May Superlatives, 2023

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… Phase Six by Jim Shepard. This is the best book about the immediate onset of, and response to, a pandemic that I’ve ever read. Unlike most pandemic literature (for example: Emily St John Mandel’s wonderful Station Eleven), Phase Six is very closely focused on the first few weeks and months after a new pathogen is released into the environment due to the thawing of Greenlandic permafrost. Jim Shepard digs deep to produce an incredibly well-researched picture of how the CDC, WHO, and healthcare centres might respond, which I found fascinating to read in its own right. I love medical detail, especially epidemiology, and the way Shepard has woven in references to Covid-19 in what was clearly a later draft of this novel only emphasises how realistic his original version was. However, Shepard also transcends this material to tell the human stories of a handful of characters caught up in this pandemic; the abrupt and open ending is intentionally frustrating, but also beautiful, speaking to how our own personal stories always finish before we want them to. This makes Phase Six sound like a dark and difficult read, but I didn’t find it so. In many ways, it’s uplifting, emphasising co-operation and collaboration between humans rather than selfishness. This is not a dystopian novel, but a realistic exploration of how people respond to adversity, and the power as well as the limitations of scientific research. If the Wellcome Book Prize had still been active in 2021, this would have been a perfect winner.

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was…

… Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird by Agustina Bazterrica, trans. Sarah Moses. This collection of very short stories has echoes of a number of other collections I’ve read recently about girls and women, sex and violence; the stories that worked better for me in Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird, like ‘Roberto’ and ‘Unamuno’s Boxes’, are reminiscent of writers like Julia Armfield, Carmen Maria Machado and Kate Folk, whereas the more experimental and bizarre pieces, like ‘Candy Pink’ and ‘Dishwasher’, reminded me more of Irenosen Okojie‘s stories with their accumulation of detail, a style I’ve struggled with in the past. Most of the stories aim to shock and I found that, once I’d worked out the pattern, I was often just waiting for the twist ending, so although they are tonally different, they also feel very similar. I wasn’t greatly impressed. I received a free proof copy of this collection from the publisher for review.

The Book I Just Simply Enjoyed The Most This Month Was…

… Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld. Sittenfeld is such a reliable joy for me; if you exclude her bizarre Eligible, I’ve loved everything she’s ever written. And her latest novel is just as captivating, if not as complex as some of her other work. Sally works as a scriptwriter on comedy sketch show The Night Owls [Saturday Night Live]. When her friend Danny hooks up with a movie star, she’s frustrated enough at this latest example of a trend to propose a sketch that she calls ‘The Danny Horst Rule’: men often date and marry women far more beautiful and successful than them, but ordinary women never end up with celebrity men. Of course, before Sally has even finished writing her sketch, she’s met pop idol Noah, who seems interested in her – but obviously, he can’t be. Can he? The first third of this novel was the most truly satisfying for me, as Sittenfeld convincingly explores the way Sally’s show is put together, with some great observations on how comedy sketches are written, and traces her developing connection with Noah as well as her sparky friendships with her colleagues. The rest of the book, which relies heavily on emails, felt slighter, giving Sittenfeld less opportunity to show what she’s good at, which is mapping complicated human connections. Nevertheless, it made me reflect that if all romance was written this well, I might be more of a fan of the genre.

The Book That Was Ruined By Its Protagonist This Month Was…

… Girl In Ice by Erica Ferencik. I ought to have loved this slow-burn speculative thriller, which ticked all my boxes. Set in a remote Arctic research station, it focuses on the mysterious thawing of a small girl, alive, from the ice. How did she survive, and will she continue to do so? At the same time, there’s a nice touch of horror with the introduction of freezing katabatic winds that are striking people unawares throughout the world and killing them on the spot. Ferencik is a great writer, and the Arctic landscape is beautifully evoked. BUT, I could not handle Girl In Ice‘s protagonist, a linguist called Val who suffers from such crippling anxiety that she has barely travelled anywhere in her life and relies heavily on medication, which she starts to supplement with alcohol once she’s forced to travel out to the Arctic to try and understand what the unfrozen girl is saying. I’m absolutely on board with novels exploring this kind of anxiety and trauma, but I just don’t think it can be explored well in this kind of thriller, and yet novelists keep on trying to do it (see also: The Dark by Emma Haughton). In this sort of book, I really want a competent and practical protagonist who’s able to deal sensibly with other people. It made me reflect on why the nervous, incompetent protagonist of Ferencik’s first, brilliant thriller, The River At Night, worked so well for me: one, she wasn’t faced with urgent research mysteries, and two, her apprehension about going white-water rafting turned out to be totally reasonable and justified! Other readers, though, might warm to Val more than I did.

The Best Novel I Read About Capitalism This Month Was…

… For The Win by Cory Doctorow. Set between LA, South China and Mumbai in the near-future, this novel follows a group of young people, mostly teenagers, who are getting exploited by capitalist bosses in their low-wage, long-hour jobs. However, its major focus isn’t the traditional setting of the factory but the virtual world of online multiplayer games, where most of the protagonists are making money by churning through quests to earn virtual gold and level up avatars that can be sold on to richer players. ‘Gold farming’ in these games is technically illegal, but there’s little the game companies can do about it. This means, though, that gold farmers are vulnerable to mistreatment, getting locked out of their workplaces – internet cafes – or having their pay cut if they dare to complain. Big Sister Nor, who started off organising workers in the ‘real world’, now leads trade union Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web, or the ‘Webblies’, playing on the ‘Wobblies’ of the early twentieth-century US. The Webblies are trying to organise workers across borders, breaking down old rules about unionisation, which is often about resisting undercutting by foreign labour; but they have all the power of the internet on their side.

For The Win is both a fast-paced techno-thriller and a crash course in basic economics and how workers might stand up for their rights. It’s now more than a decade old, but it possibly feels even more relevant today than it did when it was published. I loved the way that Doctorow weaves his accessible explanations into the story, and how this information becomes crucial as the plot unfolds. I also loved that this is a story without individual villains. There are people who do bad things, but the antagonist is the bigger social and economic system rather than any of our narrating characters, even those who hold power in companies like Nintendo. This was apparently badged as YA when it was first sold, but it definitely doesn’t feel like a young adult novel – though I’m sure many teenagers would get a lot out of it. It’s basically a serious, thoughtful and yet still fun examination of what Marx would have called alienated labour. Brilliant. I borrowed this book from my local library #LoveYourLibrary

The Best Summer Thriller I Read This Month Was…

… The New Wife by JP Delaney. I’ve read and enjoyed some of Delaney’s earlier thrillers, but this felt like a big, and interesting, change of pace. (The cover art reflects the way his other books have been marketed, but doesn’t feel right at all for this novel – don’t be put off!). Finn and his sister grew up in Mallorca on a decaying finca, but after an abusive childhood, both of them left in their teens and haven’t looked back. Now their father has died and they’ve inherited the finca – but their father’s new wife, Ruensa, is still living there with her adult daughter Roze. Finn travels to Mallorca to sort out the legalities, but is stunned by what he finds – Ruensa and Roze have transformed the finca and its grounds, planning to set it up as a functioning agrotourism spot and a hostel for hikers. Moreover, he’s immediately attracted to Roze, who draws him in with her mix of lightheartedness, practicality, and fragility. But was it really a coincidence that Finn’s father died so shortly after his marriage? And will Ruensa and Roze give up their fledging business so easily?

In short: this is a retelling of Daphne du Maurier’s unforgettable My Cousin Rachel, and Delaney does capture some of its beauty and menace, gorgeously evoking his Mallorcan setting. As with Rachel in the du Maurier novel, we both want Roze to be what she seems and fear that she isn’t – Delaney makes it completely convincing that Finn would be entranced by her against his better judgment. A late twist is effective, but I did feel that, unlike My Cousin Rachel, The New Wife then leans a little too hard into one interpretation of the characters, despite Delaney’s efforts to keep the ending open. Du Maurier said that she deliberately never made up her mind about Rachel’s true motives; Delaney admits, in his afterword, that he does know what Roze was about. Nevertheless, this is perfect summer reading.

I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review. It’s out in the UK on 20th July.

The Best Debut Novel I Read This Month Was…

… Neon Roses by Rachel Dawson. It’s 1984 in the valleys of South Wales, and Eluned is tired of her boyfriend, her job and her life. In the midst of the miners’ strike, having fun is a distant memory, as all her wages need to go to support her family. Even worse, her sister Mabli is sleeping with the enemy, being wined and dined by one of the policemen who oppress the miners on the pickets. When LGSM (Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners) turn up in Eluned’s village, her attraction to lesbian June makes her realise why she has never quite fit in with her community’s expectations – but can she really leave her whole life behind? This accomplished novel vividly evokes a range of settings across Britain in the mid-1980s, from rural Wales to Cardiff to London to Manchester. It has all the verisimilitude of Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses but, for me, much more originality and heart. As a historian of this period, I loved how effortlessly Dawson brought queer communities and protest movements to life, weaving in detail without over-explaining or overloading. I know much less about the specifics of her South Wales setting, but I felt that was also beautifully done; Dawson refuses to pander to the reader by explaining the ‘Wenglish’ that many of her characters use, but I never felt lost. There’s a depth to this novel that is absent from most twentieth-century historical fiction.

My only question is: why didn’t I love it more, as it literally ticks all my boxes? This is probably a me problem rather than a book problem, but I never quite warmed to Eluned as much as I wanted to, despite the homophobia and hardship she faces, and the solidarity she shows. (So great to read a book that understands that identifying as a lesbian, especially in the 1980s, is about more than who you sleep with.) On a macro level, she never seemed to truly experience any vulnerability, although I can appreciate that Dawson puts her in many situations where she’s positioned as vulnerable; something about what was happening to Eluned on the outside and what was happening in her head didn’t quite connect. On a micro level, I wondered if this wasn’t helped by the slightly detached prose, which keeps us at a fair distance from Eluned (Dawson continually uses ‘Eluned’ when ‘she’ would have done, and this jolted me outside of her consciousness). I wanted to fall in love with Eluned and June, and I just didn’t. Nevertheless, a brilliant debut. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

The Re-Read That Made Me Think The Most About Rereading This Month Was…

… The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank. I adored this novel when I first read it aged twenty, in 2007; I re-read it in 2008 and 2009, and was equally captivated each time. Last summer, I re-read Bank’s debut, The Girls’ Guide To Hunting and Fishing, which I never had liked as much, and commented ‘I enjoyed revisiting Girls’ Guide, but I have much higher hopes for [rereading] The Wonder Spot’. Both books follow a similar trajectory, tracing the life of a young Jewish woman struggling with jobs and dating; in The Wonder Spot, our heroine is Sophie. I do still think The Wonder Spot is better than Girls’ Guide; the humour is subtler, and Bank has abandoned the tics that annoyed me in her first novel. But, I was disappointed! Although I still admired Bank’s observational skill and the way she doesn’t feel the need to tell the reader everything, I couldn’t remember why I had once loved The Wonder Spot so much.

I think this was a book that spoke much more to my younger self; I intensely re-read it during the period of my life when I was struggling the most with romantic relationships, meeting men (that was my first mistake) who messed me around, played games or just weren’t right. And The Wonder Spot is incredibly good at showing us, rather than telling us, why Sophie’s relationships don’t work out. Most of the chapters in the book stand alone as short stories that dissect the behaviour of men who seem to have potential, but just aren’t the one; I especially enjoyed ‘Teen Romance’ and ‘The One After You’, which have the most mature takes on Sophie’s love life. More than fifteen years on, though, this reminded me too much of the Disaster Women novels that are now so popular, although Sophie is definitely Gen X rather than a millennial or Gen Z, and Bank can write much better than most. Having said that, though, I would press her books on anybody who actually likes this kind of fiction; Bank was well ahead of her time. PUBLISHERS TAKE NOTE: if this were rejacketed for 2023, I think it would be a hit again.

What books stood out for you in May?

Women’s Prize for Fiction, 2023: Pod #LoveYourLibrary

When I heard that Laline Paull’s Pod had been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, my reaction was as follows: ‘I did not enjoy Paull’s The Bees, which read like a bad YA dystopia, and while I had more mixed feelings about her second novel, The Ice, there’s no way I’m picking up a book by her from the point of view of a dolphin.’  Once Pod was shortlisted for the Prize, and having read some glowing reviews of the novel as well as some terrible ones, I was tempted to give it a try. And on the whole, I’m glad I did. Pod is indeed primarily told from the point of view of a dolphin – spinner dolphin Ea, who is isolated from her pod because she cannot hear the sounds of the ocean in the same way her fellow dolphins do. However! We also get the points of view of MANY other dolphins, including bottlenose Google, who once worked for the military; a ‘lordmale’ wrasse fish; a poisonous fugu fish; a Rorqual whale; and a quasi-parasitic Remora. Lucky us!

As this suggests, this book is quite bizarre, and yet it worked a lot better for me than Paull’s previous foray into anthropomorphism in The Bees. Why? First, dolphins are obviously a lot closer to humans than bees, so Paull’s humanisation of her aquatic characters made a lot more sense in this novel, and she was able to explore how dolphins might think much more convincingly. (As I learnt from Audrey Schulman’s The Dolphin House, dolphins have very advanced linguistic capabilities, although Paull does lean towards making them ‘human’ rather than truly trying to enter the mind of a dolphin, which is probably impossible). Second, Pod doesn’t have the ‘YA dystopian’ elements that made The Bees such a slog for me. There are a few hints of it – character that’s Not Like Other Girls! Instalove! – but only in Ea’s story, and only occasionally. Third, the way that Paull uses point of view in Pod is quite clever, ranging between different creatures and groups that are linked by the ocean. At times, this really feels like watching an episode of Blue Planet, with David Attenborough narrating the characters’ motives – and Paull acknowledges both Blue Planet and Attenborough as inspirations. My favourite chapters were definitely the multivocal ones rather than the ones that focus on Ea.

My other worry about this book was that it was going to be very preachy and simplistic, especially as Paull has form for this in The Ice. But to my surprise, Paull avoids this, and gives us a genuinely fresh perspective on climate crisis. The sheer weirdness of the dolphins’ perspectives means that incidents like plastic pollution, for example, creep up on us rather than being obvious, as we’re also trying to work out why the oceans are changing. And because Paull spends a lot of time exploring the violent social order of the Tursiops pod of bottlenoses that capture Ea – including their frequent gang rapes – the book isn’t simply about dolphins as innocent victims of human action, but has more to say about how societies respond to crisis. (Some reviewers have felt that the amount of sexual violence in Pod is unnecessary, but it made sense to me given how sex functions in dolphin societies. Dolphins do take part in sexual coercion in gangs, but also, sex is central to how dolphins form social connections. It might have been better, though, to dial down the anthropomorphism of Ea here, which would have made the scenes read differently).

I’m not quite sure why this was either longlisted or shortlisted for the Women’s Prize; it’s just so weird, and reads like creative non-fiction rather than a novel. Because of that, I can’t really recommend it as fiction. I guess, for me, novels are about humans, and even eco-critical novels that successfully decentre humanity, like Richard Powers’ The Overstory, work because they are still full of complex people. Pod hobbles itself by writing characters that are not human, and not driven by human motivations, but who are still anthropomorphised. It’s also a slog to read, quite honestly. Nevertheless, I admired Paull’s ambition to write a very different kind of story, even if it didn’t quite come off.

I borrowed Pod from my local library #LoveYourLibrary

Three SFF Novels About New Forms of Intelligence: The Mountain in the Sea, Cold People & The Book of Phoenix

I accidentally read three novels in quick succession that deal with new forms of intelligence  – whether that’s genetically modified humans, rapidly evolving octopuses, or AI!

First off, Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea. Set in the near-future on the Côn Đảo archipelago, this novel follows a group of scientists researching a colony of octopuses who seem to have accelerated into near-human cultural development. As Nayler explains, octopuses are intelligent, but hampered from transmitting cultural knowledge due to a number of factors: their short lifespans, their solitary lives and the fact that they lay eggs and move on, which stops parents passing down knowledge to their children. The Mountain in the Sea postulates that this group of octopuses have evolved past these barriers, perhaps via RNA editing which allows cephalopods to respond more swiftly to environmental pressures than other classes of animals. This novel also has a lot to say about AI and other forms of consciousness, and why humans find ‘other minds’ so frightening. As this suggests, though, there’s not really enough story in The Mountain in the Sea to make this all hang together as fiction, and although Nayler makes a stab at the end to draw the emotional journey of his central character, Ha, to the fore, it’s too little too late. Reminded me of other cerebral but detached SF about linguistics like China Mieville’s Embassytown (and made me appreciate all over again Ted Chiang’s incredible achievement in ‘Story of Your Life‘, which is both so good on language and alien minds and so intensely moving). I’d read a sequel, though.

An octopus in the aggressive ‘Nosferatu’ pose, raising its mantle.

The Mountain in the Sea proved to be a good aperitif for my next two reads, which are both about genetically modified humans who take on animal characteristics to attain superhuman strength and intelligence. Tom Rob Smith’s Cold People is a thoroughly bizarre piece of work: it starts with the entire population of Earth being ordered to relocate to Antarctica by an invading alien race, who then dissolve anybody who hasn’t made it there by the deadline into fragments of light. You might think the rest of this novel might have something to do with the aliens, but they turn out to be an extravagant deus ex machina for what Smith really wants to explore. First, how humans adapt their society to the extreme conditions of Antarctica, with few natural resources; second, how they relate to the ‘ice-adapted’ people they create through genetic experimentation. Cold People’s main problem as a novel is that it’s, well, so cold. Smith has built a second career as a screenwriter and this cinematic gaze really doesn’t help when translated into a different form. Characters have almost no interiority, and when they do, it’s super-clunky, script notes rather than emotion: ‘When he finally opened his eyes, he was crying. She hadn’t seen him cry since Echo was born. She understood that this bridge reminded him of home and the family he’d lost. “Are you thinking about your family?”‘.

Cold People also dances around the kind of interesting questions that The Mountain in the Sea explores, but never quite engages with them – it’s more interested in setting up a dramatic final showdown rather than really thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of humans as a species. Having said all that, the originality of this novel will make it difficult to forget. Smith cleverly never makes the aliens’ motives clear, so we’re left to wonder, along with the protagonists, whether they are galactic guardians punishing humanity for destroying Earth through climate change or rapacious colonisers herding humans into a reservation so they can exploit Earth themselves. I also liked how Smith resists certain dystopian tropes in his portrayal of the collective caring of some of the Antarctic communities: ‘Weren’t they better people now, better at caring for each other… fairer under even the most testing of circumstances? Maybe these virtues couldn’t ultimately save them from extinction, but they could make the last decades of people some of the best.’

I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

McMurdo station, the biggest Antarctic base

Nnedi Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix, in contrast, is not short on warmth nor passion. It stars an ‘accelerated woman’, Phoenix, who at the start of the novel has spent all her life in ‘Tower 7’, alongside her fellow genetic experiments. Phoenix has African ancestry, but has been severed from her people and her culture. She escapes when she comes into a full realisation of her own powers, burning the tower to the ground and rising from the ashes. Furious at the way she and her friends have been exploited, Phoenix declares that she is now the ‘villain’, and determines to wreak havoc on the other towers across the world. The opening of this novel was originally published as a short story, and it absolutely shows: the first twenty pages or so are bright and arresting. However, the rest of it just didn’t work for me. I hated Okorafor’s novella Binti, but, given her reputation as an Afrofuturist writer, was determined to give her another shot.

Unfortunately, I don’t think her work or her writing is for me. I had similar problems with this than I had with Binti: it’s morally simplistic, and the prose feels unworked, too abbreviated, YA-ish. It’s like a first draft that needs further expansion, and this really made it difficult for me to connect. And in comparison to both The Mountain in the Sea and Cold People, which both have a more complex take on humanity’s flaws and virtues, The Book of Phoenix is happy to tell us that Humans Are Just Bad, which is a SF take I can never get behind. Humans are often terrible, often amazingly good; who’s to say that a future version, or an alien race, won’t have the same contradictions? I did like the framing narrative and the way that Okorafor employs oral history and storytelling tropes, but I don’t think I’ll be reading the follow-on, Who Fears Death, unless somebody can convince me it’s totally different from Binti and The Book of Phoenix.

Have you read any good SF or speculative fiction recently?

February Superlatives, 2023

I originally borrowed this post format from Elle; I enjoyed writing these posts so much last year that I’ve decided to bring them back for 2023!

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai. Pleasingly, unlike the set of books I read in January, there was some stiff competition for this coveted slot this month, and I’ve put a couple of honourable mentions below. However, this prep school novel won through because it was one of those rare books that was both completely gripping and immersive, but also so thoughtful and thought-provoking. I just loved reading it so much. My full review is here.

Hon. mentions: Bad Cree by Jessica Johns and Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H.

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was…

… The Witch in the Well by Camilla Bruce. This novel focuses on a rekindled rivalry between childhood friends Catherine and Elena after they both decide to write books about a figure that haunts the history of their town. That figure is Ilsbeth Clark, a woman accused of horrific crimes in the nineteenth century. It’s constructed mostly from a series of documents: Catherine and Elena’s own narratives, plus excerpts from Catherine’s novel and sections from the historical records she’s been researching in the archives. Another, undocumented voice intrudes occasionally, and refreshingly, but this is the bulk of the novel. And unfortunately, in striving to give Elena and Catherine distinctive voices, Bruce makes them both hopelessly irritating. Elena uses plentiful hashtags, CAPS LOCKS and exclamation marks; Catherine, despite her more formal prose, actually sounds quite similar; both come off as equally deluded. I’m a big fan of an unsympathetic narrator but they have to be interesting, and I had no interest in either of these women. The only bit that gave me any kind of frisson was the description of the ‘witch in the well’ game played in the school playground, stepping in and out of a circle of chalk; otherwise, this totally lacked atmosphere. I received a free proof copy of this book from the publisher for review.

My Favourite Reread This Month Was…

… The Life and Death of Sophie Stark by Anna North. I first read this novel back in 2015 and named it as one of my top ten books of the decade in 2019, so I’m glad it held up! It tells the story of unconventional filmmaker and director, Sophie Stark, though a range of narrators; Sophie herself never gets to narrate, but we hear from her lover, her brother, her husband, her producer. North’s prose is utterly hypnotic, and I spent most of the book trying to work out how she does it (especially as I’ve since read her Outlawed and liked it a lot, but didn’t think it was nearly this brilliant). I think what makes this book so great is its series of nested stories. It starts with a woman telling a story on a stage and never really leaves that mode. I felt glued to the page by the narrative drive of a campfire tale, even when the stories told were much more complex and difficult. Sophie herself is a fantastic character, properly weird rather than movie weird, and both hard to like and to truly dislike. It was particularly special to read this book around visiting a wonderful exhibition at the film museum in Amsterdam, Saodat Ismailova’s 18,000 Worlds.

Hon. mention: Orkney by Amy Sackville, which I liked as much as I did last time I read it, back in 2013… but I do think it should have been a novella, which is possibly the only time I’ve ever said that!

The Best Ghost Story I Read This Month Was…

… The Upstairs Room by Kate Murray-Browne. Another reread! This debut, which I first read back in 2018, has been so thoroughly misunderstood by Goodreads reviewers that I want to shout its praises everywhere. It’s not a thriller or a (traditional) ghost story, but a deeply unsettling dissection of why we settle where and when we do – whether that’s in a relationship, in a job, or in a house. Any summary of the novel makes it sound like a mix of the ‘rootless millennial woman’ genre crossed with ‘middle-aged people’s marriage troubles’, but Murray-Browne’s writing is just so good: one of the writers that makes me feel I’m looking more clearly at the world after reading her, that my own life has been placed into better order. I’d shelve this next to Naomi Booth’s Exit Management. I’m thrilled to hear that Murray-Browne has a new novel coming out in 2024, which sounds great: ‘One Girl Began entwines the stories of three women, separated by history but connected by the same building. For Ellen in 1909, it is a box factory where she finds work and a transformative circle of friendship when her family fall on hard times. For Frances in 1984, it is a derelict ruin, where she joins a group of squatters and is drawn into a coercive relationship. And for Amanda in 2020, it is a gentrified conversion, where she finds herself trapped in a tiny flat and grappling with new motherhood as the pandemic looms into view. Over the span of 111 years these three women will come to haunt one another backwards and forwards in time.’

The Silliest Book I Read This Month Was…

… The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi. Jamie is fired from his job at a food delivery start-up at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic but then gets a new job opportunity; he can go and work in an alternative version of Earth, where tropical jungle covers Canada and enormous kaiju roam wild. But as the kaiju are powered by organic nuclear reactors, things could quickly get out of hand. This book is not intended to be serious. As Scalzi writes in his afterword, ‘KPS is not, and I say this with absolutely no slight intended, a brooding symphony of a novel. It’s a pop song.’ And it is pretty much as silly and fun as it promises, with a likeable protagonist and a serviceable secondary cast of scientists who work with the kaiju. For peak escapism, I would have preferred it to be a bit more immersive – the jungle setting is barely described and I felt like there was too much snarky dialogue, not enough space for the concept to breathe. Still, it’s hard to feel badly towards this novel.

The Best Sequel I Read This Month Was…

… Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo. I was worried that this sequel to Ninth House might have too much action for me, but while I feel this Yale-set dark academia series could still stand to let its characters breathe a bit more, Hell Bent hits about the same balance as the first book, and is just as atmospheric. Alex is back for a second year at Yale, trying to perform the duties of Lethe by herself while investigating the mysterious murders of two faculty members. Looking forward to the third book!

Have you read any standout books in February?

My Top Ten Books of 2022

It’s time for another top ten books of the year list! (You can find 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.

A note: If 2021 was a weak reading year, 2022 was an exceptionally strong one! Plenty of my commended books could also have appeared on this list.

In no particular order…

1. The Dispossessed: Ursula Le Guin. This classic SF novel has rightly swept many readers across the decades off their feet; it’s such an intelligent, detailed and honest exploration of what an anarchist society might look like, and how that would change the kind of people we are. I wrote briefly about it here.

2. Our Wives Under The Sea: Julia Armfield. MY OBSESSION. After Miri’s biologist wife Leah returns from a mysterious deep-sea mission, she realises that the Leah who left is not the person who’s come back. A book about grief, but also a very fine horror novel. I reviewed it here.

3. Finding The Mother Tree: Suzanne Simard. Many writers want to combine memoir and nature-writing and very few succeed. Simard does it perfectly, and she’s also the protagonist of a fascinating, revolutionary scientific investigation that would have been enough for a book on its own, as she explores how trees of different species share resources and information via an underground fungal network. I wrote briefly about it here.

4. The First Woman: Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi. Teenage Kirabo explores the secrets of her own family against a backdrop of Ugandan folktales during Idi Amin’s dictatorship in the 1970s. Makumbi’s writing is incredible: she lets her story speak for itself in a local vernacular that is so clever, vivid and alive. I wrote briefly about it here.

5. The Anthill: Julianne Pachico. Lina spent her early childhood in Medellín but left for England when she was eight; now she’s returned to the city as an uncomfortable outsider. This book is both a merciless, brilliantly observed critique of foreign visitors to Columbia and a haunting horror story that uses ghostly tropes to explore a character and a country’s traumatic past. In the end, we can never really come home. I wrote briefly about it here.

6. Spirits Abroad: Zen Cho. I didn’t love every story in this collection but about half of it was so wonderful that I felt it belonged on this list anyway. Cho expertly combines dry wit, Malaysian folklore, a hint of horror, and her own superb imagination. Best stories: ‘The Terra-Cotta Bride’ and ‘The House of Aunts’. I reviewed it here.

7. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: Gabrielle Zevin. Of course I loved this gorgeous tale of work, friendship, making art, storytelling and play. Sam and Sadie design video games together, but you don’t need to like video games to like this novel, which is really about the challenges of creating. I reviewed it here.

8. To Paradise: Hanya Yanagihara. CONTROVERSIAL. This wasn’t an instant smash hit for me but I haven’t stopped thinking about it all year, especially the third section of the novel, ‘Zone Eight’. The questions Yanagihara asks about how societies that seem dystopic to us may actually have benefits for those who suffer in our society are just not questions I’ve seen being explored anywhere else. I reviewed it here.

9. The Sentence: Louise Erdrich. Should have won the Women’s Prize! This isn’t a perfect novel but I felt that Erdrich brought a whole world to life through the warm, humorous voice of her Objiwe narrator, Tookie. I reviewed it here.

10. Bloodchild and Other Stories: Octavia E. Butler. Five incredible miniature pieces of science fiction (plus a couple things that didn’t work for me, but whatever). Best stories: ‘Amnesty’ and ‘Bloodchild’. I wrote about it briefly here.

Reading Stats

I read 190 books in 2022. This is an all-time record, but I’m not sure why I read more this year than in previous years! In 2023, I’ll again set a target of 150, as I don’t like having a target that’s too ambitious. Of the 190 books I read, 25 were re-reads, a significant improvement over the 11 books I re-read in 2021.

I read 162 books by women (including 1 trans woman) and 28 books by men (including 2 trans men). I think this is the fewest number of books by men I’ve ever read in one year, totalling just 15% of my total reading. I wanted to read more books by men of colour and trans men this year, and I did up my numbers in that respect. Also notable: this is the only time that my top ten books of the year have all been written by women.

I read 72 books by writers of colour and 118 books by white writers. This means I have FINALLY achieved (and smashed) my target of reading 33% of books by writers of colour, getting it up to 38%. I have to say, I’ve really noticed how much more diverse my reading has felt this year, and I’m glad that six of my top ten books of the year were by women of colour. Once again, I will aim to read 33% books by writers of colour in 2022.

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

A #SciFiMonth Coda: Speculative Fiction in December

Or, things I planned to read in #SciFiMonth and didn’t get round to…

This gorgeous collection of short stories by Zen Cho, Spirits Abroad, is split into three sections: ‘Here’, ‘There’ and ‘Elsewhere’. The stories in ‘Here’ are set in our world with a darker twist, while in ‘There’, characters spend more time in fantastical settings that are still linked to the real world, and in ‘Elsewhere’, they could be anywhere at all, from the Chinese afterlife to outer space. The collection is also geographically split; the stories in ‘Here’ are usually set in Malaysia, especially in Kuala Lumpur, while the stories in ‘Elsewhere’ often have British settings, and at least two are set at Cambridge. It’s not exactly original, when reviewing a short story collection, to say that you liked some stories more than others, but what struck me about Spirits Abroad was that if it had consisted solely of the first section, ‘Here’, plus everything but ‘Monkey King, Faerie Queen’ from ‘Elsewhere’, it would probably have been one of the very best collections of short stories I’d ever read. Every one of these stories was a knock-out, and they also have an incredible coherence while never becoming repetitive. Cho expertly combines dry wit, Malaysian folklore, a hint of horror, and her own brilliant imagination. These are difficult elements to balance, but somehow she pulls it off every time.

Apart from ‘The Terra-Cotta Bride’, which I reviewed back in November, my favourite stories included ‘The House of Aunts’, which draws on vampiric Malay tales of the pontianak but also tells a heartwarming tale of how teenage Ah Lee both loves and resents the older female family members with whom she lives – often with good reason (‘Dealing with the aunts had actually been less difficult than she had expected. They had told her off for not staying home and doing her homework, but it had been a half-hearted telling off.  The aunts knew they had forfeited the moral high ground by trying to eat her classmate.’). I also loved the family matriarch, Nai Nai, in ‘The First Witch of Damasara’, who is disturbing her family by threatening to become a kuang shi [zombie] unless she’s buried in Penang (‘You know why I wanted you all to call me Nai Nai? Even though Hokkien people call their grandmother Ah Ma?… In the movies, Nai Nai is always bad!’). Meanwhile, ‘The Fish Bowl’ is a less flashy story about a teenage girl who makes a deal with a koi fish as she struggles with the pressures of school, but it moves beautifully towards its joyful ending. ‘Liyana’ is a gentle, sweet story about a family who grow their own houses from the ground, while, for all the ghouls and zombies here, ‘Odette’, which lacks either, is easily the most horrifying tale.

It’s a shame, then, about ‘There’, which went badly off-kilter for me. The stories in this section tilted far too far towards being silly, losing the darker edge that rooted the rest of the collection. The only one I came close to liking was ‘The Mystery of the Suet Swain’, where the depiction of a group of Malaysian students who stick together at the University of Cambridge was so realistic and well-observed that it grounded the rest of it. (Personal bias: there’s something about stories of fairies/faeries that never works for me, so any mention of fairyland was an instant no.) But, on the other hand, the way this collection is grouped does at least suggest that Cho knows very well what she’s doing, and the stories in ‘There’ have obviously balanced perfectly for some readers. All in all, I was so impressed by this collection, and I can’t wait to try Cho’s novels.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Memory is the third in his ambitious, hard-SF series that began with Children of Time and continued with Children of Ruin. I had a mixed experience with the first two books – I struggled with the amount of evolutionary biology that Tchaikovsky included, especially in Children of Time, but loved the horror elements – ancient AIs, abandoned spaceships and invading consciousnesses – that were more prominent in Children of Ruin. Children of Memory sits somewhere between the two. It’s set on another planet that was targeted by human terraformers as they sought out new worlds to live on after the destruction of Earth. This planet, Imir, has not fared very well – the small human population has struggled to set up a functioning eco-system, and they live at a subsistence level. Our main protagonist is a teenage girl called Liff, who encounters Miranda, a woman who claims to have come from one of the ‘out-farms’ that encircle the main settlement on Imir, but who seems to originate from a much more distant place. As Liff tries to work out Miranda’s secret, she also encounters the Witch, a powerful woman who is determined to seek out Miranda.

This plot-line was compelling (and I loved the final twist). There’s not enough SFF that mixes SF and fantasy elements like this, and I was reminded of Sylvia Louise Engdahl’s classic Enchantress From The Stars. However, I was frustrated by the more cerebral material in this novel, especially when Tchaikovsky invents yet another Earth species that has followed a different evolutionary pathway – this time, birds. This felt unnecessary, and the bird chapters were so intensely annoying that I had to skim them. I would have preferred to be immersed in Liff and Miranda’s story. I guess I have to conclude that I’m not the right audience for the harder SF elements of Tchaikovsky’s work, even though I’ve enjoyed much of this wildly intelligent and original series.

I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

I’m still trying to find the right time to start Gwyneth Jones’s Life, which looks fascinating but a bit too cerebral for my currently frazzled, end-of-semester brain. Its take on sex and gender looks like it will chime well with some of the reading on trans identities I’m doing at the moment, so watch this space!

Have you read any speculative fiction in December?

Two Californian Historical Novels: Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson & Frog Music by Emma Donoghue

These two long California-set historical novels were so meticulously researched and the stories of the characters so intensely intertwined with the environment they lived in that it felt as if their writers had resurrected little pieces of the past. Despite this, neither of them quite worked for me as fiction – though I’m glad to have read both! Here are my thoughts:

Ash Davidson’s debut novel, Damnation Spring, is set in the redwood groves in Del Norte County (“Nortay,” one of the locals mocks an outsider who visits to pronounce on the fate of the logging industry there, ‘It’s Del Nort. E’s silent, asshole’). It’s 1977, and Rich is an old-timer, felling trees for timber; his wife, Colleen, longs for another baby but keeps suffering miscarriages. It swiftly becomes apparent that the chemical sprays the logging company use to kill the brush are contaminating the community’s water supply and causing defects in unborn babies, as well as illness in children and adults. Moving away from traditional methods of sustained yield (‘not cutting faster than the forest could grow back‘) has also caused soil erosion. In short, Damnation Grove could be a case study for Suzanne Simard’s Finding The Mother Tree, and also recalls other big sagas of logger families like Michael Christie’s Greenwood as well as pesticide critiques like Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation and Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer. Davidson places a neat conflict at the heart of her novel: Colleen wants the spraying to stop to protect her babies and those of her neighbours, but Rich needs the logging of the grove to continue so he can get clear-cuts through to a plot of timber he’s just bought, dreaming of felling the ‘big pumpkin’ redwoods that his father never could. And as the community realises their livelihood might be under threat from investors and environmental activists, tensions erupt.

This tidy hook makes Damnation Spring a bit formulaic and predictable, and yet it still never delivers the clash that its opening pages promise. This long novel treads water for a long time before we finally (about three hundred pages in) get to the crucial public hearing about the plans to harvest Damnation Grove. And even then, Rich and Colleen’s divisions sputter out somewhat – although I did appreciate Davidson’s commitment to making sure they both remain sympathetic. The novel feels unbalanced, with too much build-up and not enough time for these interesting questions about the rights of workers, parents, animals and trees to a place to play out. This all sounds like this was a straight fail for me, but actually I enjoyed much of Damnation Spring; I liked its immersive quality, its exploration of the daily lives and exceptional skill of loggers, and the way we take our slow, unhurried time to get to know these characters. The ending, picking up on a repetitive refrain throughout the novel, is smart and moving. I wouldn’t read this again, but it definitely provided the kind of reading experience I hope for from a historical doorstopper.

Thanks so much to Rebecca for passing on her proof copy of this novel to me!

If Damnation Spring is an evocative historical novel, Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music sticks so closely to the historical record that it probably has a claim to being creative non-fiction. It’s set almost exactly a hundred years earlier and some three hundred miles from Damnation Spring, in San Francisco during the heat wave of 1876. Blanche is an exotic dancer and sex worker, living with her lover Arthur and his companion Ernest after all three of them left the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris. She encounters the enigmatic Jenny Bonnet, a freewheeling frog-hunter who dresses in men’s clothes and rides a stolen bicycle. But when the novel opens, Jenny has just been shot dead in front of Blanche – and the rest of the story retraces their steps to ask why. Both Blanche and Jenny are arresting characters. While I didn’t like Blanche, exactly, I liked Donoghue’s bravery as she shows how circumstances have conspired to make her into a woman who ‘enjoys’ much of the sex she sells and a mother who neglects her baby. I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel, even a historical one, which allows its protagonist to be such a bad mother by modern standards, and yet Donoghue’s portrayal of the poor bargains working-class parents made with baby farms rang true to me.

Donoghue perfectly evokes both the stifling heat in small lodgings in San Francisco’s Chinatown and the tension and fear surrounding the summer’s smallpox epidemic, which eventually leads to racist riots when the Chinese population are wrongly blamed. And, as her extensive author’s note demonstrates, almost all of the major characters and events in this story are true. Frog Music has some blisteringly bad Goodreads reviews, which I think are undeserved – I’ve read historical novels much duller and more info-dumpy than this one (and I loved the historical detail!) But it is probably fair to say that Donoghue’s story is rather too constrained by the facts, and she might have done better to allow herself more creative licence, especially as Blanche’s story piles one misfortune on top of another. I wanted more of Blanche and Jenny’s daring and less of the misery of baby farms, industrial schools and thieving rapists. True to history this might be, but it makes for less satisfying fiction. Nevertheless, with the sole exception of Haven, I’ve never read a Donoghue novel that I didn’t think was worthwhile, so I’m going to keep checking out her back catalogue. (Of her adult novels, the only ones I haven’t read are Slammerkin, Life Mask and Landing – anyone read any of those three? Would you recommend, if so?)

Thanks very much to my local library for selling this book to me for 50p #LoveYourLibrary

August Superlatives

A nice short round-up this month as I’ve reviewed most of my reads for 20 Books of Summer already, and only new reads count for the purposes of my Superlatives posts.

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… The Blue Place by Nicola Griffith. This, with its AMAZING late 90s cover, only confirmed that I will read anything Nicola Griffith writes. Billed as a thriller, this is actually a character study of Aud Torvingen: former police lieutenant, lesbian, six-foot tall martial arts practitioner, Norwegian-British-American, carpenter and social manipulator. From the first page I loved Aud and the way that Griffith writes about her world, from the humidity of Atlanta to the glacial lakes of the fjords. It’s the first in a trilogy and there’s a sense that Griffith is just getting going; the book really springs to life in its second half. However, we rarely meet fictional people like Aud, and that alone is enough to make me want to read the next two books. Arguably, she’s a bit larger than life, a bit wish-fulfilment-for-lesbians, but you know what, I love it: there are so many wish-fulfilment books for straight white men, especially in the crime/thriller space, and nobody cares. (I also love that the Italian edition is called Concrete Eyes). Not quite up there with Hild, Ammonite and Slow River, but still brilliant.

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was…

…The Dark Between The Trees by Fiona Barnett. This novel had such potential. It’s told through alternating chapters set in two different time periods. A group of historians follow the trail of some seventeenth-century Parliamentarian soldiers who disappeared in Moresby Wood, now out of bounds to the general public. Both groups soon find that the woods are not what they seem; paths seem to rearrange themselves to direct them towards certain places, landmarks shift and go missing. So far, so Blair Witch. However, the poor writing robs the novel of any tension and the large cast are difficult to tell apart. There also seems to have been no real effort to portray an early modern mindset in the soldiers’ chapters (at one point, a character talks about the division between his ‘personal’ and ‘professional’ roles). My full review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

The Best YA Book/s I Read This Month Were…

….Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating and The Henna Wars, both by Adiba Jaigirdar. I think I’ve found the kind of YA novel I like, and it’s queer contemporary romance! (Though I also read Casey McQuiston’s I Kissed Shara Wheeler this month, which did not work well for me, and found Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper: Volume 3 a bit cheesy). These were two more adorable stories. Hani and Ishu is about two bisexual Bengali girls who start ‘fake dating’ each other at their Irish Catholic school, each for their own reasons, but then start falling for each other for real. The Henna Wars stars a lesbian Bangladeshi Muslim girl, Nishat, who is infuriated when Brazilian-Irish classmate, Flávia, steals her idea of launching a henna business.

Funnily enough, the first few chapters of Hani and Ishu (though not The Henna Wars) start out over-explaining everything, not just Bengali references, but Irish ones like ‘Leaving Cert’ – but then Jaigirdar drops this completely (except in conversations between the protagonists and their white friends, where explanations feel natural). She trusts the reader to come along with her, which I loved. For this reason, both The Henna Wars and Hani and Ishu feel more subtle and complex than many adult romance/women’s fiction novels I’ve read on similar subjects. The Henna Wars spells out Nishat’s frustrations about cultural appropriation a few too many times, but that was the only time it reminded me of more usual YA fare.

Jaigirdar beautifully portrays how much it means to Hani and Ishu to find each other, after years of being the only brown girls at an all-white school; however, she doesn’t ignore cultural difference. Hani, like Nishat, is a Bangladeshi Muslim; Ishu Indian and pretty secular, happy to swear and drink alcohol. Intergenerational dynamics are cleverly portrayed, too. Ishu’s ‘pushy’ parents are not driven by religion or conservatism but by ambition; Hani’s parents rarely go to the mosque until Hani becomes interested in Islam in her own right, and are totally accepting of her bisexuality. The Henna Wars, meanwhile, tells a different story about coming out in a Muslim family; Nishat’s parents are much more traditionally religious and struggle to come to terms with her being a lesbian. I adored the super-close relationship between Nishat and her younger sister Priti, though.

If I was to compare these two books, I think The Henna Wars is the stronger novel – I liked the more substantial plot-line and the more nuanced characterisation of Nishat’s classmates – but both are certainly worth reading.

The Best Historical Novel I Read This Month Was...

… The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich. Erdrich’s Pulitzer-winning novel is set in 1953 and focuses on the Chippewa Council’s fight against House Concurrent Resolution 108, which ‘called for the eventual termination of all American Indian tribes, and the immediate termination of five tribes, including the Turtle Mountain Band’. Her central character Thomas Wazhushk is based on her own grandfather; Thomas works shifts as a night watchman while protesting what was erroneously called the ‘Indian Emancipation Bill’, barely finding time to sleep. The other strand in the novel follows a young Chippewa woman called Pixie, who is figuring out her own life while searching for her lost sister. This is a solid and educational novel, but for me it never rose to the heights of Erdrich’s more complex The Sentence, which was much more evocatively and imaginatively narrated. This was more like The Round House, which I found both worthy and plodding – and I was disappointed by how much Pixie’s relatively cliched narrative dominated when I really wanted to know about Thomas’s campaign. Erdrich fans, which of her books should I read next?

The Saddest Book I Read This Month Was…

… The Dolphin House by Audrey Schulman, which is closely based on a real scientific scandal of the 1960s. A young white woman, Margaret Lovatt, lived with a male dolphin called Peter in a partly flooded house on the Caribbean island of St Thomas, hoping to teach him to communicate with humans by mimicking human language through his blowhole. Schulman presents a harrowing picture of research with dolphins in the 1960s, exploring both their innate capabilities and how little they’re understood by their human captors. Her fictional protagonist, Cora, is desperate to prevent the further exploitation of the dolphins she works with, but is ultimately unable to stop it.

This novel is so intelligent and so interesting that I’m struggling to work out why I didn’t really click with it as a work of fiction (it would have been brilliant as a long essay). the biggest problem for me was Cora herself. Schulman is so determined to rewrite Lovatt’s reputation that I think she goes a bit too far. Cora is continuously idealised, always right in every situation, always there to tell the reader what they should think. So as non-fiction, this is brilliant; as fiction, it’s a little lacking. My full review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

Did you have any standout reads in August? What were the best and worst books you read?

 

July Superlatives

Again, the Superlatives format is borrowed from Elle. I only feature books that I read for the first time this month, not rereads (otherwise the worst book would obviously be Skellig)

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. This gorgeous story of work, friendship, making art, storytelling and play completely bowled me over. My full review is here. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

Honorable mention: Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou. This smart, surreal satire about Asian Americans in academia both delighted and impressed me, even if I thought the tone was a bit uneven. My full review is here. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was…

… Pulse Points by Jennifer Down. Down is an Australian writer, and I picked up this collection of short stories because I spotted Julia Armfield recommending it. Unfortunately, it did not work for me at all. I actually liked the title story, which appears first in the collection; I thought it was subtle and clever. Then all the rest blurred into one. Although Down flips between different styles and viewpoints, I found her stories very samey, and I couldn’t figure out what she was trying to do.

(Dis)honorable mention: People Like Them by Samira Sedira, trans. Lara Vergnaud. Painfully clunky prose – I assume a combination of bad writing and bad translation – plus painfully obvious social commentary.

The Most Disappointing Book I Read This Month Was…

… Complicit by Winnie M Li. I admired Li’s debut novel, Dark Chapter, with some reservations; I thought Li wrote bravely and vividly about rape, drawing from her own experience, but was less convinced by the sections written from the point of view of the rapist. Complicit is in a very different category. It’s basically a straightforward #MeToo thriller told from the perspective of a young Chinese-American woman, Sarah, an assistant film producer in Hollywood. It brings nothing new to the table, and also makes some missteps. On reflection, I think Li wanted to make Sarah a flawed and unreliable narrator in the vein of My Dark Vanessa, struggling with internalised misogyny and racism as she stereotypes other women as dumb blondes and herself as a victim of her ‘Chinese work ethic’, and dismisses sexual assault as ‘not rape’. However, the writing isn’t strong enough to pull this off, and Sarah’s comments often end up sounding as if we’re meant to read them straight. A disappointing second novel.

The Book I Had The Most Mixed Feelings About This Month Was…

… Unofficial Britain by Gareth E. Rees. This book has a mission statement, drawn from Rees’s original Unofficial Britain website; Rees wants to ‘walk through everyday places, like car parks, bus stops, amusement arcades, factories, alleyways and promenades, only to find that they become weirder the closer we look’. Probably because of Rees’s single-mindedness, I found Unofficial Britain highly irritating and incredibly insightful by turns. I’m sorry, I just don’t buy the idea that a car park or an underpass is exactly the same as a natural landscape like a forest; apart from anything else, forests are living organisms in their own right, not just dead structures upon which humans bestow meaning. There’s also too much moaning about what Rees sees as stereotypical haunted places, like rural moorland or old Victorian houses. However, when he manages to get off his bandwagon, he has lots of interesting things to say. I especially enjoyed the chapters on motorways, multistorey car parks, and motorways, and I loved his discussion of the liminal nature of chain hotels, which feel like they could be anyplace because they all look the same inside.

The Weirdest Book I Read This Month Was…

… Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata, trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori. I struggle with body horror and am a bit tired of the numerous recent short story collections that deal with women and their bodies. Therefore, I should not have been a fan of Life Ceremony, which features cannibalism, jewellery made from bones, and a woman obsessed with other people’s body fluids, among other bizarre themes. But weirdly, a lot of these stories worked for me. I loved how Murata revealed the contingent, mandated nature of what we think of as ‘normal’ in Convenience Store Woman, and that’s a big concern here, as well. As one character puts it: ‘There was a couple engaged in insemination on the beach. What would that have looked like back when it was still called sex?’ My full review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this collection from the publisher for review.

The Best YA Book I Read This Month Was…

… A Magic Steeped in Poison by Judy I. Lin. It’s unusual for me to find a YA fantasy that I enjoy, but I liked this immersive debut. It stars teenage Ning, a physician’s apprentice whose mother has recently been killed by drinking poisoned tea distributed by her province’s governor. Now Ning is determined to take up the art of tea magic to cure her sister Shu, who was also poisoned and is now slowly dying. But to achieve her goal, she’ll have to compete to become the palace’s next shennong-shi – a master of tea-making. Lin’s world-building is elegant and convincing. It actually reminded me a bit of Tamora Pierce’s Tortall; there’s an authority in Lin’s writing that allows her to set out the politics of this kingdom simply and effectively without making them feel skimpy. Sadly, I found the characters interchangeable, and so did not invest enough in their story to necessarily want to follow them to the next novel in this duology, but this was escapist and fun. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

The Book That Swung Off Course The Most For Me This Month Was...

… Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. This much-hyped debut follows Elizabeth Zott, an uncompromising research chemist rebelling against American women’s expected roles in the 1950s and 1960s, who uses her TV cookery show to encourage other housewives to break free. I thought the first half of this novel was delightful, if a little self-indulgent. Garmus balanced the jaunty tone well with the hints of a greater darkness in Elizabeth’s past, and I was won over by her relationship with fellow chemist Calvin. Unfortunately, it all went wrong in the second half, after Elizabeth begins her cookery show; I found its audience appeal completely unconvincing and the snippets of ‘chemistry’ irritating (I loved chemistry A Level because of the way it made everything fit together; there’s no sense of that here, with Elizabeth simply namedropping terms like ‘sodium chloride’). We have to deal with both an irritating dog, who understands English, and an irritating child, who is ‘precocious’ in the cute way that children in books often are, which is nothing like the way exceptionally smart children are in real life. The random reappearance of long-lost family members at the end ties it all together into a sugary bow. A pity, because I really liked Elizabeth-the-research-chemist before she (reluctantly) became Elizabeth-the-TV-star.

The Most Illuminating Book I Read This Month Was…

… Reverse Engineering ed. Tom Conaghan. This first book from new indie short story publishers Scratch Books reprints seven exceptional modern short stories and pairs them with commentary from their authors. The stories are worth reading in their own right – I loved every single one except Irenosen Okojie’s ‘Filamo’, which I’d already encountered in her Nudibranch, so I knew what to expect. But it’s so great to have the authors’ reflections as well. My favourite story was Mahreen Sohail’s wonderful ‘Hair’. Sohail’s discussion of how she first extended and then pared back the story’s ending, which shoots forward into the future, was fascinating, as was her reflection on how she signalled a switch of protagonist early in the text, temporarily revealing the story’s workings: ‘Sometimes I think short stories should do this more. We seem to be really into smokes and mirrors and tricks and stuff but there’s something really powerful about stating something as it is.’ Chris Powers’s story ‘The Crossing’, alongside his commentary, made me reflect on what George Saunders says in A Swim In The Pond In The Rain about how short story writers should anticipate the reader’s expectations at each stage of the story, and make the unexpected choice. Other standouts for me were Jessie Greengrass’s clever ‘Theophrastus and the Dancing Plague’, which was based loosely on the life of the early modern physician and philosopher Paracelsus (who was born Theophrastus, though I wish there had been a clue to his more famous identity in the text), and Joseph O’Neill’s bizarre ‘The Flier’.

Did you have any stand-out reads in July?

20 Books of Summer, #8 and #9: Prodigal Summer and All Over Creation

Before rereading: I first read Prodigal Summer in 2010, when I was twenty-three, and backpacking around Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. (The fact that I carried this secondhand hardback edition back to the UK with me indicates how much I liked it – it still has a sticker that says ‘Librería el lector [The Reader Bookshop], Arequipa’ on the back). It was one of my top ten books of 2010, and I frequently cite it as one of the best examples of fiction that deals with a biologist trying to make a rural community understand the value of an apex predator. (This may sound like a niche topic, but there’s The Wolf Border, Once There Were Wolves, and Happiness, among others). However… I remember very little about it, other than that I found it slightly preachy, but not nearly as preachy as Kingsolver’s other novels. I did not review it at the time.

After rereading: This is just such a beautiful book. There’s no other way of putting it. It’s the best kind of comfort read for me, one that is realistic about loss and suffering but creates a world in which people can gradually mend. Prodigal Summer has three, largely separate story threads. Deanna is a wildlife biologist working for the Forest Service in the southern Appalachians, employed to deter poachers and tracking a family of coyotes who have recently returned to the region. In the valley below, Lusa is newly widowed and isolated on her husband’s farm, surrounded by her hostile relatives and wondering if she should flee back to the city. Finally, her elderly neighbour Garnett broods over his losses and nurtures a grudge against his own neighbour Nannie, who refuses to use pesticides on her plants and so, he believes, is putting his project to save the American chestnut tree in danger. Despite the focus on grief and loneliness, Prodigal Summer, as befits its title, is also about the abundant reproduction of nature, its persistence and excess. All the characters long to have a relationship with the next generation, whether that’s through biological grandchildren or adopted kin. This time round, I didn’t find it preachy at all; my only slight hesitation was that there seems to be no place in this world for women who don’t want to mother, and that Kingsolver’s own voice seeps through occasionally. Deanna and Lusa overlap a little too much in their worldviews, given the two characters’ very different backgrounds. Nevertheless, this remains my favourite Kingsolver novel (up there with Flight Behaviour) and it was an utter joy to spend time with.

My rating in 2010: ****1/2

My rating in 2022: ****1/2

L: The edition I originally read. R: The (much uglier) edition I read this time.

Before rereading: I first read All Over Creation in 2014, when I was twenty-seven. I’d loved Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being and wanted to read more by her, and I thought this one sounded more up my street than My Year of Meats (which I actually loved when I eventually got round to reading it in 2020). However, I couldn’t get on with it, and didn’t finish it. I now don’t remember much about it other than that it featured GM crops, possibly potatoes.

After rereading: Sadly, I haven’t changed my mind about this one, although I did make it all the way through this time. I think Ozeki was going for something akin to Prodigal Summer. There are several major groupings of characters: Yumi, returning to her home town in Idaho twenty-five years after she ran away at the age of fourteen; her estranged parents, Lloyd and Momoko; her old best friend Cass, childless and miserable; her ex-teacher and ex-lover Elliot, who now works for NuLife, a company developing GM potatoes; and a group of environmental activists, the Seeds of Resistance. But both these characters’ stories and the exploration of GM crops feel shortchanged.

The novel has no central protagonist, which is not necessarily a problem, but all the cast feel under-developed. Yumi regresses to her teenage self, but we get no sense of who she was in the years between. Cass is defined solely by her longing for a baby and her criticisms of Yumi’s neglectful parenting of her three children. Lloyd, Momoko and Elliot are basically caricatures, and the hippy activists reminded me of the irritating group of library misfits in The Book of Form and Emptiness. (Speaking of Ozeki’s latest, I think it’s actually the better novel of the two; All Over Creation doesn’t have the twee asides from the Book, which is a big plus, but neither does it have the strong, nuanced character work of the relationship between Benny and Annabelle). Finally, Ozeki does not interweave the theme of GM crops into her story as artfully as Kingsolver weaves her environmental messages, even though both authors have something to say about pesticides. I’d definitely recommend My Year of Meats or A Tale For The Time Being instead.

My rating in 2014: ***

My rating in 2022: ***