Christmas reading list 2024

If you still need recommendations for your Christmas reading or gifts, I might be able to help. If you are wondering what you should read in the year ahead, here is a start with personal top 3 of 2024, for both fiction as well as non-fiction. Enjoy the read(s) and do not forget to share your favourite books of 2024!

FICTION

1/ Mania by Lionel Shriver 

Mania is the story of Pearson Converse, an untenured academic who lives with her tree-surgeon partner and three children in a Pennsylvania college town. Most of the novel takes place during an alternate version of the 2010s, when the Mental Parity movement takes hold. Americans now embrace the sacred, universal truth that there is no such a thing as variable human intelligence.

Because everyone is equally discrimination against purportedly dumb people is the “last great civil right fight”. Tests, grades, and employment qualifications are all discarded. Children are expelled for using the S-Word (“stupid”) and encouraged to report parents who use it at home. In het latest controversial novel, Shriver pokes at woke culture as she wrote a funny and occasionally offensieve satire of groupthink.

2/ Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq 

Annihilation is a polyphonic work, with several themes interwoven. It is set in the election year 2027. A rash of strange messages, including the digitized film of a French Minister being executed by guillotine, appears on the internet worldwide; Chinese container ships are blown up; and the world’s largest sperm bank, based in Denmark, is burnt down.

The protagonist, Paul Raison, is a civil servant and the confidant of a successful technocratic Minister of the Economy, Bruno Juge, who re-establishes the French economy on the path of growth. Bruno, a highly capable man, is a possible candidate for the presidency, which gives author Michel Houellebecq the opportunity to describe the auto-satirizing nature of modern politics, in which communication is all and substance practically nothing.

3/ Perspective(s) by Laurent Binet 

Perspective(s) is essentially a tight, fast-paced, well-managed whodunnit, set in sixteenth-century Florence. The painter Jacopo da Pontormo is found dead. Murder is suspected: he has been struck with a blunt instrument and stabbed through the heart with scissors. His body is discovered in front of his frescoes at the church of San Lorenzo. He had laboured over them for a decade and they were nearing completion. Was this an opportunistic robbery or a crime of passion? Perhaps an overzealous art critic? Part of Pontormo’s work appears to have been unconvincingly repainted. Was this the handiwork of the culprit? 

What is more, investigators searching his residence find an obscene painting, a version of the painter’s “Venus and Cupid”, based on a cartoon by Michelangelo, with Venus’s face replaced by that of the Duke of Florence’s oldest daughter, Maria de’ Medici. The story gets a bit complex: Pontormo’s painting of Maria becomes the focus of machinations from France to undermine the Duke of Florence; Maria plans to flee to Paris to escape a forced marriage; and we meet two art-loving nuns, who are offended by the realistic nudes of Pontormo’s frescoes. The novel treads familiar ground for a historical thriller, but the art of painting is what is really at the centre of the enigmas posed by his novel. 

NON-FICTION

1/ The Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson 

Traditionally I am not a big fan of science-fiction, but this book from Barack Obama’s favourite futurist holds more science than fiction. The Ministry of the Future follows the eponymous fictional intergovernmental agency (created at a UN Climate change conference in the mid 2020s) and their efforts to halt and eventually reverse catastrophic climate change. 

The novel takes that simple, almost bureaucratic-sounding premise, and turns it into nothing less than a future history of the 21st century, a civilization and biosphere -spanning saga on how we could manage to great a good Anthropocene after all. It is a comprehensive, grim, realistic and yet still optimistic trajectory of our civilization towards a better, sustainable future past the climate catastrophe.

2/ Slow Productivity by Cal Newport

When you ask someone how they are doing, you’ll probably get busy busy as a response. It’s almost as if we need to be busy all of the time to attain productivity.

But what does productivity actually mean? Writing a lot of e-mails? Having back to back meetings all day? Everyone might have grown accustomed to the rat race we are all in, but when you take a step back and visualize your work day as constantst running to the mailbox to see whether you have received any new letters, it downs you it is a ridiculous lifestyle. It’s not natural, and that’s why I am tipping this Brilliant  book by Cal Newport.

3/ Revolusi by David Van Reybrouck

In population, Indonesia is the world’s fourth-largest country after China, India and the United States, which are all in the news constantly. It has the largest Muslim population on early… But the international community just doesn’t seem interested.

Last Summer, I devoured this book during a family trip to Indonesia. Van Reybrouck tells the epic story of Indonesia’s independence struggle: a four year fight for freedom from 1945-1949 that embroiled British and Dutch troops in fierce fighting and cost 200,000 lives.

The bravery and ultimate success of the freedom fighters - the first in European colony to declare independence after the second world war- enthused anti-colonial movements around the globe in the ensuing four decades. In 1955, Soekarno, Indonesia’s first president, gister in Bandung a summit of recently liberated Nations that was the inspiration for the non-aligned movement. Its memory has been invoked in recent years as rising powers have sought to wrede from the elders a greater role in the global economic and political architecture. 

The list above should be read with a pinch of salt. I read about 40 books per year, but I can’t read everything. The peril of curation is that it is an act of exclusion as much as inclusion. So consider this a sampling of what I believe to be the best books of the year. 

Happy reading below and please also feel free to also share your favourite books of the year in the comments section!