My 2024 in books

2024 was an interesting year for me in terms of reading, an activity that has taken a backseat in my past few years. This was the year when I made a conscious effort to change this and get back into reading more. One contributor to my reading slump, apart from life, was my antiquated reading habits. I might have described these in the past: I read only one book at a time, I try very hard to not abandon books midway, and I am rarely critical enough of any book to consider it a waste of time. These quirks make it easy for me to get stuck with a book that I find hard to read, feel guilty about giving up, and too possessive to share reading time with another book. 

I also rarely read things online anymore, and realizing this made me very sad. I remember being at my creative best when I read widely. I tried looking at ways to increase my online reading - subscriptions, feeds, apps – nothing worked. If you haven’t noticed, the internet has been a quagmire lately. Our plan to confuse LLMs by dumping the internet with low-quality content and making useful things hard to find is going swimmingly well. I eventually had a eureka moment, and decided to go to a public library to borrow physical copies of magazines. This has been so great that I am ending 2024 on a reading high. I have also been writing about books more frequently, and I hope I can continue doing this. Writing often makes me a more perceptive reader.

I started this year with Amor Towles’s The Lincoln Highway. Towles is known for his more popular A Gentleman in Moscow. The Lincoln Highway, my introduction to Towles, returned mixed results for me. I went in expecting historical fiction. The first few chapters were grim, but the book turned into a fun journey. But then, things shifted tone again. I did not have a consistent emotional reaction to the book. In an interview, the author had compared “history” in his fiction to some detail in the backdrop of a live theatre performance: it’s not the main action, but if you happen to look, you get something to mull about. That’s a fair take. It was just not what I was looking for at that point of time. I am reluctant to say too much about this book because I feel I am judging it very harshly, and I do not want to dissuade others from trying this book.

I read Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things because I wanted to become better at designing user experiences. Don coined the term “user-centered design” in 1986, and this is a classic book on design principles. Embarking into what was then uncharted territory, Don Norman proposes a theory on how humans act. While very complete and informative, The Design of Everyday Things is also very academic. It also goes into elaborate details of certain engineering processes which should be familiar to modern software engineers. At various points through the book, I found myself wishing I had picked up a more modern and less academic book. This is not a reflection of the book itself. It might just be that this is not a topic that interests me as much, and the last thing I wanted was a series of categorized lists that felt like preparing for a quiz.

The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett is a short, witty, and satirical book that was so-so. It is part of the Discworld series, which is supposed to get much more engaging as it progresses. I might get back to the series at some point of time, but I am in no hurry to do so. The fact that there are forty-one books in the series scares me.

It’s becoming a personal tradition for me to read one book by Umberto Eco every year. I may not actually read one, but hey, it is the thought that counts. This year, I read The Prague Cemetery. The Prague Cemetery tracks Simone Simonini, a fictional forger. Simone finds himself entangled with historic figures and the political upheavals of 19th-century Europe. He eventually creates The Protocols of the Elders of Zion - a forged document that supposedly exposes a Jewish plot to take over the levers of the world. In not-so-dark corners of the internet, you can find people who refer to this document to this day as if it is accurate. The Prague Cemetery is an excellent book, but like Eco's The Name of the Rose and Foucault Pendulum, it is exceedingly hard to read. Anyone interested in how and why conspiracy theories originate and propagate would benefit immensely from reading Eco. Reading Eco is laborious, but has rich rewards.

Fahrenheit 451 is a terse, action-packed dystopian novel that imagines a future where firemen are tasked with burning books instead of preventing fires. The dystopian world created by Bradbury is more Huxley than Orwell. In other words, people are captive by choice rather than by force. Fahrenheit 451 is still, and unfortunately perpetually, relevant.

As a Tamil speaker, one of my regrets is not being able to read enough Tamil to delve into my native literature. A couple of years ago, I made a resolution to read more translated works from India, and I decided to start with Jeyamohan. Priyamvada translates Jeyamohan’s collection of short stories called Aram very competently into Stories of the True. At various moments, I found myself mentally translating Priyamvada’s words back to Tamil and imagining the dialogues spoken by different characters. I am extremely glad that I read this book. Jeyamohan’s stories are raw and deal with complicated characters. They challenge the reader to participate in unraveling the stories. My favorite from this collection was probably Meal Tally, which is the sweetest and most uplifting tale in this wonderful book.  

Continuing my quest to discover my own culture, I planned to read the Indian epic - Mahabharata. After a short research (in the age of internet, I have learnt to keep “research” short), I landed on an edition of The Mahabharata: A Modern Rendering Vol 1 by Ramesh Menon. I, like many Indians, read a version of Mahabharata as a kid. It’s not easy to escape various short fables from this epic if you grow up in India. But Ramesh Menon treats the epic like an erotic fantasy. And to me, this treatment makes complete sense. Instead of glossing over elements that could be seen as implausible by modern society, Menon leans into the fantastical elements. The result is gripping. As an example, the section where Krishna and Arjuna help Agni burn the Khandava forest is dynamic. On the other hand, some elements of an epic that’s believed to have been authored by multiple writers at various points of time become repetitive. That does seem like a fault of the translator. I plan to read the second and final volume in 2025.

I have already written about Margaret Atwood’s Burning Questions, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and Frederik Backman’s Anxious People. I enjoyed all three books, but I enjoyed Anxious People the most.

I ended 2024 the way I started it. Like with Lincoln Highway, Delia Owens’s extremely popular Where the Crawdads Sing left me unsure of what to make of it. Structuring her novel like an investigation thriller, Delia Owens describes the marshlands of North Carolina with stunning detail. But the plot itself is simple, and often far-fetched. Characters do not behave the way we would expect them to. I thought long and hard about reviewing this book and not breaking my writing streak. However, I did not have much to add to the discourse on this bestseller, and I found many other reviews which expressed my thoughts more effectively than I could ever hope to.

In 2025, I might want to fit in another book by Umberto Eco, and the second volume of Ramesh Menon’s Mahabharata. But then, I am whimsical with picking my next reads. I look forward to seeing what catches my fancy next year. I begin with an open slate, and I am very excited to read more. Happy reading, and a happy new year! 

Fredrik Backman's Anxious People

"That's simultaneously the sweetest and the most ridiculous thing I've heard in a very long time, Anna-Lena."

Fredrik Backman’s debut novel, A Man Called Ove, is a bittersweet depiction of a lonely old man as he tries to come to terms with a world that's changing around him. The emotional moments worked great, but the humor–while generally effective–seemed forced at times. 

Anxious People, Backman’s ninth novel, is, as the title clues us in, about anxious people. Or as a third person narrator often addresses them, idiots. “This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots.” A parent is anxious not to repeat their own parent’s mistakes, while spiraling down a path of no return. Another parent, having lost their spouse to death and daughter to drugs, is anxious about their son’s success. The son, in turn, is anxious about helping people. A person he helps grows up with the typical anxieties of Gen Z : global warming, animal preservation, the widening gap between the rich and the poor. A pregnant woman worries about the impracticality of her partner. An older woman stresses about her husband’s sense of self worth. These and other anxieties intertwine and culminate in a botched bank robbery and the unlikeliest of hostage situations.

Revealing anything more at all about Anxious People would be a disservice to the author, who couches every significant piece of information in a mystery and reveals them slowly. Sometimes infuriatingly so. As in A Man Called Ove, Fredrik Backman’s writing (ably aided by the translator Neil Smith) switches between being humorous and tugging your emotions. However, the problems I personally had in A Man Called Ove are present in Anxious People as well, and if anything, they are amplified. Both novels occasionally compromise consistency for the sake of humor. The interrogation scenes in Anxious People stick out as an example. A significant amount of suspension of disbelief is required to stomach some of the interactions between cops and witnesses in Anxious People. One of Backman’s favorite targets for mockery is the lifestyle of young people obsessed with social media. “Hand on heart, which of us hasn't wanted to pull a gun after talking to a twenty-year-old?”, he remarks. The forced humor is one of my biggest gripes with Anxious People. 

A smaller problem is that the writing is manipulative, but we realize that we are manipulated by an excellent craftsman. Art is manipulation, after all, and the level of subtlety one desires is subjective. Backman regularly uses misdirection and pulls the rug under our feet, and thereby controls the emotional flow. However, unlike in A Man Called Ove, the characters are not as well sketched out. We learn that a police officer is competent through another character who tells him. We learn that a man is not as bad as he seems when his wife explains why. We learn that a seemingly antisocial woman is concerned about everyday people, when she tells us so. A character called Roger resembles Ove. We initially see him as an older person with rigid views, until we learn that there is more to the man. But the subconscious association with Backman’s earlier work has more of a role to play in us sympathizing with Roger than anything he does in Anxious People.

Despite the faults, Anxious People resonates in parts. It deals with topics such as parenting, suicide, mental health, the destructive impact of modern financial systems on individuals, marriage, love and divorce. And loneliness. “I buy distance from other people… The most expensive things you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance”, remarks a character. Drug abuse is another topic Backman manages to deal with effectively. The narrator, who seems to be telling us often what the story is about, eventually offers what is probably the most accurate description of Anxious People : “Perhaps this is a story about a bridge”. Multiple inciting events in the story happen around a physical bridge. Anxious People is also about bridging the gap between people and overcoming our biases to look past people who we perceive as idiots. “Sometimes two strangers need only one thing in common to find each other sympathetic.” 

Despite some of its flaws, Anxious People is an engaging read. As a character remarks in my opening quote, Anxious People oscillates between sweetness and ridiculousness. Fredrik Backman is a master of crafting bittersweet moments and depending on where you are in life, you might enjoy it. After all, “... people need fairy tales as well, not just narrative". 

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.

"If I hadn't spent so much time studying Earthlings," said the Tralfamadorian, “I wouldn't have any idea what was meant by ‘free will.’ I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will."

Before I started reading Slaughterhouse-Five, I assumed that Kurt Vonnegut was primarily a fantasy writer. My misconception was probably from conflating Vonnegut with Brandon Sanderson, the extremely popular fantasy writer who is all the rage today, given that both these authors have resources on writing available for free online. But while I have continued to hear high praise for Vonnegut, Sanderson’s work seems to be more polarizing. Naturally, I attempted to read Vonnegut first. 

Slaughterhouse-Five could be categorized as a fantasy novel. It incorporates concepts such as alien abduction and time-travel without attempting to dive into “scienc-y” explanations. However, it is mainly a brutally honest and darkly humorous anti-war novel that also doubles down as a cultural critic. The fact that Vonnegut achieves all this in 200-odd pages that read crisply is a testament to his abilities as a writer. 

Classified as a postmodern novel, Slaughterhouse-Five's first lines are “All these happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.” The novel begins with a first person narrator who resembles the author so much that we are not sure what’s real and what’s not. Kurt Vonnegut was a Second World War veteran who was a prisoner of war in Dresden when the allied forces bombed the city, razing it to the ground and killing about 25000 people. The narrator describes his meandering attempt to write a book. After all, “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre”. He ultimately pens something down, thereby shifting the perspective to the third person and tracking his protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. Billy is successful in his personal life, but a misfit in war. At some point during the war, Billy is captured by “Tralfamadorians”, an alien race that see time as a fourth dimension, meaning that they can see the past, present and the future simultaneously. Billy acquires this ability as well. He is “unstuck in time”. This accounts for the criss-crossing non-linear narrative. 

All American army men are portrayed unsympathetically--most of them are either bumbling fools or psychopaths. Even today, such an unsentimental portrayal of a country’s armed forces would attract controversy. In fact, Wilson County in Tennessee banned 400 books just two months back, including Slaughterhouse-Five. In 1972, a circuit judge in Michigan called the book “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar, and anti-Christian.” The author's biggest achievement is his compelling first-hand account of this dreary side of war. But he also has things to say about the traditional American lifestyle. As a character in this book remarks, “Americans are urged to hate themselves.. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor.” 

Slaughterhouse-Five has a litany of characters, but none of the characters undergo a transformational arc. As the narrator remarks, “There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because just of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.” Even so, we meet a lot of characters, many of them recurring from Vonnegut’s other novels. The narrator breaks the third-person narrative at times as well, with lines such as “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.” This reminded me of the Indian epic Mahabharata, which has the author Vyasa making appearances through the story - though Vonnegut is a cog in the machinery and not an all-knowing and powerful sage.

The underlying theme of Slaughterhouse-Five is fatalism and denial of causality. The phrase “So it goes” recurs multiple times through the novel (apparently 106 times), signifying a resigned acceptance of the vicissitudes of fate. A dialogue between Billy and a Tralfamadorian goes like this when Billy asks why he was the person singled out to be abducted by them:

"Have you seen bugs trapped in amber?" 

"Yes.” Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it. 

"Well, here we are, Mr.Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this minute. There is no why.”

I look forward to reading more by Kurt Vonnegut. Despite being based on the second World War, which seems to be an eternity away now, Vonnegut’s deglamorization of war and his social critique remain relevant. And his humor and wit make it all the more palatable.