In 2024, I read 48 books, two books short of my goal for the year. I could have reached 50 books if I'd picked a few lighter reads in the final couple of weeks of the year but that felt like an empty road to my goal. My motivation for setting a reading challenge in the first place was mostly to consume a wider variety of books, not obtain a particular number per se, and hitting close to 50 definitely accomplished this.
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen was one of the books I picked up at the end of the year. Coming in at 500 pages, although highly readable, it's packed with historical, cultural and philosophical references that I didn't want to skim. It's a first-person story of "a man of two faces": a Vietnamese army captain and communist spy. The natural duality inherent in the life of a spy is a theme that follows the narrator through opposing political, cultural and moral events and landscapes.
One of the things I enjoyed most about the book was how Nguyen mirrors the tumultuous, blood-thirsty events of the North-South Vietnam war, the latter communist and the former republican — a then colony of the French union — in the narrator's personal combat with not only their obvious subterfuge but their mixed heritage and identity, loyalty to their childhood friends who have grown up to be on very different sides of the revolution, and their dysfunctional relationships. The interweaving of a highly personal journey with the explanation of how colonisation and war tore apart Vietnamese lives and families, a topic I didn't know that much about, was very rewarding.
The events in the book culminate with the following insight:
[W]hile nothing is more precious than than independence and freedom, nothing is more precious than independence and freedom!
I don't think I'm spoiling much by including this quote. A sign of a good book, for me, is one that sticks with me afterwards, one that might be frustrating because I don't feel like I 100% understood every theme or choice the author took, but yet I don't feel satisfied to just forget and move on. The quote above is what has stuck with me from this book.