I might have pushed it this year, posting my yearly recap in February, but that’s how you know I am not a victim of the trends. Or at least not a timely one.
Anyways! Here it is, divided into 3 sections.
Part 1: Book stats & reading goals
I lost some of my passion for reading this year; temporarily, I assume. Despite how many good books I read, I didn’t connect with many of them1. Most, I could have dropped, even if I agree they are well-written and interesting. The more I felt this way, the more I focused on reading only books I assumed I would love.
Meaning: This was a particularly self-indulgent, non-challenging reading year for me—something that is particularly obvious in the book genre graph below:
The only reading goal I didn’t abandon this year: To read the books that I was buying or being gifted—mostly so I could keep buying more.
Total books read: 65 (3 were re-reads)
Gifted books: 10 read of 11 gifted
Purchased books: 26 read of 35 bought2
Perhaps I approached this crisis the wrong way. Perhaps I should have been reading books that challenged me, that I wasn’t sure I would like.
With that in mind, here are some vague reading goals for 2025:
Read books that I own and I haven’t read yet
Read at least 1/4 of the books on that reading list I posted in January
Read more non-fiction (like, maybe 15-20% of total books)
Part 2: My favourite books of 2024
To create this list, I divided all the books I had read into three categories: Yes, Maybe, and No. The Yes books were the exceptions to my aforementioned crisis: the books I did connect with, the books I will want to re-read in the future. This left me with only 8 Yes books, so I picked 2 more from the Maybe pile to get the Top 10. The 10 remaining Maybe books will be listed below as ‘honourable mentions.’
(The title will be in the language I read the book, and because some of you have asked me, I will also include if they have been translated into Spanish/Catalan.)
10. Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar
Translations available: Catalan, Spanish
For a book about death, about dying, and about choosing to die, this is brimming with life. The main character’s quest to find a cause worth dying for leads him to ultimately live, at least for the time being, and love—who would’ve thought? This novel felt expansive, ambitious, original, and pretty unforgettable.
9. Evenings and Weekends, Oisín McKenna
It dawned on me towards the middle that this book was giving Mrs. Dalloway3—if Mrs. Dalloway was a gay man too scared to open up to the man he loves. Set in pre-pandemic London in the span of a single weekend, during the heat wave and the ongoing cost-of-living crisis, I know this book will stay with me through all the little details (Pauline!).
8. Et vaig donar ulls i vas mirar les tenebres, Irene Solà
Translations available: Spanish, English
I have already talked about this book twice in this newsletter—in my first-half of 2024 recap, and my ‘Unconventional novels’ post—and so I will make it short. This was a bit gore, violent like old folktales really are—think of Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty before the brothers Grimm got their hands on them—but distinctly modern at the same time. Probably not for everybody, but an astonishing work nonetheless.
7. Intermezzo, Sally Rooney
Translations available: Catalan, Spanish
I am one of the Rooney Toons4 that had the publication day marked in the calendar5 and so I don’t know how objective you will believe me to be when I say this was really good. Her longest book to date, and the best one formally—criticism of her simplistic writing perhaps having got to her—it tells the story of two brothers in the wake of their father’s death. Ivan’s sections read as urgently and are as passionate as Normal People, and although Peter’s sections don’t flow as seamlessly, they do contain pockets of brilliantness too.
6. Happy All the Time, Laurie Colwin
Translations available: Spanish
I compared it to a Nora Ephron film in the past, but now that I’ve sat with it for longer, I want to say it’s more like it has been written and directed by Whit Stillman: The ridiculousness of the characters is portrayed not cynically but with warmth; it is frivolous, and silly, but so, so fun. Superficially about love and making it work, but fundamentally about how contradictory and confusing human beings can be.
5. Mina's Matchbox, Yōko Ogawa
Translated from Japanese into English by Stephen B. Snyder
Other translations available: Spanish
Yōko Ogawa is one of these writers with deceptively simple prose: Easy to read, yet each passage conveys so much. Full of memorable characters and scenes—so much so that somehow I feel like I have watched this book, being as I am able to picture some of the scenes in my head, literally like a scene from a Studio Ghibli film. Melancholic, but cozy at the same time.
4. Léxico familiar, Natalia Ginzburg
Translated from Italian into Spanish by Mercedes Corral
Other translations available: English
This is a memoir about many things—life under Mussolini, World War II, the question of art vs science, political refugees, the fragmentation of the anti-fascist movement—connected through the family lexicon that gives it its title. The author reveals her family and the trajectory of their lives through language: their shared tics, idiosyncratic expressions, the tales passed for generations, the inside jokes and the poems they make up in the spot. It had some of the funniest sentences I read last year, and some of the saddest.
3. Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata
Translated from Japanese into English by Edward G. Seidensticker
Other translations available: Catalan, Spanish
The atmosphere! The characters! The unspoken feelings! I loved this book so much that despite it being my first novel by Kawabata, he became my most read author of 20246. He manages to strike the perfect balance between what’s said vs what must remain unsaid so magically; I think partly because of environmental storytelling—no other book in this list has made me feel so much as if I were there.
2. Held, Anne Michaels
Translations available: Spanish
Despite how contained the style of writing, even the form of the book—with the short paragraphs and sections—one could accuse Held of being a bit too sentimental, but not me! The book’s main thesis is that the dead don’t leave us, that we continue to carry them, and that we will be carried too by those who are left after we leave. I guess that’s something I needed to hear. It touched me so deeply, I was re-reading it as I read it, afraid I would miss something that would cause me to not get the full impact of the novel. But yeah, I got it.
1. Un amor que destruye ciudades, Eileen Chang
Translated from Chinese into Spanish by Anne-Helène Suárez & Qu Xianghong
Other translations available: English, Catalan
I had been mentally compiling this list for weeks, but it wasn’t until I read this book, in one sitting on December 1st, that I knew which would come at number one. About an affair set during the Japanese attack of Hong Kong in 1941, Love in a Fallen City is romantic and fatalistic but unsentimental. Most importantly: It has the most perfect ending any book has ever had. It was so much to my tastes7 that my whole body was tense reading it—rushing to reach the ending; hoping it would never end.
And (in no particular order) the honourable mentions:
Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri
Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
Blessings by Chukwuebuka Ibeh
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty
Bad Cree by Jessica Johns
Part 3: Other media I enjoyed
Although I am very picky about which books I read, my consumption of other media is much less, let’s say, intellectual. Especially this year: Most of what I watched and listened to was entertaining and/or fun. In the words of Benito, they were mostly cositas felices.
All this to say, this is what I enjoyed watching (re-watches don’t count) and not what I think is good. Don’t judge!8
Favourite films
New:
Evil Does Not Exist, dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Crossing, dir. Levan Akin
Conclave, dir. Edward Berger
The Beast, dir. Bertrand Bonello
Exhuma, dir. Jang Jae-hyun
Furiosa, dir. George Miller
Older
The Lady Vanishes, dir. Alfred Hitchcock (1938)
Anatomy of a Fall, dir. Justine Triet (2023)
The Zone of Interest, dir. Jonathan Glazer (2023)
La Chimera, dir. Alice Rohrwacher (2023)
Favourite TV
New:
We Are Lady Parts (season 2)
Lovely Runner
Only Murders in the Building (season 4)
Welcome to Samdal-ri
Nobody Wants This (season 1)
The Judge from Hell
Older:
LOST (all seasons)
The Devil Judge
EVIL (all seasons)
How to with John Wilson (season 3)
Favourite songs
RM ‘Come back to me’
FKA Twigs ‘Esexua’
Laura Marling ‘Patterns’
Fontaines D.C. ‘Favourite’
Waxahatchee ‘Right Back to It’
Rizzle Kicks ‘New Sport’
SZA ‘Saturn’
Charli xcx ‘Girl, so confusing featuring lorde’
What about you? Which was your favourite book this year? Favourite film? Do you have any recommendation for me? I am genuinely interested!!! Let me know!
An example of this is The Details, a book I read and really admired, even rated 5 stars, and then completely forgot about
In my defence (no one cares) 4 of those 9 unread books I bought during the last week of December while getting presents for my family, so I literally didn’t have time to read them
Mrs. Dalloway is one of my all-time favourite books, so there is no greater compliment to me
I used Rooneyhead to refer to Sally Ronney fans until I read Brandon Taylor using ‘Rooney Toons’ and had to steal it
La Mercè: Not only my mum’s name day, but the patron of Barcelona—i.e. bookshops were closed due to being a local holiday lol
So far, I haven’t loved his other books as much. They contained some brilliant passages but they were overshadowed by all the ~~sexism
The blurb on the Spanish edition compares it to Jane Austen and, FAIR
Or do! If that’s your kind of thing
veus, ara he de llegir lexico familiar. this newsletter changes lives! (la meva, en particular)