Happy New Year everyone! We’ve successfully completed a 365-day revolution around the sun. But with every end comes a new beginning. We are provided with 366 blank pages – 2024 is a leap year – upon which to paint new memories. I hope that we will all paint these blank canvases with good and lasting memories, may it be with the people we love or all by ourselves. Thankfully, things are finally looking up after spending nearly three years under a shroud of uncertainty due to the pandemic. I sure hope that the good times keep on rolling.
As has been the tradition in the past few years, I will be kicking off the new year by looking back to the previous year, its hits, and of course, its mishits. It is also an opportunity to take a glimpse of how the coming year is going to shape up. This book wrap-up is a part of a mini-series that will feature the following:
- 2023 Top Eighteen Favorite Books
- 2023 Book Wrap Up
- 2023 Reading Journey by the Numbers
- 2023 20 Most Memorable Book Quotes (Part I)
- 2023 20 Most Memorable Book Quotes (Part II)
- 2023 New Favorite Authors
- 2024 Books I Look Forward To List
- 2024 Top 24 Reading List
- 2024 Beat the Backlist Challenge
Over the years, my Top 20 reading list opened several doors of opportunity to explore some of the best works of literature. Often an eclectic mix of literary classics and contemporary books from various genres, these lists have provided me some of the most memorable literary journeys I had in years. They have also kept me occupied for the year; particularly toward the end of the year when I would scramble to complete reading all the books in the said lists. I am filled with hope that my 2024 reading journey will be as stellar as my two previous years. Without further ado, here are the 24 books I am looking forward to in 2024.
Title: Buddenbrooks
Author: Thomas Mann
Translator (from German): H.T. Lowe-Porter
Publisher: Vintage Books
Publishing Date: May 1984 (1901)
No. of Pages: 604
Synopsis: Originally published in Germany in 1901, Buddenbrooks is Thomas Mann’s first major novel, and one of the two for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.
Buddenbrooks tells the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany. With consummate skill, Mann draws a rounded picture of middle-class life: births and christenings; marriages, divorces, and deaths; successes and failures. These commonplace occurrences, intric=nsically the same, vary slightly as they recur in each succeeding generation. And as the Buddenbrook family eventually succumbs to modern influences – influences which are at variance with their own traditions – its downfall becomes certain.
Title: A Fine Balance
Author: Rohinton Mistry
Publisher: Emblem Editions
Publishing Date: 1997
No. of Pages: 713
Synopsis: Winner of The Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, The Royal Society of Literature’s Winifred Holtby Award, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Irish Times International Prize.
A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry’s stunning internationally acclaimed bestseller, is set in mid-1970s India. It tells the story of four unlikely people whose lives come together during a time of political turmoil soon after the government declares a “State of Internal Emergency.” Through days of bleakness and hope, their circumstances – and their fates – become inextricably linked in ways no one could have foreseen. Mistry’s prose is alive with enduring images and a cast of unforgettable characters. Written with compassion, humour, and insight, A Fine Balance is a vivid, richly textured, and powerful novel written by one of the most gifted writers of our time.
Title: Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming
Author: László Krasznahorkai
Translator (from Hungarian): Ottilie Mulzet
Publisher: Tuskar Rock Press
Publishing Date: 2021
No. of Pages: 558
Synopsis: Nearing the end of his life, Baron Bela Wenckheim flees his gambling debts in Buenos Aires and decides to return to the small Hungarian town where he wishes to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart. News of his arrival travel fast, and the town’s conmen and politicians sense a rare opportunity.
Title: The House on Calle Sombra
Author: Marga Ortigas
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2021
No. of Pages: 374
Synopsis: Portrait of a mixed race family grappling with identity and betrayal in a turbulent tropical island nation.
The House on Calle Sombra follows the fates and fortunes of the esteemed Castillo de Montijo family over three generations. Set in the Philippines – a tropical island nation where truth blends with fiction – none of the Castillos is quite as perceived. Successful patriarch Don Federico arrived from Spain a penniless orphan. Formidable matriarch Doña Fatimah is a native Muslim fugitive. And their brood of privileged descendants is struggling to live up to their famed and crested motto: FAMILY FIRST
Mirroring events int he country’s turbulent history, the Castillos’ perfect facade begins to fracture as shadows form their past return to claim their due.
Sardonic, witty, and brutally frank, The House on Calle Sobra is an ode to family, and a compelling exploration of how greed, love, and trauma are passed down through generations.
Title: A Book of Memories
Author: Péter Nádas
Translators (from Hungarian): Ivan Sanders, Imre Goldstein
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: 1997 (1986)
No. of Pages: 706
Synopsis: First published in Hungary in 1986, Péter Nádas’s A Book of Memories is a modern classic, a multilayered narrative that tells three parallel stories of love and betrayal. The first takes place in East Berlin in the 1970s and features an unnamed Hungarian writer ensnared in a love triangle with a young German and a famous aging actress. The second composed by the writer, is the story of a late-nineteenth-century German aesthete whose experiences mirror his own. And the third voice is that of a friend from the writer’s childhood, who brings his own unexpected bearing to the story. Compared by critics to Proust, Mann, and Joyce, this sensuous tour de force is “unquestionably a masterpiece” (The New Republic)
Title: I Was the President’s Mistress!!
Author: Miguel Syjuco
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 2022
No. of Pages: 362
Synopsis: Vita Nova, introverted megastar, only wished for a quiet life as the Philippines’ most-liked influencer, famous for her viral dance hit, the Mr. Sexy-Sexy – yet somehow she’s now headlining a rollicking impeachment and a battle royal for power.
In these previously unreleased transcripts, collected by Miguel Syjuco, the ghostwriter of her tell-all memoir, Vita rips the bodice of society to bare her heaving story. But some of her former lovers tell it differently, asking us: ” Who’s more sinful, the seduced or the seductress?”
You must decide, as thirteen indelible voices come alive in I Was the President’s Mistress!!, a dizzying tale of democracy in peril – which isn’t about the Philippines but a society uncannily like yours.
Come, confront today’s last taboos and hurtle headlong into love, sex, politics, freedom, faith – and the war over who will tell the stories the world will know as truth.
Title: Prophet Song
Author: Paul Lynch
Publisher: Oneworld
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 309
Synopsis: On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her stop. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are ere to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.
Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappeared, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling.
How far will she go to save her family? And what – or who – is she willing to leave behind?
Title: The Wolves of Eternity
Author: Karl Ove Knausgård
Translator (from Norwegian): Martin Aitken
Publisher: Penguin Press
Publishing Date: 2023 (2021)
No. of Pages: 789
Synopsis: In 1986, twenty-year-old Syvert Løyning returns from the military to his mother’s home in southern Norway. One evening, his dead father comes to him in a dream. Realizing that he doesn’t really know who his father was, Syvert begins to investigate his life and finds clues pointing to the Soviet Union. What he learns changes his past and undermines the entire notion of who he is. But when his mother becomes ill, and he must care for his little brother, Joar, on his own, he no longer has time or space for lofty speculations.
In present-day Russia, Alevtina Kotov, a biologist working at Moscow University, is traveling with her young son to the home of her stepfather, to celebrate his eightieth birthday. As a student, Alevtina was bright, curious and ambitious, asking the big questions about life and human consciousness. But as she approaches middle age, most of that drive has gone, and she finds herself in a place she doesn’t want to be, without really understanding how she got there. Her stepfather, a musician, raised her as his own daughter, and she was never interested in learning about her biological father; when she finally starts looking into him, she learns that he died many years ago and left two sons, Joar and Syvert.
Years later, when Syvert and Alevtina meet in Moscow, two very different approaches to life emerge. And as a bright star appears in the sky, it illuminates the wonder of human existence and the mysteries that exist beyond our own worldview. Set against the political and cultural backdrop of both the 1980s and the present day, The Wolves of Eternity is an expansive and affecting book about relations—to one another, to nature, to the dead.
Title: The Three Musketeers
Author: Alexandre Dumas
Translator (from French): William Barrow
Publisher: The Reader’s Digest
Publishing Date: 2013 (1844)
No. of Pages: 568
Synopsis: All For One, One For All!
When daring young swordsman d’Artagnan travels to Paris seeking honor and fortune in the king’s Guard, he quickly befriends the famed three Musketeers—Athos, Porthos, and Aramis.
Loyal servants to the crown, the four friends cross swords with street criminals, face the cardinal’s Guards in duels to the death, and save the honor of the queen by unraveling treasonous schemes in a race against time. It will take epic courage, chivalry, and skill to thwart the plots against them and achieve victory at last.
Alexandre Dumas’s classic swashbuckling tale of adventure, swordplay, and unbreakable friendship is enriched with brand-new, action-packed illustrations by renowned artist Brett Helquist. (Source: Goodreads)
Title: The End of August
Author: Yu Miri
Translator (from Korean): Morgan Giles
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Publishing Date: 2023 (2004)
No. of Pages: 710
Synopsis: In 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, Lee Woo-cheol was a running prodigy and a contender for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. But he would have to run under the Japanese flag.
Nearly a century later, his granddaughter is living in Japan and training to run a marathon herself. She summons Korean shamans to hold an intense, transcendent ritual to connect with Lee Woo-cheol. When his ghost appears, alongside those of his brother Lee Woo-gun and their young neighbor, who was forced to become a “comfort woman” to Japanese soldiers stationed in China during World War II, she must tell their stories to free their souls. What she discovers is at the heart of this sweeping, majestic novel about a family that endured death, love, betrayal, war, political upheaval, and ghosts, both vengeful and wistful.
A poetic masterpiece that is a sprawling family saga and a feat of historical fiction, full of mind-bending storytelling acrobatics, The End of August is a marathon of literature.
Title: Woman of the Ashes
Author: Mia Couto
Translator (from Portuguese): David Brookshaw
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 2018 (2019)
No. of Pages: 254
Synopsis: Mozambique, 1894. Sergeant Germano de Melo is posted to the village of Nkokolani to oversee the Portuguese conquest of territory claimed by Ngungunyane, the last emperor of the State of Gaza. Ngungunyane has raised an army to resist colonial rule and with his warriors is slowly approaching the border village. Desperate for help, Germano enlists Imani, a fifteen-year-old girl, to act as his interpreter. She belongs to the VaChopi tribe, one of the few who dared side with the Portuguese Crown, while the others have chosen the African emperor. Standing astride two kingdoms, Imani is drawn to Germano, just as he is drawn to her. But she knows that in a country haunted by violence, the only way out for a woman is to go unnoticed, as if made of shadows or ashes.
Alternating between the voices of Imani and Germano, Mia Couto’s Woman of the Ashes combines vivid folkloric prose with extensive historical research to give a spellbinding and unsettling account of war-torn Mozambique at the end of the nineteenth century.
Title: A Small Town Called Hibiscus
Author: Gu Hua
Translator (from Chinese): Gladys Yang
Publisher: Panda Books
Publishing Date: 1983
No. of Pages: 260
Synopsis: A Small Town Called Hibiscus is one of the best Chinese novels to have appeared in 1981. Its author Gu Hua was brought up in the Wuling Mountains of south Hunan. He presents the ups and downs of some families in a small mountain town there during the hard years in the early sixties, the “cultural revolution”, and after the downfall of the “gang of four”. He shows the horrifying impact on decent, hard-working people of the gang’s ultra-Left line, and retains a sense of humour in describing the most harrowing incidents. In the end, wrongs are righted, and readers are left with a deepened understanding of this abnormal period in Chinese history and the sterling qualities of the Chinese people.
Title: Adam Bede
Author: George Eliot
Publisher: The Zodiac Press
Publishing Date: 1984
No. of Pages: 509
Synopsis: Adam Bede, the first novel written by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans), was published in 1859. It was published pseudonymously, even though Evans was a well-published and highly respected scholar of her time.
The story’s plot follows four characters’ rural lives in the fictional community of Hayslope—a rural, pastoral and close-knit community in 1799. The novel revolves around a love triangle between beautiful but self-absorbed Hetty Sorrel, Captain Arthur Donnithorne, the young squire who seduces her, Adam Bede, her unacknowledged suitor, and Dinah Morris, Hetty’s cousin, a fervent, virtuous and beautiful Methodist lay preacher.” (Source: Goodreads)
Title: The Temple of My Familiar
Author: Alice Walker
Publisher: The Women’s Press
Publishing Date: 1989
No. of Pages: 403
Synopsis: ’A romance of the last 500,000 years,’ so Alice Walker describes The Temple of My Familiar, her first novel since the hugely popular The Color Purple, filmed in 1986 by Steven Spielberg.
Transcending the conventions of time and place, this powerful and visionary novel looks at history from the viewpoint of peoples at present dispossessed and discounted, peoples whose history is ancient and whose future is yet to come.
Leading the story, we find the wonderful, a woman of thousand pasts, and her gentle painter companion Hal; Arveyda the great guitarist and his Latin American wife in flight from her own past; Suwelo the history teacher, whose generation of men has ‘failed women’, and his former wife Fanny who falls in love with spirits… And elsewhere, hovering tantalisingly are Miss Celie and Miss Shug of The Color Purple, to which this story is related both in vision and in spirit.
Title: The Invention of Morel
Author: Adolfo Bioy Casares
Translator: Ruth L.C. Simms
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Publishing Date: 2003
No. of Pages: 103
Synopsis: Jorge Luis Borges declared The Invention of Morel a masterpiece of plotting, comparable to The Turn of the Screw. This fantastic exploration of virtual realities also bears comparison with the sharpest work of Philip K. Dick. It is both a story of suspense and a bizarre romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious.
Inspired by Bioy Casares’s fascination with the movie star Louise Brooks, The Invention of Morel has gone on to find such admirers as Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Octavio Paz. As the model for Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year in Marienbad, this classic of modern Latin American literature also changed the history of film.
Title: Arrow of God
Author: Chinua Achebe
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2016
No. of Pages: 230
Synopsis: When Things Fall Apart ends, colonial rule has been introduced to Umuofia, and the character of the nation and its values, freedoms, and religious and sociopolitical foundations have substantially and irrevocably been altered. Arrow of God, the second novel in Chinua Achebe’s The African Trilogy, moves the historical narrative forward. This time, the action revolves around Ezeulu, the headstrong chief priest of the god Ulu, which is worshipped by the six villages of Umuaro. The novel is a meditation on the nature, uses, and responsibility of power and leadership. Ezeulu finds that his authority is increasingly under threat from rivals within his nation and functionaries of the newly established British colonial government. Yet he sees himself as untouchable. He is forced, with tragic consequences, to reconcile conflicting impulses in his own nature – a need to serve the protecting deity of his Umuaro people; a desire to retain control over their religious observances; and a need to gain increased personal power by pushing his authority to the limits. He ultimately fails as he leads his people to their own destruction and, consequently, his personal tragedy arises. Arrow of God is an unforgettable portrayal of the loss of faith and the downfall of a man in a society forever altered by colonialism.
Title: Beartown
Author: Fredrik Backman
Translator (from Swedish): Neil Smith
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Publishing Date: February 2018 (2016)
No. of Pages: 415
Synopsis: A tiny community deep in the forest, Beartown hasn’t been the best at anything in a long time. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink. And, in that ice rink, Kevin, Amat, Benji, and the rest of the town’s junior ice hockey team are about to compete in the national semifinals – and they actually have a shot at winning. All the hopes and dreams of this place now rest on the shoulders of a handful of teenage boys.
Under that heavy burden, the semifinal match becomes the catalyst for a violent act that will leave a young girl traumatized and a town in turmoil.
This is a story about a town and a game, but even more about loyalty, commitment, and the responsibilities of friendship; the people we disappoint even though we love them; and the decisions we make every day that come to define us. In this story of a small forest town, Fredrik Backman has found the entire world.
Title: Of Love and Shadows
Author: Isabel Allende
Translator (from Spanish): Margaret Sayers Peden
Publisher: Black Swan Books
Publishing Date: 1988 (1984)
No. of Pages: 298
Synopsis: Set in a country of arbitrary arrests, sudden disappearances and summary executions, Isabel Allende’s magical novel tells of the passionate affair of two people prepared to risk everything for the sake of justice and truth: Irene Beltrán, a reporter, comes from a wealthy background; Francisco Leal, a young photographer secretly engaged in undermining the military dictatorship, is strongly attracted by her beauty. It does not matter that her fiancé is an army captain: each time Francisco accompanies her on a magazine assignment, he falls more deeply in love with her.
When they go to investigate the mysterious case of Evangelina Ranquileo, a girl suffering from spectacular fits which are rumoured to have miraculous powers, the arrival of soldiers adds a sinister aspect to the mystery. And then Evangelina disappears. Irene and Francisco, in trying to trace her and indict the Junta, become engulfed in a vortex of terror and violence.
Title: Cities of Salt
Author: Abdelrahman Munif
Translator (from Arabic): Paul Theroux
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Publishing Date: 1988 (1984)
No. of Pages: 627
Synopsis: Set in an unnamed Persian Gulf kingdom in the 1930s, this remarkable novel tells the story of the disruption and diaspora of a poor oasis community following the discovery of oil there. The meeting of the Arabs and the Americans who, in essence, colonize the remote region is a cultural confrontation in which religion, history, superstition, and mutual incomprehension all play a part.
Thus Isadora fears flying (in all possible senses of the word), she forces herself to keep traveling, to risk her marriage and her life, until she finds her own brand of liberation.
Powerful political fiction that it is, CITIES OF SALT has been banned in several Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia. This novel, the first volume in a trilogy, has been translated from the Arabic to the English by Peter Theroux. (Source: Goodreads)
Title: The Luminaries
Author: Eleanor Catton
Publisher: Granta Publications
Publishing Date: 2014
No. of Pages: 832
Synopsis: It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On the night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man has vanished, a whore has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely patterned as the night sky.
Title: Dance on the Volcano
Author: Marie Vieux-Chauvet
Translator (From French): Kaiama L. Glover
Publisher: Archipelago Books
Publishing Date: 2016 (1957)
No. of Pages: 492
Synopsis: Set in late 18th-century Haiti, Dance on the Volcano follows the extraordinary career of Minette, a singer whose prodigious voice enables her to cross racial barriers. Her talent brings her an opportunity to perform at the Theater of Port-au-Prince, an honor previously reserved for Whites. Once the curtain falls, however, she finds herself back to life as normal. Torn between her passion for the stage, her horror at the racial discrimination she faces, and her love for a free black man who treats his slaves as cruelly as white landholders, Minette’s tumult mirrors the volatile condition of the colony. Praised but unpaid, applauded but shut out, Minette develops a political and racial conscience that will not let her rest as long as slavery exists on the island and which fuels her relationship with Rigaud, Pétion, and Beauvais, the future heroes of the revolution. Kaiama L. Grover’s masterful translation brings to light this stunning novel of the Haitian revolution.
Title: Native Son
Author: Richard Wright
Publisher: Perennial Classics
Publishing Date: 1998
No. of Pages: 462
Synopsis: Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright’s powerful novel is an unsparing reflection of the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.
Title: I’m Not Stiller
Author: Max Frisch
Translator: Michael Bullock
Publisher: Harcourt Brace
Publishing Date: 1994
No. of Pages: 384
Synopsis: Previously available in the United States only in an abridged version, I’m Not Stiller is now published for the first time in its entirety. It is the haunting story – part Kafka, part Camus – of a man in prison. His wife, brother, and mistress recognize him and call him by his name, Anatol Ludwig Stiller. But he rejects them, repeatedly insisting he’s not Stiller. Could he possibly be right – or is he deliberately trying to shake off his old identity and assume a new one?
Title: Them
Author: Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher: Modern Library
Publishing Date: 2006
No. of Pages: 538
Synopsis: As powerful and relevant today as it was on its initial publication, Them chronicles the tumultuous lives of a family living on the edge of ruin in the Detroit slums, from the 1930s to the 1967 race riots. Praised by The Nation for her “potent, life-gripping imagination,” Joyce Carol Oates traces the aspirations and struggles of Loretta Wendall, a dreamy young mother who is filled with regret by the age of sixteen, and the subsequent destinies of her children, Maureen and Jules, who must fight to survive in a world or violence and danger.
The Pine-Scented Chronicles 
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