The New Yorker’s editors and critics reviewed hundreds of new releases this year to choose the best books of 2024. The magazine’s writers also looked at many other books, including novels that had missed publication and essays that were long out of print. Collection, classics that have taken on new meaning with the passage of time. Here are some of their favorites.
Last July, during the British general election in which Labor defeated the long-ruling Conservative Party in a landslide, I turned to Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, a book I had somehow neglected to read for 20 years. I picked it up. Since it was published. shame on you! I read it all at once and am already reading it a second time. The book begins after Margaret Thatcher secured a supermajority in the House of Commons in the Conservative Party’s own election in 1983. The social and political history of this period is filtered through the sophisticated consciousness of Nick Guest, a recent graduate of Oxford University. He has joined the family of his college friend Toby Fedden. His father Gerard happens to be one of Nick’s new Conservative MPs. Although he is gay and, at the beginning of the novel, completely inexperienced sexually, his status is somewhere between the lodger and the conveniently attractive man who enlivens the dinner party. He is pursuing a Ph.D. I am interested in the style of Henry James’s work, and his influence on the author radiates from each ironic page. (When Nick compliments Toby on the Paul Cézanne painting, Toby’s uncle, Lord Kessler, says, “Well, that’s a nice painting, isn’t it?” and Gerald says, “Scan all the documents that might be useful.” Hollinghurst’s staged party scenes are masterpieces of observation, and his portrayal of the shadow cast by AIDS in the ’80s is subtle and painful. Yes, this book was published in 1987. It ends with the election of 2017, in which the much admired Lady consolidates power in what is being hailed as a second landslide. Nick explains to Toby’s unstable sister Catherine: ‘And it just seems to keep on slipping.’I first picked up this book after Labor’s July victory. from a perspective about the UK, I would now be in 2024. I’m rereading these passages with November in mind. —Rebecca Mead.
“I have defined myself personally and abstractly by my short, intense days as an athlete and swimmer,” Leanne Shapton wrote in her 2012 illustrated memoir, Swimming Studies. writes. I was relatively fast. I practiced, ate, traveled and played shows with some of the best players in the country, but not the best. I was pretty good at it. ” The one that sticks the semicolon. As a young girl, Shapton almost swam for Canada’s Olympic team twice. Even though she is in her 30s, she still has a passion for living underwater. The smell of chlorine, the nylon straps digging into your shoulders, your hair caked in icicles after a pre-dawn workout outside Toronto. She can’t help but look for pools at luxury hotels and take laps around them, even if they are short. Her partner suggests that water is “something to enjoy” and tries to introduce her to “the concept of a bath.” How strange this is for a record holder! Between each chapter of the text, Shapton includes many photographs of her in swimsuits, as well as paintings done in her characteristic form of loose, abstract watercolor. (She exhibits in galleries and works as an art editor for The New York Review of Books.) She records the shapes and locations of memorable pools and springs toward the breaststroke. Create a portrait of a swimmer in motion, crouching and then stretching into a freestyle motion. . I read myself into these images, into the heavy silence of submergence. I don’t have any championship background, but I learned to lap swim as a child and have loved the pool ever since. Reading Shapton’s book makes me think about my past, and who is still pushing me forward through the water. Tammy Kim
Frederic Seidel’s Poetry 1959-2009 has been a stylish and wild playmate for me all year long. This was recommended to me by a friend who knew how much I loved Philip Larkin, and that hearing his nasally rhyming voice, sumptuously trapped in tics and addictions, would drive me insane. You guessed correctly. These include first class on airplanes, fine dining, art, singing nonsense, sex as monstrous, sex as delicious, mourning dictators, if they even exist. Expressing love through things, the Carlyle Hotel, and sex. I can’t think of a living poet whose scope is so close to infinity, and I can’t think of a poet who makes infinity seem so trivial on a regular basis. The entire universe is a dirty 11th dimension pun.
Space is also one of Seidel’s subjects. In his “Cosmos Trilogy,” which makes up a significant portion of this collection, it grows as fast as a “ping-pong ball of foam” from a can of shaving cream, and is described as a “little octopus/Galaxies and dust.” produce. It feels like “the wobbly flesh of an oyster emerging from its shell on a battlefield” and spins with “deafening, odorless suction.” Perhaps the key line of this book’s “trilogy” comes from poem one. “Emptiness heavier than the universe.” For Seidel, there is never really anything. Also, nothing can really be destroyed, only crushed and bitten like a dog with a rubber toy. —Jackson Ahn
I first tried to read Virginia Woolf’s poorly plotted classic, Mrs. Martin. Dalloway,” when I was 16 years old. As a teenager, I lived in constant fear of being exposed for my stupidity. Flipping through “Mrs.,” Dalloway tries to allay that fear one night when she was supposed to be studying for an exam. This disconcerting experience confirmed my suspicions that it was as strong as I believed. And it was my duty to delve deeper into its secrets.
I recently re-read this book, and I’m closer to Clarissa Dalloway’s age than her daughter, dewy teenage Elizabeth. When I opened this book, I felt, like Clarissa, “so young, so young.” At the same time, I have aged beyond words. ” On page 6, I did what I refused to do 20 years ago. In other words, I quit. I quit! Specifically, the words are: “She cut through everything like a knife. At the same time, she was on the outside looking in.” Wasn’t this exactly the kind of vulnerability you felt when you were 16 years old? Why couldn’t I remember even a fragment of that searing sentence? Perhaps my younger self was too scared to even look at these words because they were the exact opposite of what I wanted to be. In other words, I remained stubbornly on the outside of most things, a bystander to my own pale life, something that young people tend to fall into. But I have a feeling that Clarissa wouldn’t have criticized me for this, any more than Woolf would have been indifferent to my middle-aged self devouring her masterpiece. If you’re lucky, she might say, the effort disappears. “Time flutters on the mast. There we stop. There we stand.” —Jiayang Fan
