This list would have been different a couple of months ago, or yesterday—maybe even in the wee hours tonight—but here are some of the books I particularly enjoyed (excluding poetry, which I will visit another time).
The Arguers
by corinna luyken
rocky pond
“The first argument,” so the story begins, “was over a brush and a comb, and which would be better for taking a tangle out of the king’s beard.” One argument follows another, until the king and queen resolve to hold a contest: The winner will be anointed as the best arguer in the land, and (such is the naive assumption) the incessant conflict will end. What makes this book particularly delightful is author/illustrator Corinna Luyken’s artwork. Get a copy for yourself and one for your grandkids.
The Ballad of the Last Guest
by peter handke
translated by krishna winston
farrar, straus and giroux
First published in German in 2023, this short novel by the 2019 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature shows that Handke, now in his early eighties, has not lost a step. Like other recent works (The Second Sword and My Day in the Other Land, for instance, two short fictions published together in one volume in English translation early in 2024), The Ballad of the Last Guest combines intense perception of seemingly mundane detail with a profound quest, all the more potent because stripped of any pretensions and seasoned with a sardonic sense of humor. Longtime Handke readers will recognize the protagonist, Gregor, who is visiting his aging parents and his sister in the home where he grew up. But if you have never read Handke before, you will have no trouble entering into Gregor’s narrative—assuming you find yourself on his wavelength!
Ballerina
by patrick modiano
translated by mark polizzotti
yale university press (the margellos world republic of letters)
Like Peter Handke, Modiano is a Nobel laureate. (He received the prize in 2014.) As I wrote when I reviewed the novella for the Washington Examiner in January, Ballerina “is even briefer than most of Modiano’s fiction, but it doesn’t feel skimpy or rushed. The title figure, whose name isn’t given, is a young ballet dancer in Paris with a small son, Pierre, whom the narrator sometimes escorts here or there and spends time with when she is practicing her art. In an unforced way, the narrator is influenced by her commitment to dance, which ‘enables her to survive.’” Indeed, “our narrator is himself an artist in the making, though at first, he doesn’t know it”; he will become a writer. If you’ve never tried Modiano, this book offers an excellent opportunity to test the waters.
Believing Again:
Stories of Leaving and Returning to Faith
by daniel taylor
cascade books
We’re all too familiar with narratives, “studies,” documentaries, and other such accounts “devoted to the erosion of religious belief and practice among Americans, particularly belief in Christianity,” as I wrote earlier this year in a column for First Things, admitting that, along with “deep sadness,” I writhe with “irritation at the smugness of many of the ‘experts’ reporting on this phenomenon. Shamefully, perhaps, I often feel a strong impulse to indulge in parody, even as I pray for a return to faith among ‘Leavers’ who are particularly dear to me.” And so I welcomed the appearance of Daniel Taylor’s Believing Again, which “responds to the narrative of lost faith in a constructive fashion.”
As some of you will recall, Dan and I have been friends since we met at the start of our junior year (1968–69) at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, but my response to Believing Again isn’t puffery on a friend’s behalf. Drawing on stories from a rich variety of figures (many of them well-known, but some not), he shows, as I wrote for First Things, “how the experience of ‘believing again’ after a loss of faith takes many different forms; it’s a vibrant reality that has been largely unreported.”
I should add that late in January, Paraclete Press is publishing a novel by Dan (whose fiction I greatly admire), The Prodigal of Leningrad.
For I Have Sinned:
The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America
by james m. o’toole
princeton university press
I wrote about this in another column for First Things, from my standpoint as a “Catholic-friendly Protestant”:
To describe a scholarly book as “saintly” would seem to be a confusion of categories (and might embarrass the author), yet another example of the rhetorical inflation that besets us on every hand, but it is only fitting in this case. O’Toole’s book has many virtues. The research was prodigious; just as impressive is his ability to work it seamlessly into his narrative. He writes with admirable clarity (giving the lie to the notion that one must choose between rigor and “accessibility”). He tells the story he set out to tell in just over three hundred pages (including endnotes). Yet what is most impressive (to this reader, at any rate) is what I would call the spirit of the book, epitomized in the opening and closing pages.
Its relevance is by no means limited to Catholics. As I wrote, “many Christians (not just Catholics) now find themselves in a setting in which the understanding of ‘sin’ has not merely been enlarged but rather fundamentally altered. How they will respond remains to be seen.”
Frieze Frame:
How Poets, Painters, and their Friends Framed the Debate Around Elgin and the Marbles of the Parthenon
by a. e. stallings
paul dry books
Before I started this book, I had no burning interest in the Elgin Marbles. I decided to check it out because I admire the author as a poet (and essayist and reviewer). Once embarked on it, I relished every page. Stallings packs so much into her account—so many interesting people, such a wealth of incident—yet does so with ease. Her book is at once compact and compendious (I kept asking myself, “How does she do it?”); she is always alert to ironies, but never smug, heavy-handed. Find an old-school bookstore that has a copy and browse in Frieze Frame for five minutes. If you aren’t eager to read more, that’s fine, but you may find yourself buying a copy and rushing home to settle down with it.
Lucretius and the Bat with Blue Eyes:
Explaining the Universe with the Alphabet
by andrea moro
mit press
This little book (130 small pages, including the extensive bibliography) was the most delightful surprise of the year for me. I had not previously read Andrea Moro (professor of general linguistics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Pavia and at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy), nor am I an adept of Lucretius (though I have read him a bit over the years). But I was intrigued by the title and subtitle of his book, and my curiosity was rewarded tenfold. I won’t try to summarize his argument here, but I do want to mention that the book begins, surprisingly, with an epigraph from the New Testament (1 Peter 3:15); Moro’s text concludes with the same passage.
Mrs. Plansky Goes Rogue
by spencer quinn
forge books
If you have followed me for a while, you know of my enthusiasm for Peter Abrahams/Spencer Quinn. I read him as Abrahams over the years (all of his many books, well-thumbed, are upstairs); he was typically described as a master of “suspense,” but that label never said much about his exceptionally wide-ranging imagination. Then (about fifteen years ago, was it?) came an unanticipated switch; under the pen name Spencer Quinn, he began a delightful series of mystery novels in a comic vein, narrated by a dog (yes!), Chet, who recounts his adventures with Bernie Little, an unconventional private eye in Arizona. A couple of years ago, Spencer Quinn gave us yet another surprise: Mrs. Plansky’s Revenge, the first book in a new series starring Loretta Plansky, seventy years old and recently widowed, one of the most inspired recent creations in the crowded field of crime fiction. Mrs. Plansky Goes Rogue is the second book in the series, superbly written and almost sinfully enjoyable. (By the way, a new Chet and Bernie adventure, Cat on a Hot Tin Woof, is coming in April!)
Passport to Paris and Los Angeles Poems
by vernon duke
poems translated and introduction by boris dralyuk
paul dry books
I rarely do this, but here—instead of my own summary—I am going to quote what the excellent music critic Alex Ross said on the back of this splendid book (he speaks on this subject with an authority I don’t begin to possess): “Passport to Paris [first published in 1955] is one of the great neglected memoirs of the 20th-century arts. The cosmopolitan composer Vernon Duke, born Vladimir Dukelsky, succeeded not only in living a mesmerizing life but also in telling his story with incomparable novelistic flair. A sampling of Duke’s California poetry [translated by Boris Dralyuk for this new edition] augments the allure of an essential republication.” Amen. Acquire a copy ASAP.
Shadow Ticket
by thomas pynchon
penguin press
In May, Thomas Pynchon turned eighty-eight; this fall saw the publication of his first novel in a dozen years, Shadow Ticket. Serious question: When was the last time a new novel appeared from a major writer who was almost ninety years old? (I don’t know the answer.) And in this instance, not just “a novel” but (for this reader) easily one of the best of the year, with a Bela Lugosi epigraph from a 1934 movie, The Black Cat (loosely inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s story): “Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney . . . perhaps not.” Elsewhere, I’ve complained that, while Shadow Ticket was very widely (and favorably) reviewed, we need a good piece on this novel as a book of old age. Maybe something along those lines is gestating even now.
Book of the Year
The Fires of Moloch:
Anglican Clergymen in the Furnace of World War I
by timothy larsen
oxford university press
Tim Larsen, McManis Professor of Christian Thought and professor of history at Wheaton College, is among the scholars I most admire; he is also a dear friend. His new book, one I’ve been looking forward to for years, demanded more hours in the archives than any of his previous projects (which is saying something), yet The Fires of Moloch is not weighed down by that prodigious labor; the main text consists of 232 pages, heavily footnoted yet not merely “readable”: For all its grim burden, it is full of life and often witty, with a sharp eye for absurdity, self-deception, and wild incongruity yet also blessedly free of condescension. Larsen’s point of departure and touchstone throughout is a book titled The Church in the Furnace: Essays by Seventeen Temporary Church of England Chaplains on Active Service in France and Flanders (1917), very influential in its day. A half-dozen of these seventeen get a chapter each; the others are treated more briefly but still to good account in a longer chapter entitled “The Minor Prophets”; and the substantial concluding chapter, “Signs of the Times,” considers the legacies of the “Furnace generation.” If you are inclined to say, “Well, yes, but we’ve been through all this before; no thanks,” I hope you will think again.
