Was 2024 a good reading year?

Every year is a good reading year because I am picky-picky-picky. I don’t finish a book unless it is (a) fascinating, (b) well-written, and (c) works some kind of spell on me. You know, Girls just want to have fun! But we also are earnest. I don’t care if it is the Book of the Year, I don’t care if if it wins every award, I’m blasé about reviews in the mainstream presses – but I seem to be able to pick the books that are right for me.

Every century is different. The twentieth century was different. So many voices and styles characterize an era. One minute you’re enchanted by Jean Stafford’s Pulitzer Prize winning short stories, next you’re reading Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Booker Prize-winning Heat and Dust, then you’re taking a break with Sue Grafton’s mysteries, then you are lost in Frank Herbert’s Dune, and then you discover the brilliant Margaret Drabble.

The New Yorker had a great influence on everybody. We were mad about the minimalist stories of Raymond Carver. And I remember going to bookstores all over town to find Bobbie Ann Mason’s books, though it might have been Harper’s or The Atlantic that drove me.

So why have I returned to the classics and the dead? It is partly due to a long illness. Once, when I was extremely ill in the hospital, I finally recovered enough to read a little. I chose Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Yes, I realized what I needed was the highest quality. And the doctor decided I was ready to leave the hospital when he found me reading Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). The doctor loved foreign languages and was impressed to meet a soulmate. The nurses informed me he knew eight languages.

Perhaps Jane Austen and Lucretius kept me alive. (Well, there was also medicine.) But there is no doubting the magic of literature. Fate brought these books to me when I needed them most.