2024 Best Reads: Picks by The Straits Times’ book critics
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SINGAPORE – Every year, The Straits Times arts team reads its way through hundreds of books.
There are international titles as well as home-grown works which have caught the attention of the reviewers in 2024. Arts editor Ong Sor Fern, arts correspondent Clement Yong, arts writer Shawn Hoo and reviewer Olivia Ho offer their picks of the best reads of the year, as well as one disappointment which readers will do well to steer clear of.
Ong Sor Fern’s picks: The Great When, Invitation To A Banquet and The Grey Wolf
PHOTOS: BLOOMSBURY
Reading is the best escape into other worlds and this year’s best escape into an alternate universe is definitely legendary British author Alan Moore’s The Great When.
The book is a meta-fiction powered by both Moore’s love of high- and low-brow cultures, as well as his fondness for the city of London. His hapless protagonist Dennis Knuckleyard gets his hands on a book which should not exist. In attempting to return it to its rightful place, he is propelled headlong into the “real” London, a meta-verse of all the ideas and concepts underpinning the city.
Clement Yong’s picks: Annihilation, Sister Snake and Her Side Of The Story
PHOTOS: PICADOR, COURTESY OF MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ
The memory of a book reviewer is a short one. After breezing through so many pedestrian offerings, the majority are by the end of the year shrouded in haze.
What sticks in my mind is a certain tending towards mess and ugliness. The rhythms of music having long moved on from the Baroque and Classical, there is satisfaction in watching syntax and punctuation break down, the stretched sentence testing the reader’s persistence in maintaining a strand of thought.
So my favourite read of 2024 is Michel Houellebecq’s Annihilation, the writing of which proves the French author to be one of the smoothest operators of the language.
Shawn Hoo’s picks: My Roman Year, The End Of August and Delicious Hunger
PHOTOS: CHRIS FERGUSON, FABER & FABER
The sensuousness with which Italian-American writer Andre Aciman renders his adolescent exile in Rome makes My Roman Year one of the most unforgettable memoirs of 2024.
One has to envy the Call Me By Your Name author for his handle on memory and his ability to whip his recollections into resplendent prose.
In his latest, memory is lubricated by the smallest olfactory detail – the smell of homemade artichokes or a glass of grapefruit juice. In a time when displacement and rootlessness are motifs of contemporary life, Aciman brings a generous eye to the era’s big themes.
Olivia Ho’s picks: Cahokia Jazz, The Ministry Of Time and Sister Snake
PHOTOS: FABER & FABER
This hard-boiled mystery of alternate history hits the high notes. In a Jazz Age America that never was, indigenous royalty still holds sway in the city of Cahokia.
When a white man is found ritually sacrificed atop a government building, the city boils on the verge of racial unrest. Detective Joe Barrow, a World War I veteran who is new to the city, is tasked to solve the murder, untangling the city’s complex web of players – enigmatic royals, corrupt cops, indigenous anarchists and the Ku Klux Klan.
