What We’re Reading to Start the New Year

The New Yorker’s editors and critics considered hundreds of new releases this year in order to select the Best Books of 2024. The magazine’s writers also made their way through many other books—novels they had missed upon publication, long-out-of-print essay collections, classics that the passage of time had imbued with fresh meaning. Some of their favorites are below.

Last July, during the British general election in which the Labour Party ousted the long-ruling Conservative government in a landslide, I picked up “The Line of Beauty,” by Alan Hollinghurst, which I’d somehow neglected to read in the two decades since it was published. Shame on me! I tore through it, and am already reading it for the second time. The book begins at the moment after the Tories’ own electoral landslide of 1983, in which Margaret Thatcher secured an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons. This period of social and political history is filtered through the refined consciousness of Nick Guest, a recent graduate from Oxford who has joined the household of a college friend, Toby Fedden, whose father, Gerald, happens to be one of those new Tory M.P.s. Nick is gay—and, at the novel’s outset, entirely sexually inexperienced—and has a status somewhere between a lodger and a conveniently charming spare man to make up a dinner party. He is about to embark upon a Ph.D. concerned with style in the works of Henry James, and James’s influence on the author radiates from each irony-gilded page. (“Yes, isn’t it a nice one,” remarks Toby’s uncle, Lord Kessler, when Nick compliments him on a Paul Cézanne, while Gerald assesses the painting “with a sharp way he had of scanning any document which might come in useful later on.”) Hollinghurst’s set-piece party scenes are masterpieces of observation, and his rendering of the shadow cast by AIDs over the eighties is subtle and agonizing. The book ends with the election of 1987, when the Lady, as she is admiringly referred to by all, consolidates her power in what is hailed as a second landslide. This is a “dead metaphor,” Nick explains to Toby’s volatile sister Catherine: “I mean the land did slide once, as we all know. And it looks very much as though it’s going to stay slidden.” If I first picked up the book for its lens on Britain after Labour’s July victory, I’m now rereading those lines with November 2024 very much in mind.—Rebecca Mead

“I’ve defined myself, privately and abstractly, by my brief, intense years as an athlete, a swimmer,” Leanne Shapton writes in her illustrated memoir, “Swimming Studies,” from 2012. “I wasn’t the best; I was relatively fast. I trained, ate, traveled, and showed with the best in the country, but wasn’t the best; I was pretty good.” Those piercing semicolons. As a girl, Shapton had very nearly swum for Canada’s Olympic team—twice. The underwater life is still with her, in her thirties: the smell of chlorine, nylon straps digging into shoulders, hair clumped into icicles after predawn workouts in a Toronto suburb. She can’t help but seek out pools and do laps in them, no matter their truncated length, at fancy hotels, for instance. Her partner suggests that water might be “something to enjoy,” and attempts to introduce her to “the idea of bathing.” How odd this seems to a record holder. Between chapters of text, Shapton includes photographs of her many swimsuits and paintings in her signature form of loose, abstract watercolor. (She shows in galleries and works as the art editor at The New York Review of Books.) She documents the shapes and locations of memorable pools and makes portraits of a swimmer in motion, crouching like a loaded spring into breaststroke, then elongating into freestyle. I read myself into these images, into the heavy quiet of submersion. Though I have no history as a champion of any kind, I learned to lap swim as a kid and have lusted after pools ever since. Shapton’s book makes me consider my past selves and which of them are still pushing me forward, through the water.—E. Tammy Kim

Frederick Seidel’s “Poems 1959-2009” has been a dapper, savage playmate to me all year. It was recommended by a buddy who knows how much I love Philip Larkin and deduced, correctly, that I would lose my mind for a snarly, rhymey voice, luxuriantly imprisoned in its tics and addictions. These include: flying first class, fine dining, fine art, potty words stringed singsongily together, sex as something monstrous, sex as something delicious, dictators, expressing love for things by mourning them even when they’re still around, the Carlyle Hotel, and sex. I can’t think of a living poet whose scope comes so close to infinite, nor can I name one who regularly makes infinity feel so petty—the entire universe a filthy pun in eleven dimensions.

The universe is another one of Seidel’s subjects. In his “Cosmos Trilogy,” which eats up a fair chunk of this collection, it grows as fast as “a ping-pong ball of lather” from a shaving-cream can, spawning a “tiny octopus / Of galaxies and dust” that feels like “the wobbly flesh of an oyster / Out of its shell on the battlefield” and spins with “earsplitting odorless suction.” The key line of the “Trilogy,” maybe of this book, comes from poem one: “the emptiness that weighs / More than the universe.” Nothing is ever truly nothing for Seidel. Nothing can ever be truly destroyed, either, just squished and chewed like a dog with a rubber toy.—Jackson Arn

I first tried to read Virginia Woolf’s plot-scarce classic “Mrs. Dalloway” when I was sixteen. As a teen-ager, I lived in perpetual fear of exposing my stupidity. Flipping through “Mrs. Dalloway” one night, when I should have been studying for an exam, was an attempt to mollify that fear. The bewildering experience confirmed my suspicion then that I was every bit as dense as I believed—and it was my duty to shove the secret ever deeper.

Recently, I reread the book, closer now to the age of Clarissa Dalloway than I was to her daughter, the dewy, teen-aged Elizabeth. Opening the book, I felt, as Clarissa did, “very young; at the same time, unspeakably aged.” On the sixth page, I did something I refused to do two decades earlier: I stopped. I stopped! Specifically upon the words, “She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time, was outside, looking on.” Wasn’t this exactly what defenselessness had felt like at sixteen? Why did I not remember a single fragment of the searing sentence? It’s possible my younger self did not even permit my eyes to alight on these words, so terrified was I of being exactly the opposite of what I wished to be. Which is to say, I stubbornly remained on the outside of most things, a spectator of my own pale life, the way the young are prone to be. I have a feeling that Clarissa would not have judged me for this, though, just as Woolf would be indifferent to my middle-aged gushing over her masterpiece. If we are lucky, effort ceases, she might say. “Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand.”—Jiayang Fan

This year, Katherine Bucknell published her long-awaited biography of Christopher Isherwood, the English novelist and playwright who moved to America on the eve of the Second World War. I haven’t yet cracked open the biography, but its appearance sent me back to the first volume of Isherwood’s diaries, beautifully edited by Bucknell, which begins in 1939, as Isherwood and W. H. Auden leave the United Kingdom for America. The ensuing two decades are taken up with Isherwood’s spiritual journeys in Southern California, where he settled down; his tempestuous relationships, especially with the artist Don Bachardy; and his continuing need to wrestle with his decision to leave England right before it was attacked by Germany, the place where Isherwood lived for some of the Weimar years. That experience led to his 1939 novel, “Goodbye to Berlin,” and to his immortality: the book, a fictionalized account of his time in the city, was eventually adapted into the musical “Cabaret.” What makes the diaries so fascinating is Isherwood’s tendency to view his behavior with both admirable frankness and complete obliviousness. His relationships are often disastrous, his experiences with Vedanta comically absurd, and his obviously difficult personality never really disappears. But there are also wonderfully amusing moments about many Hollywood stars of the era, alongside observations that remain delightful, such as this one about Gore Vidal: “Lunch with Gore. I guess he’s still wondering what I think of his novel. Well, I don’t . . . I believe he really thinks about ‘posterity’ and its ‘verdict’—just like a 19th century writer! And I don't know whether to admire this, or just regard him as a conceited idiot.”—Isaac Chotiner

Unlike his peers George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, the journalist Dwight Macdonald never wrote a book of lasting impact. To savor his work, one must get hold of his essays, as I was fortunate to do earlier this year when a friend sent me a copy of “The Responsibility of Peoples,” a collection of political pieces that Macdonald wrote in the nineteen-forties and nineteen-fifties. One reason the collection merits revisiting is Macdonald’s voice, which is both witty and pugnacious, the voice of a gadfly who delighted in mocking conventional pieties and in challenging the status quo. Another is the timeliness of the issues he explored in essays such as “The Bomb,” which first appeared in Politics, a left-wing magazine that Macdonald launched in 1944 after serving as an editor at Partisan Review. Its subject was the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which President Truman hailed as “the greatest achievement of organized science in history.” “It probably was, and so much the worse for organized science,” Macdonald wrote. A committed pacifist, he took the occasion to examine how moral responsibility should be apportioned for acts of indiscriminate violence carried out by the state.

As appalled as he was by the decision to unleash nuclear weapons on Japan, Macdonald rejected the notion that the American people bore collective responsibility for it, noting that most Americans “did not even know what was being done in our name—let alone have the slightest possibility of stopping it.” Where responsibility should instead be placed was on individual scientists and other social actors who had a choice, and indeed a duty, not to participate in undertakings such as the Manhattan Project, a form of resistance Macdonald viewed as admirable even as he acknowledged its potential futility. “To insist on acting as a responsible individual in a society which reduces the individual to impotence may be foolish, reckless, and ineffectual,” he wrote. “Only thus is there a chance of changing our tragic destiny.”

As in most essay collections on current affairs, not all the pieces in “The Responsibility of Peoples” have aged well. Macdonald’s article on the death of Franklin Roosevelt, whose humanitarianism he dismissed as a “myth” and whose reverence by the public signified “the deterioration of our politics,” reads as jarringly uncharitable today. Elsewhere, though, there are sentences of striking lucidity and prescience. “It is not the law-breaker we must fear today so much as he who obeys the law,” Macdonald observed in a 1945 essay on the crimes of the Nazis, an idea that presaged the argument made more than a decade later by Hannah Arendt, a friend and colleague, in her seminal account of the Eichmann trial. In 2011, The New York Review of Books published a collection of essays that Macdonald wrote on art and popular culture, “Masscult and Midcult.” As far as I’m aware, no volume of his political essays remains in print. This is a shame, not least because, as his biographer Michael Wreszin observed, few American writers “spoke more eloquently against the mechanized terror of the modern world.” The appearance of such a volume would be both overdue and welcome.—Eyal Press

Increasingly, I find biography to be an impossible genre. How to transmit the voice and the thought of a subject through the facts of his life? It’s a minor miracle when someone pulls it off. For the past month, I have been reading the first volume of Nicholas Boyle’s three-volume biography of Goethe, “The Poet and the Age: The Poetry of Desire, 1749-1790.” This is the story of a nation masquerading as the story of a man, and all the more vivid and important for it. Each character in Goethe’s life—his stern, devoted father; his high-spirited mother; his tutors; his friends; his lovers; the Duke; Napoleon—is thoroughly dissolved into the current of history. Every event swells with innumerable details, all of which feel essential to our understanding. Every line of poetry is turned this way and that to reveal its author’s exquisite sensitivity to folk and imperial languages alike. The effect is one of complete immersion; we are drenched in Goethe’s and Germany’s past. (It reminds me of my favorite wintry film, Alexander Sokurov’s painfully beautiful “Russian Ark,” though it would be more apt if it reminded me of Sokurov’s “Faust.”) I plan to begin the second volume, “Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803,” by the end of the year. The third volume is still in process; already, I am impatient for it. Yet there’s nothing to do but wait for Boyle, and wish for him to proceed, as Goethe wrote, “Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast” (“without haste but without rest”).—Merve Emre

The TVs are slender and flat, but the static is still there. Amid so much static—by which I mean the mediation of the world by specious sources, not the world itself—this summer saw the rerelease of “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric,” by Claudia Rankine, originally published in 2004. It’s tempting, if banal, to point out that much has changed in the twenty years since then. But reading Rankine at her best, as she is in this volume, means recognizing that any difference between then and now is a difference of degree, not in kind. Writing in a depressive and anhedonic “I,” Rankine brokers the historical present of the late nineties and early two-thousands.

There is much here that a contemporary reader will recognize. Pre-9/11 and post-9/11 America is still our America, much as we try to act brand new, as in our current rehabilitation of that former President, “the same Bush who can’t remember if two or three people were convicted for dragging a black man to death in his home state of Texas,” as the speaker of Rankine’s lyric identifies him. Bush’s America, humming the tune of pharmaceutical commercials and domestic terrorism and bombs sent abroad, was, not incidentally, as Rankine writes, quoting the Polish American poet Czesław Miłosz, “a land of great loneliness.” The “I” of Rankine’s lyric is lonely, but not alone; in fact, she feels her isolation best when confronted by the usual remedies: friends, a spouse, a prescription. “I leave the television on all the time,” the speaker admits. Television—as noise, as news, as something to do instead of killing yourself—stalks the text of this lyric, undermining the poetic form’s association with idyll. “There is no innovating loss,” the speaker says, seeing the announcement of Amadou Diallo’s death come across her screen. Time and distance have afforded a few cosmetic alterations to the original volume, such as the addition of color and, sadly, more conventional dimensions (the 2004 edition measured at about five and a half by ten inches, sticking up, plumelike at the top of our shelves). The record of history as perception remains. “No attempt was made to correct memory in the body of the text,” Rankine writes in the preface to the new edition. Or, as the speaker relates, “I am here. / And I am still lonely.”—Lauren Michele Jackson

More than six decades ago, New Yorker writer John Bainbridge spent nine months in the newly wealthy, fast-growing state of Texas, studying and schmoozing with its wheeler-dealers, oilmen, and bankers. “The epitome of America is Texas, and the epitome of Texas is its most picturesque product, its millionaires,” Bainbridge theorizes; “The Super-Americans” is his amused, quasi-anthropological examination of a world he calls “the United States in microcosm.”

Bainbridge can be patronizing; in the book’s first paragraph, he refers to Texas as “a new boy.” But he’s clearly charmed by the private-jetting, free-spending, nickname-bestowing Texans he meets. Uninhibited abundance is part of the appeal: On his East Texas ranch, Clint Murchison, Jr., the oilman and founder of the Dallas Cowboys, plants ten thousand strawberry plants and ten thousand pine seedlings. “Clint does almost everything by ten thousands,” a friend explains. Of course, the Super-American, Bainbridge’s composite stand-in for wealthy Texans, is not a model citizen: he busts unions, chronically underfunds schools, and may even sometimes indulge in a vigilante murder or two. (The Super-Americans of this book are overwhelmingly white men.)

Reading this book in 2024, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic for the time when powerful Texans could be regarded with amused fascination. The Lone Star State is no longer an upstart, but rather a leading exporter of conservative policy and jurisprudence. The world’s wealthiest man has reinvented himself as a Texan, complete with the boots and the shifting, self-serving invocations of “freedom.” The Ford F-150 is the best-selling car in the country. At the end of “The Super-Americans,” Bainbridge gets wistful at the thought of Texans becoming more like the rest of the U.S. He had it exactly backward—we all live in Texas now.—Rachel Monroe

Kate Atkinson’s “Life After Life” came out in 2013 and somehow, I don’t know why, head under a blanket, I missed it, and missed Kate Atkinson entirely, until this summer, when after stumbling across her Jackson Brodie detective series, I decided to listen to all of Atkinson’s books. Some writers I think of as “good for gardening”—because their prose is ruminative and iterative. Atkinson is like that. “Life After Life” is the story or, really, the stories, of Ursula Todd, who is born in England in 1910, and then born again, and again, and again. She lives life after life, trying to get her life right, like a plant shooting up each spring. Ursula lives and dies as England suffers through two World Wars, and if the novel is therefore most decidedly a chronicle of the twentieth century, it has something of the rhythm of the eighteenth, with its “Tristram Shandy” staccato, and its Edward Gibbon downbeat. I sadly do not recommend the sequel to “Life After Life,” “God in Ruins,” a book so painfully disappointing to me that I abandoned it, something I hardly ever do. The best of Atkinson plays with time, as was true of her début novel, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum,” from 1995. I say, start there, a seedling.—Jill Lepore

The Japanese manga artist Eiichiro Oda’s “One Piece” is believed to be one of the best-selling book series of all time. Oda began telling this story in serialized form in 1997, and it’s estimated that about half a billion copies of “One Piece” books, which collect those serialized chapters, are in circulation. I knew none of this until my child started third grade. About a year later, he has pored over twenty-thousand-odd pages (or about a thousand chapters) of Oda’s story and acquired a friend-group lexicon that revolves around pirates, swordplay, straw hats, and the physical principles of elasticity. Curiosity—and one too many shrugged-off questions about what the title “One Piece” even means—finally got the better of me, and I recently started reading the series from Chapter 1. It revolves around Monkey D. Luffy, a delusionally self-confident, perpetually bug-eyed young man who aspires to become the king of the world’s pirates. His body also has the properties of rubber—owing to the existence of mysterious, superpower-granting fruits—and cherishes a straw hat that a pirate idol gifted him when he was a boy. Two questions answered, and some slight relief that my kid hasn’t been immersed in anything too gory over the past year. It’s an old-fashioned quest in a slightly askew world. Like the rest of his pirate rivals, Luffy is in search of the “one piece,” the ultimate booty, shrouded in mystery. Oda turns fifty in January, and in recent years has taken occasional health-related hiatuses from churning out chapters. But he has hinted that the series is at least eighty per cent finished. He can already foresee the final panel. All he’ll reveal in interviews is that the “one piece” everyone’s been searching for all these years will not be the proverbial family we found along the way: “I hate that kind of thing.”—Hua Hsu ♦