Matt's Books and Music

As I was looking at my Bookish Hall of Fame this year, what was more interesting to me than how my 2023 reads would fare was what kind of changes I’d discover amongst the books already in the Hall. Here’s a quick recap of the titles with the biggest jumps or falls in the list.

(Note on ‘relative’ increases and decreases: The overall change is about the number in the list. The ‘relative’ change is about how it compares to other titles from the previous list. So for example, if a book goes down 3 places overall, but there are 12 new titles ahead of it, that means it actually increased 9 places compared to the previous year’s list. So this is a helpful measurement for how my perceptions of a book have changed year over year.)

5 Biggest Falls

• 50 places (48→98): Marrying the Ketchups by Jennifer Close (2022): I really loved this 2022 read, but its ‘of the moment’ feeling and lightly comedic writing meant that it’s not surprising that it took a fall in its second year. This was a great reading experience and that inflated it in my estimation in its first year, but it came back down to earth in year two. I’m so glad it managed to stay in the top 100 though! There were 27 new entries above it, so it lost 23 ‘real’ places relative to books on last year’s list.
• 46 places (41→87): No Great Mischief, by Alistair McLeod (1999 🇨🇦)
• 45 places (35→80): All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews (2014 🇨🇦)These are two amazing Can-Lit titles that took a bit of a tumble this year but were still comfortably within the top 100. There’s no great mystery here, just a case of certain books aging better in my memory than others. It will be interesting to see whether they settle here in the 80s next year, whether they rebound, or whether they get bumped entirely.
• 37 places (46→83) Husband Material, by Alexis Hall (2022)
• 37 places (57 → 94) The Guncle, by Steven Rowley (2021)These are two great pieces of light queer fiction that suffered from my overall slight movement away from ‘genre’ fiction in this year’s list. They are both without a doubt among my favourite books, but their place among ‘the best’ is a bit shaky in comparison to some of the heftier titles on the list.

5 Biggest Rises

Because there were 29 new entries this year, it was very hard for books that made last year’s list to gain places this year. But a few managed to do just that, and three of them were in the top 32 books overall! Here are some of the biggest winners relative to last year’s list:

• 2 places (33→31, but 12 places relative to the 2023 list): Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (2012)All three of Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy fared pretty well on this year’s list. Most surprising is that my favourite among them climbed 12 places compared to other 2023 HOF titles and improved to number 31 overall. I think this is a situation where the more distance I have from this series, the more impressive it becomes. This had an incredibly high degree of difficulty and she completely smashed it.
• 3 places (20→17, but 6 places relative to the 2023 list): The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1879)This book has been among my absolute favourites for twenty years now, so this increase is more about the vicissitudes of how I felt about other books more than a change in my feelings about it. An all-time classic of human genius, I’m happy to see it still be so high on my list in 2024.
• 4 places (18→14, 7 places relative to the 2023 list): Home, by Marilynne Robinson (2008). This sequel to Gilead (or ‘side-quel’ since it takes place at the same time as the earlier book) continues to impress me more and more as time goes by.
• 4 places (79→75, 25 places relative to the 2023 list): Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, by JK Rowling (1997). I was surprised how well this one fared, not just because of how complicated a figure Rowling has become over the past few years, but also because of the general trend for ‘genre’ fiction to fall in this year’s list. I think it did well because of just how important it was as a cultural moment, getting a generation to read, and setting up one of the most enduring fantasy universes and fandoms around.
• 6 places (64→58, 23 places relative to the 2023 list): Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi (2016): It was a pleasant surprise to see this move up on this year’s list. It’s not only a beautiful novel, but also an important one. And, in a year when novels by Black authors didn’t hit quite as hard for me as they normally do (none of the 2024 new entries into this year’s Hall of Fame were by Black authors), it was great to see this one thriving.
• 16 (!) places (66→50, 31 places relative to the 2023 list): Not Wanted on the Voyage, by Timothy Findley (1984 🇨🇦). I read this book in 2016, and it hadn’t really changed much in my estimation in the years since, so this jump was a big surprise. I think part of it could be that for a long time this was the only title by Findley that I liked, but I really enjoyed three books by him that I read this year. So it could be a case of ‘rising tides’ with Findley as an author. But also, having seen a lot of pointless myth retellings over the past few years, the audacity and point-of-view of this one stands out all the more.

Tomorrow, in the last Hall of Fame post for this year, I’ll talk about the new entries.