My reading through 2024 has been dominated by the demands of the Ballard project, taking in books about JGB as well as re-reads of most of Ballard’s novels. This kind of deeply immersive, intimate engagement with the work of one writer is something I have not experienced in the same way since writing my Masters thesis on Nabokov, getting on for thirty-five years ago now, but it is one that completely fits my mindset and that has, in some sense, reset my thinking and aspirations for where I might want to go as a writer, further down the line.
Other than that, it has been a strange and somewhat erratic year all round. From the first half of 2024 I would have to make particular mention of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story simply for existing and being there for me to read, with Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency and Amy Key’s Arrangements in Blue being in their own way similarly consolatory. Miranda Seymour’s wonderful biography of Jean Rhys, I Used to Live Here Once, and Richard Morton Jack’s superb Nick Drake: the Life were both exactly what I needed to remind me of what I was doing and why I was doing it. Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos was an extraordinary reading experience, one that was personal to me in unexpected ways, and I was thrilled to see Erpenbeck, after several previous nominations, finally win the International Booker Prize.
Moving through into the second half of 2024, Laura Cumming’s On Chapel Sands and its follow up, Thunderclap were both equally magnificent, revealing Cumming in my eyes as one of the most accomplished writers working in Britain today. Janet Frame’s posthumously published short novel Towards Another Summer is a quiet, devastating miracle, and I could use exactly the same words of Rachel Cusk’s Parade, though the two books could not be more different. I was delighted to finally catch up with Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea, which is a very good book indeed, and also – from somewhat further back – with Barry N. Malzberg’s Galaxies, which follows Ballard’s prime example in revealing science fiction as a radical, knotty form that is capable of just about anything. Indeed, one of the side-effects of the Ballard project has been a re-engagement with the ideals of the British New Wave and the literary possibilities of a mode of literature that – no matter how it is used, abused, sidelined and devalued – remains as powerful and significant as any given writer chooses to make it.
Will 2025 be the year I finally read Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow? Regular readers of this blog will know that I enjoy setting myself reading challenges, but I’m going to hold off on doing that, just for the moment. I would like to leave the reading horizon open and uncluttered, a space to inhabit as feels useful, inspiring and necessary, a year of new discoveries.