Maiden, Mother, Space Crone

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of my favourite fiction writers of all time, but I was bitterly disappointed by Space Crone, a collection of some of her short non-fiction that is also bookended by two short stories. I think the editing was a problem here: frankly, this collection includes a lot of pieces that were clearly important and necessary when published but now don’t seem to be speaking to the zeitgeist. I wouldn’t complain about this if this was one of the collections Le Guin herself collected and published in her lifetime, but this was newly curated by So Mayer and Sarah Shin for Silver Press in 2023. Frankly, I was suspicious as soon as I read Mayer and Shin’s introduction, which felt old-fashionedly feminist in a bad way. The absolute least interesting thing about A Wizard of Earthsea and The Dispossessed is that they have male protagonists, especially as Ged and Shevek are deliberately written in opposition to the traditional heroic narrative, and yet we’re still told that it was an important change in Le Guin’s writing when she started centring women.

I also felt that selecting essays like ‘The Fisherwoman’s Daughter’ was a strange choice in 2023. When Le Guin wrote the essay back in 1988, she rightly challenged the then-prevalent idea that women can have ‘books or babies’ but not both, arguing that she herself was both a writer and a mother. But nowadays, after an absolute flood of literature on motherhood, both fiction and non-fiction, it can sometimes feel like things have swung the other way, that women are told that they have to become mothers to really tap into their creative powers. Absolutely fine if a woman feels, herself, that becoming a mother has made her a better writer – but I’ve also seen this claim carelessly generalised. When Le Guin quotes a passage on ‘the advantage of motherhood for a woman artist’, this was a vital corrective in 1988, but feels tone-deaf in 2023. (And where are the essays by men claiming that fatherhood has made them more intuitive artists?)

There are also parts of this essay I disagree with even when read in its historical context: Le Guin gives the impression that childless women have been accepted as artists but mothers have been excluded, but doesn’t seem to get the point that being a childless woman is not the same as being a man, and that women without children have been judged as freaks just as mothers have been judged as non-creative. When she writes, ‘motherhood, for any woman I know, simply means that she does everything everybody does plus bringing up the kids’, I was hugely frustrated. Le Guin’s positive intention here is clearly to say that being a mother doesn’t mean you can’t also be anything else you want, and I absolutely agree! But it devalues the hard, creative work of motherhood to suggest it takes up no space at all in somebody’s life, and it devalues the lives of women without children to suggest that they’re exactly the same as mothers’ lives with the motherhood bit missing. We have to accept that some women do choose not to have children to make more space in their life for other things, just as some people might choose not to go travelling, or not to have a demanding job, or not to make art.

The other pieces selected for this anthology confirmed my sense that it may be the editing that’s a problem here. Le Guin wrote so many wonderful, thoughtful, intelligent short stories, but ‘Sur’ (1982) is not one of them. It’s basically about a group of women explorers who go to the Antarctic and get to the South Pole before Roald Amundsen. Great! Go women! Why? The essay ‘Award and Gender’ (1999) makes important points about the gender biases of literary awards in 1999, but it’s now obviously out of date. Nicola Griffith has done good work on this more recently which shows that the problem has changed since Le Guin wrote: women are winning more awards, but only when they write about men. I also hated the titular essay ‘Space Crone’ (1976), which I think wants to valorise ‘ordinary’ women but just ends up feeling anti-intellectual. Other pieces are absolutely fine but feel like they are stating the obvious in this day and age, such as ‘Is Gender Necessary?’ (written in 1976, revised 1988 – the revisions are largely immaterial and the way they’re presented here makes it really difficult to read the text) and ‘On Genetic Determinism’ (2003).

I now can’t decide whether this was an especially badly edited anthology and I should risk seeking out more of Le Guin’s non-fiction, or whether I should cut my losses and stick to her fiction – especially as I found some of these pieces actively upsetting. Have you read any of Le Guin’s non-fiction? What did you think?

The Carol Shields Prize, 2024, and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, 2024: Dances, The Blue, Beautiful World & In Defence of the Act

I’m belatedly trying to read a few more of the titles that appealed to me from the Women’s Prize longlist before the shortlist announcement on 24th April, while finishing up my last Carol Shields Prize longlist review!

Carol Shields Longlist

Dances, which follows Cece, a young Black woman who becomes the first Black female principal at the New York City Ballet, is one of several novels on the Carol Shields Prize longlist that foreground a sister’s painful relationship with her rebellious, frequently absent brother/s (the other two are Brotherless Night and Between Two Moons). In Cece’s case, her older brother Paul, a talented visual artist, is the centre of her emotional world: he provided the encouragement and, initially, the financial backing for her to study ballet when her mother believed it to be a waste of time because of the innate racism of dance companies. But when the novel opens, he’s been missing for five years after becoming a drug addict. Now all Cece has left is her art.

The ballet books I devoured as a child always featured young white girls who were innately gifted and sailed relatively effortlessly to the top; in contrast, contemporary ballet books aimed at adults, with the very honourable exception of Meg Howrey’s The Cranes Dance, tend to play into Ambitious Women Meet Bad Ends, starring white women who invariably give up ballet because it is toxic and bad for them. Dances is a refreshing counter-balance. Nicole Cuffy explores Cece’s difficult relationship with ballet, her body, and the societal oppression she faces as a Black woman, but also lets her continue to love to dance. As Cece reflects, the relationship between her and ballet is fundamentally different because she is Black: ‘I was always so adamant about classical ballet. Not contemporary. Not jazz. A rebellion. An insistence that Black women can be ethereal too. That we don’t always have to be drawn in bold lines. Paul never drew me in bold lines. Always thin, intricate strokes, a precise kind of chaos’.  This is in some ways, a conventional novel, but it’s also quietly moving.

In my overall ranking of the longlist, I’d place this one sixth, below Brotherless Night but above Between Two Moons. I read it as a buddy read with Bookish Beck.

Thanks so much to Nicole Magas at Zgstories  for sourcing a free copy of this book from the publisher for me.

I’m not aiming to read the full Carol Shields Prize longlist this year, but I’ve selected nine titles that I do want to read. This is number nine. I’ve already read Birnam Wood, I Have Some Questions for You, Land of Milk and Honey, Loot, Brotherless Night, The Future, A Council of Dolls and Between Two Moons.

Women’s Prize Longlist

The Women’s Prize has shunned SF for much of its recent history. I think the last SF novel to be longlisted was Becky Chambers’s The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet back in 2014. So it’s absolutely typical that when the Prize finally nominates SF again, it’s a totally left-field choice – which is not to say that Karen Lord’s The Blue, Beautiful World is bad. Lord’s complex book, the third in a trilogy, is set on an Earth where it gradually dawns on both the reader and the characters that alien humanoid civilisations of different kinds are already among us. Many use virtual face technology to blend in, wearing a series of electronic masks, but there are also conscious spaceships, ‘intelligent leviathans’, that have infiltrated Earth’s oceans. Lord is interested both in how different alien factions try to manage the incorporation of Earth into a wider galactic civilisation and how humans themselves react to this. One major plot-line, therefore, focuses on Owen, a pop megastar who is actually from Alpha Pisces Austrini and is using his wealth and influence to manipulate people and corporations on Earth. Another focuses on a group of young people from across the globe who have been chosen to take part in what they think is a theoretical exercise in global diplomacy in a first contact scenario, but, it turns out, is actually all too real.

When Lord stays put on Earth, this book is original, thought-provoking and subtle, a bit reminiscent of Malka Older’s Infomocracy. Unfortunately, the brief glimpses we get of the alien civilisations outside Earth’s limits make them feel much more cartoonish, even though it’s clear they’ve been developed over the course of the first two books of this trilogy. The Romanesque names, the overblown pronouncements, the paint-by-numbers politics… perhaps this would have felt deeper had I read the first two, but I somehow doubt it. On a more meta level, I do wish the Women’s Prize hadn’t gone for this one, because it is exactly the sort of SF novel that will put off non-SF readers, and I just don’t think it’s a great fit for the Prize. So many other options… Nina Allan, Grace Curtis, Emily Tesh, or indeed the one I’d have picked, Naomi Alderman. Sigh. But SF fans, Lord is worth reading.

To be honest, I’m a bit upset. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that went so wrong, so quickly, after the three-quarters mark. What happened? Did Effie Black get scared off by her own daring? Did someone steal her MS, a la Yellowface, and quickly scribble out the most conventional ending they could think of given what had come before? So many questions.

In Defence of the Act is meant to be about an evolutionary psychobiologist, Jessica, exploring the ethics of suicide; her own childhood trauma leads her to secretly believe that there can be times when killing yourself is the right thing to do. After all, if her abusive dad had succeeded when he first attempted suicide, both she and her two siblings might be considerably less screwed up. Jessica’s research focuses on species of spiders where certain individuals kill themselves to ensure the furtherance of either their genes or those of their close relatives, so in this context, suicide can make sense from an evolutionary perspective. In Jessica’s own life, she follows the same rule, but flipped: she breaks up with girlfriend Jamie because she doesn’t believe she can ever have children because of the fear of becoming her father, but Jamie ought to fulfil her desire of becoming a mother: ‘because the world needs more people like her’.

Trouble is, the last quarter or so of this novel tosses all of these difficult questions out the window. It’s impossible to fully discuss the problems with this novel without spoilers, so, if needed, my spoiler-tagged review is on Goodreads.

PS I love a small publisher, but my god have époque press burdened In Defence of the Act with a hideous, early-00s YA-ish cover and an even worse turn-of-the-millennium ‘computer’ font inside [second photo]. Seriously, we’re almost in this kind of territory.

Are you tempted by anything from the Carol Shields or Women’s Prize longlists?

I’m Still Reading ARCs for the Spring: Lyon, Tchaikovsky, Tudor, Nicholls

In which I continue to reflect on the consequences of requesting too enthusiastically from NetGalley. We have a nice range of genres here: litfic, SF, horror/crime, and contemporary romance.

I’ve never forgotten Rachel Lyon’s Self-Portrait With Boy, not only because of its arresting premise but because of the way it interrogates the costs of being an artist. Her second litfic novel, Fruit of the Dead, is beautifully-written, richly atmospheric, with an irresistible sense of folktale logic – but it just doesn’t have anything nearly as interesting to say. A loose retelling of the myth of Persephone and Demeter, Fruit of the Dead is narrated in turn by teenage Cory, who goes to work as a babysitter on a private island owned by a pharmaceutical billionaire, and her mother Emer, who is terrified when her daughter disappears for a summer without telling her where she’s going. Lyon puts both Cory and Emer on the page so confidently: there’s a real sense of them occupying physical space. In contrast, the rest of the cast fade away into sketches, even the Hades-like billionaire himself. And while the logic of the original myth gives this story its driving force, Lyon also yields to the temptation to include details that add little to the purpose of her book but are ironic references-back, like Emer leading an agricultural NGO that has sold a load of genetically-modified ‘magic rice’ to China that fails to grow. Lyon is one of those writers who could write the phone book and make it compelling, but I wish there had been more to this.

Alien Clay, a standalone SF novel from the prolific Adrian Tchaikovsky, is set on the exoplanet of Kiln, a place of burgeoning, abundant alien life but no obviously intelligent species. Humans are determined to find out who built the mysterious structures on the surface of the planet, complete with a series of hieroglyphs that seem to signify an unknown language. However, under the Mandate, free scientific investigation is forbidden: it’s a totalitarian government that pushes an anthropocentric view of the world and is challenged by any suggestion of sentient aliens (interestingly, this is the second SF novel published in March 2024 that uses this human-centric premise; the other one is Grace Curtis’s Floating Hotel). So far, so good: I loved the fascinating horrors of Kiln and, although the solution to the central question about the planet is pretty obvious, I looked forward to watching how it would unfold. But that narrator! The protagonist, Arton Daghdev, is a xenobiologist exiled to a labour camp on Kiln for his dissident views. Life at the camp is brutal, and Daghdev clearly deals with it through humour. Unfortunately, while I didn’t dislike Daghdev as a character, I found his defence mechanisms incredibly jarring; we can never engage with the seriousness of what’s really going on, because he’s always in the way. I felt like I was reading a weird cross between Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation and John Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society. I think Tchaikovsky has two modes as a writer: properly serious SF, like the impressive Children of Time trilogy, and this more lighthearted register. Readers who liked his And Put Away Childish Things, for example, are likely to get on much better with this one.

I very much enjoyed thriller writer CJ Tudor’s turn to schlocky horror in The Drift, and so I was eager to pick up her follow-up, The Gathering. Definite shades of Stephen King here: The Gathering is set in a world where the existence of ‘vampyr’ colonies is acknowledged and feared, but where laws govern the ways that humans are allowed to interact with them. Culls of colonies can be authorised if they prey on humans, but otherwise locals are expected to leave them alone. Our protagonist, Barbara, is a no-nonsense detective who is, refreshingly, an older lesbian: she travels to a small town in Alaska where a teenage boy has been found with his throat ripped out. Given the town’s history of mysterious killings, its inhabitants are keen for Barbara to call for a cull of the nearby vampyrs. But is there more going on here than meets the eye? Sadly, I’d say this is more of a crime novel with a touch of horror than an actual horror novel, and so will appeal more to crime fiction fans. While The Gathering starts well, as Barbara adjusts to the freezing weather and her run-down motel, it swiftly loses much sense of place. I was also frustrated by the lack of worldbuilding – Tudor relies very heavily on existing vampire lore and barely explains her rules (frankly, the lifecycles and biology of vampires are better developed in LJ Smith’s Night World series, which is YA from the 90s, and so has the pace and page count you’d expect). Barbara is supposedly an expert on vampyr anthropology, but there’s little sense of what that means, as the vampyrs could be replaced by an outcast human community in this novel with little knock-on effect. I got lost in the cast and felt that the climax was merely set-up for what looks likely to be a continuing series, with a number of significant loose ends left trailing. Love vampires, but I won’t be reading on.

And finally for the contemporary romance, a genre that I never typically read, so, pinch of salt. When I picked up David Nicholls’ iconic One Day in 2009 (yes bought the hardback, I am so ahead of the game), I was exactly the same age as Emma is at the start of the novel. Now I’m just a year younger than Marnie, the late-thirties female protagonist of Nicholls’ latest, You Are Here. Marnie meets Michael, a geography teacher, as they embark on a long group holiday, aiming to walk across the country from the Lakes to the Pennines to the Dales to the Moors. Marnie is not a fan of the outdoors; Michael is full of interesting facts about the landscape. A typical Nicholls romance ensues, heavy on the banter, defensiveness and the slow reveal of vulnerability.

My favourite Nicholls novel is not One Day but Us – I adored its dark comedy, its petty tragedy – so I suspect I’ll be in the minority here when I say that I was sorry to see Nicholls returning to familiar territory. I was also deeply, deeply frustrated by Marnie, her unfunny quips (seriously, she reminded me of Ian from One Day at times, except that I like Ian more), her self-centredness, her narrow-mindedness, the way she’s limited herself for no good reason. Because I really warmed to Michael, this made my reading experience weirdly jarring; I very much enjoyed Michael’s sections, and even started to like Marnie more when we see her through his eyes, but then remembered every time we return to her point-of-view that she’s incredibly annoying. Both protagonists also feel dated. Part of the bite of One Day, as showcased in the superb recent Netflix series, is Nicholls’ attention to the precise detail of being 22 in 1988, or 37 in 2003. But these characters are not his generation, but mine, and I kept on thinking the book was set at least ten years ago; they just don’t feel like millennials to me, although it’s hard to put my finger on why. Any one detail – the books Marnie checks out of the library as a child, for example – can be explained away, so I imagine it’s the subtle accumulation of these kind of things that’s throwing me off. Anyway. One Day fans will love this, but for me, it ranks somewhere below both Us and Sweet Sorrow.

You Are Here is out in the UK on 23rd April.

I received free proof copies of all these novels from the publishers for review.

March Superlatives, 2024

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… Boy Parts by Eliza Clark. This debut Tiktok hit is about a woman in her late twenties, Irina, who roams the streets of Newcastle picking up men to photograph in various compromising, barely-consensual situations, including bondage and fetish. I have a very low tolerance for disaster women novels, and I also dislike grotesque fiction along the lines of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, disgusting to no purpose via its detailed descriptions of bodily functions. HOWEVER, Boy Parts is actually great! How? Basically, it’s totally because of Irina. Irina is the antidote to disaster women. She embraces her disaster. She brings disaster to others. Her delicious callousness is just hilarious, and so refreshing after reading a long string of stories about female victims. She’s both terrifying – the image of her hunting down her prey gave me flashbacks to Michel Faber’s Under The Skin – and weirdly endearing. In one particularly funny scene in a taxi, fangirl-Irina wrecks cool-Irina’s game by revealing just how much she knows about Lord of the Rings, a joke that keeps coming back throughout the book: advising her friend Flo to dump her boyfriend, who is trying to convince Flo that Irina is bad news, Irina texts: ‘Just don’t let him like grima wormtongue you’. For me, not quite as good as Penance, basically because of its narrower scope, but still unforgettable. My full review is on Goodreads.

The Other Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… Julia by Sandra Newman. I hate dystopian fiction almost as much as I hate disaster women, so here’s another book that surprised me! Much of George Orwell’s work is now in the public domain in the UK, and so I guess this Julia’s-point-of-view-on-1984 story was inevitable. I’m glad that it was Newman who tackled it. I am very, very suspicious of faux-feminist premises that promise ‘a female perspective’ on a classic story – see my frustration with the multiple recent Greek mythology retellings. However, although I found Newman’s The Men bizarre and disjointed, I was impressed by its originality, and so I hoped Newman wouldn’t fall into usual dystopian tropes. Turns out, this was brilliant! It’s hard to argue that it completely stands on its own two feet – it’s so deeply steeped in the lore of 1984 – but as a fanfic, beautifully integrated into the gaps and inconsistencies of the original canon, Julia‘s terrific, and as a dystopian protagonist, Julia is enormously refreshing. My full review is on Goodreads. I borrowed this book from my local library #LoveYourLibrary

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was…

… Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez. This has been a very strong reading month and so I’m sorry, in a way, this has ended up here, but of the books I actually finished this month (I don’t think it’s right to put DNF books like Loot and The Hunter in this slot), this was probably the weakest. I did enjoy Raquel’s sections, but found Anita’s story tropey, overwritten and ultimately ill-considered in its very close connection to the real life and death of Ana Mendieta. My full review is here.

My Best (Children’s Fiction) Reread This Month Was…

L: the version I read as a child. R: the e-book reissue that I read this time around.

… Grinny by Nicholas Fisk. If anybody else had the misfortune to read this as a child, they will know it is literally one of the most terrifying books in existence. Eleven-year-old Timothy and his seven-year-old sister Beth are increasingly disturbed by the behaviour of their Great-Aunt Emma, nicknamed Grinny, who comes to stay out of the blue one day, and who has never been mentioned by their family before. Grinny has no smell; is resistant to injury; does not seem to understand normal human cues; but is terrified of electricity. What the hell can she be? Fisk cleverly tells this story through Timothy’s diary entries, which adds a real sense of creeping menace, as the walls close in and the children realise that they are the only ones who know the truth. I loved how capable and smart Fisk makes his very young protagonists, especially Beth, who has to deal with her brother’s misogynistic scorn but ultimately saves the human race. The sequel, You Remember Me! (included in this omnibus edition), is not as good but has to take some credit for featuring a climatic scene that has haunted me to this day. At least we can all THANK GOD that the modern cover is not as ungodly creepy as the original that I read – though anybody who innocently picks up this one is in for a shock!

My Best (Adult Fiction) Reread This Month Was…

… The Body Lies by Jo Baker. I first read this metafictional take on the kind of novel that starts with a dead woman back in 2019, when I thought it was ‘smart and creepy’. It’s interesting to reread it five years later, when these conversations about male violence and fictional representation have notionally moved on – and yet in many ways, they haven’t. Baker’s book is probably the best thing I’ve ever read on this trope, as she uses her unnamed protagonist, a lecturer in creative writing, to explore how female victims are encoded into the very structure of the stories that we tell. And yet, despite this theoretically literary material, The Body Lies is actually a beautifully grounded novel, wonderful on the simple rhythms of the protagonist’s life in the rural north, her relationship with her three-year-old son Sammy and the dynamics of the MA group she teaches. For my money, still easily Baker’s best book, and it also reads nicely alongside Boy Parts.

The Best Classic SF Novel I Read This Month Was…

… Earthlight by Arthur C. Clarke. I loved Clarke’s children’s novel Islands in the Sky about life on a space station when I was a child, and still love it as an adult; I must have read it about twenty times. I’ve always wanted to explore Clarke’s adult work, but hit a few dead ends; Childhood’s End was just too weird for me, though I wrote an academic article where it features! At last, I’ve hit gold; Earthlight is basically Islands in the Sky for grown-ups. Clarke imagines a future where humanity has colonised a number of planets in the solar system, but is now running short of crucial resources, which leads to tensions between Earth and ‘the Federation’ of other home-worlds. This short novel, set on the Moon, follows an agent sent to find a spy who’s passing crucial scientific information to the Federation. As with Islands in the Sky, Earthlight is short on character growth but long on imaginative incident. Clarke’s clarity is still unmatched for me, creating a fully convincing lunar world without ever getting bogged down in detail. I also love how practical his characters are in the face of danger: whether they’re trying to drive a crawler out of a dustbowl or hyperventilating oxygen so they can escape an ailing spaceship without suits, they could never be accused of getting emotional about it. Finally, it’s fascinating to witness this mix of accurate prediction and period detail play out: Clarke basically imagined geostationary communications satellites into being, but on his futuristic Moon, people still use computers with punch-cards, send telefaxes, and there’s of course no internet. Another novel that just does what it says on the tin, and I enjoyed it immensely.

The Best Modern SF Novel I Read This Month Was…

… In Ascension by Martin MacInnes. Written in a deliberately detached style, this follows Dutch microbiologist Leigh, who first encounters an anomaly in the Atlantic when working on a research ship, and who is then drawn into a wider project via her research on edible algae that may take her to the stars and beyond. For much of this book, I found it a gripping and, like Earthlight, engagingly practical piece of science fiction, but missed the deep character work of similar speculative novels (there’s a reason I keep writing Leah instead of Leigh in this review) like Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under The Sea. But while Armfield’s novel was really an exploration of grief, this review has convinced me that MacInnes is doing something rather different here: I like the idea that In Ascension deliberately places human experiences alongside other biological scales, and in doing so, captures ‘the environmental uncanny’. I also think there’s a reading of this novel that thinks about its detachment through the lens of Leigh’s childhood trauma. In Ascension is about the connectedness of all living things, but also about how disconnected we can become from the people physically and genetically closest to us. Leigh’s father beat her throughout her childhood, and her mother let it happen. Her sister Helena, who once stood so near to her that their breath mingled as one, now denies that Leigh was ever abused. Other reviewers have seen this novel as offering an apologetic for abusers, but I don’t think it’s doing that at all; Leigh’s perspective is distorted as she tries to rationalise what happened to her, but we get a glimpse of her resistance to the family narrative through Helena’s chapters, and it’s also just factually true that she has deliberately limited contact with her family through her all-encompassing choice of work. The publisher’s blurb presents this novel as a choice between human connection and journeying into the cosmos, but that’s not true: in fact, it’s only by leaving the earth that Leigh can find the links to other living things that she craves. Eerie and haunting.

What stood out to you this month? Are you tempted (or turned off) by any of these?

So Many March ARCs, Part Two

So many of my Netgalley ARCs are being published in March, so they’re going to dominate my reading this month. Here’s the second installment, featuring three books that all came out in the UK on the same day in late March: a slice-of-life about exploited superstore workers who plot to improve their situation, a cozy story set in a space hotel, and the different trajectories of three Asian-American teenage girls who become friends in the early 1980s. Coincidentally, these are also all second novels. The first installment is here.

Help Wanted, Adelle Waldman’s second novel, has been compared to a certain kind of nineteenth-century English classic, and I can see it. Like upstairs-downstairs novels, Waldman depicts a microcosm of society within a single branch of a Target-like US superstore, Town Square. Our protagonists work in ‘Movement’, unloading trucks every morning then breaking out boxes on the shop floor. I was honestly fascinated by the inner workings of this superstore alone, and the intricate knowledge that the older workers have of unloading its products, so I was absorbed in Help Wanted from page one. However, if you’re not quite as keen on getting a glimpse inside Target, the main attraction of this novel is its cast. Once again drawing from nineteenth-century fiction, Waldman is determined that no character  should be portrayed as wholly good or bad, though some are more cliched than others. For my money, her most complex creation is Milo, a goofy middle-aged man who acts as the ‘thrower’ at the warehouse, chucking products onto the line for the others to sort, and enjoys choosing the order carefully to tell a story: ‘Milo began dramatising the human life cycle. He pushed out boxes of baby food and powdered formula… six sets of Candy Land… a children’s bike… a Nintendo Switch… cans of Red Bull… Adulthood – a letdown in Milo’s estimation – was a set of pots and pans, a box of Tide Pods, an alarm clock…’ Milo is one of those men who monologues at women he’s interested in, but Waldman gives this a sympathetic and insightful reading: ‘It wasn’t that Milo wasn’t interested in what Callie had to say… Milo cut her off because he took for granted that she was accomplished and desirable. He instinctively felt it was incumbent on him to prove himself to her’. As this quote suggests, Waldman’s writing can be a tad clunky, and I wanted a slightly more dramatic final act than we got, but then again, that might be the point – in the cyclical world of Town Square, there is never really any escape. There’s just more stuff coming down the conveyor belt. (Serpent’s Tail, March 21st).

Funnily enough, despite their very different genres, Grace Curtis’s second novel, Floating Hotel, shares a lot with Waldman’s. Both novels are about a group of service workers; both have a thin thread of plot but are ultimately character-led, flipping between the heads of their cast until we get to know them all. But Floating Hotel is set in a space hotel that charts a course by autopilot between distant worlds, in an Empire where talk of potential alien life is banned. A dissenter issues bulletins about what’s really going on across galaxies, and an agent believes that the culprit is based at the hotel. The other obvious inspiration for this ‘cozy SF’ is Becky Chambers, particularly her first novel, The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet. Curtis’s cast are all human, but you can see traces of the same kinds of archetype Chambers explores across her range of alien races: the misanthrope, the autistic guy, the once-elite itinerant, the practical woman with a traumatic past. This was a shame, in a way, because although I enjoyed this book, I spent a lot of it wondering why I didn’t love it as much as I loved A Long Way. I wonder if Curtis’s writing is just a tad too literary for this to work. I wanted to sink deeper into the setting and the individual lives of each of the characters, and I felt like the prose was almost too agile, not straightforward enough. For me, her style suited her more off-the-wall debut, Frontier, better. Having said that, Floating Hotel is still escapist, fun and atmospheric. (Hodderscape, March 21st).

I loved Lisa Ko’s debut novel, The Leavers, and her second novel, Memory Piece, was one of my most anticipated releases of 2024 – partly because of her track record, and partly because I just loved the blurb. Three Asian-American teenage girls, Giselle, Jackie and Ellen, are drawn together in New York in the early 1980s, then strike out on their own paths: one as a performance artist, one as a coder, and one as a community activist. It’s a shame, therefore, that I ended up with such a mixed impression of this one, although there are definitely things to admire about it. The first two-thirds of Memory Piece are familiar literary-fiction fare on fast-forward: we skim across the surface of Giselle’s, then Jackie’s young adulthoods, without ever pausing to give any moment more weight than another. I was underwhelmed by both women’s stories. Giselle’s performance art, loosely based on the work of Tehching Hsieh, had potential, but Ko didn’t convince me that this character would come up with it nor explore the effect it had on her (living in a mall with no human contact for a year has to change you, but we never really find out if it does). Jackie’s story faced the same problems, and by this point, I was also wondering why the relationships between these three are meant to be central to this story when they seem to have little contact as a group. The 1980s and 1990s New York art scene has been done better in Rachel Lyon’s Self-Portrait With Boy and Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World, while the dot-com boom is more vivid in Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector.

But then, Memory Piece does an about-turn. We jump forward to 2043, when Ellen, now in her seventies and still clinging onto the communal house she built in the 1990s, is suddenly telling us, in first person, about the way things are now. Does this twist save Memory Piece? Partly. I appreciated the juxtaposition of the women’s early lives with this vision of a difficult future, and how it shed new light on the choices they’d all faced about ‘selling out’, and what ‘selling out’ even means when a few big companies own everything. But because so much time has been taken up already with Giselle’s and Jackie’s life stories, Ko doesn’t leave herself space to develop this much past a generic dystopia either. There’s absolutely a great novel buried here, but I’m not sure what would have allowed it to get out. (Dialogue Books, March 21st).

Leap Year Superlatives

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… Ash by Mary Gentle. Frankly, I can’t imagine a future in which this doesn’t cruise into my top ten books of 2024. My review is here.

[Hon. mention: Always by Nicola Griffith, which is also an Ash readalike. My review is here.]

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was…

… The Djinn Waits A Hundred Years by Shubnum Khan. A big disappointment, given this was one of the releases I was most looking forward to in 2024. I loved the premise of this novel set in South Africa, which tells the story of a teenage Muslim girl who moves into a dilapidated estate occupied by a djinn. Once a grand residence, Akbar Manzil is now haunted. It soon becomes clear that the estate is troubled by a darkness in its past, but it’s not until nearly halfway through the novel that we learn anything substantial about this earlier timeline, which takes place in the 1930s. When this plot finally emerges, the book becomes more readable, but no better. It suffers from one of the big problems that makes me avoid a lot of multi-generational historical fiction: basically, the characters are ciphers defined by their role in the family. In this one, it comes with a nasty twist of misogyny (bad mother-in-law; evil first wife, saintly second wife; female child evil-from-birth; male child weak and misled by his sister; good husband weirdly not held responsible for all this). In short, this has been mis-sold as speculative fiction when it’s really straightforward histfic. My full review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

The Book I Read This Month That I Most Expect To Get Longlisted For The Women’s Prize Was…

… Jaded by Ela Lee. Jade is a British-Korean-Turkish lawyer in her twenties, working stupid hours in an effort to excel at her law firm. She feels split between the worlds of her parents and the Oxford-London world she’s tried so hard to fit into, abandoning her birth name Ceyda, dating white, upper-class Kit, who says the right things but only when other people are listening, and learning to cook beef wellington rather than tteokbokki. In Korean businesses, people address her in English, recognising her as somehow other; she gets a warmer welcome in Turkish restaurants, ‘where the first thing the waitress would ask is Türk müsün? Are you Turkish? After that was settled, generous familiarity struck like lightning until hours later we would leave the venue to calls of güle güle! A charming parting expression that translated to leaving while laughing’. After a client dinner, Jade is raped by a colleague, and this event tears her world apart, but also makes her start to question whether she wants to live this way anyway. Jaded is an accomplished debut, better-written than comparator novels like Queenie, and dealing authentically and viscerally with Jade’s PTSD. The central plot of this book, I suspect, won’t really stay with me simply because I have read so many excellent novels like it: Dark Chapter by Winnie M. Li, Asking For It by Louise O’Neill, and Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty come to mind. It’s also a shame that, given that Lee’s writing is generally warm and intelligent, she occasionally slips into telling us too much. Still, this is an impressive debut, and I look forward to reading what Lee writes next. My full review is on Goodreads. Thanks very much to Yazmeen Akhtar at Vintage and Harvill Secker for offering me an e-ARC of this novel for review.

The Thriller That Just Delivered This Month Was…

… Run on Red by Noelle West Ihli. I’m a bit of a grumpy thriller critic, as readers of this blog will know: I’m likely to think that they rely too much on big ‘twists’, that the characters are unbelievable or stupid, that they use too much cod-psychology or that they are simply misogynistic. This is not to say that I hate psychological thrillers: there are authors that do them brilliantly, like Ruth Ware, Louise Doughty and Erin Kelly. But, it turns out, sometimes I just want something very simple. Run on Red brought that. Set in 2007, this novel takes place over a single night when two young women, Laura and Olivia, realise they are being tailgated by a truck on a remote country road, and from then on, things only get worse. Plot and characterisation are straightforward, as is the villains’ motivation – but people actually behave logically, thank goodness, and the tension never lets up. Basically, I think I liked that this book knew what it was doing and just went with it, rather than making us read through chunks of supposedly complex backstory that just ends up being the same old thing and doesn’t add any depth to the characters, or giving them all ‘secrets in the past’. Funnily enough, the scraps of information we got about Laura and Olivia made them feel much more real to me then if there had been these info-dumps – partly because they were just normal human beings rather than the usual secretive triple-crossing revenge-seeking grudge-holding thriller women. I’ll definitely look out for more from Ihli.

The Best Straight Historical Novel I Read This Month Was…

… The Unspeakable Acts of Zina Pavlou by Eleni Kyriacou. I don’t read much historical fiction, not because I have any concerns about historical accuracy but because I often find it dull, familiar and info-dumpy (see my Djinn review above). Kyriacou’s second novel nimbly avoids these concerns. Set in London in the mid-1950s, it centres on the trial of an older Greek Cypriot immigrant, Zina, who has been accused of the brutal murder of her daughter-in-law. Zina speaks very little English, so Eva, a younger Greek woman, is employed to translate for her, and swiftly becomes emotionally involved in the case. This novel is based on the real-life case of Styllou Christofi, and Kyriacou’s attention to historical detail is meticulous but never overbearing. However, what really impressed me about this novel was how she wrote about Zina. Novels based on real-life cases about murderous women usually exonerate them, then think about how patriarchal beliefs led to their miserable fates (I’m thinking Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites, Emma Flint’s Little Deaths, and even, to an extent, Margaret Atwood’s much smarter Alias Grace). But instead, Kyriacou chooses to accept Zina’s guilt and dig into it, which makes for a much more interesting story. Although Zina is guilty, the prejudice she faces as an older, non-English-speaking, illiterate immigrant profoundly shapes her fate; she is seen as a stupid peasant woman who showed no remorse for her crime, because her emotional reactions aren’t legible to a British tabloid audience. Kyriacou also beautifully develops her relationships with her son and daughter-in-law in a thread set during the weeks leading up to the murder, so we see how tensions rise through cultural misunderstandings and judgements without anyone being painted simply as the villain. Eva, too, is not just Zina’s vessel but has a quietly compelling story of her own.  Both satisfyingly pacy and very thought-provoking.

Disclaimer: Eleni Kyriacou is a friend of mine – we met while taking the Curtis Brown Creative novel-writing course in 2015/16. However, this review reflects my genuine opinion of this novel.

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

…The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu. Liu has done tireless, sterling work translating Chinese SF for an English audience, and I first came across him as the editor and translator of the brilliant anthology Broken Stars, one of my favourite books of 2020. Liu’s editorial instincts were obviously so good that I decided I must read some of his own work, and I’ve finally got round to it. Liu’s short fiction has been compared to that of Ted Chiang, and I feel like I need to say it upfront: Liu is no Chiang. (This makes sense when you read about their processes; Chiang can spend months on a single story, producing about fifteen or so in two decades, whereas Liu is much more prolific, writing more than seventy stories in just a dozen years.) Having said that, though, there are some great stories here, and I was impressed by how well Liu can switch between historical fiction, crime, fantasy and SF. For me, his straight SF stories tended to be too on-the-nose (‘Perfect Match’, ‘State Change’) or too list-like (‘The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species’; ‘An Advanced Readers’ Picture Book of Comparative Cognition’). I preferred those that sat in a more speculative space, like ‘Good Hunting’, where a demon hunter befriends a demon in a China that is being drained of its old magic, and ‘A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel’, set in an alternative timeline where an undersea tunnel connects Shanghai, Tokyo and Seattle. My favourite story in the collection, ‘The Simulacrum’, also fell into this category: I found the image of a father who can only connect with a digital version of his daughter when she was younger and more pliant, rather than the adult daughter herself, utterly heartbreaking.

As for the historical fiction, Liu is obviously interested in untold stories, often of atrocities such as joint US-Republic of China repression against suspected People’s Republic of China Communists in Taiwan in the 1960s (‘The Literomancer’), but also of unexpected moments of co-operation, as in the novella-length ‘All the Flavours’, set in Idaho Territory, where Chinese people made up 28.5% of the population in 1870 before the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Liu poignantly writes in his afterword to this story, ‘As a result, the bachelor communities of Chinese in the Idaho mining towns gradually dwindled until all the Chinese had died… To this day, some of the mining towns of Idaho still celebrate Chinese New Year in memory of the presence of the Chinese among them’. But, while I loved the ideas behind these more historically-situated stories, I can’t say I always loved the execution. This was even true of the undoubtedly powerful ‘The Man Who Ended History’, which closes the collection. Liu marries a fascinatingly original take on time travel (you can go back to any moment in time, but only once, as the connection is then destroyed) with an exploration of the real horrors of Unit 731 in Pingfang in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo during the Second World War. As a history lesson for a Western audience, this is vital. As an exploration of its central ideas – should we witness history? what happens if we can witness it only once? does witnessing risk the process of healing from intergenerational trauma? – it fell a bit short for me. I’d love to read a novel-length version of this seventy-page story.

What books stood out to you this month?

#LoveYourLibrary, February 2024

I’ve very rarely participated in Rebecca’s important #LoveYourLibrary tag as I often can’t make it to my local library, which is volunteer-run and has limited opening hours, or when I do get there, find that others have checked out what I want to read from their small (but excellent) stock! However, I managed to nab two great books this month.

‘Laura reads two books in a row by straight white men shock’

Daniel Mason’s North Woods follows the fortunes of a single patch of land and its white settlers in what becomes Western Massachusetts from the seventeenth century to the present day, recalling eco-fiction like Richard Powers’ The Overstory, Michael Christie’s Greenwood and, in its early sections, Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds. Its polyphony of found narratives (marginalia, photographs, ballads, case notes, letters) mixed with more traditionally-narrated chapters also reminded me of another Groff novel, her debut The Monsters of Templeton – although Mason is, thankfully, less whimsical. For much of this novel, I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about; it’s well-written but felt incredibly familiar (even the pastiches were of things that normally get pastiched).

The later sections, however, beginning with the story of Robert, a schizophrenic who believes that it is his job to hold the fabric of the world together through regularly tracing certain routes (‘Stitchings’) through the woods, throw the earlier bits into more interesting relief. I also loved Mason’s attention to the particular details of this place, which is echoed by some of his characters. Two nineteenth-century twin sisters catalogue the places they play: ‘they took a second route that scaled a jumble of ferny boulders they came to call “the Danger” and crossed into a forest of a different character, with rocky soil and low, sinuous trees that barely rose above the whortleberry and laurel. Sometime not too long ago, there’d been a fire, and the trunks of pine and oak were black and interspersed with sassafras with funny mitten leaves. This, they called “the Fire of London”.’ This focus is echoed in Robert’s writings to his sister, describing his Stitchings: ‘After the fifth maple, you will pass a white stone with tufts of grimmia moss… The place where the brook turns towards the oak with the hollow like a tall, thin heart.’ Certain things, too, reoccur across the centuries: an apple; a beetle; a panther. Powers’ book is much better, but this one is worth reading.

The US cover has the panther.

I’m only halfway through Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz at the moment, but he’s such a good writer I’d trust him with anything. This novel is set in the US in 1922 over the course of a single week, but in an alternative version of history where the vast majority of the Native American population weren’t wiped out by smallpox. In Cahokia, an ancient city that sits beside the Mississippi, Indigenous traditions rule, but racial tensions still exist: the Klan are active, white people resent the power of the takouma, and African-Americans are often consigned to menial jobs. I worried this one would be dense and cerebral, but after the first fifty pages or so, it flies; the only important, unfamiliar terms are three words that are helpfully defined at the start of the text. Cahokia Jazz is really making me think about genre. I absolutely agree with Elle’s point that Spufford is ‘at heart, a science fiction writer‘; this one might be more obviously speculative, but actually this world is no stranger to the modern reader than Golden Hill’s mid-eighteenth-century New York, and I found it easier to get to grips with. We often think about SF in terms of content (spaceships, tech), but I really like Jo Walton’s point that SF is actually about a certain way of reading. Walton writes: ‘SF is like a mystery where the world and the history of the world is what’s mysterious’, as the reader has to build the world from the clues.

This makes it obvious why SF and crime/noir can pair so well as genres, as they also do, for example, in the opening to James SA Corey’s Expanse series, Leviathan Wakes, and China Miéville’s The City and the City. But it also made me realise that a lot of crime novels miss a trick here; crime fiction is such a great way of getting to grips with a place or a social group as your characters investigate it, especially if they are unfamiliar outsiders. Nicola Griffith does this with Seattle in Always, Tana French with a new-build housing estate outside Dublin in Broken Harbour and with a private girls’ school in The Secret Place, Val McDermid with winter-of-discontent Glasgow in 1979. And yet, so much crime fiction takes the reader’s knowledge for granted and has nothing much to say about the wider society in which it’s set. I’m coming to realise that what I really want from fiction is an exploration of ideas – whether these ideas are intellectual, social or emotional – and while SF tends to be the genre that most reliably delivers this, it certainly isn’t the only place to find it.

Have you read anything from your library recently?

A 1500+ page novel? Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle

Version 1.0.0

I read the single-volume Gateway edition on Kindle [centre], but I kind of love the four-part US version with the individual titles, even though I don’t know why Ash keeps her long hair until Volume Four when it gets cut off after Volume One.

I love a long novel, but I’ve not read many novels that are 1000+ pages – though, granted, this massively depends on text size, book design etc. Those I have read tend to be either a big YES (Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, George RR Martin’s A Storm of Swords – of which more soon) or a big NO (The Lord of the Rings, War and Peace). So where does Mary Gentle’s Ash: A Secret History, intended as a single-volume novel although published in four parts in the US, fit in? Well, this one had to be a YES, or there’s no way I’d have finished it. In many ways, this book is completely bonkers. Ostensibly set in late fifteenth-century Europe, it follows Ash, a fictional peasant woman who grows from being a scavenging child in an army camp to commander of a mercenary army at just nineteen. Like Joan of Arc, Ash has a voice that whispers in her ear, advising her on strategy, but she has no idea where it comes from. Surrounding Ash’s story, however, is a framing narrative that consists of a sequence of emails between historian Pierce Ratcliff and his editor Anna (this was actually my favourite part of the book). We learn that what we are reading is supposed to be a translation of actual medieval manuscripts, with Pierce only adding an explanatory gloss and some footnotes. But both Pierce and Anna grow increasingly mystified as Ash’s story veers off the rails of what they know to be history.

If you wanted to tear this book apart, you’d find rich pickings. Most obviously, the idea that any of these manuscripts are ‘translations’ is ridiculous; Pierce admits that he’s modernised the language, but that still doesn’t explain a lot of the dialogue (“I’m not a hypocrite,” Ash said… “I’m an equal-opportunities heretic.”) Also, there is copious dialogue… written just like it would be in a modern novel. It would be easier to believe that this is Pierce’s creative non-fiction version of Ash’s life, but, for good plot reasons, Gentle does not want to go down that route, so we need to believe in this impossible medieval world. My sense is that Gentle knows more about archaeology and war studies (she completed a Masters for the sake of this novel) then she does about history, as a discipline; even though I know nothing about this time period, there’s limited historical sensibility at work. Although we quickly learn that this is an alternative history of the fifteenth century, it’s clearly meant to be close enough that it fools scholars on first glance, and this so wouldn’t. On a more micro, literary level, the prose is at best workmanlike but often wonky (Gentle keeps slipping between past and present tense, which gets distracting).

Having said that: WHO CARES. Many of the things that make Ash a bit of a problem enrich its vibrancy and reality; it’s a perfect example of how, particularly in historical fiction, you often have to get things wrong to get them right. This novel fully brings to life the experience of being a mercenary in this period, what it feels like to fight knowing full well you might die, and if you get wounded there’s only basic medical care to save you; how medieval worldviews might rely on ‘evil miracles’ and stolen souls but are just as complex as our own. And yeah, a lot of the modern dialogue is absolutely necessary to do this job (though I do still feel the sentence I quoted above goes a bit far… but that’s part of the joy of reading this book, the sense of witnessing a writer in a full, exuberant sprint, pushing the boundaries of what she’s allowed to do). In the early sections of this book, I felt that Ash herself was the only fully-realised character, but this didn’t much bother me; she’s such a compelling protagonist that she easily carries the story by herself (OK I do have a bit of a crush). But by the final sections, I felt like certain members of the secondary cast had fully stepped into their own: Fernando del Guiz, Florian, Godfrey.

L: My single-volume US paperback edition of A Storm of Swords. R: The two-volume edition. This one got split in two in the UK, which was a terrible idea.

Elle says in her review, which prompted me to read this book in the first place, that ‘somehow, all 1000 pages seem genuinely necessary to the plot, which is not something I think I have ever said before’, and I completely agree. Ash is beautifully plotted. I think the other only book I’ve ever read that has consistently delivered twists at the end of each chapter that are not egregious tricks, but which genuinely further the story every time, is, coincidentally, Martin’s A Storm of Swords, which is not only also a Very Long, Very Good Book but was published in the year 2000, the same year as Ash. This Reddit post both explains why Ash is so great and outlines the incredible surge in the fantasy genre around the year it was published (Harry Potter! The Amber Spyglass! Some Wheel of Time book that I’ve not read but was apparently important!) But I’d agree that it’s a groundbreaking novel, and if you have any interest at all in fantasy or indeed in science fiction, you have to read it. It’s difficult to say anything more about the plot of Ash because everything is a spoiler, but I adored its genre-bending quality, as historical fiction meets fantasy meets SF with a touch of horror, and not even in the ways you might expect from the early sections. A Storm of Swords is a very different book, but I think they are equally essential.

But honestly, what I really loved about Ash is that, like A Storm of Swords,  it both woke up the writer in me (the way Gentle makes her totally implausible resolution plausible by building it up gradually across the course of the novel is just genius, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a writer deliver an answer to a mysterious plot question so satisfyingly) and the geeky teenager, who responded much more emotionally to this novel (I hate Fernando! Ash and Florian should get it on! WHY BURGUNDY???). It’s hard to sell a 1000+ page, obscure fantasy novel, but yes, there is a reason this bizarre book has never quite been forgotten. I’m so sad it’s over. Oh yeah, and the Nicola Griffith/Aud/Hild fans that I know follow my blog? Read this one.

January Superlatives, 2024

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Just stunning. My full review is here.

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was…

… River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure, from my 2024 reading list. Mixed-race Alva and her American mother Sloane live in Shanghai, where Alva attends a local school and dreams of the kind of life she could access via her US passport, although she has never left China. When Sloane hooks up with their landlord, Lu Fang, Alva assumes he’s just the next in a series of Chinese men her mother’s dated for their money. But it turns out that Sloane and Lu Fang have a shared past that reaches back more than twenty years, when Lu Fang was working in a shipping yard in Qingdao, miserable after missing out on his chance of finishing university due to being caught up in Mao’s ‘Down to the Countryside’ movement in 1966 and sent for rural re-education.

River East, River West is extremely competent: it’s readable, the writing flows well, the plot beats land correctly. Lescure has some important things to say about the prejudice of American expats towards the locals and the difficulties that Alva faces, labelled as a laowei by her Chinese classmates and yet dismissed by foreign visitors. But for me, this just lacked soul. It reminded me of the modern-day sections of Susan Barker’s The Incarnations, which are also set in 2007-8, though in Beijing rather than Shanghai; it’s also about a group of miserable people who wreak misery on each other and the innocents who happen to cross their paths. When I finished this, I found that the only characters I’d really cared about were tertiary: Alva’s rooftopping friend Gao Xiaofan and Lu Fang’s sad son Minmin. I don’t need to like fictional people for their stories to work for me, but there has to be something more to them than this. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

The Short Story Collection I Most Wanted To Connect More With This Month Was…

… Out There Screaming ed. Jordan Peele. This is a solid collection of short speculative fiction by Black North American writers, most of it horror or horror-adjacent, and I’m not sure why I didn’t like it more than I did. As you’d expect for an anthology edited by Peele, the horror often emerges from societal racism more than the supernatural elements. The dangers of travelling while Black are a recurrent theme. Tananarive Due’s ‘The Rider’ follows two sisters who are travelling to join the Freedom Riders in Montgomery in 1961 and find themselves in peril when they board a Greyhound bus in Tallahassee, while in Maurice Broaddus’s ‘The Norwood Trouble’, a Black town in Indiana protected by a mysterious orchard finds itself in danger after one little girl crosses the town boundaries to get ice-cream. Nicole D. Sconiers’s ‘A Bird Sings By The Etching Tree’ features a Black girl haunting a highway after she was driven off the road, while in Chesya Burke’s ‘An American Fable’, a group of Black people are forced off the train in inter-war Cincinnati towards a terrifying fate. At the same time, characters are often protected by the power of their ancestors, or by shared magical traditions, in both these stories and in others, such as Rion Amilcar Scott’s arresting and beautifully-written ‘A Grief of the Dead’.

Yet, despite how well most of these stories work, I found that I only connected with a few of them – often the ones where the speculative elements took centre stage. I loved Erin E. Adams’s ‘Lasirèn’, based on Haitian folklore, where a siren lures a girl into the darkness of the water. I was also struck by Ezra Clayton Daniels’s disconcerting ‘Pressure’, and P. Djèlí Clark’s ‘Hide and Seek’ was so nearly brilliant (I wish Clark had resisted the temptation to constantly spell out the irony of his story, e.g. ‘This is hide and seek. And it’s not a game.’). Still, definitely a worthwhile collection, just one that for, whatever reason, won’t stick with me.

The Fluffiest Book I Read This Month Was…

… Valley Verified by Kyla Zhao. I thought this second novel from Zhao would be more The Devil Wears Prada meets Uncanny Valley, but no: this is straightforward chick lit. Nothing wrong with that, and current fans of the genre may enjoy it more than I did. Valley Verified is about a fashion journalist, Zoe Zhang, who trades a job working on a magazine to work at a start-up for a new app in Silicon Valley. Feeling out of her depth, Zoe wonders if she will ever get the tech industry to take her ideas seriously, or connect with her new colleagues. This is a predictable novel and I have to admit I eyerolled a lot in the first third, when Zoe seemed unbelievably naive, assuming that she’d automatically be able to bond over clothes and gossip with her only female colleague, for example. However, I did like how her character developed over the course of the novel as she had to reassess her initial judgments, and I enjoyed her growing friendship with software engineers Bram and Austin. The romantic sub-plot is kept light and I appreciated that the focus was on Zoe’s work problems, although there’s still an incredibly clunky scene where the character development for the love interest is basically accomplished by him writing a personal essay which he shares with Zoe. Valley Verified is, however, readable, fun, and more intelligent than it initially seems. Also, gorgeous cover. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

Hon. mention: Young Jane Young by Gabrielle Zevin, which is much lighter and fluffier than Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Told by five different narrators, it ranged from the intelligently light (Jane’s mother) to the shallow (Jane) to the unbearably cutesy (Jane’s daughter) for me.

My Best Re-Read This Month Was…

L: The cover of the Kindle edition I read first time round. R: The cover of the second-hand paperback edition I read this time.

… The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell.  I first read this Jesuits-in-space SF novel back in 2018 and remember being completely riveted by the mystery of what went so badly wrong during a first-contact mission to a distant planet. The sole survivor of the mission, Emilio, a Jesuit priest, returns with mutilated hands, traumatised by what he has seen and questioning his relationship with God; the title of the novel refers to what he once believed about this relationship (‘Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it’). This time through, I was naturally less inclined to speed-read the novel to find out what happened, and I missed the intensity of my first reading. Having said that, though, I found myself disagreeing with some of the criticisms I made of the book the first time round: back then, I felt ‘the last third of The Sparrow feels too compressed’, it’s ‘structurally clunky’ and ‘tries to do too much.’ Re-reading the book more slowly (in 2018, I read it over the course of five days; in 2024, I read it in ten) allowed me to get more out of it. I no longer found it clunky or compressed, and I felt Russell does what she sets out to do, which is to depict Emilio’s devastating crisis of faith and how it emerges from his closeness to God. The persistent sense of menace throughout this novel is balanced by the smart generosity of its secondary cast (this description of Anne, my favourite of the secondary characters, could really stand for all of them: ‘for although she was a woman of highly trained intelligence, she passed all experience through her heart’). You don’t need to hold any kind of religious belief or indeed, usually enjoy reading SF, to appreciate this brilliant novel.

The Most Resonant Novel I Read This Month Was…

…The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernández, trans. Natasha Wimmer. This piece of autofiction is told by a nameless narrator who grew up under Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s, and who is haunted by the cover of a magazine she encountered as a child, where an intelligence agent for the regime, Andrés Valenzuela Morales, confessed ‘Yo Torturé’, translated here as ‘I Tortured People’. Our narrator tells the stories of these tortured, vanished people by intertwining them with fictions she also remembers from her childhood: most often, the serial TV programme The Twilight Zone, where books kill and an actress merges into her own image on the movie screen, but also the Back to the Future films and A Christmas Carol. This is a good novel by any definition, but it particularly resonated for me this month through some book/life serendipity; the narrator’s reflections on recording and viewing atrocities reflected Samantha Harvey’s musings on Michael Collins’s photograph and Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas in Orbital, while I also went to see an exhibition at the Baltic that showcased some Central and South American artists (among others) working with themes of trauma and dispossession. And although this is realist fiction, its intertextuality reminded me of horror novels set in other South American countries that have suffered from regimes of terror: Mariana Enríquez’s Our Share of Night (Argentina) and Julianne Pachico’s The Anthill  (Colombia). Finally, it made me think of Elissa Washuta’s brilliant White Magic, which also braids together 80s pop culture with personal trauma, though from the perspective of a Native North American.

What books stood out to you this month? Have you read any of these? Would you like to?

My Top Ten Books of 2023

It’s time for another top ten books of the year list! (You can find my 2022 post here, my 2021 post here, my 2020 post here, my 2019 post here, my 2018 post here, my 2017 post here, my 2016 post here, my 2015 post here, and my 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011 posts on my old blog.) For clarity, these are my ten favourite books I have read this year, regardless of when they were published.

In no particular order…

1. Penance: Eliza Clark. This utterly riveting novel, set in the mid-2010s, explores the horrific killing of sixteen-year-old Joan by three of her classmates in a run-down seaside town in north-east England, and digs deep into their complicated real-life friendship networks, with grudges, loyalties and rivalries dating back to primary school, as well as Tumblr, Insta and creepypasta online cultures. I was captivated by its unusually insightful portrayal of teenage girls and thrown back to my own adolescence in the early 00s. My Goodreads review is here.

2. The Birthday of the World: Ursula Le Guin. A collection of seven SFF short stories and one novella that make us rethink much of what we take for granted. These brilliant novels-in-a-bottle present new takes on sex and gender, but also on solitude and the ‘natural’ sociability of humans, family ties, and power. Le Guin breaks down familiar genre boundaries between SF and fantasy in this incredible sequence of worlds. My full review is here.

3. Hijab Butch Blues: Lamya H. This series of non-chronological essays skips between Lamya’s early childhood in an unnamed South Asian country to the rest of her childhood and adolescence in an unnamed Middle Eastern country to her adulthood in New York, reflecting on how difficult it has been for her to square her identities as a hijabi Muslim and a gay woman, but also how these different ways of living have illuminated each other. Tying together stories from Lamya’s own life and sections from the Quran, this memoir is intensely moving. I reviewed it here.

4. Ducks: Kate Beaton. Beaton spent two years working in Albertan oil camps after college to pay off her student loans. In this graphic memoir, she marks out the trauma suffered by both women and men in the oil sands. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that so accurately depicts the drip-drip-drip impact of sexual harassment and misogyny at work, especially for very young women. But she also empathises with the plight of older men who are injured on the job, only to be made to feel worthless when they have to work in an office or a tool shed because they’re no longer up to heavy manual labour.  I reviewed it here.

5. The Stepford Wives: Ira Levin. This classic, first published in 1972, is both a terrific horror novel and a fascinating glimpse into the very early days of second-wave feminism in the United States. Everyone knows the overt feminist message here – that women who come to this town are made into robots, losing all independent ambition and caring only about housework, childcare and sex. However, what I found most striking about Stepford is that it gets the husbands too. I reviewed it here.

6. White Magic: Elissa Washuta. 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.

7. Bright Young Women: Jessica Knoll. This literary thriller is a fictionalised retelling of some of the murders Ted Bundy committed in the United States in the late 1970s, but it’s not about Bundy: instead, it’s about the women left behind. I’ve rarely read feminist historical fiction that so accurately nails the experience of being a white, middle-class, well-educated woman in the 1970s. I think sometimes it’s difficult for us to really appreciate how radical second-wave feminism was at the time, because it so fundamentally reshaped our way of thinking about the world that we can’t now get outside it (see also: The Stepford Wives, above). Knoll adeptly uses the telling detail, the snigger or the politely patronising smile, to let us really feel how difficult it was for our protagonists to escape this thought-world. My Goodreads review is here.

8. Chain-Gang All-Stars: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. In a near-future United States, incarcerated people convicted of serious crimes can ‘choose’ to become a Link in a Chain-Gang, fighting Links from other Chain-Gangs in staged, televised death-matches. This fantastic novel is explicitly abolitionist, exposing the suffering of incarcerated people and the way in which the prison-industrial complex magnifies the problems it claims to solve. But Adjei-Brenyah also fully faces up to the consequences of this Hunger Games-esque trope by refusing to make his protagonists easily ‘redeemable’, which also means that we can’t assume their opponents are simply ‘evil’. I reviewed it here.

9. The Centre: Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi. At first glance, this debut 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. 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 Goodreads review is here.

10. The Future: Naomi Alderman. This is a somewhat uneven novel, but I found it so engaging, refreshing and memorable in its vision of the near-future that I had to put it on this list. Lai Zhen, a survivalist YouTube blogger originally from Hong Kong, attracts the ire of a fundamentalist religious group, the Enochites. Zhen recently met Martha Einkorn, daughter of the Enochites’ leader; Martha gave Lai an app, AUGR, which switches on and helps her to survive when an assassin comes after her. But later, AUGR also alerts a group of CEOs to evacuate to a deserted island to await the end of the world. This is important and thought-provoking, but it’s also just incredible fun. I reviewed it here.

Reading Stats

I read 161 books in 2023. This is down on previous years, but I’m not bothered about it; I really want to go for quality over quantity. In 2024, I’ll again set a target of 150, as I don’t like having a target that’s too ambitious. Of the 161 books I read, 11 were re-reads, back to the number I reread in 2021, and a lot lower than the 25 I reread in 2022, when my 20 Books of Summer Rereading Challenge boosted the total. I’d like to re-read more in 2024.

I read 127 books by women, 31 books by men (including 1 trans man) and 3 books by writers who identify as non-binary. I read more books by men this year, totalling 19% of my total reading, as opposed to 15% in 2022. Two men are also in my Top Ten Books list, as opposed to zero in 2022.

I read 38 books by writers of colour and 123 books by white writers. Back down again after a very successful 2022: only 24% of the books I read were by writers of colour, whereas I aim for 33%. However, as usual, writers of colour punch above their weight in my Top Ten books list, taking up 4 of the 10 slots.

Finally, here’s what Goodreads thinks was My Year In Books: 

An addendum: I mostly watch trashy films or rewatch old favourites so I rarely write about films, but I’ve watched 46 new-to-me films this year which was a bit of a record (though they were still mostly trash!), so here are my five favourite films that I saw for the first time in 2023: Tár, Get Out, The Truman Show, Host and The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. 

What were your favourite books of 2023?