The Last Word On Nothing

For a few years now, I’ve been going through my annual list of books read and picking my favorites. (Here’s 2024 and 2022. I guess I didn’t share my list in 2023, though I did contribute to some of LWON’s best of the year lists.) 

This year, wow! I read a lot of really great books. It was really hard to choose, but I managed to pare my favorites list down to a dozen, starting with my top four.

Terrestrial History by Joe Mungo Reed
Big thanks to Lila for recommending this; I loved it too! This book really stayed with me. The novel follows four generations of a single family —mother (Hannah), son (Andrew), his daughter (Kenzie) and her son (Roban). Hannah is a scientist in our present day who’s working to make a fusion reactor. As climate change accelerates, society starts to collapse and there’s a private effort to colonize Mars. Andrew dedicates himself to pushing for collective action to save Earth, while Kenzie joins the effort to start again on a new planet. I hadn’t heard of Reed, but I wasn’t surprised to learn that he has a master’s in philosophy and history. The book does a fine job of exploring ethical and philosophical issues raised by climate change and the prospect of human settlements on Mars. There’s also an ongoing tension between working together as a society for the collective good versus privatizing the future. The character development is outstanding and I especially loved the way Mungo Reed depicts and unfolds the mother-son and father-daughter relationships. There’s some really beautiful writing. The book left me feeling both deeply sad but also hopeful in a surprising way. 

Orbitalby Samantha Harvey
This was another novel that really captivated me. It takes place over the course of a single 24-hour period, and tells the story of six astronauts aboard the space station, which makes 16 orbits around the Earth during this time. That’s about the extent of the plot. Nothing much happens, and yet…the novel holds so much. We get stories from the astronauts’ lives on Earth, but at its core this book is a loving tribute to planet Earth and all its majesty. The writing is absolutely gorgeous as it describes the awe of our planet and grief for loved ones but also for the damage being done to our home in the universe.  

Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett
I’m slowly working my way through Barrett’s back catalogue and loving every word she writes. This collection of short stories won her the National Book Award in 1996, and rightly so. The common threads in these stories are science and love. Many of the stories take place in the nineteenth century, and Carl Linnaeus (“father of taxonomy”) appears in one of them. There’s also a story of love and betrayal and the title story follows a young doctor treating Irish immigrants to Canada during the typhoid epidemic of 1847. It’s a grim historical event, beautifully told. She captures something essential to the human condition. 

Heart the Lover by Lily King
I’m not ashamed to admit this book made me cry. I absolutely loved my first Lily King novel, Writers & Lovers, and I think I loved this one even more. The novel tells the story of three college friends and their sort of love triangle. In college, they all yearn for a life in literature, but only the protagonist follows through, becoming a successful novelist. The narrative begins when they are in college, then fast forwards to the characters in middle life, when the dreams of their youth have met the realities of adulthood. This is a story about friendship, love, regret and forgiveness. The characters are complex, flawed, and easy to love. It turns out (revealed in the last line, but only to those in the know) that the protagonist of this novel is also the protagonist of Writers & Lovers, so after finishing this, I went back and re-read that book and loved it just as much the second time.

More Favorites
Hilarious and Important: Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhoodby Trevor Noah
I listened to the audiobook, which I downloaded several years ago after Catherine Price recommended the book to me. It’s narrated by Noah himself, and he is fantastic. It’s a series of stories about his childhood and upbringing in South Africa. He was about ten when apartheid ended, and this book contains a lot of history of South Africa — how apartheid was constructed, how it worked and the problems that remained after it ended. Those facts are fascinating and horrible (the apartheid government in South Africa studied racism and white supremacy in the U.S. and based many of their policies on these practices). And yet this book is laugh-out-loud funny and Noah’s delivery is hilarious. I doubt you will find a funnier book about the harms of racism. It’s also about a boy finding his way in the world and his love for his amazingly strong and resilient mother.

Books that are Funny and Tons of Fun
Becoming Duchess Goldblattby Anonymous
Another great recommendation from Lila. I listened to the audiobook and it was a delight! It’s the story of a real-life writer going through multiple losses in her personal life and the wonderfully funny and wise fake persona she created on social media and how that persona helped her rebuild a sense of connection. The name Duchess Goldblatt comes from a friend’s first pet and his mother’s maiden name. Also, Lyle Lovett has a leading part, and he voices his lines in the audiobook. I will never be convinced that the voice of Duchess Goldblatt in the audiobook is not my friend Holiday Mathis, and many of Duchess’s witty posts are reminiscent of Holiday’s daily words of advice. 

Actress of a Certain Age: My Twenty Year Trail to Overnight Success by Jeff Hiller
Big thanks to Shannon Palus for recommending the audiobook, narrated by the author. I love, love, LOVE Bridget Everett’s HBO Show, Somebody Somewhere, so I was probably destined to love this memoir by the show’s co-star, who plays the best friend to Everett’s character on the show. The subtitle pretty much lays out what the book is about: a working actor who keeps working and working, because he loves to perform and he refuses to quit even though he can’t support himself with his craft. He finally “makes it,” with a show on HBO, but he’s also careful to show that this “success” doesn’t mean his struggles are over. The book is a lovely exploration of creative process, notions of success, and the experience of being a vulnerable human being in the world. It’s also laugh out loud funny. 

Books That Gave Me Feels
O Pioneers! By Willa Cather
Oh my god, Cather can write. So many beautiful sentences and observations. This masterpiece of a novel tells the story of Alexandra Bergson, who moves with her family from Sweden to the plains of Nebraska when she’s a little girl. It’s a story of survival and suffering and the deep connections that Alexandra forms with the land. It’s about frontier life, but also about a strong woman who takes the reins of her family’s farm and makes it successful in spite of the odds. It’s short and tight, and I’m pretty sure I will be reading it again, just to admire Cather’s writing. 

Train Dreams: A Novella by Denis Johnson
This is a sparse and memorable story about a man making a life in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1900s. The opening scene of a mob attacking a Chinese immigrant is startling and powerful and sets a tone for the remaining pages. The narrative is powerfully written and it evokes a picture of life in the West at this time among White laborers. The mood of the story felt reminiscent of Nathaniel Ian Miller’s historical novel, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven, and the opening made me think of Ana Maria Spagna’s fascinating book, Pushed, in which she tries to fact-check a rumored mass murder of Chines immigrants by indigenous people in the Pacific Northwest. The Netflix adaptation has some beautiful cinematography, but is not nearly as thought-provoking or as textured as the novella. The film felt like a sanitized version that left out much of the deeper meaning.

Great Stories
Isolaby Allegra Goodman
I read my first Allegra Goodman novel earlier this year (Intuition, which I loved), and when I heard she had a new novel out I put it on library reserve. Well, I loved Isola too. It’s the tale of Marguerite de La Rocque de Roberval, a real French noblewoman who lived in the 16^th century. Her parents die when she is young so she’s left to live according to the whims of her older cousin, who spends most of her substantial money and eventually takes her with him on a ship to “New France.” There, he abandons her with two others on a small, rocky island in Newfoundland. Marguerite, who has always had servants, is forced to learn to live a subsistence lifestyle that involves fish and polar bears, among other things. The story shares a few plot similarities to Suddenly, an another novel about people stranded on a remote island, but I liked it a lot more. Goodman does a wonderful job of developing the main characters, particularly the transformation of Marguerite.  

Clear by Carys Davies
This tight, short novel takes place in the 1840s, during the Scottish Clearances, in which Scottish landowners cleared their estates of poor, unprofitable tenants and replaced them with sheep. Seriously, that happened. John Ferguson is a Presbyterian minister sent to a remote Scottish island to evict its final resident, Ivar. Things don’t go as planned, and as John and Ivar learn to communicate through sign language and repetitive sharing of their words for common objects, a surprising bond forms between the two men and Ferguson begins to doubt his mission. I wanted to find out more about this historical time period and learned via an NPR book of the day interview (support your local station!) that Davies based Ivar’s language on a real-life extinct language called Norn. Highly recommend.

A Book Even More Essential Than Bird By Bird
Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fictionby Andrea Barrett
We interviewed Barrett on EMERGING FORM, and it was one of my all-time favorite episodes. I loved this book so very much. It’s about writing and art and the relationship between fiction and nonfiction. I don’t write fiction, but I read a lot of it, and I was stopping almost every page to underline or mark something. Barrett quotes from some of my favorite writers about their process, but she also discusses the genesis of many of her works and the unexpected ways that the form emerged. If our podcast was a book, this would be it.