Books of 2025 Part 3: 31-38

 Yes, I should have posted this several days ago to keep up my post-a-day rate. And really I just forgot, in fact this whole thing slipped my mind completely for several days, acting like I was done since the writeups are all done, formatted ready for blog posting. But in fact, there are two posts to go.

As is my tradition, I disrupt the order a bit when I have more than 30 or so books, by stopping just outside the top 10 to now count backwards up my least favourite books of the year. Something was missing from these books: let's call it 'heart'.

31) Chosen Family - Madeleine Grey

Another book group choice, I have to bash out this writeup quickly before we go to the meetup and my thoughts become tainted by others’ (eeeww, other people’s thoughts). So I enjoyed, or at least was entertained by this book for the most part. However I do feel like it’s like a drawn-out and dramatic version of a classic sitcom episode where people are trying to communicate only by subtext and allusion, and are being heard by misunderstanding the subtext, and if people could only communicate honestly and directly, then the whole premise of the story falls apart. It tells the story of Eve and Nell, best friends in high school who, apparently as told by proleptic narrative at the start and by two parallel timelines, are later co-parents of a young girl called Lake, and their tumultuous relationship over the years. It’s primarily framed from Eve’s perspective but Grey tends to throw in the interiors of other characters haphazardly, if and when it suits her. Which brings me to what I think is her greatest weakness, which is taking narrative shortcuts. There are a few key incidents throughout the book; a falling out between the girls in high school, and a reunion of the two during uni, that are told as big inciting incidents while also being played for great dramatic effect. These do work for me and I could feel the emotion required, but Grey has a tendency to just skip ahead in the timeline; in one case she actually writes something like “now somehow two years have past” which is all well and good if it’s what’s required, but given the gravity of what came before, it’s hard for me to believe that life has just gone on as ‘normal’ for two years with absolutely nothing like the dramatic events before it. Except, of course, that it conveniently avoids having to explain this by just skipping forward. I found my suspension of disbelief challenged, to say the least, at the ostensible obliviousness of one of the characters, which means the situation in which they find themselves later in the book feels like completely their fault, and I couldn’t help but find them a malevolent and selfish character instead of the sympathetic figure they’re supposed to cut. There are a few sections and parts that I just found myself not really buying. When Eve first starts uni for instance, I found this section interminable and actually kind of cringey at the lubricated ease with which she suddenly makes best friends for life and fits in with the queer community, like she goes from the awkwardness of being a lesbian in high school to suddenly being the queen lesbian of her own little kingdom. Now it’s possible - not my milieu - that it really is as simple as that and the gay community really is that tight-knit and welcoming, but the dialogue read to me like a cheap Queer as Folk fanfic: everybody is just such a perfectly witty bitch and everybody’s banter is so quick and immediately formed, and it just didn’t strike me as especially relatable. Which isn’t a huge problem because the point of the narrative is to emphasise the contrast between the emotionally stunted world she comes from and the liberating utopia she now finds herself in. But it feels like there are moments of great emotional gravity in this book juxtaposed with moments that feel too easy and convenient that they end up feeling very shallow. I did appreciate some of the open-ended parts of this book too, but it also felt like Grey made irredeemable villains out of a couple of her characters who I felt had very believable reasons to act the way they did, and in both cases there’s no resolution and not even any comeuppance for these characters. In both cases I feel like the scenes of reckoning would have made for interesting and nuanced character elements but again, it feels like Grey goes the convenient route of just writing them out of the rest of the story. Which again is a device better suited to a sitcom farce as per all of the miscommunications that drive the emotional heart of this story, instead of the complex narrative about modern sexuality and friendship that she purports to be writing. It probably doesn’t help that I loved the in-depth autobiographical and intellectual narrative of Fun Home by Alison Bechdel a short while before this, because by contrast this does feel like a somewhat superficial - and very horny - coming out and coming of age tale cut from similar cloth. But nevertheless this book simply frustrated me in its characterisation, and it could have been far stronger with a more mature and reflective outlook rather than the insecure narrative of the high school section and the idealised utopia of what ‘coming out’ entails.

32) The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 - Lionel Shriver

I always look at the Lionel Shriver books in my local library because there's quite a lot of them, but I never really know where to start with them. Obviously having 'enjoyed' (huge, huge scare quotes there) We Need to Talk About Kevin, I've been curious about reading something else from her so I finally just picked one blindly and this was it. My general view on Lionel Shriver from having read two of her books is that she is probably the most stressful writer out there. Because this book, too, has an unrelenting quality to it where we are made to feel uncomfortable from the get-go largely just by all the characters being kind of unsympathetic, but then it gets progressively worse and worse as the book goes on. It reminded me a bit of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections in that sense, but there's also something a bit lacking here as far as humour and irony go whereas Franzen's book sort of pushed the family foibles to comical exaggeration. In Shriver's case here she imagines an 'alternate' future where in 2027, the USA effectively defaults on their national debt or rather simply refuses to pay any of it back and moves forward with a blank slate. This gets called the "great renunciation" but the bulk of the book then plays out what happens next in this imagined future. The Mandibles, the titular family, are one of those most keenly affected since prior to this renunciation they numbered themselves among the more wealthy people in society, but the Great Renunciation has a number of flow-on affects that devalue currency, mandate seizure of precious assets by the state, and the flow-on effects deprioritise law and order plus most employment opportunities, which dries up what assets the family held. What this book is, besides a Kafkaesque imagined nightmare scenario, is effectively an economic dystopia. I wouldn't call it a 'critical' dystopia in the strict definition of the word in that Shriver is not necessarily offering a critique of modern society (this was published I believe in 2016 before the USA committed to becoming a parody of itself), but she is offering this up as a kind of worst-case scenario, and there are a few cheeky nods to potential events (there's a reference at some point to the "Chelsea Clinton administration" and one of the early events is told to have been precipitated by an Arnold Schwarzenegger run at the presidency which eventuated in a repeal of the 'native born' requirement) but oddly, nothing at all said about the cheeto-faced shitgibbon himself, possibly because that reality is far less believable and stupider than anything Shriver could imagine at the time. But as interesting as I found the concept of this book, it does feel like the stakes of the story are always bigger than the individual stakes affecting the family and as such, the family is merely our conduit into this world. In one sense this helps as none of the characters are particularly likeable as I mentioned, so as stressful as their situation becomes, I wasn't feeling especially drawn into their individual struggles as something worth being anxious about. But on the other hand, I do feel the impact of the book is blunted, and it becomes mostly a thought exercise rather than the searing critique of what we might be doing to society and how this will play out across the generations that I feel Shriver was aiming for. The fact is that at the end of the day, as much as I don't want to live in the future she envisions here, I also don't really care about any of the people in it enough to set about correcting any potential movement in this direction.

 33) Autumn - Ali Smith

This was another pickup from the library; they had a couple of these books titles '[SEASON]' so I looked them up and found that this was the first written or chronologically first or something, but from what vague things I do know I imagine they're not super-connected anyway. But I also chose this as one of our books for Book Group discussion mainly because I already had it out from the library and this seemed like the best one for book group discussion of my haul at the time, so I just cheated in that sense. Anyway, this book: I'd read one Ali Smith before this, her Women's Prize for Fiction-winner How To Be Both and I can see a lot of parallels with this book even though I honestly don't remember it that well. Part of the reason for me not remembering it that well is simply that Ali Smith is a fairly enigmatic writer who adopts a stream of consciousness style not so much for her prose but her overall book structures. The main thing I remember about How To Be Both is that it had two parts that were only vaguely, tangentially related, and that it had a lot to say about the nature of art and the artist. Which brings me (finally) to this book, as it also has a fairly loose structure and an even looser timeline, and also has a fair bit to say about the nature of art and the artist. I did try googling Ali Smith to find out what her connection is to the art world but google didn't show up anything explicit, so I assume it's merely an interest of hers. This story is about Elisabeth Demand, at the novel's contemporary setting a lecturer in art history, and her friendship with her much older neighbour, Daniel Gluck. The contemporary setting sees Daniel, now 101, in a comatose state in his care home where Elisabeth regularly visits him, and the novel intersperses this with various flashbacks showing the inception of their friendship and how it developed over the years, to the growing chagrin and alarm of Elisabeth's mother who disapproved of the friendship and attempts at various times to sever the connection. The loose structure of the book means that I didn't really feel like it wrapped things up fully and a number of questions lingered in my mind at its conclusion. But nevertheless it does have a nice development to the story, and I was mostly engaged with the friendship and how it developed, as well as seeing how Daniel directly influenced the character of Elisabeth in the present day. I note in the Wikipedia article on this book (which I had to look up just to remind myself of Elisabeth's surname as I don't have the book at hand) that they call it the first "post-Brexit novel" which is an odd thing, because while there are a number of references to the Brexit vote and its aftermath in the novel's contemporary setting, but that felt very much like a sidenote to the main action, or at best a thematic connection to the unlikely friendship between the two people and how Daniel generally preaches to Elisabeth about open-mindedness and embracing other ways of thinking. He does this largely with reference to art, and his own connection to the art world is hinted at but never made explicit (much like my hopes for a similar connection for Ali Smith), but it does draw the major connection to Elisabeth in the present day. The other thing that I'm honestly unclear about at the book's conclusion is exactly why it's called "Autumn" which may only become clear if I read all four books - like Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy perhaps - although because of the book's title I was very conscious throughout of Smith's frequent references to the season and weather, although it didn't really seem to me to hinge or focus heavily on Autumn. Regardless of the enigmatic and maybe inconclusive feeling I had at its end, I found it a warm and occasionally funny story about friendship and connection, and I feel it could very well have benefited from a less experimental approach to the timeline or storytelling just to make everything a bit starker and less elusive especially to the casual reader (and these days I definitely am one even if my English degree suggests otherwise).

34) The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England - Brandon Sanderson

I went looking in my local library for something by Brandon Sanderson to see what all the fuss and hype online is about. I don't pay close attention but I know his name comes up quite frequently in online literary discourse, so knowing nothing else I found his books in my library and picked this one for the simple reason that it's the only one that wasn't book 3 or 4 or book 5 - appendix B of one of his built worlds/series. It's quite possible - just to skip to the end of this review - that that was a mistake, because I still don't really see what the hype is about based on this book. In its favour, the fact is that this book has a lot of different layers going on. It's essentially a futuristic sci-fi book but set in a parallel dimension Medieval England, whose resemblances to our own Medieval England are uncannily close, but different. The 'modern' characters are a group of people from our earth who enjoy futuristic 'enhancements' such as in-built body armour plating, microbes called 'nanites' who self-repair the body as well as monitor vital systems and circadian rhythms, and of course a variety of different gadgets and weapons. But the dimension-crossing part of the world-building is told to us in parts by excerpts from a marketing handbook from the company who sells a kind of 'trans-dimensional tourism' where people can go to parallel versions of Medieval England and immerse themselves in that world. The handbook is also the property of our main protagonist Johnny, who finds himself at the start of the book stranded in one of these dimensions with no memory of who he is or how he got there. The story then takes the form of him slowly piecing together his identity and his past while also trying to survive and help some of the villagers he encounters. So all of these layers going on, I feel like Sanderson does a good job of maintaining the enigma, weaving a coherent storyline through all these different layers, while also through the 'marketing' materials injecting a good deal of humour into the proceedings. Where I'm kind of unenthused about it is the fact that I found the story strangely dull. There's something a little uninspiring to me about the stark contrast between the primitive traditions and setting that we find ourselves in and the futuristic technologies that Johnny has access to, and the vastness of the gap between the two makes the stakes of the story feel a bit contrived and not relatable enough to really immerse myself in. And while Sanderson does have a good comic edge to him and a self-awareness that lends itself to a lot of dramatic irony, what I found a bit lacking was in his character-building. The fact is that the medieval characters in this story feel a bit cookie-cutter to me, like they're defined by their courage and loyalty and little else, while the more we find out about Johnny as he learns it about himself, the less we (and he, to his credit) like him. I think Sanderson sets this own trap for himself, really, because the beginning of the story is centred around this mystery and the blank slate that Johnny finds himself with, but the pace of the story moved a bit too fast for me at first to latch onto a keen desire to know more, without any understanding of who this guy is or why I should care. The fact is that the story is all very high concept - in terms of technology and world-building, in terms of narrative layers and mythology, and in terms of unravelling the mystery that we're presented with at the start - so I think Sanderson struggles in this setting to get deep into the characters' minds and give them real, breathing personalities beyond some occasional repartee and curious misunderstandings in dialogue. It's quite possible that this is a weakness of his writing in general, but I would need to read more of Sanderson and maybe more deeply into those worlds he's built to fully diagnose this. This book is certainly surface-level entertaining, but I found it fairly lacking in humanity and insight.

35) Gigi - Colette

This feels like a bit of a cheat to consider this as a whole novel as it's only 50-odd pages long, but who am I to argue with the rules that I laid down myself? I picked this up expecting it to be a short but otherwise worthwhile read but then discovered as I was approaching the end of this particular story that the book I'd picked up actually consisted of Gigi together with another of Colette's shorter works The Cat which I then went on to read as well. So I can't really consider them together as one 'book' I'd read, while The Cat is twice the length of Gigi and therefore this feels like a pretty lightweight consideration. It is of course the basis of the 1959 Best Picture winner starring Leslie Caron and Maurice Chevalier, but without this being a musical the plot is fairly lightweight. It all takes place in the space of a few weeks surrounding the near-sixteen-year-old Gilberte and her interactions with her grandmother Madame Alvarez and a frequent male visitor to their house in the form of Gaston Lachaille, known as a bit of a ladies' man around town. It has some short but piquant observations about social etiquette and norms around the turn of the century, and Gilberte ('Gigi') cuts an interesting figure of young impetuousness and represents a youthful ebullience wanting to break free of societal conventions and strictures. The only real issue with this story, which is well written and sharp and to the point, is simply that it isn't very long. I feel like I could have spent more time in the company of Gigi and her grandmother and great aunt as they fuss and stress over her, and more time spent drawing out the conflict that occurs when Gaston develops more than a platonic fondness for this young girl. It feels like there's potential there to really draw out the elements of gossip and scandal that the book fixates on, and provide some curious and more satirical points about the place of women - and young women in particular - in this society and how they relate to and serve the men in their life. But it makes the point it needs to very quickly and moves on with little to no fanfare. So it is ultimately a short and uneventful, if frothy and enjoyable, stop on the way to my reading life in 2025.

36) When Things Are Alive, They Hum - Hannah Bent

It really gives me no pleasure to have disliked this book, so let me preface the following string of furious criticisms with the fact that this book is very sweet-natured, and I feel Hannah Bent's heart was definitely in the right place when she wrote this. But nevertheless I found myself growing increasingly irritated by it and its main character as I read to the point where its bittersweet and melancholic story ended up leaving me cold. It's about two sisters, Marlowe and Harper, who grew up in Hong Kong to a white father and Chinese mother (as did Hannah Bent herself, as far as I can tell) who has since passed on but appears frequently in the story in the form of flashbacks. Harper, the younger of the sisters, has Down's syndrome (which she calls the 'Up' syndrome; I don't think it's ever made clear where she got this terminology from) as well as a congenitally weak heart for which she frequently needs to be hospitalised, while the older sister Marlowe at the start of the story has moved away from Hong Kong and is a successful PhD candidate studying lepidoptera in London. Marlowe flies back to Hong Kong on receiving the news that Harper is not doing well, and sets about trying to take charge of obtaining a necessary heart and lung transplant for her. Obviously the story has a certain level of emotional manipulation to it, like it plucks at the heartstrings and wants you to feel very strongly for the innocent but constantly suffering Harper, and feel a certain level of pathos for her well-meaning but sometimes hyper-fixated sister. But the character of Marlowe really is the big weak point for me here because she's such a wilful ignoramus of all the important things that are going on around her. She turns up to the house in Hong Kong virtually unannounced and is shocked that her father's new paramour Irene has dared to bring her own things into their house, while also noticing that her later mother's piano is missing. But rather than sit down and have a proper conversation with her Dad about this, Marlowe moves straight to hostility against Irene, while the story is contrived in such a way that they have a very important appointment for Harper at the hospital in like ten minutes after Marlowe touches down so of course there's no time for such conversations. As with Chosen Family a few books ago, it felt like one of those farcical sitcom tropes where if the characters sat down and talked and listened properly to each other for five seconds, the whole story wouldn't happen but instead they make assumptions and misunderstand meanings and go off in their own little worlds to escalate the situation. Only here, it isn't played for laughs and I found it gratingly irritating. Frequently Marlowe's first-person narration parts say something like "the emotion was so overwhelming that I had to leave the room" or "I was so irritated by what was just said that I had to leave the room" or " an important character motivation was about to be explained so I just had to leave the room and also cover my ears and go LALALALALALA loudly to myself". And ultimately it just felt like a whole lot of contrived narrative roadblocks were put up to lead Marlowe down the weird alternative road she goes down whereas if she just listened to people (especially her goddamn sister herself whom she treats as a mission to be saved rather than a person), she would see the clearer path - but in doing so, the story wouldn't happen. Ultimately though I'm aware as a modestly acceptable reader of fiction that this is largely the point: Marlowe is still suffering in a repressed way from the early death of her mother when she (Marlowe) was nine, and hasn't properly processed her grief. A lot of the events of the story revolve around a promise her dying mother extracted from her to "look after Harper" which the grown-up Marlowe interprets for herself as "keep Harper alive perpetually and through any unscrupulous and unfeasible means necessary" rather than the far more level-headed "make sure Harper, who will definitely, incontrovertibly die young, is content and understands bad things will happen". So the story concludes in a suitably sweet and sentimental way as it was inevitably going to do, but I feel it took a really roundabout route to get there through a number of narratorial artifices that struck me as unnecessarily obtuse. As part of the sweet conclusion, I should also say that Harper's own first-person narratives (the story alternates between Marlowe's and Harper's viewpoint) feel a bit too perfect and profound like she sees the truth in a way that able-bodied people can't. I don't have a lot of close experience with Down's syndrome and it feels like it rings true enough in terms of the simplicity of her outlook but it also helps shape and even directly affect the story for the emotional journey it needs to take us on rather than being incidental or parallel to the other characters' own revelations which I think could work better. In short: if you can buy into the emotional investment this story needs, I can see it being profoundly affecting, but I found myself far too conscious of the strings the author was pulling while also finding too many of those strings to be flimsy in their structure; as such important parts of the story ended up ringing completely false and undermining the emotional connection I needed.

37) Grand Union - Zadie Smith

I have written up a few Zadie Smith books over the years, and I have never particularly cared for a single one. So when I saw this, her 'first' collection (of how many, unknown) of short stories in my library, I picked it up as a kind of ultimatum. Since I've enjoyed Haruki Murakami's short stories and earlier this year Jeffrey Eugenides' short stories - as two other authors I'm mixed/ambivalent on - I thought this would be a good final test to see whether I can enjoy Zadie Smith or not. In short: no. What this experience did bring back was my experience reading White Teeth and how much I felt my mild intrigue at the opening sections of that book just evaporated when the story went in a completely different direction in the "FutureMouse" section and how little I began caring about any of the characters once that had taken over. It's a frustration I feel reading some Pynchon as well, especially Against the Day, and while I wouldn't have thought such authorial quirks would afflict a collection of short stories, the truth is it happens time and time again in this collection. But moreover, there really isn't a coherent theme or a consistent approach to short story telling evident in this collection. It's stylistically all over the place, with some stories feeling more like stream of consciousness writing exercises than any attempt at storytelling, while the varied length of these provides some stories with meat and others just feel like airy blurts of prose with very little to sink your teeth into. But more importantly, everything that I've always just pondered quizzically about in Smith's writing is evident even in the longer and more developed stories here. The one or two I could recommend reading as the only properly engaging stories - Sentimental Education and Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets - still have an annoying ambivalence towards their characters, whereby a character will read a situation in a particular way and the other characters contradict that reading and nothing is ever resolved by the story's end. I feel like Smith delights in ambiguity but also in introducing subtext only to subvert her own subtext by the end of the story. It's certainly an issue I found with the meandering plot in White Teeth and in the questionable morals of the universally horrible characters in On Beauty. In this form it can make for some mildly amusing subversion of expectations as in the two example stories I gave, but mostly it just leads to confusion and a lack of engagement with the characters whose motivations are muddy at best and mostly antithetical to themselves. I also just coincidentally learned in the middle of this that Smith has moved from London to New York, which explains why most of these stories use New York as their setting, and honestly I find her writing about New York just far less engaging than someone like Colson Whitehead, while when she does set the occasional story back in London I found it a far more fully realised city-character than when she tried to evoke the same sense of New York. In the end I'm happy to let Zadie Smith go as an author I simply have no connection with and I don't think I ever will.

38) Mother Land - Paul Theroux

I've enjoyed a couple of Paul Theroux books, so despite the length of this one, I borrowed it from the library and gave it a go. What did appeal to me about reading the blurb here was that the concept of a malevolent, self-serving matriarchal figurehead put me in mind of one of my favourite literary characters from reading memory - Livia, as portrayed in Robert Graves' I, Claudius. But the long and the short of it was: I found this book very disillusioning, an immense struggle to read and ultimately a badly written story. The main trouble with it, overarching as the trouble is, is that there is no redeeming or even remotely sympathetic characters in here. The mother of the title is portrayed as shrewdly calculating, self-serving, and malevolent - all of which can make for compelling reading - except that most of her manipulations consist of effectively just being utterly contrary in each of her interactions with her children where she'll say one thing to her eldest son and completely contradict it when speaking to Jay, our protagonist and narrator. That could also be quite interesting except that her contradictions make little sense, and only exist in the contrived environment Jay (potentially as unreliable narrator) conjures for us where her sole purpose in life is to keep herself on top of the hierarchy by having all of her children antagonised and divided against each other. Which then brings me to the fact that all of the children in this story (who are all middle-aged to further advanced throughout most of the book) are all such pathetic, self-serving losers themselves, and I couldn't once imagine a situation where I would be dealing with this insufferable old woman and feel that I needed to stay by her or retain any kind of contact with her. Jay himself frequently through the book travels abroad (as a travel writer; one wonders how autobiographical he's meant to be as a character and hence where the antagonistic mother comes from) and each time he does, he remarks on the liberating feeling he gets from being separated from his mother, only to return back to his mother's vicinity for reasons that he himself struggles to articulate except that for some reason the negativity seems to have a centripetal effect on all of the siblings. But the thing is, this character portrait of a family who somehow stays together through the sheer force of antipathy between them all could have still been somewhat interesting as a read, except that this book is so long and so monotonous. Every single chapter seems to be just another iteration of the same kind of interaction between mother and son, mother and daughter. There are some life-changing events that happen in the book: the eldest son Fred has a stroke, Jay has a couple of relationships that fail, some long-lost relatives re-emerge, Jay and his other literary brother Floyd have a long falling out and then a reconciliation, Floyd gets married; but they're all just incidental set against the main action of "Jay's mother antagonises him again by being contrary". So it was a tedious, repetitive read for 800 or so pages where no character development took place, no revelations happened and certainly no emotional catharsis ever happened. It was simply a struggle even to pick this up knowing that I had already read a version of the same events a dozen times already in this same book and that ultimately I didn't care half an ounce for any one of these horrible people but nor did I even feel enough animosity towards any of them to be willing them to fail. They were just uneventful losers, and the book is as uneventful a loser of a read as I can imagine. I will say that Paul Theroux - despite me liking the books I've read previously - always strikes me as very self-indulgent as a writer where he draws things out too long or too fancifully, but this seems to be him with no filter and no restraints at all and it's significantly worse as a result.

So negativity done, tomorrow (maybe; maybe two days' hence; maybe never?) I will flip the tables and count down my ten favourite books I read in 2025.