Books of 2023: My Top Ten

 10) All the Lovers in the Night - Mieko Kawakami

Of course I had no reason to pick this up from the library; it was relatively short, it was a new author; I've reached the stage now where that's pretty much sufficient on its own. And in the end I don't think I really understood this book, much at all, but I think that's very much a big part of its charm. Our narrator is Fuyuko, a thirtysomething professional proofreader living in Tokyo but originally from Nagano, who it slowly emerges has trouble forming meaningful connections with people. Herein lies the first bit of intrigue and surprise that Kawakami set me up for: I was fully prepared to dislike or even disdain Fuyuko as a typical 'blank slate' protagonist who just becomes a conduit or mirror for the fully-fledged personalities around her (if you haven't heard my anti-Nick Carraway rant for a while, let me know, but fuck Nick Carraway is a pointless character). But in fact Kawakami takes her protagonist even further: she's more of a vacuum, devoid of any real sense of identity and only able to make her way through life by letting others lead her. This turns her into quite a surreal, ghostly presence as she observes quite objectively the things other people say and do, almost like she's a robot making notes about human behaviour while simultaneously trying to learn it herself. There's more to Fuyuko's character and back-story that gets revealed in quite a haphazard way as the story progresses around a strangely detached relationship she develops with Mitsutsuka, a physics teacher at a local high school whom she happens to meet by chance. The novel has a great deal of interiority to it as we're exclusively guided through the story by Fuyuko's own narration, but she doesn't seem to have much of a handle on how she thinks or why she does or says the things she does. That gives the whole novel a dreamlike quality like she sleepwalks through her life, reflecting on where she's come and reaching an ultimate revelation about what she wants out of life. It feels a little like Murakami, but with the surrealism dialled up to 11, but just to cherry-pick other Japanese authors to reference, I felt the ambivalence of the tone more akin to Yukio Mishima, in that I was never really sure where the story was going to take me, but more importantly it never took me where I expected and I'm left unsure what to make of it by the end. While, in the end, I was a little bit mystified, I found Kawakami's oddly detached writing style frequently surprising. It always kept me in the moment but also with an uneasy feeling that I was watching the moment from afar and seeing it through a foggy haze that blurred the lines of reality. I can't say that I fully loved something that I didn't comprehend but there's no doubting it was a fascinating reading experience.

9) Patternmaster - Octavia E Butler

I basically discovered that my local library is replete with Butler books so I couldn't think of any reason not to accelerate my consumption of her entire oeuvre with this one. Now as a bit of context: I read Wild Seed earlier this year, which was published later but is effectively the prequel to this and the whole Patternmaster series, while this one was the first book published but also the latest in the chronology. And I set that context here because I do believe this is the weakest of the Butler novels (three in total now) that I've read. This is by no means a weak book, but it feels early in her career when she isn't quite as daring in her social commentary. It actually reads a bit like early science fiction/fantasy generally, in the sense that it doesn't really push the envelope stylistically or the story structure in any unpredictable ways; in other words it's quite generically conventional. The world building, as I've found with her other stories, is very vivid and clear without needing much explication outside dialogue between characters. In this story's case the characters fall into four groups: 'house masters' who are the strongest in the 'pattern' that forms a mental connection between all its users and that can be used to cause physical harm to enemies; 'outsiders' who are effectively servants or companions of the house masters who are also part of the pattern, 'mutes' who don't hold the pattern but are loyal to a specific house master, and the 'Clayarks' who are at war with the pattern due to their genetic mutation that renders them physically and mentally incompatible. That's effectively both the premise and the majority of the story's key plot points apart from the central conflict which I won't bother explaining for the purposes of this writeup. The main point is that apart from that world-building and any predictable inherent themes - inside vs outside status, social hierarchy and split loyalties - there isn't a lot on this book's mind, at least that wasn't explored in much greater detail in the later (but earlier-set) Wild Seed. I also found that while there wasn't a great need for explication except through dialogue, there is quite a lot of dialogue in the story and not very much interiority of the characters, which had the ultimate effect of making the narrative quite "tell not show" with characters always speaking out their thoughts and intentions and not really giving much motivation beyond what they willingly volunteered. That made some of the dramatic and action sequences feel a little stilted and awkward. This isn't helped by the fact that the book just feels quite short; I mean it's absurd but it almost felt like Butler had a limit for how long the book could be and the action and emotional arcs of the characters felt a bit rushed because she needed to cram the story into so much space. That's obviously not what happened but it just felt like she could have spent a lot longer drawing out the characters and their relationships before another big plot development comes into the mix. It felt in the end a bit pastichey within the genre, like she was leaning on some tropes (which she may have helped create, really, with this very book to be fair) to skip ahead and not necessarily explore those themes and events and their implications in greater detail. It was definitely a page-turner, and more so than Wild Seed, but I feel that Wild Seed was less a page-turner because its narrative was so rich with detail and broad, deep social commentary whereas this was predominantly action with less of the broader vision.

8) Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens

I found out when I’d got this from the library and it was sitting around my house that it was my mother’s favourite book she read last year. I felt the pressure was therefore on - on me or the book I’m not sure, but on. And look, evidently I didn’t like it quite that much but I can see why someone might. I think content-wise it’s substantial and evocative: the story of Kya ‘the Marsh Girl’ who is abandoned one by one by her family to live alone in the marshes of North Carolina and slowly has a mythology both positive and negative built around her in the small town. What I didn’t like about the book was how conscious I was of Owens’ narrative voice, but in particular the tricks she was using to manipulate her audience. The use of the dual timelines - telling of Kya’s upbringing and coming of age, while also jumping forward some twenty years later to a murder investigation after one of the town’s beloved sons meets an untimely death in the marsh - is one of the main tricks she pulls. It’s not so much the dual timeline itself but the fact that the later timeline of the murder investigation is far thinner as a narrative, and as such it felt self-conscious when Owens would go for long chapters about Kya’s upbringing and then include a short interlude of the later timeline; it felt like she was trying to rush the former timeline to catch up to the present day. But when the murder investigation reaches trial stage (I mean, spoiler alert that’s ruined in the blurb) with Kya accused of the murder, the more egregious trick is that we’re told nothing of Kya’s own psychology at that stage, and the narrative has skipped the part joining the two timelines, i.e the night the boy died. This becomes a trick to lead to ambiguity, i.e we don’t know whether Kya did it or not, and learn the details only as they emerge in the trial, but it felt far too manipulative because we’ve been given such depth in Kya’s interiority all up to that point that it felt too obvious a gap during this part of the story. Where the trial leads is all part of its purpose, but I just couldn’t get as invested in the drama because I was so conscious of the strings being pulled all the time. I will say that the story’s conclusion stayed with me for a few days and it’s that feeling of moral ambivalence and curiosity in where the narrative has been drawing you that I can see leaving a big impact. It’s no doubt a clever book, with an interesting central character and a heartfelt love story at its core, but it’s also a little too caught up in its own attempts at Dickensian twists and turns that I could feel the author constantly winking at me.

7) Pursuit - Joyce Carol Oates

I tend to enjoy the more provocative works from Joyce Carol Oates (in the sense of enjoying being challenged by them) and this certainly had the feeling of one from the get-go. It tells the story of Abbey, who steps off the kerb in front of a bus the morning after getting married to the pleasant young man Willem. Willem sits by her comatose form for weeks and, upon her reviving, sets about trying to discover the dark secrets that made her subconscious punish her in this way. At first, given Willem's devout Christianity and the story of their (very chaste and proper) courtship, I thought that this was heading in the direction of a critique of traditional religious marriage and its orthodox strictures, but Oates has other things on her mind here. Regardless of the direction it was going to take me, what was inevitable early on was this would be a very oppressive read. Oates has a dense quality about her writing that can feel very claustrophobic, but at the same time that feeling is often compelling as it forces you to continue reading to get to the inevitable catharsis. Catharsis is very much the order of the day, too, as Oates takes us back into Abbey's past or more specifically the past of her parents and the horrifying events leading up to the trauma that dictates much of her mental health in the present day. As much as Oates often applies quite a savage feminist lens and there is certainly an argument to be made that this book is critical of its male characters, I found it far more explicitly a fable about the importance of mental health awareness and in particular advocating for better support systems for men to turn to. Most critically, the character of Willem becomes the stable guiding light of the story as well as the agent of its catharsis. As much as the story is Abbey's, his dramatic arc is the one that guides the story back to its origins and again to its conclusion. Through the oppressive nature of Oates' prose, I found the emotional payoff far more resonant, certainly in terms of the horrors it contained but also the unexpected feeling of hopefulness in the end, with its promises of breaking the cycle of trauma and working through the mistakes of your past in constructive ways.

6) The Bass Rock - Evie Wyld

I picked this up remembering really enjoying All the Birds, Singing when we read it for book group many years ago. But truth be told I've grown a bit skeptical about my love for that book mainly because it had a very effective ending, and an unusual narrative structure and I started to wonder if the writing was any good or if the conceit just surprised me. So this was an effective litmus test for Wyld's writing then, because this book has a similar conceit and explores a lot of the same ideas with the same ominous, gothic feeling to it. One key difference though was that I didn't actually piece together the conceit of this book all that well. It tells three (actually three and a bit) corresponding stories all set around the same area at different time periods. Two of the stories are related, and related through a somewhat complicated family tree that at one point I actually got out pen and paper to sketch out so I got the relationships between characters. The third story that seems to take place some centuries before the others - I'm not actually sure if it's related at all apart from the setting, and I guess philosophically through the themes Wyld is exploring. Part of the issue - as a sidenote - is that I was just short of finishing this book and had some time to go to the library to get more books to read, so I finished this off then immediately returned it, so I can't now flip back through the pages and see if I missed some connection that ties the stories together. But truth be told, I think the ambiguity is a large part of the charm, and I think Wyld's elusive writing style shines through very clearly here and very strongly in the narrative. Besides the setting, what does connect the three (and a bit) stories is a common sense of men's violence and sense of possessiveness towards women, and how women invariably adopt certain roles, sometimes interchangeably all at once, in a way that keeps them the safest possible from harm. Wyld evokes - though not explicitly - classic gothic romances, especially Rebecca but to a lesser extent Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights to utilise but also subvert tropes about what it means to be a good wife and a worthy woman, and she very effectively changes her language and the conventions of her story to fit the different time periods she's working with. What never changes throughout the stories though, is how the men in these women's lives act, and while there's any number of spooky atmospherics and haunting events that occur throughout the story, what Wyld manages to convey most effectively is how the biggest threat is always with the men and their propensity for sudden provocation.

5) David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

I got my yearly Dickens quite early this year, and for some reason (I probably had at least one child with me so I was in a hurry) thought it necessary to grab this and my yearly Austen in the same haul so I ended up really killing any reading momentum this year and sat on these two books for the best part of a month and a half. Because this book, besides just generally being Dickens and dense, is really bloody long. But as much as it took a long time to get through, I do think this is a really rewarding read. In fact I'd probably say this one now pips Great Expectations and/or Tale of Two Cities (not sure really how I'd figure those two against each other since they were years apart being read) as either my favourite Dickens, or at least the most quintessential Dickens that I'd direct people to read if they wanted one story to encapsulate how he works as a writer. There's a bunch of reasons for that: firstly, it's got all of the essential Dickens hallmarks. It's got a cast of characters who are all 'pure goodness and heart' or are pure malevolent (and usually hypocritical) evil. There's a lot of surprising twists and turns usually involving a character from the past popping up in an unexpected place. But I think even more so than the other two books mentioned, this gives a really complete but intimate look at the society of the time. Copperfield grows up fairly modest so there's an intimate portrait of working class families, he gets sent to a more prestigious school where he makes friends with the more worldly and sophisticated James Steerforth, but then falls on far harder times when his mother dies and needs to appeal to his one surviving relative, his estranged aunt, who is able to provide him a more sophisticated education and upbringing. The scene where his aunt - eccentric and harsh by all appearances - shoos away Copperfield's steapfather is probably my favourite in the book and possibly my favourite Dickens scene generally (in a close tussle with the revelation of Pip’s mysterious benefactor in Great Expectations). Throughout the story of Copperfield making his way in the world, with his first job, his first love, navigating all the social niceties but above all the economic necessities, Dickens is obviously drawing on a lot of his own personal experiences but as a result it's a really colourful and vibrant portrayal of English society both high and low. Copperfield himself is at times slightly naive and ignorant, but confronts everything he comes across with a sense of down-to-earth honesty which can lead to his downfall when pitted against people who aren't so honest. It's undoubtedly a bit of a slog just because of the density of the language, and some passages and events felt ultimately superfluous except from a "how about that" narrative standpoint (the scene where he reacquaints himself with his old schoolmaster who's now warden of a corrective institute is the most egregious example), but reading between those to what is ultimately a heartfelt love story framed as a bildungsroman coming of age story, it's quite an affecting and enjoyable read.

4) Lemon - Kwon Yeo-Sun

I picked up this book largely because it was short, but also I tend to get quite a lot out of translated Asian writers, more so than other translations at least. And this book really felt to me like a novel-version of one of those great bits of South Korean cinema that are always full of dark twists and always have an undercurrent of menace. On the surface this seems to be a straightforward murder mystery: a high school beauty is found bashed to death in a park and suspicion falls on two boys who were the last two people to see her alive. But Kwon is not interested in the murder itself or its mechanics, but on what happens afterwards. The story jumps forward several times and is told through three first-person narrators: the younger sister of the murdered girl, an exchange student who befriended the younger sister, and another classmate of the murdered girl who was a witness as part of the original investigation. First of all, it becomes fairly obvious quite quickly who the murderer was, at least from the perspective of the survivors left behind, so that isn't really what's at stake. But Kwon's narrative jumps forward paint a story of everlasting grief and trauma and how difficult it is to leave behind a crime so brutal and shocking. She does so with a palpable sense of ambiguity, particularly ambiguity through omission. There is so much in this story that isn't said explicitly and it's a piece of elegant writing whose subtleties really reward close attention. Or rather, I think I got more out of it because I can be guilty of paying embarrassingly little attention to crucial details. Upon finishing this story I didn't really understand it completely and knew there was some crucial piece that I was missing. So given that it was a relatively short read, I went back and started to read it again. Now this is the embarrassing part though, there was a point in starting again from the beginning that suddenly everything clicked into place and even though I was alone downstairs at home, I actually clamped my hand over my mouth as if stifling a yell of surprise. It's a gesture I don't think I've ever done before or since but it was just my immediate realisation when the revelation dawned on me what the missing piece was. To go back to my comparison earlier it's akin to the intercom scene in Parasite or the vengeance revelation in Oldboy, that level of everything always seeming a bit off but OK, then suddenly everything comes crashing down. But I do think this is a compelling read and not just a book with a dark underbelly to it that caught me off guard (and I should say, if you're paying attention you won't really get the same level of shock that I did; I tend to read more casually, willing to be caught off guard). It's just that the overall effect of an elegant narrative about lingering grief and feelings of injustice was made so much more powerful by my willingness to almost let the narrative slip past me completely before I determined to work out the full weight of its meaning.

3) Wild Seed - Octavia E Butler

I snatched at this after loving Kindred last year, and didn't realise until I was about halfway through that this was part of a series and was the fourth book published in the series. However it seems that this is a perfectly cromulent place to start as it was written as a 'prequel' to the first three books and hence comes chronologically first in the narrative. And you know, if Octavia E Butler had had a part in writing the Star Wars prequels, they wouldn't be derided the way they are because Butler is just a scintillating storyteller. To cut to the chase: I loved this excellent book, and the main thing I felt while reading it was an anger about the fact that I was 37 years old before I even heard about Butler and it feels like a failure of every algorithm-based recommendation resource like GoodReads that Butler isn't the first thing suggested any time someone indicates they like, for example, Margaret Atwood. Anyway, to return to this book: as much as I loved it, it did feel a little belaboured at times. Like Kindred it has a high sci-fi concept at its core and through that manages to explore themes around slavery and the African diaspora, femininity vs masculinity, and the concept of bodily autonomy and control. In essence it's the story of Anyanwu, an immortal and shapeshifting being who begins the story living in a small village in western Africa until she is discovered by Doro, a fellow immortal who doesn't shapeshift but instead swaps bodies with living people, in the process killing the physical form of his previous body and erasing the existence of whatever 'essence' previously occupied his new body. Doro convinces Anyanwu to come back with him to a civilisation he's established in pre-colonial America designed with the purpose of selectively breeding to create beings as powerful as themselves. The narrative jumps ahead decades or centuries at a time, telling of the tumultuous relationship that develops between Anyanwu and Doro; the former occupying a space as a powerful healer and nurturing being, and the latter's driving force being that of death and destruction, but it's a relationship that tends to use its polar extremes as ambivalently complementary and at times necessary. The fact is that even from my glib description of the plot's basics, I think all of the thematic explorations and metaphors should be quite obvious, and in a lot of ways Butler isn't subtle about the points she's raising. But the strength of the book isn't really in how it metaphorically explores its themes or in how it adumbrates modern America, feminism and race relations through the lens of a sensationalised past; the strength is in the fact that with that in plain sight, the fantastical essence of the book is captivating and compelling. Where it does become a little belaboured and really its only fault, is in the way Doro and Anyanwu across the years/centuries continue to disagree on the same fundamental points in a way that feels ineffectually bickering, knowing that a climax where their conflicting powers must clash is inevitable. Basically it feels like it takes quite a long time to get to that inevitable conclusion, and the dialogue they have along the way tends to circle around itself rather than escalating until the narrative demands it happen now. It's obviously not a deal-breaker to a fascinating and richly rewarding read, but I do feel the same level of emotional resonance could have been more efficiently delivered in a real gut punch that could have been shorter and more quick to its point. 

2) The Gustav Sonata - Rose Tremain

Besides my gravitating towards female authors generally, I picked this one up out of curiosity about Rose Tremain; I read her Women’s Fiction Prize-winning The Road Home a few years ago, and while it didn’t leave much of an impression (I actually had to reread my writeup even to remember what it was vaguely about) I knew that I enjoyed it well enough at the time. It was middling Women’s Prize stuff basically, below Shriver and Adichie but above Patchett and even A M Homes. So this book was a bit of a surprise to me because I was quite wrapped up in it. The Gustav of the title is Gustav Perle, a lifelong resident of the fictional Swiss town of Matzlingen. The book is told in three parts: part one tells the story of Gustav as s child, and his friendship with a Jewish boy called Anton whose family fled to Switzerland during the war. Part two jumps back in time to tell the story of Gustav’s mother as a youth and the tragic events that led to her aloof way of caring for Gustav as well as her antisemitism that creates a wedge between Gustav and Anton’s friendship. Part three then tells of Gustav as an older man, still residing in Matzlingen, and how the events of Gustav’s and his mother’s childhood have come to affect his and Anton’s worldview and how they look back on their lives. It’s told throughout with a deep sense of melancholy, with bittersweet regret mingling with the notion of Swiss fortitude and self-actualisation in the face of adversity. It felt like a book that had big things on its mind, but I think the three-part narrative in some ways fractures those big ideas into lots of smaller ones instead and it only comes properly full circle at the very end. Tremain considers the love of music, the moral ambiguity of remaining neutral and self-interested in the face of conflict and the sacrifices you need to make, as well as the nature of intergenerational trauma and how people can break the cycle of abuse and regret handed down from parent to child. But above all, this is a story about love; Gustav is a human being who wants nothing more than to be loved by those closest to him, who gives everything in order to feel that love and finds that everybody receives it and uses it for their own purposes or nourishment without returning. It’s a bittersweet rather than a bitter tale though, with the eventual question Tremain raises being, what must we give up in order to be loved, and to what extent can loving someone be its own reward? As a narrative it did feel a little fractured, but there is no denying the ultimate warmth and ‘heart-stilling’ peace that Tremain spins around her central character.

1) A Luminous Republic - Andrés Barba

Apart from my overall fondness for David Copperfield, this felt like the first book I read this year that I was really genuinely engaged by. And it's largely the story itself that engaged me, but Barba's style that he adopts had a habit of creeping up on me. At first I found his narrator - who is unnamed, more on that below - a little too dry and detached in his bureaucratic, 'report the facts even if it's facts about my own interior feelings' style, but it created a curious effect in the end. Despite the dryness of the prose, Barba depicts a vivid portrait of a turn of events here, and it's vivid in such a way that I found myself being reminded of films rather than other books as I read. The story here is about a group of precisely 32 vagrant children, who terrorise the citizens of the town of San Cristobel, and the ways in which the adults and bureaucrats try to get rid of them. It's not a spoiler to say that all the children end up dead, as our unnamed narrator is reporting the events that led up to this tragic event, and it is foreshadowed in the very early stages of the book. Here is where the cinematic imagery starts to come in: his descriptions of the children and their own way of communicating has flourishes of Bunuel's Los Olvidados as well as a sense of Lord of the Flies if it were being narrated by a fly-on-the-wall adult observing the goings on. However the more palpable feelings I got were of the push-pull narrative between the events leading inevitably to a horrible tragedy and  retrospective reflections, looking back on the tragedy and its aftermath and trying to figure what could have happened differently: in that sense, particularly dealing with the death of children as it does, the book brought to mind both Gus van Sant's Elephant and Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter. Barba's narrator though is not simply concerned with piecing together the events; his concern is also in reflecting on how they as a society reacted to and treated these children, and what their reactions say about their own humanity. The fact that the narrator is unnamed (although his position in society is well documented) gives him a haunted ethereal quality that also brought to mind the unusual first-person-plural narrator of Geoffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides in that he speaks on behalf of the whole community and absorbs all of their shock and guilt in order to convey this to the reader. The choice to not name him as well keeps him as a detached observer of the key point I feel Barba is trying to make here: that the children we create and raise become reflections of ourselves, and there is an inevitable connection between how we comport ourselves and how the children respond. There's a fairly obvious symbolism to that effect that Barba employs in the fact that three of the children in the narrative have been given the same name as their parent (the narrator's wife has a daughter of the same name from another man, and the narrator refers to her simply as "the girl"). But the evocative and vivid portrait of tragedy that he conjures here really makes this an affecting story with a palpable sense of doom and guilt, and it does away with the need for such symbols; one can't help but use this narrative to reflect on the broader implications of the ostensible 'innocence' of children and what part we all play as part of the society that fosters that innocence or otherwise.

So yes, late in the month though it is, that's it for another year of reading. I will (out of sequence) probably post something about the music of last year mainly because I still use this blog as my reference point for song and album end-of-year ordering and so forth, but I think the end of year snuck up on me this year what with moving house, so I don't think I'll have the motivation to actually write anything up, just post a list. Watch this space if you're interested. Not that I'm telling anybody to look at this space to begin with.

Books of 2023: Bottom 7 41-47

I think I alluded in my first post to the fact that I didn't have any huge standouts at the top end of my reading list this year. By contrast though, there were some absolute festering turds I read this year, and I apologise for the 1500+ word essay to cover the bottom of the pile here but I really felt I had to justify in full how truly terrible it was to read.

41) Johnno - David Malouf

Always open these days to reading another 'classic' of Australian literature even if it's not one I've ever come across or had any reason to need to read before today. But partially of course because I've until quite recently always had a bit of a wall up when it comes to Australian books, feeling like they're much of a muchness. Unfortunately this book is very much part of that muchness and one of the reasons I would have eschewed more in earlier years. It's very much got the same kind of Great Gatsby derivative feel to me, where the Johnno of the title is this enigmatic figure who exudes an inexplicable pull on those around him but particularly our first-person narrator, who is given the name "Dante" although we're never made aware of his real name. The fact that he's given a nickname is really the most compelling and layered element of the character we can discern from the writing, as he's otherwise probably the worst and most egregiously Nick Carraway-esque empty vessel since... well, Nick Carraway. I feel like the 'narrator' is probably therefore a semi-autobiographical stand-in for Malouf himself, and this is basically a fictionalised retelling of his youth. Part of the reason I believe that - without doing any background reading - is that where Malouf absolutely excels here (no this isn't going to be an entirely critical review) is in his description of pre-war Brisbane, its ersatz, tumbledown, cobbled-together kind of feel, and how WWII changed the residents' perspective on the city and how quickly it modernised and built itself up. This is told in stages throughout the novel, as 'Dante' and Johnno at one stage traipse aimlessly around Europe in another typical cliche of this kind of story, but the character of Brisbane as a city really becomes the most nuanced and interesting character in the story. Yes Johnno has a certain devil-may-care charm to him, and because the story revolves around trying to figure out the mystery around who he is and why he is the way he is, a lot of the plot hinges on when that mysterious interior reveals bits of itself but in doing so just deepens the aura of impenetrability. I ultimately feel like the storyline here of the two boys isn't especially novel or compelling, but the backdrop Malouf sets it against is at least an interesting piece of Australian history that I'm otherwise not familiar with. There is value here, but its value is simply an aside to what the book otherwise purports to be about.

42) Slow Man - J.M. Coetzee

This was a very weird book, and I can't really talk about the weirdness without spoiling a major plot point so I'm just going to spoil it. If it's important for you to approach some medium-minor work from a renowned author fresh, do not read any further. Or do, I'm a blog post not a cop. This story starts out as a lightweight and ambiguous but somewhat engaging story about a man, Paul Rayment, who loses his leg after being knocked off his bike by a car, and the care and convalescence that follows. Where it become strange is that, after becoming enamoured with, and embroiled in the family dynamics of, his Croatian nurse, he is suddenly visited by "renowned author" Elizabeth Costello who for all intents and purposes seems to be a fourth wall breakage where she is entering his story gonzo-style to try and change the path he's on. Now where this conceit becomes just 'weird' rather than anything else is, firstly: it's not a new conceit and as you’ll know from reading all of these write-ups in great detail, it was the first of two stories that included this authorial intervention I read this year. But secondly, it's very unclear why Coetzee is making this narrative choice. It's not the kind of story that really warrants this level of post-structuralism and self-awareness because it's actually a fairly conventional drama. But my suspicion really is that Coetzee employed this device purely because he lost interest in where the story was heading or even just used it as an escape from writer's block (and indeed, as was the case with the other book this year). Of course after this it becomes a very different story while still employing the same characters and scenario (albeit with a new overarching character who gets involved with every piece of action), but I didn't really feel it was a deep and engaging meta-narrative about story structure or character motivations. Paul Rayment is a pathetically ordinary person, which both adds to my suspicions that Coetzee used his fourth-wall break as an escape route, but also means that he isn't exactly a fascinating subject for such a meta-exploration of free will, reality and identity as this book could otherwise have been. I also had a bit of a side issue with Coetzee's choice to use this fictional author as a stand-in for himself (Coetzee-Costello), mainly because Paul's attitude towards Costello takes on a fair bit of misogyny where she comes across as a meddling, fussy and intrusive woman where if Coetzee had actually used himself as a character it could be delightfully self-deprecating. It feels like a major track change in the middle of the story where we end up heading in the same direction but by a completely circuitous route. It's probably testament to Coetzee's efforts in writing if not his skill that the narrative isn't completely derailed, but I can't say I fully enjoyed the route we ended up taking, nor did the book provide a satisfying explanation or impetus of why it changed direction at all.

43) Tangled Destinies - Diana Palmer

I alluded to this in my first writeup (for The Virgin’s Lover by Philippa Gregory) but one day I took my then-3yo daughter to the library, mainly to return a book but naturally we explored a bit as well. En route to the kids’ section through the grown-up book section she says “I’m going to choose a book for you, Daddy” and grabs this book with a rugged-looking muscular bloke in a tight t-shirt on the cover. I thanked her, and said to myself, I’m going to absolutely fucking read this book, yes. You don’t say no when a 3yo gives you a gift. So is this book utterly terrible? In a word, yes. Bec found me a bit annoying when I started reading this because I kept laughing uncontrollably at particular parts. The story starts when Gaby Bennett, who’s skinny and sexy and rich, gets mugged and is then rescued by a mysterious stranger “wearing a white cotton t-shirt that barely covered his muscular chest” and with a voice “rich and smooth, like dark velvet” (actual quotes). But after the shock of the hilariously tacky wore off, I honestly started to enioy this as a bit of an easy-reading cliche. The thing is, it does develop some classic soap opera drama that keeps you reading impatient for the denouement. I’m not familiar enough with romance novels to know what ‘the plot’ typically entails beyond Man and Woman who want each other’s bodies and souls but can’t until the end of the book for *insert reason*, but in this case it turns into a sort of detective thriller where Gaby is involved in a plot of murder and blackmail, all while she and her first love (the muscular velvety dude) try to rekindle their youthful romance nine years later. There were some utterly absurd plot points and a lot of the interior reflections were completely on the nose and unnecessary explication. There’s an incredibly protracted section on the eve of the whole murder mystery thing coming to its climax, where the central couple repeatedly make hot sweaty sex love over and over and over and over again (and once more for the road), to take their minds off the impending doom. But there’s strengths that Palmer has, and one of them is writing sex scenes that are – yes – hilarious out of context, and largely shoehorned in, but nevertheless feel expressive and evocative as part of the text. That, and her ability to write dialogue full of easy to detect subtext and misunderstandings between people, keep the story strangely engaging and entertaining even while it hinges on every known love and romance trope. But the key value from reading this is I’ll definitely be delighted in bringing up this gift from Polly as she gets older and more cognisant of the world, and who knows, she may even love to read it herself when she’s nearing 40 and as jaded and cynical as I am. 

44) Made Things - Adrian Tchaikovsky

I referenced this book by comparison with Permafrost by Alistair Reynolds and why that latter was superior, so here’s the poop. I picked up this book early in the year from the library because it was quite short and wanted to keep things moving after the long stretch of David Copperfield and Mansfield Park. But ultimately I think the fact that this book is short is its largest *ahem* shortcoming. Being a sci-fi/fantasy type book (I'd say it leans more to the latter but I'm not enough of a connoisseur to really pull apart the differences), what it's really lacking in is the world-building, and I feel like it's the world-building that Tchaikovsky has cut corners on in order to keep the book short. Instead I feel that he relies on a lot of genre tropes to do that corner-cutting and there's obvious archetypes in the talented but lowly main figure Coppelia, the brutal law-enforcer (with the on-the-nose name of Maulhands), the overlord type characters and the scoundrel types whose moral ambiguity is more situational than inherent to them. He employs these tropes gainfully in that we do get what they're about in an efficient kind of way where too much explication could also be dull, but what it costs him is that when the emotional stakes of the plot are introduced, I don't really buy into them because the author hasn't taken the time to make me care about these characters or the situation they're facing. In this way, the way the story builds to its action climax is all built on tropes themselves and familiar plot points. And that becomes more apparent when it actually reaches that climax; without giving too much away it frankly feels very rushed, and we're given a denouement that could really only be described as predictable but the main shortcoming was I wasn't feeling the dramatic stakes at play. Tchaikovsky simply doesn't seem to have the time or patience to really set the scene and the stakes and get us emotionally invested in rooting for the protagonist(s) nor in really dreading the consequences if they fail, so any payoff at the end feels similarly blunted and cheapened by his shortcut approach to narrative.

45) The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

I picked this one up from the library knowing that it was one of the hot bestselling books from a while ago and, sure, the premise kind of intrigued me since I tend to enjoy time travel novels. Unfortunately the book and I got off on the wrong foot because the prose here is focused 50% of its time on sex, and in quite puerile and vulgar ways as well. There's an erection joke in the first few pages that just made me raise my eyebrow, in a "what are you doing" kind of way. But getting off on the wrong foot was more because this book then led in directions that I didn't particularly care about. While time travel is the conceit of the book, the story itself is a love story about Clare, who meets Henry at a young age (for her I mean) when a grown-up Henry appears suddenly in a clearing near her family's house, and then appears at intervals all through her childhood and adolescence until they meet in Henry's present day (not a spoiler, the 'present day' meeting is effectively how the book starts). But the love story doesn't quite work for me for the simple reason that I don't really get a good sense of what the attraction or the chemistry is between them. It feels like there's a strong suggestion of predeterminism in this, i.e. the two were somehow destined to be together as illustrated by Henry's sporadic appearances in Clare's proximity throughout her formative years. But such a romance doesn't really make for a heartfelt love story unless the psychology of the characters is properly examined, or the charm of the participants and their interactions expounded properly. I felt Niffenegger did neither, and really what drew them together (apart from physical attraction and horniness which, frankly, seems to be enough for a lasting relationship in Niffenegger's mind) was the fact that Clare was at all willing to have a relationship with a man who uncontrollably disappears back or forward in time for hours or days. But despite the time travel being the central pivot point of the love story that this story is concerned with, I feel like it's dealt with in a fairly patchy way as well. Niffenegger is not really concerned with the science and the philosophy of it, although she touches on it here and there as well as introducing a plot point later where a doctor tries to 'cure' Henry's condition (which I thought was the most intriguing part of the book, and disappointed it fizzled out so unceremoniously). The fact is that time travel is the 'twist' but otherwise this reads completely like a soap opera. Some of the central narrative just feels so incredibly mundane and bland; meeting families, getting married, meeting the friends and exes 'but oh what if time travel'. There's a completely bizarre sequence where one of the central characters has a 'big confession' that they've apparently been meaning to reveal for a long time (although this is the first time we've heard about it) and in a subsequent scene, another character talks about the same 'big confession' in a different way. All of which is perfectly fine if there had been any foreshadowing of this, or if the confession or the fact behind it actually had any implications in the story at all. Instead it just comes across like a part of the episodic nature of a soap opera where suddenly one character is revealed to have a big secret only for the status quo to return immediately. The fact is there are interesting parts to this book and the premise generally, but Niffenegger's prose carries on far longer than the premise can stretch and introduces far too many mundane details about the lifelong saga, without ever drawing me into the character's ways of feeling, for me to care deeply when the big events actually take place and the characters have to make big life-changing decisions. 

46) A Lonely Girl Is a Dangerous Thing - Jessie Tu

I'll be honest: I feel like I want to lift this book up as something provocative from Asian Australian woman, but I simply didn't like this book at all. It tells the story of Jena Lin, a former world-famous child prodigy on the violin and how she navigates life and relationships as a young adult, still focused around her violin playing but far more focused on her sex life. As with The Time Travellers’ Wife, It got off on the wrong foot because it doesn't beat around the bush when it launches straight into detached, matter-of-fact and constant sex scenes early on and doesn't really let up. I'm no prude of course, I enjoy watching footage of BDSM gangbangs as much as the next person, but the point is really the detachment. I don't like Jena's company as the first-person narrator, I think she's selfish, narcissistic and utterly devoid of empathy while also being whiney, self-pitying and obviously self-destructive. Now there's nothing wrong with that if it felt like a critical self-examination, but there's a tone throughout implying that we're meant to feel sorry for her because of the curse of her natural talent, but moreover I feel like the character of a self-destructive narcissist is only really engaging if there's a relatability to her as well. And in this case, there's not a "there but for the grace of God" catch that makes me connect with her on any level. She's got a natural gift, it's both her greatest blessing and her greatest curse, and I spend the entire book reading about how she uses her gifts to manipulate people, begging them to love her, while also using it to destroy herself and any sense of self-identity she might have had from a 'normal' life. But really it's the writing that bothered me more; I can put up with an unpleasant and even annoying protagonist, but Tu writes primarily in an attempted Hemingway mode with short, clipped sentences so there isn't any poetry or emotional impact from the words she uses and yet so much of the actual narration surrounds her lack of emotional fulfilment so it's very unclear what purpose any of this is meant to serve: hence why the detachment during the manifold filthy graphic sex scenes just doesn't work for me. I did have a feeling that the book was heading towards some dramatic climax where her self-destructive spiral ends in something... you know, dangerous, like the title suggested - but the worst thing that happens is (spoiler alert I guess) she… breaks up with the older guy she's been repeatedly fucking. And as if that wasn’t dramatic enough, he calls her a rude word on his way out. Not that I was sadistically waiting for her to receive some kind of comeuppance, but I left her life story wondering why I was supposed to care about what happened to her, and in fact why should I hope for any kind of ending for her - happy or deeply unhappy? The whole thing is so detached from a relatable experience that I just felt nothing.

47) The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

I finally found a copy of this book in my local library this year; I've wanted to read it since – against all odds – really enjoying Atlas Shrugged a few years ago, but not wanting to pay money for it. So to enunciate my thoughts on this I want to get the main crux of my dislike of this book by upfront comparing the two. Atlas Shrugged worked for me because it felt so unique; as a vehicle for a philosophy that runs at odds with mine firstly, but also because the way Rand built the world of Atlas Shrugged felt like a dystopia but from the point of view of the big mega corporations as the protagonists and 'good guys'; that was fascinating. So what worked for me there was that the universe she constructed was in dystopian fashion a version of our own world, recognisable but also hyper-realised and exaggerated in proportions so I could sense the nightmare her rich, self-centred characters were feeling and understand their own struggles. Besides the 100-page John Galt monologue basically, I loved that book. So that comparison being done, let me try to express why The Fountainhead is in so many ways an inferior book. Firstly: reading the two books together it becomes clear fairly quickly that they're not dissimilar. I had hopes that this would come at the same ideas but in a completely different way, but in a reductive sense they are exactly the same story in so many ways (which I won't go into unless I somehow attract the attention and ire of psychotic libertarian bots who want to take issue with some nobody writing a once-a-year blog post). But the world of The Fountainhead really isn't a hyper-realised version of our own: it is our own, but hamfistedly depicted by someone with a very specific world view and cultural agenda to get across. What I found intriguing about this book for a while was the fact that Rand had included more detailed and ambiguous depictions of her 'opponents', particularly Peter Keating who is the protagonist for the first part of the book. Keating is a success, a prodigy, a darling of all who meet him and destined to become one of the world's leading architects. The issue is that Keating has no creative impulses of his own, and succeeds through copying superior talents and charming important people. While Keating was narrated as part of a sympathetic portrait, I found him quite interesting. When he meets his downfall at the exposure of his fraudulence I felt like I'd been duped by Rand's narrative, and it exposed me to how facile and simplistic his portrayal had been all along. Writing from his viewpoint, we see a lot of the decisions he has to make and the struggles he encounters and we can sympathise with them because he often feels caught between what will make him happy for himself and what will make him a success in the world and set him up for the future. His downfall is, from a narrative viewpoint, rushed largely because Rand uses him as a target for her own disdain and spite so it's as if she gleefully can't wait for him to come crashing down to earth. All of which could be interesting story-wise except that of course, in Rand's viewpoint, people are either in complete agreement with her worldview and therefore able to have an original thought for themselves or they are not, in which case they just 'copy the crowd' and can't have a single independent thought for themselves. This is true of the James Taggarts and their ilk from Atlas Shrugged as well, except that we're never given enough depth in James Taggart's character to feel any of his struggles; he exists only really as an avatar onto which the concept of leaching from other's hard work and ingenuity are plastered - hence the hyper-realism and how that narrative works as an unusual, inverted dystopia. When we're given the tools to try and understand characters only for that understanding to be yanked out from under us as a false sympathy portrayed in the same simplistic, one-dimensional way, it feels like a waste of time and effort. And to be clear: I don't for a second view Peter Keating as a sympathetic figure: he's nakedly ambitious and greedy, but the main issue is that Rand depicts him as both unable to escape his fate as an 'uncreative' person but also complicit in the wilful destruction and blockade of the brilliant ingenuity of Howard Roarke (her actual hero in this book whom I haven't mentioned yet because he's such an empty vessel for her objectivist nonsense that he's barely worth considering as a character). So that's mainly how I felt a bit duped and ultimately disappointed with this book because it approached the same ideas from ultimately the exact same perspective, but in such a way as felt like cheap manipulation rather than actually considering other viewpoints in order to tear them down intelligently. Now let me be clear: I consider her ultimate world view as having some merit, and we share some ideals, at least in a superficial way (when Gail Wynand proselytises about the majesty of man-made constructions for instance). But beyond the ways in which she depicts everything in black and white terms, I found large passages of this book to simply be boring. She loves her little anecdotes as a way of introducing character detail, so Ellsworth Toohey and Gail Wynand's biographies tend to consist of dozens upon dozens of little anecdotes of idiosyncratic actions they've taken that take the place here of actual depictions of psychology or, better, being able to draw an understanding of characters through the narrative action itself. These are fine to a point but after about six I absolutely get the point and everything else just seemed like wank. I was willing in spite of the above criticisms to remain open to this book's charms but the final chapter really nailed the coffin shut for me. Apart from the fact that the final struggle between Wynand and the court of public opinion felt interminable just because it dragged on endlessly down and down further into the mire it had set up for itself (a writer concerned with pure drama rather than hammering home a point would have skilfully drawn out the climax in half this many pages). But then for the final 'twist' in the narrative to be delivered by a Howard Roark monologue comparable to the 100-page John Galt monologue in every way apart from length (in that it just recapitulates everything that's already painfully clear to us by this point) felt such a glib and frankly unrealistic ending. John Galt's monologue, for all its faults, felt realistic in the world she'd built and the fact that it fell on deaf ears among the James Taggarts of the story also rang very true to me from how she'd written her points. In this case, Roark doesn't address the court of public opinion at all, but rather manages to convince 12 jurors (selected by him) to his side, where Rand has basically dictated that these 12 jurors are part of Roark's (Rand's) world view and able to think for themselves rather than being part of the throng. If I'm making this sound a bit contrived, believe me when I say I'm just summarising the flagrant contrivances that Rand attempts to depict subtly in the book. Then the court of public opinion goes on unencumbered, Roark is exonerated despite his argument having no legal basis (it's not clear anyway what exactly is the legal basis for the proceedings in the first place and why Roark should be arguing against it in a courtroom instead of taking his case to the public), and everybody lives happily ever after, including the sheeple who go on blindly believing what they're told and never thinking for themselves. I mean one reason why I feel the need to read Rand's work is that I hear a lot of people who I'd otherwise agree with just dismiss her books as poorly written drivel that's not worth the paper they're printed on, and I feel like that in itself is unhelpful because it ignores the fact that her writing is compelling and her worldview seductive for many people. It can be a compelling vision to see yourself as an independent thinker, and everybody who disagrees with you as just blindly following the pack, and I feel her painstaking detail in drawing out the characters not only of Roark, Wynand, Dominique Francon but also Keating and Toohey on the other hand, is part of what makes her fascinating. Of course the fact that her starting point is so skewed means that all of these depictions end up contrived (there is one particular egregious point in the story where a character thanks Roark "just for being you"), and only truly compelling if you agree with them. But as much as I found this novel distasteful in the extreme because of its longueurs, its in-depth detail that yielded only the most superficial insights, I can absolutely see why it's a seductive and life-changing book for people who feel compelled to live in wilful ignorance of other people's viewpoints; namely giving them permission to accept their own perspective as gospel truth and everybody else as somehow brainwashed by a mastermind of conformity. Interesting though that such people so assiduously conform to someone else’s (Rand's) ideals themselves.

Books of 2023 Part 3: 20-11

 Third and middle post as we get to the outskirts of my top ten of the year. The next post, as is tradition, I will yank you back up the other end of my list to count up my bottom 7 (in this year's case) books, before I finish off the top ten and the whole list.

20) Lila - Marilynne Robinson

I had no idea that this follow-up to Gilead and Home existed, nor that there was in fact another, fourth, book in the series until I found them both in my local library. Now I wasn't a really big fan of Gilead because I found it a bit too theological and the prose a bit too elusive; I liked Home a fair bit better but I loved Robinson's earlier (unrelated) novel Housekeeping so that and the intrigue of continuing the series was enough of a drawcard. This story tells the 'back-story' of the Reverend Ames' (the protagonist of Gilead) younger wife Lila, who finds herself outside the town of Gilead as a drifter and catches the kindly attention of Ames. It's not a spoiler (since I would never recommend reading this before the earlier-published two books) to say that she and Ames get married (well der I called her his wife a couple of sentences ago) and have a child together - since Lila and the child feature prominently in the conflict in the first book. I found this generally a very fulfilling back-story filling the gaps and further deepening the characters in Gilead who we already know. I will admit though I had to re-read a synopsis of Gilead to fill in my own gaps here, which I think is a shortcoming as it's not only hard to fully grasp the situations here without having read Gilead but I'd say it's hard without having read Gilead quite recently (we're talking at least ten years since I read it). Given Ames' prominence in this story as well there is certainly still a heavy reliance on theology, but Lila as more of an outsider gives a perspective that I find more relatable than reading everything through Ames' own lens. But I did have a few quibbles with some elements of this story: firstly, Robinson paints an overly-idealised picture of small town America, or at least her particular small town America, where everybody is full of the milk of human kindness and is nothing but helpful and charitable to the poor Lila without any reservations or suspicions. I found this particularly pronounced because the story is told from Lila's perspective and covers a lot of her mistrust of people (including Ames) so the fact that there is virtually no conflict at all apart from a slight distrust between Lila and Ames' long-term friend Boughton just rings false to me, both in terms of Lila's own view of things and more generally in terms of humans suck, so 'as if'. I feel there's a bit of a sanitisation of the darker side of human nature in the way Robinson writes her characters; this is particularly pronounced in a flashback sequence where Lila spent time living in a whorehouse in St Louis and sex is not mentioned a single time. If this book were your first introduction to the concept of a whorehouse you'd think it was a boarding house for wayward girls where men visit occasionally just to be entertained (through chatting and card games I guess) in the parlour in the company of everybody. But relatedly, the whole of Lila's backstory felt a bit contrived to me in that it's almost entirely told chronologically (with just occasional flashes forward to things that will happen later). I often find this a bit of an issue with any story telling about a character's past in bits and pieces but given some of the experiences Lila has had it would feel more vibrant and realistic to me if it were told more haphazardly and with more of an emphasis on the more recent and more traumatic incidents that then feed into her processing the events that came earlier. Otherwise the 'revelation' of details in the order that they happened is just too much of a storybook convention and doesn't feel like the way Lila would recall or even narrate her own life story. All of which quibbles equates to me finding the narrative a bit lacking in impact, but overall the tone has a beautiful melancholy to it; I did find Lila an intriguing if elusive hero, and her relationship with Ames an unusual but warm-hearted love story.

19) Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix - JK Rowling

(Mandatory disclaimer that Jo Rowling is a horrible human being and if you also feel the need to read these, you should do it for free by supporting your local library, as I did)

I'm committed to continuing to the finish of this series at least so I can have done it, and having read this book I've now caught up to where I got up to with watching the movies (I didn't get this film at all when I saw it mainly because it was such a long gap between seeing the fourth film and this that I'd forgotten practically every bit of continuity). So I actually have no idea what happens after this point in the story from anything, so no spoilers please and I hope nothing silly and absurd happens like, I don't know, Snape kills Dumbledore or anything. Anyway, having not enjoyed the film and being told from multiple sources that this is one of the two worst books in the series, I actually enjoyed it a lot more than I expected. Certainly there's less of a good framing device as the previous two books; Professor Umbridge and her sinister bureaucracy provides a source of neverending and escalating conflict, but just doesn't have as clear a start and end point as the Triwizard tournament of the fourth book, and has less intrigue than the mystery around Sirius Black and his escape from the third book. But one of the clear reasons I enjoyed this is that Fred and George Weasley have always been my favourite characters in this series, and here they're almost co-protagonists with Harry, given that they share a lot of the same fate as him and experience a lot of the same critical plot points concurrently. This does have a lot of the same shortcomings as the previous book otherwise though; in particular I found Harry mostly an irritating character throughout this book, beyond his pubescent hormones he's a frustrating Hamlet-esque figure of indecision but also often making completely the wrong decision in a way that breaks any emotional connection I may have had with him. There's one point following the climactic finale here where he encounters Snape again and the narrative says something like "Harry knew he would never forgive Snape" and I'm not in any way sure even within the reality of this book what he's supposedly not forgiving Snape for, especially given everything new that he's learned about Snape recently. I think it's meant to be perpetuating the big seven-book-long reveal of Snape actually being a good guy in the end but this same idea seems to happen in every individual book, and that particular line makes it seem like Harry's more committed to the trope of Snape being his antagonist than the narrative is and it rang completely false to me. There's also the most predictable trope Rowling uses here of the actual villain of the piece being dumb at the crucial time, when Umbridge openly goes along with Hermione's obviously fake story and - for some reason - goes alone with the two of them to the forbidden forest, in exactly the way that 'fake Moody' sat Harry down at the end of the previous book and spent twenty pages patiently explaining everything that happened in the past 12 months and got around to finishing and killing Harry _just_ in time for Dumbledore to burst in and save the day. The other weakness is that the resolution and explanation of this book takes far too long, and it diminishes the effect of the climax I feel, making it less of an emotional cliffhanger and more of a long drawn-out emotional journey to the elven afterlife. So while I enjoyed the read of this more than I expected, there are obvious things that set this apart as a lesser book than the previous couple.

18) Prosopagnosia - Sònia Hernández

I think I picked this up in the library for the holy duality of it being short and written by a woman. The fact that at the time one of my favourite books from this year was also from a Spanish writer hitherto unknown to me was a delightful bonus. But besides having those points in its favour, this ended up being quite an interesting book. The disorder of the title refers generally to the inability to recognise faces, but in the context of the book refers to a game that the narrator's adolescent daughter plays where she holds her breath in front of a mirror to the point where she nearly passes out and cannot recognise her own face in the mirror. The daughter forms the main crux of the story, dealing as she is with typical teenage angst, but coupled with the fact that her (narrator) mother is dealing with her own insecurities and neuroses and seems unable to understand or relate to her daughter's struggles. The two butt heads when the daughter is befriended by a famous artist recently moved to their town, and the mother takes it on herself to interview the artist and write up a profile for her regional newspaper. Where the story then goes becomes a short but tangled exploration of identity and self-image, where some characters are perfectly competent in their skin but never feel it, while others adopt different personas to forge their own identity and lift up their own self-worth. I feel that being a short book, some of the ideas weren't necessarily explored in the depth they maybe warranted, but Hernandez adopts the mother's voice in such a blunt way that it doesn't obviously tease out ambiguities. While the mother is not precisely an unreliable narrator, a lot of her words are coloured by her own uncertainties about herself and her own abilities so in order to explore the book's ideas in great depth I feel it would be useful to dispense with a lot of the narrator's own commentary - something which is difficult in such a short story. At the very least, the book raises interesting questions about the value of art and how art helps us make sense of ourselves and our own realities, and it does so in ways that are curiously elusive enough to ponder and bring your own interpretation to.

17) Here Is the Beehive - Sarah Crossan

I picked this up in the same batch of library books as David Copperfield and Mansfield Park so it sat on my shelf for a good long while before I finished those two and finally got around to this. Then I managed to finish this in a couple of days. It’s an easy read in some ways because it’s all told in piecemeal, scattered prose, structured like miniature poems but also flowing like a stream of consciousness. So it’s partially an easy read because it’s about a third of the length it looks, with all the paragraph breaks throughout. But it’s also easy to read because it’s fairly gripping. It’s written from the perspective of Ana, a lawyer who gets a call from the wife of a man she’s been having an affair with, to inform her (Ana, besides being his mistress, has been acting as his lawyer) that her husband is dead. We then enter Ana’s torment as she reflects back on the affair, jumping back to how it all began and then back to the present as she deals with its aftermath. Ana is a broken and flawed person, but her interior grief through the book is compelling, in part because it’s done in a jaunty but ironic kind of style, and partly because it’s somehow relatable even removed from its subject matter as I am (honest, Bec; I’ve never been a lawyer). She composes her monologue while addressing it to ‘you’, Connor, her dead ex-lover, and trying to explain her way through her grief and her unanswered questions even while she condemns herself for everything she did and didn’t do. Ultimately it becomes relatable because Ana’s struggles are more a craving for connection, for meaningful relationships where she feels inadequate and inferior to people around her. But I will say that all of this does feel like the substance feels like it’s there because it’s easy to read and read it all into it. But it’s never fully clear why the piece is written in this style or what is at the end of the stream that she lets flow; which is to say that the themes and the emotional resonance are there but I feel they’re drawn out more by the easily-parsed style and its abrupt, staccato qualities, not necessarily because there’s a depth in meaning. I fear that it may just be a book that’s written cleverly to avoid having to get to the heart of what it’s struggling with, and possibly because it wouldn’t be relatable or as enjoyable if it did.

16) The Wind Through the Keyhole - Stephen King

I found myself after finishing the whole of the Dark Tower series that I didn't really have much of an appetite for this book, published years after the rest of the series as a kind of 'addendum' situated temporally between books four and five. But I saw this on the shelf this year and absolutely thought "why not", it's been a couple of years and, like King himself talks about in his foreword, I'm interested in what else these characters have to say. I guess my main takeaway from this book though is that it really is an addendum, and is not in any way a necessary part of the series; it's very much just a curiosity from the author dipping his toe again in mid-world and letting his storytelling prowess take over. It effectively tells two, two and a half max, stories, all nested Matryoshka-style within each other. There's a wraparound section of Roland and his ka-tet (Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy) taking shelter during a deadly storm, and to pass the storm Roland tells them a story (following Wizard and Glass which ostensibly is the exact same format) from his youth, and within this story he tells to another character a celebrated fable called The Wind Through the Keyhole. The two main stories have their own compelling elements to them, and King weaves his unique blend of mythology, fantasy, science-fiction and western frontier tales throughout them. I think just owing to the fact that it's the one narrative that isn't interrupted, I was more invested in the central story that shares the book's title and felt the impact of that narrative the strongest, while the story from Roland's youth suffered a little from being completely side-railed by the interruption, and I simply wasn't as caught up in that action by the time we returned to it. The narrative wraparound set in the present day is effectively pointless and only really there as a framing device (hence my comment about two and a half max). But as staggered as the story is and as ultimately pointless as it is as well, I enjoyed it. It's a nice little splash in the pond of the mythology that King weaved so effectively throughout the Dark Tower series, and it feels like a little petits fours course as an afterthought, where each story has its own stakes and is contained within its own narrative, but thematically it all ties in with the classic ideas of fate and doom and courage that the rest of the series explored in great depth.

15) Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut

This was a really interesting story collection, and for some reason I didn't realise that this was originally published in 1968 - even before Slaughterhouse-Five was published. I felt as I was reading it that it was a sort of whole career retrospective published long after most of Vonnegut's major works, but only retroactively twigged to the fact that all the stories carry dates from the 50s and 60s. It reaffirms my belief in Vonnegut as one of the keenest observers of human nature of the last century, as well as a remarkably forward-thinking writer who was ahead of his time in many ways. Reading this collection he has a vast array of incisive commentary on advances in science and their effect on humanity, on the class divide and the discrepancy between "haves" and "have-nots" and the exercise/misuse of government powers. It's fair to say that Vonnegut would be considered as a capital S socialist from these works which invariably tend to advocate for a sense of collective good and communities of people working towards a common purpose. But where this story collection maybe falters a little is the fact that all of these ideas are prevalent in his novels as well, and sometimes some big ideas are explored here in a kind of glib fashion in order to keep the stories short and punchy. That works excellently most of the time, but at other times it exposes Vonnegut's shortcomings as a writer, namely that he's got quite a casual, laconic narrative style, so for him to get to the point quickly - when the point is quite a poignant observation or devastating critique - feels quite rushed. So some stories - I'll single out "All the King's Horses", "D.P" and "The Euphio Question" - manage to get their point across well through his heavy use of irony, while others - such as "Harrison Bergeron" and "Unready to Wear" - feel too heavy in their world-building to reach their conclusion in such a hurried manner. What makes somebody like Alice Munro such a devastatingly effective writer in short form is that she's so economical and efficient at drawing characters and their feelings that I get sucked into the world of each story immediately, whereas Vonnegut's chief failure here is that he often cares more about ideas and the satire. As a result I don't get as drawn into sympathy with the characters which means the stories can feel like a train passing by. But it only marks a shortcoming with some stories, and for the most part it's a lovely collection of funny, poignant and disturbing prose from a master of evoking all of those feelings at once.

14) The Undefeated - Una McCormack

This is a really good, engaging start of a story. At least it feels that way. I mean I picked this up mainly because it was short and otherwise seemed interesting enough, so I shouldn't really complain that it feels unfinished. But the trouble is that I did really enjoy what I got from this and felt that it could have just been the first two parts of a longer story. We're introduced to our protagonist Monica, a famed front-line journalist in this universe of the ‘commonwealth’ spread across a planetary system including "old Earth", and the story is framed around the fact that "they're coming". Who is "they" isn't really specified at first (I think; it's made clear who 'they' are by the end but I'm not sure if I missed obvious hints earlier or if it is meant to be a bit of a reveal by the end), but we follow Monica to one of the more far-flung planets that's likely to be the most vulnerable when 'they' arrive. We're then taken on a bit of a flashback to Monica's childhood and told of how she and her mother abandoned this planet she's returned to after the death of Monica's father. So in essence we're dropped in the middle of this story, then told the beginning and how we came to be here, but essentially the book ends with 'their' arrival still imminent but not really here so it doesn’t feel like we get the ‘end’. It would effectively be a different story if McCormack reached that point, and while it's no doubt a conscious choice to restrict the scope of her story to how the current situation came about, and just leaving us with this sense of doom and how the human race and the commonwealth may have brought this doom on themselves. Nevertheless by clipping it off so short I couldn't help but wonder if McCormack didn't really know what to do with any supposed 'end' to this story, or potentially she felt that there wasn't that much intrigue or ambiguity and that mankind's fate is essentially sealed so we're supposed to leave the story questioning how our current existence ties in with humanity in this dystopia and how we could escape such a potential fate. I did enjoy this book and I think McCormack did a good job of efficient world-building; certainly leaning on some familiar generic tropes but without exploiting them to fill in gaps, and I felt there was more depth in this story to explore had she made the choice to continue the narrative for longer. I do get it, though: I feel it may have been a risk to follow it through to the end, which could have had far more impact or possibly could have cheapened the efficient and effective storytelling up to this point.

13) The Dispossessed - Ursula Le Guin

Thinking about it, it's funny that it's taken me this long to read my second Le Guin novel. I read "The Left Hand of Darkness" as part of a course in uni which was almost 20 years (!!!) ago now and I simply haven't thought about seeking out any more of her stuff. So I just came upon this one in the library and picked it up. If truth be told, although my reading was more enjoyable this time than with Left Hand mainly because this was purely for entertainment, I think my thoughts are fairly similar. I certainly respect this as a book and I think there's a lot of interesting social and political commentary going on, but at the same time I don't think the book especially gripped me or made me feel very strongly at any point. It's kind of hard to summarise the plot without going into lots of byzantine detail but basically it's the story of a visit to the 'mother planet' by a citizen of an off-world colony and his exploration of the 'mother planet', told in tandem with his upbringing and the back story of how he came to be chosen as the visitor in the first place. I think Le Guin is incredibly adept at world-building and exposition, so there isn't any particularly long passages or explicit narratorial interventions 'explaining' things to the audience; she has the political machinations, social conventions and communication styles very well plotted out so she's able to dole out the world-building unnoticeably as the book goes on. Shevek, our protagonist, is an intriguing conduit to examining the differences between the worlds by virtue of him having an immense amount of scientific know-how but an almost child-like naiveté (due to deliberate obfuscation of knowledge-sharing between the worlds) when it comes to social and cultural norms. So as the reader we tend to learn things at the same pace that he does, and become acquainted both with the customs of the world and the underlying motives of a lot of these customs. The nature of the political machinations in the book, obscuring a lot of the underlying 'truth' from Shevek as his hosts take him around and give him space to do his work, means that when these revelations come to him it's quite late in the story and quite abrupt, and this is perhaps the most intriguing part of Le Guin's storytelling here. Early on a lot of the political commentary she's putting forward is similar to the revolutionary work that Shevek is doing in the field of physics, in the sense that it's all theory and all hypothetical, and when it becomes manifest and tangible it's quite expedited by virtue of it suddenly becoming a reality after a long time of existing only in theory. While the main shortcoming of the book is that I didn't really feel anything quite strongly (apart - as a sidenote - from a bit of awkward cringe at sex scenes which are just clunky), academically it's certainly an interesting book particularly given how much of the narrative is deliberately centred around the mundane and everyday veneer that is placed over Shevek's surroundings in order to make the abrupt jolt back into harsh reality all the more jarring, and that makes her political thesis all the more effective and interesting.

12) The House of the Dead - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I escorted this one up from my book storage in our shed garage a while back when I was concerned about having nothing to read, and have otherwise had this on my shelf for a few years. So I finally found myself in a position to read it, with enough time and insufficient alternative options, in mid-January this year and it took me literally to the last day of January to finish it off. It's not that it's a poorly written book or that its subject matter is not interesting, but there's very little in the way of narrative arc or story here. It really is just a sequence of unstructured observations about life in a Siberian prison, ostensibly told by a fictional nobleman who 'the author'/'editor' comes across in the form of written notes - but we historically of course know that it's just Dostoyevsky documenting his own experiences as a political prisoner. Prison journalism, observations such as these, is not really a 'genre' that I'm overly familiar with, so this kind of thing feels like a prototype for modern-day jail narratives like Falconer or indeed, The Shawshank Redemption or even Oz to a certain extent (with significantly fewer Latino gangs and gay love stories). But being set in Siberia in the nineteenth century, there's very little in the way of outward violence or even aggression here; actually Dostoyevsky paints a curiously detached portrait of the civility that comes from people encountering the same misfortunes and befallen to the same fate. Indeed the worst fate that befalls anybody is being subjected to lashings as a form of corporal punishment, and he doesn't take either pleasure or care in describing the action as so many since then have done, but focuses mainly on the men's attitude towards it and how philosophically some of the inmates are in dealing with it. But beyond it taking me a long time to finish, the fact that there isn't really a narrative arc is certainly a shortcoming of the book in that it's hard to really get caught up in the emotional heft of it. The particular stories he tells, the men he writes about, end up being too various in terms of interest and ordinariness, with some exchanges feeling too mundane to warrant inclusion and others feeling like they're dealt with more glibly because the narrator himself didn't put much stock in it at the time. If I were to offer one of the most revered writers in history some tips on narrative building for his book he wrote while in prison, I'd suggest he cut it down to about half the length and restrict it purely to the stories that connected to other stories, as it was hard for me to bridge the gap between mentions of particular characters or indeed a timeline of the events from the way it's put together. But on the whole there were lots of compelling elements to this and it’s a fascinating slice of history.

11) Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K Jerome

I read this following The Fountainhead and it was really the perfect antidote. For one reason there are no big ideas explored in this book - successfully or otherwise: it very much is a story of three friends preparing for and taking a boat trip up the Thames. It's also a very funny book, and having read it now I can see its influence in a lot of the British comedy I grew up watching, from The Goodies right up to Ricky Gervais sitcoms. The predominant source for the humour here seems to centre around unwarranted hubris, where one or other of the characters - Harris, George and Jerome himself (although this is not made explicit as he's just the first person narrator) - takes it on themselves to perform some feat or gets a stubborn idea in their head and are unwilling to shake it in the face of overwhelming opposition. You can see even just in that description where the influence could be seen in characters like David Brent and Basil Fawlty. At one point I had tears in my eyes from laughing so much, when Jerome narrates his friend Harris' attempts to perform 'a comic song' in a public space, together with heckler comments, and consistently gets it wrong and gets more and more confused as he goes on. The book is also well-written enough that even the anachronistic elements of the cultural and practical niceties of the boat trip don't feel like too much of a cultural remove, and the jokes and comedic situations certainly don't date the book a great deal either. But at the end of the day, the story doesn't really go anywhere and I found the ending a little curtailed. If I had hopes for this book beyond being funny, I'd have hoped that it might at least offer some great crisis relating to the trip itself that might drive narrative or even let the book descend into a kind of chaos, and instead it was quite abrupt and ultimately uneventful. As a result the book overall felt like a neat and amusing little diversion without anything besides a short entertainment to offer the reader. And that's fine too because it doesn't purport to do anything else.

Books of 2023 Part 2: 30-21

 30) Blue Flowers - Carola Saavedra

This book was kind of an intriguing premise that I think ended up getting lost a bit in its execution. It starts with a love letter written to an unnamed recipient from the sender identified only by the initial "A". We then find out in the following chapter that the person who opens and reads this letter is not the intended recipient at all, but the new occupant of the house where it was addressed. This is basically both the premise, and the entire story, as the book consists of alternating love letters and the story of the man who receives and reads them, and the effect these letters have on his own life and relationships. Where the book falls down for me is that the letters themselves are all very long, and they're written from a perspective of having recently separated, where there doesn't seem to be much of an end goal. The writer is not necessarily trying to get back with the recipient, but is rather writing out her own feelings and recounting the last day they spent together, but revealing it piece by piece, letter by letter. Her writing therefore comes across as quite self-indulgent and overly elaborate and floral as she interrogates profundities like the nature of love and how their relationship came to the end that it did. There is verisimilitude in the sense that she wouldn't need to reveal all the details of the breakup all at once since they both supposedly lived through it, but the letters started to get tedious to me, and the story overall did likewise, because it was following the same formula but never making any progress to a next step. The story of the actual recipient and how he starts to fantasise about meeting the writer of these letters became more intriguing but at the same time, more ambivalent and actually rather disturbing by the end and depth of his obsession. I honestly feel this would work better as a short story - that would be necessarily more efficiently written - that could really pack quite an emotional punch; the premise and Saavedra's execution doesn't really add value from having stretched the premise out to a 200-page novel.

29) A Delicate Truth - John LeCarré

I went through a few stages when reading this (I think it's now my third LeCarré novel), and the stages I went through I think were deliberately designed by LeCarré's tinkering (HA. Pun. Because he wrote... nevermind) with the more conventional story structure. The first chapter takes us through the stages of an unknown operative known only by his undercover pseudonym bearing witness to an anti-terrorist operation in Gibraltar, whose outcome remains ambiguous by the end of the chapter. Then the second chapter takes us to a completely new protagonist at a completely different time, and it's only at the end of this chapter that the connection to the first becomes clear. The third chapter yanks us to yet another brand new protagonist at yet another time, and only here do the three chapters finally coalesce into a coherent whole. All of this made for quite compelling reading though, because there was another layer of mystery overlain on LeCarré's bailiwick of ambiguous espionage fiction, in this case namely the mystery that he was casting over his own narrative and how each of these characters play their role. It helps of course that his writing is always tight, and efficient, and his in-depth understanding of the inner workings and politics of Whitehall and their international relations are always on conscious display in even the most banal interpersonal dialogue. But unfortunately for me, once the substance of that extraneous mystery became revealed, the narrative became far more conventional. It becomes more of a typical spy thriller, with our operatives working against the clock to discover and reveal the "delicate" truth before their enemies discover that they're after it. It has the same page-turner quality, but there are some thinner parts to the narrative: a couple of extremely questionable decisions from characters that feel a bit ridiculous even in the context of the story, and there's a bit of a tacked-on romance subplot that plays a slight role late in the story but isn't really delved into in great depth so it felt a bit unnecessary. Ultimately I got pretty much what I expected from this: a cerebral thriller with a touch of commentary on international politics. I did feel early on that it would go in a different direction and perhaps be even more subversive than his commentary usually is, but despite a couple of odd forays into deep state conspiracy theory territory, I don't feel there was much more going on here than a typical cover-up thriller and that ultimately felt a bit of a letdown after an intriguing narrative conceit.

28) From a Low and Quiet Sea - Donal Ryan

This was an interesting book in some ways because I read it two books after reading the very book that preceded this, A Delicate Truth by John Le Carré, and this has the same subversive story structure as that in terms of switching between narratives and perspectives. The first part is the story of a doctor in a war-torn part of the world (I think it's later implied it's Syria) trying to get his family to safety through people smugglers; it then switches quite dramatically to be from the perspective of Lampy, a young Irish man living in a small town around the Limerick area, while the third part tells another story from the same area from another character's perspective and at another time. When the first shift occurred the story was striking me as if the point was to contrast the suffering of the Syrian doctor and his family with the trivial concerns that bother people in everyday Irish life. That may be one of its purposes, but like the LeCarré (or more aptly, like an early Alejandro González Iñárritu film), the stories all end up converging at the conclusion, and it's really the third story that obfuscates the book's overall purpose to me. This third part takes the form of a man in a confessional telling the story of how he started with small sins as a child before developing these as a grown-up to the point where he now sees himself as beyond redemption. While the stories all dovetail at the end, it all feels like a bit of a coincidence contrived by the author rather than the coincidences serving some grander thematic purpose. To continue with the Iñarritu comparison, the third story fits into this the way the Japanese story fits in with the other far-more-intertwined stories in Babel, and its connection to the first story is really only philosophically hinted at in the very last few paragraphs of the book. So the conceit of the book being about these parallel stories that come together, it didn't really successfully draw me in. And as much as I was successfully drawn in by the individual stories, the fact that there isn't really any thematic connection and they only exist in the same universe in the sense that, you know, they all happen on earth, just means that the ambition of the story falls flat beyond just being "a story of three different people doing stuff". I guess I'm sounding critical on it though mainly because I thought it was a good book, but I feel like Ryan could have done more to draw out resonance between the stories or even sharp contrasts, but I feel like they existed completely independently and manifested in their own styles so it's really only a narrative gewgaw that allows them to coexist at all; just some minor additions and tweaks could have taken me aback a great deal more when the conclusion comes about.

 27) The Friend - Sigrid Nunez

It was a long time after finishing this book that I ended up writing it up, mainly because I was finishing it while we were moving house and unpacking, which then bled into Christmas and I ended up just forgetting large chunks of it. The truth is I found the book a bit patchy anyway, and that just serves as a reminder that it's completely the wrong book to leave a long gap in between finishing and summarising one's thoughts on, since there isn't a very clear story here to piece together as a reminder. The book is the form of a kind of stream of consciousness but largely written in the second person by our unnamed narrator as she dictates this story and her thoughts to a close writer friend who has recently passed away. I say a "kind of stream of consciousness" because the writing is more structured and easy to follow than that term usually conjures up, but the point is the narrative consists of a series of unconnected thoughts and anecdotes where the narrator will be reminded of something or will muse on something else, and most of the time these little skits and slices of life are not really connected to each other. There is an overarching story, or at least a story that develops, and that's where the title of the book comes: specifically the "friend" refers to an enormous Great Dane left behind by "you" the departed friend, and whom our narrator adopts following his death. The blurb and so forth seem to suggest that this book is about the relationship she develops with the dog - and it is - but because the writing is so disconnected it felt like more of a sideshow to her musings to me, and in fact it took me a while to realise that "the friend" of the title referred to the dog, and not the relationship between narrator and dead-guy (since she reveals that throughout his life she was notoriously close to this womanising academic, without becoming one of his conquests). Mostly what this book gave me though was the voice of a well-read, erudite woman with great life experience, and as scattered as her thoughts were and patchy the narrative was, I did enjoy her company throughout. It's important to note though that part of the reason I feel I enjoyed her company was that a lot of the literary touchstones she referenced - Flannery O'Connor, Kafka, J.M Coetzee among many others - I myself am quite familiar with, so I could understand the references quite well (the exception being Rilke, who is probably referenced more often and in more depth than others). I can imagine this book falling quite flat - as, for instance, did The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco for me - if the constant literary name-drops were unfamiliar to the reader, but in my case the musings and observations were interesting and engaging, and that made the reading overall a success, even if the story was unclear and the ultimate point of the story a bit elusive as well.

26) Cities of the Plain - Cormac McCarthy 

I think this book has been in my local library for years, but I always felt I had to read the rest of the Border trilogy first, and when I read The Crossing I felt I didn’t need to have waited until I read All the Pretty Horses first, as those two books are completely unrelated. This one however completes the trilogy and is useful to have read the previous two as it unites the main protagonists of the previous two books and explores their lives after all the traumatic incidents of their own individual stories. I had high hopes for that premise but I think I probably liked this the least of the three. For the most part it felt a bit like it was going through the motions, and I didn't really get a great sense of what was 'at stake' in this book. I think by contrast with the other two, this one felt more 'grown up' like John and Billy had survived to tell the tales but no longer being boys, this felt like less of a life or death struggle and there wasn't that sense of the innocence of adolescence being corrupted by the brutal landscape they inhabited. Here they feel part of that landscape, and the only real crisis of the story becomes a star-crossed love story, which in itself felt a little familiar and a lot of the story beats kind of predictable. Not that McCarthy is ever a predictable writer, but it encapsulates my not really feeling the emotional stakes: there felt to be a fatalism to the way this story unfolds, and having surpassed all the trials in All the Pretty Horses, John Grady Cooper's love story felt like a bit of an indulgence rather than constantly struggling against the odds just to survive. McCarthy weaves the story deftly though, and while I wasn't fully invested in the characters on this occasion he does paint the characters and their own feelings with enough clarity that I'm engaged with the story. But ultimately what would have felt like a decent if not harrowing conclusion to the story did lose track a bit in the epilogue where an ageing Billy meets an old Mexican (?) man who outlines his philosophy about life and death, which felt like McCarthy proselytising at the end when the exact same message was portrayed with plenty of clarity simply through the events we've just read through. It felt both tacked on and protracted and actually kind of cheapened a lot of McCarthy's impressive narrative voice that's so efficient otherwise throughout this trilogy.

25) The End of the Affair - Graham Greene

I've resisted reading this one for a long time, mainly because I went through a Graham Greene-reading phase a few years ago where I read all the books in my local library except for this one, and the reason for skipping this was that I've watched Neil Jordan's film adaptation of the same, and I loved that film adaptation so I just didn't have the enthusiasm for reading this book. It's been a few years now, so I was luckily able to read this with most of the plot points only vaguely recalled enough so it still developed with some surprises as it came along. But if I'm honest, the truth is I think I still prefer the film adaptation, whereas other Greene books have intrinsically worked their magic on me in a way that this one didn't. Part of my fuzzy remembrance of the film may be to blame: for instance I thought that the reason for Sarah breaking off the affair of the title was more of a revelation later in the story; this may be an adjustment made by Jordan and Greene himself (who wrote the screenplay for the adaptation) but I think it's more that Jordan makes more of a 'twist' of it whereas here it's just a middle section of the narrative, and because it's delivered through Sarah's journal entries we don't really get Bendrix's reaction to them in real time. I also found the film wonderfully melodramatic in an oldskool 50s kind of way, and the score really helps bring out the emotions in the style; in prose form it feels a bit stodgy when you're trying to evoke the same feelings. But really the main issue (and I apologise for the fact that this book writeup is largely a comparison between page and screen but that's just how I experienced this book) is that Bendrix in first-person narrator form is really quite insufferable; by contrast the film of this is really the film that solidifed my rule about Ralph Fiennes which goes: there are two types of films: films that aren't as good as they could have been, and films with Ralph Fiennes in them. Even in his self-serving obnoxiousness, Fiennes has an unmistakeable charm to him and the attachment people have to him makes more sense in the film, whereas in this book I just found him a pompous twerp, didn't enjoy his company at all and didn't understand why everybody else sought him out so much. I mean part of the point of the book is that he's an unreliable narrator, starting out making it a story about hate and anger at Sarah and the fact that she broke off their affair so suddenly and the revelations that happen make him question his whole outlook. But with only his perspective to show it, his misguidedness becomes quite annoying and the less I found I could relate to him, the more the emotion of the book became lost on me. The point is that usually when I read a book after seeing the film adaptation, I find new depths that I hadn't found in the film (or the perspective of the story is completely different, as per One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). But I think Greene's perspective in his narrative is especially Catholic - this does feel in some ways the most overtly 'grappling with Catholicism' of all of his very Catholic books - and it becomes a bit back-and-forth between the different contradictions the characters are feeling. The film in some ways probably simplifies this to make it a more straightforward narrative, but apart from Bendrix's obnoxiousness I found the wallowing in contradictions and faith and disbelief felt a bit too dense to wade through in order to find that emotional resonance.

24) Murder in the Crooked House - Soji Shimada

This is the second time I feel I've picked up two similarly-themed books in the same library trip because I read this shortly after Cat Among the Pigeons by Agatha Christie, and consequently couldn't help but compare the two. This one definitely has a post-modern self-awareness to it, in that Shimada presents the narrative alongside a number of illustrations and diagrams showing the layout of the house and various crime scenes so that he frequently winks at the audience and invites us (at times explicitly) along the quest to solve the puzzle. This means that I wasn't at all really drawn into the drama, and there's an excess of that self-awareness as it goes on that basically makes it more of a puzzle than a compelling story. I believe Shimada is a veteran of the crime fiction scene in Japan even though this was my first exposure to him, so I feel like he understands his audience and in that sense this book is quite fun as a piece of pure entertainment, but it has little beyond that. Those same qualities also made the book drag a bit for me, especially in act 2 when the police investigators who are staying in this crooked house and preventing everybody leaving while they try to solve the mystery have these long dialogues where they just discuss all the aspects of the case but frequently interject with comments about how frustrated they're becoming and how they can't make head or tail of it. That sort of drags a bit because Shimada tends not to reveal any new clues during this section, but keeps circling back to the same puzzles that they've been dealing with before, but primarily this dragged for the very reason that I had correctly identified the murderer in the first act, and I'd correctly guessed it because frankly there are only two viable suspects and it's obvious it could only be one of those. Meanwhile the investigators constantly keep returning to motive, and trying to work out which of the 12 or so people in the house could possibly have the motive and drawing blanks, and I kept silently screaming at them "It doesn't matter! It's obvious who did it! Just work out how they did it and worry about the motive later!". There's one particular plot point that happens early on, where I knew what was going on mainly because it has distinct echoes of a similar plot point in Agatha Christie's Murder in Mesopotamia, and Shimada includes an irritatingly deliberate obfuscation of the facts, which then becomes this big twist down the line when the connection between two (quite obviously connected) mysteries becomes clear to the characters. That irritated me early on because I was thinking, why is nobody drawing this connection between these two events when they're so obviously related or at least could be related even if you haven’t read Murder in Mesopotamia. In the end, the answer to the mystery, the way it's revealed and the way all the clues fit together, that's all quite enjoyable so to Shimada's credit, he does understand that his key task in crafting this story is to set up the puzzle and make sure the logic all works and then work the story around it, but there were just a couple of glaring issues where he was too self-consciously skirting the clues to avoid giving it away, yet I felt like he basically knocked over all the other vases in trying to deftly tiptoe around the really precious one. It's an enjoyable country house murder novel that is very aware of how enjoyable it could be and sometimes tries too hard to entertain with its puzzle rather than focusing on the story.

23) Eventide - Therese Bohman

No reason to have picked this up; it felt quite short and quite written by a woman so that was enough, sight unseen. I think ultimately this is an interesting book more because of the themes that aren't explicitly stated rather than because of the action. Story-wise anything that centres around the academia of art history is unlikely to be chock full of car chases of course. The story revolves around Karolina Andersson, an academic who focuses on the depiction of women throughout a particular period of art history. While women are the focus of her work, the story that this narrative tells centres almost entirely on Karolina’s interactions with men. Having just left her husband after twenty years, she finds herself ricocheting from one romantic misadventure to another. It's clearly implied that Karolina remains an attractive woman and she becomes the object of desire for a series of professional and casual acquaintances - but seldom the object of actual lasting affection. The book explores Karolina's reflections and feelings during this time with a mix of pathos and what could only be described as self-pity, which brings me to one of Bohman's presumably deliberate but strange choices, which is to have left this book narrated in third-person. Given that we spend the entirety of the book in Karolina's company, often in her thoughts about herself and her future and her love life, it seems like a strange choice not to move to first person voice. At the point where I realised this I wondered then if it was a deliberate choice, in that some parts of the story revolve around awkward social exchanges and misadventures, and viewing it from the outside gives it more of a sitcom feel rather than the embarrassing cringe one could experience seeing it through her own eyes. But it's also an interesting perspective since frankly this book I think would fail the Bechdel test quite astoundingly for a book entirely about a woman trying to figure out her life. I can remember only one exchange between women in the entire book, that involves a PhD student in her department offering Karolina a cinnamon bun (which Karolina refuses). I can't help but feel there's an implied internalised misogyny in Karolina's character, in that she struggles to find or even seek any meaningful female company and seems to place all of her self-worth on the value that men give her. Which does make the denouement of the story more effective when it comes. Without going into detail Karolina up-ends a couple of her male relationships in one fell swoop, which frees her into a newfound sense of independence with a sense of uncertainty where hitherto she's been seeking little beyond validation from her male admirers. It's an engaging and clever ending that renders what could have been a dull, academically-minded book into a more trenchant exploration of femininity and self-realisation.

22) Permafrost - Alastair Reynolds 

This book suffers from a number of the same issues I found with Made Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky (still to come of course), but I think this one handles them a lot better. Of course I picked both of these up purely because they were short, so it seems a bit cavalier that I complain about them both ultimately feeling too short, but that's the case. Maybe I would never have read these if they'd been as long as I feel they needed to be, but that's a hypothetical story for another day. For now, there is Permafrost: set in a post-apocalyptic scenario in remote Russia, it tells the story of a kind of ‘humanity's last hope’ where they are harnessing the power of time travel to alter the present by salvaging parts of the past. The premise is solid and I think the story beats are generally well executed as well; unlike Made Things I feel this story relied less on genre tropes, but I think that's more because Reynolds uses them more skilfully so they serve a purpose in the narrative rather than just patching together the bits and pieces of his story in a rush to get to the finish line. What didn't really work for me here though is the fact that the chronology jumps all over the place. That feels like a stylistic trope Reynolds has employed to no great purpose here, when realistically this story would pack far more of an emotional punch if we followed it chronologically from our protagonist Valentina being recruited (with maybe a bit more back-story at that point than we're given, too) to join this experiment through to the experiment's inner workings and then the complications that set in. There's some prolepsis used here in the back-and-forth chronology but Reynolds doesn't manage to use this prolepsis to give us any sense of impending doom during the other timeframes, it just ends up feeling like stuff that happens later that I already knew about. It gives me less chance to get emotionally invested in the dilemma and in the fact that humanity's entire future is at stake here, so the fact that this - like Tchaikovsky's book - feels rushed in its efforts to get to the denouement ends up cheapening a lot of the payoff. I'm a bit surprised by the ending here, and the fact that it ostensibly seems hopeful and optimistic, whereas I found the predicament at the conclusion quite ambivalent and I was really unsure what was going to happen next. I think that's the greatest shortcoming here: the climax is so rushed that Reynolds doesn't seem to consider a "what if I'm wrong" scenario and instead charges through in the assumption that they're not wrong. So what could have been a big cathartic ending if he'd weighed up other possibilities ends up just leaving me confused and a bit led down the garden path.

21) The Sandman: Book One - Neil Gaiman

On a whim I had a look at the graphic novels section at my local library and hit upon this. I've read enough about this series online, including from people who - like me - are mixed to negative on Gaiman's novels, but consider The Sandman (in its entirety at least) to be a masterpiece. Odd side note is that I came home with this among a dozen other books from the library and that night I got informed that someone had put a reserve on this. So apparently I was lucky to get it when I did, but it also drove me to finish this off quickly so I could return it. So I'm quite far from considering this a masterpiece from having read just part one of four of the published series (and even then I feel like the particular collection in this volume, besides being based chronological on publication, seems a bit arbitrary in its end point). I can see potential for it to get to a masterpiece place, but this really felt like a disconnected collection of story threads revolving around a single character and never really synthesised into something greater than those bits and pieces. As such there are definitely published issues within this that are stronger and more affecting than others, but being a comic book neophyte I often wished that some storylines would continue for longer. Instead the title character here, the lord of the dream realm, seems to have a glib omnipotence to him so every conflict that arises seems to be more or less resolved by him easily defeating the antagonist in the end, regardless of what effects flow on from there. In most cases the following volume doesn't directly follow on from the previous either, which means that after part 1 here I'm left with an overall impression of a bunch of tangled threads that have no connection to each other, and certainly no grander purpose either. I do feel that if I get around to reading books 2-4, I'll either look back on this impression after book one as [understandable but also] misguided knowing that Gaiman will eventually tie everything together for some grand vision, or I'll look back and think I'm being generous now to even allow for the unfinished nature of my reading. There are definitely good parts to this, especially his post-modern intertextuality mingling together classic mythology, medieval and modern English texts and popular culture of the twentieth century, and I do find the character of the Sandman intriguingly ambiguous in his motivations, but each time I felt like the story was heading somewhere, that volume would be wrapped up a little too neatly and the next one began with a completely new idea to explore. I do find the art here impressive too for what it's worth, not really being my thing, and the style is innovative and engaging, so I certainly wouldn't mind finishing off the whole series at some point possibly even all this year, but I find myself at the end of volume one asking "what else is there?"