Timothy Moriarty's 3 favorite reads in 2024

• 2023
• 2024

I was enthralled by this book because it seems to pull off the impossible: it feels historically accurate and utterly alien, yet it’s perfectly clear what is happening most of the time – there’s at least one hallucinatory passage that deliriously rattled my brain. It is rich in description yet never plods. It chronicles the sometimes-bumbling trek of Hernan Cortes and his Spanish Conquistadores to the center of the Aztec Empire in 1521. What follows are a clash of cultures, a sharing of knowledge and a struggle for power amid hilarious misunderstandings and multiple tragedies. Authentic yet irreverent, poetic yet vulgar, this is the kind of historical novel I treasure.

It’s magic, that’s the only conclusion I can reach. A conjuror’s trick. How can a tale of a woman and her dog move me in ways I cannot adequately express? Because this thin, enthralling novel is not simple: When the narrator’s friend commits suicide, she reluctantly takes custody of his ginormous great Dane. The relationship of dog and woman blossoms, and inspires long, fascinating ruminations about life, death, sex, good vs. evil, relationships, work, craft, obsession, all of it addressed to “you”, meaning her friend, the suicide. It is intimate, specific, relatable, moving, and thoroughly thought-provoking. Bonus for the literary set: there’s a forehead-smacking modernist twist two-thirds of the way through. Altogether marvelous.

I love the way this well-written, propulsive novel manages to elevate mighty Achilles while also humanizing him. He’s an inspiration to his legions, larger than life to the point of strutting blowhard, brutal to the point of sadism, cunning as a snake…but also tender, thoughtful. Same for the “Gods.” Athena, Zeus, Thetis, Aphrodite -- they’re all here: petty, fumbling, overbearing, jealous, plotting to protect what’s important to them, or staying far away just to see what happens. Narrated by a young man who becomes Achilles’ best friend-then-lover in their adolescence, we follow the lead-up to the siege of Troy, and its aftermath. The ancient world is vividly, viscerally drawn. You feel the grit, the stink of it. Author Miller brings Mt. Olympus down to earth.