Some Books Chris Read

Mid-year review

It's the beginning of July, which means we're halfway through the year. I figured this was as good a time as any to look back at my past 6 months of reading.

At the beginning of the year I set myself a goal of reading 30 books this year. In 2023, after going through a massive years-long reading slump, I read 39 books. Most of them came either when I Was on holiday or over Christmas, when I suddenly fell in love with reading again. I figured that 30 for 2024 was a good manageable target. At the time of writing this post I've read 55 books so far in 2024 (and DNFd a further 9), so it turns out I was right about that goal being manageable.

Over the next six months I hope to make more progress on the reading list I put together in Januar, as well as getting around to some of the upcoming books I'm excited about. I'm also looking forward to the Booker Prize longlist being announced in September, and I'm hoping I'll be able to read the majority of them before the prize is awarded towards the end of the year.

The full list of everything I've read this year (plus everything in past years since I started keeping track) is here. The full list of books I've tagged as "top reads" either here or on Goodreads/Storygraph is:

In no particular order, here are my top 5 so far this year:

The Bee Sting - Paul Murray

The first book I read this year and still a highlight. The Bee Sting was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize and it's easy to see why. This book goes to a place that I think is impossible to predict. What starts as a quiet, meditative, generational slice-of-life story ends as a taut, tense thriller. The final words leave us with the knowledge that somebody is about to die and that, just as jj taught their students, the reader is entirely complicit in deciding who that might be.

This is one of the best-written books I've read in a long time. Murray has absolute mastery of the language he uses. Every point of view character feels entirely distinct, and you feel like their story is the single most important part of the book for the entirety of each of their chapters. The second person sections towards the end of the novel are a masterclass in crafting fiction. Second person can often feel irritating or gimmicky but The Bee Sting wouldn't work half as well without it.

How Much Of These Hills Is Gold - C Pam Zhang

I posted my review of this a week or two ago. I picked this up entirely because I liked the cover and I'm very glad that I did. This is one of those books that's really stuck with me since I read it, and I fully intend to read Zhang's Land of Milk and Honey as soon as possible. Of everything I've read this year I think this is my favourite - which probably means it should be at the top of this list, but never mind.

Elder Race - Adrian Tchaikovsky

A short novella that's easily digestible in a single sitting, Elder Race nevertheless packs a lot in. Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", and Tchaikovsky takes that premise and runs with it.

I've previously read the first three or four books in Tchaikovsky's Shadows Of The Apt series and liked them but didn't love them. Elder Race, on the other hand, I loved. The juxtaposition of pseudo-medieval fantasy with hard SF to show the same world and events from two vastly different perspectives works brilliantly, and I'd happily read more novels set in this world.

The Ship Beneath The Ice - Mensun Bound

I went into this knowing nothing about Shackleton's Endurance and came out of it with a new special interest. Bound writes really well, and it's a delight to read someone who clearly loves their work. The first section in particular, detailing Bound's aborted first attempt to find the Endurance, is completely enchanting while also being utterly terrifying, made moreso by the knowledge that it's all real. His new book Wonders In The Deep comes out later this year and I'll definitely be picking it up.

Looking Glass Sound - Catriona Ward

Last year I started reading Sundial and, for some reason, I never finished it. It wasn't that I thought it was bad, it was just that I was still coming out of my reading slump and I guess simply wasn't in the mood for that book at that time. After reading Looking Glass Sound I fully intend to fix that.

This was fantastic. It's a very well-executed metafiction that kept my guessing - and hooked - right up until the last moments. Even the slight silliness of characters being trapped inside the book that we're currently reading that shows up at the end didn't feel silly in context, and it's very hard to get me to buy in to that kind of thing. In a lot of ways this reminded me of Ian McEwan's Atonement (though the two books are obviously not at all similar), and I felt a very real connection to the characters.

#in-review #jul24 #topreads2024