A Few Pleasures of 2024
by Kristin King
I inhaled The Melancholy of Untold History by Minsoo Kang. It was marvelously simple in appearance, but complex in structure, emotion, and intellect. Kang interweaves four connected narratives from different millennia: a myth about four gods, the misfortune that befalls a storyteller, a political intrigue, and a bittersweet relationship between a grieving historian and his colleague. The stories connect backward and forward in time, and events in one story shed new light on all the others. I read each new connection with growing delight. Kang is a history professor and the son of a diplomat, with a love of rigorously fact-checked historical study and an equal but opposing love of inventing stories. As he explains, “What I ended up doing is I created an entire fictional country that greatly resembles China, but it also has elements of it from Korea, Mongolia, Manchuria and so on.” (https://blogs.umsl.edu/news/2024/09/16/minsoo-kang-publishes-debut-novel/) The land may be fictional, but it reveals a deep understanding of history, politics, and people. So it’s an accurate history of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. If you’re off on a trip to the uncertainty of 2025, be prepared. Pack this book.
The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznik was a surprise find this year. I came home in the pouring rain one day to find it standing up in our rockery, undamaged, without its cover. I put out a sign asking if someone had lost their book. The next day, the cover was there in the rockery. It was a big book, and I don’t have the space, so I put it in a nearby Little Free Library. A few more days passed, and the book kept staring at me. I gave up, took it home, and read it. Magical. It demands to be read on its own terms, not only as a book, but also as a silent film. A boy lives in a train station winding the clocks and stealing clockwork mechanisms, and then . . . well, the book is big and I don’t have space, but I can’t give it up. The moral of the story: beware of books you find in rockeries.
I reread Escape to Witch Mountain by Alexander Key this year because it left a big impression when I was a child with undiagnosed autism. Two children lose their caregiver and are sent to a foster home, where they try and fail to mask their differences, like hyper-empathy and mutism. This opens them up to bullying and violence and starts them off on a journey to find out what they are and where they belong. I will give a content warning for the ignorant use of a racial slur for the Roma people, which marred an important scene. Aside from that, the book felt incredibly validating, both then and now.
Doctor Who kicked off last year with the superb Ncuti Gatwa showing up in his underwear. That’s the best-dressed any Doctor has been after their regeneration! He is also the most emotionally mature Doctor so far, able to cry openly when sad and to explain complex emotional difficulties to his traveling companions. Many of the episodes were madcap fun, and some were utterly heartbreaking. Unfortunately, Disney acquired international distribution rights to Doctor Who in 2022, and while the corporation doesn’t have direct control over the show, I’ve noticed what seems like a Disney-flavored aesthetic, with too much showiness and too much mandatory happiness at times. I’m apprehensive at what’s to come.
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