Crash Rhino’s Top Seventeen Books of the Year (2024)
Introduction by Becky:
If I wasn’t married to Sam, I would hate him on the sheer fact that he reads too many books that it makes me feel bad about myself. Whilst I can average a good 20-30 books a year depending on how fixated I become on certain topics (for 2024 it’s been dictators, ‘supporting women’s rights and wrongs’ and the lives of male authors and how badly they treated their wives), Sam will have his nose in a book all year round so that he clocks up an impressive 52 books a year. Insufferable, I know.
So I can hand on my heart say that this list of Crash Rhino’s top seventeen books of the year isn’t one that has been cobbled together for the purpose of SEO. It’s a list born of countless hours spent at airports, on trains, on buses, and has some absolute bangers that will have Lee Child or James Paterson quaking at their laptops, crying about their nonexistent plot arcs.
There’s also some slight shade thrown in this blog post so strap yourself in. My favourite bit is when Sam refers to Tom McCarthy books “as thinking they're just a little smarter than they actually are.” Ouch.
And am I really that surprised that the number one slot is a literary epic that spans 900 pages? No, but at least it’s not another Thomas Berhardt which makes Sam incredibly morose and existential for about two weeks afterwards.
17. Terminal Boredom
An uneven collection - I found a couple of the middle stories a real slog. But the standouts here are fascinating, and ridiculously ahead of their time given they were written in the 70s.
The title story is one of the best creative looks at "screen culture" I've read. You May Dream is another highlight - Izumi's general vibe revolves around groups of broken youth desperately struggling through their post-universes, and it's a great vibe.
She's maybe a bit too strange and dark to get a true anglophone resurgence amidst the ongoing boom of Japanese women in translation (though Verso finally published one of her novels in English this year so hopefully I'm wrong) and that's a shame because there's a unique eeriness to Izumi's work, well worth a read if you're looking for experimental sci-fi.
16. Orbital
I’m very conflicted on Orbital. There are flashes of gorgeous description, real life-affirming stuff, and I love how compact it is.
The characters are however practically nonexistent, and it became quite repetitive for me despite its short length. It's a great concept - each chapter being one rotation around the Earth in space is brilliant - but I felt a lot was missing in the execution. Worth a read, I just don't quite understand the levels of hype surrounding it.
15. Remainder
Predates it slightly but this is essentially Synecdoche: New York if it was a novel. A guy wins a massive payout after an accident and decides he wants to pay people to recreate things he can half-remember.
Lots of very precise repetition going on here - spending pages to describe the cracks in wall plastering, that kind of repetitive. I'm a weirdo so I like that sort of thing, but I recognise it's an acquired taste - you'll find the narrator mildly to majorly insufferable depending on your tolerance level.
McCarthy's novels always come off as thinking they're just a little smarter than they actually are for me. But I liked the themes he's playing with here, worth a read if you're looking for some light existentialism.
14. Convenience Store Woman
Transports you to Japan's many konbinis with their immaculate shelves, bright lights and plastic wrap. I loved the narrative voice throughout.
I tried Earthlings first and it wasn't for me - I couldn't gel with the childish narrator and how the abuse scenes were described from their perspective, it made me very uncomfortable. This was still odd but it felt much more controlled, with a clearer purpose (deciphering Japan's insane work culture and its results like Hikikomori) that didn't outstay it's welcome. It’s a great weekend book that you can fall into for a couple of days.
13. Island of Missing Trees
A surprisingly cosy book despite some of its more harrowing plot points, focused on the history of Cyprus through the perspectives of a relationship across the Greek-Turkish divide, a London-based descendent and a fig tree.
Adored the descriptions and any extract focused on Cypriot food and culture. The Happy Fig taverna is such a beautifully realised setting. Dialogue here is however terrible, and the London timeline was far weaker for me. Still a great book though, its strengths far outweigh any shortcomings.
12. Wild Thorns
One of the most important Palestinian novels, first translated into English in the mid 80s. It actually got a bit of criticism at the time for being too generous in its depiction of the working conditions in Israel for Palestinians.
A great book firstly for its deft focus on class relations between Palestinians under the occupation - it offers a very nuanced angle of the realities at the time. It goes beyond the idea of resistance - it asks whether there's a right way to protest, and explores how an apartheid regime like Israel's impacts the relationships between the innocent people who live under it. There's also some interesting insight into masculinity and how resisting through its lens can end up creating even more issues. Worth reading in the 80s, absolutely worth reading today.
11. Broken April
All about centuries old blood feuds and revenge killings between Albanian mountain tribes - the unbreakable cycle of death, passed down through generations via an unwritten code.
Can pinpoint the exact moment I realised there was something incredible here with this description - "The world shone like glass, and with a kind of crystal madness, it seemed that it might begin to slip at any moment and shatter into thousands of tiny fragments"
A brief but fantastic book, deeply unsettling. Have come to love what I've read of Ismail Kadare so far.
10. Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
A stunning collection with some of the most important short stories of the last couple of decades. The title story is obviously incredible, but the man who ended history is the standout for me - it should really have ushered in a new faux-documentary way of writing. Perhaps it still will.
Very few misses in here that I can recall to be honest, both Mono No Aware and the Perfect Match are also impeccable, but the whole collection is worth reading.
9. My Year of Rest and Relaxation
A woman decides to try and sleep for an entire year to essentially reset her life, and does so by continuing to escalate her prescription drugs intake.
This is a wild ride and I loved it. Treads the fine line between darkly witty and just a bit fucked up incredibly well. The dialogue is stupidly good but it's the strength and unique depravity of the narrator's voice that drags you in and refuses to let go. I need to seek out Ottessa's other work.
8. Homegoing
Two sisters and their descendants are tracked across hundreds of years of the slave trade and its impact in West Africa and across the US.
Hard to cling onto who's who here - I appreciated it more as a set of loosely connected short stories that often end too soon. In fairness I think there's something there thematically, in that I wanted to spend more time with most of these characters but their stories and voices were cut short. An excellent novel that deserves most of the lofty praise it's received in my opinion.
7. Greenwood
A generation-spanning eco-narrative about tree-felling in British Columbia. This comes close to something really special - it faltered for me with the pacing (without spoiling anything the structure is very clever, but falters a bit with a couple of sections really dragging for me) and far, far too many tree metaphors. One of the characters is called Willow - there's not a lot of subtlety.
I still thoroughly enjoyed it though - there's a lot of variety given to each character's narrative, and some of the better-realised ones stuck with me for a while. Also devoured it, it's very readable.
6. The Obscene Bird of Night
I’ve been meaning to read this for ages and it got a new translation this year, so no better time to dive in. An utterly depraved book in both concept and writing style, where narrators shift without any explanation and the experience of reading is less experiencing a story and more being trapped in a labyrinth whilst simultaneously falling into an abyss.
There's a few important through-lines here though, about the crimes parents commit on their children, the ramifications of Chile's colonial past, the importance of the imbunche and other folk monsters to Chilean psyche among others. Wouldn't recommend it to most but if you want a challenge it's a rewarding nightmare.
5. Lord Jim at Home
Similar to what happened with Stoner a few years ago, in that this was first published to relatively minimal acclaim in the early 70s and has recently been "rediscovered" - hasn't quite reached a wider audience yet but I'm hopeful it will because it's excellent.
Adored it - such a deeply weird novel, it's a bildungsroman mixed with a dark fairytale, and it's weird in that uniquely British way, full of unspoken expectations and stupid upper-middle class eccentricities. Unlike anything else I've read.
4. To Live
It all comes down to the flow here. To Live progresses so perfectly, drags you so seamlessly from one altercation to the next that you're never bored for a second.
Yu Hua narrates decades of Chinese history, from land reform to the communist revolution and its aftermath, with some brutal scenes along the way. No word is wasted, it's just masterful in its precision. Essential reading if you're interested in Chinese history.
3. Giovanni’s Room
Ridiculous that I hadn't read this before now really, such a beautiful novel.
Baldwin has that clear talent reserved for only the true greats where you'll read a couple of sentences and what he's saying is so painfully true to your experience of the world —but in a way that you've never seen communicated or managed to express in your own words before that you catch your heart in your throat.
2. The Dispossessed
The hardest of hard sci-fi and all the better for it. I had a bit of a fascination with anarchism as a teenager (I know, hard to believe) and of all the reasonable critiques of the ideology one I could never stand was the small-minded retort that it simply wasn't possible on a societal scale.
The Dispossessed imagines the potential reality completely. It's an extraordinary achievement in world building anchored by an Oppenheimer-esque protagonist, and I catch myself thinking about it all the time now. Ursula is untouchable - she's a force of nature, undoubtedly one of the best to ever do it.
1. Demons
Unfair to compare everyone else to Dostoevsky really. I've now read 3 of his great 5 and yeah Demons is indescribably good, perhaps my favourite of his to date - adored TBK but the depths of human evil that this dredged is something else entirely.
So few writers, if any, can write people so completely - we're all too complex. That's what really sets Dostoevsky apart for me. It isn't just his impeccably precise style, it's the fact that all his characters, their feelings and motivations and the nature of the inexplicable corruption inside each of them, feel frighteningly real. Not an easy read, but the best things in this miserable life aren't always easy.
The Idiot next, but I might wait a few years.
Crash Rhino’s Top Seventeen Books of the Year Recap
So there you have it, another seventeen books to add to your never-ending TBR pile. I also read a smattering of the books on this list and my absolute must-reads are: ‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation’, ‘Homegoing’ and ‘Greenwood’. Ottessa Moshfegh is officially my new author crush and I’ll be getting my hands on all her books in the New Year because I’m a bit obsessed with how good her writing is.
This is the first in Crash Rhino’s blog series of ‘Blogs You’ll Actually Want to Read’. We’ll be putting out some blogs each month on a whole range of different topics that don’t just focus on marketing and copywriting.
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