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?

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?

2023 in Books: Commendations and Disappointments

As always, I won’t be posting my Top Ten Books of 2023 until the 31st December, but here are some books that almost made my top ten – and also my biggest disappointments of the year. Links are to my reviews. All books are first read by me in 2023, not necessarily first published in 2023.

Highly Commended

I thought I was tired of the wave of #MeToo novels that have emerged since 2017, despite some outstanding examples like Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa. But this year, writers have stepped it up a notch, examining not just the impact of sexual assault and rape on individual women, but how society gaslights women as a whole. My favourite of these novels is in my top ten books of the year, but my second favourite, Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You, is nearly as good: it follows Bodie as she reassesses her memories of her own adolescence in an elite prep school while reinvestigating a cold case.

There have also been some outstanding memoirs. Chanel Miller’s Know My Name was the standout for me, as she analyses the aftermath of her rape by Stanford student Brock Turner: ‘On the day the verdict of my case was read, a Washington Post article quoted Brock saying that in ten years he hoped to be in residency to be a surgeon. His sister wrote, Goodbye to the Olympics. Goodbye to being an orthopaedic surgeon… At the time of the assault, he had worked as a lifeguard for two years and then at a store called Speedy Feet. But I never read this anywhere. He was not forced to acknowledge the facts of his present. He was talked about in terms of his lost potential, what he would never be, rather than what he is. They spoke as if his future was patiently waiting for him to step into it.’

Horror is hot at the moment, and while it’s always been one of my favourite genres, I’m delighted by the new wave of horror fiction that centres women, queer people and/or people of colour, including Indigenous voices. These three horror books exemplify this trend perfectly (for more, see my top ten books of the year). Jessica Johns’s Bad Cree follows a young Cree woman who reconnects with her heritage when she finds herself pursued by a terrifying supernatural threat; she’s assisted by her dead kokum (grandmother). Zen Cho’s Black Water Sister picks up on some of the same story beats as a lesbian American-Malaysian woman is suddenly addressed by the ghost of her grandmother, Ah Ma, and they have to deal with an angry god. Genuinely funny but also properly scary, this confirmed how much I love Cho’s work. Finally, Isabel Yap’s short story collection Never Have I Ever draws brilliantly from Filipino folklore, from her take on the manananggal myth in ‘Good Girls’ to her brilliant evocation of the kind of urban legends that circulate in a girls’ school in ‘Have You Heard The One About Anamaria Marquez’.

The Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist initially disappointed me, but the Prize did nominate some excellent novels this year. My three favourites were Jacqueline Crooks’s dub reggae 1980s-set Fire Rush, Sheena Patel’s nailing of an obsessive relationship in I’m A Fan, and Barbara Kingsolver’s irresistibly voiced Demon Copperhead, which ended up being the overall winner.

I’m weary of familiar psychological thrillers and police procedural, but I read some excellent cross-genre and literary thrillers this year. Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood, a loose retelling of Macbeth where a guerrilla gardening group tangle with an amoral billionaire,‘injected plot back into litfic and serious morality back into thrillers’. Nicola Griffith’s Stay, the second book in the Aud Torvingen trilogy, continues to brilliantly dissect the manipulative, ruthless, traumatised Aud alongside a pacy modern noir plot. Cory Doctorow’s For The Win is a smart techno-thriller set between LA, China and Mumbai, following a group of workers who try to resist capitalist exploitation – but their means of production isn’t the traditional factory, but multiplayer online games. Louise Doughty’s A Bird In Winter further blows apart the literary/thriller divide by following a woman on the run through rural Scotland; it’s both a nuanced character study and a spy novel.

Some of my favourite writers were back on form this year after some disappointing previous works. I adored Ann Patchett’s deeply resonant Tom Lake, where she finally crystallises her more mature writing register as she tells us about Lara, who, in her turn, is telling her three adult daughters about the summer she spent in northern Michigan with a famous actor in 1988. Emma Donoghue’s Learned By Heart sees her return to the historical period where she is clearly most confident; exploring Anne Lister’s girlhood at boarding school in the very early nineteenth century and her real-life love affair with fellow classmate Eliza Raine, she’s brilliant on the specifics of this society, and how it constrains our protagonists. Meanwhile, Karen Russell’s short story collection Orange World was both disappointing and incredible at the same time: many of the stories didn’t work for me but those that did were unforgettable. I was especially struck by ‘The Tornado Auction’, a near-perfect short about a man who was forced to give up raising storms when his daughters were young but can’t resist purchasing one last cyclone in his old age.

Best Rereads

A new category this year to highlight the books that were most satisfying upon rereading! The highlight here has to be Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel, which I last read in my late teens. Picking apart both Philip and Rachel was absorbing, and the novel is so technically brilliant. I also loved rereading Tracy Chevalier’s lightning-doesn’t-strike-twice gem, Girl With A Pearl Earring, and Kate Murray-Browne’s domestic chiller The Upstairs Room. A special shout-out, too, to Val McDermid’s Tony Hill novels, which I’ve been reading in sequence for the first time over Christmas. I’ve been amazed at just how good the character development is when you actually read the books in order; novels that I thought were ‘weaker’ entries in the series, like Cross and Burn, have really come into their own, although my favourite remains the utterly terrifying The Wire In The Blood, which prefigured the unmasking of Jimmy Savile.

Biggest Disappointments

By ‘biggest disappointments’ I don’t mean that these were my worst books of the year, but that they were books I’d been looking forward to, that had been hyped by publishers/reviewers/friends/all of the above, and which fell well short of my expectations.

The Women’s Prize for Fiction delivered two of my biggest disappointments of the year. Cecile Pin’s Wandering Souls and Parini Shroff’s The Bandit Queens were both on my 2023 list of anticipated reads, but neither worked for me. I thought Wandering Souls was thinly written and cliched as it related a familiar refugee narrative that seemed designed to pull on white liberal heartstrings. Similarly, The Bandit Queens had a great premise – women in an Indian village band together to murder their husbands – but felt like it was designed to sell stereotypes about the misery, dirt and abuse of rural India to a Western audience.

Some horror and speculative fiction also fell short of the mark. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Silver Nitrate sounded SO promising. When Monserrat and Tristan, two friends living in Mexico City in the 1990s, encounter a cult horror director who stopped making films decades ago, the director claims he can change their lives if they help him complete the dubbing of a film made by a Nazi occultist on fragile silver nitrate. But the incredibly slow pace and flat affect robbed the narrative of all its tension. Erica Ferencik’s supernatural Arctic story Girl in Ice ticked all my boxes, but was ruined by its frustrating protagonist.  I loved Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut trilogy but her earlier novel, Ghost Talkers, didn’t work for me at all. Another great premise – a female medium working in the ‘Spirit Corps’ during the First World War talks to the ghosts of men who have recently been killed to extract important information – but I couldn’t invest in the central romance.

What books stood out to you this year? Did you have any particular disappointments? And have you read any of my picks?

December Superlatives, 2023

An early Superlatives post this month because I’ll do my round-ups at the end of December. If I read anything especially good or bad before then, I’ll find a way of talking about it!

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… The Birthday of the World by Ursula K. Le Guin. I read ‘Paradises Lost’ for #NovellasInNovember, but despite being very good, it ended up as one of my least favourite entries in The Birthday of  the World – which speaks to the quality of this collection. Le Guin, as we all know, is a wonderful writer, but here she excels herself with seven novels-in-a-bottle that present worlds utterly unlike our own. I sometimes ponder why I love SF and speculative fiction so much but don’t get on with a lot of recent fantasy novels, and this collection suggested one answer to me: while both SF and fantasy have the potential to reimagine the way we think and create societies that feel truly other, in general, I find that SF does this more consistently than fantasy. Even current fantasy novelists I love, like George RR Martin, draw heavily on familiar history (and frankly, Martin might be very good at fantasy but his real brilliance lies in horror). In the hands of a writer like Le Guin, the boundaries between the genres dissolve. Like Sylvia Louise Engdahl’s wonderful Enchantress From The Stars, Le Guin’s title story, ‘The Birthday of the World’ reads as both fantasy and SF.

A string of other gems rethink sexuality, gender and patriarchy. In ‘Coming Of Age in Karhide’ we get a Gethenian’s view of how sex works in the society portrayed from an outsider’s perspective in The Left Hand of Darkness, where all people are sexless (or ‘bi-sexual’) except for the brief period each month when they go into ‘kemmer’. This is so good on both how insane sex looks from the viewpoint of beings with no sexual desire and how necessary it seems when they are in kemmer. ‘Solitude’, possibly my favourite in the collection, takes us back to an anthropologist’s point of view, as a mother and daughter explore a human society on a different planet that the mother is simply unable to understand because she has not grown up there. It really reckons with the difficulty of understanding genuinely alien belief systems, and considers what a society run by true introverts might look like: ‘although no adult ever entered another’s house, and adults seldom spoke to one another… still there was a kind of community, a wide, thin, fine network of delicate and certain intention and restraint.’ Like another story in the collection, ‘The Matter of Seggri’, it focuses on a woman-only community where men have been cast out, but gives us a different kind of sex-gender system.

The only slightly disappointing stories were the two set on the planet of O (‘Unchosen Love’ and ‘Mountain Ways’), exploring a system of four-person marriages governed by strict rules about whom you can marry, and this was because they read more like an exploration of navigating polygamous relationships than a true evocation of another world. Le Guin herself calls them ‘comedies of manners’ that are deliberately set in a society not very different from ours, and I think that’s fair – as she says, why does SF have to be ‘written ray-gun in hand’? Finally, ‘Old Music and The Slave Women’ is apparently linked to an earlier quartet of stories, and I’d like to read those – this story was deeply disturbing and powerful, but I felt like I wasn’t fully getting it. Still, any excuse to read more Le Guin.

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was…

… Trust by Hernan Diaz. This Pulitzer-Prize winning novel needs little introduction: four narratives about the same woman, the clever, musical wife of a Wall Street tycoon in the 1920s. First is a bad novella in the style of the period. Second is a fragmentary, bad memoir in the style of ‘great men’ autobiographies. Third, A Memoir, Remembered, is about the secretary tasked with writing the latter to refute the former. Fourth is the actual diary of the woman at the centre of all this. The third section is a perceptive character study of the aforementioned secretary and her Italian-American father, a printer and self-proclaimed anarchist, unexpectedly loving, but increasingly unable to take care of himself and demanding more and more attention. This is good fiction, but it doesn’t need the rest. The first two sections could have been imagined by the reader from the information we are given, and aren’t even especially good pastiches. The last, with its twist, undermines and simplifies the whole book by resorting to a massive cliche. It would have been better to leave the story open. In short: A Memoir, Remembered is an excellent novella; everything else included in Trust makes it worse.

The Most Uneven Collection of Short Stories I Read This Month Was…

… Orange World by Karen Russell. This last book from my 2023 reading list contained some brilliant short stories, easily as good as the offerings in Russell’s previous collection, Vampires In The Lemon Grove, which was one of my top ten books of the decade (2010-19). Unfortunately, they were clustered in the second half of the collection, which meant that my early impressions were underwhelming. The three stories that stood out for me all took a common theme from realist fiction and reinvented it through speculative conceits, but grounded their flights of fantasy so well that they were still incredibly emotionally resonant. As I said in my review of Vampires, this is a triumph of ‘precisely imagined detail’.  ‘The Tornado Auction’, about a man who was forced to give up raising storms when his daughters were young but can’t resist purchasing one last cyclone in his old age, has so much to say about men rooted in traditional patriarchal industries and the precious daughters whom they believe to be privileged, but who in fact have grown up with ‘black storms feeding’.  ‘The Gondoliers’ stars three women who can echolocate their way around the flooded remains of ‘New Florida’ in their gondolas; it’s about a future generation who need to adapt to climate change, but also how sisters protect, restrict and free each other. ‘Orange World’ presents women who feed devils alongside their newborns because they believe they will protect their babies from the ‘bottomless’  horror of life; even after they are told the devils are lying, they find it hard to let the hungry, pitiful creatures go. These three exquisitely painful stories make up for the others.

The Two Novellas That Spoke Most Interestingly To Each Other This Month Were..

… Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin (trans. Aneesa Abbas Higgins) and Chlorine by Jade Song. Both these novellas are told in first person by young women alienated from themselves and their cultures, and who take out their frustrations on their own bodies. Dusapin’s protagonist is a French-Korean woman working at a guesthouse in Sokcho, a fishing village near the border with North Korea. She feels tied to this place by her responsibilities for her mother, a seller at the fish market who exerts subtle control over her, insisting that they share a bed on Sunday nights and criticising her poor seafood-gutting skills. The narrator tells us little about her inner life, but one exchange is starkly revealing: when a guest asks her why she chose to study French literature at university, she tells him: ‘So I could speak a language my mother wouldn’t understand.’ 

In Song’s novella, a Chinese-American teenager who gives her life to the high school swim team is totally open about her dream of being a mermaid, but we have to translate her skewed view of the world. Chlorine ends in dramatic self-harm, but there’s a more restrained hint of body horror in Winter in Sokcho, as well: the narrator feels forced to stuff herself to bursting when eating in front of her mother, and pulls out her eyelashes one by one after she paints them with ink. Both these novellas create atmospheric, symbolic worlds, playing beautifully on the imagery of the sea, fish, pools, ink and sirens. But neither quite worked for me. I found Dusapin’s prose too simple and a little empty, while Song’s writing has the opposite problem; it’s erratic, which works for this narrator but sometimes veers, despite flashes of brilliance, into sounding a bit awkward and obvious: ‘it is true that what humans call intergenerational trauma has always been heavy, sinking to the gloomy abyss of repressed memory to be mined for so-called wisdom later’ . Of the two, though, I’d be keenest to read more by Song; Winter in Sokcho is forgettable, and Chlorine is anything but.

The Most Disappointing YA Horror Novel I Read This Month Was…

… Those We Drown by Amy Goldsmith. More mermaids! I had mixed feelings about this debut, which promised creepy happenings at sea and sirens who lure people to their deaths. Those We Drown is narrated by Liv, a scholarship student who joins a group of richer peers on board a luxury cruise ship for an ‘educational’ trip. Liv doesn’t question why she was included on such a bizarre voyage or what its ultimate purpose is, and instead spends her time feeling inadequate, shy and poor, wishing that her friend Will would reciprocate her feelings rather than being drawn to the glamorous group of teen girl influencers who are also on board the ship. The first chunk of Those We Drown dragged for me because I found Liv a hopelessly irritating narrator – perhaps it’s because I’m no longer a shy teenager, but even when I was in my quietest phase at school, I think I would have cringed on Liv’s behalf. Despite frequent descriptions, the cruise ship never quite lifted from the page, either. It felt like a collection of objects rather than a living setting, and the Greek vibes seemed tacked on to catch the zeitgeist. Having said that, Those We Drown picks up about halfway through, as Liv starts to gain confidence in herself and in her own suspicions, finally accepting that Will has disappeared and going after him with dogged persistence. It’s even more annoying, then, that just as this book starts to get a little scary, as the influencers reveal their true selves, it abruptly ends. This ends up sitting awkwardly somewhere in between Kiera Cass’s The Siren and Mira Grant’s Into The Drowning Deep – and if you want proper oceanic horror, read the latter instead. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review. It’s out in the UK on 15th February 2024.

The Best Book I Started Reading This Month But Have Not Yet Finished Was…

… The Midnight News by Jo Baker. Despite publishing eight novels to date, Baker is one of those writers who seems to fly under the radar, with the exception of her breakout hit Longbourn, which got more attention for obvious reasons (it’s Pride and Prejudice from the point of view of the servants). Nevertheless, I admired her loosely fictionalised account of Samuel Beckett’s experiences during the Second World War,  A Country Road, A Tree, and loved The Body Lies, which so brilliantly explores the subtle undermining of a university lecturer by one of her MA students. The Midnight News recalls both of these earlier novels: it’s set during the beginning of the Blitz in London in 1940, and is narrated principally from the point of view of an isolated young woman, Charlotte, who has a history of mental health issues and is disbelieved when she tries to argue that there is a connecting motive behind the sequence of recent losses she’s suffered. I’m tired of the familiar psychological-thriller trope of ‘woman is ignored because they say she’s crazy’ but here, Baker reinvents it beautifully, and does not simply dismiss Charlotte’s genuine experiences of mental illness but show how they play into the way she experiences the world. She also manages to freshly capture the surreal horror of the early days of the bombings, when Charlotte can see body parts on the street and try on gloves in a glossy department store within the space of a few hours. In this respect, it reminded me of Lucy Caldwell’s These Days, which is set during the Belfast Blitz of 1941, but The Midnight News is clearly the better novel, with characters who are more complex and less stereotyped. I’m about halfway through The Midnight News at the moment, so I’m eager to see how it develops.

What were your standout reads this month? Have you read any of these? Are you tempted?

November Superlatives, 2023 + December Blogging Break

Click on my Novellas in November and SciFi Month round-ups for more!

Also, I’ll be reviving an occasional tradition and having a blogging break during December until I’m back at the end of the month with December Superlatives and my end of the year round-ups.

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton. Such a brilliant and painful graphic memoir about being a woman working out in the Canadian oil sands. My full review is here. #NonfictionNovember

Honorable Mentions: The best novella I read for #NovellasInNovember was Eva Baltasar’s Boulder, and the best SF novel I read for #SciFiMonth was Naomi Alderman’s The Future.

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was…

… Nordic Visions: The Best of Nordic Speculative Fiction ed. Margrét Helgadóttir. This collection of Nordic speculative fiction, read for #SciFiMonth, was a real disappointment. It presented an often bizarre and, in my opinion, weak set of stories. My full review is on Goodreads.  I received a free proof copy of this collection from the publisher for review.

The Best Book I Read About Illness This Month Was…

… It’s All In Your Head by Suzanne O’Sullivan. I was fascinated by O’Sullivan’s The Sleeping Beauties, which ranges far and wide to tell stories of psychosomatic illness – such as the group of refugee children in Sweden who fell into mysterious, prolonged comas –  but I found it occasionally too dense and repetitive. Her first book, which deservedly won the Wellcome Book Prize in 2016, is much more gripping. Here, O’Sullivan’s writing is admirably clear and uncluttered, and I loved her willingness to explore her own fallibility and to admit when she’d made mistakes. It’s All In Your Head has a tighter focus than The Sleeping Beauties, tracing O’Sullivan’s work as a neurologist who develops expertise in working with psychogenic disorders. Through a series of compassionate case studies, she explains how real, physical symptoms can have psychological causes, which doesn’t mean that the illness suffered by the patient is any less serious or debilitating. This was a welcome antidote to Meghan O’Rourke’s frustrating The Invisible Kingdom, where O’Rourke implicitly suggests that mental illness and physical illness are entirely disconnected, and the latter is inherently worthier of sympathy. I was slightly less engaged by the brief historical sections in It’s All In Your Head, where O’Sullivan traces back the history of psychosomatic illness into the nineteenth century, telling a familiar story about Jean-Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud – but these may be of more interest to readers less familiar with this material. All in all, great popular science, and I wish I’d read it before The Sleeping Beauties – but it has inspired me to return to that book with greater insight. I’m excited to hear that O’Sullivan is writing a new book about the benefits and pitfalls of medical diagnoses. Thanks very much to Rebecca at Bookish Beck for passing on her copy of this book to me.

The Graphic Memoir I Had Most Mixed Feelings About This Month Was…

… The Roles We Play by Sabba Khan. There’s much to admire in this important, Jhalak-Prize-winning memoir about the experience of being a second-generation Kashmiri Muslim migrant in London. Khan poignantly captures her own pain as she struggles between being a ‘good girl’ carrying on her family’s legacy and her own wish to stop wearing a head covering and, eventually, to question her religion. She writes beautifully about her relationship with her mother, with whom she shared a bed until she was twenty-three, and who is the source of both deep love and resentment. My hesitation is that I’m not sure this really worked as a graphic memoir, even though there are some brilliant panels (pp. 54-55, where Khan stares down into an empty gulf that spans two pages after being unable to speak about her experience of racist abuse, is devastating). It’s very wordy and a bit too didactic for my tastes. Some of the more text-based sections are vital: for example, when Khan tells us about her family’s displacement after the building of the Mangla Dam in the 1960s, which drowned their village and surrounding cities. Other, overwritten passages tell us things we already know from the more emotional sections of the book: ‘our friendship was left quivering and fractured under the weight of sacrosanct religious beliefs and violent events’ or ‘the only way to dismantle this centuries old stronghold is for all genders to work together.’ I’m glad I read this, but I was left wondering if it would have worked better in a different form.

The Best Literary Psychological Thriller I Read This Month Was…

… Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra. This book had been hanging around on my Kindle for a while after I downloaded it from Netgalley a few months back, and one evening I decided to start it, having forgotten in the interim what it was even about. Some time later, I was forced to put it down halfway through because of the lateness of the hour… but I was utterly gripped. What a sucker-punch! This book, which is Sierra’s debut, opens when a mother realises that a man has broken into her house and is approaching her two sleeping children, and has to rapidly formulate a plan. Should they run? Should they hide? Sierra’s writing is perfect for this kind of literary thriller: visceral, relentless, but also reflective. I feel like there have been several novels recently that, smartly and thoughtfully, dissect the pain of being gaslighted by the patriarchy as a whole, rather than just by particular men (Jessica Knoll’s Bright Young Women springs to mind). Nightwatching absolutely joins them. The protagonist has to escape her house, but once she’s outside, her troubles are only beginning. Sierra is also brilliant on detail; her narrator can figure out exactly where the man is as he moves around, for example, because of the many nights she’s spent listening out for wandering children. That floorboard creaks, that door tends to slam. This leads to disbelief from the police, who don’t think she could hear these sounds or know what they mean.

The contemporary thriller this reminded me of immediately was Gin Phillips’s Fierce Kingdom, but it also resonates with the best of vintage Nicci French, especially Land of the Living. Top-notch genre work. My fuller review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review. It’s out in the UK on 8th February 2024.

The Most Compellingly Uncomfortable Book I Read This Month Was…

… The Incarnations by Susan Barker. This month’s book club read. This novel flips between telling the story of a Beijing taxi driver, Wang, as the city gears up for the 2008 Olympics, and his five previous incarnations. Wang has been a eunuch in seventh-century China, enslaved by Genghis Khan and a captive in the Opium Wars, a concubine of Emperor Jiajing in the Forbidden City in the sixteenth century, and one of Mao’s Red Guards in 1966. In all of his lives, Wang’s fate has been entwined with the mysterious ‘I’ who is telling his story, and part of the fun of this book is trying to figure out who that is. I say ‘fun’ with some unease, because the reason this book made me so uncomfortable is that it reads like a potboiling historical thriller, but it’s absolutely packed full of cruelty. Murder, torture, starvation, slavery, rape, castration… it’s as if Barker found out about trigger warnings and used them as a checklist. I’m no scholar of Chinese history but it did occur to me that this risks presenting it as one long catalogue of exotic misery, although Barker is clear that she drew heavily from Chinese folktale and this is not intended to be read as a historical novel. And it’s true that the stylised nature of the past-life sections does distance the reader somewhat from the misery therein, though I imagine mileage on this will vary. The grabby stories work as a narrative device, but I don’t know if I’d actually recommend that anybody read this. I’ll be interested to find out what my book club think of it!

The Best Collection of Essays I Read This Month Was…

… Dark Tourist by Hasanthika Sirisena. The essay is easily my favourite non-fiction form. I loved Elissa Washuta’s White Magic last month, and this short collection – also from my 2023 reading list – is almost as good. Sirisena was born in Sri Lanka but grew up in the US. As with White Magic, the blurb of this book is a bit misleading – it claims that Sirisena uses the lens of dark tourism to explore the ‘unexpected places (and ways) in which personal identity and the riptides of history meet’, but only a few of these essays actually do that. All, however, are brilliant, bringing together distant history, contemporary history and personal trauma to illuminate subjects like marriage, decision-making, diagnosis and Buddhism. In ‘Confessions of a Dark Tourist’, an essay which deals with her experience of going on a ‘war tour’ to Jaffna and Mullaitivu in the wake of the Sri Lankan civil war, Sirisena quotes Richard Sharpley’s and Philip R. Stone’s definition of dark tourism as ‘the act of travel to sites associated with death, suffering and the seeming macabre’ (it’s tempting to suggest that Barker’s The Incarnations, above, forces the reader into becoming a dark tourist of Chinese history). There are also a few oddities: an essay in alphabet sketches, an essay that’s just a list of queer and trans touchstones. As always, however, it was the essays on art that really struck me, though I didn’t agree with everything she says. Sirisena, who trained as a visual artist but then didn’t make any art for twenty-five years, is especially good on the practice of art-making, and the frustrations we can feel as more experienced artists when it seems like we’ve heard everything before. In ‘Six Drawing Lessons’, she writes:

If I think, however, of the now nearly lost denotation of lesson, a passage of scripture read during a religious service… I recognise that being constantly taught is a component of discipline. It’s not, after all, as if after a half century of churchgoing, a parishioner can get up from the pew, walk out, and come back when the reading is over. It’s part of the practice of faith, an act of humbling oneself, to remain even when you’ve heard the words many times before.

As Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes in Women Who Run With the Wolves, ‘to love is to stay with’ – to remain, even when you think you know what is coming.

[Happily, at 174 pages, this actually counts for both Nonfiction November and Novellas in November.]

What were the best and worst books you read this month? Any stand-outs from Novellas in November, SciFi Month or Nonfiction November?

October Superlatives, 2023 #SpooktasticReads

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

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

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

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

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

My Most Nostalgic Reread This Month Was…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

copyright macrovectorart from 123RF.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

RIP XVIII Challenge, October 2023

I couldn’t resist posting this on Friday the 13th. And not just any Friday the 13th. An October one!

I’m taking part in the Readers Imbibing Peril (RIP) challenge for the third time this year! This challenge runs from 1st September to 31st October, and involves reading books classified as mystery, suspense, thriller, dark fantasy, gothic, horror or supernatural. You can find my earlier round-ups here: 2018, 2022. My September 2023 post is here. (This challenge has some overlap with Spooktastic Reads, which runs from 19th to 31st October, and focuses on ‘stories on the boundaries of fantasy and horror’; I hope to post about a couple books in this category later this month.)

If you want a horror novel, Hiron Ennes’s debut, Leech, fully delivers: it’s got a bit of Gothic horror, SF horror, eco-horror, steampunk horror, body horror, old-fashioned mad scientist horror… Peter Watts sums it up as, ‘If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if David Cronenberg and Edgar Allen Poe bumped into each other at the same parasitological conference, here’s your answer’ and I can’t do better than that. Our narrator is both the single hive-minded entity known as the Institute, which has a monopoly on medical care in this world, and one of its many human bodies. Their predecessor has recently died in mysterious circumstances, and this body has been sent to a snowy, isolated chateau both to replace the previous doctor, and to find out what happened to him. While Leech‘s setting feels like gothic fantasy, its ideas and concerns are purely SF: I was reminded particularly of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice trilogy and her more recent Translation State, as well as, obviously, Mira Grant’s Parasite. This means that different aspects of the novel will chime with different readers; I got a bit tired of the creepy twins and rustic locals, but loved how Ennes explores what it might be like to be part of a multiple consciousness.

What can’t be faulted, however, is Ennes’s world-building: it’s incredibly original and totally realised, while never overloading the reader with detail. Ennes is confident enough to let us figure out a lot of it ourselves, and to leave some mysteries unexplained – the ventigeaux, for example, are terrifying precisely because we don’t know much about them, and never find out. This post-post-apocalyptic world both feels like a remnant of our own civilisation and is more fantastical; the cod-French the characters use as slang is eerily convincing. I also loved the way our narrator’s language changes throughout the book as their relationship with their human body alters – from reading interviews with Ennes, it’s clear this was very deliberate, and shows an immense amount of skill. The repellant coldness of the early chapters, it turns out, is intentional – if, like me, you weren’t sure you could take 300+ pages of this person, it’s worth persevering, as Leech ends up in a very different place to where it starts. Though there’s still a lot of snow. And a lot of parasites.

The Winter Spirits is the inevitable follow-up to the surprisingly successful The Haunting Season, which became the first short story collection to hit the Sunday Times bestseller list since records began. This collection is more substantial than its predecessor, with twelve short stories rather than eight, which means that it retains all the authors from the original line-up (Bridget Collins, Natasha Pulley, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Elizabeth Macneal, Imogen Hermes Gowar, Jess Kidd, Laura Purcell and Andrew Michael Hurley) and adds four more (Susan Stokes Chapman, Laura Shepherd-Robinson, Stuart Turton and Catriona Ward). It’s also slightly more thematically focused, with all the stories based around Christmas or Advent, though I continue to be baffled by the lack of editorial control on these collections – the first suffered from a glut of stories about Victorian mental health and motherhood, and while this one is more varied, it’s a shame to see all the writers, once again, choose modern historical settings, which made the stories feel overly traditional to me. On the other hand, this is probably the point, as this is clearly intended as a cozy ghostly gift collection rather than being aimed at dedicated horror fans.

Most of the stories fit very much into this mould. All (except Ward’s baffling ‘Jenkin’) are well-executed but too morally tidy and bland for me. Millwood Hargrave’s ‘Host’, about Victorian spiritualism, stands out from this crowd by giving us a nicely unsettling, open ending. Collins’s ‘The Gargoyle’, featuring a supernatural amanuensis, is also more promising, although like her story in The Haunting Season, it feels like it finishes just as it starts to get interesting. Turton’s ‘The Master of the House’ works because it’s so stripped back, feeling almost fable-like as a father pursues his son through the house of the devil. Purcell, whom I find disappointing as a novelist, once again proves that she’s great at writing short stories that tread the line between fun and scary; I liked her contribution to The Haunting Season a lot, and this one, ‘Carol of the Bells and Chains’, makes good use of the Krampus legend.

I’ve saved the best till last! Natasha Pulley always delivers: her brilliant ‘The Salt Miracles’, set on a fictional version of St Kilda, is as imaginative and haunting as all her writing. It’s hard not to read it as a bit of a ‘this is how it’s done’: Pulley’s time period (which we can pin down to 1903-4) doesn’t feel like a moody backdrop, but is integral to the selfhood of her central character, a priest who’s wrestling with what Weber would call the ‘disenchantment’ of modernity in the face of the horrors of the Boer War and a new wave of Sherlock Holmes stories that preach logic over belief. Advent is also not just when the story happens to be set, but crucial to the mystery at its centre. Worth the price of the book alone.

I received a free proof copy of this collection from the publisher for review. It’s out in the UK on October 19th.

Have you read anything spooky this month? Or watched or listened to anything spooky?

August Superlatives, 2023

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. This novel is emotionally deep in the same way as a lake itself: you can see right down to the bottom, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a long way down. It’s 2020 and Lara’s three adult daughters have returned to pick cherries on their family farm in northern Michigan in the middle of the pandemic. Isolated from the world, they ask Lara to finally tell them the full story of the few months she spent with the famous actor Peter Duke in 1988. I’ve always thought Patchett is a wonderful writer, but after finding her last two novels, Commonwealth and The Dutch House, quite underwhelming, I’d started to wonder if I was really more of a fan of her non-fiction. It’s such a joy, therefore, to read something like Tom Lake, which I think really represents a step forward for her as a writer: I don’t think it’s necessarily better than the best of her early stuff but it’s as if she’s finally crystallised her more mature voice, moving away from the Anne-Tyler-esque family sagas in her more recent novels to something more reflective, beautiful and resonant. My full review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was…

… Femlandia by Christina Dalcher. After her thought-provoking and moving The Sentence, this was a major disappointment. An unwritten rule seems to have been established over the past few years that all-female communities in speculative and dystopian fiction must be portrayed as brainwashed, abusive cults, and Femlandia is no exception: it ends up being both misogynistic and misanthropic, with a bit of lesbophobia thrown in for good measure. My full rant review is on Goodreads.

The Book That Made Me Think The Most This Month Was…

… Reverse Engineering II ed. Tom Conaghan. I loved Reverse Engineering so this was a must-read for me – another set of seven short stories with commentary by their authors. And Reverse Engineering II hits higher highs, but also lower lows, than the previous collection, in my opinion. There are some absolutely stunning stories here – the ones that stood out to me all painstakingly and beautifully record the detail of ordinary lives, often hinging on chance encounters in hairdressers, beauty salons, under bridges. Tom Drury’s ‘Path Lights’, Tessa Hadley’s ‘Bad Dreams’, Yiyun Li’s ‘All Will Be Well’ and Wendy Erskine’s ‘To All Their Dues’ were all in this group. I was especially struck by one of Erskine’s reflections on her craft, which is in tension with a lot of contemporary writing advice, but rings absolutely true to me: ‘The thing that is often said about the short story form [and I’d add, about novels as well] is that every single sentence must drive the story forward – I’ve got to say I don’t entirely agree with it… there’s also the room for aspects of the story that are providing a kind of complexity or nuance or supplying a kind of texture… Also, I absolutely hate the idea of backstory. I think that’s such a misnomer. It gives the impression that the past is always subservient to the present and that people’s past experiences are only interesting and have validity in how they form the present.’ My full review is on Goodreads.

The Most Underwhelming Final Book In A Series I Read This Month Was…

… The Ends by James Smythe. As I gradually progressed through the Anomaly Quartet, I started to realise that one of Smythe’s aims with this series was to critically engage with a specific genre or sub-genre in each of the books. The two strongest entries in the quartet, The Explorer and The Echo, are both takes on different kinds of SF, with a big helping of horror. The Explorer plays with classic SF tropes like the bootstrap, the brave astronaut, the manly space mission; The Echo picks up on the idea of the troubled scientist and the mysterious, abandoned ship. Given this, I found it unsurprising that I struggled with the third instalment, The Edge, which rewrites the psychological thriller: I’m so done with this genre, and so this one inevitably felt less fresh and original to me than the earlier novels. My problems with The Ends were slightly different. This one is post-apocalyptic. The Anomaly has now enveloped the Earth and people can no longer die; they simply follow their own time loops round again. Smythe, again, piles on the tropes: we have a global pandemic, a road trip, a suicide cult. And although The Ends engages intelligently with this source material, these are things that I just don’t find interesting in fiction (I do like a pandemic novel, but that’s not really the focus here) and so there was a limit to how well this book was going to work for me. The treatment of the cult, in particular, felt a bit morally simplistic, and I wondered if there was more Smythe could have done with the brilliant concept of a society that has lost the threat, and release, of death. I will return to the first two Anomaly novels – I already have done – but I’m not sure the second two added much for me. From my 2023 reading list.

The Book That Most Pleasantly Surprised Me This Month Was…

… All The Lonely People by Mike Gayle. I would NEVER have picked this up had it not been selected as a book club read. I give a wide berth to anything advertised as ‘inspiring’, ‘heartwarming’, ‘uplifting’ or anything that can possibly be compared to Eleanor Oliphant, The Lido or Three Things About Elsie. Also, I’d read one of Gayle’s early chick lit novels and wasn’t a fan. But, this was actually a delight! Hubert Bird is an eighty-four-year-old man living alone in Bromley; part of the Windrush generation, he came to England from Jamaica in 1958. Hubert has withdrawn from the world after something terrible happened five years ago, but when his daughter, Rose, who lives in Australia, announces she is coming to visit, Hubert has to seek out the kind of lively social life he’s been pretending to have during their weekly phone calls, so Rose doesn’t worry about him even more. The rest of the novel alternates between tracing the course of Hubert’s life after his arrival in England, and his efforts to make friends in the present day. I think this worked for me because of its gentle humour; Hubert is a genuinely loveable character, but he has a great line in snarky grumpiness, and the narrator backs him up (‘Hubert was by no means a fan of cat-kind and would chase any feline intruder from his garden with whatever weapon happened to be closest to hand’). Frankly, it’s refreshing to read a novel like this written by a black man rather than a white woman (and I LOVE that Gayle used to be an agony uncle for the teen magazine Bliss – I think I read his ‘boy’s point of view’ columns back in the day!). All The Lonely People skirts the edge of being saccharine, but its emotional honesty helps it stay clear – and I was glad that Gayle didn’t tie up all the loose ends in the novel’s conclusion. A late twist also works far better than any version of this kind of twist I’d read before (and there are a few 🙄). I borrowed this book from North Shields library #LoveYourLibrary

The Novel That Most Failed To Live Up To Its Potential This Month Was…

… We Measure The Earth With Our Bodies by Tsering Yangzom Lama. This debut novel comes much-garlanded, having been shortlisted for the Giller Prize in 2022 and longlisted for the inaugural Carol Shields Prize in 2023. I picked it up in Toronto because I was attracted by learning more about the experience of Tibetan exiles: it follows sisters Lhamo and Tenkyi, who flee Tibet for Nepal in 1960 following the Chinese invasion, and Lhamo’s daughter, Dolma, who was born in a Nepalese refugee camp but is now trying to pursue graduate studies in ancient Tibetan history in Toronto. Sadly, I was so disappointed that this very much falls into the familiar rut of the ‘inter-generational history of a non-Western family novel’, despite the important things it has to say about the dispossession and colonialisation of Tibet, both by China and by white ‘experts’. I would have loved to read an entire novel about Dolma, but most of We Measure The Earth With Our Bodies follows traditional ‘family saga’ lines, with characters differentiated solely by their roles in the family – sacrificial parents, responsible older sister, love interest – and the storytelling thin in the sections set in the Nepalese camp. Lama faithfully depicts the life lived by Tibetan refugees but it all feels distanced and emotionless. The handling of chronology is awkward, too. I thought this could have been fantastic if it had focused on Tenkyi and Dolma in Toronto and told their story in a simpler chronological order, as Dolma gradually learns about her family history after finding the object that makes her realise just how much has been taken from them. My full review is on Goodreads.

The Best Speculative Thriller I Read This Month Was…

… The Husbands by Chandler Baker. Given my new Stepford Wives obsession, I had to try this gender-flipped, Texas-set version. And it turned out to be a lot better than I thought it was going to be – even if it doesn’t fully lean into the horror of the Stepford premise. Nora and her husband have a four-year-old daughter and both work full-time, but Nora carries the mental load, which means that she also ends up doing far more for their daughter – especially as her husband contrives to travel slowly home from work or spend a long time in the bathroom when there might be something that needs doing. Nevertheless, he is constantly applauded for being a ‘hands-on’ dad because he sometimes does bath or bedtime. Pregnant again, and trying to make partner at her law firm, Nora knows something has to change. When she meets a group of women with remarkably helpful husbands at the exclusive neighbourhood of Dynasty Ranch, she starts to wonder how she can become part of their world. Baker soft-pedals a bit when it comes to why the husbands are so perfect, which means that The Husbands has less of an edge than it might have done, and we also just don’t get to see enough of their uncanny niceness. Still, I liked how she slowly built up Nora’s resentment of her husband, capturing the drip-drip-drip of someone who isn’t pulling their weight but is doing just enough to avoid scrutiny, and a sub-plot with a teenage daughter of one of the Dynasty families is nicely chilling. I’d read more by Baker.

The Book I Most Wanted To Like This Month Was…

… Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I so want to love Moreno-Garcia’s novels in general, as they always have amazing, very different premises, and I do admire her short fiction. Unfortunately this is the second book of hers that I haven’t finished (the other being Gods of Jade and Shadow) and so I’m not sure I’ll be picking up anything novel-length from her again, however enticing it sounds. Silver Nitrate has all the ingredients of brilliant speculative horror. Set in Mexico City in the 1990s, it has two great, nuanced protagonists: Monserrat, a stubbornly independent, no-bullshit sound editor, and her childhood friend Tristan, a washed-up soap star. It also has a creepy hook: when Monserrat and Tristan encounter a cult horror director who stopped making films decades ago, the director claims he can change their lives if they help him complete the dubbing of a film made by a Nazi occultist on fragile silver nitrate. Sadly, not only is the pace of this novel incredibly slow (it takes a long time to even get to this inciting incident), even when genuinely frightening things happen, they somehow don’t create the frisson that they should. Everything plays out with the same flat affect. I gave up three-quarters of the way through. My full review is on Goodreads. I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

My Most Illuminating Reread This Month Was…

L: book swap copy, later book-swapped for something else. R: current copy, bought for 99p on Kindle.

… The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver, which I first picked up from a book swap while backpacking round South America in 2010. While, in some ways, I learnt nothing new about my tastes from this reread (I rated the book 3.5 stars in both 2010 and 2023), I was struck very differently by the plot, which ends with a white woman illegally adopting a Cherokee child after the abused little girl is abandoned in her truck. Kingsolver clearly clocked that she had Done Wrong here, and tried to fix her mistake by writing an entire sequel, Pigs in Heaven, which I also read this month (for the first time), and which highlights the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 that gave tribal governments exclusive jurisdiction over the fostering or adoption of reservation children.

Unfortunately, I think Kingsolver would have done better to leave the matter alone: Pigs in Heaven manages to make the whole thing even more uncomfortable than it was before, and, lacking the strong first-person narration that made The Bean Trees so striking, is a much weaker novel (the first line of The Bean Trees is just brilliant, establishing character, setting and voice in one fell swoop: ‘I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine’s father over the top of the Standard Oil sign‘.) It was, however, fascinating to read The Bean Trees, Kingsolver’s debut, having recently read her latest, Demon Copperhead: they share much in common, possibly more than anything else Kingsolver has written*. Both are completely made by their fantastic narrators, Taylor and Demon; both deal with the impact of growing up in rural poverty in the Appalachians; and both are occasionally marred by preachiness and sentimentality, though I’d say The Bean Trees is heavier on the latter but lighter on the former than Demon Copperhead. In short, Kingsolver fans, it’s worth trying The Bean Trees, but I’d skip Pigs In Heaven.

*unless Animal Dreams is super similar – it’s now the only Kingsolver novel I haven’t read!

What were your best and worst reads this month? Have you read any of these books?

July Superlatives, 2023

The Best Book I Read This Month Was…

… The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin. A terrific horror novel, a glimpse into the early days of second-wave feminism in the US, still prescient and thought-provoking today. And all this in less than 150 pages! My review is here.

The Worst Book I Read This Month Was… 

… The Most Precious Substance On Earth by Shashi Bhat. I feel bad tagging this as ‘worst book’, because it really wasn’t that bad – just bland and familiar.  Set in Halifax, this collection of interconnected short stories follows Indian-Canadian Nina from her teenage years into adulthood. Much of it felt like a rehash of better novels that do the same thing, like Melissa Banks’ The Wonder Spot or Curtis Sittenfeld’s The Man Of My Dreams. There was one story near the very end that did stop me in my tracks: ‘Facsimile’, when Nina is trying to write a dating profile in a coffee shop and has her laptop stolen, then realises she can trace the teenage girl who stole it via her awkwardly Photoshopped pictures that sync with Nina’s other devices. Bhat is much better at writing adults observing teenagers than she is at writing from an adolescent point of view; ‘A Human Shape’ also chronicles Nina’s stumbles as she tries to teach undergraduates creative writing. But other stories about teaching, like ‘Everything You Need To Know’, fall headlong into sentimentality. If you come across ‘Facsimile’, I’d read it, otherwise this is incredibly skippable (and bought in Canada, so I doubt it’s available in the UK anyway).

The Best Historical Fantasy Novel I Read This Month Was…

… She Who Became The Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan (thanks to Elle for the recommendation!) This epic debut cleverly functions as historical fiction with a touch of fantasy, which gives Parker-Chan much more imaginative scope than straight historical might have allowed. She Who Became The Sun is set in mid-fourteenth-century China, when the country was under Mongol rule, and tells the story of a peasant girl who becomes a boy who becomes a monk who becomes a commander, driven by her unshakeable sense that her fate is to be great. The way Parker-Chan handles gender is brilliant; she doesn’t impose modern ideas of trans and non-binary identity onto the past, but nevertheless demonstrates how many ways there were of living outside the gender binary in Yuan China. Our protagonist disguises herself as a boy but feels that she has to shed her former self completely to survive, which leads to an internal conflict about who she really is.

Parker-Chan also showcases characters who were placed into ‘third gender’ categories by Chinese society itself, such as monks and eunuchs, and demonstrates how these characters don’t like their ascribed roles, either. She effectively incorporates a touch of magic by taking her characters’ belief systems very seriously; they see ghosts, and believe fully in a visible Mandate of Heaven, which takes the form of a coloured flame in the hands of those who have the right to rule. I struggle with a lot of fantasy novels because I think, honestly, very few authors have the ability to create truly convincing fantasy worlds; Parker-Chan partly circumvents this through her historical setting, and partly because she really does write well. This did take me a long time to read, and there were moments where I wasn’t sure if I would continue, but it turned out to be worth it (and I’ll probably read the sequel, which already puts it ahead of 99% of fantasy series I’ve started in recent years!). I’d recommend this to fans of Nicola Griffith’s Hild.

The Book I Was Most Looking Forward To That Actually Delivered This Month Was…

…  Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs. I put this on my 2023 reading list, but it sounded SO up my street I was actually a bit wary of it. Would a story that combines so many of my random interests in fiction – sisters, Antarctica, magical books, woods, Vermont – actually work? (Plus the bits of Spanish and the mention of Playmobil childhood games, which I didn’t know about until I actually read it). I’ve been disappointed recently, too, by some dark-academia-book-magic-adjacent stuff like Katy Hays’ The Cloisters and Sara Gran’s The Book of the Most Precious Substance. But not to worry, because this one delivers. I was especially captivated by the first half, which moves between Esther, who is working on a remote Antarctic research base with her girlfriend when she realises someone is performing mirror magic; her younger sister Joanna, who lives isolated in rural Vermont, keeping up the wards on the family home; and Nicholas, who has also lived as a virtual captive all his life as the only Scribe in a mysterious library.

Esther and Joanna are both wonderful characters, as are the other members of their family circle. (Nicholas, for me, felt a bit reminiscent of other young snarky male victims of magical wrongdoing, perhaps most obviously Garth Nix’s Nicholas Sayre in the Abhorsen books, but this was partly compensated for by his bodyguard Collins, who is quietly hilarious.) When the plot kicks in fully about halfway through, this becomes a bit more run-of-the-mill, and I missed some of the dark strangeness of the early chapters, as atmosphere is sacrificed to pace and the mood becomes cheerier, more YA-ish, despite some nasty twists. Nevertheless, a superior example of its sub-genre, and I’d describe it as a cross between Bridget Collins’ The Binding and Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night.  I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

The Novel That Most Failed To Live Up To Its Stunning Cover This Month Was…

… The Black Eden by Richard T. Kelly. Largely set in Scotland in the 1960s and 1970s, this novel traces the search, discovery and exploitation of oil under the North Sea through the viewpoints of a number of different men. Most significant, perhaps, are childhood friends Aaron and Robbie, who dove together as boys but whose lives took very different paths. Aaron becomes a geologist, trying to identify the best spot in the sea to drill for oil by studying the rock strata, while Robbie moves between different kinds of skilled manual labour, eventually becoming a diver and a welder. But we also hear from a journalist; a banker; the son of an Aberdeen trawler-fishing family company; and a preacher. Unfortunately, this list-like approach is how The Black Eden deals with these men as well. They are defined by their class and occupation, and characterisation is perfunctory. Dialogue is distinguished by accent but inside their own heads they all sound the same. Women are given even shorter shrift, appearing only as future love interests – and even the ones that start off interesting, like a female welder, collapse completely into that role. Kelly is great at evoking certain working environments, especially oil rigs and diving bells, but The Black Eden spends much too much time in offices, conference rooms and bars, and not enough time ‘making hole’, as the oil drillers would put it. This novel is impeccably researched, and I learnt a lot from it, but it feels both old-fashioned and incredibly predictable, creaking slowly towards the inevitable ending like an ancient trawler.  I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

The Best Biography I Read This Month Was…

… Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell. I studied John Donne’s poetry for A Level English but knew little about his life, so I thought I’d pick up this highly-garlanded new biography. As everybody has said, Rundell’s writing is exceptional. She has the gift of writing beautiful, evocative line after evocative line (‘He was a man who walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute‘; ‘Time eats your paperwork, and it has eaten some of his’; ‘Tap a human, he believed, and they ring with the sound of infinity’ – and all this just in the introduction!) But I agree with other reviewers that some of this prose rather gets in the way, and I’d add that the very short chapters broke the flow of the narrative for me. And maybe this is just me having wrong expectations for a biography, but I wanted more of the poetry; there actually isn’t as much quotation as I’d expected. Obviously, I could look it up myself, but it would have been nice to have it embedded in Donne’s life story. I’m excited to hear that Rundell is working on an adult novel, though, because she’s obviously an incredible, versatile writer.

The Weirdest Book I Read This Month Was…

… Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge (trans. Jeremy Tiang). This book, which was on my 2023 reading list, follows an unnamed writer and cryptozoologist as she records the stories of the beasts that roam the city of Yong’an, while trying to disentangle her own personal history, especially the different stories she’s been told about her father and mother. Although the writer’s own narrative develops throughout this book, Strange Beasts of China reads like a series of linked short stories – a form I especially enjoy – particularly because most of the stories have the same, haunting, structure. Each begins with a series of precise, banal facts about a certain type of beast (‘Joyous beasts like breakfast cereal and plain water… They enjoy fantasy novels, and hate maths’) and end with a return to these supposed certainties, rewriting the rules of the beasts’ existence in the light of new knowledge, but still maintaining they exist (‘The joyous beast is an auspicious one… [it] reproduces through death… The joyous beasts are immortal.’)

This doesn’t, however, feel repetitive, but rather deliberate, as the form of each story gradually shifts towards the narrator’s realisation at the end, and we see how she is using the stories of the beasts to explore her own sense of rootlessness. Because of this, ‘Flourishing Beasts’ was one of the most resonant sections for me, even though its meaning is elliptical. The narrator meets the flourishing beasts in the Temple of the Antiquities, who grow in the ground until maturity and take on the appearance of those who care for them; there, she finds a little beast with her mother’s face. Strange Beasts of China skirts close to magical realism but, for me, avoids the things I struggle with about that mode of writing because it is committed to understanding the rules of these beasts’ lives, even if that understanding shifts. It’s a slow but unforgettable read.

What books stood out to you this month? What were your favourite and least favourite reads?