June Superlatives, 2023

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, which I reviewed here. This brutal near-future novel about incarcerated people who are forced to fight to the death for audiences’ entertainment is superb, and totally fulfils the promise of the best stories in Adjei-Brenyah’s first publication, Friday Black. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review. It’s out in the UK on July 13th.

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was…

… The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke. My major problem with this book was simple; I’d expected a wider overview of chronic illness in modern society, along the lines of Suzanne O’Sullivan’s The Sleeping Beauties, which deals with functional neurological disorder, but I got a quasi-memoir of O’Rourke’s life with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, POTS, Lyme disease and thyroiditis, and the ways she has tried to make herself better. O’Rourke does try to link her own experiences to broader social commentary, but the links often feel clunky, partly because her experiences are so exceptional (she seems to have unlimited money and time to try every treatment under the sun). And I was uncomfortable with her determination to preserve a neat line between mental and physical illness, which suggested that her experiences of chronic illness would be less ‘real’ if they were ‘all in her head’, and that anxiety and depression can’t be debilitating. Disappointing.

The Other Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi, which, in any other month that didn’t contain Chain-Gang All-Stars, would have been UP THERE. At first glance, The Centre sounds like one of the many zeitgeisty novels that are about at the moment, novels with gimmicky premises like ‘what if all feminists had to live in submarines’. Its blurb promises the story of a British-Pakistani translator, Anisa, who is introduced to the exclusive, secretive Centre, where you can learn any language in two weeks. Anisa, who speaks English and Urdu alongside some French, currently spends her time writing subtitles for Bollywood films, and thinks that truly mastering a European language like German will see her recognised as the ‘serious translator’ she desires to be. The Centre, however, is so much more than its grabby concept. It’s a beautiful, thoughtful novel about how we devour that which we most want, how eating up things in this way is taken as a sign of respect, and how doing this often leaves us hungry. My full review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review. It’s out in the UK on July 6th.

The Book I Read In The Most Appropriate Location This Month Was…

… The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr, which I read on a train from NYC to Toronto. In the late 1920s, Baxter, a gay black man, works on a Canadian passenger train as a porter, embarking upon mammoth several-day journeys that criss-cross the country. The first third of this novel, which won the Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Carol Shields, is superb. Mayr takes us entirely into Baxter’s reality, as he struggles not to earn demerits for minor infractions, quashes his sexuality and starts to hallucinate through sleep deprivation. I especially enjoyed the way he devours pulp science fiction through the pages of Weird Tales, although gruesome stories about cursed Egyptian scarabs devouring explorers from within don’t help when he’s already started seeing things. But, much like a long train journey, The Sleeping Car Porter becomes a bit wearisome from then on. The social intrigues with the white passengers Baxter has to serve feel like a distraction, and even the evocation of his interiority starts to become repetitive. While this certainly made me empathise even more with Baxter’s tortuous working conditions, it didn’t help me engage with the novel. And, for a book that isn’t afraid to skirt the edges of realism, the ending felt much too neat.  I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

The Weirdest Book I Read This Month Was…

… Translation State by Ann Leckie. This is such a bizarre book: it’s basically a warm, cozy found-family story about beings that devour and vivisect each other and have no respect for human ideas about physical boundaries, as if Becky Chambers had rewritten the protomolecule bits of James SA Corey’s Expanse series. I picked Translation State up because I loved Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice trilogy, and this is set in the same universe, although the Imperial Radch is not central. Instead, we follow three characters who live outside the Radch: Enae, older, at a loose end after the loss of hir grandmother; Reet, an adopted man who has never quite fit into society, bedevilled by strange urges; and Qven, a juvenile Presger translator who is kept with their own kind for other species’ safety, but is horrified by the behaviour of their peers. I was absolutely riveted by Qven’s story, and ultimately by the way it interweaves with Reet’s. Sadly, the last third or so of this book trailed off a bit for me, when it becomes a more traditional, action-orientated narrative; I preferred the discussions of identity that came earlier. I wasn’t sure what the purpose of Enae’s character was; the story is so obviously focused on Reet and Qven that hir narrative felt like a distraction. Also, I could never quite square the almost childlike telling of this story with the bizarre creepiness of the Presger and their Translators – I want to know more, but I also really don’t!

A side note: I was a little disappointed by how gender is handled in this novel compared with the original Ancillary Justice trilogy, although Leckie makes it clear that gender still functions in the same way in the Radch and these characters understand gender differently because they live outside the Radch. All three protagonists choose their own gender identities, with Enae and Qven using neopronouns; this lines up much more squarely with how we understand gender in our world than the system used in the Ancillary Justice novels, which I found much more challenging, in a good way. Nevertheless, this book doesn’t overwrite the previous books, and as it is meant to be simpler and ‘cozier’, I guess it made sense to default to chosen gender identities as a part of how these characters shape their own destinies outside state definitions. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

The Book That Felt Most Relevant This Month Was…

… The List by Yomi Adegoke. Nigerian-British Ola is a journalist on the trendy, consciously feminist Womxxxn magazine (white editor Frankie admits she saw ‘womxn’ on Twitter and thought it sounded cool; she isn’t quite sure how to say it, but has leant in by ‘declaring it was pronounced ‘Wo-minx’ in a bid to encourage women to embrace their “inner minx”.’) Ola’s fiance, Ghanaian-British Michael, is an influencer who’s just started a new job at CuRated, a company that needs to prove they aren’t entirely staffed by white people. When Michael’s name appears on The List, a list of anonymous accusations against famous or semi-famous men, Ola is horrified. Can she believe Michael when he says there’s no truth to the accusations? Should she? While I warmed to Ola as a character and believed in her relationship with Michael, this novel is undercut by a final twist that offers too neat a solution to its central dilemma, and forecloses some of the interesting questions that it does raise. (Also, it has one of the worst covers I’ve seen for a long time.) My full review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review. It’s out in the UK on July 20th.

The Novel I Most Wanted To Like More This Month Was…

… Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano. It’s hard not to warm at least a little to this Chicago-set family saga that focuses on the four Padavano sisters, Julia, Sylvie, Emeline and Cecelia, their parents Rose and Charlie, and the man who marries into their family, William. Hello Beautiful is loosely inspired by Little Women, but, although each of the Padavano sisters pretty neatly lines up with one of the March sisters, character-wise, they don’t follow the same trajectories, which avoids the plot becoming predictable. What Ann Napolitano takes and runs with from Little Women is also my favourite thing about the novel: its focus on how strong the relationships between sisters can be, and how they may be at least as meaningful as any romantic or sexual relationship. I loved how Hello Beautiful explored alternative ways of living and mothering beyond the traditional nuclear family unit, and how the sisters centred each other in their lives. It’s a shame, therefore, that it’s a bit of a potboiler, definitely better than Claire Lombardo’s The Most Fun We Ever Had (which is also set in Chicago and follows the lives of four sisters and the man who interrupts their plans), principally because the characters are much more likeable, but in the same kind of category. We’re told that the sisters are incredibly close, with a complex network of references and in-jokes that spans their childhood and adolescence, but we don’t actually get to see a lot of it in terms of how they interact with each other – which is sad, because there was certainly the potential here to tell a much more haunting and moving story about sisterhood.  My full review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review. It’s out in the UK on July 13th.

What books stood out to you this month? What were your favourite and least favourite reads? And have you read anything from my list?