Papercut and Friends: Year in Review
Featuring: Brad Casey, Kate Nugent, an anonymous reader, Lucy Pauker, Sean Michaels, Sophie McCreesh, Greg Conway, Taylor Mooney, and your boys.
Below you’ll find some thoughts on what ourselves and dear friends read over the last year.
Happy new year,
Andrew and Ryan
Ryan in 2024
I reread Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, the matchless novel about an amnesiac with a Gatsby-meets-Nathan Fielder obsession for restaging past events. I was hoping to, by way of revisiting old familiars, rekindle the flame of person and splendor inside me. The irony of choosing this book for that is not lost on me. (To quote Adam Phillips, “It’s only worth having a past if you’ve got a future.”) I also read Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding twice over one week. I re-read Philip Roth’s The Counterlife because it’s his best novel, also Joseph McElroy’s A Smuggler’s Bible (heartbreaking ending), Don Delillo’s The Names and Underworld. Any word of these novels, and one or two of the ones I mention below, could be the bold white Hollywood Sign on the Mount Lee of my mind. I’ve slept beside them, taken refuge underneath them, posted them to Instagram a million times over. Soon armed forces will pull me away for loitering.
I loved The Piano Teacher this year. A lot. You can get the iciness and the sex from the film adaptation, but you can’t get the fantastical digressions, metaphors, and high-literary gaming—an incredible novel. Magda Szabó’s The Door was a perfect and crystalline story of class (maybe the best I’ve ever read) and without an iota of didacticism. Rachel Cusk’s oblique, very good autoficto-incognito Parade: she’s the Dua Lipa of literary fiction (how’s she always on all these vacations?) Renee Gladman’s My Lesbian Novel was so good, but it wasn’t my lesbian novel of the year—that was The Bostonians. I spent too much time reading Vol II of À la recherche du temps perdu on account of planning a wedding around the same time (no big deal). I cat and dog-sat a lot this year; Ishmael Reed’s satirical Louisiana Red was the standout from those times. Flann O’Brien’s At Swim, Two Birds transcended expectations at every hilarious, lyrical line, ditto Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler. The Appointment by Katharina Volckmer was the absolute best blind buy of 2024 (shoutout Trident Cafe). I finally read Martin Amis’ Experience and at the perfect time. It’s one of the best memoirs I’ll ever read, from him teasing Salman Rushdie at a party for liking Beckett to his last days with his ailing father. (I wasn’t expecting all the chapters about dental problems, though I guess those are the Brits for you.) Intermezzo? It was good, but the stream-of-conscious chapters sounded more like horny Yoda than Joyce. It did have me talking about the book on the phone for three hours one night, something no other book did.
Lastly, it seems like we’ve all taken to a certain young man, an upright young man, a man who has taken matters into his own hands after being wronged by unconscionable powers who’ve cheated one and all many times over. Citizens near and far support him; the ruling class expresses condemnation. He’s righteous, yet his past is absent of radicalism; he’s the “little man provoked beyond the limit of endurance.” It’s Luigi Mangi—no, it’s Michael Kohlhaas of Michael Kohlhaas (written by Heinrich Von Kleist, not in this century or the last but in 1810 somehow). MK’s the story of a 16th-century horse dealer who after being wronged by the system goes on a murderous quest for justice. All my friends are reading it now. I wonder why.
Andrew in 2024
To find concrete evidence of what I read this year, all I had to do was look at my bookshelves and survey the damage.
I spent hours with each of these books, and yet for many of them, I can barely recall the subject, let alone the plot.
In the style of Joe Brainard, here’s a few things I do remember from 2024, a year I’m happy to be leaving in the dust.
I remember reading The Corrections and realizing that history will prove Jonathan Franzen right about almost everything.
I remember being thankful that in Intermezzo, Sally Rooney didn’t bother attempting to diagnose Ivan as autistic.
I remember how much Andre Agassi fucking hates tennis.
I remember reading Lili Anolik’s it-girl book of the moment Didion and Babitz and rolling my eyes every few pages or so, wondering if the book was published without an editor (so many authorial asides, cool it!) and thinking that if Babitz was effortlessly cool and Didion’s cool was calculated, Anolik’s is non-existent, the literary equivalent of having “no chill”.
I remember how so many contemporary novels have this flat, anthropological prose style that I’m soooo sick of.
I remember how this prose style does actually apply to The Anthropologists, a book I read earlier this month that was widely praised but that I found forgettable and boring.
I remember being aware that calling something forgettable and boring isn’t a particularly astute critique but that sometimes there isn’t anything else to say.
I remember that “voice” matters to me in a novel and that women and gay men are the funniest people on the planet, as evidenced by three books reissued this year: In Thrall by Jane Delynn, Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott and Love Junkie by Robert Plunket
I remember the best opening sentence of any book I read all year: “Some people get the glory. Some people get the glory holes.” (Ripcord by Nate Lippens)
I remember the second best opening sentence from a book I read this year, that won’t be published until the next: “Although I have a small penis and entered puberty at the ordinary time, nevertheless I was stung from ten or eleven by sexual desire.” (The Loves of My Life by Edmund White)
I remember all the books I meant to read but didn’t get around to.
I remember promising to write more and soon
Sean Michaels in 2024
This year I read Iris Murdoch's A Fairly Honourable Defeat and also Trenton Lee Stewart's The Mysterious Benedict Society, each of which was a kind of portrait of how easily people go bad. Stewart's novel, which is intended for 11-year-olds, had the more delectable series of puzzles (the first quarter of the book is as intriguing and excellent a sequence of plot as anything I've ever read), but Murdoch's, which is intended for the 12+ set, is the one that lingered with me longer. I couldn't stop pondering its supervillain, Julius King, trying to figure out whether he was a full character or a fake, paper-thin.
Lucy Pauker: 2024 Metro Reads
The Piano Teacher, Elfriede Jelinek: incredible, maybe perfect abject metro read. Never in my wildest dreams could I come up with so many horrible ways to describe a vagina. Give your fellow travelers a little pep in their step on your morning commute.
The Water Statues, Fleur Jaeggy: not a good choice, this is a rot in bed book, not a quick 15 at Berri-UQAM.
Infinite Gradation, Anne Michaels: Throwing a cancelled author into the mix, poems usually require more focus than I can give them during my commute times between 8-9 am and 5-6pm, but I liked this, nice prose, research-essay like poetry.
Héloise, Anne Hébert: While this was not a good book (imo), it was fun to read about the metro in la belle Paris, while on the metro in la belle province.
The Appointment, Katharina Volckmer: Another to shock all the passengers absolutely desperate to read over your shoulder, hit them with a Hitler sexual fantasy. A stream of conscious monologue during a gender-affirming surgery is a perfect metro choice.
A Severed Head, Iris Murdoch: While not my favourite Murdoch this passed the metro test.
Bitter Water Opera, Nicolette Polek: Strangely one the only written in short chapter/vignettes I read, and it did work well for the metro, I even missed my stop once! All to say the book itself totally fine, not a winner not a loser.
xx Metrosexual
Brad Casey on An Honest Woman in 2024
After I finished reading An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work by Charlotte Shane, which for a large part talks about her near ten-year relationship with a married client in his fifties who died during the early stages of covid lockdown, I went for a walk with a dear person in my life who is a sex worker and we talked about some of the things that I read, about the kinds of relationships that are possible when coupling sex and capital, loving relationships and capital, we talked about the kinds of love involved, these relationships bound with love and pleasure and care and also your livelihood depends of them and this can be tricky and they’re different though not dissimilar from the intimacy you seek out in others in a romantic sense, it’s all romantic, what does it mean to be in a relationship, what does it mean to be a worker, what is it to love? What are you looking for in love? Why? How do we navigate the desires, the wants, the needs, the materiality between what we want from another person and what they want from us. I gave this person the book. I don’t know if they read it yet. They still have it in their apartment, I’ve seen it. I wonder if I’ll get it back. I’d be fine if I didn’t get it back though it was the best book I’ve read this year, I hope they read it and we get to talk about these things again. Near the end of her book, Charlotte Shane finds sympathy with the mistress, the one who loves but can’t go to the sick bed of her lover, can’t care for him, can’t attend his funeral, never finds closure, she moves through the world seeing his face in the faces of others, is he dead? She moves from the first person to second and addresses her recently deceased client imploring him if he’s reading this to find her and I cried, if only this spell worked, how many of us never find closure in the relationships that drift away, we all become someone else, against our wishes, there is no goodbye, you might never even hear of the passing of the people you loved, would you be the lucky one to go on wondering? Or knowing? Anyway they can keep the book, if they want, forever, though I loved it.
Sophie McCreesh on 2666 in 2024
My favourite book of 2024 is the one I wrote. I’m just kidding that would be obnoxious. I reread the first part of Bolaño's 2666 - “The Part About the Critics” - which isn’t a whole book but it’s simply lovely. 10/10 highly recommend. Love those critics. Looking forward to rereading the rest.
“Julian” on Skyland in 2024:
Brennan McCracken on This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom in 2024
The socialist, the busybee, the seeker, the agnostic: all gather under the ambo of Martin Hägglund’s remarkable This Life, a work of philosophy with the deceptive, inviting brilliance of fresh snow. I first read the book’s fifth chapter, which develops a secular notion of freedom out of Marx’s theory of value, before a seminar Hägglund gave in Montreal this past spring. I was so moved by his thoughts on finitude and work that I immediately bought a copy of This Life for my bedside, where for several months it became an unlikely companion when I was feeling baffled or blue. I lack the theoretical fluency (and the ability to fully remember my bedtime reading) to summarize Hägglund’s argument with any grace or facility. But this book is so lucid that I could imagine picking up at almost any point and feeling recognition in its lesson of devotion beyond religion and collective work beyond capitalism. As I down tool during the darkest days of the year, I’m returning—against a cynic’s course—to the bleak consolation of a book that says our disease is the same one as the trees.
Kate Nugent on Anna Karenina in 2024
Listen: I know that it’s silly to review one of the greatest Russian novels of all time. Some would even say one of the greatest, Russian or otherwise, but that won’t stop me. I’m joining the chorus of readers who finished this 800-and-something page novel down on their hands and knees, reverent not towards some God as Tolstoy would like but towards his words, towards his attention to the gesture. If Anna comes alive before you it’s in every glimpse, every brush of the hand, every gentle touch that is accounted for. I began 2024 enthralled by this novel, reading from morning to night in a way that I haven’t in years. I also developed an interest in acquiring furs, jewels and other adornments. In the words of a friend: Anna Karenina is like reading the most delicious gossip around. The thrill of a whisper, or falling in love.
Taylor Mooney on All Hookers Go to Heaven by Angel B H in 2024
This novel tells the story of Magdelena, who, when we meet her, is a teen growing up in an Evangelical Christian family in THE ANNAPOLIS VALLEY. Can you believe it?! This is an incredibly important piece of CanCon. She struggles to reconcile her queerness with her religious upbringing, and her search leads her to Montréal (a quintessential experience for so many gay Maritimers!!!). Once in La Belle Province, Magdelena becomes enmeshed in the pursuit of money and unholiness. She lives up to her biblical namesake by taking a job at a stripclub called Supersexe, and then begins to pursue opportunities in her newfound career abroad, from New Orleans to Berlin to Australia. The book reads like a series of vignettes, some of notable clients, but more of the nuanced and influential friendships she makes with fellow sex workers along the way. This book is VERY funny, very smart, very tender, and very sweet. It explores influential female friendships and the oppression of work and money, while contextualizing sex work in broader discussions of power and inequality.
Greg Conway on On the Calculation of Volume I & II in 2024
The book starts on November 18th. For antique bookseller Tara Selter, this is the 121st consecutive November 18th. This is a groundhog day novel which was just released in English two weeks ago after critical and commercial success in Denmark. Balle shines when Tara and the time-fractured relationship with her husband becomes a vast exploration of the blurred definitions of love, distance, memory and time. The first two books, to me, are the most exciting literary release and discovery of 2024- I patiently wait for the entire septology to be translated. For fans of Lucy Ellman, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Annie Ernaux and Marcel Proust.