opinionated commentary on literary matters - from the complete review

The Literary Saloon Archive

1 - 3 January 2025

1 January: 2024 translations from ... Chinese - Indian languages | 2025
2 January: Forthcoming in translation from ... Arabic | Year-in-reading posts | 2024: the year in review copies
3 January: Bestselling in 2024 in ... France | Transit Books profile | Most Popular Reviews - 2024 | The Proof of My Innocence review

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       Bestselling in 2024 in ... France

       At ActuaLitté Clotilde Martin reports on the bestselling titles and authors in Farnce in 2024, in Bilan : Quel auteur aura vendu le plus de livres en 2024 ? with both unit-sales numbers and turnover.
       As anticipated -- see my previous mention -- Anna Stuart's The Midwife of Berlin beat out all the local boys, selling 499,639 copies -- some 75,000 more than Joël Dicker's latest, Un animal sauvage, and two by Guillaume Musso. Kamel Daoud's prix Goncourt-winner Houris came in fifth, with 391,085 copies sold, while Gaël Faye's prix Renaudot-winner Jacaranda came in seventh, with 344,187 copies sold. There was only one other book in translation in the top ten -- Freida McFadden's The Housemaid's Secret.
       The title that apparently took in the most money was the Joël Dicker -- €9,624,465 (though given its list price, I'm not sure why the Anna Stuart didn't top the table).
       As far as authors go, Guillaume Musso rules the day (well, year), with the two books he published last year selling 806,992 copies, and selling for €12.46 million.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Transit Books profile

       At Berkeleyside Joanne Furio profiles The indie Berkeley publisher with a worldwide view -- Transit Books
       Among others, they've published several works by Nobel laureate Jon Fosse -- e.g. A Shining -- and/but: "Fosse's books have sold around 65,000 copies".

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Most Popular Reviews - 2024

       The most-viewed reviews at the complete review in 2024 were:

1. Poor Things, Alasdair Gray
2. The Dilemma of a Ghost, Ama Ata Aidoo
3. Voice of a Dream, Glaydah Namukasa
4. Bird in a Cage, Frédéric Dard
5. The Face of Another, Abe Kobo
6. Trilogy, Jon Fosse
7. The Golden Fortress, Satyajit Ray
8. The Empusium, Olga Tokarczuk
9. Noli Me Tangere, José Rizal
10. The Legends of Khasak, O.V.Vijayan
11. A Play of Giants, Wole Soyinka
12. El Filibusterismo, José Rizal
13. The Secret Hours, Mick Herron
14. The Cairo Trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz
15. The Lost Steps, Alejo Carpentier

       In 2023 only two titles reviewed in 2023 made the top 50; in 2024 there were 14 reviews posted during the course of the year that cracked the top 50 -- yet more proof that readers aren't finding the backlist as readily as they used to (via Google search, which now buries the review-pages from the complete review way down on their search results).
       Similarly, turnover was enormous: in 2023 only 18 reviews that hadn't been in the previous top 50 made it on the 2023-list (in 2022: 21), but in 2024 more than two-thirds (34) of the top 50 were different from the previous year's top 50 .
       Continued interest in the movie-version propelled Poor Things to the top of the list, while Olga Tokarczuk's Nobel win obviously made for great interest in the most recent book of hers to appear in English, pushing it into the top ten.

       See also all the top 50 reviews of 2024.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       The Proof of My Innocence review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Jonathan Coe's latest, The Proof of My Innocence.
       This is out in the UK (and Italy ...), but American readers will have to wait until April.

       This is the sixteenth work by Coe under review at the site -- and, yes, a good start to the new year.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       Forthcoming in translation from ... Arabic

       ArabLit has a useful look at what we can expect of Arabic Lit in Translation: Forthcoming in 2025.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Year-in-reading posts

       The Millions posted their A Year in Reading-series last month, with a nice variety of contributors, and there are also many other 2024-in-reading posts to be found elsewhere; here a selection of some I have come across which might be of interest:

• A few sentences on every book I read or reread in 2024 at Biblioklept
• Every book I read in 2024, with commentary by Elisa Gabbert
  
  
• 2024: A Year's Reading at irnewtonwrites
• Rounding up the year with some thoughts on my 2024 reading ! at Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings
• My reading year 2024 by Austin Kleon
• Year in Reading 2024. at Languagehat
• Looking back at a year of reading: 2024 edition at roughghosts
• 2024 reading at Stochastic Bookmark
  
  
• Novel Readings 2024: Part I and Part II by Rohan Maitzen
• End of year review 2024 at The Modern Novel
• The 2024 Tony's Reading List Awards at Tony's Reading List

       I can't offer much of a reading summing-up for the year -- most of my reading made at least some impression on me, in one way or another, and there's little I regret reading/reviewing (not that there weren't a lot of books that I tossed aside after a few (or, in a handful of cases, a few hundred) pages) so basically the 121 reviews posted over the course of the year at this site sums it up ..... There were quite a few very good books among them too, but the *best* book I read this year -- Alejo Carpentier's The Lost Steps -- was actually a re-read (albeit in a new translation) and the book that engaged me most fully was -- quite the cheat here -- the one I finally finished and (self-)published, Salome in Graz.
       It was a year in which I didn't read/review a single 1000-pager -- indeed, only a single reviewed title was more than 750 pages (compared to eight in 2023) --, suggesting I was slightly (or even considerably) less ambitious than usual (as does the smaller number of books tackled overall).
       So: it was a good year, but not a real stand-out one, with no real stand-out books or newly-discovered authors to dig into.
       Maybe this year .....

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       2024: the year in review copies

       The first of the site-statistic round-ups: review copies !

       As with everything else, it was also a down year regarding getting books: in 2024, 234 books were acquired (down 33.14% from the 350 acquired in 2023), of which 199 were review copies (down 27.90% from the 276 received in 2023); see the full list of Books Received and Acquired 2024. The 199 review copies are the fewest in two decades -- since 2004, when 179 were received; in 2005 it was already up to 299 .....
       (Note that I could get lots more -- total number-wise --, because I seem to receive more offers from publicists than ever, but very few of these are offers for books that I might actually want to read and review. Publishers -- including those with desirable titles -- increasingly also push e-versions, which I do sometimes download (but don't count towards the total review-copy tally as I rarely manage to do more than glance at them; I still find it almost impossible to read, much less review from e-formats -- I did not review any titles from e-versions in all of 2024 (or, for that matter, 2023 ...)). Fewer publishers send me their books without asking, and I have also become somewhat more selective in what titles I specifically request -- and all in all this all adds up to: fewer review copies.)

       The publishers providing the most review copies to the complete review in 2024 were:

• New York Review Books: 21 (2023: 25)
• Harvard University Press: 9 (26)
• Columbia University Press: 8 (3)
• Dedalus 8 (18)
• Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 8 (4)
• Open Letter: 8 (13)
• Pushkin Press: 8 (8)
• Sublunary Editions: 7 (3)
• Wakefield Press: 7 (3)
• Yale University Press: 7 (9)

       As usual, independent and university presses dominated -- with New York Review Books impressively ahead of the pack, sending me most of what they publish. Another twenty-one publishers sent at least two books -- though only one of those was from one of the 'big five' publishers/imprints (Alfred A. Knopf, with 3 (up from 2 in 2023)).
       Among publishers I got few or no review copies from are Penguin Classics (1, compared to 7 in 2023), and two publishers specializing in literature in translation who have been near the top providers in many previous years: AmazonCrossing (whose catalogue/offerings I admit I have a tough time keeping track of) and Dalkey Archive Press (who didn't bring out much in 2024 -- though I would have liked to have seen Kaga Otohiko's Marshland; see their publicity page), from neither of whom I saw anything in 2024.

       As of 31 December 2024 I had reviewed 65 of the 199 review copies I received -- 32.66%, considerably above the historic average. (In 2023, the year-end total was 75 out of 276 (27.17%); by year-end 2024 an additional 16 titles from that batch had been reviewed, bringing the percentage up to 32.97; old review copies do continue to get reviewed, often long after I receive them -- in 2024 the longest-delayed review was of a title received in 2006, appearing 6380 days after the review copy was received .....)

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       2024 translations from ... Chinese

       At Paper Republic they have their 2024 Roll-Call of Chinese Literature in English Translation -- a useful overview.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       2024 translations from ... Indian languages

       At Scroll.in they collect Chittajit Mitra's tweets, in A reader compiled a list of 103 Indian language books translated into English and published in 2024 -- a bit unwieldy, in this presentation, but also a useful resource.
       It's frustrating, however, how few of these are readily available/distributed in the US/UK .....

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       2025

       The complete review celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2024, so that was ... something. And, yes, it's back (or rather continuing) in 2025 -- puttering along as always

       For a variety of reasons, reviewing slowed down some over the course of the year -- only 121 titles were reviewed -- and that slower pace will continue into 2025 (though hopefully things will pick up at some point later in the year; long-term, I should get fully back on track eventually -- but it'll be a while). But on the whole don't expect much change at the site ..... (I don't really need to say that, do I ? Longtime readers are surely well aware that I'm not really big on change .....)
       The quality of Google's search results -- still the only ones that matter -- has degraded further (to really quite abysmal levels), and they've been terrible for the site (both in terms of finding pages to link to as well as in listing (usually far, far down on results-lists) complete review-pages) for all of 2024, and I don't see that changing (which means less exposure for, less traffic to, less interest in, less engagement with the site). Among the consequences is a shift in the percentage of users finding their way to the site via the backlist (searching for information about specific titles) to those coming, as it were, through the front door -- i.e. checking in on 'what's new at the complete review' or via the postings about new reviews at this Literary Saloon -- a shift back to the way traffic came to the site in its earliest days ..... (This has led to a great decline in total traffic, since the number of regular users checking on 'what's new' and regularly visiting the Literary Saloon hasn't changed significantly in ages, while the occasional visitor coming via the backlist -- making up the bulk of traffic for at least the past fifteen years -- has largely been lost.)
       All the (fairly depressing) 2024 site statistics will be up in a few days.

       While 2025 promises political chaos (and everything that goes with it) pretty much everywhere, I remain hopeful that at least the reading will be good: the pile of books (old and new) I'm looking forward to is already looking good, and I feel very optimistic that I'll be able to cover a nice selection of interesting titles. (Logistics will be an issue for a while, but the reading and reviewing will get done !)

       Glad to see you're here for (at least the start of) a new year as well -- and I wish all my readers a great new year, filled with an abundance of good books and much good reading !

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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