Books of 2024 - Top/Bottom 23 (All in One this year)
23) New Moon - Stephenie Meyer
Yes, after last year's experimenting with Twilight, this year I decided to actually commit and read the whole series. Not because I really enjoyed the first book or was invested in it at all (if you missed my writeup, the most disappointing thing was that I neither particularly hated nor loved it), but just because if I'm curious about the phenomenon then I feel I need to get the full experience to really assess it. And there are quite a few thoughts that I have about this book, which can be summarised in the following way: it's weirdly crap. But it's only weirdly crap because of the weird fixation Meyer has on the character of Edward Cullen. This book begins in a roundabout way with Edward and his family packing up and leaving town forever and effectively him bidding Bella farewell and have a nice life. All of which is done in such a way as to make him seem like an absolute dipshit, largely because Meyer has not really bothered with imbuing Edward with any great character except for being utterly beautiful, and therefore his motivations here are completely obtuse and opaque; therefore I was left with just a feeling of him being a flaccid dipshit. So then enter the more fully-fledged and far more likeable character of Jacob Black, who has already befriended Bella but their friendship deepens in the aftermath of her grief at suddenly losing the beautiful dipshit vampire who she has deluded herself into thinking she deeply loves for some reason. I genuinely didn't believe coming into this series that I'd pick a side in the Team Jacob-Team Edward thing, but not only am I 100% team Jacob, but anyone who is team Edward is utterly, irredeemably stupid. At least if you are team Edward at the end of this book; there’s still time for Jacob to do inexplicably dipshit things in future books, I guess, but if that happens I think I’ll become team “everyone explodes horribly”. It is very telling how keenly Meyer invokes Romeo & Juliet imagery throughout this particular book, and it's mostly telling because it's clear she sees that play very much as a play about ‘true love’ cut tragically short, instead of a story about two messed up teenagers who pointlessly end their life over a brief physical infatuation which it objectively is by the way. So when Bella is reunited with Edward (oh spoiler alert I guess, like you care) it's done in this ticking-clock way where you're meant to hope it doesn't Romeo & Juliet on you and hopefully Bella can make it in time. But the strangest thing is that the plot of this story takes such an abrupt left turn in order to contrive that scenario. The story is about Bella and Jacob's growing friendship and the threat that exists in the town of Forks that is immediate to Bella's safety and that Jacob is pivotal to protecting her from, but then suddenly it's no longer about that and that doesn't matter and there's a far more pressing and immediate crisis regarding Edward. It's introduced in a sudden, strange manner for sudden, strange reasons, and that becomes the focus of the story that hitherto had been focused on something completely different. It also takes us completely out of the effectively gothic setting of Forks (the gloominess of the surroundings is one thing Meyer is adept at writing about, if only because it's fairly derivative of genre conventions) and thus completely dispenses with everything the story was invested in up until this point. Then of course there's one line that basically undoes all the good work of actually spending time building up and developing an interest in the Bella-Jacob relationship; Bella sees Edward again and it says something along the lines of "At that instant I knew I could never ever love anybody as completely as I loved his perfect, perfect, shimmering face and perfectly sculpted physique wearing a white tank top revealing his rippling muscles". It basically just tosses the proper relationship we've just seen her develop off the table into the trashcan for the simple reason that the dipshit is gorgeous. As a sidenote too, I was mildly intrigued by the plot device throughout this book of Edward's voice sounding in Bella's head whenever she found herself in mortal danger, and I had suspected that there was some kind of paranormal connection happening where Edward was constantly watching over Bella ensuring she was OK - and frankly I found that kind of romantic in spite of myself and thinking he's a dipshit - but as part of the weird left-turn conclusion it seems to be revealed unequivocally that he was doing no such thing and that it actually was just a delusion of Bella's that he was speaking to her and really his 'voice' was just standing in for her own sense of self-preservation to be able to gaze on Edward’s beauty again one more time, or some bullshit. It was all a bit of a glib, muddled mess at the end so at the conclusion of New Moon I can really only look forward to presumably the remainder of this series increasingly irritating me as it insists upon the extremely tenuous bond between an undead dipshit and a ridiculous adolescent girl who doesn't know what's good for her.
22) A Short Walk Through a Wide
World - Douglas Westerbeke
This one was chosen for our book group as it was a book that had been recommended to Nat. So nobody I know (as far as I'm aware at time of writing, pre our discussion) is personally invested in having chosen this book, but I do reserve the potential right to edit my writeup if more things come to light during that discussion, from people who had a more positive experience with this book than I did. Because, in short, I did not like this book at all. I mean generally I don't particularly like picaresque novels; it is on record many times in this blog that 'wandering aimlessly' books just bore me, and they tend to feel lazily and self-indulgently episodic with place-hopping used as an excuse to get out of any narrative thread without the need to wrap it up. This is a particularly egregious example of it since there is a fantasy novel conceit that dictates the protagonist's constant wandering, rather than any desire on her part to keep moving that might give us some psychology to dig into no matter how shallow. It's never fully explained except in some enigmatic and elliptical resolutions late in the novel, but ostensibly our main character Aubry is cursed from a young age from a promise she was unwilling to fulfil, to the point where she cannot stay more than three days (or thereabouts) in one place before she is overwhelmed by a horrifying crushing illness that abates when she moves on to a new place. So it's full of these picaresque episodic skits where she gets attached to a person or a place but then has to bid them farewell and move on to something completely different. The book becomes quite tedious and repetitive as this format is repeated multiple times through the novel, and I found myself a bit irritated how samey a lot of these episodes became where people are inexplicably drawn to her as a fascinating mystery but without any sense of her being actually likeable or interesting. Which brings me to the main issue, of course: if I'm going to be drawn into her plight and invested in her journey and dilemma, it's necessary for Aubry to be a sympathetic character who I enjoy spending time with. But early on in the book it's clear she's a capricious and tetchy personality, and I couldn't find myself sympathising either with her and certainly less in any of these people who fall head over heels for her in the space of a day and then find the great tragedy of their lives that they have to let her move on a day or two after meeting her. All of this could perhaps have been drawn to an interesting conclusion, if I found that the mystery of 'why this is happening' or 'what does this all mean' were in any way answered by the end of the book, but it really just seems to wind itself down to exhaustion without any particularly great answers being revealed in the end. Now what I reserve judgment for mainly is whether there's any great metaphor or intertextual reference that I may be missing here. The marketing fluff seems to draw parallels with Life of Pi and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, which are not exactly canonical references that I feel are necessary for understanding modern literature, and moreover it feels more like Westerbeke is flimsily playing with modern tropes rather than literary archetypes, and moreover he's not doing anything particularly interesting with them. It's a book that never stays still by design and therefore there is no great character development, no evocative descriptions that amount to anything, and certainly nothing that ties all these episodes together save for an irritatingly ambiguous and unsatisfying mystery conceit that is too far-fetched to be an obvious metaphor for any kind of relatable life dilemma. In short this was not a short walk for me, but a long enervating walk through an irritating world. Late self-editing note: most of the group disliked this book to some extent and though it’s not a competition, I think I disliked it most.
21) Little Dorrit - Charles
Dickens
I picked this up as my annual
Dickens for 2024 and it was quite late in the year so it was quite
frankly annoying how long this took to read. The main reason for the slow-going
is on a simple level that I didn't really enjoy this book. But more
specifically it was that it was very hard to get invested in this story, for
the confounding reason that there are just too many story threads here. It
starts out by introducing us to two characters sharing a prison cell in
Marseille, which characters will go on to become very peripheral characters,
although central to key plot points throughout the novel. It then focuses on a
group of travellers emerging from mandatory quarantine,
most of whom will then become players in the various story threads;
but it's not until a good 100 pages in that the key central
players of the story finally become crystallised. At the
conclusion of part 1 which really represents the entire story
arc of most Dickens stories (some impoverished characters suddenly
become wealthy once a long-lost inheritance is brought to light and fulfilled),
and when I entered part two, I became aware quite belatedly that
two of the story threads had never actually touched each other
despite hinging on the same central character in the form of Arthur
Clennam. Even then I only became aware of this through
one of the narrative devices of the titular Little Dorrit
writing to Clennam about her becoming acquainted with the characters from the
other thread of the story. In essence the multiple narrative threads
to my mind really dilute the impact that the story can have, whereas David
Copperfield that I read last year managed to include a wide
array of characters and plot machinations but through focusing
singularly and centrally on David as the key protagonist in nearly
all of those threads which helped ground it all and give it the right
dramatic stakes. Tonally, I found this book a little at odds with Dickens'
usual storytelling. As an interesting point of differentiation, I found
Dickens' authorial voice here often took on a comedic or even sarcastic
tone where he would drop little ironic asides into the narration, and I was
quite on board with this at first but it became a bit tiresome once I realised
I wasn't especially caught up in the story. I also did find that where
most of Dickens' stories can treat poverty with a casual, light
touch, in Little Dorrit's case it almost romanticises poverty
through the figure of the titular figure who is a
model of self-sacrifice, discipline and dignity, and I found the
interchange in part two between Amy ("Little") Dorrit and her
ambitious, self-important sister Fanny the most engaging parts of the
book. But the romanticism with which Dickens imbues poverty and its associated
humilities felt a bit on the nose especially late in the piece where it becomes
more overtly religious than his works usually are, and the suffering undergone
by the novel's poor characters becomes an indirect but clumsy Christ allegory
or at least representative of how we should all adopt a 'servant'
mentality in the pursuit of reverence to a higher power (or even
secularly to a 'greater good' kind of idea). It felt to me like it
came in late in the piece to be a ham-fisted fable based on a story that I
wasn't particularly caught up in, and ultimately I wasn't particularly thrilled
by the predictably happy endings for these characters whose lives I was never
particularly invested in. I don't agree with George Bernard Shaw who, according
to the cover, called this Dickens’ "masterpiece among many
masterpieces"; I would go so far as to say that this is the least focused
and therefore the most convoluted book of his that I've read, where
the tone is inconsistent and the narrative arc of its characters
blurred and ultimately unfulfilling.
20) Zone One - Colson Whitehead
This was my first library-sourced read of the year, and with a new batch of books I put them in front of Dylan and got him to select which one I should read first. I was looking forward to this because I've really enjoyed both books from Colson Whitehead I've read - The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys - and him embracing a full-on horror aesthetic as I was promised here seemed like it had great potential. So as it turned out, I was quite disappointed with this book. It's essentially a postapocalyptic story, narrating the exploits of a survivor of the apocalypse nicknamed "Mark Spitz" (after the successful 1972 Olympic swimmer) and his company of sweepers occupied in cleaning up parts of Manhattan by going systematically through buildings and finishing off the undead 'stragglers' and 'skels' left behind after a more full-blown marine operation has already gone through. Systematic really is the order of the day, because I found Whitehead's narrative focus a bit dull. It had the feeling of Max Brooks' World War Z in that it felt quite procedural and objectively reported, but with just a singular and quite isolated focus that became quite repetitive. I also found it not quite precisely focused enough, and his prose takes on a kind of stream of consciousness style as "Mark Spitz" will shift suddenly from a present-day adventure to a new reminiscence taking place some time between the "Last Night" when the plague started affecting mankind and the present moment. It felt a bit hard to really follow the timeline of events and, ultimately, the emotional arc of the story likewise. Therein really lies the ultimate problem: Whitehead presents "Mark Spitz" (who is otherwise unnamed) as a perennially mediocre individual whose unremarkableness has become an asset in the post-apocalyptic wasteland I guess due to him being adaptable and not too stuck in his ways of doing things. Even notwithstanding the character's mediocrity, I find Whitehead's meandering approach makes it hard for me to get a sense of interiority for his protagonist, and as such I never really empathised with his plight. I didn't really get the grounding in reality and the grounding in real humanity that would render this nightmare landscape so much more horrifying. As such I didn't really experience the suspense or terror that Whitehead was aiming for, I didn't experience the existential dread or the tragedy of the downfall of humanity. But more egregiously I think that without that contrasting humanity, a lot of the satirical or speculative points that Whitehead was probably aiming for also fail to land, and at best he's only covering the same sort of horror ground that George Romero and Danny Boyle have already executed to far greater impact in films. At the end of the day the main issue with this was by not getting caught up in the emotions of it, the book felt like a bit of a dull slog through a bleak world rather than a horrifying and poignant one.
When I needed to read Galapagos for book group, I applied for an interlibrary loan and the library found me a collection of Vonnegut novels, so after finishing Galapagos I had some time before the book was due back and I decided on this one mainly because it was the first in the collection. And this very much reaffirmed again for me my general thoughts on Vonnegut: specifically that he's a very witty writer and has lots of interesting ideas to impart but is not always the very best at telling stories. This one's a bit of a muddle really: it's a story about a twin boy and girl who - it is constantly repeated throughout the book - were born hideously ugly, but also had a collective genius to them that they keep hidden for the first few years of their lives. But it's all told through the brother's perspective later looking back on his life, following his tenure as US president and after the world has become a completely different place. In brief summary, there's a mandate from him as president where mandatory familial relationships are created to connect all citizens with each other, there's scientific research from China about shrinking people to microscopic size, there's a cult who believe Jesus was kidnapped so are constantly looking around for the kidnapped Jesus, oh and there's lots and lots of incest (purely for synergy in collective intellect and not for visceral pleasure). The summary of the main plot points done, the main point is that Vonnegut's full of wacky ideas here and feels the need to cram these all in without a clear narrative at any point or a clear idea of where any of it is going. And I find that a shame here; the undirectedness was more of a disappointment or frustration with Galapagos but in this case I think there's a really good bit of satire in the heart of this book but it gets obfuscated through too many obtuse plot trajectories and the parodical themes he touches on in brilliant ways get lost in a confused maelstrom of a story. He's never really been one to focus on real authentic human stories as everybody's too eccentric and flawed for that, but I feel the real value here is in what he's lampooning and even that became too multifaceted and variegated as it went on, so the target of his satire became less and less clear as the story did. I feel there's some really good things in here but it again confirms that Vonnegut likely just works best in short form where he can make his point without getting horribly lost along the way.
18) The Mirror and the Light -
Hilary Mantel
I honestly didn't know this book existed, to the extent that, when Hilary Mantel passed away a couple of years ago, my main thought was "oh what a shame she didn't get a chance to finish chronicling Thomas Cromwell's story". Turns out she in fact did, and here is that conclusion. But I can totally understand why this book passed under my radar considering I don't really keep on top of book news when it happens, and can also understand why this book didn't receive the accolades of Wolf Hall or Bring Up the Bodies. For one thing, this book took me six weeks to finish. It is dense. It is also just a big drawn-out saga compared to Bring Up the Bodies in particular, mainly because the period of history that this book covers is far less eventful and far more sparse in terms of drama than the period of Anne Boleyn's reign that the previous book chronicled. This book covers the period immediately following Boleyn's death all the way to Cromwell's own demise, so in ‘wife’ terms it covers all of Jane Seymour's time as queen and most of Anne of Cleves' but Cromwell dies pretty much immediately before Henry annuls the Cleves marriage in favour of Katherine Howard. And I'm not sure if that's a particularly long period in history but it's a period where Mantel covers pretty much every event that occurs in great, intimate detail and not a whole lot of it is really worthy of being covered even in history besides the odd major event: Richmond and Jane's deaths (the latter of which coincides with the birth of Henry's only legitimate heir so that's like two events in one; not very efficient storytelling there, history), then the Cleves marriage and a bunch of little uprisings and conflicts between France, Spain and England. Mostly this story also tells in great detail about Cromwell's tenure as Henry's most trusted advisor, which frankly is also less interesting than Cromwell's rise to that position which the previous books covered as well. Mostly Cromwell is in control of this story, and with a few interesting observations about the diplomacy of the times (Eustache Chapuys, the ambassador for the Holy Roman empire, is to me the most intriguing and well-drawn character in this book) there just isn't much in the way of immediate conflict or plot points. So it's no doubt a fascinating book for people interested in this period in history, but I only have a passing interest in the major events, and otherwise I found Mantel's commitment to assiduous commentary and almost journalistic approach to her subject matter a bit too drawn-out in this instance. I'm glad to have learned that she did complete this magnum opus, but part of me does kind of miss when I thought it had been cut short on the high note at the conclusion of the second book, because this series does feel like it lived long enough to become the villain, to me at least.
17) The Sandman Book 2 - Neil
Gaiman
I picked this up bearing in mind what I had thought of volume 1 last year - namely that it was scattered and didn't really have an overarching narrative to speak of, and hence I was hoping that this volume might crystallise a bit clearer what the Sandman story was all about and what the stakes were. In short: it didn't. This volume (collected after the fact though it was, as all of these are) consists less of individual one-off stories so in that sense it's maybe a bit more substantial, but it still feels fairly scattered despite having a series of two or three longer, multi-volume stories. Those stories remain unconnected except thematically, and they also retain one of the key issues I had with book 1, namely that no matter what the stakes or the conflict, Dream/The Sandman has an ability whatever he's faced with to overcome all obstacles and arrange matters in a way that maintains the status quo. Maybe that's something of the nature of graphic novels and I should expect more sort of sitcom stakes going in rather than expect horrible changes to take place that forever alter the fate of the world, since without the fate of the world remaining what it is, how can the story continue in the same vein? But even the story that occupies the largest space here, has the most notions of 'fate' and 'karma', and feels like it has the largest stakes, still ends up being resolved quite quickly and seamlessly given how much dramatic build-up there is to the denouement. I do think that part of what emphasises these as so profoundly affecting for a number of people though is the fact that they are more philosophical (as well as post-modern and intertextual in their narrative structure) in nature than just people fighting and saving the world. The other thing at the back of my mind while reading this is the accusations that have come out against Gaiman in between me reading part 1 and part 2 (and a couple of disclaimers that I read this book and wrote it up prior to reading Lila Shapiro’s Vulture article that lays out the accusations in excruciating detail, but also given that they’re still available in my local library free of charge, I’m likely to conclude this series in spite of what further comes out or gets upheld). Having at this stage not looked into the accusations in great detail, I will say that I've read quite a lot about Gaiman generally having a kind of pervy nature and it's extremely apparent in this volume. Where part 1 was full of gory and grotesque violence which felt consistent with what I understand about graphic novels aimed at adults, this one had far more sex and nudity. In fact it reached the point where I felt that all conflicts in the stories seemed to be resolved by naked people having conversations rather than any fighting or suffering at all. I don't really have a point in that regard, it was just an interesting observation about the shifting focus (as I saw it) from more action-based to more talky-based (but with lots of nudity also). In summary, I still feel a bit lost in the wilderness regarding The Sandman generally and precisely what makes it worthy of the appellation 'masterpiece' that is so often levelled at it. It's interesting and has some curious ideas certainly, but I don't think it really explores them to their fullest extent, and I'd also wish for all of these inter-textual references and meta-commentaries on mythology to be better connected as it seems more of a buffet-style discourse where he picks and chooses whatever little bits and pieces he has an appetite for at the time, but doesn't create anything substantial with that (let’s not follow that metaphor through to the logical conclusion).
16) The
Extinction of Irena Rey - Jennifer Croft
This was the first book I attacked as part of the (online) revival of our old book group, and I was a late addition back into the group only a couple of weeks from the meetup to discuss this. So I powered through it quickly and also went in knowing absolutely nothing about it, not even the initial spiel from the person who chose the book on why they chose it. And honestly, this is a very strange book to go in knowing and expecting nothing. It's just a very strange book to begin with, anyway. It tells the story of a group of international translators of various languages who are summoned to the home of their esteemed author who they all have in common, which they do as a regular summit whenever the author has a new book for them all to translate in their various languages. It's also told in first person narration by one of the translators (Spanish), but the conceit of the overarching book is that we're reading the English translation of the Spanish original, translated by one of the other translators who is one of the characters - although the original setting and common language for everybody is Polish. Confused yet? What we then get is a sort of unreliable narration of the events that take place when their author unexpectedly disappears after a couple of days together in the house, and how each of the different translators react to this disappearance and set about trying to locate the author. It's explicitly an unreliable narration in the sense that the English translator who is translating the original provides lots of commentary in footnotes about things that didn't really happen or where she expresses her confusion about what the Spanish translator means in her original translation. The fact that we're experiencing a dialogue between the two writers is strange in and of itself before you even get to how strange the events narrated are. I describe it as a kind of surreal but tawdry soap opera, as conflicting egos and libidos interact with the mysterious disappearance, the concern about the future plight of the forest where the story takes place, the haunting presence of ghosts and mysterious strangers who come on the scene haphazardly, it's all quite a lot to take in notwithstanding the layers of 'translation' taking place. The structural framework brought to mind The Virgin Suicides for me at first, since initially the translators are all presented as a collective, unified voice of 'we' and they don't refer to each other by name but only the languages they translated into. When the breakdown of the rituals starts to take effect it starts to remind me of Bunuel's film The Exterminating Angel as the eight figures find that they are mysteriously held captive in this house and unable to leave until something is resolved - whether that is completing the translation of the author's latest novel or the tracking down of the author herself, or something more metaphysical like them unearthing the purpose of their author's disappearance and how she views their role as translators. All of this feels like it should make for a fascinating novel, but the main issue Croft encounters is that the intricacies of the plot get completely out of hand. Some of the particular soap operatic twists come straight from left field (and the 'English' translator sometimes clarifies that events never happened and they're therefore fabrications or false memories from the 'Spanish' translator's recollection) and start to obfuscate where our sympathies are meant to lie with which characters; new characters emerge from the woodwork who have hitherto not been mentioned and are suddenly intimately part of the central plot; but ultimately besides being a surreal exploration of battling egos and cultural cringe I'm not really sure what the point of this story is. I'd say about halfway through, Croft gets lost in searching for a climax, and when the story reaches its actual denouement, the journey to get there has been such a roundabout and dawdling one that it doesn't have the big dramatic impact I feel it was supposed to. Effectively I'm a few layers removed from the centre of the story and too many layers removed from the characters it's about, so if there is a question being answered or even posed at the centre of this - about the nature of writing, whether translation is a form of charlatanism, how language forms part of our identity (all of these were questions that occurred to me during the read but never fully formed in the text) - it gets lost in too many twists, turns and tribulations.
15) Harry Potter and the
Half-Blood Prince – J.K. Rowling
I’m finally into actual reading territory here with this series, because this is the first book I’ve read without having seen the film adaptation first. Honestly the previous two books were largely fresh for me as well because the films were incoherent for someone like me who watched them with a large gap between them and no prior knowledge of the story (I’ve heard that it’s also just a function of trying to cram long dense narratives into digestible film length). As for this though, while I had no idea of the plot points or the events of the narrative, having been on the internet at all since the book was released, I knew going in: A who the Half-Blood Prince is (although I only realised in reading this that a huge amount of the plot centres around that mystery so I probably should have tried to avoid spoiling that for myself), and B the other major plot point that happens at the end of this book - and the groundwork for that is laid very early on here. So this was an interesting experience because even though I knew more than the characters did, it was still a really well-plotted book to keep me turning the pages and finding out the next chain of events. Knowing some of the spoilers meant there was a dramatic irony in Harry’s insistence on suspecting foul play on the part of Draco, since pretty much every book hitherto has proven his suspicions unfounded and prejudiced and in this case they’re correct. But a step up in this book were the romantic subplots and the teenage angst portions of them; they just felt more adeptly handled in this case where Rowling (may eagles enjoy feasting on his foul eyeballs) had plotted them more carefully and allowed the plot and subplots to untangle in parallel rather than feeling like sidenotes to carry on the unrequited love story or shoehorn in some hormonal moping around. In the end I feel like this book is mostly just laying the groundwork for the finale though and feels like a stepping stone rather than having any grand meaning itself; the whole misplaced trust and grounded suspicions don’t seem to serve any grand purpose here except by what will inevitably come to pass and be revealed in the next book. So this was well-written and highly entertaining but feels like a deliberate cliffhanger rather than a standalone great narrative.
14) Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins
Warning: As part of this write-up, I’m going to massively spoil this extremely popular book that everyone’s read. I'm quite pleased now to have finished one of these young adult series that I've embarked upon, particularly given that I struggled through the second Twilight book earlier in the year (as seen earlier in this write-up), and I still have two or three more books to go in that series (I genuinely don't know how many there are, I think there's four in total?). But I also went into this with some trepidation because honestly I didn't love the second book of the series. This book though quickly assuaged many of my misgivings; specifically I remember being incredibly frustrated with how obtuse Katniss is in the second book and how oblivious she was of her own value and significance. Mainly it just felt a bit contrived to give her this humility and act like the whole "she is the Mockingjay" thing was a big revelation to her, when it made absolutely no sense in the context of everything she'd achieved, had been told throughout the story and what she could do with a bow & arrow. Anyway, point is: this story made a lot more sense with her character. In a lot of ways it helped to have her more closely entwined here with Gale since they have the same ethos as these kind of rebellious lone wolf types (not that I'm 'team Gale' mind you, I'm actually quite neutral in that regard but my point is that it felt like Katniss' natural milieu to be a bit of an outsider as she was in the first book and as she more strongly becomes here). But while I was on board with this story for the most part, I fear I got a bit lost by the end. I honestly think there's a conscious choice made at some point and maybe it's to do with young people these days and their attention spans, but I felt like I knew the general direction the story was going in and I was content with it following a fairly predictable path just not quite knowing the minutiae of how it would get there. But instead Collins introduces a myriad of abrupt left turns throughout the protracted climactic sequences and I found myself largely derailed by a lot of it. I'm not saying the story needed to follow a cliched path of least resistance, but it felt like too wild a ride for me and I completely lost track of where my sympathies and even the stakes of the story were meant to lie. One of the biggest blind spots for me was the death of Prim, where I had no idea what was going on as I was reading it, and in the next chapter when it's basically revealed (for the first time, to me) that Prim actually died, I went back and reread the passage where it all goes down again and still had no idea that that was what it was describing. It's a key and pivotal example of where I found myself lost in too much action suddenly happening too quickly, but I was on that path much earlier when the mission and strategy and goals keep changing with rapidly changing circumstances. Then when Katniss makes her big decisions to change the course of destiny and vote 'yes' for a final Hunger Games and then murder president Coin, none of that made much sense to me either because I don't think a good enough job had been done of setting Coin up as an actual villain. I think she'd been set up as 'opposed' to Katniss but it was only really that 'last Hunger Games' that was really villainous, and I feel like the world-building had become too confused in the maelstrom of individual occurrences that I had personally lost sight of the fact that it was actually 'the system' that Katniss was tearing down with that decision. I'm of course in the minority in feeling this because it's a remarkably popular series among people much younger than me, but I feel the final statements could have been made more stark and clear with a predictable and even formulaic narrative arc towards the end - especially given the fact that all the hard work of world-building and character development had already been done in the first two books to make me heavily invested in their fate and journey.
13) Demon Copperhead - Barbara
Kingsolver
I picked this up because of my increasing fondness for Barbara Kingsolver's work (see, #1 book of 2022 and probably increasingly lower ranks prior to that) and didn't quite register at first that this had won all the accolades last year including the Women's Prize for Fiction (which at one point I was trying to be a completist in) and the Pulitzer prize. It also became more obvious to me at first that she wasn't simply playing on David Copperfield with the title but in fact this whole story is a reimagining of the David Copperfield story. That worked really well for me at first, as I read David Copperfield just last year and very much enjoyed it, so a lot of the story beats were still fresh in my mind as I went into this. I was really enjoying this and I felt that Kingsolver's decision to transplant the basic story structure from impoverished English streets to the more modern-day paragon of poverty, the Appalachian region of Virginia, was an inventive one. But to be honest the story started to drag for me a little bit for a number of reasons: firstly, I had imagined at first that Kingsolver was simply borrowing the premise and would take more artistic licence once that premise and its transplantation was established. Instead, she stays assiduously true to every single plot point, and some of them felt a bit too forced into this new milieu. For instance Damon/"Demon"'s adoption of junior varsity football instead of his studying to become a proctor felt a bit on the nose as a modern update and Americanisation of the original story. But by contrast there was the issue of the daughter of his adopted parental figure Coach Winfield, who is introduced to us first as a boy called Angus. I obviously recognised "Angus" immediately as the stand-in for Agnes who, in the original, David treats as his sister but eventually falls in love with, and thought that Kingsolver may be taking this in a queer direction which I thought was an intriguing premise. But instead "Angus" turns out to just be a nickname for this tomboyish girl whose real name is revealed to be… - wait for it -… Agnes! *balloons* So everything else in that story plays out exactly the same, beat for beat. The main issue that I took with this book though, and what made it hard for me to really relate to this was effectively that Kingsolver extrapolates from the 'rags-to-less-rags' story a more searing commentary about the opioid epidemic in these parts of the US, and how the powers-that-be and coastal elites keep them in their impoverished state through the soft power of the media marginalising them as 'rednecks' and keeping them dependent, in-fighting and effectively docile through the use of addictive prescription drugs. This is mainly where Demon started to lose my sympathy since his own dependence on various drugs stems from one stubborn decision made to avoid surgery on a football knee injury which I just couldn’t really relate to, whereas hitherto all of his ill luck and bum steers in life had elicited my sympathy, and that developed into empathy through the first-person narrative where I could understand his frustrations and bitterness. Once he becomes an addict and descends into the maelstrom of addiction, its resemblance to the original story - with its perhaps antiquated optimism - started to fade, largely through a far heavier ambivalence in personal sympathies and the level of agency that the characters start to have over their own circumstances. A broader political point that she may be making, the frequent shoehorning in of plot points and character points to keep the parallels with David Copperfield started to become a bit of a distraction, where again I feel Kingsolver could well have dispensed with a lot of those parallels and taken the story in different directions as far as landmarks along the way goes, not simply in terms of character development and motivations. For instance the character of Uriah Heap - here called "U-Haul" Pyles - is so instrumental to the downfall section of the original, but here just feels like a tacked-on side character whose malevolence is isolated to his own corner of the story and doesn't really factor into Demon's fate at all. Instances like that serve to reinforce for me the difficulty Kingsolver is playing with here - staying true to her inspiration while also reinventing and modernising it - and I feel she tries to do both things in equal measure, whereas I feel the complex array of coincidences and fortuitous events that are so typical of Dickens' storytelling is better served by Dickens' other bailiwick of having dichotomies of purely good and purely bad characters. Here it becomes too much of a muddle to have so many twisty plot points while also having a tortured sense of sympathy amidst a larger overarching storytelling agenda of how the impoverished are kept 'in place' by some unknown cabal of social elites. I admire the ambition here but I feel it gets very much out of the author's grasp.
12) The Shining - Stephen King
It'd been a while since I'd picked up a Stephen King book, so I opted for this one as I had a fair chunk of time to sit with a slightly longer book. And I will say that reading this book had much the same effect on me as reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest many years ago, in the sense that I love the film adaptation but it becomes apparent very quickly in which ways the novel and film diverge greatly. Less immediately for this than Cuckoo where the narrative focus is immediately different, but in this case I knew that Stephen King was not a fan of Kubrick's adaptation and for about two thirds of this novel I found myself strongly on King's side. The main things that differ in this is that the Overlook Hotel is not an immediately foreboding presence; it's impressive certainly, but we only get subtle hints in the early stages that the hotel has anything intrinsically askew with it and it's only when the snowstorm isolates the Torrance family from civilisation that it properly 'comes to life'. The other key difference is that Jack Nicholson's Jack in the film feels a bit unhinged from the very beginning, and King here paints a far more nuanced portrait of a man struggling with life, with a guilty conscience, fiscal and familial responsibilities and above all alcoholism. In summary he comes across slowly but surely as a man who is vulnerable to the effects of cabin fever and isolation and the increasing paranoia that eventually transforms him. The more documented and debated change that Kubrick made is to the character of Wendy, who here is a far more capable and forward-thinking person whereas Shelley Duvall's portrayal feels like an audience stand-in for the oppressive terror that Kubrick wanted to infect us all with immediately and she comes across as anxious and potentially hysterical almost from her first appearance (at least so far as I recall, it's been a while but I've seen the film twice and I remember her seeming very anxious much earlier than I myself did). There are other superficial differences, such as the fact that perhaps the most iconic image of the film – the Grady twins – do not actually appear in the novel at all except as a reference to people who once existed. So that then brings me to where my opinion started to become more equivocal or even back to Kubrick's side of things: the final part of the novel when the hotel is completely isolated is when the hotel itself becomes a character in a palpable sense. And that's when I felt like King's narrative lost track of itself. I found it quite compelling early on given how much he focused on Jack's struggles, his impulsivity, his guilt and its manifestations, and it made me feel like the hotel wasn't actually haunted at all but the effect of it on an unquiet mind like Jack's would become palpable and terrifying. But instead the narrative turn it takes is more that Jack's psychosis simply makes him a vulnerable target for the hotel which is quite literally alive and supernaturally possessed, and that felt like a bit of a departure from the psychological horror that I had been expecting and I feel would have been far more compelling. I feel like what Kubrick did was offer a very visually creative way of balancing the oppressive terror of the hotel as a space with the actual immediate terror of a man driven insane by isolation, whereas King's novel feels too fantastical and the actual physical threat posed by 'the hotel' doesn't lead to the same level of unease as the idea that a normal, relatable but flawed person like Jack Torrance could completely lose his marbles by the impossible situation he finds himself in and end up completely turning on those he loves most. It remains a kinetic and exciting read, but in a similar way to me hating the 'demon spawn' sequence in (I think) the third Dark Tower novel, I feel like King sometimes draws too liberally from the actual supernatural and demonic and can't quite tie it down enough to a real human anxiety and as a result I found myself more emotionally detached by the end and only really reading for the cheap thrills. Which, in the most ungenerous reading possible, is simply what Kubrick offers so well in terms of sudden jump scares and askew angles that really make you feel physically afraid.
We read this as part of our book group; the selector had always wanted to read Vonnegut and this was the best known of his works that nobody else in the group had read (I’d hoped it would be my chance to finally read Cat’s Cradle, but someone else had already read that). So this book is, mostly, weird. As with all of Vonnegut’s stuff, there’s a circumspect feeling to a lot of the narrative where everything goes yet nothing really happens. In this case he tells a sort of parallel story of evolution centred around the Galapagos islands, where an ill-fated celebrity cruise voyage will - at some point in the story - run aground, stranding the passengers there to interbreed and evolve into a new form of humanity (this isn’t a spoiler as the whole thing is telegraphed very early in the book). Meanwhile of course the rest of humanity wipes itself out fighting over material scarcity and territoriality etc. Our narrator explains basically that the old humanity wiped itself out because our brains were too big and we had too much capacity for imagination and jealousy and revenge and all the nasty things that befall us. Interesting thoughts, where Vonnegut postulates that the peak of evolution is existing just to survive and thrive. I feel like the ideas he explores here - as in a lot of his works - might be more interesting than the story itself, which as I hinted at earlier, takes ages to go anywhere. We spend the vast majority of the book being taken in painstaking detail through the 24 hours leading up to the cruise’s embarkation but in that time we jump back and forwards in time to the end of the revolutionary cycle, to the past of all these characters, to parallel goings on elsewhere in the world. It’s all honestly a bit grim given how little sympathy we’re overtly supposed to have for these characters, how quirky and oddball they all are and how much contempt, really, the narrator has for humanity as a whole and particularly our susceptibility to illness and impulse. And that’s really key to my mixed feelings about this book; as with all Vonnegut’s works, there’s an ingenuity to his turn of phrase and some curious inverted logic and plenty of irony throughout, but this book in particular feels derisive of humanity and nearly all of the characters have some strange impulses that set odd things in motion and generally I feel there’s far too cynical a tone here without any hope for redemption. Possibly that’s ultimately the message of Slaughterhouse Five as well, but it’s been a while since I read anything in long form from Vonnegut and this felt a bit coldly academic, sluggish in pace and ultimately a bit too heartless in the way it derided humanity’s foibles without room to celebrate any of humanity’s achievements.
10) Our Share of Night – Mariana
Enriquez
This was the last book I read in 2024, and part of the delay of this whole writeup being posted is due to the fact that I simply didn’t write this up until right now. Jez loaned me this book (or gave it; I’m sure the difference means little to him but it means similarly little to me) after he enjoyed it earlier in the year so I knew going in that I’d have to either disagree with my beloved brother or – worse – agree wholeheartedly with my idiot brother. Overall I’d say that I agreed more than disagreed but I did also find this book a bit of a frustrating drag when it came down to it. It tells the story of Juan, a terminally ill man, who is taking care of his son Gaspar and navigating through a number of horrors as – it turns out – Juan is also in frequent touch with a shadowy ‘other’ realm occupied by violent bloodthirsty demons and monsters. To be honest I can’t recall how much of a spoiler that is because this whole narrative is a little bit elliptical and fairly long-winded. And therein lies my main issue with this: it’s extremely inefficient as a novel. The initial premise feels very The Road-esque, which is one of my all-time favourite or at least most affecting novels I’ve read, but it takes some protracted meandering side-routes that, while reading, felt engaging enough but didn’t end up reaching much of a full circle conclusion. In particular, when Gaspar becomes the focus of the story, it takes on an almost comically typical ‘coming of age’ story tone and the mundanity of it is in stark contrast with the charnel horror and visceral violence we’ve experienced up to that point. Which really could have been an extremely effective narrative device except that the ’routine’ elements occupy such a huge portion of the story, and really I felt like Enriquez could have condensed a large amount of that part of the narrative to make the overall story more fast-paced and dynamic. The truth is I was still kind of open to this book completely blowing apart my year of reading and finishing with a bang, but the denouement of the story felt disappointingly short and quick given how long I’d been reading this book and how much detail we’ve been given on the more incidental aspects of Gaspar’s life compared to how few we’re given on the climax of his story. So it’s important to note that I was definitely engaged with this story throughout, but I always had the niggling thought that the effectiveness of the long narrative hinged very heavily on how devastating an impact the finale had. Given the bulk of the story reveals more details of what’s happening to us, the reader, than it does to Gaspar, while also maintaining huge chunks of mystery throughout, Enriquez left herself a huge amount of work to do to wrap up all the mystery elements and deliver the crushing blow and it simply felt too shallow compared to the perhaps unnecessary depth of detail provided earlier. The narrative jolts too hastily into wrapping itself up, and ultimately I did feel like the long passages of the everyday, while not exactly wasting my time, did feel like they served no great purpose except in extending and deepening the narrative.
This is the first Banks I’ve read since he somehow made my bottom of the year list with The Quarry, a book I never really got on the same wavelength with. This one was certainly better but possibly only because it was so bizarrely, radically different even from other Banks books I’ve read. This tells the story of Chisako, a world famous Japanese cellist, who is en route from Japan to a European tour via the Panama canal when she gets locked down due to a security issue in Panama. To spoil the inciting incident a bit, her ship then gets taken hostage by a group of Panamanian freedom fighters and she has to face the ensuing hostage situation vulnerable as she is as a famous musician with a precious instrument on board. Immediately it brought to mind Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, my absolute bottom book of 2015, as well as Julie Thomas’ The Keeper of Secrets which I read last year, it being the third book in as many years to explore the idea of the delicacy of music clashing with the brutality of war and terror. But Banks deals with it remarkably differently to Bel Canto’s cringey soap opera and a great deal differently as well to Thomas’ far-less-cringey soap opera. Banks intersperses Chisako’s current plight with flashbacks of her past, outlining her terror of flying – hence the reason she is on the ship in the first place – as well as her developing her cello skills as well as the ambivalent relationship she has with it and music generally. There is no saccharine sentimentality in Banks’ narrative; in fact he quite savagely undercuts the trope of the ‘savage beast’ when Chisako is asked to play the cello for the jefe of the hostage takers. If anything though I found this book played a little too hard in the opposite direction to the soap opera sentimentality, imbuing Chisako with a bit too much blunt and remorseless nihilism. It takes some surprising and confronting turns which are quite effective, but ultimately his attempts to link her back story with the situations she creates for herself in the present day don’t fully marry up, thematically or emotionally, to me. It makes for an interesting narrative overall with some of the twists he includes, but I guess like The Wasp Factory, its moral ambivalence is so explicitly cold and clinical that it’s hard to leave this book feeling anything other than perplexed, if slightly and effectively haunted as well.
8) Rendezvous with Rama - Arthur C
Clarke
I've never read any Arthur C Clarke, although of course I'm very familiar with his name just as a giant of sci-fi and through his work with Kubrick on 2001. So I picked up this book to see, firstly, what the fuss was about, and secondly, to get an idea of what precisely the nature of the fuss is, since I don't really hear Clarke talked about with hushed voices the way people talk about Ray Bradbury or even Neal Stephenson. My first impression of his writing is that it's strangely dull. This is not to say that the story is dull, but Clarke writes with a fair amount of emotional detachment and very little poetic or philosophical flourishes: most of the time he is descriptive, he sticks to the facts, even when describing characters' inner thoughts or motivations. And that actually makes the story overall quite interesting, because he focuses on those details that bring the high concepts he's describing to life and makes them feel both real and almost tangible. In this story "Rama" is a huge foreign object that appears in our solar system some 200 years into the future, and the story describes the mission of the nearest space craft who docks with Rama to explore its interior and try to puzzle out its origins, nature and potential motivations. There are a handful of fairly colourful characters introduced both on that scout party as well as part of the terran 'committee' who regularly meets to discuss observations and theories, as well as stratagems. Where someone like Neal Stephenson is furious and kinetic with his writing, Clarke has an admirable patience with his subject matter, taking the time to draw clear descriptions of all the strange parts of Rama, as well as providing clear and matter-of-fact explanations for why characters make the choices they make. The result is a clinical and curious bit of speculation about how our first extraterrestrial visitation could actually go down, with little in the way of huge fireworks or existential terror; more a viable sense of wonder and curiosity that definitely gave me a good sense of what Kubrick envisioned to bring to life in Clarke's work. It's not an exhilarating read but it was extremely fulfilling, and I probably enjoyed it more for the fact that it wasn't ostentatious at all.
7) Seven Days of Us -
Francesca Hornak
I found this book a little bit frustrating, to be honest. That's sort of jumping ahead a bit to my conclusion, but it's definitely the lasting impression I got from it. Mainly my issue was that throughout I felt it was challenging my beliefs about family stories like this and how I tend to dismiss them as being soap operas where everybody comes to an understanding at the end. The setting here is a family country manor, where the Birch family - parents Andrew and Emma, along with their two grown-up daughters Olivia and Phoebe - decide to hole up for seven days of quarantine following Olivia's return from Liberia treating a deadly infectious pandemic. The story follows fairly predictable paths where the family butt heads, argue, reflect on their shared paths and contemplate their respective futures all while living in this isolated setting where they can't even get reliable phone reception. There are complications along the way as well of course, with each individual keeping something secret from the other family members, and the reader not quite knowing how these secrets are going to come out and how they will affect the dynamic. What was interesting about this book was I found it really quite captivating - despite my misgivings sometimes about this kind of story. I felt Hornak adopted the perspective of each family member with great aplomb, having a fully nuanced depiction of each individual psychology and allowing each voice to give a unique perspective to the events that transpire. So I was finding myself enjoying this as a page-turner, finding it at turns amusing, often surprising and garnering genuine pathos for the characters as it went on, despite them all being flawed human beings afflicted by ego and neuroses that happen in families especially at close quarters. But where the book ultimately frustrated me was that, despite me feeling like it was challenging my own prejudices throughout, the way it finished I found horribly saccharine and completely upended any sense that I had of it subverting the soap opera accusations and instead completely succumbing to them. I felt like it could have delivered the same essential message of the family members gaining new understanding and appreciation for each other without it being quite so rosy-tinted: there's an unlikely hero introduced who, with one gesture, mends all the bridges with their greatest antagonist, there's this warm Christmas/New Year ending with the family all gathered around the fire and everything wraps up all peachy. While there is a death near the end of the story, it's a peripheral character who we've gotten virtually no knowledge of throughout, and it only serves as a plot point to help the family rally around and get closer. In short: I felt a bit suckered by this story in the way that a good soap opera should, but the weakness is that I felt the characters far more vividly when they were in disagreement and uncertain about life, and they no longer felt as relatable to me when everything turned out peachy and hopeful. That obviously says more about me than about the book, so if you’re a warm fuzzy human being, this is highly recommended.
6) Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
I've been curious about reading this book for ages, and kind of gave up hope of randomly finding it last year when I broke my Palahniuk cherry instead with The Invention of Sound, but then this showed up in my local library as part of an influx of this new "American gothic" set of editions (that also gave me Zone One by Colson Whitehead a few months prior) so I snapped it up. Now that I've read this I'm a bit fuzzy about what the internet always says about this book compared with the movie, but I had in my mind that people say this is really different from the movie as well as far inferior. And regardless of whether that's true that the internet says that, I honestly found it neither dissimilar nor inferior. In fact it's very clear in reading this how exciting the prospect of making this into a movie would be and it raises my opinion of Palahniuk a lot from where I thought it would be, and frankly where it was after the last book of his I read. Because the authorial voice in this book is so strong with the narrator (Edward Norton's character) suffering through a kind of surreal landscape brought on by his insomnia and it paints a blunt picture of how much of a galvanizing force Tyler Durden is when he meets him. There are some obvious deviations from page to screen, but I wouldn't really say any of them are particularly glaring - except one maybe, the unnecessary intrusion here of Marla's mother as an unseen but active character during one plot point that doesn't feature in the movie at all - and really the main thing that screenwriter Jim Uhls did in adapting this was just tightening up the trajectory of the plot. Really the only criticism I have of this otherwise fascinating and engagingly dark and surreal novel is the same criticism I had of the previous book of Palahniuk's that I read and really of him as a writer generally: that he's got some fascinating ideas but he needs to get them in a better order to present them to maximum dramatic effect. In The Invention of Sound I thought he derailed the emotional core of his story by over-extending the ambition of his broader themes, and that's definitely a criticism that could be levelled at this book (and the film too, while we’re going there) but really I think the movie lets the chaos spiral in a very controlled kind of way where you completely understand the story beats and where they've come from, and by the time the movie really starts to go out of control it's part and parcel of the themes. Palahniuk doesn't have the same sense of direction in this novel and there are some parts that do wander a bit aimlessly, while the ending both provides less closure and also doesn't have the same level of cutting satire that the film manages to pull off by its denouement. In summary, I do think this novel provides a different experience from the movie and it is an inferior one, but at the same time I think most of the brilliant film's credit is down to Palahniuk's vision and if possible I'd recommend reading this first to appreciate them both as fresh as possible.
5) Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman -
Haruki Murakami
I feel like this writeup will inevitably end up being a critique of Murakami's work overall or at least my reaction to it. Because the thing is I've always tended to find myself either disappointed with his works overall or finding my hopes for a work that I've started end up being disappointed by the end. This is not always true, but the main thing is I lose the thread of the story a lot of the time and end up just no longer connecting with it on an emotional level by the end. I was reflecting on that a lot during this book, simply because it became apparent to me that his style works (for me at least) a lot better in this short form. The first story left me feeling a little unfulfilled simply because it has that short story thing of ending very ambiguously without any resolution of any of its parts and ultimately just a lingering mystery and unanswered questions. But once I recognised that every story was likely to end like that, it made Murakami's (apparent) trademark surrealism more heightened and more affecting. It's one reason that After Dark, the first Murakami novel I ever read, remains probably my favourite - because it does have a detachment to it, as well as an efficiency (it's relatively short as well), but also one shortcoming that always tends to come up for me is that Murakami's lead characters start acting in unexpected ways and I no longer connect with their motivations and why they're making certain choices. In short form this kind of surreal warped psychology never has time to show its face but, moreover, I think it's more that Murakami allows himself to freestyle a lot of the time and the longer a novel goes on the more ethereal and alien his prose and characters start to become for me. In this form there are lots of musings on death and the supernatural, on love and loss, and once I was on board with none of the musings reaching an eventual point, I thought they were interesting as reflections or even just as unfocused ramblings which some of them came down to. I didn't really pull out any particular favourite stories from this collection though, and in that sense it's laudably similar to Alice Munro's writing in that the themes tend to be so common across the stories that it works better as a collection than any single story would work on its own. I feel like I'd almost start to think of this as being the Murakami book worth recommending to anybody who's new to him, because as much as some of his novels have affected other people more profoundly than they do me, I think reading this is a good litmus test for whether his writing is really for you or not. Because the ultimate reflection I have from this and others of his works is his writing's definitely for me, but I think there's a limit to how long I enjoy spending time with his characters.
4) The Count of Monte
Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
At the start of the year I felt it was finally time to tackle this, having had it in a box along with all my other books in the garage for several years now, and given I'd run out of books from the library following 2023's last trip. And I was hooked right away with this book; one thing I remarked is how efficiently Dumas introduces all of the necessary plot points, characters and conflicts in the very first chapter: we meet Edmond Dantès, who's pulled off a heroic bit of sailing and is popular with the crew; we meet M. Morrel, the owner of the ship and learn of his respect and admiration for Edmond; we meet Danglars who seems jealous and resentful of Edmond; and we learn of Edmond's devotion to his father and Mercedès the love of his life. It's a bit of a rollercoaster ride through the next 200 pages and I was relishing every part of it. I do think though that (spoiler alert, I guess, for an extremely well-known plot point in a 200-year-old book) following Edmond's escape from prison, the book loses momentum a little bit. In particular I wasn't really sure why the Baron Franz d'Epinay became our protagonist for the reintroduction of Edmond (in disguise as the titular count now) into the story, and in hindsight I still don't really see a point to it because he's ultimately not that central a character. It all becomes a slow and intricate build-up of tangled plot points whereby Edmond can exact his revenge on the three players who orchestrated his initial demise and imprisonment which I think is very much of its time, but I did feel that Dumas starts this story with a far more action-filled focus (whether appropriate for its time or not) and becomes a bit too focused on detail as the book went on. But most importantly, reading from a modern perspective I found the Maximilian / Valentine love subplot quite superfluous. I felt a bit like Edmond when he learns about Maximilian's love for the Mlle Villefort - "You what?" - like it was pointlessly interrupting his precisely laid plans for revenge. In the end, Edmond's vengeance on Villefort consequently becomes the least satisfying of the three simply because it becomes accompanied with some unnecessary suffering from innocent parties, which I guess adds a poignancy to proceedings. Then the final revenge on Danglars is a good one because it invokes a kind of moral high ground that Edmond claims for himself in being able to reflect his own suffering back at the key player and allow Danglars to see his own actions for what they were. But ultimately I was willing this book to be a rollicking adventure, and I think it got a bit sidetracked by introducing too many episodic side adventures along the way with incidental players in the overall story. Far be it from me to dictate how the book that influenced every single adventure or vengeance story in its wake should have been composed, but I personally felt it diluted a lot of the emotional satisfaction I'd been craving pretty much since page one when that central revenge plot got dragged through so much additional content and philosophising.
3) The Spinning Heart - Donal Ryan
Similar to reading Fight Club, Donal Ryan was another author I picked up for the first time last year and then found a second novel in my local library. In this case it was kind of a whim to pick this up because I wasn't huge on From a Low and Quiet Sea that I read last year (it was my #28 book of a reading year I wasn't consistently thrilled by) but I was far more delighted by this reading experience than I was with the other. From only two books it seems like Ryan's bailiwick is to write about the same series of events but from different narratorial points of view; in Quiet Sea this took the form of three different personal memoirs all culminating in a day of calamitous events in small-town Ireland. In this book (which predates the other by six years), that narrative voice is split in a myriad more ways, with each chapter comprising of a monologue by a different character. All the characters are residents of the same town (again, small-town Ireland) or nearabouts and all bring a different perspective. But the conceit is not simply about the characters all providing their views of the same events, more it feels like the events are playing out across a series of days where these monologues are also being delivered in parallel. So the first monologue we get is during the inciting incident but before the actual events of the plot take place, then the events start to take place as they would in a normal novel form but told through narrator number X's eyes. The kaleidoscopic effect that this creates reminds me of another singular narrrative approach, that of Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides: the true protagonist of this story is none of the characters specifically but is rather the whole collective community that they form, and Ryan's adeptness at mimicking people from different walks of life and cut from different cloth makes it a rich and vivid picture of a community struggling in austerity, with interpersonal conflict, intergenerational trauma and of course the damage that can be done by idle and mean-spirited gossip. This book is also very Irish indeed, and I feel it gives the voice to the common man that people credit someone like James Joyce with but I found this far more engaging as a set of character voices and far more parseable as living, vibrant language. It also just happens to be a very captivating, amusing and ultimately moving story about how people can end up rescuing themselves and each other from despair and guilt in unexpected ways.
2) Guards! Guards! - Terry
Pratchett
I embarked on this as my second Discworld novel (after Small Gods which I read a couple of years ago, I think) and which is one of many different novels that the official reading guide order suggests will work. I do endorse this reading order so far, as it didn't feel like I was lacking context to a lot of this one, and what's more, there were a few incidental references to Small Gods which I vaguely understood even though I don't remember that novel so well. Anyway, this is actually the first Terry Pratchett novel that I found myself enjoying all the way through. I've found with his works (I haven't read a lot as implied, but including Good Omens in this) that there's often a good sense of humour employed in the writing which I enjoy, and there's often some wacky plots which I also enjoy, but invariably I tend to find that the plot gets out of his hands and becomes too convoluted for me to really keep up with. Not necessarily not really understanding, but I lose track of where my sympathies are meant to lie given the number of different story threads that tend to be employed and how big and apocalyptic the plot ends up being, it's hard to maintain the relatable element throughout. This story manages to keep the focus more sharp by centring around the night watch guards, Captain Vimes and his troops, and they remain the key protagonists throughout no matter how complex the dragon-summoning and misuse of magic plot gets otherwise. Because the focus and sympathies are sharper as well it means that I'm enjoying the comedic tone of Pratchett's writing throughout, his consistent irony and its side-swipes into satire, whereas when I lose track of those sympathies I can often find the ironic tone at odds with whatever drama is happening in the story at that time. These are just quibbles in what I find generally quite entertaining writing, but I find it stops me from wholly embracing his writing when I know I should be enjoying it more. So this is the first time I've been fully on board with him, and part of it has to do with how effective Captain Vimes and his troops (especially the adopted 'dwarf' Carrot) are as conduits into the madness that the plot entails, so that the ironic juxtapositions of their views of the world help to surface up the broader satirical points and the absurdities of the plot. I wouldn't say this as an individual book is any kind of masterpiece, but it was consistently funny and thoroughly entertaining and I’m more open to the whole Discworld concept potentially being a ‘masterpiece’ if the books can maintain this level of wackiness and fun.
1) Me, Antman and Fleabag -
Gayle Kennedy
I honestly don’t think I’ve ever
read any first nations literature, so kudos to this publisher - UQ Press with
their “First Nations Classics” series - for bringing this to my attention.
Because this short book is an absolute delight, from the first story – in which
the unnamed narrator and her partner Antman discover they can get away with
drinking in public simply by copying white people in laying down a picnic rug
first and having food with it - to the final poignant story about making peace
for some dead spirits by burying them in the proper traditional way. It is just
a series of vignettes and observations, but it gave me a very nuanced
and fascinating insight into Aboriginal culture in modern-day Australia. It
touches upon and goes deeper in some cases on a lot of the
aspects of the culture that I have heard about - connection to the
land, relationship to ancestors and bloodline, the oppression and displacement
at the hands of white settlers and the quirks of identity
among mixed-race children - but puts a personal perspective on them that I’ve
never really seen and never fully appreciated. That ignorance is entirely on
me, of course, which is why I’m grateful to the publisher and my
local library for putting this book on my radar. Kennedy as a narrator is
fluently descriptive, witty, and keenly observant of the
quirks of human behaviour, and she adroitly switches through these
tales from heartfelt and enraging to cheeky and spry. It’s a short book so it finds itself on top of this list if for no other reason than by getting to its point quickly and without unnecessary elaboration, but
its few words really contain volumes and I feel this book will stick with me for a long
time.
posted by Sean's Beard at 9:06 PM
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