Books of 2023 Part 1: 40-31

 Better late than never I guess? As is tradition, I determined to finish the last book I started in 2023 before I could conclude my reading and write this post. Unfortunately with moving house in December, I was not very far along in that book by the time the year ended, hence it took me quite deep into January before I was ready to commence preparations for this series. But here it is. I wouldn't say it was a stellar year of reading; indeed my top ten feels a bit like a series of default "I enjoyed this with fewer reservations than others". I'd say I feel more strongly about my bottom 7, which of course will immediately precede that top ten post. As I always do, I will commence in the middle of the countdown before heading back to the bottom and then back up to the top. So let's get things started with 40-31.

40) The Virgin’s Lover – Philippa Gregory

I picked this up from the library at the same time as I picked up a romance novel called Tangled Destinies by Diana Palmer (story behind that one still to come), and from the title alone I thought it was another tawdry romance novel. But instead I got this: a tawdry romance novel set in a historical context. I will expand on why I call this tawdry, but basically I didn't really know of Philippa Gregory at first and it was only during my reading that I learned she's the writer behind The Other Boleyn Girl among other semi-fictionalised accounts of the Tudor-Elizabethan era. In this case we have a version of the narrative surrounding Elizabeth I's rise to power but specifically focusing on her love affair with the dashingly handsome former traitor Robert Dudley (who I know of course as Joseph Fiennes in the 1998 film telling the same events in a completely different way). I did at one point have to cross-reference what I remember of that film (which I haven't seen since seeing it with a 13-year-old non-historyphile's understanding when it came out in cinemas) and I was somewhat confused by the complete absence of Francis Walsingham in this book, although my understanding now is that the film greatly upscaled his importance at the time it was depicting. So where does that leave me with this book. I found this book quite inconsistent in its tone, and particularly its sympathies. It feels like we're supposed to sympathise with Robert Dudley, who is fallen on hard times at the beginning of the book and has ambition only to restore his rightful place in high society after falling from grace during Mary I's reign. But as the book goes on Dudley became less and less likeable, not simply in the ways the book wants us to feel but due to his own silly decisions whose reasoning became more obtuse the higher he seemed to rise in Elizabeth's court. I felt the same way about Elizabeth, who is portrayed here as a passionate, headstrong woman whose desire for Dudley's hot man love far outstrips her reason and her decisions likewise come across as increasingly erratic and short-sighted. Gregory seems to be engaging in a form of revisionist history that isn't so much rewriting or reframing the accepted stories and rumours as much as taking one particular thread of possible narrative and spinning it into its most extreme manifestation. Thus enters the tawdriness. There were times when I felt Gregory's narrative was extremely vivid and captivating in its depiction of the queen's court, the characters within, the political machinations involved, and then we're given a love scene that in fact seems lifted from Diana Palmer's book except that frankly Diana Palmer's absolute forte was in writing love scenes whereas Gregory's felt awkwardly out of place and cheapened the historical context. Its inconsistencies ended up feeling like it was an attempt at a love story while also being an attempt at a historical fiction but those two attempts tended to undercut one another by pulling the focus away. Dudley works well as a classically tragic figure undone by his own hubris, but it was difficult to properly sympathise with him when it was unclear what he really wanted. He's undone largely because his ambition for the throne outdoes his love for Elizabeth, which destroys a lot of his likeability, whereas Gregory could have maintained the hubris and the tragic downfall while keeping the focus on the forbidden love between the two figures. I think she ends up overextending her own ambition in retelling this story, and the ending as it befalls Dudley doesn't pack the tragic emotional heft it otherwise could have with a tighter and less distractible focus.

 

39) Skylight - Jose Saramago

No-brainer to pick this one up from my library when I saw it; a Saramago I'd never read? Yes, of course. Turns out that this book was almost the Saramago that nobody ever read, as it was lost at his publishing house for decades until it was uncovered and published later, presumably once Saramago was a marketable quantity and even his inchoate early writings would make them money. Because there's definitely quite a lot missing here that Saramago would develop much better in his later works. Most superficially and obviously, he uses actual quotation marks and paragraphing in this book (!!) instead of dialogue delineated by commas with no reference to who's speaking except sometimes at the beginning and end. But moreover this book feels full of big ideas - the sort of big ideas he would explore in immense depth in things like Seeing, The Double and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ - and here they're left largely unfinished. Part of the issue is that this book isn't really one story, but rather several concurrent and interlocking stories all set within a tenement building and focusing around the stories of its inhabitants. Most of them have something unfulfilled in their life or some ongoing conflict that they are trying to explore and reconcile, so the book is quite engaging as it explores these conflicts and hostilities. Saramago is quite a matter-of-fact writer, particularly when it comes to his heavy use of dialogue to explicate character psychology, and in this early form it doesn't feel like there are many ambiguities to ponder as the story unfolds. But nevertheless a lot of the story threads are left open, and without any sense of ambiguity it just feels unfinished. Some of the stories reach a conclusion of sorts, but others reach a sort of climax without obtaining the emotional catharsis, and particularly where the stories intermingle (not just through occurring in the same building but by involving two or more of the parties and comingling their conflicts) I felt it finished with a lot of entanglements and no ultimate coherence. It's interesting both as an historical document of the 'lost' Saramago work, and it's interesting moreover as the germ of ideas he would write about so explosively in his later career, but it's ultimately quite a disappointing experience on its own terms that left me feeling unfulfilled.

 

38) Twilight - Stephenie Meyer

Yes, believe it or not. Of all the books I could have chosen, this was the first book I voluntarily read this year (as opposed to ones just hanging around my house when I hadn't visited the library). Despite me swearing off reading it years ago, once the hype died down a curiosity developed in me, and I was able to find it in the youth section of my library so I snapped it up (should note that someone put a hold on it during my three-week loan, but I'd finished it by then). And I really wanted to approach this writeup with a viewpoint that either: the haters were wrong, fuck the haters, this book's actually good, or; actually the haters don't go far enough, this is the worst shit I've ever read. And unfortunately of course, the answer lies somewhere in the middle but I'd say I'm more positive than negative on the book. Let's start then with the negatives: yes I can totally see what people see when they hate this book. I do still feel they’re hating the franchise and its popularity more than they're hating this book because really this book is not terrible until it becomes a worldwide phenomenon. But there are certainly issues with it: yes Bella goes on quite a lot about what a specimen of physical perfection Edward is, and I think I've read somewhere on the internet sometime where someone counted the number of times (through the series) when she mentions the word 'perfect': it's quite a lot just in this book. But the thing is: it's a first-person narrative ostensibly written by a teenage girl experiencing an intense crush. Of course she'd see him as perfect, and rhapsodise constantly about his beauty. The thing is I actually found this unintentionally funny how much she goes on about it, and that became a bit of an endearment to me - more of an "oh dear, this girl got it BAD" sort of charm rather than an annoyance. I do also think it's a bit of an easy escape for Meyer to make Bella physically clumsy as her defining characteristic, which therefore make it easy for her to be insecure in herself but still stunningly beautiful to all the boys in town, so she's relatable and not one of those annoying girls who's clearly modelesque but pretends she's not. But what I personally found actually the biggest sin the book committed was: it's honestly a bit boring. Until the latter stages there really isn't any conflict here; there kind of is, when Edward seems to hate her intensely at first, but then that gets resolved, they get together, they 'let each other in' so to speak, and then it doesn't go anywhere for a long time as they just hang out and find out more about each other. And I feel, coming off things like Stephen King who certainly would have tangentially influenced this, there really could be more horror elements intertwined with the basic supernatural elements and of course the central romance. It does improve a fair bit towards the end, when Bella becomes the target of a more predatorial character, but I feel like there's a lot of interesting ground to explore in the supernatural elements around having an adolescent fixation on somebody you know is bad for you, but it really doesn't enter into the themes at all except as parts of dialogue and in the sense that Bella is drawn to him despite everybody else warning her off or questioning the idea. She's never conflicted internally I think is the main reductive weakness here, and that's where the bulk of the book could have been far more engaging when it instead became a bit humdrum once the initial rom-com style misunderstandings are cleared up. Nevertheless, I did find the book built to the end and I feel it finishes strongly with the action climax, the theme of loyalty and what you're willing to give up for those you love. So in the end, while I did have issues with the prose and the way the narrative is constructed - and they're the same as anyone is likely to have - I can also see why people would love this book and would fall so hard for the characters and their world even if it requires a great deal of suspension of disbelief.

 

37) The Keeper of Secrets - Julie Thomas

By some strange coincidence, this was the second book out of three I read that centred around a young violin prodigy and their struggles balancing their personal life with the pressures that come inherently with their talent. And while I disliked A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing by Jessie Tu (more to come on that of course), this book actually made me appreciate some things about it that I hadn't while I was reading it. The main difference between the writing styles here and in Tu's book are that Julie Thomas very much tells us everything we need to think rather than just showing us what's happening and letting us work out any broader implications. These are sometimes hideously clunky narrative interventions, I think at one point she actually wrote this sentence: "but next Winter, something happened that changed everything." So, unexpectedly I started to feel ever so slightly whistful for Jessie Tu's oblique, ambiguous writing where she frankly told too little about what was going on (but specifically about why I should care). However, the strengths of this book are that the story here is far clearer on the emotional stakes. We have Daniel, the teenage prodigy who is in conflict with his parents about the obligations he has to continue on the family tradition of violin-playing and he just wants to live his life. Then we also delve into the family history and discover that his grandfather is a holocaust survivor who survived the death camps by being able to play the violin to soothe the SS guards. If that all sounds a little contrived and a bit far-fetched, that is exactly how I kind of found it. So while the strength here was the fact that the emotional stakes were clear, and there is a good amount of moral ambivalence at times about people who do the wrong thing for the right reasons, what it suffers from is believability. There's a touch of Markus Zuzak's The Book Thief at times here about how there's "people involved with the war" who are inherently evil, and "people to whom war happens" who are intrinsically good and doesn't allow for enough grey area in between. But I think the bigger issue with this book is that Thomas' well-intentioned ambition ends up getting away from her, and parts of the book felt too glib and hurried to get to the grand climax where all the story threads come together. While it's far more of a challenge to read and, particularly, to write, I feel that she should have taken a lot more time to set up the moral conundrums and take her time to draw out the character arcs properly. It's effectively a Dickensian story in many ways, full of coincidences and chance connections, but through its shortcomings it proves how important it is to explore all these coincidences in greater detail rather than just throwing a whole heap of them together quickly and letting them work themselves out in a fast-paced popcorn entertainment kind of way. It's effectively an effecting story told in a way that cheapens its impact by not giving it the time and care it needs.

36) Cat Among the Pigeons - Agatha Christie

I have enjoyed digging into Agatha Christie's back catalogue in recent years knowing that there's still a deep well of stories still to uncover. I particularly loved Ordeal by Innocence that I read a couple of years ago, and this novel's title has always struck me as rich with good potential when it's come to mind. So it actually feels like a bit of a disappointment that I didn't really love this, and I'd rate it probably the lowest of all the Christie novels that I have read (which isn’t many, for the record). At first the main thing that struck me was that its inciting incident, a coup d'etat taking place in a fictional middle eastern country, and the safeguarding of a priceless treasure, had all the trappings of an espionage novel rather than the country house murder that I'm accustomed to. That's not a problem and I was intrigued at first at seeing Christie expanding (from my own experience) into broader scope. But the shortcoming of this premise is that I feel I've read similar premises from other writers, in particular John LeCarre, which really speak the language and map out the operations of the secret service in a way that made this feel a bit facile by comparison. But then the inciting incident leads us to Meadowbank, an exclusive all girls' school in England, which then forms a more conventional country house setting for some juicy murders to take place. Obviously without spoiling a lot of the plot points, I enjoyed a lot of the mystery and was mildly intrigued by the overarching story about Meadowbank school and the headmistress/founder's plans for its future. But where the story ultimately led felt to me firstly a little convoluted due to the many different interested parties involved in the plot, not just from the point of view of people committing certain deeds (and there are many types of deed), but also the various parties who are investigating the same. The fact that this is billed as a Hercule Poirot mystery but Poirot doesn't enter into the story until the third act felt a bit deflating, since one of the things I've enjoyed so much about the Poirot mysteries I've read so far revolve around his investigation and interrogation methods that all come to a head with the big reveal at the end, and in this case most of the investigation/interrogation is done by other parties and their results then relayed to Poirot. The denouement therefore felt a bit stuffy as well as convoluted; in classic whodunnit mode I had my theories about what was going on, and since there were so many threads to the story I was basically correct in all of them but they were just peripheral to the actual central whodunnit, which I didn't predict. The fact that the big 'reveal' came about due to a plot point introduced early in the novel but that was kind of meaninglessly delayed until the end felt like a strange blockade that then becomes effectively a deus ex machina at the end. For those who have read it, I'm talking about the part played by Mrs Upjohn and I feel that that being the big 'gotcha' at the end was incredibly weak storytelling, and instead Christie very much could have contrived some giveaway clue that Poirot stumbles upon instead. It just didn't give me the warm feeling of a murder mystery where all the clues neatly fall into place in the end and feeling like I'd been suspecting one thing but fooled by a writer far cleverer and way ahead of me in her thinking. On the contrary it was replete with conscious omissions by the writer as well as some strange coincidences that felt more artificial than I usually feel even when earlier clues that should have been obvious reveal their significance later.

35) The Invention of Sound - Chuck Palahniuk

I've always avoided Palahniuk's books when I see them on the shelves in the library. Partially because, although I loved Fight Club (the film) as many people did, everything I've read about the original novel suggests that the film adaptation is far superior, and more generally Palahniuk seems like a dudebro kind of writer who I'd happily avoid unless his books were great successes in their own right - which they don't seem to be. Nonetheless, I picked this one up, and in all fairness I quite enjoyed it. Funnily enough I read this right after Blue Flowers by Carola Saavedra, and despite this not having the same conceit of two different voices and writing styles, I found this even more annoyingly jarring as each passage of narrative would swap between the two central characters - Mitzi, a foley artist working in Hollywood and specialising in creating "scream" sounds for use in horror movies and the like; and Gates Foster, a man haunted by the disappearance of his young daughter who is convinced that she's been trafficked for child pornography and spends his days trawling the darkweb for clues. But in the case of this narrative it was less that the premise of swapping between the two characters was just a conceit; in fact it could be quite an effective way of telling the story until they intertwine, but it had a short attention span in doing so, and Palahniuk would tell just a short skit from one side before switching back to the other character for another short skit, and in most cases I wanted to follow the same story for a while longer. In the end I think Palahniuk's ambition outstripped the narrative as it spirals - similar to Fight Club (the film; as mentioned I haven’t read the novel so can’t compare it) - into a very complex byzantine network of betrayals and mistaken identities and so forth. There are lots of moments of dark humour, and overall the hard-boiled, constantly menacing narrative reminded me a lot of Bret Easton Ellis with a touch of David Foster Wallace in some of the premises. Hence yes, it certainly confirmed him as a dudebro kind of writer, but in this case I feel he kind of undermines the emotional heft of Gates Foster's story of trying to find his daughter with his broader vision of depicting Hollywood as a rotten hierarchy that's corrupt and immoral from its top to its bottom. I feel like the final third of the story where the moral lines become significantly more blurred ends up cancelling out the story I otherwise may have been caught up in emotionally, and part of the reason is I'm pretty sure that's just what Palahniuk does. Like thinking that Fight Club is about a loner suffering from insomnia and getting caught up in that story and it ends up being a story about society-sweeping anti-capitalist terrorism. I guess there's fun to be had in that, but I didn't so much find the twists and turns here compelling and shocking so much as part and parcel of Palahniuk's limited attention span and inability or unwillingness to explore a story in full depth.

34) Quichotte - Salman Rushdie

This was the last book I read in 2023, but it ended up a bit of a slog so I didn't finish it until fairly deep into 2024 (hence the reason these posts are later than they usually are). I'd say of the more recent Rushdies I've read (I'd put the transition point at Shalimar the Clown because I read it more contemporarily with its release while I was still reading through his back-catalogue), this is one of my least favourites. There are definitely some hallmarks of his classic style here, especially when he starts blending fantasy with social commentary to create this surreal magic realism, that's where I was most caught up in the story here. But the main reason this ended up missing the mark for me is the meta-textual layers. Although the essence of this story tells the story of a modern Don Quixote, who instead of having his brain addled by reading too many novels and embarking on his noble quest, Quichotte in this story has his brain addled by watching too much television, and resolves to seek out and woo the beautiful successful talk show host Miss Salma R the way his namesake sought out the beautiful Dulcinea. Now I haven't read Don Quixote all the way through, and maybe it would be valuable to have the full text in mind when reading this as I'm sure there are intertextual references I missed, but I haven't read the Arabian Nights at all and yet I loved Rushdie's modernist take on it, Two Year Eight Months and 28 Nights that I read a couple of years ago so I don't think it's necessarily a requirement. The issue is that in this book, Rushdie takes us out of the Quichotte narrative to tell a parallel story of a writer of popular crime fiction, "Brother", and the story behind him deciding to write the story Quichotte that we're also reading. I'm not really sure what Rushdie's purpose in doing this is, and my uncertainty stems from the fact that while the two stories he's telling here (the meta-one and the story-within-that-story) have parallels to each other and you can see the inspiration behind some of the plot points and so forth, there isn't really a grander point being made. It's possible that Rushdie felt the Quichotte story told a too fantastical version of contemporary America, so he wanted to ensure that it was grounded in an actual reality within the fictional narrative and thus making commentary about contemporary America while also using his fantastical elements to paint broader strokes. But really it felt like a case of writer's block to me, as if he didn't really know where to take the Quichotte narrative without a greater emotional core, for which he uses the "Brother" character. I'm unclear on whether "Brother" is meant to be an autobiographical stand-in for Rushdie himself either - the fact that Brother's writing is derided as escapist bilge could be a bit of self-satire but he just doesn't seem like the same kind of writer as Rushdie is or have his same standing, so I doubt it. Aside from the fact that the meta-narrative didn't seem to serve any grand purpose to me, the fact that this book felt like a slog - it's full of a lot of textual longueurs and too much interiority, among other things - meant that having an unnecessary second story in here made it a particularly convoluted reading experience. I think Rushdie's writing style just suits things with a grand literary ambition, so when I couldn't see the point of a good half of this story, his long grandiose style felt a bit bloated.

33) Mansfield Park - Jane Austen 

After reading Northanger Abbey last year, this was my last remaining Austen to finish her oeuvre, so as a bonus in this writeup I’ll give my definitive ranking (which I’ll hope to do as well in eight years or so when I finish all of Dickens). This one - spoiler alert - will rank near the bottom. It’s remarkably boring for the most part. It’s aimless for about the first 200 pages, largely because Fanny Price our protagonist gets virtually no agency for that time. She’s merely an accessory to the story which has no direction and no great point. Moreover when she does factor more actively in the story, it’s to raise concerns about the morality of the young friends at Mansfield putting on a play together, which concept feels incredibly dated and puritanical now, especially as the play factors in as a major plot point where Fanny ends up being the only morally incorruptible one by the end of the story. It made sense to me retroactively to reimagine ‘putting on a play’ as if someone at a modern dinner party had suggested ‘having an orgy’ and everyone willingly went along with it. But therein lies the main issue I had with the whole situation and most of the book: Fanny and Edmund, those morally opposed to the play, become emblematic of the moral rigours of the time and what Austen seems to be railing against, whereas Henry and Mary Crawford feel like lively, animated characters willing to try new things; in other words they felt more modern to me and I found my sympathies largely with them for most of the story. So when Austen has them commit certain deeds (ooh such deeds) that are fairly reprehensible even by modern standards, it felt like an easy escape route to vindicate Fanny and allow the moral standards she was holding everyone to earlier to shine through as right and just. Austen’s ultimate message then, contrasting Fanny’s ability to appreciate her privilege at being brought up at Mansfield because it lifted her out of poverty and deprivation with Maria and Julia’s arrogance and lassitude, is well taken. However I feel it could be far better laid in earlier (except if you take the play as the ultimate moral corruption) and better woven through the story; instead it falls to a kind of John Galt-esque authorial monologue with Austen’s message transplanted into the reflections of Sir Thomas Bertram looking back on his failings as a father. Compared to Northanger Abbey I felt the denouement of this story was much better drawn out, but the development of the plot was far inferior and just felt far too removed from me emotionally. So my definitive ranking (I can expand on these if you’d like): Pride and Prejudice number 1, no question. Number 2 maybe a controversial choice, but for me it’s Sense and Sensibility. Persuasion number 3; Northanger Abbey 4. I’ll put this at number 5 at a pinch mainly because I did care about some characters even if they’re the wrong ones, but last is the “who cares” story I didn’t need at all, Emma.

32) Well-Behaved Indian Women - Saumya Dave

I knew very early on that I was getting into the sort of book I tend to term a 'soap opera', lots of everyday people dealing with situations and whatnot and probably all coming to some kind of understanding by the end. But apart from the fact that I'm not averse to that per se, what struck me here was the fact that the dual protagonists - mother and daughter Nandini and Simran - were Indian women embarking on crucial stages of their life, and the fact that the title made it all-too-apparent the themes the author was interested in exploring. For the most part, I think she navigates these themes - of the expectation placed on Indian women by the men in their lives but equally if not more so by other women around them - with great aplomb. Where it started to ring false for me is quite simply in the fact that she makes this point well on about page 5, and then proceeds to make the same point just as well for the remaining three hundred or so pages. In some ways I feel the title is too on the nose, but the book does itself no favours by being written in such a "tell, don't show" kind of way where everything needs to be spelled out (side quibble but right down to the fact that each chapter is split into a "Simran" perspective, and a "Nandini" perspective together with headings telling you it's now Simran, now Nandini - when it's really easy to work that out yourself from the fact that Simran is now the protagonist of the prose, like it's all in third-person narrative voice anyway), and I feel like the same ideas could be more strikingly explored in a more metaphorical way. That's where the soap operatic nature of the misadventures and decision-making of the characters sells them short, because it is just everyday Indian diaspora in America navigating crucial life stages - centred around Simran's upcoming non-arranged marriage to her Indian boyfriend of many years - and coming to terms with the generations of restrictions they as women have enabled or even helped perpetuate. Simran comes across as a bit of an irritating Hamlet character, ‘in’ one minute and completely ‘out’ the next, and the decisions that she makes are all narrated well by Dave as crises but ended up slightly irking me how she manages to let so many things go wrong at once by not being more decisive earlier on. Ultimately I did enjoy this book, but it felt like a really great set of ideas in search of a more compelling narrative framework, and I'd love to see Dave attack the same kind of material from a more metaphorical perspective, one where she allows the audience to make up their own minds more often.

31) Findings - Kathleen Jamie

This was the first book I read this year, I picked it up at the start of the year because we had it sitting around the house from a loan from Catie, and I had nothing out from the library yet. So it was an odd way to start my year largely because I had no expectations going in, but also... I don't know why but it doesn't really feel like the sort of book to open up new possibilities of thinking or something. It does feel that way on the surface because it's essentially a series of vignettes of travel or discovery in one sense or another. But besides the discovery and examination of the natural world which occupies much of its space, the other key theme I found running through this is that of entropy: they go hand in hand of course but Jamie seems equally enamoured through the book with decay and death as she does with life and growth. So it’s an odd feeling and I didn’t quite get any larger vision from why these particular observations as I continued reading. Jamie does also have a little bit too much of a focus on birdwatching for my liking; it suits the narratives and her Scottish highland settings fine but it also did feel a bit like I was sitting having a conversation with my Dad at times as well. The death aspect struck me more notably; there is one story where she is exploring a university museum filled with preserved body part specimens and describes them all in intricate and fairly poetic detail. There's something quite fascinating and indeed, late-stage romantic about her turning her eloquent turn of phrase to topics not about life but death and about our inevitable relationship with mortality. Ultimately it’s a curious book, not one I'd have sought out myself but certainly one that was interesting to read.