The newspapers and magazines that invite such lists tend to publish them in November or early December, presumably to encourage frantic Christmas shoppers to max out publishers’ sales. It seems that bloggers follow suit. Call me old-fashioned, but I feel that if it’s my best reads of the year, it needs to include the whole of December. I can’t quite bring myself to close off the list until Dec 31st, just in case there’s a corker that I forget about out the following year!
Anyway, that’s neither here nor here. So here is my list of all those I gave 5* on my GoodReads page in no particular order. Obviously it’s quite an artificial filter, because there were some other wonderful books over the year, but they just missed the 5th star for whatever reason. You can find them on Goodreads.
Fiction (no particular order)
The plot of The Winding Stair does not exactly stir at first sight: the bitter rivalry in the court of the newly crowned James I (& VI of Scotland) between scholar Francis Bacon and legal genius Edward Coke. And it’s true that some of their arguments are obscure and fairly unfathomable. But this is a historical novel that I unexpectedly found gripping and unsightly, written by historian and former Tory Cabinet Minister.
Friends rave about Leif Enger, a contemporary writer based in Minnesota. I now see why. I’m a sucker for a good dystopia, but I Cheerfully Refuse is striking not so much because it offers detailed world-creation but because it doesn’t. We never really find out what has brought about the USA’s breakdown. But we do get to know a few people who are trying to navigate the Great Lakes and this unpredictable world. It is their grounds for hope and perseverance that makes this book so special. Just marvellous.
I was so nervous about this, being a lifelong le Carré devotee. But I’ve loved some of Harkaway’s fiction in its own right (Gone Away World is breathtaking) and he is le Carré’s son after all. Karla’s Choice is what the hype claims – a remarkable achievement of literary ventriloquism, with much loved characters given more backstories and depth. And he does a much better job of writing female characters than his father. How amazing now to know about what happened between The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and the classic, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. PLUS George Smiley gets his very own car chase behind the Iron Curtain! What’s not to love!?
History/Memoir
Bury the Chains (2012) is a classic, the account of the grim roots of the Atlantic Slave Trade, of British Abolitionism, and the banning of slavery in the Empire. Hochschild does not appear to be religious or have a religious agenda. Instead he’s fascinated by the sheer oddities of abolitionism. Why Britain? Why 18thC-19thC? Why certain Christian groups (esp. the Quakers) so often? This is not hagiography, but it is full of both haunting and moving stories. And alongside Equiano and others, Thomas Clarkson really was extraordinary.
Daniel (now Lord) Finkelstein is a Times columnist and now Tory grandee. His family’s stories from escaping from Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Reich are hair-raising and extraordinary. They defied the odds. Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad is a beautifully crafted and deeply humane book: Finkelstein obviously writes fluently. But it is arresting to find the intensely personal constantly jostled by the cruel grind of 20thC geopolitics.
This powerfully reminds us that history is never a matter of mere forces and processes but changes or crushes lives.
Alexander Chula is of mixed Thai and British heritage, read classics at Oxford and then went to teach it at the (in)famous boarding school founded by Malawi’s controversial president Hastings Banda to be the ‘Eton of Africa’. That in itself is quite the cultural combo. But Goodbye Dr Banda, a memoir and meditation about the influences of culture, colonialism, and church in Southern Africa is constantly surprising. He rejects simplistic formulae and reductionisms. And despite having no axe to grind for Christianity, he ends up finding answers about its growth in Africa that resonate with Hochschild’s history of abolitionism. Gripping.
Is there an age limit for taking alleged war criminals to court? Tobias Buck is a German journalist who’s risen to the top of the English language Financial Times. Final Verdict is his account of Bruno Dey’s trial in 2019 and all the questions it threw up. Because Dey was only 17 when an SS guard at concentration camp in Poland. But in 2020 he was convicted for being an accessory to crimes from 70+ years before. This is real court-room drama, but never ducks the dilemmas nor discomfort from wondering how many of us would have been any different.
Peter Pomerantsev has written a number of books since his decade working in Russian TV media as Putin’s grip in power grew. He has chilling insights into how the views of a population get swayed and manipulated. In this latest, How to Win An Information War, he profiles one of the few in Britain who was equal to the guile of Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s arch propagandist. This was Sefton Delmer who had been born to Aussies in Germany and partly educated there. So he could exploit ordinary German thinking to devastating effect. None of us is immune.
Regulars know how much I love Türkiye, and Istanbul in particular. Alexander Christie-Miller has written a marvellous and original book about the Sublime Porte. Structured around his retracing the city’s ancient walls, he threads together key events from its long history with the experience of contemporary Istanbullus trying to survive in the complexities of globalism and Erdoğan’s regime. I guess that To The City will have less appeal for those who have never visited, but the writing is so lucid and vivid that even the briefest encounter would make this a brilliant read.
Russias invasion of Ukraine continues, having now passed the gruesome 1000 day mark. The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister is very affecting, the account of someone killed in conflict with ‘the little green men’, those fighting as Putin’s proxies in between the 2014 Crimea annexation and the 2022 full-blown invasion. Khromeychuk is a war historian based in London, but in her grief, the focus of her studies is far from remote.
Poignant and salutary.
Arts & Culture
Martin Gayford is my favourite writer about art. He always stops me in my tracks and makes me look again. How Painting Happens is an unusual art history. Instead of taking it chronologically, geographically or even culturally, Gayford chooses the fascinating approach of analysing the various steps in the process from artwork’s conception to display. He has talked with countless great artists over the years, as well as read widely.
I just loved this and never wanted it to end!
Alexandra Harris zeroes in on a particular moment: 1930s and 1940s England. Her purpose in Romantic Moderns is to capture the excitement, foreboding, ground-breaking of creative people while the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and augurs of global war are constant. This is a book about writers and poets, painters and architects, composers and photographers. They all wrestled with what it meant to be ‘modern’ in a peculiarly English way. Unlike their continental counterparts, they never could bring themselves wholly to reject their history and inheritance.
Thank goodness.
Tim Blanning is a historian of the early modern European history, from the French Revolution onwards. So he brings an unusual perspective on the history of music. Rather than a musicological analysis (ie how did Beethoven develop harmony and orchestration), The Triumph of Music considers the way musicians changed society and vice-versa. For having been little more than an aristocrat’s household staff (as essentially Haydn and Mozart’s father had been), they became autonomous life-forces of creativity. And now music is absolutely everywhere. Such a fascinating story with plenty of twists and turns.
In the summer, I co-taught a seminar with the great African American singer and composer Ruth Naomi Floyd. We considered the heritage of African American music and the impact that Dvořák’s 3 years in New York had for it. So Joseph Horowitz’s Dvořák’s Prophecy was sheer gold. For the great Czech composer showed deep insight and prescience when he discerned that it was the African heritage which had led to the forging of a genuinely American music. But he also anticipated the resistance to such a view. It is a shock that the likes of Aaron Coupland, Leonard Bernstein and Elliot Carter flatly rejected it, instead insisting for a musical blank slate (rejecting European music) for the new sound.
Theological
My big passion now is to show how important the arts are to what it means to be human, what it means to social thriving, what it means to live as creatures rather than biological robots. Jeremy Begbie has been exploring the arts at deep theological levels for years – and this book is a wonderful, apologetic application of all his work to the nightmare of contemporary reductionism. This is dense and tightly argued – but the case of Abundantly More has never been more crucial.
Rachael Denhollander is a modern hero; a valiant for truth and justice in the face of abuse, institutional intransigence and wilful blindness; someone willing to risk reputation and wellbeing for the sake of those without a voice. She was instrumental in bringing the gymnastics doctor and prolific abuser Larry Nasser to court and jail after years of slog.
Anyone who wants to understand why the abused stay silent, why they face mountain when they speak, why it is so hard to prove, must read What is a Girl Worth?. Along the way, Denhollander demonstrates how the Christian gospel can be the one thing that sustains such a fight.
Tara Isabella Burton is such an interesting writer about the quirks and oddities of contemporary religion in the west. Her latest, Self-Made, articulates the crazy and multifaceted world of personal (re)invention. How on earth did we get here? It is a strange and unprecedented story, full of surprises (not least because she delves as far back as the great Renaissance artist Leonardo).
Alternately chilling and spellbinding.
An essay that started life as a lecture. The sociologist Hartmut Rosa was invited to speak at a Catholic seminary in Germany. I don’t know his faith position of course; he gives little away. Instead he offers a sociological perspective on the benefits and problems with religion. The latter seem clear for all to see; today’s caricature is that it is inherently dangerous because of its susceptibility to power abuse. However, Rosa is insistent that this is NOT the only story.
Fascinating and refreshing.
Earlier in 2024, I blogged about the horrors of TB Joshua’s cult in Nigeria. I only learned about it all from BBC TV and podcasts. It was hearing Matthew McNaught interviewed on the podcast that prompted me to read his memoir.
It is beautifully written, with searing honesty and a remarkably little bitterness. But what damage these things wreak, not just for those sucked in but for everyone and anyone even loosely connected. This is an important book of testimony, reportage, and even literature.
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