Lilah's Blog

Best Books I Read in 2024

Yes, here it is - yet another post I made ever year on cohost before the shutdown. As usual I read a lot of books in 2024, albeit less than in 2022 and 2023. Here are the best of them!

THE BOOKS

The Door (and various other novels) by Magda Szabó

The Door is a masterpiece, the kind of book that hollows you out inside, the kind that you finish and put down and all you can do is stare for a few minutes. Its slim size belies its impact - it's the first book to make me feel like I'd been hit by a truck. A domestic and personal exploration of the relationship between two women, a writer and her much older peasant housekeeper, it's also a story of Hungary, a clash of generations and two very different faces of a rapidly modernizing country. It's persistently melancholy and haunted by the wounds inflicted on a nation by war and political upheaval, but also beautiful and wonderfully rich in its approach to character. I love it dearly and it's one of the best books I've ever read.

The Door was also my introduction to the great Magda Szabó, who has steadily been climbing the list of my favorite writers. After The Door I went out and bought every in-print English translation of her work, and I read three more Szabó novels in 2024. Abigail is her most beloved work in her native Hungary, a thrilling boarding school novel set during the Second World War full of mystery and danger and romantic entanglements, but also an overt political streak with plenty to say about growing up in wartime and the nature of resistance. Katalin Street is an absolutely gutting exploration of trauma, grief and memory, jumping through the remembrances of three families across decades of Hungarian history as they grapple with the death of a friend under the German occupation. And Iza's Ballad is another shattering story about two Hungarian women from different generations, a mother and daughter, as they struggle to understand each other. All were wonderful; all made it onto my Goodreads Favorites shelf.

I'm distressed to report I only have one more Szabó to read in 2025. I'm begging NYRB Classics to bring us more, and if you haven't read Szabó yet, I urge you to do so - her books are really something special.

2666 by Roberto Bolaño

The final novel by Roberto Bolaño is one of the most sprawling books I've ever read. It is, essentially, five separate novels, each with a different set of protagonists, loosely connected by shared characters and the Mexican border city of Santa Teresa, where over 100 murders have taken place over 4 years. Despite Bolaño's sense of humor it's filled with an overriding bleakness, and its 900+ pages are easy to feel lost in. The disparate nature of the text, Bolaño's meandering pace, the sheer sprawl of the thing often made me feel adrift, lost within a larger structure I was sure existed but that I couldn't perceive.

It was only at the end that I felt like I understood it. It's clear that, while writing 2666, Bolaño knew he was going to die and didn't have much time left. And so he wrote an opus, a giant novel grappling with his own mortality, his ever-bleakening view of the world around him, his own legacy as an author, the relationship between art and artist. It's the terminus of a body of work preoccupied with art, violence and exile, and the lasting wounds of 20th century fascism and political violence. It's huge and frustrating but also a masterpiece and a final sign-off from possibly my favorite author. I can't recommend it as a first step into his wonderful oeuvre, but for a Bolaño fan, it's essential.

Transit by Anna Seghers

At the beginning of Transit, Anna Seghers' unnamed narrator flees the Nazi advance into France and ends up in the port city of Marseilles. The subsequent novel, written in 1944 and based on Seghers' own experience fleeing the Nazis in 1941, is refugee fiction par excellence. As its protagonist kills time in the smoky cafes and diplomatic offices of Marseilles, all the while mistaken for a dead man, Transit becomes a novel of perpetual liminality and palpable ennui, of deception and merging identities, of desperate people trapped in cycles of Kafkaesque bureaucracy. It captures the sheer mundanity and numbing repetition of navigating avenues of escape at the peak of crisis. I loved it

Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante

Elsa Morante's Lies and Sorcery is little-known outside of Italy, but that's hopefully soon to change thanks to the efforts of translator Jenny McPhee and the folks over at NYRB Classics. It's perhaps the most Lilah-coded novel I read all year, a heroic 800 pages pulling from the realms of melodrama and romance for a story of characters crushed by their passions and obsessions and hopes and delusions and the structures of class and patriarchy. It's a novel about the abjectness of poverty and the capricious cruelty of wealth, writing as an escape, and women in all their honest ugliness. In many ways it's the successor to the stormy heart of Wuthering Heights, with characters sacrificing reason on the altar of emotion and voyaging to extremities of human behavior and personal ruin. Ultimately it's something of a literary soap opera, living in a heightened reality and proudly pulling from "low" literature without sacrificing complexity. Despite its length, I was enthralled throughout - it's so rare to find a book that delighted me on a moment-to-moment basis as consistently and for as long as this one did. It's a huge recommend from me!

Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities is a philosophical travelogue of a voyage through human nature. With fable-like simplicity, each of its bite-sized prose-poems describes a journey to a fantastical imagined city. Each city has a philosophical (sometimes even Borgesian) angle that grows from the experiences of its inhabitants or its visitors. It's immensely rich and a perfect book to unfold slowly, savoring each city as you go. It's a much-loved classic that's every bit as wonderful as people say it is.

Honorable Mentions

It was difficult to limit myself to a top five! So here are some of the other books I loved in 2024: