Bookmarks: The 9 Books Which Defined My Year
By B.P.
As of Nov 14th I’ve read 29 books. Every day I wake up at around 9 AM and, over a cappuccino, get in my 50 pages. In and out and in and out – for the last few years, my new year’s resolution has been to treat my reading like my long-distance running, and, with two months left on the clock, I think I’ve been making good time. Despite how tumultuous 2024 has been, I’ve been especially lucky. In my 20th year of life, I’ve read so many books that have made an unalienable impression on me.
Something I’ve realized in the compilation of this list is that the stories that really struck me this year were in no small part made by the circumstances in which I read them. Despite this difficult year – or maybe, because of it, these books became more than just words on paper, and thus the job of trying to judge them objectively became nigh impossible.
Books to me are more than just vessels for entertainment, cruise ships one boards and exits at the same port. They’re akin more to landmarks in a vast ocean, islands rising out of the sea, texts populated by fragments and snapshots of the periphery which one navigates to and from. Over filter coffee in Tokyo’s Nagano Ward, on flights escaping the East Coast chill, on the throne of a fading toilet in a Plano funeral home, these stories clung to me and became emblematic of specific places and times in my mind. In recalling my favorites of the year, I can’t help but remember what music I was into at the time – the cafe I read it most at – the girl I was in love with – the country, the smells, the smoke.
So, collected here are not just the best books I’ve read in 2024, but 9 books that changed me and a small vignette of the me that read them. I hope, should you consider picking any of them up, that they can tag the pages of your life too.
Apeirogon by Colum McCann
–Jan, San Francisco
In October of 2023, I became a bum. I quit college and booked a flight to the farthest edge of the U.S. I could find: San Francisco. For three months I holed up in my uncle’s guest room in the north end. I was tired, mentally and physically, but most of all I was unsatisfied with my life. Studying at a school in the sticks, in a major and community I wasn’t challenged by – I’d push and push, but it seemed I was getting nowhere. I mistook this lack of satisfaction as a sign that I wasn’t pushing hard enough, and, somewhere in my second year of college, I cracked.
In my short time away from school, I did nothing of substance. All I did was joke around with my friends over the phone and lie out on benches in Golden Gate Park, counting out the clouds in the sky. So when I was recommended Apeirogon, I bought it without a second thought. At that point, I hadn’t anything better to do.
The book loosely tethers itself to the story of two fathers, one Israeli and another Palestinian. Both are separated by societies that tell them how to treat the other. And yet – their histories, much like their nations, are inextricably intertwined – both, at the hands of the other side, have lost a child.
Apeirogon is a kaleidoscopic view of not only conflict, loss, and solidarity, but also how these seemingly contemporary ideas and values transcend time and borders, manifesting in every facet and corner of the world. The novel argues that nothing exists within a vacuum, and thus nothing is off limits – McCann pulls from old reports, historical findings, the migratory patterns of birds, and the naming convention of mathematical concepts – all interlinked by underlying threads of human and animal tendency. Weaving all these together, all these truths, he bends the nonfiction genre to its breaking point.
Apeirogon not only has a fantastic conceptual vision but an elegant, straight-to-the-point prose style that could back up its lofty ambitions. To say it was moving would be to undersell how quickly I came to care, so deeply, about two real men and a conflict I, at the time, had put far out of my mind.
In reading Apeirogon, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long while. That the world could be summated – if only momentarily – in the mere pages of a book. I was so jealous that, for the first time in a while, I tried to create something even a fraction of its quality.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
–Feb, Boston
In the month following, I’d pulled myself together and moved back east to a new city. The cold had just properly set in then – and the roads along the colonial stretch were bare – snow and smog filling the air with a thick grey.
In the pits of Boston, there is no spring. As I’d come to learn there is only winter and colder winter here, and, having transferred in in late January after a last-minute application, I had the dual misfortune of not knowing the difference and foolishly forgetting my thermals.
New England in February, much like Small Things Like These’s setting of rural Ireland, is filled to the brim with the same sandy, biting air. Claire Keegan’s world of 1985’s Irish countryside seems not expansive, but rather cramped, confined entirely in the eyes of our protagonist, Bill Furlong, and his humdrum life as a coal merchant.
More than anything, expectation lingers on the periphery of the story. Trapped in his town, in his marriage, his job, and his responsibility, Keegan paints Ireland in the watercolor strokes of his perception. Bill is trapped, but he stays there in his own reality, willingly. It is only when he comes across a disturbing sight at a nearby church that the walls of his world begin to crumble.
Keegan isn't restricted to only impressionism, however – rest assured there are sentences in this novella that strike directly at the vein, cutting through the fog. As the novel continues, these two styles and voices seem to interact and conjoin, as Bill’s world slowly begins to dissolve under his growing awareness of the truth that exists beyond the boundaries of his life.
What does it mean to make a choice in a world so well-established, in which all roads lead somewhere known? What does it mean, to do the right thing, to be satisfied? Despite these existential nature of the questions, the book encompasses them in its entirety in a mere 116 pages.
I imagined that cutting Irish gale as the air seeping into my skin when I passed Downtown Crossing on my way to class.
In a new city, at a new college, I was ready to start over.
White Nights (Collection) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
–May, Saigon
The semester went quick. Soon spring made way for summer, and I was back home in Saigon. Burning hot, cheap, travellable Saigon – I visited all my favorite coffee shops, played badminton, and, taking advantage of the low price of books, bought as many as I could carry. Of these books, White Nights stood out the most.
What confounded me about White Nights was how blatantly it disregarded my conception of what made great stories. Rather than masking his method, Doystoyesky presents us his schematics. Rather than painting over the bits and bobs that make his stories work, he explicitly says – “This is what I’m saying, and I’m going to explain to you why it works”.
Rather than being completely immersed in these stories as reality, it felt more as if I was part of a Socratic seminar, being told explicitly how characters feel and think and reason. Rather than believe, I understood. A general’s pride, a pawnbroker’s contempt, a lonely Peterburgian's heart – their esoteric construction and self-conception revealed a clarity of character I had yet to see in any novel.
While these stories did not touch me to the same extent as the other novels on this list, they certainly opened my eyes to the "science" of writing – and lent me a better understanding of what the classification of “man of letters” truly meant during an earlier period of the novel form.
I thought of Dostoyevsky, tinkering away in his room. The joy of following his argument struck me. Far from the sweater weather of Boston, I was having a ball. I filled my notebooks with wild experiments – I wrote a story from the perspective of a balloon.
The Termite Queen by Ta Duy Anh
–June, Plane Over The Atlantic
It was about 5 am–on the tail end of my flight to Osaka, when I finished The Termite Queen. The window blinds had all been closed, letting light leak inside the cabin in only trace amounts. A thick, ambient buzz rose from the plane casing, shaking the words on the page. I had been handed it by an old English teacher of mine from Saigon, who, grimacing, asked for my opinion on it.
The novel was a translated Vietnamese work advertised, sold, and even written with the conceit of being a true, naked look at Vietnamese society. Plastered across the back were those words seemed to always grace the “best” of translated Vietnamese books, worn as if some kind of quality assurance sticker:
Banned In Vietnam.
The story centers around Viet, a young college-educated man who, in the wake of his father’s death, comes home to inherit his father’s coveted position at a large land-owning company. Upon settling into his job, however, he realizes that his father is not the man he thought he was. Shadowy board members watch his every step, and towns under his company's purview are mysteriously wiped off the map by increasingly dubious means. All the while, Viet dives deeper down the rabbit hole – who was his father, really and who is the “Termite Queen”?
The novel itself is a piece of metafiction, with the conceit of being a revisionist novel, written by the main character in response to a fictional biography of his father. In an attempt to “correct’ history, the main character creates a revised version of the original book, pulling chapters from it and inserting lengthy commentary on its validity, or bias, inserting his own stories. Citations litter these pages in a way not unlike those in a research paper, as our main character struggles to expose the truth of his father's company.
It had me in those first few pages, in its examination of the distinction between the truth and fiction, which made it all the more unfortunate that the book wasn’t very good.
There were all the hallmarks of a poorly conceived novel: A strict adherence to class stereotypes, a habit of abandoning ideas and characters soon after their introduction (the conceit of having Viet corrects quote sections of the biography nearly disappears by the halfway point), a “kind” main character who could do nothing other than limply protest as the novel pushed him along, and a deus ex machina to rival those of Grecocian theater – it was all there. But this was no mere “bad” book.
What astonished me was that, in a novel dedicated to examining how individuals can be warped and rendered helpless by class and wealth, the characters present have been reduced to nothing more than stereotypes. The good-natured, idiot farmer, the gruff, honorable town leader, the schwarmy suit obsessed with sex and really, really basic ideas of opulence, the fat tycoon, the good-natured but wimpy college graduate. When, in the final chapters of the novel, the author conjures up a gorgeous, fair-skinned college-educated town representative, I became so baffled I nearly woke the man sleeping next to me. A picture-perfect woman in a cruel, money-grubbing world – I waited till the last page for some semblance of irony or humor to defuse my dread, a shred of depth, a difficult question. No dice.
The novel which concerned itself with people neglects its people – is more concerned with its hyper-sexualized, almost comical depiction of high society, for the sake of it. This novel about people seemed to be completely unconcerned with them. And this, as advertised, was supposedly “cutting edge Vietnamese literature”.
I have no issues with novels about bad people and bad things. I don’t have issues with novels that conclude with ideas that don’t align with mine. But what disturbed me was that this book was attempting to make a point about the real world, attempting to pass as some sort of social commentary, and yet was representative of a deeper, more sinister kind of ignorance.
Closing the book, blinking away sleep, one phrase from the novel stuck to me.
Please, Thao. Let us run away and get married and have the most beautiful and moral children to ever exist.
Moral. There is no word that has done more harm to the human race than that one – “moral”. In it contained all my frustrations. Morality asks no questions, makes no concessions, heeds no response or discussion, enables manipulation, discards critical thought, and splits things into boxes of what is right and what is wrong with no in between. Flipping the book over, I read the blurbs on the front again.
Outside my window, my destination slowly emerged from beneath the clouds, rising up towards us. I entered Japan with a bitter taste in my mouth.
Kafka On The Shore by Haruki Murakami
–June, Osaka
Running along the bank of the Tosahori River in Kitahama sits a strip of boutique cafes. At the water’s edge, they are joined by a boardwalk. It was around midday, and the heat, filtered through the thick trees, fell to the wooden walkway like dust. Leaning over the railing, my eyes follow the river. The breeze, pulled in from Osaka Bay, pulled in the faint smell of flowers. Drinking my coffee, I sopped it all up like a sponge.
For most of my first-ever solo vacation, I stayed around these cafes, trying all different kinds of coffee and food and enjoying the air. At that particular moment, I was in a new city, all by myself, wandering around in pleasant silence. It was here that I opened Kafka On The Shore for the first time.
Kafka On The Shore follows 15-year-old runaway Kafka and 60-something psychic Nakata as they both navigate an ominous, dual calling, which draws them far from home.
Kafka attempts to escape a lifelong omen, and Nakata is drawn out of Tokyo by an urge beyond him, but both stories interlock, quietly, in their exploration of meaning, music and metaphysics.
For me, this is Murakami at his finest, so seamlessly blending the subconscious world with the physical, making them nigh indistinguishable from one another. This is a world where almost anything can happen – where angel hustlers cosplay Colonel Sanders and fish rain from the sky. Losses in childhood and regrets manifest in the sudden loss of genitalia, and broken romances lead to the invention of an impossible musical chord.
But never is it unnatural. An underlying logic remains, and so tightly is it considered and crafted that natural intuition draws the eye from page to page, absorbing these obtuse ideas without a second thought.
Some of the best character writing I’ve seen in a while is on full display here too, and, as the world begins to dither at the edges in the later chapters, and Kafka and Nakata become embroiled in deeper existential territory, these characters and their voices keep us tethered to the plot, asking the same questions as us, with just as few answers.
After The Termite Queen, I felt giddy reading a book like this. Landing in Osaka, I had no responsibilities or pressing matters. For the next two weeks, I was free – free to go and do anything. I shut off my phone and plugged in my earbuds.
The next time I looked up from the book it was evening. Paying the bill, I went off to find something cheap to eat. Tomorrow, I would do the same thing, and the next day, the same thing again. On that trip I disappeared into the world alongside Kafka and Nakata, as light as a feather.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
–July, Texas
In early July, a few days after my 20th birthday, I watched my grandpa take his last breath over a video call. The last time I would see him alive would be halfway across the world from him, in Saigon. Eyes glued shut, he did not see me. My grandfather, an immigrant to America, would never see Vietnam again.
At the airport bookstore on my way to the US for the funeral, I found myself reaching for What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, despite already having read it. It is a comfort read in every sense of the word: a short, quiet detailing of author Haruki Murakami’s day-to-day life, preparing for marathons and triathlons as he travels back and forth between conferences and residences. It is a quiet, almost-pedestrian depiction of his life, one I always find myself returning to when I need to get away from the world.
Every time I return to this collection of diary entries, I find something new to pique my interest. It is a fantastic travel read, devoid of any bs or romanticism, but still carrying a sense of purposed rhythm throughout. Murakami speaks on everything and anything that comes to mind – all interwoven with his adjustments and notes on his training regimen. He's a devout runner, and his simple meditations on discipline, ethics, and writing whisked me away to a world of order and sense.
The venue where my grandfather’s funeral was held could barely hold the amount of people who had come to visit. Dressed in a borrowed suit, I shook hands with what felt like hundreds of people. From across the world, people I’d never heard of came and spoke of my grandfather. A older man, breaking down in tears, lamented his inability to fulfill his last promise to my grandfather. “I promised to see you again alive.” He whispered. “I’m sorry.”
Twenty is the “big one”, as my dad calls it. With it came an expectation – maturity, productivity, a penchant for adult stuff. I knew it was coming, but I hadn’t understood it. Nothing in my life had really changed. My life would continue on as normal. But in the back of my mind, I began to think about my own legacy. What was my life, really? Suddenly, I was an adult, and I had no answers to this question. Suddenly, I didn’t have any answers to a lot of things.
That month was tough. Coming back home, I was diagnosed with a chronic illness and began taking my first prescription anti-depressants. My life, which I had so carefully built up over the last few years, fell apart. I felt completely helpless.
The calculated, constant nature of Murakami's lifestyle began to make no sense to me.
The Vegetarian by Han Kang
–August, Kendall
Before returning home to Vietnam, I crashed at a friend's flat near my old college in Virginia. I had been left alone to house-sit, and, while my family went off to Austin to visit my grandmother, I hid away in books.
The novel, through its three parts, tells the story of a Korean family torn apart by a seemingly innocuous choice: One of the daughters, after a series of foreboding dreams, refuses to eat meat. Thus begins the tragedy of Yeong-Hye, through a book that chronicles the destruction of her marriage, her family, and her life. The meaning and place of womanhood within contemporary Korean society stand at the forefront here – being examined with an almost porous level of detail.
I was reminded here, how living can be such a disgusting prospect, and how the needs of modern society can obscure and blunt our spiritual faculties All three parts are told from the perspective of those around the Yeong-Hye, otherizing our subject. Rarely do we hear from her directly – and thus our entire perception of her is created in how she is seen. From the perspective of all of our narrators, all deeply enmeshed in the rules of society, we come to intimately know how poorly they understand Yeong-Hye and how her spiritual and emotional logic informs her actions.
The Vegetarian is the quietest book of everything I’ve read this year. It is simple and ruthless, and the first Nobel prize-winning book I’ve ever read before its distinguishment as such.
Putting this book down, I didn’t feel very good. I didn’t want to speak to anyone. Quietly, I applied for a leave of absence and disappeared from my own life. I was running away. Confined to my friend's couch in the early morning, I read, wishing I were as brave as Yeong-Hye.
Botchan by Natsume Soseki
–October, Somerville
My September disappeared the instant I set foot back in Saigon, and soon I was in Boston, with my head held low. After losing my grandfather, I decided to take a gap year. I reasoned it perfectly with everyone I knew. I would get a job and I would learn to cook and I would do everything I needed to prepare for the rest of my life, I said, but in my heart, I was lost and embarrassed by how badly I had been affected by it all. I couldn’t even begin to think about the day after tomorrow, much less what my life would be in a year.
In that way, Botchan was a slap in the face. Taking place in the early 20th century, the short novel follows the titular Botchan – a roughneck, 23 or something college graduate, as he is sent to his first teaching gig in a backwater town.
At 23 years old, the Botchan stands in a similar position to me. Fresh out of college, with no family, meager savings and few prospects. he is left to fend for himself against antagonistic teachers, jocular, rowdy students, and an assault on not only his physical health but his values.
Despite this and his shrimpy, noodle-armed build, Botchan is a jock in spirit with his blatant, almost naive fowardness being his only defense. When asked to solve a simple algebraic statement by his student, he peers over it for a second, and shakes his head, refusing to lie: “I haven’t a clue." For this, he is laughed at, pranked and ridiculed. To everyone else, he is a bumbling, immature fool – but to him, it is his only strength.
It’s interesting to see how the concerns of early 20th-century Japan, with its rapidly changing values and technologies, seem to mirror our own. The same kinds of hipster intellectuals, rhetoric, insults, and gossip permeate Botchan’s world as they do today. Soseki’s stream-of-consciousness style is so casual and almost timeless that I forget that this novel takes place before the advent of Insulin.
At first, I scoffed at Botchan. But behind his crass attitude lay a man who lived almost entirely by his values, of honesty, respect, and integrity, with no regrets and hang-ups. He would sooner wage war against the world than succumb to it. Whatever happened, he would face it, head-on, in his way, even if it meant risking everything.
My contempt slowly morphed into admiration. How did he do it?
There is a quote of Botchan’s I have attached to my wall, scribbled on a piece of scrap paper. It reads:
All right, I decided. if I couldn’t win tonight, I’d win tomorrow. If I couldn’t win tomorrow, I’d win the day after. And if I couldn’t win the day after, I’d just have my meals delivered from home and stay right where I was until I did win.
Boston at that time of year was warm and lush. The Charles rowed cool air through the funneled city, brushing the heat out of my face. I had a lot I needed to do, but for now, I would take the world as it came. Just gotta get out of bed.
The Year Of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
–November, Harvard Square
Eventually, Boston fall made way for winter, and I was returned to the cold of spring. It was around this time that I got this job.
My excitement at the thought of writing for pay soon turned to worry, however, because I had absolutely no idea as to how to write an essay for a public adult audience. In an effort to learn, I went to the nonfiction section of Harvard Bookstore and picked out something with a name I could recognize.
Part memoir and part essay, The Year of Magical Thinking follows author Joan Didion’s life in the wake of her husband's sudden death, and her attempts to unravel her life with him as a method of reconciling the past.
The cyclical nature of grief stands at the center of the book – opening with the lines that Didion returns to, over and over:
Life changes fast.
Life changes in an instant.
You sit down and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity.
For her, time effectively pauses, and the book pulls us far into the past, pushing out Didion’s present. We are brought through the decades of her marriage, the highs and lows, the passing comments and quips that suddenly, in this new absence, seem so important. Meaning is ascribed to the mundane in a way I began to relate to deeply.
I thought of my grandfather. From my understanding, she wrote most of this novel before a year had even passed. I couldn’t conceive of having so much coherence with so little distance from the subject – Somehow, Didion is able to concentrate her sporadic anguish into the tight, focused rays of prose, piercing the vague miasma of her grief. Not once does she sugarcoat a feeling, or hide an ugly feeling. I couldn’t read this book without a clenched jaw, and if that isn’t a sign of a damn great memoir on death then I don’t know what is.
To be quite frank the book scared me – I was twenty, and I could barely even begin to think about the rest of my life, much less next week. Much like Didion, I felt, in the wake of a sudden, terrible moment, like a straggler at sea, trying to find a way back home.
Finishing the book, I was reminded of the power of words to mend and diagnose – but more importantly, that books alone could not heal me, nor could my friends or family. While Didion could explore her feelings on the page, the work she needed to do could not be done there.
Around this time, I thought a lot about growing up, now a bit more measured, a bit more cautious. I still don’t know much about it, really, but I think I’ve figured this out: Growing up isn’t something that just happens. It’s something I have to do.
This fall, I bought my first-ever prescription medicine, bought my first-ever health insurance package, and filled out my first WS-9 form. More than ever before, I practiced writing. I wrote a paragraph and then I wrote it again, and again. The only way through life is forward. Once again, I rolled open my drawer and pulled out Apeirogon.
—
It is November 16th as I write this. I’m sitting in a busy hole-in-the-wall cafe in Harvard Square, pushed up against the wall by the bulging crowd. The place is packed, not only inside but out. If the weather forecast is to be trusted, today is the last day of warmth in Boston. The vestiges of summer have disappeared in exchange for that lost hour given by daylight savings. Today will be my last day in shorts, and my first proper winter in America.
In reality, however, not much has changed. As I was in the spring, I am once again on a leave of absence, alone in a new, cold city. To be honest, it's difficult to imagine that I have grown in any way at all. But through these stories, however small, I’ve gained definitive markers in the vast ocean of my year, outlining my journey. Looking back, I am comforted by the fact that I am, at least in some ways, moving.
–
Twenty-year-old B.P. is a rising Junior currently residing in the New England area. He served as a Cheuse Center intern and helped organize and curate the inaugural Cheuse Center Busboys and Poets Lecture, delivered by Azar Nafisi in April 2023, at the Sherwood Community Center in Fairfax, Virginia.