Best of 2023 – an even dozen

Well, a dozen and a few honourable mentions because it was really hard winnowing down to a shortlist this year.

2023 was the year of Project Chunkster – a deliberate attempt to read some of the longer books on my actual and virtual shelves. I made a list of the longer novels in my library and decided to pick as many of them off as I could (though the two longest, A Suitable Boy and The Books of Jacob remain…).

Project Chunkster was a big success. Longer books (over 400 pages, sometimes a lot over) constitute five of my twelve end of year finalists. I still love a novella, but there’s something to be said for just inhabiting an author’s world sometimes.

Anyway, with that preamble, here’s my best of 2023. Since I didn’t manage to do Autumn updates some of these I haven’t talked about here before, but I still wanted to do an overall wrap-up post.

Best novel featuring a doomed love affair: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and translated by Rosamund Bartlett. I had mixed views on War and Peace (blasphemy I know) which I felt could have used a good edit, particularly with respect to the increasingly lengthy historical sections. No such doubts about Anna Karenina. This came close to my best of the year slot and the Rosamund Bartlett translation was absolutely excellent (thanks Guy Savage for pointing me towards it here). This is a rich novel absolutely packed with life and I adored it. One to read and reread.

Best novel featuring scenes that are genuinely quite hard to read: Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez and translated by Megan McDowell. This is a surprise entry for me as I wasn’t absolutely sure about it when I read it. I thought it was well written but suffered a bit from so what, as in so what did any of it matter. To an extent I still feel that, but in common with all my choices this year it’s absolutely stayed in memory. It’s over 700 pages and yet I still remember even minor characters and scenes. This is unapologetic horror fiction so only for those with strong stomachs. Grant’s review is here and the comment by Bookbii is I think particularly insightful.

Best faux-Gothic novel: Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen. I have now read all the novels that Jane Austen finished in her life. I don’t think this is the best of them, it’s not even really the best one I read this year, but I did love it. It’s just so funny. Catherine Morland, the heroine, is an ordinary young woman to whom nothing very unusual happens, and yet Austen writes it all so portentously and in such high gothic style that it just becomes absurdly funny. Brilliant, and not I think what most people associate with Austen in terms of style. Heavenali captures quite how funny it is here.

Best fantasy novel I’ve read in a very long time: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. In fact, I think this is genuinely one of the best fantasy novels I’ve ever read, up there with classics like Lord of the Rings, Wizard of Earthsea or The Shadow of the Torturer. Napoleonic fantasy isn’t I think a new thing, but this just has such wit and richness of character and story. I was going to link to a review by Karen over at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, but Karen hasn’t written one. If you see this post Karen and you haven’t read this I think you’d like it. Top tip, read it in hardcopy because Clarke puts most of the worldbuilding and a great deal of the humour into often very lengthy footnotes and they just don’t work well in ebook or audiobook form.

Best novel on a subject of absolutely no interest to me: Kick the Latch, by Kathryn Scanlan. I really had to be talked into reading this, because not only do I have no interest in horse racing I’m actually fairly antithetical towards it due to the animal welfare issues. So, a fictionalisation of the life of an American horse trainer really didn’t feel like my kind of book. As ever, execution is everything. This is superbly well written, somehow capturing the richness and complexity of an entire life in very few pages. I’m reminded of books like Stones in a Landslide and Train Dreams, both of which somehow pull off the same trick. An absolute triumph and genuinely meriting the hype it received. Jacqui wrote about it here and pushed me over the edge into finally reading it.

Best apocalyptic fiction: Termush, by Sven Holm and translated by Sylvia Clayton. I’ve undersold this really by billing it as apocalyptic fiction, even though it undoubtedly is. A group of rich survivors inhabit a hotel after a nuclear war has devastated the world, and as ever with hotel settings they form their own small society save here with perhaps no larger society left outside. It comes from the marvellous Faber Editions series which don’t seem to have a dud among them and its quiet examination of the morality of privilege remains highly relevant. Jacqui wrote about this here which I hope reassures those of you who don’t like science fiction that even so this is very much worth your time.

Best uncategorisable novel: The Twilight Zone, by Nona Fernandez and translated by Natasha Wimmer. Fernandez is one of my new favourite authors thanks to the influx of newly translated novels by Latin American women (Selvada is another favourite). Here Fernandez writes something that is perhaps a form of autofiction, save that instead of using fiction to examine her own life she uses it to examine the life of a torturer who handed himself in and exposed the secrets of the regime and his former comrades. It’s an extraordinary read, a work of perhaps-redemptive imagination not only examining the life of a man who did such terrible things but reclaiming into light the lives of many of his victims. It’s far from an easy read, but it is a hugely rewarding one. Radhika writes well about it here.

Best comic novel featuring architecture: The Forgery, by Ave Barrera translated by Ellen Jones and Robin Myers. This was actually a strong runner-up for the best shaggy dog story category, but the book of the year also won that so Barrera was left with this category (a good previous winner would be Will Wiles’ Care of Wooden Floors). A Mexican artist is tempted into becoming a forger, ends up a prisoner, and discovers he may even be haunted. It’s a rich brew and great fun. Impressively this is a first novel and given how much I enjoyed it I’m looking forward to a lot more from Barrera. Grant wrote about this one here.

Best slyly subversive novel: Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata and translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori. Honestly I read this one as a bit of a palate cleanser and really hadn’t expected to like it as much as I did. Keiko is happy in her thirties working in a convenience store, a job most people take as students and quickly leave behind them. She’s under pressure to conform – to find a man and a better job and to fit in with society’s expectations. When she tries though things don’t quite go as expected… This manages to question societal pressures on women to conform while being darkly funny and easily made its way onto this list. One thing true of most of my end of year books is there’s not much else like them, and that’s definitely true in this case. I’ll link to Tony’s typically insightful review here on this one.

Best novel by an old favourite not read in many years: The Comedians, by Graham Greene. This was my Jolabokaflod gift this year from my wife (google it, you can thank me later!). I love Greene but haven’t read him in ages and had entirely missed this one. It’s the story of three Westerners, the comedians, at large among the horrors of Papa Doc Duvalier’s Haiti. It’s heart of darkness territory, though unlike Conrad’s novel the locals here are characters in their own right, some good, some bad, most neither. The hell of Haiti in this period becomes a trying ground in which compromise and courage come at odds with each other. There’s not a lot of bad Greene (though The End of the Affair is far from my favourite) but I thought this up there with many of his greats. A tremendous Christmas Eve read, if not perhaps a very festive one.

Best lifetime achievement award: Time Regained, by Marcell Proust and translated by Scott, Moncrieff and Kilmartin. Best achievement of my lifetime that is, though it’s no small achievement on Proust’s part either I admit. After the difficulties of The Captive and The Fugitive, often genuinely hard reading, we’re into the final strait as Proust brings his narrator back after a gap within the fiction of several years. The distance that provides enables Proust to bring together his themes of aging, memory, death and art in a sublime finish to the entire series. I’d like to thank Emma of Bookaroundthecorner who’s Proust readings really helped me when I got bogged down and stuck. Like Emma, I took years to read this but also like Emma I picked it up each time reading it as if I’d barely paused. Emma does a fantastic write-up of it here including describing how in this volume Proust explains his whole project. This is one of the greatest collective works I’ve ever read and deserves its fame, even if I still suspect most people who read it at all never make it past the first volume.

So, if not that, what could be my best book of 2023? It is, drumroll please:

Greatest shaggy dog tale ruined for generations of Americans by their having to read it in school: Moby Dick, by Herman Melville. What to say about this one? Well, I could say that Ahab doesn’t turn up until you’re over a 100 pages in and the White Whale doesn’t come onscreen until you’re fairly near the end. I could say it contains a bromance which a great many readers have seen as simply a straight up gay romance and they may well be right. I could say it contains hilarious pseudo-academic treatises on cetology and other subjects all of which were as wrong when this was written as they are today. I could say that it’s a novel of the sea and of obsession and like Tolstoy just absolutely full of life. I still wouldn’t capture it though.

The Proust is of course the greater overall artistic achievement. Even so, I think there’s more to this than it gets credit for even with all its fame. It’s funny, exciting, evocative, it contains worlds. It’s also exceptionally readable, assuming you’re reading it for pleasure and not as a class assignment… It pipped Proust at the post partly as it was such a surprise, so much not what I was expecting and instead so much more. Tremendous, and I still love this cover.

Honourable mentions

I have a few that almost made it on the list but in the end didn’t quite. These include Yukio Tsushima’s Territory of Light which I loved in part for its descriptions of the light flooding the protagonist’s apartment. Leo Perutz’ Saint Peter’s Snow which is an audacious thriller by one of the most under-appreciated Austrian novelists brought back to us by Pushkin Press. Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter also impressed and felt very much of our current moment. Lastly, Gillian Clarke’s translation of early Welsh poem The Gododdin is a delight and publishing it with both Welsh and English text so you can see the rhythms of the original text is an inspired move. One for fans of The Iliad.

And that’s it! Project Chunkster won’t continue as a set thing in 2024 though I do still hope to read A Suitable Boy and The Books of Jacob this year (god knows when though). Thanks as ever to the various bloggers, not all named here, who’ve inspired me to read these and many other great books this year just past.

For the curious, I read 71 books in 2023, well down from 2021 and 2022 both of which I read over 100 in. Proving that volume really isn’t everything it’s as strong a reading year as any I’ve had, stronger than many in fact. The full list of books is set out below. Please feel free to ask about any of them.

Emma, Jane Austen

The Last Days of New Paris, China Miéville

The Captive, Marcel Proust

Tokyo Express, Seichō Matsumoto

Italian Ways, Tim Parks

Sisters, Daisy Johnson

The Judge and his Hangman, Friedrich Dürrenmatt 

Stealing for the Sky, Adam Roberts

The Fugitive, Marcel Proust

The Girl with all the Gifts, MJ Carey

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

Intimacies, Lucy Caldwell

Our Share of Night, Mariana Enriquez

The Fell, Sarah Moss

Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen

Territory of Light, Yuko Tsushima

The Hunter, Richard Stark

Shards of Earth, Adrian Tchaikovsky 

Hotel, Joanna Walsh

Suspicion, Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, S Clarke

Grief is the Thing With Feathers, Max Porter

Men in Space, Tom McCarthy

Belt Three, John Ayliff

Atlas of Remote Islands, Judith Schalansky

One Day all this Will Be Yours, A Tchaikovsky 

Rosewater Insurrection, Tade Thompson

Familiar Things, Hwang Sok-Yong 

The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin

Sidewalks, Valeria Luiselli

The Sing of the Shore, Lucy Wood

The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (audiobook)

Moby Dick, Herman Melville

Saint Peter’s Snow, Leo Perutz

The Dark Forest, Liu Cixin

Kick the Latch, Kathryn Scanlan

Last Summer in the City, G Calligarich

Termush, Sven Holm

Ten Planets, Yuri Herrera

The Twilight Zone, Nona Fernandez

The Dry Heart, Natalia Ginzburg 

Our Lady of the Nile, S Mukasonga

Celestial Bodies, Jokha Alharthi

Ms Ice Sandwich, Mieko Kawakami

The Forgery, Ave Barrera

Child of Fortune, Yuko Tsushima

The Body in the Library, Agatha Christie

On Java Road, Lawrence Osborne

Jirel of Joiry, CL Moore

Persuasion, Jane Austen

Death’s End, Cixin Liu

South of the Border, West … Sun, H Murakami

Murder in the Crooked House, Soji Shimada

Strange Weather in Tokyo, Hiromi Kawakami 

Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata

Eyes of the Void, Adrian Tchaikovsky 

The Moving Finger, Agatha Christie

Time Shelter, Georgi Gospodinov

Man in the Holocene, Max Frisch

The Goshawk, TH White

The Rise, Ian Rankin

After the Quake, Haruki Murakami

Aliss at the Fire, Jon Fosse

The Humble Administrator’s Garden, Vikram Seth

The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man, Dave Hutchinson

The Gododdin, Gillian Clarke

Sleeping Murder, Agatha Christie

Humiliation, Paulina Flores

The Eve of St Agnes, John Keats

The Comedians, Graham Greene

Time Regained, Marcel Proust

Summer reading round-up

July and August were pretty great reading months. There were a few that didn’t quite hit the mark for me, but many more that did.

Project chunkster continued, helped by a July holiday in Italy with lots of train journeys. Then in August I did WiTMonth again . I still find it rewarding and it pushes me to broaden my reading.

JULY

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

Love that cover.

What a book! I mean, what an absolutely brilliant book! And so unexpected too. This has quite a daunting reputation but really undeserved. Mostly it’s a rambling shaggy dog tale with Ishmael sharing his thoughts on life, whaling and whatever else crosses his mind.

We’re 100 pages in before Ahab even makes an appearance, and the whale doesn’t turn up until you’re near the end of the book. I’d thought the whole thing was grim pursuit, and that’s in there but it takes its time to set out the characters and their world and that pays dividends as it starts to accelerate.

At times it’s very funny and Ishmael is a wonderful narrator, not least for his habit of creating his own pseudo-academic categorisations of types of whales none of which are borne out by any kind of real science even of the time. His bromance, and frankly quite possibly outright romance, with Queequeg is nicely observed and there’s just a richness here which is really rewarding.

Oh, and Call me Ishmael isn’t the first line. There’s a whole bunch of whale-related quotes and an in-book foreword. You’re quite a few pages in before you get to Call me Ishmael. So one of the most famous first lines in literature it turns out isn’t.

Anyway, it’s genuinely brilliant. I’m sorry if you had to study it in school and that spoiled it for you because it’s just such a good book. Rather obvious trigger warning though of cruelty to animals – the scenes where they hunt and kill whales are genuinely hard reading. On the plus side it does mean that when the clash with the White Whale does arrive I was pretty sure which side I was on…

Saint Peter’s Snow, by Leo Perutz and translated by Eric Mosbacher

At first I thought this was translated by the translation fairy, since Pushkin rather shamefully don’t seem to have named the translator anywhere in the book. I eventually found the actual translator on their website. Anyway, that aside this is a marvellous psychological thriller about a man who may have discovered a terrible conspiracy threatening Europe or may just have suffered severe hallucinations following a traffic accident.

This becomes a clever psychological study, a proper page-turning read and quite a nice observation of the forces pushing the rise of fascism in the early 20th Century. It’s my second Perutz and like his Master of the Day of Judgment highly, highly recommended.

I was reminded of how Pushkin Press used to regularly reintroduce lost European treasures to the English speaking world. I think that mission may have moved on but it’s nice to see it still occasionally happens.

The Dark Forest, by Liu Cixin and translated by Joel Martinsen

Second of Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem trilogy, and for me now that I’ve finished probably the weakest (though that’s often the case for the middle book of trilogies).

In the first book, humanity discovers it’s not alone. Our nearest neighbouring system contains an advanced civilisation and unfortunately it’s not friendly. The thing is, statistically that’s incredibly unlikely. Space is vast and there are around 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone (many more by some counts). Unless civilisations are extremely common the odds are pretty high against there being one right next door.

The Dark Forest answers that question and in the gloomiest way possible. Here, civilisations are in fact extremely common. They’re just also extremely quiet and for very, very good reason. Letting anyone know where you are is a great way to go extinct (this is also a real world theory by the way, and if correct not a good one for us as a species).

If you’re not already intimately familiar with the Fermi Paradox then this isn’t the book for you. If you are though there’s some great ideas. Characterisation isn’t a strength, but nor is it really the point of this kind of novel.

Kick the Latch, by Kathryn Scanlan

Slight change of pace and distinctly more down to earth. I had to be talked into reading this one as I’ve not only no interest in horse racing, I’m actually a bit hostile to it on animal welfare grounds. A novelisation then of the life of a racetrack trainer wasn’t an obvious read for me.

Jacqui finally pushed me over the line to read this, but honestly I’m very much last to the party and a lot of people have already talked about how great it is. And it really is. It’s spare, lean prose is absolutely captivating and brings out a life and a world (and a world in many ways more alien to me than that of Cixin Liu’s aliens). Don’t let the subject matter put you off. This is the good stuff. Here‘s Jacqui’s review and here‘s Radz Pandit’s which I also thought very good.

Last Summer in the City, by Gianfranco Calligarich and translated by Howard Curtis

This is another one I can thank Jacqui for. It’s a lovely slice of Dolce Vita-esque Italian drama and a great summer read, if not perhaps a terribly cheery one. It’s also translated by Howard Curtis which if you know your translators is definitely a good sign.

It’s a well written story of a romance between two people both of whom are lost and perhaps too far gone to save each other. It’s melancholic, even despairing, but beautiful. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes Alfred Hayes as there’s some tonal similarities. Jacqui’s review is here (and looking at it again I see Jacqui also made that Alfred Hayes connection).

Termush, by Sven Holm and translated by Sylvia Clayton

I loved this. It’s another reason why July was such a strong month. It’s a Swedish novel about the rich survivors of a nuclear war, safely ensconced in a luxury hotel. It was first published over fifty years ago, but in its examination of 1%ers trying to opt-out of the end of the world it’s sadly surprisingly relevant.

There’s a surreality to the situation – the hotel management taking care of guests who’ve paid for a package to keep them safe while billions die. What next though once the apocalypse has happened? What sense does this transaction make when there’s no longer an economic system underpinning it? And what happens when other survivors who didn’t pay turn up to this bolthole asking for help?

Jacqui’s review here is excellent (it’s clearly link to Jacqui week for me). While this is technically SF it’s very much about people and situation rather than concept and would make a very good autumn/winter read.

Ten Planets, by Yuri Herrera and translated by Lisa Dillmann

Yuri Herrera is one of my favourite authors and Lisa Dillmann is a hugely talented translator (and well done And Other Stories for putting her name on the cover). All the more of a shame then that I really didn’t take to this.

Basically it’s a Borgesian short story collection, using fantastical elements to play games with language, character and situation. Grant makes an interesting comparison to Stanislaw Lem here which also makes sense to me.

Unfortunately I just found it slim stuff. I’ll still pick up Herrera’s next with interest and enthusiasm, but for me clearly he’s a novelist and essayist rather than short story writer.

AUGUST

The Twilight Zone, by Nona Fernandez and translated by Natasha Wimmer

I loved Nona Fernández’ novel Space Invaders so no great surprise I loved this too. It’s a sort of autofiction but about someone other than the author, here a torturer who became a whistleblower of the atrocities behind Argentina’s disappearances.

It’s a difficult, powerful and angry read but for me was quite breathtaking. It lifts the veil on horror, not the horror of ghosts and monsters and all that but the real horror of state-sponsored murder and systematised brutality.

Not an easy read, but a rewarding one and as Grant says in his insightful review here it avoids the trap of becoming merely accusatory. Instead it tries to understand, both the times and the people involved. Superb.

The Dry Heart, by Natalia Ginzburg and translated by Francis Frenaye 

I’ve been wanting to read Ginzburg for a while now and this seemed a good way in, partly as it’s quite slim but also because it has a tremendous opening. It’s an examination of why the narrator murdered her husband (she does it on the first page, it’s not a spoiler), and through that of her life and their relationship.

It’s a sparsely written novel of a woman trapped by her times and society who escapes through marriage only to find herself trapped by that too. It’s horribly sad. Were it true it’s easy to imagine how the narrator would be demonised by the press, and to be fair she does commit murder, but the choices available to her never led to anywhere worth going.

Our Lady of the Nile, by Scholastique Mukasonga and translated by Melanie Mauthner

This is why I like WiTMonth. I’d had this tale of tensions at a private girl’s school in 1990s Rwanda for a while but hadn’t got round to reading it. My mistake because it’s very well written and has that marvellous thing where you take an enclosed environment – a hotel, a school, a boarding house – and it becomes a microcosm of wider society.

Our Lady explores colonial legacies, the value placed on women, and class and ethnic tensions. It’s has memorable characters and a good exploration of how a few strong-willed chancers can drive people to terrible outcomes. Stu wrote a bit more about this here.

Celestial Bodies, by Jokha Alharthi and translated by Marilyn Booth

This wasn’t my book but the fault was mine rather than Jokha Alharthi’s. It’s a multi-generational family saga and that’s simply never been a genre that interests me, even when as here it’s well done.

We follow three generations of Omani women seeing both the changing role of women in Omani society and the changes to Oman itself. I’ve actually been to Oman a couple of times by the way and it’s lovely and very chill, so even if this wasn’t quite me I do still recommend the country.

Grant wrote about this here and his reaction was very similar to mine. It’s skilled and to use Grant’s phrase there’s a great deal of craft, but it’s telling a family’s story and that’s just not something I’ve ever been that interested in. A good book then that deserved the attention it received, but not my book.

Ms Ice Sandwich, by Mieko Kawakami and translated by Louise Heal Kawai

I absolutely loved Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven and I felt like something bite-size after the saga that is Celestial Bodies, so this Kawakami novella felt just right. It’s the story of a boy who has a crush on a woman who works at a sandwich counter, and so it’s a story about growing up.

The boy has a girl he’s friends with but he misses her signals that maybe she’d like more. His grandmother is bedridden and he’s coming to terms with the idea of losing her soon. The sandwich woman is safe in all this because in a sense she’s not real, she’s a dream he’s built around a woman he knows nothing about, but underneath his idea of her there is of course an actual person.

It’s much slighter than Heaven and less memorable, but I enjoyed it and I thought the narrative voice captured early adolescence well. Tony was perhaps a little less taken in his review here. Not prime Kawakami then, but worth a read.

The Forgery, by Ave Barrera and translated by Ellen Jones and Robin Myers

My last read in August and an absolute delight. It’s a tale of an artist trapped by debt into forgery and then literally trapped by his rich but very dodgy patron. It’s huge fun, from a cliffhanger opening to the series of unlikely yet somehow inevitable events which draw our hero Jose in far, far over his head.

Barrera writes well on art and architecture, both of which are central to this, but it’s the characters that make it sing. Grant writes well about this here and I think it has a good chance of making my end of year list.

And that was my Summer reading! Not bad and nor was Autumn, but that’s my next post…

June ‘23 roundup

Another mixed bag of a month. The June chunkster isn’t below as though it took a fair bit of June reading time I didn’t finish it until July.

Rosewater Insurrection, Tade Thompson

Second volume of Tade Thompson’s rather good Rosewater trilogy. Nigeria-based sf with genuinely alien aliens and great human characters.

Thompson is a talent and this was up to his usual high standards. I particularly enjoyed the political struggles between a populist mayor and the national government. Aliens may land, our survival as a species can be threatened, but politics continues through it all.

Familiar Things, Hwang Sok-Yong (translated by Sora Kim-Russell)

This was a June highlight. It’s a Korean novel about a 13-year old boy who goes to live with his mother on an island rubbish dump (the now ironically named Flower Island). They join a community of rubbish pickers who are paid to sort through the waste. The higher your status the better the waste you have access to…

The book showcases people living at the absolute margins without ever losing sight of their humanity. Impressively, it does so without becoming too heavy handed or at all mawkish. In fact it’s quite an engaging read.

There’s a supernatural element in the form of the ancient spirits of the island who are increasingly crowded out by the ever expanding refuse. It works well both straight as a twist to an otherwise realist narrative and metaphorically as an emblem of our impact on our environment.

The characters are well drawn and their dramas are small but involving. Overall, I really liked it. Tony of Tony’s Reading List does a good review of this here and I do recommend you read his piece.

The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin (translated by Ken Liu)

This is one of the most influential sf books in years and one that introduced a vast array of Western readers to contemporary Chinese sf. This is big screen stuff about first contact and the nature of intelligence in the cosmos.

In many ways it’s like classic American sf of the 50s and 60s with all the good and bad that implies. Deep ideas, shallow characters. If you enjoy old school sf you may well enjoy this. If you don’t, you won’t.

Sidewalks, Valeria Luiselli (translated by Christina MacSweeney)

After mega-scale Chinese SF I needed something a little more down to Earth. I chose this slim but enjoyable essay collection by Valeria Luiselli. Tony in his review here uses the word musings and I think that’s a good description. The pieces here are light, bite-size even, yet pleasantly discursive.

It’s a little hard to say what it’s about. There is an often melancholic theme even though it’s not a sad read. Bicycling comes up a fair bit. Cities and travel. It’s like a walk with an interesting friend sharing what’s on their mind.

As well as Tony’s review linked to above, Jacqui did a good review of this here. Unlike Tony and Jacqui I probably won’t return to it but I’m happy to have read it.

The Sing of the Shore, Lucy Wood

Lucy Wood is a Cornish writer that I’m something of a fan of but who nobody else on the blogosphere seems to read. You’re missing out!

This is a slightly more grounded collection than Wood’s debut Diving Belles. There’s less of the mythic elements that worked so well there and more of the everyday issues facing Cornwall, in particular the impact of seasonal employment and getting priced out of your own community by second-home owners.

For all that, my favourite story was the darkly comic A Year of Buryings in which an unnamed and likely ghostly narrator comments on the various random deaths over a year. Some entries are just a sentence long (“Lenny always said he’d fix that loose rung on his ladder.”) Most are around a paragraph.

If you pay attention there are connections between the stories, making the whole greater than the parts. Lucy Wood for me is under appreciated and I look forward to whatever she does next.

The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (narrated by Ray Porter)

This is an accidental reread. I noticed I had an audiobook of it so thought I’d listen to a few minutes to see what it was like.

Obviously I finished it. It’s Chandler. Such good prose and it simply never gets old. Read (or listen to) a page and it’s hard not to read all of them.

Ray Porter did the vocals on the audiobook version (I moved between audiobook and kindle copy, though I’ve also a hardcopy because it’s The Big Sleep). I thought he did a pretty good showing of it though sadly his version doesn’t appear to be on the Audible store anymore. Anyway, it’s The Big Sleep and it’s one of my all time favourite novels.

May ‘23 roundup

This is arguably a little late coming out. Still, here we are.

May was a mixed month. One book carried over from April that I loved, a couple that I liked, then several I really didn’t connect with. Still, the one I loved was very good so overall it wasn’t too bad.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke

This was my April/May chunkster and it was an excellent one. It’s a fantasy novel set in an alternative early 19th Century (basically Austen but with faery). It is quite genuinely one of the most innovative fantasy novels in years. It expands the genre. Most fantasy fiction, good or not, is of interest only to existing fantasy fans. This I would recommend to those with no other interest – it’s a landmark. It’s also often very funny which helps the pages speed by.

Top tip, this is one to read in hardcopy rather than ebook or audiobook. The reason is it’s full of footnotes citing made up historical references or providing commentary. They’re where a lot of the humour lies and they just don’t work as well outside of print.

Grief is the Thing With Feathers, Max Porter

I read Ted Hughes’ Crow ahead of this. It’s a short novel where a family deal with grief following the loss of the wife and mother. A crow, perhaps real, more likely metaphoric, moves in and brings with it disorder and emotional chaos.

Lots of people absolutely love this. Unfortunately it wasn’t me and I don’t remember enough of it to really say much.

Men in Space, Tom McCarthy

Another I can’t really recall much of, save that I didn’t finish it. While I enjoyed his Remainder, it’s becoming clear to me that I’m not Tom McCarthy’s reader.

This one is a sort of shaggy dog tale set in Eastern Europe, but through a modernist lens. For me it needed a bit more propulsion, but in fairness that’s me wanting a book other than the one McCarthy set out to write.

Belt Three, John Ayliff

I needed a bit of light relief after Feathers and Space so read this short sf first novel by game designer John Ayliff. Earth and the rest of the inner solar system have been destroyed by self-replicating alien machines that are slowly moving outwards threatening the surviving remnants of humanity. Society has stratified into a large slave-clone population and their natural-born elite masters. One such clone, masquerading as his former master, falls in with a pirate obsessed with attacking the invaders.

It’s actually pretty good. There’s perhaps a few too many unlikely escapes from peril, but the setup was interesting and I liked the utter indifference of the enemy and the bleakness of the setting (the implication is very strongly that this isn’t targeted at us, it’s everywhere and only just now reached us).

Atlas of Remote Islands, Judith Schalansky

This is absolutely charming. It is literally an atlas of fifty remote islands. For each there’s a diagram, a timeline of events in the island’s history, and a bit of evocative text. Many of the islands are uninhabited. It’s an exercise of imaginary travel and there’s something very likeable about it.

John Self wrote a review of this back in the day here. He rightly pulls out the understated theme of climate change and environmental damage that runs through the text, perhaps unavoidably so. Even with that it remains quite charming and it is beautifully produced. Highly recommended.

One Day all this Will Be Yours, Adrian Tchaikovsky

I thought I’d end the month with ever-reliable and ever-inventive sf author Adrian Tchaikovsky. Well, I say ever-reliable but while this was inventive I didn’t much like it so he’s now demoted to mostly-reliable Adrian Tchaikovsky…

Our hero is a survivor of the time war living in a sort of no-when because we broke the timeline. That’s fine and quite fun. Then he discovers that time isn’t as ended as he thinks and finds himself in a very personal war against a woman that travel to the future shows he will fall in love with. He’s no intention of letting that happen.

It’s actually a pretty good set up and in fairness looking at Amazon I’m about the only person who doesn’t like this. I just found the wisecracking tone a bit smug and samey (but then it is essentially an sf rom-com). Otherwise though 1,361 ratings on Amazon as at the time of writing and almost all of the very few negative ones are just complaining about the price rather than the book itself so I’m very clearly an outlier here.

And that’s it! I’ll try to get June and July up before the end of August, but I make no promises…

April ‘23 roundup!

Late I know, but I was ill and I’ve been busy. I’m no longer ill, though still pretty busy. Even so, the ever-growing TBR pile won’t read itself.

April had lots of enjoyable reading, dominated by a book that’ll actually be in my May roundup. My year of long books project continues and some of those books are long enough they straddle months…

More on that soon. In the meantime, here’s the books I did finish in April.

The Fell, Sarah Moss

Sarah Moss has been on a bit of a roll recently with short and highly topical novels. She’s mastered a neat trick of books that are very rewarding as narratives in their own right, but that also have deeper contemporary resonances. Ghost Wall deals in issues of resurgent nationalism; Summerwater speaks to Brexit and xenophobia.

The Fell explores our recent collective experience of lockdown. Kate is in her 40s with a teenage son and going stir crazy. One night she decides to go out for a run on the local fells. It’s a breach of lockdown rules and if she’s caught there’s potentially serious fines. While out, she slips, falls, and needs rescuing.

It’s a brilliant scenario. We get her perspective, her son’s wondering whether to call for help as it gets later and later, her next door neighbour and a volunteer rescue worker. It’s tense, Kate will die if she’s not found in time, but more than that it captures something elusive about a time that already seems to be being almost wilfully forgotten. That sense of everyday dread, eroded trust, but also of the extraordinary efforts some made to keep others safe.

I loved Ghost Wall, liked Summerwater (though I remember it very clearly which speaks well of it). Here I think Moss is on top form and if you can bear to revisit 2020 I’d strongly recommend this.

Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen

I adored this. It’s easily the funniest book I’ve read in a while. It’s a satire on the gothic novel featuring Catherine, who being a young woman of no particular distinction is an unlikely heroine. The novel largely consists of her staying a while in Bath, visiting a country house with a very welcoming family, and taking some carriage rides out with a young man who is perhaps fonder of himself than he is of her.

What makes it so fun? Because everything is written in the most portentous and dramatic style, but then nothing much really happens. The author’s voice will warn that Catherine little knows what dire consequence may soon befall her, then next chapter she’s fine because actually nothing has happened. What is the dark secret of Northanger Abbey? There isn’t one, it’s a perfectly pleasant place.

It’s probably fair that this isn’t mentioned in the same breath as Emma or P&P, but it’s still masses of fun. Also, it’s quite short. I’m not sure it’s best as first Austen, but it’s certainly not just one for completists.

Territory of Light, Yuko Tsushima (translated by Geraldine Harcourt)

A young mother moves into a top floor apartment with her toddler daughter. She’s separated from the father and making a new life. The apartment has massive windows and is flooded with light, hence the title.

This is one of those novels where in a sense not much happens. The woman struggles to adapt to being a single parent, has to juggle work and childcare, suffers from isolation and perhaps depression. That’s life though sometimes isn’t it? It’s a situation as worthy of exploring as any other. Most importantly though it’s beautifully, superbly written.

This is a clear candidate for my end of year list. Jacqui wrote about it here and captures it well. Very, very highly recommended.

The Hunter, Richard Stark

Slight change of style and pace. This is the first of the Parker novels, there’s over twenty of them. Parker is a career criminal left for dead by one of his crew. He wants his money and he wants revenge, and he doesn’t care that the guy who betrayed him is now a somebody in ‘the ‘The Outfit’.

What follows is a brutal and propulsive thriller. Parker is essentially an animal, amoral and savage. He takes what he wants and god help anyone who gets in his way. It’s very much a man’s world, women aren’t treated well or given much agency. Then again anybody who’s not a criminal is basically an extra. I wouldn’t call it literature, but it’s great pulp (as you’d expect, given Richard Stark is really Donald E. Westlake).

Shards of Earth, Adrian Tchaikovsky

Space opera! I can’t recall why I picked this up next but I enjoyed it. It’s over 500 pages and the first of a trilogy which is a bit daunting, but Tchaikovsky is very good at big-screen SF.

In the far future, much of human space including Earth itself has been destroyed by massive planetary sized alien craft of unknown origin. The war ended leaving a shattered humanity, but is the enemy now returning? Of course they are or there wouldn’t be a trilogy. If this is the sort of thing you like then you will definitely like this. If you’re SF-curious this probably isn’t the place to start.

Hotel, Joanna Walsh

This is an interesting one. On its surface it’s a book about hotels, mostly high end ones. In fact it’s more a mix of memoir and reflection about the narrator’s failing/failed marriage. The book consists of vignettes, postcards even, featuring at times Freud and his patient Dora and other famous hotel-guests.

If you were to read any of it as an excerpt it might be amusing. Collectively it becomes terribly sad. What is home after a major break-up? Whatever it may become in future, in the immediate aftermath you’re in a non-place surrounded by seemingly familiar objects robbed of comfort.

Suspicion, Friedrich Dürrenmatt (translated by Joel Agee)

There are two Inspector Barlach novels and I was something of an outlier in not enjoying the first, which I found contrived. No such concerns with the second.

Inspector Barlach discovers evidence that a prominent doctor may in fact be a Nazi war criminal and determines to bring him to justice. He does this by the arguably imprudent tactic of submitting himself to the doctor’s care as a patient in his clinic. What could go wrong?

I’ll leave you to find that out for yourself if you’ve not already read it. As with the first novel, but for me much more successfully, it becomes an examination of moral choice and of moral purpose versus nihilism. It’s also a very tense read as Barlach becomes perilously aware quite how vulnerable a position he’s put himself in.

And that’s it! I’ll try not to leave it too long before writing up May.

March roundup

In just before the end of April!

My 2023 goal of reading longer books continues, which means that while I read a fair bit in March there’s not that many titles to talk about. It is satisfying though to have engaged with some really lengthy works and it makes a change from my usual reading and my fondness for novellas and short novels.

So, without further ado:

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy (translated by Rosamund Bartlett)

I had mixed views on War and Peace. You’re not really supposed to say that, but it’s true. It was rich, epic, but also had lengthy non-fiction sections where Tolstoy shared his ideas on historical theory which sometimes robbed it of momentum.

No such concerns with Anna Karenina. This is an extraordinary and rewarding work packed with complex and fascinating characters. Bartlett’s translation is lively and I highly recommend it. She avoids ‘smoothing’ Tolstoy’s prose where the original was jarring or repetitive. (It was an intentional technique on his part, often ‘tidied’ by translators. Lispector has had the same issue).

Seriously, this is superb. Yes it’s a classic of Russian literature which can be a bit daunting, but the pages flew by. Money back guarantee if you don’t like it*.

Thanks to Guy whose post here made me pick up this translation.

Intimacies, Lucy Caldwell

Lucy Caldwell is a fairly recent discovery for me. She’s a Northern Irish writer and an absolute master of the short story form (apparently her recent novel is pretty good too).

This collection is about parenthood, motherhood really, and it’s exceptional. I don’t have kids and barring surprising advances in science it’s pretty unlikely I’ll ever be a mother. Even so, the sheer quality of the writing, the emotional intelligence and the ability to see the drama of the everyday meant that I absolutely loved this.

Further info in Jacqui’s review here.

Our Share of Night, Mariana Enriquez (translated by Megan McDowell)

I loved both of Mariana Enriquez’ short story collections, but even so like many I was taken aback when she went from short stories to a 700+ page behemoth.

Enriquez is still using horror to explore Argentina’s past, but on a larger scale. A cult dedicated to an entity known as the Darkness lives in extraordinary wealth and privilege, sacrificing children and perpetrating horrors to maintain their position. The Darkness devours its sacrifices, who literally disappear into it never to be seen again. What could that be referencing?

The story opens following a medium, Juan, a large and handsome man and a skilled sorcerer. The cult depend on him as he can summon the Darkness which is key to their rituals. They believe that they can use the Darkness to achieve immortality by passing their consciousnesses on to children’s bodies, and they plan either to transfer Juan’s into his son Gaspar’s body or to make Gaspar into their pawn in Juan’s place.

Gaspar later becomes a character in his own right as we see him grow up and the slow battle between the cult and Juan over Gaspar’s future unfold. I enjoyed this, but then I enjoy horror. Here I think the horror elements are more to the fore than the social and historical aspects. The metaphors are clear enough, but on this scale you’re spending more time in the actual situation of the characters than what it reflects in Argentinian history.

Oddly, most reviews I’ve seen have taken it as read that the immortality thing works. That’s not in the novel though. Juan is concerned it might but there’s no clear evidence it will, just that his son will be harmed as the cult tries. For him the Darkness is a mad god, if it’s even an entity at all, forever hungry and he believes the prophetic messages the cult think they receive from it are just self-delusion. It makes for a more ambiguous book and perhaps a better one, since the cult’s real motive is more plainly perpetuating their own power.

As is probably apparent by now, it’s a hard one to sum up. I enjoyed it which is good at over 700 pages, but I’m not sure it actually needed all that space or quite what the point of it all was. I’ll definitely read more Enriquez but I hope she goes a bit smaller scale next time.

Final caution, this very much is horror. It involves scenes that are genuinely difficult to read including the torture and maiming of children. The passages of real world historical barbarism are no better than the cult’s magic-fuelled psychopathy, which of course is intentional. If you do decide to try this one, be prepared for some strong content.

And that’s my March reading! Few books, but rewarding ones.

*Terms and conditions apply. Cash refunds may be replaced with unsatisfying apologies at blogger’s discretion.

January/February update

This is my year of reading longer books and so far that’s going ok. I’ve gone back to Proust who I hadn’t read since 2018. I’ve also gone back to Tolstoy and I’ve just finished Maria Enriquez’ rather huge Our Share of Night.

That does mean there’ll likelier be fewer books in each of these updates, but hopefully some very good books.

Emma, Jane Austen

I mean what is there to say? Firstly I suppose that it really is very, very good. It’s tremendously well written, remains very readable and is often pretty funny too. Mr Wodehouse’s utter solipsism is particularly hilarious.

Anyway, highly recommended. I know it’s not exactly original to recommend Austen’s Emma, but there’s a reason this remains so popular.

The Last Days of New Paris, China Miéville

China Miéville is an immensely talented writer of what for want of a better term I’ll call literary fantasy (though I think he’d just say fantasy). Miéville avoids tired post-Tolkien pastiche, instead embracing the freedom that use of the fantastic can bring.

Here we’re in a world where the Second World War has continued after 1945. Something strange happened in Paris, giving life to figures and symbols from surrealist art and creating a nightmare city where surviving Nazi forces battle impossible beings. The novel follows a French resistance fighter as he wearily continues his small part of the war while working with one such creature, the elegant corpse as shown on the cover art.

If you’ve any knowledge of surrealism it’s a lot of fun, and honestly it is if you don’t too plus there’s an appendix which explains the many references. Don’t let the fantasy label put you off here – this is a clever novel which deserves a wider readership.

The Captive, Marcel Proust (translated by Scott, Moncrieff and Kilmartin)

Gosh this gets dark. I had no idea. In this volume the narrator effectively imprisons his girlfriend Albertine in his apartment, obsessively tracking her movements and interrogating her friends and driver out of an obsessive jealousy. He is manipulative and controlling, more focused on preventing Albertine having any life than having one of his own.

Emma at bookaround describes this here as claustrophobic, and it’s absolutely the right word. It’s a very difficult read, as you’re absolutely immersed page after page after page in what is frankly a sick mind.

Emma is great on how this works in the French, which is fascinating. It’s the language of property and of domination, not of love. The irony, and again Emma touches on this, is that in imprisoning Albertine he imprisons himself too. Life as her jailer is too all-consuming to allow time for anything much else. He disappears from society because to take part in it would mean stopping his ceaseless observation of Albertine.

As ever I love Proust as a writer, but this is one of those where the quality of the writing if anything makes it even harder to read. I suspect most readers don’t get this far or I’d expect more discussion of quite how extraordinarily challenging this volume is.

Tokyo Express, Seichō Matsumoto (translated by Jesse Kirkwood)

After the Proust I needed some light relief. This is a lovely Penguin imprint of a classic Japanese murder mystery. It’s actually one that could only take place in Japan in fact, because the entire plot hangs on the intricacies of the Japanese rail system and whether or not a suspect’s alibi stands up or if somehow they could have used the rail network to cross the country in time to commit the crime.

Once in Japan I was on a platform where a train was 30 seconds late. People got restive, checked their watches, looked concerned. In the UK I think we still define within 15 minutes as being on time. It’s fair to say this novel’s plot wouldn’t work in Britain.

It’s fun, well written and absolutely classic golden age crime stuff. Stu did a nice write-up of it here. If you’ve any liking for the genre you’ll like this. Also, did I mention it’s a lovely imprint? Penguin have done Matsumoto proud.

Italian Ways, Tim Parks

Continuing with the trains theme, this is a non-fiction book by novelist and academic Tim Parks in which he explores the culture of his native Italy through its railway system. It sounds dry but is actually often very funny, and if you’ve spent any decent length of time in Italy you’ll recognise a lot that he discusses.

Parks has written several books about Italy. For me this was one of his best. Perfect if you have an Italian holiday coming up involving some rail travel…

Sisters, Daisy Johnson

After all that light relief I was ready for some dark again. Who better than Daisy Johnson? After all, I liked both her short story collection Fen and her first novel Everything Under. Johnson is a very physical writer, bringing out the body and all its mess in her fiction. Here she uses gothic horror to examine the relationship between two sisters, one dominant, manipulative and daring and the other shyer and more cautious.

Johnson is never less than interesting as a writer, but for me this wasn’t quite the right book at the right time. It’s well written and I see why people are excited by it, but it wasn’t me. It is though another interesting example of the recent trend of female writers successfully using the horror genre to explore psychological and societal issues.

The Judge and his Hangman, F. Dürrenmatt 

Time for a bit more crime. Here we have a Swiss classic from 1950. A police officer is found shot dead in his car. Inspector Barlach, terminally ill with stomach cancer, leads the investigation.

Initially it seems straightforward enough. Barlach is a highly experienced detective but with personal problems in the form of his illness and a perception that he’s past his prime, all of which impact his investigation. Quickly however, it becomes apparent this is less a murder mystery and more a moral inquiry.

Jacqui wrote about this here and talks about the dilemma at the heart of it. For me, it didn’t quite work. I thought the whole scenario just a bit too unlikely and the killer a bit incredible in his motivations. Jacqui llked it much more and to be fair this isn’t entirely my genre, so I’d encourage you to read Jacqui’s review.

Stealing for the Sky, Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts is one of the more intelligent SF writers about today. His books often push genre boundaries and display a sharp intelligence with a keen sense of people and their motivations (many SF writers are much better on the science than they are the fiction, Roberts can do both).

This is the lighter side of Roberts. It’s an intentional homage to Richard Stark’s novels with a Parker-esque near-future hero who’s been paid to steal an ex-soviet rocket capable of getting a new micro-state its own spaceflight capability. It’s fast moving high-octane stuff and lots of fun. It leaves very clear room for a sequel and I’ll definitely read the next one.

The Fugitive, Marcel Proust (translated by Scott, Moncrieff and Kilmartin)

Back to Proust! I have to admit I returned to Proust with a bit less enthusiasm this time, after the challenges of The Captive. Happily this isn’t quite so grim. Albertine’s left the narrator and he’s working through that, then through conflicting emotions of grief balanced against the refreshed interests provided by his return to society.

The narrator is still a creep. His attitude to women even for the period isn’t great, but because he’s back in society we’re back with Charlus and other classic characters and back to Proust’s marvellous observations. Emma wrote this one up too, here, and like me found it a welcome breath of air after The Captive.

The Girl with all the Gifts, M.R. Carey

Post-Proust wind-down was this now classic horror novel by MR Carey, later turned into a very successful film. Humanity has succumbed to a fungus-driven zombie apocalypse (this helped create that particular fictional trend rather than cashing into it). A military base is working with children who are infected but not mindless, engaging in horrific experiments in the hope of finding a cure.

Unsurprisingly it all goes a bit wrong and soon a handful of survivors and one of the infected children are out in the world with very little to keep them safe. The wonderfully sinister chief scientist, played superbly by Glenn Close in the film wants to dissect the infected girl but her teacher sees her humanity and wants to protect her.

For a novel involving the end of the world and an awful lot of biting it’s very well done and I can see why it was such a hit. It’s pacy, cleanly written and while it’s less original now that’s only because it’s been much copied. A great palate cleanser if you don’t mind a few people getting eaten in your fiction.

And that’s my January and February! I’ll try to update on March before too long, the month of Anna Karenina…

My best books of 2022

I’ve been crazy busy since the start of the year and likely will be for another month or two yet, so my usually late posts may be even later. I’m temporarily covering for an extra team while its new head is being recruited and it makes for not a lot of downtime. It’ll pass though. On to my best of last year!

2022 was a bumper reading year, not least because of a decent length holiday in July involving several long train trips. I read a lot, 101 books in total, though that includes a fair few novellas and a small number that I abandoned part-way in.

For 2023 I’m changing tack. I’ve a few absolute chunksters I’d like to get stuck into: Anna Karenina; Ulysses; A Suitable Boy; The Books of Jacob and more. Each will probably take weeks so my reading count at end of 2023 is likely to be much lower, but quality rather than quantity really is the thing here.

One wrinkle with reading longer books is that more of them will be on kindle. Porting an 800 or 1,000+ page tome on public transport isn’t that great an experience; Moby Dick doesn’t easily fit in a pocket. It’s a shame as I do prefer hardcopy, but realistically most really long books just won’t get read in hardcopy.

Anyway, that’s the plan for this year. Here though is my best of the year just gone. My top choice of the year is at the end but otherwise these are in the order I read them.

Best book that shouldn’t really be on the list: The Gate of Angels, by Penelope Fitzgerald

I loved this, but then I’m not sure there’s any Fitzgerald’s I haven’t loved. I also read her At Freddie’s this year which I think is actually in many ways the better book, and should really be on the list instead of this one. This though won the prize for its mix of innocence and romance and as ever very dry humour. A gem.

Best Renaissance romance: Tell them of Battles, Kings and Elephants, by Matthias Enard (translated by Charlotte Mandell)

Of course it’s not really a romance in any meaningful sense at all. I just adore alliteration. Instead it’s another Enardian exploration of the gulfs between east and west and between people, here told through the lens of an imagined trip by Michelangelo to Constantinople. Brilliant, and also bitesize which makes it not a bad Enard entry point.

Best mixed audio/text experience: Border, by Kapka Kassabova

I read three books last year that I had both on kindle and audible. Sometimes I actually read, sometimes I listened while walking. It wouldn’t work for everything but when it does it works pretty well.

This is non-fiction, a travelogue exploring the history, folklore and complex present of the Bulgarian borderlands. It’s very good, not what I’d normally read but even so I plan to read more by Kassabova.

Best book most people wouldn’t read if it weren’t by Ernaux: Happening, by Annie Ernaux (translated by Tanya Leslie)

What is there to say on this one? An unflinching report of an illegal abortion that Ernaux had as a young woman. It’s unsentimental but not unsympathetic and for me easily one of Ernaux’s best. I know the topic is difficult but this really is excellent.

Best book I didn’t think would be on this list: Cold Enough for Snow, by Jessica Au

I found this a bit slight when I first read it, but it’s held up well in memory. It’s beautifully written with a little but not too much ambiguity. It’s a lovely exploration of a mother-daughter relationship and overall very atmospheric. A slow burner but a keeper.

Best book about bullying, adolescence and meaning: Heaven, by Meiko Kawakami (translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd)

This was my first Kawakami and confirmed me as a fan. The central character is the subject of brutal bullying and makes friends with a girl in his class in the same situation. Is that really enough to found a friendship on though? This is another difficult read, mostly for the descriptions of bullying, but it pays off. The scene where the protagonist asks one of the bullies for an explanation of why he thinks it’s ok to behave like that remains absolutely sharp in my memory.

Best book that I most regret buying on kindle rather than hardcopy: Cursed Bunny, by Bora Chung (translated by Anton Hur)

I genuinely considered this for my book of the year. Typically I buy short stories on kindle because I mostly read them in bed. This was no exception but I just liked it so much I like the idea of it sitting on the bookcase. Irrational, but then desires largely are.

There’s been a bit of a genre recently of short story collections using fantasy or horror elements to explore contemporary lives, particularly women’s lives. This for me is the best of them, the book that pushes past the limits of form to do something genuinely interesting. A keeper.

Best evocation of a dying order: The Leopard, by G.T. di Lampedusa (translated by Archibald Colquhoun)

I was lucky enough to read this on the train to Sicily. It’s an extraordinary book, widely and rightly praised. The characters are as richly drawn as in any Russian classic, the grandeur and decline of the old Sicilian order is vividly painted and overall it’s a bit of a triumph. Another strong candidate for my book of the year.

Best book about nuns abroad: Black Narcissus, by Rumer Godden

I took a fair bit of persuading to read this and I’m not sure why. It was recommended by readers I trust and it opens well. Eventually I did take the plunge and I’m glad I did. The evocation of the mountain, the tensions of the small community of nuns far from anywhere they have any good reason to be, it’s marvellous. Like quite a few mid-20th Century female novelists Godden deserves a much greater profile than she has.

Oddly enough this isn’t my only book in the nuns abroad category, because of that sf series by Lina Rather I’ve been reading about a convent inhabiting a living spaceship and dealing with their internal issues against a backdrop of interstellar war. One of the more original sf premises I’ve come across in a while.

Best blackest noir: Ride the Pink Horse, by Dorothy B. Hughes

And this one really is black. This was my first Hughes and it was very impressive. Three characters, a town in fiesta, heat, dust, death and stark moral choices. It’s all here. If you’ve any fondness for noir this is an absolute classic.

Best novel that wasn’t what I expected: Will and Testament, by Vigdis Hjorth (translated by Charlotte Barslund)

My first Hjorth was her Long Live the Post Horn! It’s a gently comic tale involving public service and an EU postal directive. Turns out it’s not necessarily representative of Hjorth’s other work and while this was great it wasn’t quite the wry and charming tale I was expecting.

Here we’re in territory of family trauma, conflicting narratives and how you move forward when people won’t even accept what happened to you because it changes the narrative of their own childhoods. It’s a powerful book that may need a bit of a trigger warning for some. A trigger warning of course doesn’t mean don’t read it, just that it may be worth knowing some of what’s coming.

Best sheer loveliness: Some Tame Gazelle, by Barbara Pym

Barbara Pym!

That is literally the only explanation needed for this being on my end of year list.

Best choral novel: Space Invaders, by Nona Fernández (translated by Natasha Wimmer

This is a really impressive little book. It’s about Pinochet’s Chile and uses a semi-choir of childhood voices and the metaphor of the then-current space invaders game to capture the brutality of life under the regime. Fernandez creates an incredibly effective dreamlike collage of memory, metaphor and dread. Absolutely superb and I’ve already bought her novel The Twilight Zone.

Best book of the year: Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan

Because it just had to be. I read some truly great novellas in 2022, some of them listed above. Regardless of length though this is simply a masterpiece. It’s an examination of history, moral responsibility and moral choice and yet it’s written with a jewel-like clarity and precision. Keegan’s Foster is also brilliant but I try to have no more than one book by an author in my end of year regardless of how great (and Keegan really is great).

This and Foster are also ones I regret buying on kindle to be honest. They’ve since come out in rather nice paperbacks and they’re just so good. If you haven’t read this then I urge you to do so.

And that’s it! I’ve a small number of honourable mentions that on another day might have made the list: Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City (with a superb audiobook adaptation by the way); Elisa Shua Dusapin’s The Pachinko Parlour; and my perennial favourite Arthur Schnitzler’s Casanova’s Return to Venice. End of year lists mean hard choices though and the ones above aren’t too bad a selection.

December ’22 round-up

I never do my end of year write-ups before January. There’s two reasons for that. One is that I always hope my next read will be amazing, and that’s as true in late December as it is say in mid-March. The other reason is that I like the sense of completeness of the year definitely being done and being able to look back over it as a reading whole.

As it’s now January my end of year should be up soon. In the meantime, I did have a good December. I usually do if only as there’s more time to read when I get a break from work (hence July being such a powerhouse of a reading month this year). Even so, the worst in December was fun but forgettable and the best were outstanding.

Pond, Claire-Louise Bennett

We start with a good book that wasn’t entirely me. This is a series of maybe-linked short stories, some very short indeed. They all feature an unnamed woman living in an English village. She’s a solitary sort but happily so and the stories are observations and vignettes from her life.

It made Radhika’s Best of 2016 list and I can see why as it’s nicely written and has very much its own voice. It would make a good later winter/early spring read and it’s published by Fitzcarraldo which is always a good sign. Lisa Hill at ANZ LitLovers was less taken though and writes a countervailing negative view here. I’m somewhere between Radhika and Lisa on this one. I liked it but didn’t love it and it’s not a keeper for me.

Carmilla, Sheridan Le Fanu

Before Dracula there was Carmilla. Actually, my understanding is that before Dracula there were quite a few vampire tales. Enough so that it’s a bit odd nobody in Dracula says “hey, are we dealing with a vampire here?” Still, Carmilla is one of the more famous ones.

We’re in gothic potboiler here with a lovely young woman who lives in an isolated castle with her father and minimal staff. The beautiful Carmilla literally crashes into their lives after a carriage accident and they agree to look after her while she recovers her health. Is Carmilla all she seems though? No, of course she’s not. Before too long our innocent heroine is fading from an illness that’s claiming the lives of many of the area’s young women and her attachment to Carmilla is starting to look distinctly unwholesome.

It’s often said there’s a lesbian subtext to Carmilla. In modern terms that’s true, but for when it was written I’d say it was probably less a subtext and more neon highlighting. It’s a clear influence on Stoker’s later Dracula and it’s a lot of fun. One for anyone with a fondness for classic Gothic fiction. Guy Savage wrote about it here.

Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami (translated by Jay Rubin)

It’s years since I’ve read any Murakami. I used to be something of a fan but I got tired of his idiosyncrasies. I’m not sure why I suddenly went back to him but I’m glad I did, as while the usual Murakami issues with depictions of women remain this was strong. I’m not at all surprised it was a massive hit for him.

We open on a flight in the 1980s. A muzak version of The Beatles’ Norwegian Wood sends the narrator back into his memories and of a time as a young college student when he was in love with two different women. We know right from the beginning that one of them killed herself.

This is a dark novel, much more so than I expected. For some reason I had the idea that it was a rather sweet love story, rather than a story of mental illness, depression and suicide.

The narrator as ever with Murakami works in a jazz shop (part time as he’s a student) and loves F. Scott Fitzgerald. The female characters all want to sleep with him (it’s that which drives most of the story). It’s Murakami.

Even so, despite my caveats and Murakami’s issues it is powerful. Tony wrote about it here having read it first when he was younger and again more recently. He rightly brings out the youthful energy of the book and its copious charm, but also the dark undercurrents of mental illness against a background of social change. If you’ve ever wanted to try Murakami to be honest you could do much worse than starting with this one.

Space Invaders, Nona Fernández (translated by Natasha Wimmer)

This is a candidate for my end of year list. Again it’s an act of narrative memory, here adults looking back on their time as children in 1980s Chile under Pinochet. It’s a slight volume, novella more than novel, but spectacular in how it builds an atmosphere of dread and everyday brutality.

It’s a mix of dreams, mingled voices, metaphor and memory and yet despite being really genuinely cleverly put together is also immensely readable. Jacqui refers to it as a literary collage, which is nicely put and captures something of its layered complexity.

Jacqui has written more on this here than I have time for and I strongly encourage you to read her review if you haven’t already. This made Jacqui’s end of year list and I’m not even slightly surprised.

The Kaiju Preservation Society, John Scalzi

Kaiju if you don’t know are basically giant monsters like Godzilla or the creatures from the recent Pacific Rim films. John Scalzi is an extremely successful SF author that I’ve not previously read and I fancied something lightweight at this point in the month. Scalzi himself described this as a pop song of the novel and it’s the slightly silly tale of a New York delivery guy who ends up working for a cross-dimensional organisation that protects kaiju that live on a parallel earth.

It’s fun and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it appear at a movie theatre near you at some future point. It’s let down a bit though by pretty much all the characters having the same wry comic tone which makes them a bit samey. Still, I wanted a light novel and it certainly delivered on that. Good thing it did too, because up next was…

Days in the History of Silence, Merthe Lindstrom (translated by Anne Bruce)

Delighted to see the translator on the cover here. This is a Norwegian novel about an aging couple told from the wife’s perspective. Her husband literally hasn’t spoken a word for years now. She’s become his carer, but it seems less a case of dementia (at least at first) and more that he chose silence.

As the novel develops it becomes apparent the silence goes back much further than when the husband literally stopped talking. He comes from a family that was wiped out in the Holocaust and is left with trauma from that but his wife never wanted to discuss it, to acknowledge it. They’ve never even told their now adult children. She gave up a baby for adoption when she was 17, but she won’t speak of that either. More recently they sacked their much-loved housekeeper but while it’s easy for the reader to guess why they can’t explain it to their children because there’s so much the children don’t know of their lives.

It’s powerful and well written but for me it became claustrophobic and airless. This terrible marriage, these people who’d somehow wasted their lives in silence. Guy wrote about it here (which is where I learned about this one) and was hugely impressed by it so it’s one you may wish to consider.

New Hope for the Dead, Charles Willeford

This is another one that Guy introduced me to, here. It’s one of Willeford’s Miami-based Hoke Moseley novels. Hoke’s part of the homicide squad, all of whom have been told to live within the city district which is an issue as Hoke is financially crippled by his divorce settlement. He’s also just got his first female partner, Sanchez, and while he’s no problem with women cops it’s painfully apparent he’s no idea how to connect with a woman on an equal working level.

Hoke and Sanchez are called to a drug overdose, but the dead junkie was the son of a drug-gang lawyer and he was living with his step-mother who Hoke thinks is gorgeous and up for going to bed with him. The suicide doesn’t feel quite right to him anyway and investigating it gives him a reason to keep talking to the step-mother…

I liked the last Hoke Moseley novel I read and this one is just as much fun. I said in my review of the first of these “If you’re even slightly a crime fan, I can save you some time on this review. You’ll like this one. Go pick up a copy.” I stand by that.

The Topeka School, Ben Lerner

This is an interesting one. My wife bought me this for Jolabokaflod (look it up, it’s delightful). It’s very much a novel of the Trumpian post-truth era. We’re in the 1990s and Adam is a college student and debate star, but college-level debate isn’t as most of us would imagine it. Instead it’s all about the spread – getting as many assertions in as you can so your opponent loses not because your argument is better but because they can’t keep up.

The book’s told from Adam’s own perspective and from the perspectives of each of his parents, who have their own issues and stories both being members of a nationally famous therapeutic community. Adam’s mother has had breakaway success which has made her something of a celebrity, putting strains on her friendships and marriage and exposing her to the hatred of men she’s never met who take exception to her work.

So we’re in an examination of toxicity here, both in the public sphere through the debating tournaments whose champions will become the politicians of our own age and privately through the men who feel entitled to harass a woman they’ve never met because she wrote something they didn’t like.

It’s semi-autobiographical. Lerner was a debating champion and his mother was an academic who had breakout success, but that’s not what’s interesting about it. What persuades here is seeing how we got where we are (or at least how contemporary America got where it is, but it’s not like Europe’s exactly immune to this stuff). A difficult read in many ways, but difficult because persuasive.

Journeys, Stefan Zweig (translated by Will Stone)

I usually have a short story collection on the go alongside my full-length reads. In late December I instead read this collection of feuilletons by Stefan Zweig, each a short piece by him on a location such as Antwerp, Seville and Bruges.

These pieces were written over a span of years ranging from the 1920s into the late 1930s. The latter are inevitably more powerful. I sometimes find Zweig a bit overblown as an author and that was the case for me with most of these here, but that diminishes as he has more serious subjects to write about and his account of a London shelter for Jewish refugees was genuinely moving.

Karen wrote about this here and liked it a lot more than I did. In fairness, I’m not as much of a Zweig fan as most so if you do like Zweig the odds are you’ll be closer to Karen on this than me.

In Our Mad and Furious City, Guy Gunaratne

Final book of 2022 and a great justification of why I don’t like to write end of year posts too early. I don’t know yet if this will be on my best of 2022 list, but it’s definitely a candidate.

We’re on a North London council estate. A soldier has been killed and the streets are full of tension. The novel follows a few of the estate’s residents, most of them friends but one an older woman and another a paralysed old man reliving his memories of coming to Notting Hill from the West Indies decades before.

This is a great London novel. One of the characters is named Selvon and as with Sam Selvon’s masterful The Lonely Londoners Gunaratne captures not just the lives of his characters but their speech too. It’s a vernacular novel, ennit, but written with skill so that each voice is quite distinct and even if you’re not familiar with the way people speak in that part of London you become familiar with the rhythms of it.

Unusually for me I both read this and listened to it, as I had it both on Kindle and Audible. If you do listen to audiobooks this might be worth taking that way as the voice acting is pretty much the best I’ve encountered and really helps bring the characters and style of speech to life.

This got huge attention back when it came out and deservedly so. A great book to end the year on.

Right, that’s December ’22. See you soon for my best of the year post!

October/November ‘22 roundup

Yes, it’s a double post because I’d like to finish my 2022 posts by and large within 2022…

On which note, I’ve started thinking about my reading for next year and I’ve noticed I tend not to read many long novels. I think that’s partly just because they are a big commitment, but also because the thing with blogs is you want to be part of a conversation (even haltingly as I am these days). If you read just one book in a whole month then you can feel less a part of that conversation.

The thing is though, while I love a novella, there are some really good long books out there that totally justify their length. So I’m thinking 2023 may be when I try to read fewer books but tackle some that require sustained attention.

Anyway! October and November. Both good solid reading months and a couple of stand-out reads.

OCTOBER

I’ll Sell You a Dog, Juan Pablo Villalobos (translated by Rosalind Harvey)

This is my third Villalobos and he remains a favourite. Here it’s the tale of a retired taco seller who moves into an apartment building where the residents are all semi-compulsory members of a book club who quickly become obsessed with the idea he’s writing a novel. It’s a satire on art and literary criticism and very, very funny.

Content warning (I know, how millennial of me), there are several dogs killed over the course of the book which is normally a total deal-killer for me. It’s not dwelt on in terms of the details or frankly I’d have had to stop reading, but it is one of the running jokes and is I think among other things a bit of a commentary on the contrast between the brutality of life and the pretensions of art and literature lovers, but that may be just my own pretensions speaking.

That warning makes this maybe not your best choice as a first Villalobos. If though you already like him this is another star turn on his part.

Perfecting Sound Forever, Greg Milner

On paper this is a fascinating concept – a history of the technology of recorded sound and its impact on music. For me though this didn’t work. I encountered several fairly basic scientific howlers in the first chapter plus some quite repetitive and meandering language. I know very little about recording technology but I do know some basic physics and if a book gets the stuff I do know wrong it dents my confidence that I can trust the rest.

One example, bizarrely Milner thinks Neanderthals didn’t have art. Fine, it’s not a book about human evolution but he uses it as the basis for an admittedly short bit of speculation and he’s so profoundly wrong on that point I found myself wondering what research he’d done in other areas or if he’s just working on what he believes to be true and making assertions.

There’s no point really to an educational non-fiction book once you lose trust. Others have loved this though so if the concept appeals I’d suggest looking at some wider reviews. I bailed.

Central Station, Lavie Tidhar

My October piece of science fiction and a very strong choice. This is a series of connected short stories set in the future space port of Tel Aviv. What makes it work so well is Tidhar’s focus is not on the spaceships and colonies and all that (much as I do sometimes love all that), but in the sense of life continuing on the ground much as it ever has.

A man returns from Mars to encounter his former love, both of them now much older but no wiser. A young woman falls in love with the semi-roboticised veteran of a forgotten war. A construction worker trades with transhuman intelligences in the hope of building a legacy to pass to his children and grandchildren. The trappings of society have changed, but people haven’t.

If you know your SF history there’s a lot of references buried in here which are fun to discover but they’re not necessary for the core of the book. Tidhar creates a future that is utterly persuasive not in its details, of course those won’t come true, but in its sense of a lived place with people making do as best they can just as they always did. It’s a tremendous achievement.

Don’t Go to Sleep in the Dark, Celia Fremlin

I adored Celia Fremlin’s The Hours Before Dawn. What I didn’t realise then was Fremlin also wrote a lot of short stories. They tend to be in the same vein as Dawn – claustrophobic psychological horror/suspense, with every now and then a story having a low key supernatural element. They’re not quite horror, but they certainly are horror-adjacent.

This is I think Fremlin’s first collection and it’s very good, particularly for a winter read. Radhika wrote up a slim Faber volume which comprises some of the best of this collection here and Guy has written up lots of Fremlin here. I’ll be reading more by her.

A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright

Typically I don’t read much non-fiction, but I felt like a change in October and read a few titles out of my normal range. This one is a series of essays on societal collapse which were turned into a book back in 2004. It examines how various civilisations have failed and tries to see if there are lessons we can draw from them to avoid the same fate.

It’s well written and extremely interesting. Wright does indeed draw some lessons, but I had the feeling he wasn’t that hopeful we’d learn them. A good and thought-provoking read but not one that gave me much hope for the future. We’re no smarter after all than those who’ve gone before us and our better insights and understanding of the world doesn’t seem to translate much into better behaviours.

Turned Out Nice Again, Richard Mabey

Richard Mabey is a well regarded English nature writer, most famous (I believe) for his book The Unofficial Countryside on how nature persists in edge lands and wastelands in our towns and cities.

Here he writes about the British relationship with the weather, how we feel and talk about it. It’s a very personal book, in some ways quite slight but also quite short so it doesn’t outstay its welcome. Mabey’s interest is less in the climate than in the weather, a much more transient phenomenon (though of course the two are intimately connected which he recognises).

This would make a good rainy afternoon book or perhaps one for a train journey.

Some Tame Gazelle, Barbara Pym

Now we’re talking. October ended on a high with Pym’s first novel. It features two sisters each in their fifties living together in their pleasant but ordinary village and harbouring quiet passions for the local vicar and a series of curates. Their quiet and orderly lives are disrupted by the arrival of visitors at the vicarage, some old acquaintances and some new. Could love disrupt their lives? The genius of Pym is that with any other novelist you’d be rooting for that outcome whereas here you find yourself rather hoping it doesn’t and things can go back to normal.

It’s hilarious, warm, wry, intelligent, utterly charming. In fact, I lack the words for it. No question but that it’ll be on my end of year list.

Lots of people have reviewed this, all glowingly. In no particular order there’s reviews by Jacqui here, Guy here, Karen here and Ali here. Honestly, if you’ve not read this you can find out what I read in November later. For now you should be getting this.

NOVEMBER

I’m assuming if you’re reading this you either already had Some Tame Gazelle or have rushed out to buy it. So, on to November!

The Terrorists, Sjöwall & Wahlöö (translated by Joan Tate)

The tenth Martin Beck novel! Last of the series! Sadly, it was a bit disappointing. Beck and the crew are all as enjoyable as ever, but the crime here is an extremely convoluted series of political assassinations by a James Bond-style international criminal conspiracy and it felt like I’d jumped suddenly into a different genre. If you’ve read the rest you’ll want to read this and it has its strengths but for me it’s easily the weakest in the series. Oh well.

Dracula, Bram Stoker

Possibly a bit of a cheat this, as actually I read the Dracula Daily Email. This is a project where each day you get emailed the bit of the novel which is written as taking place on that day. It changes the novel’s sequence slightly as it’s purely chronological which isn’t quite how Stoker does it. It is fun though and will run again next year.

The early sections with Jonathan Harker are the highlight (he’s a much more robust character than generally portrayed in adaptations). Dracula’s castle, the ‘brides’, Dracula’s sheer monstrousness, it’s all very well done.

Less well done is any scene with Professor Van Helsing, who comes over as a crackpot who this time happens to be right and who has some of the worst dialogue I’ve read in really quite a long time.

Overall it’s Dracula. Iff you’re at all interested I’d encourage you to join up for next year. Details here.

A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula le Guin

So I blame this one on Karen and her recent journeys in children’s and adult fantasy fiction. It inspired me to revisit one of my childhood favourites, A Wizard of Earthsea. Ged, a goatherd in an insignificant village on a minor island is born with a great power of wizardry and the book follows his journey to the famed college of magic and beyond in an attempt to undo the harm he let into the world with some of his early magical experiments.

It holds up pretty well as an adult read. There’s a nice mythic quality to it. It’s part of an original teratology and a couple of subsequent later sequels in addition and I’m not sure if I’ll go on to any of those, but this stood up well as a standalone.

So, thank you Karen for inspiring me to revisit this old classic. I hope to revisit Lord of the Rings next year, in that case absolutely and directly inspired by Karen’s rereading of it.

Casanova’s Return to Venice, Arthur Schnitzler (translated by Ilsa Barea)

So I mentioned at the opening to this post a couple of stand-out reads this month. The Pym was one. This is the other.

I love Schnitzler’s work and I’ve read most of his that are in translation. For some reason I’d missed this one. A mistake, but a happy one as it meant I had a top-notch Schnitzler still on the shelf to be discovered.

Giacomo Casanova is in his fifties. He’s tired of his exile and wants to return to Venice. His powers are waning and increasingly young women he’d once have eyed as conquests now instead eye him as an irrelevant old man.

Casanova finds himself staying at the estate of a couple he helped many years ago with money for their marriage. The wife has designs on him but he’s more interested in the daughter. Trouble is, she seems more interested in a young army officer who reminds Casanova painfully of his younger self.

It is brilliant. Melancholy, well written, a beautiful meditation on aging but with a wickedly amoral underpinning and a slight swashbuckling edge (it is about Casanova after all). Lizzy Siddal gives an excellent account of it here. Lizzy is actually much less taken by it than I am but as a good reviewer still brings out its qualities.

Dark Eden, Chris Beckett

This is a novel which I think will be a future SF classic, the way people now refer back to classic SF of the 50s and 60s. A small colony exists on a planet with no sun, the only light coming from the plants and animals native to it. The colonists are primitive but with memories of a founding couple who unwillingly settled there. The society is riddled with genetic defects, the result of massive early inbreeding, and waits for when Earth will come back to rescue them all as their ancestors hoped they’d be rescued.

Change comes when a teenager questions the social settlement. He’s noticed that the hunting each year is a bit worse than before, but nobody’s willing to move in case Earth can’t find them when it comes. Generations have been born and died waiting for Earth to come. He decides to take action and the result is social schism, conflict and a fundamental undermining of their social contract.

Although the protagonists are largely teenagers this is not a YA novel, instead they’re used to create a generational clash between the old but failing order and a new order which isn’t sophisticated enough to take the good of what their elders built and jettison only the bad.There’s hard science clearly underpinning the whole thing, but since the characters don’t understand it most of it isn’t explained (though you can work it out as a reader if you want to).

Beckett creates a fully realised and very alien world then sets it into motion. It’s an absolute classic and deservedly received a lot of attention when it came out. There are several sequels – it eventually became a teratology and I plan to read them all.

Findings, Kathleen Jamie

This is an essay collection by Orkney-based poet and naturalist Kathleen Jamie. It’s a book full of quiet moments beautifully observed. Jamie watches peregrines nesting from her kitchen window, explores the Edinburgh rooftops and skyline with the aid of a telescope, goes to watch salmon leaping in their attempt to return to their spawning ground. It’s a book rooted in the natural world and that includes at times some ugliness, but put in context and without losing sight of the magic of things which ultimately are quite ordinary (if far away from a city dweller like me).

Ali wrote this up really well here. Like Ali my favourite essay was the one on the Corn-Crakes, a bird I’d never heard of that was once so ubiquitous that every book set in the pre-industrial British countryside would have had its dialogue accompanied by the bird’s distinctive crex-crex cry, rarely recorded precisely because it was so ubiquitous. Just a superb book and one that would make a wonderful Christmas present whether for someone close to you or just for yourself.

Minna Needs Rehearsal Space, Dorthe Nors (translated by Martin Aitken)

I’ve read two of Nors’ short story collections and didn’t really love either, so I didn’t have huge hopes for this. It turns out though that I’m much fonder of Nors’ long form fiction than her short (or maybe I just really like this one).

Minna is a composer. Minna has just had a breakup. Minna needs rehearsal space. Minna’s ex’s cousin has one. Minna’s ex won’t return her texts.

As you’ve probably guessed the book is written in a series of staccato sentences, though each standing on its own line so they run down the page like a poem rather than as a paragraph as I did it above. You’d think it would be gimmicky and annoying, but somehow it works well and it creates a kind of flatness which helps emphasise that everything Minna is going through is just life.

I was surprised by this one. Partly because I hadn’t liked the short stories as much as others seem to but also because it’s often very funny. There’s a great bit where Minna is on holiday and runs into a former music student who always wants to enthusiastically share their awful compositions with Minna. Minna can’t face spending her holiday with this person tagging along but is too polite to say so and instead tries not to be noticed. It’s very human as indeed is the whole book. I don’t think it’ll be on my end of year but it’s at least up for consideration which isn’t bad given how I didn’t take to Nors previously.

And that’s it!