2024 superlatives

Other year-end literary lists focus on the year's best. I favor other superlatives. This year I am adding a new category: most fun. And remember, these are just books I read this year, not those published this year.

Most Enchanting Book: Reading Leif Enger's Peace Like a River makes a person believe in miracles.

Most Important Book: Published a number of years ago, David McCullough's The Great Bridge, about the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, still seems important for what it teaches us about how big ideas become reality.

Most Daunting Book: What I found daunting about Sy Montgomery's The Soul of the Octopus was the subject matter. Each of an octopus's eight tentacles has its own brain and its own personality. Staggering.

Wisest Book: Who would have suspected that a book about a famous madam could explain so much about what was going on in the United States between the wars? But Debby Applegate's Madam, about Polly Adler, does just that.

Most Familiar Book: The Funny Stuff is a collection of highlights from the work of P..J. O'Rourke. Even those excerpts I had not read before seemed familiar because of O'Rourke's distinctive wit.

Most Incomprehensible Book: In The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy, Arik Kershenbaum attempts to predict what creatures on other planets, if they exist, might look like. Huh?

Most Beautiful Book: William Kent Krueger's The River We Remember may be a mystery, but it is a beautifully written  mystery.

Most Fearless Book: In The Power of Eight, Lynne McTaggert takes a scientific approach to prayer. A small group of people praying for the same thing at the same time brings amazing results, she says. What takes bravery is not so much writing the book or reading the book as acting on what it says.

Most Surprising Book: I didn't expect Elizabeth McKenzie's The Dog of the North to be as much fun as Charles Portis's The Dog of the South. But it is.

Most Unpleasant Book: I love Patrick deWitt's other novels, but Ablutions describes some of the very worst human behavior, and I found it disgusting.

Most Luminous Book: Olaf Olafsson's beautiful novel Touch tells of an Icelandic man who fell in love with a Japanese girl in his youth. Now retired and widowed, and in the midst of a pandemic, he flies to Japan to try to find her.

Most Fun Book: All of Richard Russo's Fool novels are fun to read, but Somebody's Fool, the last in the trilogy, puts the icing on the cake.

A full life

The novel written about the life of Dita Kraus was called The Librarian of Auschwitz. Kraus tells her own story in her 2020 autobiography A Delayed Life.

Written when she was 89, her book covers her entire life and does not dwell on her time in Auschwitz or her experiences in Nazi labor camps. She deals with her experiences as the extermination camp's librarian in just a few sentences. There were only about a dozen books that Jewish prisoners had brought with them and were left behind after their deaths. Only 14 years old at the time, she was briefly put in charge of them.

Kraus writes about the deaths of her parents, the starvation diet she and other prisoners endured and the work she was forced to do to stay alive. She survived only by lying about her age, saying she was a year older than she actually was. A teenage girl at the time, she seems to remember more about the boys she liked than the horrors of camp life.

Most of the book deals with her life after the war, first as a translator for British soldiers, then as a wife and mother and settler in the new state of Israel. Her description of life in a kibbutz is particularly interesting. She tells about the kibbutz raising pigs, not caring about Jewish dietary laws, while residents were disciplined if they used the name of Jesus when they swore. There were no marriages. Couples simply declared that they wanted to live together.

In the end, Dita Kraus looks back on a full and rewarding life, even if it was delayed by that horrible experience as a prisoner of the Nazis when she was apparently doomed to an early death.

A Game for Readers (2024 edition)

Each year at about this time I try to answer the same 12 questions with the titles of books read that year. It's a game anyone who reads a lot of books can play. If you do play, please comment with your own answers. Here are mine:

Describe yourself: Somebody's Fool

How do you feel: Touch (literally)

Describe where you currently live: The Old Place

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Two Nights in Lisbon

Your favorite form of transportation: Hitchhiker

Your best friend is: Hid from Our Eyes

You and your friends are: The Messy Lives of Book People

What is the weather like where you are: A New Day in the City

What is the best advice you could give: Doesn't Hurt to Ask

Thought for the day: I Shall Not Want

How would you like to die: Every Man Dies Alone

What is your soul's present condition: Peace Like a River

Alien abduction can be fun

Light-hearted sci-fi novels are not that common, so we should be grateful for Connie Willis. Her The Road to Roswell (2024) is, like Crosstalk, a comic gem.

Francie goes to Roswell, N.M., to be maid of honor at her former college roommate's wedding, although her real objective is to try to talk Serena out of marrying a UFO kook. Yet no sooner does she get to Roswell than she is snatched by an actual space alien who looks like sagebrush with multiple octopus-like tentacles.

Her fears subside as she begins to realize the alien does not want to harm her but rather needs her help. Before long four others are abducted by Indy, the name given to the alien because he uses those tentacles like Indiana Jones uses his whip.

Indy learns English by watching western movies, leading to many hilarious conversations. One of his favorite expressions becomes, "MIGHTY GRATEFUL MA'AM." Indy's mission is to find a missing friend, but he feels so bad about Francie missing the wedding that he insists on going to a Las Vegas wedding chapel so that she can marry Wade, one of the men he has abducted. He seems to know before either Wade or Francie that they are in love.

Indy and his human crew are chased through the West by both the FBI and other aliens. This may not be classic science fiction, but it is all outrageous fun. 

Hard on books

First edition

Why are first editions of classic children's books in good condition relatively hard to find? Simply because children are hard on books, especially the books they love.

Very small children even chew on books. So do their pets. Children want their parents to read the same favorite stories over and over again at bedtime. They like to carry these books with them and take them places, even outside when they play. Before they learn to read, they enjoy sitting down with these books to look at the illustrations and relive the stories in their minds.

Like teddy bears and favorite dolls and toys of any kind, few favorite books survive childhood in good shape. They may eventually get tossed. If kept, they may become prized possessions to their original owners, yet they may not be prized by collectors looking for something more pristine.

It is probably true that any book, whether written for children or adults, that remains in a condition loved by collectors was never truly loved by its original owner.

Written in scars

In America, a man could become what he dreamed; in India, dreaming could undo a man.

Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

In Thirty Umrigar's wonderful 2023 novel The Museum of Failures, Remy's loving father raised him to escape India, move to America and make his dreams come true there. To a great extent, that is exactly what happens. At Ohio State, Remy meets Kathy, an American beauty, and marries her. Then he becomes very successful in business. Yet he had actually wanted to write poetry, and his and Kathy's dream of having a baby proved impossible. Perhaps his dreams could come true in India after all.

Remy returns to India alone when he learns of a young woman with an inconvenient pregnancy. She has agreed to let Remy and Kathy adopt her baby.

In Bombay, however, Remy discovers his mother, Shirin, in a hospital bed, unable or unwilling to eat or speak. His relationship with his mother has always been difficult. His late father had been the loving one, while his mother had always been distant, critical and sometimes cruel.

Yet his presence in her hospital room seems to revive Shirin, and slowly she begins to recover, even as his adoption plans run into difficulties. Remy's feelings toward his mother gradually change, especially when he discovers a long hidden family secret that causes him to rethink his attitude toward both of his parents. His family turns out to be very different than what he had assumed.

Late in her novel, Umrigar, who like her main character is a transplant from India to Ohio, writes that "everybody's story was written in scars." That is certainly true in The Museum of Failures.

A pleasant old age

I cannot imagine a pleasanter old age than one spent in the not too remote country where I could reread and annotate my favorite books.

Andre Maurois, French author

Andre Maurois

I once met a man in his 90s — and wrote a newspaper column about him — whose life was pretty much what Andre Maurois describes above. Once a chemist, if I remember correctly, he now spent his days reading, not in a comfortable easy chair but sitting at his kitchen table. He mostly reread old favorites. He was reading Thackery when I met him and he became my friend. He lived in a small house full of books in a very small town, which might even be described as a "not too remote country."

I am too rapidly approaching that age now, and his life seems pleasant to me.

Most very old people seem to spend most of their waking hours watching television. That's what both of my parents did in their 90s. I am prepared for that kind of life, as well, for I have a large collection of DVDs, both favorite movies and television shows. I could happily watch them all again and again.

Yet reading sounds even more pleasant to me, for as long as I can focus my mind, make out the print and make notes on index cards about what I read.