Books of 2022 Part 4: Top Ten

 Alright, final post to wrap up 2022 so I guess... happy 2023 now! After this, I'll see you next year to do all of this again.

10) Two Girls, Fat and Thin - Mary Gaitskill

I had this book on my to-read list from a long, long time ago - long enough that I haven't the foggiest clue now why it was there in the first place. I remembered it was there and I succumbed by requesting this on inter-library loan: there's a mildly curious side-story about how I got it via inter-library loan in the end but the point is, I got it. And having read it now, I'm even more in the dark as to why it was on my to-read list, mainly just because it was quite an odd book. The key descriptor I'd have to use is quite extremely, polarisingly ambivalent, but also ambiguous. There's just a lot of really elusive psychology and emotion in this book that's really hard to pull apart, so the ultimate feeling of having read it is simply I don't really have a clue how to feel. It tells the story of two women - Dorothy Never and Justine Shade - who represent the 'fat and thin' of the title. Justine is a journalist who interviews Dorothy as part of an article she is writing. The article concerns a thinly-veiled stand-in for Ayn Rand called "Anna Granite", a right-wing writer/philosopher whose inner circle Dorothy was once part of. After their initial meeting the book takes us back in time on a journey through both of the women's childhoods: Dorothy as a fat, unloved girl whose father verbally and physically abused her and who felt friendless throughout her school time, and Justine, a thin, beautiful girl who was part of the popular crowd who tormented girls similar to Dorothy. The book jumps back and forth in time, telling the story of how Dorothy was drawn to Anna Granite's work and became part of her clique, while also exploring the present day, and how both Justine and Dorothy are simultaneously repelled by and drawn to each other. Therein really lies the central ambiguity of the story. While one half of the story (Dorothy's) is very pro-Ayn Rand (via Granite) and explores rapturously her two great novels, The Bulwark and All the Gods Disdained (try and work out their analogues in the real world), Justine's side of it is a bit unclear throughout how she feels about it all. There's a confronting and again elusive attitude in this book towards sex, both consensual and otherwise, and the inner workings of the young girls' personal turmoil and how that turmoil manifests when they reach adulthood is actually quite disturbing. Not just because Gaitskill's writing is explicit yet emotionally detached, but because the ambivalence in the characters' attitudes towards the torment they endure - at the same time painful and exciting - is told in such a matter-of-fact way that I can't help but be largely confused by the characters and their experiences. At the end of the book that's very much why I'm left feeling ambivalent: both towards Ayn Rand (/Anna Granite) and her alleged value as a writer and a thinker, and towards what the book is trying to tell me about the psychology of the characters and the pathology of their neuroses, and in particular why those neuroses draw them inexplicably towards each other. But within that ambiguity is very much a fascination to me, in that I appreciate how elusive the meaning here is and how it provides a whole number of provocative, challenging questions with no easy answers.

9) The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy

I remember seeing this book years ago in my not-quite-local library, but the one that's linked to my most-local library (so I can borrow from both) but I still needed to read All the Pretty Horses which I did read in 2018, so when I visited that library again I snapped this up. Note for those thinking that you need to read Pretty Horses first to understand the ‘trilogy’: you don't. I mean this book stands apart as its own masterful work even though together they form very different portraits of young men living life on the 'edge' of the border between the US and Mexico. In this case we're told the story of 16-year-old Billy Parham and his travels into Mexico to return a wild, pregnant wolf to her homeland, and then his further travels when he returns home to find his own parents murdered. Cormac McCarthy has certain writing tics that are unmistakeable: one is his use of "and" to create run-on sentences particularly describing characters' actions. Another is his use of fairly basic Spanish language dialogue without translation (Google Translate was on-hand throughout my reading here) but with a general sense of what was being conveyed written in English. Neither of those things are weaknesses; in the end his writing is so matter of fact here that it's kind of astounding how efficiently he conveys so much. There's little profundities hidden so discreetly through this novel that you could completely miss them if you weren't paying attention: among others the thing that struck me was just a side-note about the fact that blind people "do not seek each other's company" which gave me quite a pause for thought. Along with his matter-of-fact style that parcels out these deep truths with no ceremony, there's certainly an ambiguity to his character's motivations: Billy takes three quests into Mexico, and in each case we're not really clear on what is really driving him on even though each time he declares a purpose. His quests, like the landscapes and the people McCarthy depicts, are detached from regular humanity and exist on their own plane with their own rules, and I felt them very strongly even while I didn't quite believe in them. It's hard to compare this with All the Pretty Horses since it's been a few years since I read that and if truth be told I don't feel that story so strongly either, but I think this is an immensely striking book, containing all the lawlessness of the old west but seen through the eyes of a boy who can't quite understand his place in the world but knows enough to mistrust it. McCarthy writes it all with efficiency but also intricacy, and knows enough to scatter depths throughout it that can't be avoided.

8) The Vanishing Half - Brit Bennett

I don’t know if I should have loved this book as much as I did, but… yeah, I loved this. The main reason for my reservation is that I’ve often rejected things that felt like a soap opera, and this - at least in its closing passages - certainly feels that way. But part of the way through, it felt Dickensian to me in its revelations, the twists and turns, and it reminded me of the fact that really, Dickens invented soap operas and pretty much all of his stories - bar none, in fact - could be reframed as one. More to the point, as much as this ends in a satisfying way where everybody ends up pleasant and reasonable, there’s some interesting and not-often-covered territory here that makes it more worth the while. This is a story about black identity, told through the story of twins Stella and Desiree Vignes who grew up as pale-skinned black women in a tiny town known as a haven for pale-skinned black women. One of the twins, Desiree, yearns for the black side of her nature and is attracted to the darkest-skinned boys she can find. The other, Stella (oh um kinda spoiler alert) decides instead to pass for white which she is able to do due to the paleness of her skin. Bennett presents the twins as essentially torn between their identities, Desiree unhappy but strangely content and Stella settled and happy but extremely unstable and vulnerable. Moreover in true soap opera style, there are other key players, namely Stella and Desiree’s two daughters, one styled by the townsfolk “blue-black”, as black as they come, and the other raised rich and white. Throughout the various stories Bennett maintains the resonant themes of race and identity, in particular the idea of yearning to be somebody you’re not but also raising the question of what really determines who you are? She manages to pose these interesting questions without shoving them down the reader’s throat. Who determines your identity? How much are you able to defy and even lie your way out of the fates set before you by virtue of how you were born? This book ultimately contains three varied love stories: two based on raw, unvarnished truths, and one based on nothing but lies. While they all have emotive resonance, Bennett pushes no judgment but presents them all as examples of people yearning for something outside of themselves. I do feel the story wrapped itself up a little too nicely and conveniently to affirm its characters as ultimately united in a common goal to make the best of the life they’ve been given (even if that’s a sense of being united by radically changing course), but the questions still linger regardless. And what’s more, it’s actually reassuring - without being glib or saccharine - to read a story about the struggles of being black and of wanting to be someone you’re not that’s also life-affirming.

7) The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead

Found this one by chance in the library and since I enjoyed The Underground Railroad a couple of years ago, thought it was fair enough to give another Colson Whitehead story a chance. Truth is, just to telegraph the conclusion of this writeup a bit, I found The Underground Railroad effective, but mostly compelling as a bit of pseudo sci-fi and the commentary on black history was a bit too metaphysical in its case to be truly fascinating. By contrast, this book through its relative simplicity, really cemented for me Whitehead as a scintillating chronicler of the contemporary black experience, again told through its history. In this case Nickel refers to a fictional reform school for boys where our protagonist, Elwood, finds himself sentenced through a series of unfortunate mishaps. Whitehead chooses to frame the story around Elwood's future, knowing from the prologue that he made it out of this place and went on to make a relative success of his life, which device makes the story of how he ended up there and suffered through his time there feel somewhat detached and incidental (since we know whatever he suffers, he makes it out the other side). What narrative tricks Whitehead pulls though are incredibly effective and powerful; the story acts out as a sort of revenge story, where Elwood finds himself suffering injustice at the hands of white men and the white system, and repeats quotes from MLK to himself as a kind of mantra to continue resisting and continue hoping in the face of his own and others' suffering. We know that Elwood makes it out the other side, and the successful life that he builds for himself is portrayed as a sort of revenge, that despite all his bad luck and injustice, the fact that he ends up making a bright future for himself is a middle finger to the system that tried to destroy him. The exact nature of that revenge though, the form it takes and how it stands as an indictment to post-Jim Crow America, is not fully apparent until the very end, and it ends up being far more powerful and poignant than I could have guessed. It's a remarkably subtle subterfuge that Whitehead enacts, and it's testament to his gift as a storyteller that I was so moved and taken by its conclusion.

6) Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro

It feels almost too on the nose to suggest that this book feels like a follow-up to Never Let Me Go. I can't really avoid making comparisons but in the following writeup I will attempt to keep direct comparisons to a minimum while unpacking both what makes this book special but ultimately, inferior to Ishiguro's earlier work. To begin with, there is no subterfuge in this story the way there is in the early stages of NLMG: our narrator Klara is not at all ambiguous about the fact that she is an 'AF' - Artificial Friend - whose sole purpose is to be a companion for a boy or girl throughout their teenage years, and essentially to help them with their transition into the socially defined norms of 'adulthood' in this world. As in NLMG, although not done in the service of any great plot twist (although for the record, I maintain that NLMG doesn't actually have a plot twist, even though it absolutely and even explicitly feels that way), Ishiguro spends very little time on world-building, and our picture of how this society differs from our own and indeed what has changed between our now and their now comes to us purely from small observations or from conversations between the characters. The key reason and benefit of this of course is that Ishiguro is not interested in world-building, but rather in an exploration of humanity seen through this outsider lens. Outsider both in the sense that this world is different from our own but is still populated by humans, and in the sense that Klara, the artificial friend, is our first-person guide into this world. Klara's voice is essentially that of a child trying to find her way in the world, who takes on board what people tell her but tries to interpret it all in her own innocent and simplistic way. Her raison d'etre is not - as in other sci-fi about artificial intelligence - simply to 'serve' but rather to be a constant companion, and therefore she bears more resemblance to David from the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Note I haven't read the short story on which it's based) in the sense that her sole motivation is to love and be kind to Josie, the teenager who chooses her from her shop and who is suffering from a mysterious illness that renders her weak for days on end. This book very much achieves the same levels of poignancy and bittersweet beauty as NLMG, with my main criticism being that here a lot of the questions about humanity and those themes are outlined quite explicitly in dialogue between the characters, and there is definitely more opportunity here for Ishiguro to leave these more open for us to bring our own interpretations. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly an achingly beautiful portrayal of Klara and her flawless capacity for observing and understanding mankind better than we can understand ourselves. The cast of characters - from the underprivileged boy Rick next door and his slightly unpolished, tactless mother through to the delightfully blunt and protective 'Melania housekeeper' who looks after Josie and her mother - are all very real, deep characters whose interactions with Klara and each other feel like a periscope into their souls even when they talk more casually. The fact is that, for all of Ishiguro's slightly unsubtle expositions into the questions he's interested in, I feel the most interesting theme is left unwritten but becomes the ultimate question of the book: Klara is capable of only one thing - love - and isn't human. Therefore I'm left wondering: is she really capable of love by being capable of nothing else? Or does what make us human not so much the capacity for love, but the capacity for hate? Inasmuch as, by choosing to love the things we do rather than hate, is that really what makes us human? Hmm I think I'll call the suicide hotline and ask.

5) Dear Life - Alice Munro

Picked this up after loving the edited collection of Munro stories Lying Under the Apple Tree two years ago, and this one is a complete collection as it was originally published, rather than a compilation of several collections. As such I found this a much more rewarding experience because it contained a more unified set of themes throughout the stories and together made a fascinating, profound and nuanced examination of life. It’s hard for me to pick a favourite story here, or a highlight, because there isn’t a low point for one thing, and also because the stories are so unassuming and subtle in isolation but together pack quite a monumental punch. At times they feel like different versions of the same story: they all make some commentary about life in small-town Canada, about life during the depression and world war II, but above all they’re all stories about life as a woman. Of particular interest to Munro is women who strike out on their own, against society’s expectations for them, against their family’s wishes, or against the lot that’s been dealt them in life. Often this leads to some kind of misfortune, but most of the time what it tends to lead to is life, and how life sometimes just happens. That’s key to the writing here, Munro has a very detached, deromanticised view of life which somehow makes it all the more moving and profound because of all the wistfulness and sadness the characters don’t reveal. She has an extraordinary ability to let her words flow so fluidly that the mood will suddenly change or suddenly ten years have gone by in the story but I don’t notice the abrupt shift because it’s all part of the rhythm of life that she’s drumming. It’s a book that’s beautiful, yet completely unadorned, and cutting without any obvious punchline or twist. I could happily have read another two dozen of this same collection if they existed.

4) Baba Dunja’s Last Love - Alina Bronsky

This was quite a wonderful, heartening read, whose only real flaw is the fact that it’s so short. I mean, story wise and narrative wise it’s as long as it needs to be, but there’s definitely potential in here for more. It tells of the village of Tschernowo, abandoned due to being in the exclusion zone around the site of a nuclear meltdown, but now inhabited by the affectionately named Baba Dunja, who returned to her home to live out her twilight years, along with a ragtag bunch of old folks who followed with the same goal. Baba Dunja is our narrator, and similar to an Alice Munro narrator she has a very no-nonsense way of narrating as well as seeing the world. She sees the ghosts of people and animals around her; they speak to her and tell her things. What emerges from her narrative voice and these sorts of quirks is a wonderful sense of nostalgia but without the usual tinge of sentimentality. Her view of the present day is all sentimentality but coupled firmly with a sense of the real and practical, resulting in a lovely poetic portrait of the theoretical late life stage that Erickson called ‘Ego Integrity’, being at peace with yourself and your place in the world you’re leaving behind. The ghosts are not haunting her, longing for life or making up for past mistakes; they’re just there, hanging around the way her living neighbours do. What made me want more from this is firstly that the story of the events that unfold is told in a somewhat haphazard way. Because she concerns herself with the fairly practical details, she deals with events in a reactive way, without looking far ahead to what they may mean or lead to. What that ultimately results in is more of a series of ‘sketches of life’ in a radioactive village, and that means there’s plenty of room for more stories, more events and more side characters than the cobbled together narrative we get here. At the same time, the culmination of the plot and its denouement also felt like they could have been drawn out more to go into greater deliberation. These critiques though are more to do with how much I enjoyed what I got here and the fact that I wanted to spend more time within this setting with these eccentric people shouldn’t take anything away from how efficiently Bronsky gets her point across, while drawing us deep into the world of these vibrantly breathing and feeling people.

3) Kindred - Octavia E Butler

Found this quite a compelling read, and it too brought to mind Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad except of course this book predates it by several decades. The comparison comes in because it’s a very similar modern look at slavery through a lens of magic realism. In this book Dana, a black writer living in 1970s Los Angeles, finds herself transported to antebellum Maryland at an opportune time to save the life of the son of a white plantation owner. What begins as a bit of a conceit remains a conceit, but it opens the door to a fascinating modern examination of race relations and our understanding of slavery as a concept. Dana, when transported back, makes no pretence of her modern sensibilities, so largely dresses ‘like a man’ in long pants, does not hide her unheard-of ability to read as a black woman, and makes no secret of her objection to the whole concept of slavery. All of these things make her a compelling figure to Rufus, the youth she saves and is connected to in more than one way, while her 20th century ways frequently land her in trouble in the past where she’s expected to know her place both as a black person and as a woman. What I think Butler does so well is draw a subtle line of inquiry from 1819 (or whenever) to present day 1976, probing as to what the progress undoubtedly made really amounts to, and how much of the subservience she sees in her black predecessors is part of human nature, to avoid conflict and accept our fate. When there really feels like no future, then all people succumb to desperate measures to avoid their fate, while others see themselves as having no choice but to surrender. Dana, and her white husband Kevin, become the conduits for this examination, feeling compelled to play along with the grotesque masquerade while viewing it with an outsider lens and knowing that they should be doing more to change the course of inevitability. It’s mostly a tragic and challenging read, but its provocations are timely and essential even fifty odd years after its publication.

2) Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry

This was another one I got from Interlibrary loan. I can't really remember why it was on my to-read list specifically except that I think it comes up quite frequently in discussions about the great American novel, and I know of Larry McMurtry for this among other beloved works I haven’t read but have seen adapted on film (Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show) so I felt this was worth reading. My first reaction when the librarian brought it out from the office was "bloody hell, that's long, isn't it" (I actually said this out loud to the librarian). Because yeah, this book is a long read. But to cut to the chase: it's very much worth it, but moreover it doesn't feel long. McMurtry plays a bit of a trick in some ways, because the book starts out really quite jovially and casually, introducing us to the ‘Hat Creek crew,’ a group of four old Texas rangers led by Captains Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae, along with their chef Bolivar (a former Mexican bandito) and a young orphan boy Newt who's been effectively raised by this crew. The interplay between Captain Call and Augustus (or Gus) is the first key selling point, and the two immediately brought to mind (just through recency bias) the characters played by Jesse Plemons and Benedict Cumberbatch in Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog: Captain Call is Cumberbatch: aloof, no-nonsense, a bit hard to read, and relishes his solitude (I’m not going there as I have much more to say but a reading is certainly possible that he’s a closeted homosexual as well), while Gus is jovial, well-liked, albeit prone to like an argument. The trick that McMurtry plays is that that convivial atmosphere is played for full comic value through the early stages set in the Texas border town of the title - Lonesome Dove. When the crew is reunited with Call and Gus' old rangering buddy Jake Spoon on the run from the law, they decide to go on a long cattle run to the fabled prairies of Montana, of which Jake speaks so highly. So while I knew the comic, convivial atmosphere wouldn't last on this dangerous frontier, the violence when it comes is really quite confronting. It's confronting on its own terms but it's more shocking because it's so abrupt and mostly because it happens to characters who I've come to like and whose company I've come to enjoy. Make no mistake: there's definitely a cast of very likeable characters but McMurtry intersperses them with bloodthirsty psychopaths as well whose deeds are unpleasant and starkly contrasted with the good nature and adventurous spirit of Call and Gus. Being the old west of course, there is a phallocentric spirit here juxtaposed with the presence of Lorena, a prostitute whose blonde presence becomes the lovesick obsession of many of the company hired on to help drive the cattle from Texas to Montana. There's also an unfortunate but inevitable racist element to McMurtry's narrative wherein Native Americans are reduced to either warmongering savages or peaceful exotics whose motives are more a cause of mystery to our crew. As much as I'd like to call it symptomatic of the time the novel was written, the fact is the novel was published the same year I was born, and I feel there is a self-awareness in McMurtry's writing in the sense that he's aware of the racism and is writing it deliberately as a commentary of the times it's set in. My criticism is merely that he's exploiting the mythology of the old west and holding up the white frontiersmen as heroic and brave while more importantly they are the only characters given enough depth to be seen as fallible humans. The depth and fallibility of them is quite palpable though, and it's through the characters that the story really draws all of its strength. Above all else thogh, what was most intriguing to me about this is that it reads to me very much like an old Norse saga but set in the American west: there's a strong theme of 'luck' throughout, of characters whose luck sees them through many a trial where other people perish, but when that luck runs out it feels like fate is drawing them to an inevitable doom, even at the hands of people who were formerly their comrades in arms. There's the same sense of exploration, and the ubiquitous theme which I was going to examine in the PhD I applied for but never accepted: the contrast between dying young as a hero or living long enough to become either a villain or a worthless old coward. I can’t imagine that McMurtry was in any way influenced by old Norse sagas in writing this, but it's a fascinating observation of how storytelling traditions can get passed on through generations and across cultures, because in every sense this story follows the same trajectory as a cross between Egil's Saga and Brennu-Njal's Saga and I found it all the richer for it.

1) A Heart that Works - Rob Delaney

I ordered a copy of this book on a whim one night, basically feeling an uncharacteristic surge of bravado thinking I could handle this book's subject matter. In case you've been living under a rock, let me just summarise the premise: Rob Delaney, one of the funniest people in the world, had a son who was diagnosed with brain cancer at 1 year old. He underwent treatment, became somewhat disabled from it, the cancer returned, and he died. For background, I did dive into the book expecting it to be excruciating, devastating, and borderline unreadable. But the truth is, while it's definitely the first two in absolute spades, Delaney manages to make the book not only readable but compelling and ultimately a strange, bittersweet delight. Yes, the unbearable pain of losing a beloved child is there on every page and on every word. It can't not be: it's part of who Delaney is now, it's a constant companion for him and a big part of his everyday existence. He narrates his pain, his anger, his suffering, and how it's never going to go away, with solemn and savage beauty along with his characteristic blunt and at times absurdist humour. But yes, I described this book about constant pain and sorrow as a delight, and the reason is that the pain is not really what this book is about. While Delaney focuses plenty of the book on dealing with his grief, dealing with the anger during the situation, the vast majority of the narrative is about the pure joy of what his son Henry brought to his and his wife Leah's lives. He zeroes in on the kindness that he experienced through the ordeal of going through cancer treatment with a 1-2 year old, all of the endlessly patient and caring people who looked after Henry, and all of the people who brought joy to Henry's short life through their compassion and kindness. Delaney also focuses a great deal of his time talking about his two elder sons, how much love they had for their little brother and how hard it was on them while at the same time what absolute champions they were dealing with so much at a young age. Yes, the book made me ugly-sob with gasping breaths frequently, but in spite of Delaney's obvious and understandable woe, by far the most profound and affecting thing about the book is the joy that kids bring to our lives and how important it is to cherish that joy, however fleeting it may be. It's also a very timely reminder to remember that lesson, because dying - sometimes unjustly, sometimes way too early - is always going to be a part of life, so having a deep appreciation for the lives of those we love is essential at all times.

Books of 2022 Part 3: 31-41

 Yes it's that weird part of the year where I yank you backwards like I'm trying to save you from falling off a cliff. In this metaphor the cliff is "reading my top ten before you've looked at my least favourite books of the year". I managed a total of 41 books this year, and at least one of this bottom 11 is here in part because it dragged on far longer than it should have and hence cost me the ability to read more than that. But also because I didn't like these that much anyway. Oh and of course this one's in reverse order, from 31 down to 41.

31) Dark Lullaby - Polly Ho-Yen

It annoys me a bit when reviews of books like this use the Handmaid’s Tale as a comparison: “A Handmaid’s Tale for the Modern World” proclaims this book cover, but obviously the writer is hugely influenced by Atwood, and is trying to channel the same energy. So regardless of how successful her aping is, it’s such a lazy comparison to make as if people wouldn’t see it transparently and as if The Handmaid’s Tale is somehow not relevant to the modern world. Now let’s talk about the lack of success here. Polly Ho-Yen clearly has many of the story points and the emotional arc worked out well in advance of the story beginning, to the point where you can see broadly where it’s going from the start. Where she finds herself lacking is more fundamental to the storytelling: the world-building, and the writing itself. It’s a small quibble but I found myself annoyed at how often our first person narrator would turn explicator with phrases like “then something happened that changed everything – Cue next chapter”. I feel like skilful storytelling doesn’t need these elaborations, and if we are to buy that this person is telling her own story you wouldn’t really provide these narratorial interjections, you’d get on with the facts. But it’s hard to buy as well because the world-building is quite convenient and derivative. There’s these things called “spheres” that seem to be some kind of communication slash constant broadcasting device that are not really well described or explained in terms of their capacity or their omnipresence, but they feel like something a better sci-fi writer would have a whole mythology and technical knowhow about that they can slip skilfully into things that also have thematic resonance. In this case I found myself constantly unclear about them, including what danger they posed or how invasive they were while I also couldn’t see how they wouldn’t be. That one detail is kind of all there is as far as world-building goes apart from the more foundational scenario piece that there’s an infertility epidemic and a fascist group called OSIP who are in charge of enforcing that all parents raise their kids according to the strictest of standards, or else the kids get “extracted” to be placed in better care under the state. Now this is where the emotional arc comes from, you’re supposed to feel the terror as a parent of having your every move judged and every mistake penalised. It works for a while but it clearly and quickly becomes a mere framing device. The main narrative sin that Ho-Yen commits is making OSIP  so faceless and dehumanised. They’re just humourless trolls sucking all the joy and wonder out of parenthood. It needs more world-building again to make their nightmarish presence more realistic, and relevant. And to return to Atwood, what it tends to lack is the “aunts”, the cruel irony of a group charged with enforcing and policing the subjugation of other people like them. What Ho-Yen does eventually touch on is the parallel and more resonant idea of parents policing other parents, but it comes too late in the book. By the time this concept is touched upon, I already feel like I’ve been strung along by a contrivance, a convenience drawing on too many traditions of speculative fiction that it loses its emotional heft. It’s a well thought-out story that punches just its weight, but not a world I truly believed could happen, or that was on its way to happening, and that’s really the resonance- this story needs to have a real impact.

32) The Silence - Don DeLillo

It’s sadly been a long time since I was really excited about reading a new Don DeLillo book. I still revere Underworld, but everything else I’ve read from him since has largely failed to impress me. This book is no real exception, although it’s also just a little vignette of DeLillo surrealism so it’s not bloated or anything despite being fairly insubstantial. The premise is simultaneously simple and strange: in the midst of a Superbowl dinner party hosted by an intellectual couple, all electronics in the entire world spontaneously shut down, disrupting the broadcast as well as the incoming flight of two of their late-running guests. What ensues is somewhat predictable if you’ve read DeLillo before: specifically it becomes more about the surrealism than about the gravitas and impact of the events unfolding. The party guests feel like they’re locked in a scenario reminiscent to Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel while the guests vacillate between spontaneous ramblings about global conspiracy forces and satirical nonsense about modern consumerism. Of course the endpoint of the book is… unclear, because DeLillo is more interested in elusiveness and obfuscation than in the story which is pretty thin. Again, a writer who knows how to weave some magical webs of story chooses to impose mostly ramblings and directionless invective in place of narrative. It’s a sad story of diminishing returns between me and Don that’s been going on since I was blown away by Underworld.

33) A Spindle Splintered - Alix E Harrow

I picked this up out of mild curiosity but also just generally trying to ensure I had a good gender balance in my writers (although "Alix" is a nicely gender neutral name so I did need to double-check this one). The main thing to caution about this writeup is: I am quite a long throw from being the target audience of this book. I enjoyed it well enough as a personal academic exercise to expose myself to different ways of writing and different ways of thinking, but ultimately this didn't work for me at all. It tells the story of Zinnia, a terminally-ill young woman whose days are numbered due to an industrial accident causing the genetic disorder she was born with, and who finds herself supernaturally swept up in a Sleeping Beauty-esque fairytale (Sleeping Beauty being a story she is obsessed with due to the morbid parallels with her own fate). There are a couple of reasons this didn't work for me: firstly, the dialogue throughout the book is very shallow and quite coarse; by design as the whole premise is based on the juxtaposition of the medieval fairytale world and the 21st-century succinct texting aesthetic that Zinnia and her best friend - egregiously named "Charm" - engage in. But I found it a bit hard to sympathise with the characters, and Zinnia in particular, because she is so glib and fatalistic about everything. The juxtaposition that's meant to set the charm and the humour of the story ends up undermining what could otherwise pass for a sense of wonder in the magical realism she gets caught up in. But within that magical realism lies the main issue I had with this story, which is it's too self-conscious. Rather than just being a play on Sleeping Beauty and the fairytale tradition, this book crosses an imaginary border into post-post-modernism in that it's already conscious of fractured fairytales, modernist retellings, and feminist reimaginings of classic tales, and there's almost a boredom to the way the characters react when they realise how reluctantly they're being drawn into one of "those" situations. For the most part, Harrow's prose seemed to sabotage her own ambitions, in making this so obviously and overtly a post-modern reimagining that it's hard to get caught up in the essence of what makes the archetypal story transcend time and culture. It becomes far too much a wink and an in-joke commentary to the audience, and because there's too much of that I found it hard to really empathise with the characters because they all felt like nitpickers pointing out plot holes and making sure I knew when a subversion was about to happen. There's merit in the idea but I think Harrow focused way too much on showing the wizard behind the screen and not enough on the journey to get there, and as such I was never really invested in the story.

34) Days of Awe - A M Homes

I have the dumbest confession to make about this book and my reading of it. It took me quite an unreasonably absurd amount of time before I realised it was a book of short stories. Obviously, I could have read the blurb; I could have noted the “short stories” label from the library that was on its spine; I could even have noticed that each ‘chapter’ concerned itself with completely different characters and scenarios than the previous. But here’s the thing: I think the way Homes has written these stories lends itself to that kind if misconception. While it’s certainly true that short stories do not need complete and unambiguous endings to be satisfying, and while it’s also true that a skilled writer can introduce you deftly to new characters and settings without needing too much exposition; nevertheless I found myself throughout the second and third stories here to be impatient for the open ending of the first story to have some kind of resolution, or for me to return to this dense array of characters I’d been introduced to but without any semblance of their relation to each other or background. The opening story felt a bit like an Iris Murdoch novel in that I felt dropped suddenly into the middle of these characters’ story. And while Murdoch will spend the length of a full novel both exposing the sordid histories of each of them and expanding those histories into the present and future, by virtue of the short story format here it instead ended abruptly and without any elucidation. Ultiastely, having been spoiled by the beguiling skill of Alice Munro more recently, Homes feels like a writer with too much artifice and too much flourish to tell these stories in a way that I got my full complement of feelings from them. While there is certainly some satirical wit woven through these tales, there also seems too much artistic licence and playing around with structure and narrative voice to be fully immersed in the worlds she’s creating in such a short space. I didn’t get a strong sense either of any connections between these stories, and so the book’s success hinges solely on whether the individual tales pass muster, which only some did. My personal favourite was perhaps the most stylised: about an acquaintance and conversation between a teenage girl being molested by a local boy and an armed serviceman dealing with the stresses and horror of ordnance disposal, but the conversation is somehow taking place on an online message board dedicated to discussion among parakeet owners. There then ensues quite a compelling narrative with a lot of subversive dark humour as the parakeet owners butt in with irrelevant tidbits or pointless bromides to reassure the two. That story notwithstanding, the book often felt a little forced and the target of its intended satire often too elusive for me to really feel any pathos.

35) Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams - Sylvia Plath

For whatever reason I’d never sought out or thought about any of Plath’s other writing after being quite affected by The Bell Jar a few years ago, so I chanced upon this in the library and snatched it up. It’s both a rewarding and frustrating elucidation of Plath’s writing. There are some great and profound stories covering similar ground to Bell Jar, looking into mental illness and its manifestations in both a metaphorical and tragically ironic way. There are straightforward stories covering ideas like ageing, coming of age, family and community; nothing overly profound in a lot of cases but her writing is always engaging and competent and I felt a running theme that felt like exploring different stages of psychosocial development throughout life. What I found frustrating was that there isn’t a lot of coherence to the editing here. The first section is subtitled “The Most Successful Writings”. By what criterion is not made clear, and it sets up the second section called something like “the shitty hopeless failure writings Plath should be frankly embarrassed about” to be a disappointment. It doesn’t disappoint, because they’re fine, but there’s no coherent theme to the compilation of order that led to a great reader experience. The third section is a seemingly pointed but ultimately scant selection of four journal entries, one of which is then recreated almost word for word in a short story form in section four which felt redundant. Ostensibly the edition seems to be geared towards illustrating Plath’s development as a writer, which I didn’t really get if only because the most ambiguous and striking story is the first one, after which the collection is named. Otherwise there wasn’t much thematic development or clarity that made the actual reading more compelling than the individual bits of writing were. And mostly they were competent with a handful of interesting observations scattered throughout, but I feel with a more thoughtful and less arbitrary ordering they could have been more compelling as a collection.

36) Lone Wolf - Jodi Picoult

I’ve been meaning to read some Jodi Picoult for the longest time, but it was hard to know where to start because of the breadth of her output. The oddest thing though is that even though she’s close to a household name I had no idea what sort of thing I was in for and I have no idea who her target audience is. This seemed like a good place to start, being a bestseller and all (but then what books of hers aren’t? And like why? Who buys them?). But anyway, there’s no question after reading this about what her appeal is: it’s certainly got a gripping feel to it, in the sense that it keeps you turning the page wanting to know what happens next. The story is about Luke Warren, a Timothy Treadwell type who lived with wild wolves in Quebec for two years, and the family he left behind who then must make a decision about his life support when he is left in a coma from a car crash. The family includes his daughter Cara, his estranged son Edward and his ex-wife who has remarried and has two young kids to her new husband. The book is obviously a bit of a soap opera in the end, so as much as I kept turning the page I felt that Picoult’s writing was far more adept at driving plot than at crafting compelling situations, characters or indeed logic. Too many of the machinations of this plot derive from characters making bizarre impulse decisions that are too far-fetched to really make sense or draw sympathy. I feel like inevitably we are meant to be empathising with Cara here, who was closest to Luke and is determined to keep him alive for any chance at a life he has. But Picoult makes that impossible by rendering Cara an incorrigible little shit. Edward, the prodigal son returning, could be the Dickensian outsider on whom all mistrust falls but who ultimately saves the day, but in the most nonsensical of all the plot twists, he has what in a real person would be described as a wet brain fart, but in a fictional character is just a terrible and clunky bit of narrative trash wedged into the cracks of the plot. And we rightly lose sympathy for him at that moment too, just as Picoult needed us to, or whatever. I lost track many times on who I’m meant to be siding with. But rather than being an intriguing ambivalence running through it, that confused sympathy is also symptomatic of the clunkiness of her narrative-building: alongside the family histrionics, she attempts a moral fable about what constitutes right to life. But without being particularly compelling in favour of either camp, Picoult manages to plonk herself right on the euthanasia fence so that all readers whatever their fervently held belief can come away thinking the author agrees with them. I genuinely didn’t buy the argument that is put in favour of keeping Luke alive, but nor did I find the euthanasia case (with which I’d personally agree for so many reasons) well articulated at all. For the legal drama that this ends up being, it felt facile and sensationalised (the judge in small-town New Hamphire saying this was the strangest case of his career for example, when truly this would have thousands of precedents and is a very run-of-the-mill right-to-life case), while my wavering sympathy/apathy for the rival characters meant I was taken along for the ride but never truly felt it.

37) The Quarry - Iain Banks

This is one of the few - if any - Iain Banks books that I haven’t had pre-vetted by Jez, as he had a tendency for a while there to gift me Banks books that he’d enjoyed each year. This one I just picked up at the library as it’d been a while since I’d read any of his, and I don’t know if I just need that Jez filter (worth noting that I haven’t loved everything I’ve read anyway), but this wasn’t very good. It was just frustrating and ultimately not that fun to read. It centres around the first-person narrator of Kit, an 18-year-old kid who seems to have some kind of neurodivergence (I suspect autism although it’s never said explicitly) who is looking after his terminally ill father Guy in his house at the edge of a quarry. One weekend they are visited by all of Guy’s old friends from university and they reckon with their pasts, presents and futures together. That’s, basically, the plot. The friends are all abrasive misfits, there are multiple arguments, misunderstandings, acts of hubris and misguided self-destructiveness. There’s a touch of Graham Swift’s Last Orders to it, but there doesn’t feel like there’s much narrative arc as far as their relationships go, and the denouement is all a bit awkward and even hurriedly dealt with when Guy finally succumbs to his cancer. There are two central mysteries in the book, where the plot kind of dances around them but without resolving either satisfactorily or indeed even attempting to. That’s really what led to the greatest frustration was the fact that I didn’t care really about any of these characters: Kit as the narrator is deliberately emotionally detached and comes across like an outsider anthropologist objectively observing the behaviour of this mob, while each of the more grown adults are individually flawed but in a way that gets tiresome, especially when you realise that spending time in their tiresome company is all the book’s going to offer. If it had answered properly either of the two central questions being asked, it would have been much better, even if it did so in a sudden Wasp Factory-esque left turn that jumped the shark completely. I frankly would have preferred something surreal and nonsensical to the bland anticlimax it offered instead.

38) Machines Like Me - Ian McEwan

I've found that sometimes McEwan protagonists, especially narrators, tend to have a know-it-all quality to them that can sometimes be because they provide the insight the story requires (eg. The Children Act) and other times feels like a narrative conceit to make the narrator a basic stand-in for McEwan himself (cf. Nutshell in particular). In the case of this book, the narrator lost me very early on because his prose is so unapologetically verbose, but without having the particular professional acumen that's required to make observations on such complex topics. He's an anthropologist, aptly since we're dealing with questions of artificial humans here integrating into society, but... I don't remember the finer details because I lost interest early, but I seem to recall that he's not an anthropology expert in that he's spent years in the field studying in-depth, it's more of an amateur hobby for him, and it shows. The trouble is that the narrator and his loquacious but ultimately facile observations end up being a synecdoche for the book overall. The novel's ambition and its opinion of itself far outstrips its ability to make itself coherent and engaging. The central issue I had with it is simply that there's too much going on for McEwan to deal with any of it in the depth it requires and that I expect from him. Centrally this is a story about a new line of human-like androids, one of whom our narrator acquires as an early adopter, and how he - the android - and others like him manage to cope with human nature. But McEwan sets the story not in the near or distant future, but in an alternate reality where a number of significant historical events just happened to fall 'the other way' like the ring toss in Match Point. The key one that's not so much a plot point (I'll get to why it's not really a plot point) but is a heavy focus of the book's zeitgeist is that the British lose the Falkland Islands conflict. Others include Thatcher subsequently losing to Labor in the following general election (which then leads to her Labor successor actually dying in the Brighton IRA bombing), Jimmy Carter defeating Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, JFK not actually dying in November 1963 in Dallas; while another that's given a bit more focus is that Alan Turing decides to undergo jail time for his homosexuality instead of chemical castration. This latter is a key point, since it seems to be the catalyst for the more advanced robotics they have by the 1980s in which this is set. But anyway, the point is: none of these alternate-history events actually matters, and it's unclear on what point McEwan is making when he includes them (some of them are just mentioned in passing anyway); they seem to be parallel to the plot without really affecting it except in incidental ways. Possibly I need to have lived through all of the actual events to really ponder 'what if something different happened' but even that thought exercise intrinsically is a diversion rather than a critical commentary on the state of affairs. Alongside this, there's a love story here, and a weird indictment on the legal system as it relates to rape allegations and convictions (and frankly is completely unrealistic in this regard, because a rapist actually gets convicted and sentenced on far flimsier evidence than many others have been acquitted). All of which makes for a bit of a mess of a story, but a mess of a story where the narrative and the narrator is hell-bent on providing all the details we could possibly need and all the commentary we really don't. It's hard to sympathise with this character at the best of times because he's such a dullard, but his motivations are always fairly obtuse as well, and the thematic resonance of all the different elements McEwan is introducing get far too tangled and muddled up in each other for any of them to have any significance. My only real issue but also my lasting impression of his work is that he tends to hate humanity; I would have killed for the kind of cynical gut-punch I got from The Comfort of Strangers or Atonement. What I really felt from this work was little more than obliviousness, on what I was meant to be feeling or even, despite the constant diatribes, what I was meant to be thinking about.

39) The Museum of Broken Promises - Elizabeth Buchan

This book felt a bit frustrating to me. I feel like Buchan had a good concept in her mind but faltered when transferring it to the page. It feels a bit weighed down at the start, given that the prologue is very much the pivotal scene in the entire timeline of the story, but then we get a great amount of “present day” Laure’s story, when she is curator of a small museum in Paris called the museum of the title. There’s a mundanity to the way the story begins as it follows several ordinary days as the curator, giving too many details of her quotidien activities but no details at all about her and her personality. And that’s really the great frustration I found, because when we finally delve further into her past, I don’t really have a good sense of what makes her tick in the present day, and therefore no great sense of what made her tick back then. The present-day narrative is generally just dull with her constant obfuscations being frustrating rather than intriguing; as a result the drama and curiosity it’s hoping to engender is ineffectual. Which in turn makes her impulsive, impassioned behaviour in the past feel both false and, worse, superficial. The book is ostensibly a love story set against the backdrop of Prague during the cold war (this is not a spoiler as this is the subject of the prologue, but it feels like I’m giving a spoiler as it’s a long way into the book before we get any more of it), but Laure as a central figure is not really a good guide, being either naive and facile, or the superficial object of primal desire. In all honesty, both in her starry-eyed youth and in her sexually dynamic but cynical maturity, she’s the kind of shallow character that I’d completely roll my eyes at if this book were written by a bloke. The fact is it relies quite exclusively on the reader sympathising with Laure or at least being able to connect with her feelings, but I found those feelings either overly simplistic and juvenile, or needlessly obtuse and blockaded, so the story struck me ultimately as histrionic- more than anything else.

40) The Supernova Era - Cixin Liu

I’m still excited to pick up a new book by Liu, wondering what inventions and conceits he’ll introduce me to, although how long that excitement will last is definitely up for debate following this. This was another unsuccessful book following from Of Ants & Dinosaurs which I read last year; it loses focus like a lot of his work does but without spiralling into a delightful sort of world-ending chaos like Death’s End did. The premise here is that a nearby star goes supernova, dosing the earth with enough lethal radiation to wipe out humanity. The catch, though, is that people under the age of thirteen are unaffected by the radiation, so the earth becomes populated entirely by kids. This premise I felt had promise, and I expected it to go in all sorts of analogical directions like Of Ants & Dinosaurs. Instead Liu fails here by being too reductive; there’s a quantum computer who is used to democratise the voices but of course “the kid” population then only wants to have fun and play games and not run society so the quantum computer and any subsequent commentary on democracy and groupthink gets pushed aside in favour of a simplistic exploration of “kids being in charge”. There is some commentary on the society the adults left them and its inadequacies, but Liu spent I feel far too little time expounding on them too. Instead he focused too heavily on childhood’s obsession with games and playing, and how that manifests itself when they have their hands on big, real weapons rather than toy ones. It’s all rather glib, and to me the worst part was how much the world view resorted to hackneyed stereotypes: the English are uppity, the Japanese are cold and stoic, and of course the Americans are aggressive and boorish  while 95% of the world’s nations don’t warrant a mention except maybe once to acknowledge they exist. This then descends into a fairly dull exposition of war ‘games’ and it goes on way beyond its value in actually making any interesting commentary. The depiction of American society is essentially that episode of Futurama where Fry gets transported to present day Los Angeles, only without the humour. The book also ends quite abruptly, with only a tokenistic wrap-up of ‘history’ as it’s recorded, and the final international manoeuvre feels inconclusive and enigmatic but without me having a great deal of intrigue. I was waiting to see where he took it, rather than gripped and willing it to go somewhere. Ultimately, lack of clear commentary and vision, and sadly resorting to a number of easy narrative cheats and get out of jail free cards rather than really building a tangible world.

41) On Beauty - Zadie Smith

Started out my reading year with this, and it took me more than a month to get through. Yes, it’s long; yes, some of the prose is quite dense when Smith gets into great detail about an object or a mood taking over somebody that morning; but honestly the main reason it took so long is I found this boring, and hard to motivate myself to keep going. The main issue I had with it is I’m really not sure - and wasn’t from the get-go - what the point of this story was. It starts out in a series of letters written by the eldest son of a mixed race family while staying in London, and after a series of misadventures, we never see anything written in letter form again. The son remains one of many, many characters in the story but the focus is not on him much at all for the entire rest of the story. Largely of course because the story is completely unfocused. There are close to a dozen characters who get at least a moment in the spotlight, and at times that moment includes an internal monologue and a piece of their psychology, and when these characters are so peripheral or incidental to the central conflict - that between the patriarch and matriarch of this family (although it’s one of a dozen conflicts, too; it’s just the one that runs through the majority of the narrative) I found myself wondering why I’m supposed to care? It’s really difficult to care about any of these characters, who range from irritatingly pompous and self-unaware to utterly vile, with the one exception of Kiki, the black matriarch of the Belsey household. But despite this, even she feels like a cardboard cutout: she’s a Caribbean beauty who’s gained an enormous amount of weight and holds this exotic beauty about her while becoming the wronged party and the only one without moral fault in all she does, so she becomes this convenient perennial victim for all of Smith’s vicissitudes. The book is of course titled “On Beauty”: does it contain profound observations and poignant insights about the same? No. It mentions the exact phrase maybe twice, while also disseminating frankly a shallow and facile exploration of beauty which would more appropriately be titled “On Lust and Desire” than anything about what beauty entails. I found the whole book in the same vein, concerned about superficial themes while interested deeply in letting these simplistic caricatures of siblings, middle-aged men and intellectuals, have all the floor to air their nonsense as they could use. I find it a shame that this is the third of Zadie Smith’s books I’ve read and I simply don’t get what the fuss is about regarding her writing. Without exception I find her prose cluttered, obtuse and only ever floating on the surface of themes - particularly cultural alienation amid diaspora - that could be fascinating if explored with sharper clarity and focus.

So that's it for this end of the scale; tomorrow I'll count down my top ten and we can all finally put 2022 to bed.

Books of 2022 Part 2: 20-11

20) Hard Times - Charles Dickens

My one Dickens a year, came across this in my local library and realised it was new to me and I knew nothing about it. I can, having read it, kind of see why. It's definitely lower-tier Dickens, and the main reason it's lower-tier Dickens is that it has quite a lot in common with upper-tier Dickens or plenty of analogues I can draw to other stories that are more successful. Well, curiously the main machinations of the plot have most in common with the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood that I read last year. And I'd put Drood in the upper-tier of Dickens, at least in the sense that I was quite gripped by the story and sympathetic with all of the characters, and found it deflating to find it unresolved but also tantalising to think of how rich the completed product may have been. Hard Times shares in common with it an unhappy marriage/engagement, a central 'crime' with an obvious suspect who suspiciously leaves town and has always had suspicions cast on him. Where this becomes lesser is simply in how successfully Dickens draws out the story and engages with these characters. The latter in particular is frankly threadbare here; it's all framed around the two characters of Thomas Gradgrind and his friend Josiah Bounderby who are intricately painted as men of complete sense, in that they don't allow for flights of fancy or imagination and stick always to facts. Dickens' fascination with this upfront only really pays off when one of the characters finds himself confronted with 'feelings' that don't reconcile themselves easily with cold, hard logic - and this character ends up probably the most sympathetic of the cast here. The trouble is that there's too much of a diversion in the middle to deal with the side characters (or rather one of which who becomes central) and it's easy to lose track of the trajectory of the story and where the stakes lie. By the time the story reaches its crisis point, some characters come back in who were prominent early on but I'd frankly forgotten existed and suddenly I'm supposed to have a deep understanding of their sensibility and why they interact with others in certain ways. There ultimately are really only two characters who are properly drawn - Gradgrind and Bounderby - while all the drama happens to other characters who are only really painted superficially, and it's hard to feel their crises and conflicts deeply enough to care. In particular the main character who becomes the villain of the piece (without spoiling too much, the person who actually commits the crime) it's hard to understand their motivations, as their personality and circumstances are told mainly through hearsay from other characters rather than interactions they themselves have. Basically they are the Edwin Drood of this piece, while Stephen Blackpool - the man suspected of the crime so heavily that it's obvious to the reader he's innocent, since we understand drama - is the equivalent of Neville Landless, but we spend far less time in Stephen's company than we do in Neville's in Drood and besides being unfortunately mistreated is otherwise not sympathetic on his own terms. Overall basically reading this book only made me appreciate Drood all the more, feeling like Dickens was building on what he'd done before it and making something that was both a compelling mystery and a compelling human drama. This is both of those things - a mystery and a human drama - but without being compelling.

19) Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins

I picked this up on one of my jaunts to the 'youth' section of my local library after I discovered it existed and contained a lot of these sequels and books that I've been wanting to read out of curiosity for a while but would never actually fork out for. It follows Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in terms of my acquisitions therefrom, and I mention that because the premise and structure of the two books have quite a bit in common. In both cases they're stories about adolescent angst set against the backdrop of fatal competitions where other characters will eventually die. And I make the comparison beyond it being apt, in the sense that I found this a lot more stressful a read than Goblet of Fire. A big part of the reason is that Collins' writing feels more subtle and hence compelling than Rowling's, even though both suffer from the YA affliction of needing to spell things out too much (which is of course completely audience appropriate and it's me who's the wrong audience, but it just bothers me a bit as I'm reading). But I also found this more stressful because I just care about these characters more, and the world-building is more detailed and dark and oppressive. What's maybe a bit odd is that when Katniss finds out she's having to enter the arena again, the reading became less stressful because the stakes within the realm of the Hunger Games arena are much clearer, whereas in the dystopian outside world it's unclear where the next attack and oppression will come from. More importantly and more as a criticism though, the whole book became stressful frankly because Katniss is so irritatingly naive and oblivious to the whole Mockingjay resistance symbol; it's fine at the beginning when she's reasonably ignorant and kept in her little victors' cotton wool, but when she's explicitly told about the symbol and its meaning and significance for her she somehow still fails to recognise its meaning and significance as it pertains to her. It's part of the whole Katniss-being-too-pure-for-this-broken-world thing I know, but it gave the book and her character an irritating Hamlet-esque air of indecisiveness where it was plainly obvious to me what she should be doing. I did feel this volume of the story ended a bit abruptly, like the denouement came about with an air of haste, but by this point obviously we know that there's going to be a third and final part to the story so it's not a deal breaker. Despite the various stressors I found throughout the read, it was undoubtedly page-turning and exciting, and a big reason for that was that Collins makes me care about all of these characters and what happens to them.

18) The Queen of the Night - Alexander Chee

Picked this up for completely unknown reasons now (I was in a rush due to having Polly with me) and baulked a bit at the size of it but gave myself permission to abandon it and I think that freedom helped me become determined to finish it instead. One thing about this book, as soon as I learned in reading it that it was about a famous opera singer, I knew that I had to read the story as if I was reading the plot synopsis of an opera. Chee does say in his acknowledgements that he based his main character on the lead soprano part in The Magic Flute but I’m not familiar enough with opera to get any actual plot parallels. I did though accept a certain amount of melodrama, and a fair bit of suspension of disbelief necessary to absorb the story. There are some annoying obfuscations Chee employs that do make it hard to grasp at times; some of his descriptions are elusive and told in a roundabout way that when I comprehend them they feel obviously like dramatic flourishes that may make sense in a performance but feel too elaborate in prose fiction. The early parts of the story also jumped around in time a bit too much; there’s quite a lot of different parts to the story, and the fact that this is a combination of bildungsroman with picaresque along with the fact that he starts near the ‘end’ of her story and then goes back to the beginning to explain how we got here, it’s all a bit too much crammed in at first. It wasn’t until towards the end of the retrospective part that I really got on board with what was going on. But the dovetailing of both these observations (the melodrama and the density) for me comes into play with the central mystery presentedast the beginning: I figured out the answer long before Lillian herself does, mainly because the plot twist feels so well suited to an opera libretto and because she spends so much time alluding to this future event that she’ll get to eventually but knowing that it’s the one part of her narrative that feels casually observed. So one suspects there’s something she’s not telling us, or that she doesn’t actually know for sure. But some difficulties aside, it is a grand and epic narrative befitting of the dramatic flair Chee employs, and the vicissitudes of Lilian’s fate can be quite compelling, even though at the end of the day I felt a bit exhausted with quite how epic the story was, and just how many vicissitudes she had to endure.

17) A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta - Paul Theroux

After enjoying and being quite enthralled with Theroux’s “The Mosquito Coast” last year, I found that the library has quite a few of his books and picked this one largely at random. It ends up being another great confirmation of Theroux as a writer largely at odds with my experience and expectations – in mostly good ways. In essence this is a hard-boiled detective story: the overcrowded, stinking hot, fetid underbelly of Calcutta serving as an exotic but clichéd genre backdrop to his narrator’s investigation of a crime. But there are a number of left turns that Theroux throws in that make it significantly more than that. While the initial crime investigation runs through the whole narrative, the book becomes mostly – entirely, even - about his obsession with Mrs Unger, the woman who asks him to investigate the crime. Mrs Unger is a larger-than-life figure, a former acolyte of Mother Theresa who ostensibly outdoes the famous nun for true charitable works, helping without begging for donations where Mother Theresa encouraged suffering. Because of its singular focus, not on the titular crime but on her, the narrative becomes weirdly horny, and the narrator starts chapter after chapter rhapsodising about Mrs Unger, canonising her while also fetishizing her, and the writing is at times heavy-handed and obsessed itself. But of course being a crime story, there comes a point where Mrs Unger is revealed to in fact be a femme fatale of sorts, and his obsession with her becomes the classic plot point of the weak horny male blinded to the truth. But there are also very strange nuggets hidden in this story. In particular for one scene, our narrator - who is a fictional travel writer like Theroux himself - is introduced to none other than Paul Theroux, the famous travel writer. They talk, our unnamed narrator finds Theroux amusingly obnoxious and insincere, they part, and Theroux disappears and is hardly mentioned again. Now why did he write himself into his book for one scene? I have multiple theories, one of which is that his appearance in his own story is an apotropaic charm against accusations that this could be based on real events, i.e. Theroux is saying “yes I know the narrator is a travel writer, but it’s not me. See? There I am! We’re in the same room together!” and the other two theories I can’t really expound without spoilers while all three seem equally likely but also remain periphery to the narrative (sidenote: I really wish I’d written down my other two theories because they were more interesting but I can’t personally remember them now). There’s another plot point where a character makes a grand revelation about themselves and it also feels like a major turning point but it also seemingly lacks relevance to me. There is a potential ‘thematic’ connection to the big plot twist ending but I feel it’s a long bow to draw. Anyway, the point I want to make about these incongruities is that while the book itself is not extraordinary, there’s something compellingly unusual about Theroux’s writing n that he includes these turning points without any clear meaning but is also happy to leave their meaning ambiguous. And that’s strange, because he’s not an ambiguous writer; indeed there are few details in descriptions or inner monologues that he leaves off the page. But he is an oblique, and an enigmatic writer, for these foibles, and it’s those that make this more than a genre piece and more than a bit of post-colonial Indian travelogue.

16) Imaginary Friend - Stephen Chbosky

Picked this up having really been moved by The Perks of Being a Wallflower a few years ago. This, firstly, has a far more wieldy and also more apt and descriptive title, so it’s a step up there. But also this is a hell of a hefty read. The first impressions are that this is really effective, creepy horror. The opening ‘section’ of the book (not the prologue, which is also effectively creepy) tells of Christopher and his devoted single mother who escape from her abusive ex-boyfriend and move to a small Pennsylvanian town, then Christopher gets lost in the local woods for six days and has no memory of what went on there. It’s mysterious, it’s dark, and it introduces us perfectly to the dynamics between the two of them and the town perfectly. Christopher functions a little differently, but his Mother is always his shining light, while the eccentric character of the town is a bit of a complication. Now what becomes apparent following this is unfortunately a bit of a derivative sense. There’s no doubt an obvious Stephen King influence here. It’s unclear to me the nuanced differences between small town Pennsylvania and small town Maine, but the ‘everybody in town has a mysterious secret’ trope is well wrung here. But then the story structure also began to coalesce too perfectly into a parallel with the Netflix series Stranger Things (at least the first season of which I’ve seen). The ragtag bunch of misfit kids, one of whom has visited a mysterious parallel universe and comes back haunted but with mysterious powers, the devoted mother, the bully kids at school, and of course the nice handsome sheriff who’s the most morally upright figure in the town. I couldn’t help but picture David Harbour whenever the sheriff character appears here. But all of that does become a sidenote when the horror really begins to manifest, and though Chbosky is an adroit and tantalising writer, he really succumbs too heavily to his ultimate vision here. There’s definitely some effective creeps, and catharsis, and a well-drawn battle between good and evil here. But long as this book is, there’s a point about two hundred odd pages from the end, where there’s a kind of twist - more a shift in perspective - yet the leadup to this point was all of the dramatic climax you needed. So when this ‘twist’ of sorts happens and I realised I was still a long way to the end, it brought it home just how brutal and relentless the mounting crises and conflicts are. It just became an endless string of calamities and misfortunes with every page bringing a new cataclysmic or apocalyptic scenario with everything hinging on one character’s decision. So by the end, my captivated interest became more one of battered subservience where I needed to finish the book to have served my mission’s purpose. And what’s frustrating about all of this is that it could have been so much more effective, and pointed – particularly the religious analogy that he bashes us over the head with by the end – if he’d just stopped indulging his whims, or indulged them a little less. The same story with 30% of its twists and revelations and story arcs would have been the masterpiece that Emma Watson’s quote proclaims this on the cover, and it could have been playing at the very top of my year-end list. Instead it’s a bloated and overly cynical indictment of humanity at its worst, and I found it hard to really believe its emotional message when I’m so bludgeoned with it.

15) Ghost Wall - Sarah Moss

Catie lent this book to Bec essentially, because Bec in a moment of inconsistency thought she should try reading stuff. But instead this book, among loans, just sat around our house gathering dust until I found myself without new books to read so I made the borrowing it worthwhile instead. It’s a curious book, and a curious coincidence that without any intention it’s the closest analogue I’ve found to The Mosquito Coast, which I read last year and thought I’d never read a book quite like it. This also tells the story of a father with a singular obsession, and the effect that has on his family and the people around him. Like Theroux’s book, this is also written in first person from the perspective of his child, in this case the teenaged Sylvie who is forced to go on a camping expedition with her parents and a small group of “practical archaeology” students as they basically LARP as ancient Britons in the midlands. Where this pales in comparison to Theroux’s book is largely a more blurred focus. Rather than zeroing in on the eccentric character of Sylvie’s father, Moss makes this more a coming of age story where Sylvie’s frightened subservience to her overbearing father approaches an asymptote. But in doing so there are attempts at making the conflict bifurcate several times: rather than just being child vs parent it also becomes about men vs women, as well as a dichotomy between working class and privilege and a Gaskellian north vs south contrast as well. Sylvie’s father is less of a mercurial figure and has a more simplistic single-mindedness. If you go back to my writeup last year, Moss’ father figure is, throughout, quite like Allie Fox in the latter stages of the book where I started to lose interest. It’s not that he isn’t a curious character, but he felt a lot more predictable due to being more shallowly drawn, and the enjoyably strange vicissitudes of the plot became more left-field and byzantine, less organically grown from those curious foundations that a more three-dimensional antagonist could have developed. I’m glad to have read a similarly exotic narrative but I feel that The Mosquito Coast was the more compelling and the more fascinatingly ambiguous read within a similar kind of setting.

14) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - Mark Haddon

Yes, you can finally tick me off the list, there are no more people on earth who have not read this book. So there’s not much more I can say about this that you haven’t heard at your weekly “let’s talk about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time” meetings, but suffice to say I quite enjoyed this. It’s certainly a unique book from a unique perspective, and for the most part Christopher’s autistic tics and awkward explanations gave me frequent chuckles. But ‘enjoy’ is a funny word; as much as there’s a sense of ironic amusement inherent by Haddon’s adopting this voice and trying to point out the inconsistencies and general hypocrisies of neurotypical society, it’s also kind of unsettling. I felt a certain sense of guilt reading this, knowing firstly that it’s not actually a memoir from an autistic teenager but feeling like it’s a neurotypical person’s approximation thereof, but also the laughs I experienced felt a little off-key, like I didn’t know to laugh or cry at certain points but opted for the easier option of laughing. Regardless of Haddon’s intent though I found the story to be adroitly humanistic. He adopts this voice less to say “here is what autism feels like” as much as to put a pure and unfiltered lens on people who are trying their best, even when they fail miserably. It’s less Christopher’s story itself and more that of Christopher’s Dad and Mum, who are both the heroes and the villains of the narrative in much the same way as Christopher is both their purest joy and greatest curse. I did enjoy the turn the story takes when it becomes less a detective story and becomes more of a quest, and the climax of the detective story was quite poignant and heartbreakingly told. It did however lead to the only false point to me though, which was: I really felt Christopher should have sought out Siobhan for help. He dismisses this idea too hastily, and his reasoning (that she’s a teacher and therefore not a friend or family) didn’t seem overly logical or, paradoxically,  what he’d come up with even irrationally thinking in the moment. But it rang false for me because I feel that Siobhan would have been kind and understanding both of his quandary and precisely why Christopher now feared his father, and she would as a trained professional (whom he obviously trusts) have been the best person to deal with the situation. But because Haddon is set on turning it into an awkward reunion with Christopher’s mother, he dismisses it too readily in order to set his chosen course as the inevitable one. It felt like a glaring plot hole because he could have easily covered it anyway since Christopher goes to seek Siobhan purely to ask how to get to the train station anyway - and then stops because his Father’s van is parked outside. Like he could have written it as Christopher seeking out Siobhan for more general help, but then panicking at the sight of the van and realising his mother is the only other option. That just makes more sense to me and would not leave what seems like a big hole of illogic in what is otherwise a quirkily logical, honest and utterly relatable story of dealing with people who operate differently.

13) The Dark Tower - Stephen King

This one has been a long time coming after reading books 5 and 6 in the series a couple of years ago: I’ve been keeping an eye out for it at my local library, assuming no library could possibly have books 1-6 and not 7, the conclusion. But when I finally actually searched for it in the catalogue and found out they do in fact have everything except the conclusion, I bit the bullet and ordered myself a copy. Now, was this book worth it? Was it a fitting finale to this epic adventure? Yes, and no. Firstly, I read on some internet thread a discussion of these books where people basically agreed that the series drops off in quality greatly after book three. I wholeheartedly disagree mainly because I think book 5 - Wolves of the Calla - is arguably my favourite, up there with books 1 and 2 due to its perfect fusionof the science-fiction and western tropes and making of them a story that’s real and pulsing with life and hearty characters. But I would agree that book 6 - Song of Susannah – was certainly the weakest. But it wasn’t until reading this that I realised why: it’s really just a stopgap. It finishes on three different cliffhangers with the characters spread across worlds and each facing a life-or-death moment. So this book feels a bit clumsy in that first, King has to finish off all the separate storylines from the previous book (He also had to do this in book 4 to conclude a cliffhanger from book 3). But the issue here is that this book really needs to be about the final quest to the tower, and nothing else, and I feel book 6 would have been a more powerful bit of storytelling if it had reached the conclusion of its plot and left that final quest for this book. There are two more new plot points introduced here, both involving our ka-tet saving the world in various ways, which also get concluded fairly quickly, albeit dramatically, before the final quest actually begins. Now here’s the thing: Roland’s final quest for the dark tower begins after several story climaxes have already happened in the same book. And it feels, therefore, incredibly anti-climactic. The world is saved, people have died, people have moved on and been redeemed. There is even talk about ka, the murky concept of fate and fatalism imbuing these books, having run its course. So what’s at stake in Roland’s final push becomes unclear. It feels personal, but no longer has any gravity or drama to it. Which would be fine, except it’s still about half of the entire book’s length. Now King is a gifted storyteller, and he peppers the final march with trademark horrors that are imaginative and page-turning in and of themselves, but they feel like sideshow entertainment where the compulsion of the overarching story is no longer there. So in the end, I found this book periodically exciting but actually somewhat dull. Both in the sense of boring but also in the sense that it had no point anymore and nothing to get under my skin. The final conclusion and epilogue and so forth, all nicely told and it neatly wraps everything up - as much as the full climaxes here were a little short and quick for my liking - but there’s a good 100 pages that just could have been expunged here as they didn’t draw us towards that conclusion and didn’t serve any grander purpose beyond their own as diversions. I feel King succumbed to self-indulgence and entertained himself with his go-to crutches when he could have been just as dramatic yet significantly more efficient here.

12) Today Will Be Different - Maria Semple

Picked this one up obviously because I enjoyed Where’d You Go, Bernadette a couple of years ago, and from the cover design through to the comedy of cringe and the cast of flawed but human characters, this book really rehashes a lot of the same themes and ideas. It also shares in common an innovative approach to storytelling, with a variety of intermissions here including the entire existing text of our protagonist Eleanor’s planned graphic novel based on her and her sister’s upbringing. What makes this worthy though is very much the same as what made Bernadette so compelling: that Semple is above all a very empathetic observer of human irrationality, but also she’s just an extremely funny writer. This story predominantly takes place in one day in a similar vein to Ulysses: Eleanor Flood sets out on this day determined to make a difference in her life, do things better, the little things that will set her life back on the right track. Of course things don’t go to plan and Semple again demonstrates her adeptness at conjuring up narrative maelstroms where characters’ decisions and irrationalities all conflagrate in a glorious crescendo of chaos. I feel like beyond painting Eleanor as a hectic mess, Semple’s real conduit or even her muse here is Eleanor’s son Timby (named after a typo in a text message), a boy at the awkward cusp of exploring his sexual and gender identity in real terms who accompanies his mother on all her misadventures on this day, and takes all the absurdities of adulthood in with his innocent but ultimately cutting curiosity. There were many laugh out loud moments for me - usually precipitated by an observation or incisive question from Timby - that made this very enjoyable to read even while it explores very similar ground to her previous work. The middle section here is the only part that didn’t quite work for me, even though this flashback section is narratively adroit taking part in a brief respite from the haphazard vicissitudes Eleanor involves herself in during this day and manages to fill in all of the gaps that part one has left in its wake. It felt a little bit forced at times, especially regarding the fascination with this character Bucky, and why he held such interest and curiosity when he just seemed like an absolute fucking tool to me, both in terms of his presence in the narrative (like, as a tool to drive the narrative) and as a person. I felt it could have been laid in better earlier to build up better, whereas instead it was a bit rushed and therefore its treatment a bit shallow. Overall despite not advancing Semple into new areas of storytelling, cultural milieux or character types, she demonstrates that she has a deep well of wit and pathos, and can be sturdily relied on for funny, zany and ultimately very relatable human comedy.

11) Rites of Passage - William Golding

Among other books, this has been on my to-read list for a while just because it's one of the Booker prize winners I couldn't get my hands on a few years ago when I tried to read as many Booker prize winners as possible. I've also been fairly curious about this because I know of William Golding as the writer of Lord of the Flies and never hear about any of his other books except this one because it won the Booker (and apparently he was quite prolific in his life, so it's actually a bit odd that people only really know one of his books. He's like Anthony Burgess in that respect I guess). So this book felt a little boring and possibly stifling for a while. Structurally it reminds me a lot of Moby Dick at the outset, in that it's a first-person narrative of life aboard a ship - in this case a migrant passenger vessel bound for Australia during colonial times - but what made it more stifling was basically that the narrator of the story, Edmund Talbot, is generally an unpleasantly supercilious presence to have to keep company with for the entirety. But the book does open up other perspectives, and what's probably more important is that Talbot isn't accidentally an obnoxious presence like I find Nick Carraway for example, in fact his obnoxiousness is a very pivotal plot point and a large part of his narrative involves him coming to terms with his arrogance in a way that he personally finds quite sobering and even confronting. Without getting into plot details, the twist and the intrigue revolves around his relationship with a fellow passenger, the clergyman James Colley, when Colley encounters some misadventures with the crew of the ship. In exploring the goings on both from Talbot's and Colley's perspective, Golding weaves some very interesting commentary on social structures in places where civilisation takes on different forms - in this case the isolated hierarchy of a ship. Talbot is used as the synecdoche of the upper classes, representing as he does his 'Godfather' who is not named but is well known to everyone on board the ship as a well-respected peer of the realm back in England, while more obviously there is class commentary around the working class seamen who comprise the majority of bodies on the ship. Of particular interest though, I feel that Golding is making a more subtle point about colonialism generally, and the misguided folly of attempting to transplant existing social hierarchies to new places where different civilisations already exist. In the case of this tale, they never actually reach Australia (I mean, the book ends before they do, I don't mean they sink halfway), but the ways in which this idea plays out in this floating petri dish makes a lot of intriguing and challenging points about what is generally esteemed and in turn expected from people of different social status, and what happens when the pillars that hold up such societal structures are removed or even just reconfigured.

Books of 2022 Part 1: 30-21

 I set myself a task this year of arresting the downward trend in the number of books I was reading, and whooo I managed to do it quite comprehensively. Enough so that it makes sense to move this annual tradition back to the old yearly custom of breaking it up into chunks instead of doing them all in one countdown post. So as a reminder of how I do them traditionally: since the most fun posts are the books I really hated and the books I really loved, I start in the middle so the first post - the one you're reading - is counting down from 30-21. Tomorrow I'll countdown again just to number 11. Then the following day I jump back up and will countUP my bottom 11, from 31-41. Then my top 10 will follow that. So let's plunge in, starting with...

30) The Spirit of Science-Fiction - Roberto Bolaño

Bolaño, like Cixin Liu, is one of those authors from whom I’ll find progressively more new books to read as they steadily get translated into English. This one, frankly like I think every single one of his books I’ve read besides his short story collection The Insufferable Gaucho, centres around a group of young poets or writers leading a Bohemian lifestyle in the city - in this case, Mexico city. Remo, our narrator, and his friend Jan (ostensibly a stand-in for Bolaño himself) have an upbeat and optimistic view of Mexico City as a friendly city of dreams where a poet can find all the inspiration and intrigue he’d ever need. Their exuberance is quite infectious, which along with Bolaño’s quirky observations of life, make this readable enough in spite of its confused focus. There is a chronological story here, but it’s interspersed with scenes of dialogue between an older Remo and a reporter once he has been successfully published, and letters that Jan writes to science fiction luminaries of the USA (Le Guin, Bester, etc). I didn’t really see the point of Jan’s letters, nor for that matter the title of the book itself, nor did I really get the flash-forward sequences of dialogue unless they were some kind of finishing line we were supposed to imagine. None of it was framed especially well and little of it concluded especially well either. Remo and his friend Jose Arco’s quest to investigate the veracity of a statement that there were thousands of poetry and literary journals being published in Mexico City (despite rising illiteracy) also came to virtually no conclusion at all despite being the most consistent plot point throughout. Nevertheless, the book feels less interested in plot and more about interactions between characters, and in particular the love affair between Remo and - not Laura the girl he has an actual love affair with - the city itself, getting himself lost and caught up in its life and nightlife in particular, and Bolaño infects it all with a bright-eyed spirit that makes the ride entertaining even if it’s directionless.

29) His Favorites - Kate Walbert

Bec got me this one from the library following my request to get “short books, and/or books by women” and hey presto, this is both. This is a bit of an odd one, structurally, and narratorially, as it switches around in quite a haphazard way. I feel like a question that one can ask of any narrative is “why is it being written” in the world of the book, and especially a first-person narrator. It’s a question that’s very pertinent in Atwood’s Gilead novels for example, and it’s one that is explicitly answered here, late in the book. But I’d put that question to anybody looking to read this because I feel it helps make sense of the narrative as you go through, or rather it put a lot of it in a different perspective once it was answered. I don’t know if that’s therefore a spoiler or spoils the experience as Walbert intended, but I found it a bit hard when reading this to get a sense of who the narrator was, what her psychology was and what she was intending to convey with the random jumping back and forth in time with no real logical flow. But that question does frame it more interestingly, as it feels more like she’s trying to make sense of her own rambling and wandering thoughts, largely due to the traumatic events she’s describing. I guess the structure that I found weird and discombobulating at times serves the purpose better than the writing itself does, since it feels like a laissez-faire account of no particular account until that framing device puts her disconnected thoughts into sharper focus. It works less well as a story and better as an introspective character study, and I feel like I’d get more out of a second reading but also more out of a first reading if I’d interrogated the structure as I went through rather than expecting the story to coalesce.

28) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - J K Rowling

I’ve had this on my to-read list for a good many years after getting through Prisoner of Azkaban back in whenever. I finally discovered that there’s a “youth” section in my local library I never knew existed that contained all of these books and will probably give me a chance to read Twilight too, which I’m curious about but would never pay for in the same way that I don’t feel the need to add to J K Rowling’s nonsense hysteria fund. So yeah, as the biggest undertaking in the series so far I found this did drag a bit at times. There’s almost nothing I could say about this book that people don’t already know of course, but I found a lot of the teen angst stuff with the Yule ball a bit on the nose, and there’s some annoying character decisions throughout that felt a bit frustrating. They’re meant to be, of course (such as Harry consistently putting off trying to work out his golden egg clue because he’s “got ages to figure it out”), but some of them rang a bit false, in the sense that I wasn’t really convinced the character would really act that way except that it was necessary for the plot. The most egregious, naturally, is both times Harry manages to escape the clutches of the villains at the end of the piece, not because he’s brilliant but because the villains take a ridiculously long time to explain the plot to the reader urrh I mean Harry, and then give him every chance to fight back or someone else to rescue him. The first instance at least Rowling gives a good reason for it, in that he’s testing his own power against Harry’s as a demonstration to himself as much as everybody else, but the second is really quite unnecessary when his ultimate goal is to kill Harry rather than sit and explain how brilliant he is. But those niggles aside, it’s undoubtedly entertaining stuff even if I found some of it a bit too “tell me rather than show me” and other parts a bit cringey. I get it, I’m too old to be the target audience anymore and teenagers need to have everything spelled out because they’re stupid. I enjoyed it but wouldn’t really change my life for it. I’d also say for myself that I still prefer Azkaban out of the four I’ve read.

27) Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth - Xialo Guo

I picked up this book randomly basically because I’d picked up at the same time a bunch of bloke-written books so I felt I needed to fix the gender imbalance (yes I know that seems to be a mantra, but it’s just so easy to find a bunch of books by blokes I’ve already heard of). It was an interesting read, but at the same time not one I loved. It was mainly interesting just because it gave a perspective not often represented, that of a young woman from the provinces who moves to Beijing to try and make a life for herself. Her perspective is one of a woman who yearns to be independent, both personally and financially, but struggles with the competitiveness that comes from such a dense population and from a hangover community mindset that’s both collective and misogynistic among people who sometimes question women who stand and live for themselves. She is, however, a fairly incorrigible and misanthropic presence to spend time with. A big part of that comes from her circumstances, both the troubles she encounters and the fact that she’s just unhappy with her lot in life while also being unsure about what she really wants. Her being somewhat unpleasant is not, of course, a deal breaker, but because the whole thing is first-person perspective and, as the title suggests, fragmented, she becomes a somewhat unreliable source of information about her own life. Her narrative is self-centred but without a great depth of interiority, and her tone is plaintive without any great sense of needs or yearning or loss and certainly not what could be done about the situation. As a result, the book becomes mostly negative in tone and all in little skits so with no great direction for the future. It does have notes of hopefulness towards the end but the hope feels a bit elusive, and the trajectory of the book feels a bit cluttered and noisy like the city in which it’s set.

26) Frolic of the Beasts - Yukio Mishima

After struggling through Confessions of a Mask last year, I wasn't sure if I would ever read another Mishima (and I've already read and loved his best-known work anyway so any peripheral reading really feels like Mishima fan-service, which I'm not sure I'm that capable of anymore). Nevertheless, I came across this book in a bookshop in Launceston when I was about to finish another book, so I snapped it up to at least read on the plane home. And this certainly engaged me more consistently than his Confessions did, if only because it was shorter and the story more succinctly drawn out. The premise is also quite intriguing to keep you reading: it tells of a love triangle between a young student who is in love with the wife of an established lecturer on literature, the latter of whom has frequent and open affairs. There is a violent incident at the beginning of part I, and part II deals with the long aftermath years after the incident and where the love triangle still exists but in a different form. I found from reading the translator's note that Mishima uses Noh theatre as his inspiration here, and without knowing much about Noh theatre or the specific play he's satirising, the theatrical influence is very obvious from reading. There is a tight cast of characters, and a lot of the psychology and motivations are revealed through dialogue; there is even a subplot that doesn't at all factor into the main story but parallels it in thematic ways. In Mishima's typical fashion, the dialogue between the characters often tends to be conspicuously ambivalent with the psychology we get from the omniscient narration about the characters themselves. Of course extending the Noh theatre narrative, the implication is that the literal masks the characters wear often hide their true motivations, or their words may reveal their true motivations at odds with what the mask shows (it's not lost on me that I'm talking much more about masks here than I did in my writeup of Confessions of a Mask, mainly because with that book I had far more issues). There remains Mishima's characteristic savagery, his vision of human beings as inherently violent and vengeful, and the ironic treatment of one of the characters as the 'innocent' caught in the crossfire of the primal desires and actions becomes whatever passes for a moral core in a Mishima novel. Its ambiguity is where the intrigue comes in though, so even though I was left quite cold and a bit eluded by sympathies for the characters, I feel that's exactly the point, and the fact that I was searching for that sympathy at all is very much to the author's credit for creating that interest.

25) Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen

I don’t think I’ve stuck to my one Austen a year I’d planned a few years ago, but here this one is and it leaves me with just Mansfield Park to have read her entire oeuvre. I went into this knowing it’s Austen’s attempt at a Gothic novel, and it does make me curious as to the historiography of why. Did she lose a bet to write a Gothic novel, despite having no aptitude to do as such? Because… look. For the most part this is a perfectly serviceable Austen novel. Its main weakness for its lengthy part one is a lack of what’s really at stake, since it tells a similar story to the rest of her output: of manners and decorum, of love and longing and even yes, pride and prejudice. Or sense and sensibility. But at the end of part one where we spent the entire time in Bath and there had been no mention of an abbey or a locale called Northanger, I could think of at least two things wrong with the title. So part two takes us to the titular place, and here is where Austen makes her overtures, such as they are, to the Gothic genre. In a word: they’re terrible. They’re not just terrible but completely out of place, literally like she had to include some Gothic element to win a box of crackerjacks and had forgotten that stipulation after writing most of the story already. They’re superfluous, they’re facile and go nowhere, and more to the point they come from nothing, since part one has nothing to do with the overwhelming Gothic power of the titular Abbey, and has no foreshadowing which is such a critical part of the gothic genre. But let’s return to the actual story and not Austen’s awkward asides as the result of losing a bet. The key story arc has a lot of merit: I was caught up in Catherine’s desire for Mr Tilney, I was more caught up with the horribly awkward advances of the vexatious and obnoxious John Thorpe, so really the most egregious sin Austen commits is in wrapping up the main love story so glibly and hastily. It feels like she had a deadline to meet and couldn’t really fulfill the potential of her own story because she just had to get to its denouement as quickly as possible. We knew where the story was going if only because she would refer to Catherine as “our heroine” and Mr Tilney as “our hero”, so why not give them the glorious reunion we had hoped for? We could have had a really romantic reunion to make the emotional arc of the story worthwhile, but instead we got a quickfire “by the way they end up together and shit. Whatever. Stop bothering me I’ve got crackerjacks to eat” and that is the more ugly weakness of this otherwise fine book, even in competition with the pathetic attempts at Gothic spooks.

24) Act of God - Jill Ciment

Picked this up purely because it was short, but also my library put it in the ‘humour’ section so I thought it might be light-hearted and funny. It isn’t overly funny, although the other two criteria worked well as I finished it fairly quickly. And it is funny, but more of a dark humour and not exactly light-hearted. It revolves around a community of people living in Brooklyn who are forced to evacuate from their homes when a luminescent toxic supermold is found growing in their residences. It centres around ageing twins Edith and Kat, whose disparate personalities and lifestyle leads them down different paths and different ways of dealing with their displacement. The tone of the story is at turns surreal and fantastical, even nightmarish when this supermold gets out of control and seems to touch everything. There’s also a wry look at New York living, the haves and various tiers and types of havenots, and how to deal with spiralling adversity. I think Ciment’s tendency towards comedy actually feels a little glib at times, and the way she resolves the story feels both soap operatic in the way that everybody deals with the misfortune by bonding together, but also there’s an irritating lack of resolution in fact, not just by the ambiguous ending but the fact that there are quite a few loose ends left over: particularly the mystery of who (the fuck) is Alice, this older dementia patient who Kat visits at one point, who has no idea who she is and why she’s there. It’s not explained to the reader either. There feels like potential for some commentary on close-knit living, environmentalism and climate change although Ciment’s focus on tongue in cheek humour and the spiralling chaos of the story seems to take precedence, and the ambiguity of the ending leaves a few too many questions unanswered for it to be properly satisfying.

23) The Green Road - Anne Enright

This is the third Enright book I’ve read, the two previous including her booker prize-winning The Gathering and a random book called The Hat My Father Wore which I picked up in a used-book sale, and although I remember reading them both I remember absolutely nothing about them. And from reading this book, I can get a pretty clear idea as to why: will I remember much about this book? Well I keep these written up notes now so that will help, but if not for these I’d be doubtful. I feel there’s a strong commitment from Enright towards ambiguity which, coupled with her fragmented modernist approach to prose, makes it hard for her books to leave me with lasting emotional impact. In this book she tells the story of the Madigan children and their mother Rosaleen, all introduced to us in a series of four short stories from each of the four kids’ perspectives but across a span of several decades. While each of these stories is engaging, they’re all individually engaging and what they contribute to the overarching family saga is just a fragment. When the family and the stories converge in the second part when the children all return home to Ireland for one final Christmas, and the stories all reach their collective emotional culmination, the ambiguity throughout the narrative has left me in two minds about how I’m meant to feel. The thing is, that’s by design: Rosaleen the matriarch is meant to be a perplexing character, needy and emotionally aloof, sharp-tongued yet absent and dreamy. Enright’s choice to tell her family’s story in little vignettes means there are too many emotional threads for any of them to have any great depth, and her frequent use of stream of consciousness is done in such a cold and detached way that I found myself distanced from the psychology of the characters. Where it does resonate though is in the relationships between people, all of the siblings reacting their own ways to Rosaleen’s standoffishness, her criticisms, her unrealistic expectations and constantly shifting goalposts. But that resonates largely because we’ve seen family sagas like this before, not because these characters are so painstakingly drawn that you feel everything in sync with them. So ultimately I feel that Enright writes with fluidity - possibly too much - but without a deeply affecting manner, while her characters are largely mannequins to hang the adornments of their relationships on and don’t have memorable or clearly discernible personalities of their own. Whether these criticisms could be applied to The Gathering or The Hat My Father Wore too is not my fallible memory’s to say, but in this case there just isn’t any great sense of wonder or catharsis from the story.

22) The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao - Martha Batalha

I often pick up books like this in my local library, that have a nice cover design that's eye-catching enough, and when they're written by a woman and particularly if it's a translated book I tend to be more well-disposed to giving it a go, because it's far enough removed from my milieu that I'll likely experience something new. This book I guess delivers that, but I also found myself fairly unsure about really what to make of it. It tells the story of Euridice Gusmao, a good and obedient wife living in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, and the various projects that she undertakes in her marriage that give her life purpose. When I reduce it to those terms the book actually sounds quite enjoyable - and it is somewhat, don't get me wrong - but I feel it loses that focus as the book goes on, and other characters start to take their turn as the main character for a while, so in the end, the 'invisible life' of the title actually becomes too invisible even to its own author. What I did appreciate about this book was that it had a kind of 'soft' feminism to it: it does position women as the hero of its various narrative threads, and a lot of the empowerment it gives them is at the expense of the men in their lives. But it doesn't really laugh at those men, nor does it portray them as irredeemable villains: at worst they're cowardly and a bit hapless, but I think without being too explicit about it, Batalha portrays the men as just as much victims of the patriarchy as the womenfolk. In many ways they act in the ways they do because it's how men are expected to act, but in this particular story the men can't really lash out at their frustrations properly, so they end up turning all their anger on themselves and sabotaging their own happiness where they could instead flourish by letting their wives enjoy their own lives in their own ways. Central to all this is Antenor, Euridice's husband, who tends to become an NPC in his own life and, while he fails at every attempt to assert himself, ends up being a success largely because he's such a non-event that he has no hubris to be his undoing. I feel like I'm talking myself into liking this book more than I did, but I think that's the point: there's a lot of good, juicy themes in this book that I feel could have been explored in greater depth, but it lost its focus for a lot of the narrative and ended up being a whole lot of interesting ideas in search of an author to tie them all together.

21) The Neighborhood - Mario Vargas Llosa

Randomly picked this one up as one of several Mario Vargas Llosa options in the library, not really knowing what to expect. It’s a fairly odd book, bringing together a series of connected narratives centred around the wealthy mining entrepreneur Enrique. It got off on the wrong foot a bit starting with a “lesbian awakening” scene between Enrique’s wife and the wife of Enrique’s best friend-slash-lawyer, the kind of machinations of which I’ve seen more times in short porn scenes than in Nobel-winning literature as it had a particularly ‘horny male’ gaze to it. But from there it expands into more of a hard-boiled story about blackmail, government corruption and the media’s role in facilitating, enabling and ultimately exposing both. It’s a somewhat conventionally plotted and written story for the most point, with some mystery and suspense interspersed with lots more of those really horny sex scenes, hetero and otherwise. What makes it a bit more worthy of note is how Llosa draws the climax and conclusion in more self-conscious ways that blur the fourth wall a bit. The chapter entitled “A Whirlpool” is great as it draws together five different scenes, one of them from a different timeline, all told ‘simultaneously’ in that there are no paragraph breaks but switching between them every three or four lines, so it’s like a cinematic montage scene in novel form. The following chapter then consists of sections of a magazine report that ensues following these scenes and that constitutes the climax. So Llosa’s slightly awkward horniness aside (we get it, the women are hot, move on dude), there are some innovative approaches he takes that set this apart from the typical crime fiction it otherwise is, aside from its scope (reaching up to the highest echelons of government) and the other noteworthy fact of its being set in Peru where I otherwise don’t read voices from very often.