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.