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"\n2024's reading for me has been a sabbatical into non-fiction and, for the best part, fiction beyond horror; not only as a matter of taste but reading widely has always been essential for my writing.\n\n\n\nI've been absorbed by Georges Simenon's 'hard novels' and devoured The Paris Review Interviews, one through four in succession this summer. Real treasures that I've dipped into for years but I read/reread every interview carefully in 23.\n\n\nI thought Cormac McCarthy's last two novels were sublime and I read them with reverence.\n\n\n\nMax Hastings' encyclopaedic histories of the war in the Pacific (Nemesis), and the final period of the war in Europe (Armageddon), were compelling but sobering - and considering how perilously close to destruction western civilisation came less than 80 years ago, it's gravely disappointing to look at the east of Europe now. Nothing learned.\n\n\n\nNorman Mailer's The Naked and the Deadis one of the best novels I've read. As is Celine's Journey to the End of the Night. Two classics that I read for thefirst time in 2023.\n\n\n\nFrom the annals of weird masters, I devoured Bruno Schultz's The Street of Crocodiles and Ramsey Campbell's Fellstones.\n\n\n\nMarcus Aurelius's Meditations have been straightening my thinking before bed. A considerable source of comfort.\n"
<https://adamlgnevill.com/blogs/blog/my-2023-reading-highlights>