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.