirdly for modern readers he almost never directly quotes from any of the writers he discusses) but it’s worth sticking with him because it gets exciting. The three philosophers Berlin tackles - Vico, Hamann and Herder - were among the earliest and most brilliant critics of enlightenment rationalism. My copy is full of underlinings and exclamation marks. Here are the beginning of ideas about the modern exaltation of the self, of cultural relativism, of “personal truth”. I increasingly think the anti-enlightenment tradition (alive and kicking in our own times) is the most important story in the intellectual history of the modern West.

After the Funeral by Tessa Hadley
Tessa Hadley is probably my favourite living novelist. If you haven’t read her before, you need to buy The Past and Late in the Day. Both are exquisitely well observed and quite amazingly emotionally and psychologically sensitive. It’s very satisfying seeing twenty-first century society through the eyes of a really alert novelist. Her short stories are equally satisfying - I think Sunstroke and Married Love are the best collections. A new one, After the Funeral came out last year but I only just got round to reading it this summer. In my view it is worth owning on the basis of the fact it contains one of my favourite recent short stories, Cecilia Awakened, which I read in the New Yorker a couple of years ago.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius by Leo Damrosch
The most famous Rousseau biography in English is Maurice Cranston’s multi-volume epic but this is more fun. Rousseau was just an unbelievably interesting person and for my money, one of the all-time great civilisational geniuses. He revolutionised political philosophy, wrote the bestselling novel of his age, the first modern autobiography, and one of the most influential education treatises in history. He also composed a hugely popular opera that was performed in front of the king of France. On top of all this he must also have had one of the most fascinating lives of the eighteenth century. By about chapter two of Damrosch’s book, Rousseau has run away from home, worked (chaotically) as a servant, been chased by a mob after publicly exposing himself to a group of young women and got involved in a love affair with a much older woman. And it only gets more eventful after that.

Some Other Things

My most recent column was an attack on pointless jargon which, I theorised, is on the rise. I think its no accident that ostentatiously complex language thrives in a society in which education and social status are so closely correlated.

And I was right! Well, according to one measure. The Economist analysed the language of 350,000 PhDs and found that it is getting more complex in every field, especially the humanities and social sciences.

I enjoyed appearing on the excellent podcast Better Known to nominate six things that should be better known: the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, the CAT S-22 Flip, Martin Amis’s The War Against Cliche, Uzbekistan, the acronym WEIRD and Rossini’s opera L’italiana in Algeri. Ironically Better Known is itself a podcast that should be better known. It’s had lots of good guests - I especially enjoyed Helen Lewis and Dominic Sandbrook’s episodes.

Interesting new evidence that we are getting stupider. Especially notable that literacy skills are falling around the world. There has been some recent evidence that IQ has started falling recently too. I know I obviously would think this but it surely has at least something to do with smartphones.

Clive James interviews Germaine Greer. She is incredibly charismatic. And people just don’t casually drop references to Dante’s Divine Comedy on TV talk shows any more (see previous item). Greer and James would have made an excellent podcast.

I like Scott Alexander’s long book reviews. Here he is on Tom Wolfe’s history of modern architecture From Bauhaus to Our House, which I think is generally regarded as a bit naff and tendentious. But Alexander gets an interesting piece out of it. I often wonder whether modern architecture (which, as Alexander says, appeals to architectural experts but few other people) will eventually be a victim of the populist mood of the times.

Poem of the Week

This first edition of the newsletter is technically also the Christmas edition of the newsletter. My favourite Christmas poem is Thomas Hardy’s The Oxen. It references an old folk tradition that at midnight on Christmas Eve, oxen kneel down to welcome the birth of Jesus. Like many of Hardy’s poems it’s about the passing of time and the loss of illusions. As an adult Hardy was a stark pessimist but he was still able to be beautifully tender and understanding about all kinds of naivety - religious naivety, romantic naivety, childish naivety. This is an important part of his genius and his embodiment of the quality Keats called “negative capability”, the capacity to think more than one thing at a time. Hardy can be cynical and innocent in the same breath. If I were to get literary critical about it I would say that the simplicity of the poem’s form and rhyme scheme reflects the simplicity of the story about the oxen. You can feel the structure of the poem yearning for the innocence of the folk tale, even as the words deny it.

I should also add that a “barton” is a farmyard (pretty much every other Hardy poem seems to feature one). Most notably the wonderfully funny The Ruined Maid.

The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.