October Superlatives, 2023 #SpooktasticReads

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… Elissa Washuta’s White Magic. This stunning collection from my 2023 reading list was sold as a Native woman reflecting on the appropriation of Indigenous magical traditions by ‘Instagram witches’ but is really about intergenerational trauma, time and relationship with the land. Washuta brilliantly repeats and returns to different moments, physically encountering her past and future selves but also finding resonance in objects as well as in popular culture, from Twin Peaks to Oregon Trail to anti-drug public information adverts from the 90s. If you loved Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House, read this. In contrast: Jenn Ashworth’s Notes Made While Falling, another collection of autobiographical essays about trauma and alcoholism from my list, didn’t work for me at all – I found it simultaneously pretentiously academic and gratuitously explicit. Did not finish.

The Worst Book (That I Actually Finished) This Month Was…

… Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree. I don’t do ‘uplit’ but I honestly think I could be the right audience for ‘cozy fantasy’. I don’t care about plot, I love invented worlds you feel like you can snuggle into (though, given that I find the Scholomance cozy, maybe my tastes are a bit offbeat here) and while I am not the best fantasy reader, I usually get along with low-stakes, folktale-esque stories in the vein of Patricia C. Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles or the early books in Tamora Pierce’s Protector of the Small quartet. But as Legends and Lattes seems to be THE example of this sub-genre at the moment, maybe it isn’t for me. I thought this book was just about OK. In short, I think to make this sort of thing work you need really distinctive, loveable characters and worldbuilding that feels properly solid without being too complicated. Legends and Lattes’ cast are nice enough, and the romance is sweet, but I didn’t get attached to any of them, probably because, with the exception of Viv, the orc protagonist who decides to open a coffee shop, they’re all a bit one-note. It was the world, however, that made this drop over into ‘silly’ rather than ‘cozy’ for me. As Nataliya says in her review, this is just a book about somebody reinventing Starbucks*. It’s all too nudge-nudge-wink-wink: ooh, people hog tables doing their university work in fantasyland too! Wow, what if we wrote people’s names on mugs so they could take drinks away? There was a marked improvement in the last 40% or so, so I’d be willing to admit that this could’ve been a fun novella. But as I liked Becky Chambers’s A Psalm for the Wild-Built even less, I’m still holding out for my perfect cozy SFF read. Any suggestions?

*also, given that Charlie’s coffeehouse in Robin McKinley’s Sunshine exists, I don’t think I could ever get properly attached to any other magical coffee-making establishment

My Most Nostalgic Reread This Month Was…

L: The hardback library copy I originally read. R: the second-hand paperback copy I read this time.

… The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff. I have an incredibly vivid memory of first reading The Monsters of Templeton, back in the summer of 2008, when I was 21, just graduated from my undergrad degree and waiting to start my masters. In the meantime, I was having a miserable time working at Presto Pasties in Bath, which put me off pasties for life; on my lunch breaks, I would sit under the stone arches immediately next to the shop, which sits in the courtyard outside Bath Abbey, and read. I’d checked this novel out of the local library and immediately related to both Willie, our protagonist, who’s dropped out of her archaeology PhD and fled back to her home town of Templeton, and her mother Vi, who captured my imagination by boarding a Greyhound bus back to Templeton in her turn when she was seventeen. (For some reason, Vi ‘in the sun on a shuddering bus… deep in a voluptuous, open-mouthed sleep… having traveled from a mild San Francisco February into an upstate New York ice storm’ made a deep impression on me, an image of freedom and self-reliance). Despite having plans for my immediate future, I guess I, too, was wondering what’s next. Unsurprisingly, then, The Monsters of Templeton did not resonate with me in quite the same way this time round. While I still warmed to Willie, whose story is the right side of quirky, I found most of the historical interludes about her family tree tiresome. The mysterious monster found dead in Lake Glimmerglass is still fantastic, though. #LoveYourLibrary

(It was interesting to reread this right after reading Groff’s latest, The Vaster Wilds, as you can absolutely see how the seeds of that later, bleaker novel were already present in Groff’s mind. The Monsters of Templeton features brief snatches of narration from both eighteenth-century colonisers and from the colonised. And Marmaduke Temple, family patriarch, writes of how, in 1785, he ‘traveled into the vast and melancholy wilderness of New York.’)

The Book That Most Made Me Want To Play More Computer Games This Month Was…

… Critical Hits: Writers on Gaming and the Alternate Worlds We Inhabit ed. Carmen Maria Machado and J. Robert Lennon. I have intermittently played a few computer games throughout my life (mostly Diablo, Diablo II, The Sims and The Sims 4 – an interesting combination) but I’ve encountered them far more often in the pages of novels like Ready Player One, For The Win and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Nevertheless, I’m absolutely fascinated by their storytelling potential and in people’s emotional experiences with them, and, like all pop culture, how they weave themselves through our lives – and so I was excited by this collection of essays about digital gaming. In retrospect, Critical Hits starts so strongly that it was almost bound to be disappointing. Machado’s introduction is incredible, if nothing less than I would expect from the writer who dealt with pop culture so brilliantly in In The Dream House.

The first essay in this collection, Elissa Washuta’s ‘I Struggled A Long Time With Surviving’, is also fantastic. She retells the story of The Last of Us so movingly that I was totally captivated despite knowing very little about the game, linking it to her own experiences of chronic illness. Her White Magic, which I wrote about above, features an essay on Red Dead Redemption 2 that could easily have fit into this anthology, ‘In Him We Have Redemption Through This Blood’. And there are other strong essays in Critical Hits, although none quite so strong as these first two entries. Tony Tulathimutte’s ‘Clash Rules Everything Around Me’ is great on how some things, like gaming, are ranked as ‘a waste of time’ because they are seen as ‘something outside of the narrative of whatever you’ve called your real life, some menial and unproductive activity that doesn’t amass wealth, deepen your relationships and quality of life, or improve you. Something that makes time pass without changing anything else.’ Or in other words, a term that might encompass our deepest flow states and most important experiences, things that can’t be captured in the logic of capitalism because they are unproductive.

However, many of the other essays in this collection were forgettable and sometimes a bit frustrating: the writers are often content with pointing out problematic narratives in games without saying anything else, which is important work for reviews or articles, but I expected more from both these individual contributions and from this collection as a whole. My fuller review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this collection from the publisher for review. It’s out in the UK on 7th November.

The Best ‘Modern Noir’ Novel I Read This Month Was…

… Stay by Nicola Griffith. I’m never quite sure how to classify the Aud Torvingen novels, probably because they’re a kind of book I would never have picked up if they weren’t written by Nicola Griffith. A lot of reviews call them ‘modern noir’, so let’s go with that. As with the first book in this trilogy, The Blue Place, the draw here is not the familiar plot (bad guy needs to be stopped from people trafficking), but Aud herself, who remains a brilliant character study. She’s still most of the things she was in the first book – former police lieutenant, lesbian, six-foot tall martial arts practitioner, Norwegian-British-American, carpenter – but her social manipulation is dialled right down in this one, probably because she’s dealing with personal trauma. Instead, even more so than before, she prefers to solve problems with violence. Such a brilliant antidote to all the books like this I’ve read about troubled straight men, and, as ever, if Griffith wrote the back of a cereal packet I’d shoot out to buy it. Another classic early 00s cover, as well!

copyright macrovectorart from 123RF.com

I’m combining my October Superlatives with reviews of two books I read (or part-read) for Spooktastic Reads, which runs from 19th to 31st October, and focuses on ‘stories on the boundaries of fantasy and horror’.

The Best Spooky Collection of Short Stories I Read This Month Was…

… Never Have I Ever by Isabel Yap. This has been on my TBR for some time, principally because of its stunning cover. Many of Yap’s imaginative and evocative short stories draw from Filipino folklore. There’s dark here – from her take on the manananggal myth in ‘Good Girls’ to her brilliant evocation of the kind of urban legends that circulate in a girls’ school in ‘Have You Heard The One About Anamaria Marquez’ and ‘A Canticle For Lost Girls’. But there’s also a surprisingly joyful, queer short story, ‘A Spell for Foolish Hearts’, which I adored, despite my usual problems with cozy fantasy (see above). Yap is obviously a versatile writer, and here she also moves between stories that feel like pretty faithful folklore retellings (‘How To Swallow The Moon’) to stories inspired by contemporary superhero movies (‘Hurricane Heels (We Go Down Dancing)’). There were two kinds of story in this collection that worked less well for me. The two stories that engage with SF tropes (‘Syringe’ and ‘Milagroso’) felt a bit hackneyed. On the other end of the scale, there were a couple that drift into magical realism, becoming too mystical and vague for my liking (‘Only Unclench Your Hand’, ‘All The Best Of Dark and Bright’). But overall, this is such an impressive collection, and I loved the way that Yap used the language of her Manila girlhood, bits of Tagalog and Spanish slang, without feeling the need to explain it to the reader – when a term is crucial to the story, we’re given enough clues to work it out on her own. This is published by Small Beer Press, who also published one of my favourite short story collections of last year, Zen Cho’s Spirits Abroad, so I’ll need to watch out for more from them.

The #SpooktasticReads Book That Went Most Wrong For Me This Month Was…

… The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. A grad student called Zachary discovers a mysterious book that leads him to a magical library. This started brilliantly and I was immersed up until the point Zachary actually enters the library – even the snippets of lore and story, which felt a bit superfluous, were dark enough to add a pleasant chill. But after that, The Starless Sea got increasingly slow and increasingly twee, and the interweaving threads became more and more distracting. Made it about halfway through, but did not finish.

Did you take part in #SpooktasticReads? What were the best and worst books you read this October? And do any of these appeal to you?