2024 This Fluid Thrill Awards: Best Reading

I read 20 books that were released in 2024, but that's burying the lede. I actually read 100 books this calendar year, published between 1837 (The Pickwick Papers) and 2024.

One hundred. 

This is the first time in tracking my reading here (see previous awards: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017... 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, & 2010) that I've cracked three figures. 

The previous high was 90 in 2021.

I had five reading targets for the year, all of which I met, but there was no target for gross number of books.

How'd I do it? When you look at what format I consumed these books, the answer might seem to be through my ears...

But I actually listened to more audiobooks (85) in 2021. This is the first time in over a decade I've read as many physical books. Issues with my eyes (and attention span) aren't as bad as they were. Yay!

I've also been more ruthless with audiobooks, abandoning some early (these don't count towards the total and I won't drag anyone here) and moving onto books I'm more likely to devour.

Speak of which...

Best Reading of 2024

Outline by Rachel Cusk (2014)

If there's a theme for this year's top ten, it's clusters. This year I read five books by Cusk, and the Outline trilogy was an absolute highlight. The first book in the trilogy gets top billing here thanks to the thrill of seeing the magician pull the trick for the first time (autofiction with the merest silhouette of the author-narrator). Rather than diminishing marginal returns in the next two books, the power of Fay's self-abnegation only builds.

For more, check out my March/April consumption diary.

She's a Killer by Kirsten McDougall (2021)

Here's what I said about it in February:

Holy Moses this was great. This seems weird to say, and only just occurred to me several weeks after reading it, but it's like a grown-up Fight Club. The disaffection. The bifurcation. The sardonic wit. But without the empty nihilism and cheap shocks.

Looking back, this might've been the book that got me back into the physical form. So much good Aotearoa NZ stuff still isn't making it to audiobook.

Wellness by Nathan Hill (2023)

Here's what I said about it in July:

Wonderful. Part of me feels I shouldn't have loved it so much as it's lineage back through Jonathan Franzen is pretty clear (even without Oprah's seal of approval for Wellness), but it deals with things I'm interested in (and made me interested in things I wasn't previously) and feels big without being overblown or tryhard. Need to go back and read The Nix now.

Cluster #2: fat Nathan Hill books. While The Nix got more buzz upon its release, and I liked it when I read it later in the year, I still rate Wellness higher.

Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld (2023)

Here's what I said about it in April:

I'm a sucker for stories that immerse me in a world I was sort of interested in already but not obsessively so, like Saturday Night Live (which Sittenfeld repatches as The Night Owls in her novel). Pair this with a not-too-typical, not-too-out-there love story and you've got a winner.

The good test of a book like this, which is trying to have its genre cake and eat it too, is whether you can remember much of the plot or characters at the end of the year. This one absolutely passes this test. Memorable and smart. *Chefs kiss*

Martyr by Kaveh Akbar (2024)

Maybe this is recency bias, but Akbar claims the title of best book actually published-and-read in 2024 (just pipping James by Percival Everett, Good Material by Dolly Alderton, and Intermezzo by Sally Rooney).

Here's what I said about it in my December consumption diary:

This could be the start of a bad joke: Acclaimed poet writes a literary novel about death, religion, sexuality, loss, nationhood and lies... Except it fucking rules.

The narrative hinges on a pretty incredible (as in: hard to believe, though not hard to predict) twist, and yet somehow it doesn't scuttle the whole enterprise.

The most fun you can have while being miserable. Highly recommended.

Right Story, Wrong Story by Tyson Yunkaporta (2023)

First non-fiction on this list. First Australian. First first nations. Second book by Yunkaporta to make one of my year-end lists.

Here's what I said about it in February:

A worthy successor to Sand Talk, but I'm worried I might come across as one of the wrong kind of fans of Yunkaporta's books (who Yunkaporta addresses in this latest book).

Subsequently, I took part in an cross-discipline, online competition-cum-capacity-building-thingamee about indigenous perspectives on energy and climate change. Yunkaporta was one of the guest speakers and he was the same caustic, insightful, unserious-and-dead-serious-simultaneously self as presented in his (audio)books.

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray (2011)

Here's what I said about it in May:

Another book I was on the fence about reading (having already committed many hours to listening to the very good, but very Irish Franzen-y The Bee Sting already this year).

Another book I ended up really enjoying. I think I preferred this to The Bee Sting because it's a bit less Franzen-y and because I myself have been grappling with a plot point not dissimilar to (not a spoiler, guys) Skippy dying!!!

Another fat book cluster. Unlike with Nathan Hill, I preferred Murray's earlier book to his newer one. It felt wilder. Less Seriously Funny Family Saga and more Stranger Things without the STRANGE THINGS (though there's plenty of lower case strangeness). 

Big Swiss by Jen Beagin (2023)

Here's what I said about it in May:

Yeah! This was excellent. Funny, dark-at-times, possibly even profound. And it has dogs in it!

I really liked that the protagonist/narrator was late 40s (I think) but language and ideas still seemed to be alive to them. It felt true(ish) to my inner dialogue as a early 40s person. 

Totally unrelated negative-impulse: I don't want to Google how old Elizabeth Bennett's parents are in Pride and Prejudice...

Nothing further to add, your honour. The Defence rests. 

Companion Piece by Ali Smith (2022)

Here's what I said about it in October:

The great Ali Smith keeps on being great in uncomfortable ways.

It's incredible how much now-ness Smith gets into her books. You can pretty much lock in a slot in next year's list for Glif (and maybe it's companion piece, Glyph, if it comes out and I read it before the end of the year)... though I find the sight of the word 'Glif' very triggering as someone who often gets called Cliff in email, and occasionally Graig.

Poūkahangahatus by Tayi Tibble (2018)

I didn't write about thing about this in my December consumption diary because I hadn't actually read it before I left for Christmas up North, but I had it in my backpack and needed to read it to complete my goal of reading at least 10 single-poet collections this year. 

It's crazy it took me six years to get to this collection. Crazy.

It's incredibly polished for a first collection published so young... annnnnnd this is where I stop myself from saying other condescending-sounding drivel.

This is the collection that convinced me that I need to read AT LEAST another ten poetry collections next year (with Tibble's sophomore effort top of the list).

Graphs and shit

A little more on how my 100 books breaks down... (sorry for the pixelation, for some reason posting graphs directly isn't working today).

Works in translation: 7

Works by non-white authors: 27

This gender split was interesting. Last year it was 35 female to 23 male authors, but going back to preceding years, 2024 looks pretty typical. Maybe it's because of the non-fiction I read? I read 19 non-fiction books by dudes and only 3 by females in 2024... Whereas with novels it was 34 females to 28 males.

Reading targets for 2025

• Read 100 books (why not?)
• Read at least 10 single-author poetry collections
• Read at least 20 physical books
• Read at least 10 non-fiction books by female authors
• Non-white + translated > 40

Okay, buckle in.

This Fluid Thrill Awards: Best Books I read in 2021

Not the best books that came out in 2021, just the best books I read in that calendar year. Same story as for 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, (...), 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, & 2010.

I first tweeted out my 2021 top 10 (with GIFs!) in December, which kinda took the heat out of me actually doing this post. But when I finally got around to it, I realised my list of  89 books read was missing one. 

And that book should have been in my top 10. 

Shit. I mean, THIS BOOK WAS MY NUMBER ONE.

How did this happen? I must've read this book over the crest of two months, thereby leaving it out of my monthly/bi-monthly consumption diary, which I used to create my Excel list of titles for ranking and statistical dissection.

So let's start with #1 and taiho on the pie charts for a tick.

1. Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason (novel, audiobook, NZ, 2020)

This novel is funny. This novel is dark. It's like a perfectly weighted handgun. Like someone you hate saying the quiet part loud. Like the thrill of having your stitches pulled and the anticipation of whether your flesh will hold.  

There's a caesura at the centre. An illness afflicts the narrator, Martha. It's mental, it's genetic, it explains a lot... only it's referred to as "--"in the physical book and "x" in the audiobook. It's not meant to stand in for any one particular real-life illness. In the wrong hands, this vagueness, this game-playing, would cheapen everything. But Martha is so completely rendered, so real, such good company on the page, that we feel this diagnostic void as she must have in all those years before its absence, and even since. What power does naming have over chemistry? Over years of interpersonal muscle memory?

I wanted to read it again immediately after finishing it. This is a thing people say, but I rarely ever feel.

I want to read it again now. For a raft of reasons, both to do with the book and events in the lives of friends and family.

None of this has anything to do with the fact Meg Mason was born in Foxton, but that, too, is awesome.

2. Mayflies by Andrew O'Hagan (novel, audiobook, UK, 2020)

What I said about it in October:

So good. A top ten book of my reading year for sure. Friendship, youth, music and loss all intertwine. 1980's Glasgow and Edinburgh shine through, as does this novel's winning heart.

The best book about mates, mortality and music I have read.

3. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders (non-fiction, audiobook, US, 2021)

What I said about in in August:

SOOOOOOOO GOOOOOOOD.

Maybe I'm starved of down-to-earth literary criticism, but this book was probably the biggest encouragement to start writing again of anything I've read, done, seen or heard this year

A degustation menu with an avuncular, expert guide. The slow food revolution for the short story. Read me more, Daddy!

4. Earthlings by Sakata Murata (novel, audiobook, Japan, 2020)

What I said about in January:

A gem. I loved it from the first sentence. I worried for a bit that it was going to swerve too much into the territory of Convenience Store Woman, but it remained enough of it’s own thing to be a triumph!

Go weird into that good night! 

5. No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (novel, audiobook, US, 2021)

What I said about it in June:

Gonna call it now: this is the funniest book I will read all year.

Is it a novel? Is it another autobiography, veiled this time by the third person pronouns? Is it longform poetry?

Answer: it is the natural end result when language and attention and logic come out the other side of being "extremely online".

Buy a ticket, buckle up and enjoy the ride.

6. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (non-fiction, audiobook, US, 2013)

What I said about it in June:

Right book, right time. One test of a book is how often you bring it up in conversation and I've been able to refer to, and evangelise about, Braiding Sweetgrass often in the weeks since reading it.

It ranges widely - and does drift in parts, being rather long - but the topic is so broad (see that subtitle) and the process of decolonising the thinking of a reader such as me when it comes to plants takes time.

7. Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta (non-fiction, audiobook, Australia, 2019)

What I said about it in December:

Wow. Read this immediately after reading this piece by Angela Meyer. Thank you Angela and thank you Tyson (and thank you Audible and I guess, grudgingly, Amazon, for making this book free to all members so hopefully many more will read/listen to this and extend the yarning).

Books like this raise interesting questions about form. As an audiobook narrated by the author it more closely resembles the kind of yarning and sand talk at the heart of the culture Yunkaporta shares, but the listener misses out on the sand talk symbols as visual things (my brain, at least, cannot follow extended descriptions of unique symbols). In the end, all books are imperfect and incomplete in whatever form they take, and it's the work of the reader to complete the circle.

8. Islands of Decolonial Love by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (short stories, audiobook, Canada, 2013)

What I said about it in May:

Wow. This book is exciting. It starts out with short stories in a recognisable, North American mold. It felt a little like a first nation's Jesus' Son - and then the stories lean more into Nishnaabeg modes and language. Another bad comparison: it felt like the bait and switch in David Vann's Legend of a Suicide where the death (the dyer?) in the second half is unexpected and makes you re-evaluate everything. This time, it's like: where those first stories good on their own terms or were they bait to lure me in.

9. The Flatshare by Beth O'Leary (novel, audiobook, UK, 2019)

What I said about it in June:

Okay, so, hear me out. I enjoy reading romance...

The set-up (a male hospice nurse who works nights rents out his flat 7pm to 7am to a junior book editor so he can pay legal fees for his brother, and the two flatmates only converse through post-it notes...) is super hooky.

Sometimes the beats felt like they came with signposts: THIS IS A BEAT.

But I devoured it. I like romance. It only took me 38 years.

...

Which brings us to the 10th spot... Which I'm making two white dudes share because they made my Twitter list and I can't decide who to boot... This is also the point where those of you playing along at home realise that, I've put a romance novel in my top 10 by not Marcel Proust. Yup. Swann's Way came in at 27th, beating 2020's Booker Prize Winner but not the latest Stephen King. Good thing no one is paying that much attention, eh?

10th= Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan (non-fiction, audiobook, US, 2011)

What I said about it in May:

Published in 2011, collecting magazine pieces from even earlier, but it didn't feel dated. Sullivan was tapping into the racial, religious and economic discontent that would propel Trump into the White House - that's part of it. But his voice is so clear, distinct. I really want to read a collection of his essays from the last 10 years...

10th= Notes from an Apocalypse by Mark O'Connell (non-fiction, audiobook, UK, 2020)

What I said about it in June:

This is the book I thought I was going to read when I picked up End Times by Bryan Walsh in May. I wasn't sure if I was ready for more apocalypsia so soon, but O'Connell's book lived up to my (deferred) expectations. Maybe it's homerism, but I enjoyed the section set in NZ the most. Often, that would be the part where the hollowness of the European correspondent rang through, but not here.

CHART TIME!!

Interpretation: My eyes suck. I've worked hard for nearly two decades to be a good reader with my ears. This enabled me to read 90 total books this year, a significant step up from 66, 61, 42, and 66 in the preceding years.

Interpretation: Nothing to see here. Novels were 56% of my reading the year before. Moving on.

Interpretation: Backslid from 2020 when on 41% of authors identified as male (52% the year before that).

Interpretation: Still a 'work on' (the same old saws about audiobook availability etc etc). 18% in 2020.

Interpretation: In 2020 UK and US tied as most common countries of origin with 20 titles each. US more than doubled its count. Wha' happened?

Interpretation: Kinda follows from the above  levels of diversity. Page count might've been different thanks to Proust!

Interpretation: A stab at intersectional analysis. To help decide my top ten list, I rank every book I read out of 100 in a not-very-scientific way (for reference, Sorrow and Bliss got a 95 and Is This Anything by Jerry Seinfeld got 60). But it shows that non-white females out-perform the average. And women edge men in general. There may be some selection bias (perhaps I only read "diverse" books I really think will be good, while I'm more willing to read dudes without knowing much about the book?) or maybe I give these diversity titles a higher score to make me feel like a better person when I'm making my list? Am I really that sad? The jury is still out.

Cold compress - Fortnight 10 of the Burns / 20 Week review

Fortnight 10 summary

(NB: this is for the fortnight ending 18 June, so I'm a week behind)

• Total words: 10,600 words
• 1^st week – 3841; 2nd week – 6759)
• Weekly imbalance - 1st week was a 4 day week after returning from Italy, and generally getting back into the flow.
• Split - all on THE NOVEL except 385 on this blog.

First 20 weeks in graphs

What follows is, on one level, meaningless. It doesn't matter how many words I write, or how quickly. All that matters is what ends up getting published.

But, as I've said before, quantity is a precursor of quality. And things like wordcounts help to keep me motivated, allow me to reflect on my practice and, hopefully, DO BETTER WRITING.

Bar chart:

This'll probably be too small to be meaningful (even if you click on it), so let me gloss it. It's colour-coded for the type of writing (novel, short stories, blog, poetry, essays, other) - more on the split between forms later. But it shows that I focussed on short stories in February to blow out the cobwebs, before sliding into the novel in month two.

There's a lot of non-writing days. Like every Saturday (except one) and Sunday (except two), and periods where I had people staying in Dunedin or was exploring (Catlins, Fiordland, Italy - that big blank patch on the right). More on which days of the week have been more productive shortly.

Camembert:

So, interestingly, non-fiction (blog + essays + other) is a pretty big slice of the pie. If you remove the Chris Cornell thing and the Recurrent Neural Network Poetry thing, the distribution would look more like what I'd have expected at the beginning of the year. I've gone and committed myself for at least one more decent piece of non-fiction (more on that in another post), but this exercise has convinced me I should probably start saying 'no' to things.

At the moment, I'm resisting a strong urge to go back to short stories. But I would like to find a way to carve out time later in the year -- like after I finish the 1st draft of the novel and before I start second draft, but that relies on me getting to the end of the first draft this side of Christmas...

Speaking of.

Line graph:

This is a little misleading.

When I open my working draft of the novel later today, it won't be 44,000 words, more like 36,000. These stats represent the cumulative total of my daily wordcounts on the novel, rather than the actual wordcount of the novel-in-progress.

So I've lost about 8,000 words already. This tends to happen when I'm starting a new section and I do it in a fresh word document, work on that for three or four days, then cut and paste the cream into the novel's main document.

Some examples for future reference that won't mean anything now: the Motta quotes between the first and second section (only about 2/3 made it in; these may be further slimmed down as time goes by); the Curio Bay insert.

To get to 36K after four months is okay, I guess.

I probably should have done a post at the start of the year about my expectations... If I did, I might have said 10K per month (only takes around 500 words every week day) as the minimum, but this wouldn't have factored in two weeks in Italy (and the prep for such a trip). Which would put me right around my floor.

So a little disappointing, especially as I feel the manuscript is getting a little flabby at the moment and I need to go back over the last 30 or so pages and trim, trim, trim. (But the other fifty pages have had that treatment already and feel tighter. So my first draft isn't rip, shit and bust. When I get to the end, it's probably my draft 1.5.)

Looking ahead, I should be about to meet and exceed 10K a month until I finish the 1st draft. At the moment I'm less certain about the total length of the novel than I was when I started. I'd have said 70-80K in February. Now, It feels 110-120K (about the length of THE MANNEQUIN MAKERS). But that's for the first draft - I may get savage in editing and create something sleek. May.

Doing the maths on this minimum scenario: if I need to produce another 80K words, that'll take 8 months but I only have 7 before the end of the residency. And what about Christmas and all the logistics of moving back to Wellington (probably have to go back a little early so my daughter's settled before starting school at the end of January)?

And I can kiss goodbye to my dream of a fortnight to work on short stories while I let the completed first draft breathe.

If I want a finished first draft by the end of November, I'll need to 16K a month. That seems doable. The last two weeks I've been able to produce around 1,000 words a day, so 10K a fortnight.

Doable, but not yet bankable.

What do the numbers say?


Which day of the week is my most productive? Part 1

NB: this is wordcount across all forms, not just on the novel.

This result really surprised me. In an earlier fortnight summary I said Tuesdays were my most productive days, which made sense as I take the weekends off, Monday involves a bit of working myself back into the flow, and Tuesday is where I still have the energy and enthusiasm and direction.

But Friday?

And what's up with Wednesday being so paltry. Do I run out of energy after only two days of writing? Or is it that I only have two days of clarity about what I'm writing before having to scratch around on Wednesdays to be able to be more productive the rest of the week?

Then I considered how these numbers were calculated. It's the average of all wordcounts from the given day of the week, divided by the number of those days thus far (19 for Monday and Tuesday, 20 for the others).

But what about all the zero days? Surely they weren't distributed evenly.

And they weren't. Of the 19 Mondays, I had 7 goose-eggs. Wednesdays had 8 non-writing days out of 20. But Friday only had 4. This seems to be a quirk of when I've been travelling or had people come to visit from up North.

This is what it looks like if you take all the non-writing days out of the equation...

Which day of the week is my most productive? Part 2

That's more like it.

I'm still surprised Monday beats Tuesday. This may be due to some of the blogging that happens on Monday.

And the dip on Wednesdays and Thursdays? That's something to reflect on. It'd be great to pull those days up to 1,000 words per day, though that might be quite hard given I'm already 20 weeks in.