I’ve been keeping a list of everything I’ve read and watched all my adult life. I was surprised to learn how few people do this. I go a little further than most people, in that I write a nightly diary – an entirely factual list of what I did (including things like steps walked, minutes cycled, lengths swum, etc), bordering on the sort of thing favoured by people in the Quantified Self movement. I don’t doubt that one can go too gamifyingly, alienatingly far in that direction, but I can’t deny that it helps me do more of the things I like, and to observe patterns that I need to make a conscious effort to correct – e.g. to find ways of incorporating more trips to the pool and cinema even now that I no longer live in London with the BFI and Oasis pool a short bus ride away.
Film
This was the year I finally watched Chariots of Fire (1981), which was considerably less kitschy and preachy than I had feared, and Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), which was much more ambiguous than I had thought. I was also pleasantly surprised, after years of hearing them traduced, at how clever and consistently engaging GoldenEye (1995) and Notting Hill (1999) were.
Of the new films I watched this year, the three I admired unreservedly were Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera and Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light. Here were some other 2024 (or late 2023) films that I admired, but with reservations:
Alexander Payne, The Holdovers
Yorgos Lanthimos, Poor Things
Justine Triet, Anatomy of a Fall
Cord Jefferson, American Fiction
Jonathan Glazer, The Zone of Interest
Luca Guadagnino, Queer
Tim Mielants, Small Things Like These
Ellen Kuras, Lee
The two most disappointing films – that is to say, that promised most and delivered least – were Edward Berger’s Conclave (I enjoyed this response to it by Dan Hitchens) and Anand Tucker’s The Critic. Both films have strong performances in the leading parts by great lions of British acting – Ralph Fiennes in Conclave and Ian McKellen in The Critic – but both appear afraid to touch the deep and difficult questions they raise, even more so than the books they are adapted from (Robert Harris’s Conclave and Anthony Quinn’s Curtain Call). McKellen’s sneering performance as the drama critic of the title made me think fondly of my friend the philosopher and opera critic Michael Tanner, who died earlier this year (obituary); he had much of the venom of the McKellen character but an integrity, warmth and seriousness that character is eventually shown to lack.
I should also like to recommend two new Indian films, both on the border between the mainstream and the arthouse, that I admired this year. Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies is set somewhere in the rural Hindi belt of northern/central India and picks up on an intriguing premise: what if a man walked off, by accident, with the wrong (veiled) bride, who don’t even know the name of her husband’s village and won’t, for deep-rooted cultural reasons, even say his name out loud? And what if this happened in 2001, a while before mobile phones came to be widely available even in rural India? The story is played for the most part as comedy, but with the possibility of a horrific denouement always dangling at the edge of the characters’ (and audience’s) consciousness.
Sandhya Suri’s Santosh is a darker film, set in a darker version of the same terrain. The Santosh of the title is a 28-year-old widow who is offered her late husband’s job as a police officer, and immediately finds her integrity and life at risk in the course of an investigation of a young girl’s murder.
Both films were selected for the Best International Feature Oscar (Santosh by the UK and Laapataa Ladies by India), though only the former has made it to the shortlist – the Academy predictably going for the obviously serious over the superficially comic. I saw Santosh in Paris, in an innocuous UGC where it happened to be playing after it had been screened at Cannes. It appears that it will finally be shown in the UK next year, and I recommend it strongly.
Both films concern two of my greatest ethical-political preoccupations: the fate of liberal values (procedural justice, autonomy) in social worlds disdain them, and the significance of (‘street-level’) bureaucratic discretion, and they have these themes in common with another admirable film that was also the Indian entry for the Oscar in 2017, Amit Masurkar’s Newton, about an upright (and somewhat uptight) clerk seconded on election duty to a Maoist stronghold.
Books
Of the eight new books I reviewed this year, mostly favourably, the only one I am likely to read again was Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings. Reading him is a reminder of how culpably mediocre – stale, unmemorable – the prose of most contemporary literary fiction in English is. I also admired, sporadically, Vinson Cunningham’s Great Expectations, seeing the Obama campaign from 2008 through the eyes of a junior fund-raising (what Americans call a) staffer.
Of the many books I read in preparation for recording episodes of my literary podcast this year, the one I admired most was Magda Szabó’s The Door (1987). Two classics I read for the first time, and thought fully deserved their celebrity, were John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963) and his almost namesake J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country (1980). Like many others, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Le Carré’s son Nick Harkaway’s resurrection of George Smiley is much much better than anyone had any right to expect: Karla’s Choice. Also like everyone else, I have slowly been catching up on Mick Herron’s Slough House series (I’ve just finished Joe Country). I’m not sure it isn’t worth just waiting for the (faithful) television adaptation, but I didn’t feel like waiting another year.
Two good works of political theory published this year:
Robert Talisse, Civic Solitude: Why Democracy Needs Distance
Alexander Lefebvre, Liberalism as a Way of Life
And two slightly older pieces of non-fiction I only go to this year:
Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (2023)
William Deresiewicz, The Death of the Artist (2020)
Friends of mine who subscribe to this newsletter: do please write in with your own news / reading / watching. I hope you’ve all had a good Christmas and I wish you the best for the new year.