I remain very impressed with Susan Osborne’s (better known as A Life in Books) way of summarising her reading year by seasons. You can read her Part One, Part Two, Part Three and even Part Four of her 2024 summary, and I hope she won’t mind that I’ll be stealing (I mean, of course, borrowing) her idea to summarise my own year, both in terms of reading and with other cultural events more generally. I didn’t have a target total number of books in mind, but as it happens, almost every section has roughly six books, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, most of them have been in translation (or other languages).
Part 1 covers January to March 2024, so of course it will skew heavily towards Japanese and French literature (January in Japan and French February). In fact, all of my favourite reads during this period were in translation, partly because I’ve found books in translation more interesting than the ones published in English and have therefore read far more of them.
My favourite Japanese reads were, unsurprisingly, by two favourite authors: Dazai Osamu’s The Flowers of Buffoonery (one I’d somehow never read before) and Tsushima Yuko’s Territory of Light (just as impactful upon rereading). For French literature, I was amused and exhilarated by the exuberance of Mathias Enard’s The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger’s Guild and deeply impressed by the translation acrobatics of Frank Wynne. I also returned to one of my favourite recent women writers from France, Maylis de Kerangal, her novella Eastbound was translated this year but I read it in the French original.
I also got involved in the International Booker Shadow Panel, although most of the books on the longlist did not impress me all that much, but all three of our Shadow Panel winners made it to to the top of my reading list in March. These were: Not a River by Selva Almada, Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck and White Nights by Urzula Honek.
It was also an extremely busy, happy and productive winter period, watching lots of films and plays, socialised with my sons and other friends, translated my first full-length novel from German, and even attended a memoir writing course, which I greatly enjoyed. Now that I’ve been blessed with a Kasper of my own, I had to rewatch The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, of course, one of Werner Herzog’s great films. My greatest ‘event’, however, was leaving my day job at the university and choosing to work full-time on Corylus Books and other freelance projects. I miss my wonderful colleagues and the iconic building, which has appeared on film many times. It has not been the easiest of times financially (so if you know anyone looking for a translator or editor, or an executive coach or trainer, please point them to my For Hire page), but it has really been worth it in terms of health and stress levels.
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