2024: My Year in Reading—A Retrospect

Happy New Year! After tracking my progress via Goodreads, today, for the fifth year in a row, I’m sharing a retrospect on the books I read in the last year. (Here are the links to check out the 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020 editions if you’d like to travel back in time!)

In 2024, as in 2023, I read 50 books, an average pace of approximately 50 pages a day. 

My preference for fiction over non-fiction remains clear, with 41 vs. 9 books read. But my non-fiction reading covered topics of particular interest to me, such as art (All the Beauty in the World, Patrick Bringley, and The Art Thief, Michael Finkel), ballet (Turning Pointe, Chloe Angyal), and the nineteenth century (Stranger in the Shogun’s City, Amy Stanley, reviewed here, and The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum, Margalit Fox), and expanded into less expected areas (e.g., memoirs by Flea, Esmeralda Santiago, and Patricia E. Beattie, and the story of an eighteenth-century naval mutiny, in David Grann’s The Wager).

When it comes to fiction, for the first time in one of these reviews, one contemporary author dominates—I read six (!) novels by Tana French in 2024 and continue to love her work. 

I reviewed three novels as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series, covering books set in the nineteenth century, but written in the twenty-first: Edward Carey’s Edith Holler, Ami McKay’s The Witches of New York, and Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music. And I also read and blogged about two pieces of nineteenth-century French fiction in translation: Three Tales, Gustave Flaubert, and The Animal, Rachilde. 

My interest in my own genre, historical fiction, remains strong, accounting for 20% of books I read last year. Other strong themes for the year in fiction included witches (The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch, Melinda Taub, The Manningtree Witches, A.K. Blakemore, The Witches of New York, Ami McKay, and Weyward, Emilia Hart), ballet (Tiny Pretty Things, Dhonielle Clayton and Sona Charaipotra, and The Dance of the Dolls, Lucy Ashe), and, as ever, books by friends/acquaintances (Marvelous, Molly Greeley, The Last Star Standing, C.G. Twiles, and What's Eating Jackie Oh?, Patricia Park). 

Thirty-five books I read this year were by women, and 15 by men, which is slightly more gender-balanced than in 2023. 

In 2025, I’ll again be aiming to read 50 books. My reading resolutions? Continue to embrace the unexpected (one of my favorite 2024 reads was Chelsea G. Summers’s A Certain Hunger, a book about a female cannibal!), prioritize joy in reading, and continue to support writer friends. 

What books did you enjoy reading in 2024 that I should continue adding to my list? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Want to stay in touch? Sign up to my monthly email newsletter here.

Review: Three Tales, Gustave Flaubert (1877)

I’ve previously reviewed Gustave Flaubert’s 1869 novel, A Sentimental Education, for this blog, but this month I’m back with a post about a lesser-known work—his collection of Three Tales, published eight years later in 1877. 

In the first story, ‘A Simple Heart,’ a servant woman, Felicité, suffers through a difficult existence, despite the love she has to give. She ends her days unable to distinguish between her stuffed and moldy parrot, the one creature that ever showed her any affection, and the Holy Ghost.

Meanwhile in the second story, ‘The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitalier,’ a much-loved son with a sadistic passion for hunting finds himself subject to a terrible curse. Destined to kill his own parents, Julian abandons his former life to save theirs, but fate soon catches up with him with terrible consequences.

Finally, in his third story, ‘Hérodias,’ Flaubert expands on the biblical tale of the beheading of John the Baptist.

All three tales, which I read in Roger Whitehouse’s translation, have a modern feel, especially when contrasted with Flaubert’s full-length novels. ‘A Simple Heart’ and ‘The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitalier’ are both incredibly readable, while ‘Hérodias’ is denser, packed as it is with proper nouns and theological references. 

I found ‘A Simple Heart’ emotionally arresting, even as the old woman’s veneration of a taxidermied parrot borders on the absurd, and the descriptions of Julian’s blood lust as he hunts will stay with me. ‘Hérodias’ left me a little cold, but that could be due to familiarity with later works, such as Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1893), which Flaubert’s story is said to have inspired.

Overall, Flaubert’s Three Tales succeed in feeling fabulistic, while remaining unexpected. They’re peopled by characters with depth—these men and women aren’t just archetypes—that show off Flaubert’s range and far-reaching empathy. If you’re looking for a shorter work of nineteenth-century literature to read next, check the collection out, or dive into my full “Victorians in Brief” list here.

What book would you like me to review next on the Secret Victorianist? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Neo-Victorian Voices: The Twelve Rooms of the Nile, Enid Shomer (2012)

Moving, surprising and well researched, Enid Shomer’s 2012 The Twelve Rooms of the Nile was my favourite of the books I’ve reviewed this year as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series.

The novel takes an interesting fact—that, before each was famous, Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert travelled through Egypt at the same time—and imagines an alternate history, in which they meet, bond and inspire each other’s respective genius.

The result is an intimate double character study set against the sweeping backdrop of nineteenth-century Egypt, borrowing from Flaubert and Nightingale’s own writings, yet elevated further by Shomer’s distinctive and evocative prose (her previous works have been poetry).

The Twelve Rooms of the Nile, Enid Shomer (2012)

You’ll love The Twelve Rooms of the Nile if any of the following apply. You…

Have an interest in Nightingale, Flaubert or both.

Are fascinated by Egyptian mythology and French/British tourism in the nineteenth century.

Enjoy reading love stories that defy conventions of what relationships and intimacy are or should be.

Are interested in fictional depictions of depression, obsession and the artistic temperament.

Have ever felt acutely your difference from those around you or societal and familial expectations of who you should be.

You might find the novel less appealing if you…

Avoid sexual explicitness in (historical) fiction. And I don’t just mean sex scenes—Flaubert is in the midst of writing a treatise on female genitalia.

Want an ‘easy read’—Shomer doesn’t spoon feed and at times she makes you work for it. But rereading and parsing her longer sentences was a joy, not a chore.

Enid Shomer (1944-)

This is the kind of novel that left me feeling bereft when I turned the final page—a testament to the power and immediacy of fiction, even if it’s set in a distant time and place.

Which twenty-first century written, nineteenth-century set novel would you like to see the Secret Victorianist review next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Review: The Immoralist, André Gide (1902)

André Gide

I’m cheating a little bit here, as The Immoralist takes us two years into the twentieth century and is by a writer who, while born in 1869, lived well into the next century, being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. Yet reading and writing about Gide seemed a natural next step after reviewing some Flaubert and Huysmans recently, and, in terms of literary interest and personal life (including a relationship with Oscar Wilde), Gide has a foot firmly in each century. 

The Immoralist is the story of Michel (an erstwhile scholar of History), his life subsequent to his father’s death, his marriage to Marceline and his travels around Europe and Africa. The novel charts the development of Michel’s moral philosophy, his increasing prioritisation of sensation and pleasure and his exploration of his own sexuality – from admiring the ‘health’ of an Arab boy’s ‘little body’ which ‘was a beautiful thing’ (the first stirrings of his pederastic impulses) to apparently enjoying an MMF threesome, as his devoted wife lies dying in the novel’s final pages. 

For general readers: The Immoralist isn’t a novel which makes it easy for you to know what to think or how to judge its protagonist. Michel’s worst crimes – potential paedophilia and disregard for his wife – are difficult to pin down precisely. His apparently candid narrative stops short of telling us the exact nature of his relationships with the many boys and young men he comes into contact with (including the Arab boy Bachir, his steward’s son Charles and the child Ali he lives with at the end), although what he does admit to is increasingly physical and suggestive of sexual consummation. And Marceline’s consumptive illness cannot be blamed on Michel, even if his own tuberculosis and insistence on continual travel are certainly contributory factors in her ill health.

The lack of narrative certainty and conclusion can be unsettling. This is deliberate and reflected in the frame narrative, where Michel’s friend, who has listened to the ‘confession’, says: 

We did not speak either, for we each of us had a strange feeling of uneasiness. We felt, alas, that by telling us his story, Michel had made his action more legitimate. Our not having known at what point to condemn it in the course of his long explanation seemed almost to make us his accomplices. We felt, as it were, involved. 

The use of Michel’s voice makes this feeling of involvement inevitable. Without the guiding light of a third person narrator we feel closer to Michel than any of the other characters – even Marceline – and so sympathetic towards his selfishness. This means this is a novel which makes you think and allows you to judge for yourself at which point, if any, Michel crosses a line, and to make a call about the value of conventional morality. 

For students: Gide’s lack of narrative commentary and concentration on the development of an individual’s consciousness, where other characters are almost incidental, is very reminiscent of Flaubert and the two styles, particularly in passages where the protagonist elucidates their current ideological position in dialogue with other characters, are worthy of more detailed comparison.

Michel’s Nietzschean philosophy could also be of interest, as could Gide’s treatment of same sex desire, but there is most here perhaps for those investigating colonialism in the period and the novel’s African context is difficult to overlook. Sexual power is of course a large part of this – and Michel’s status as a white man in Africa is in some ways similar to the dominion he enjoys over workers on his country estate in Normandy – but it is Michel’s first trip to Africa, after the intense emotions surrounding his father’s death, and lack of emotion at his own wedding, which is the catalyst for the selfish, destructive and dominant behaviours he goes on to exhibit in all areas of his life: 

Tunis surprised me greatly. At the touch of new sensation, certain portions of me awoke – certain sleeping faculties, which, from not having as yet been used, had kept all their mysterious freshness. 

The Immoralist then is a wonderful study for those looking at the effects of colonialism on those who colonise and at Africa as shorthand for exoticism and permissiveness in the later nineteenth-/early twentieth-century novel.

Which novel should the Secret Victorianist review next? Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist! And did you know you can also keep up-to-date with all things Victorian over on Pinterest?

Review: A Sentimental Education, Gustave Flaubert (1869)

Gustave Flaubert

A Sentimental Education is the story of Frederic Moreau –a young man from the provinces who arrives in Paris, with great ambitions and romantic ideals, and goes on to witness the revolution of 1848, with its corresponding political change and social upheaval. 

For general readers: A Sentimental Education is obsessed with conveying feeling – of a time, a society and an individual – more than delivering plot. Characters disappear and reappear and focus shifts with the developing emotional and mental life of the protagonist the only constant.

Moreau is a deeply flawed character – cowardly, selfish and entirely preoccupied with his all-eclipsing emotional life. Yet somehow he manages to engage reader sympathy. We feel for him as he pines hopelessly over another man’s wife – the beautiful, long-suffering Madame Arnoux – and sympathise as he deals with the coquettish courtesan Rosanette (‘The Marshal’). Moreau’s fickleness and his self-obsessed nature are not unique character traits. Almost everyone who features in the novel is the same (with a partial exception perhaps of Frederic’s mother and Madame Arnoux) and it is the capricious course of human action in all things, whether politics or love, which directs action.

At times the novel feels like an assault on the senses – violence on the streets, decadent parties, a surplus of flesh and feeling. But, for a novel obsessed with desire, sex itself is often lacking, and, where it features, dissatisfying. The novel ends with Frederic and his friend Deslauriers discussing a teenage visit to a brothel when the very sight of the women available to them made them turn and flee. They agree that this was their ‘best time’, confirming the belief throughout the novel that feelings themselves are more meaningful than experiences and desire sated is desire lost. 

For students: Published nearly a decade after his most famous novel – Madame Bovary (1857) – A Sentimental Education is a good text for comparison, dealing as it does again with the emotional life of a central character (this time a man) and similar sexual ‘immorality’.

For students of English literature, the novel is an interesting read for understanding the hostility towards the moral liberality of French realism. Henry James’s admiration for Flaubert is also understandable and telling. Flaubert’s characters’ realities are Jamesian in their subjective nature and there is the same obsession with the randomness of human interactions, though perhaps, in this instance at least, put under a less tragic and more satirical lens.

Have you read A Sentimental Education? What did you think? And which nineteenth-century novel would you like to see the Secret Victorianist review next? Let me know below, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!