Books I Read in 2023

I read a lot this year, again. There were quite a few books I started and stopped - it’s something I’m trying to get better at. There’s something that feels very wrong to me about not finishing a book. It’s lazy, somehow. Unvirtuous, unstudious. Slowly but surely I’ve been learning to leave that attitude behind me; certainly there are books that reward toil, and there have been times when I was glad I stuck with something that I had initially disliked. But if I’m reading a horror novel for entertainment I’m under no obligation to keep reading it if I’m not entertained, or if I’m bored or annoyed. One horror novel, which I won’t name, I closed and returned to the library after the opening epigraph: a quote from a Taylor Swift song. A book by someone who finds meaning in Taylor Swift lyrics might be good, but it’s not for me.

Still, that left a lot of books that I did finish, and most of them I liked. My thoughts on each as I finished them are below. In the new year I plan to track my reading differently, however: after I finish each book, I’ll publish a piece here (probably just a few hundred words) with my impressions. Then another, longer piece summing things up at the end of the year. But for now, here are my favorites:

Favorite fiction: Cloud Cuckoo Land, Affinity, Manhunt, Small Things Like These, Lone Women, The Word for World is Forest, The Year of the Flood, The Strange, Home.

Favorite non-fiction: Empire of Pain, Locking Up Our Own, An Immense World, The Undertow, Servants, The American Slave Coast, We Were Once a Family.

Favorite re-reads: Middlemarch, Dawn, The Moonstone, My Cousin Rachel, Our Mutual Friend, Regeneration, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ulysses, Anna Karenina, The Bloody Chamber.

All Books Read in 2023

Middlemarch - George Eliot*: It is a cliche of course to call this one of the greatest novels written in English, but it is! It is. I find something new in it with each read. Maybe it was becoming a parent, maybe it was getting older, but I’m less dissatisfied with Dorothea’s ending than I used to be. Perhaps her life is the best that any of us can hope for in this world. To love, to be loved, to be thought good by the people who know us, and to have made the lives of others just a little easier. That might be enough. I have so much sympathy for all of her flawed, striving characters. This was a great way to start the year.
Dawn - Octavia E. Butler*: I love this book - this series might be my favorite Butler. I find it so viscerally upsetting and compelling; I really can’t tell who wins and who I even want to win. Maybe it’s wrong to think of it in those terms (I suspect yes). The Oankali-human dynamic is so interesting, and so fraught with trouble. And it’s interesting, to me, the automatic sorting of a group of people into couples and then families, as the primary organization of a society. I don’t think it has to be that way, so it’s interesting that it does seem to have to be that way here. I have so many scattered thoughts about this book and this series and I want to find a way to get them all down elsewhere.
Matrix - Lauren Groff: I liked this very much; it took a while for the book to grow on me but I got there in the end. It was more dreamlike than I expected, but again by the end I found that appropriate; it’s a story about a slow, dreamlike life, one spent in a great deal of solitude and silence. A plot or dialogue heavy novel would not have worked to tell this story. It was interesting, and refreshing, to read a novel in which men are almost totally absent; relationships between women, all kinds of relationships and all kinds of women, are enough.
The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot*: Reading this back to back with Middlemarch was interesting. At first I kept thinking “Middlemarch really is the masterpiece, Mill couldn’t measure up like I remember” and I do think Mill is the lesser work. But it’s my favorite. I love Maggie, I always have, but I appreciated the other characters more this time, especially Tom and their father. The end is completely bonkers but I think it works.
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis - Lydia Davis: I really liked these. I’m not sure that every story (and it was all of her stories) needed to be here; not every one is brilliant. But the short shorts are especially good, like prose poems. Some of them will really stay with me, in particular “What You Learn About a Baby.”
The Ministry for the Future - Kim Stanley Robinson: I liked this very much, in the end. I liked the central conceit of it; that the future looks hopeless, and it might be, but as long as there are still people alive we have to at least act like we can do something to save ourselves. It’s not a novel of blind optimism; I think Robinson would admit (and kind of does, several times) that the odds aren’t good that we’ll fix the problem. But we can do it; what’s lacking isn’t ability but political will. And that can change; it can be changed. I finished the book feeling rather hopeful.
Haven - Emma Donoghue: I always like Donogue and I liked this very much. The Skellig feels like it looks, like another planet - she’s very good at conveying isolation. I did see the twist coming, though was surprised it took so long to arrive; it felt a little like she didn’t know how to get the two nice monks off the island and had to throw something in. Still, it was all effectively done. I liked the environmental themes, the suggestion that living in a place means destroying it.
Life on Mars - Tracey K. Smith: I so rarely read poetry, but I liked this. It felt strange and remote yet intimate at once. I’ll think about a few of the poems for some time.
The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins*: This was a great reread, Collins usually is. I still love The Woman in White more; it’s more complex, and darker, its characters are more compelling and it has more to say. But The Moonstone is a solid good time.
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty - Patrick Radden-Keefe: God. I can’t remember the last time I read something that made me so, so angry. I’m glad Radden-Keefe brought up that line from The Great Gatsby in the notes, because the word you have to associate the most with the Sackler family is “carelessness.” Vast, vast carelessness. It never occurred to any of them why they should care that their accumulation of wealth came at the cost of other people’s lives, because other people were just a vehicle for extraction and plunder. Not even customers, just things you use to build wealth, like farm animals. This book was beautifully written and suspenseful and I’m glad I read it, and it made me sick with anger. They got away with it. They’ll never pay, for any of it. No one will go to jail or lose their fortune, and so many ordinary people lost so much. We’re a sick, sorry country, to let this happen.
Cloud Cuckoo Land - Anthony Doerr: I read this for my book club and I’m so glad I did. Oddly, right after finishing it, I don’t have many thoughts I can easily articulate; I think I want to let it marinate for a bit. But it was beautiful, and very clever, and finally very moving.
My Cousin Rachel - Daphne Du Maurier*: Such a weird, great book and my favorite by Du Maurier. Each time I read it I’m more convinced that Rachel did nothing wrong except have bad taste in men, and that’s really the point of the book. And that it was maybe about Du Maurier’s fear that she had no right to Menabilly and the original owners would expel her, no matter how beautiful she made it. I should write something about how her books chart her relationship with that house, because it’s so important to her work.
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America - James Foreman, Jr.: This was really good and I’m glad I read it. Foreman does a good job of laying out how the pieces came together; I wish he had spent more time on the intersection of race and class and how they impact the criminal justice system now. He touches on that in the last chapter, but I could have used more. I think he’s too optimistic about individual action en masse being the answer to the “what is to be done” question. Still, a good history and a good analysis.
Nicholas Nickleby - Charles Dickens*: This is not a great Dickens, but it’s a pretty good one. He was always best when being nasty, and worst when being sentimental. For better or worse, there’s a lot of both here. The nastiness was more satisfying to me on this read; maybe it’s having a little boy of my own, but the scenes at Dotheboy’s Hall hit me a lot harder than they ever had before, as did the scenes with Smike. I still find it to be a particularly misogynistic novel, even for Dickens, but I liked the good parts more this time.
Affinity - Sarah Waters: I really, really like Sarah Waters. This book took a little while to get going, but the payoff was really good. Waters can really nail an ending - she seems to know exactly what the story needs. There’s a lot about class in here, about the people who get overlooked and the cost of overlooking them. I liked this a lot.
The Other Black Girl - Zakiya Dalila Harris: I didn’t love this, but I’m glad I read it. I liked parts of it a lot; the strange and hostile world of publishing felt authentic, and authentically frightening even before the horror elements appeared. The central metaphor was interesting, and pleasingly elusive: you can’t really pin it down, which is how horror should work. The pacing wasn’t quite right, I think - too slow of a buildup and then frenetic action all at once, plus digressions that take a while to mean something. But I liked it, and I liked it more once I understood where it was going.
The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century - Olga Ravn: I ended up finding this really moving. Part of that was how beautifully it was written, and it wasn’t overwritten - it was just enough. Enough to make you think, about what it means to be alive, what it means to know other people are alive, what it means to die. There aren’t answers, really, except that we know we are real even if other people don’t. I really liked it.
Nightmare at 20,000 Feet: Horror Stories - Richard Matheson*: This was fun to reread. I think I like Matheson’s short stories better than any of his novels; he was more ready to be nasty, which is his strong suit.
Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen*: Definitely my least favorite Austen, but the last one I had to reread and I’m glad I did. It’s so obviously a first novel; the plot never really works and it’s paced very strangely. But it’s so funny, always. It’s still Austen.
High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories - Joyce Carol Oates: I’d never read much Oates before but I’m really glad I read this. Interestingly, I think I liked the newer stories best. “The Cousins,” “Spider Boy” and “The Lost Brother” especially, but really I loved all of them. Of the older stories, I think “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” was the best (obviously). That was the only one I’d read before, and it does deserve its reputation. I wished I liked the other older stories as much; they were good, but none grabbed me quite like the more recent ones. Still, a great collection. I’ve been told to check out her short horror fiction, and I will - she’s very good at suspense.
Our Missing Hearts - Celeste Ng: I liked this, with caveats. It was beautifully and movingly written, as I expected. I keep accidentally picking up books about mother-son relationships and then crying over them. Maybe I just notice them more now, when they appear. The politics of the book were…very liberal, which is fine, but it means the theory of change and political action described felt a little naive to me. I would like to believe it worked that way, maybe I used to, but I don’t anymore. Still, I was glad to have read it. It felt disturbingly plausible, in the mechanics of the downfall if not the mechanics of the resistance.
Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens*: Still my favorite Dickens. I found it very sad this time around - so many people struggling to find love and connection, and so much stuff about money being a barrier to that. It’s really well done. And it’s probably the best example of the kind of Dickens plot he was so good at, where you see all of the gears and wheels of the social machine operating at every level, and how each level interacts with every other level.
The Warehouse - Rob Hart: I liked this, but didn’t love it sadly. It’s a good concept and was well-executed, but something felt a little lacking - I think the characters were a bit thin. Which is ok, maybe - they’re stand-ins for a whole kind of person. It would make a really good movie, which I suspect was kind of the point. Hart’s heart and politics are both on his sleeve and in the right place, and the ending was handled well. I’m glad I read it.
The Awakening - Kate Chopin*: Reread this for my book club. This is a novel that I appreciate more than I like, I think. I get it - I get its influence, I get its importance. I just don’t really enjoy reading it or have much to say about it.
The Sentence - Louise Erdrich: I liked this very much. I always like Erdrich. I didn’t love it as much as Tracks or Last Report, or even as much as The Night Watchman, but it was good. Tookie felt very real to me - she seems like the kind of woman who probably ends up working at Erdrich’s store. The setting of 2020 also felt very real, sometimes too real. It’s odd how that year feels so recent and like a million years ago - it felt at the time like anything was possible, in ways good and bad. She managed to convey that well.
The Paying Guests - Sarah Waters: this was slow to start, but I liked it a lot in the end. I think Waters is better at thrillers than at domestic dramas, so it got good after the murder and then stayed good until the end. The characterization was very good, and you can tell, as always, that she does her research. I’ll probably end up reading all of her stuff - it’s always great.
Manhunt - Gretchen Felker-Martin: This rocked. It was on my list for a while, and I was a bit worried my expectations would be so high that I’d be let down, but I shouldn’t have worried. It was scary, and heartbreaking, and really satisfying. And for all of the hard edges, for all of the mercilessness of it, for all that Felker-Martin never lets you get comfortable and never gives you the easy ending, I don’t remember the last book I read that was so bursting full of love. It’s got a great, great big heart.
Rebecca - Daphne DuMaurier*: I always like rereading this book; I don’t think it’s actually her best, but I know why it’s as popular as it is, still. It’s still so weird and creepy even after many rereads. And the narrator seems tougher and more sinister herself with each reread; like she succeeds by forcing Maxim into a little box where she controls him instead of anybody else who could rival her. It’s very unnerving and very well done.
Small Things Like These - Claire Keegan: This was so lovely; I think I liked it even more than Foster. I want to read Keegan’s short stories; I expect they’re just as beautiful and perfect. This novel was just enough - I liked all of the brief time I spent with this character and was satisfied with everything I got.
Pontypool Changes Everything - Tony Burgess: This wasn’t like any other horror novel I’ve read; it felt more post-modern, even more so than something like House of Leaves. It was beautifully written, surprisingly so, and very compelling. I liked it quite a bit. Aphasia does scare me, and an apocalypse centered around it scared me a lot.
Regeneration - Pat Barker*: I’ve read this book so many times that I don’t know if I have anything new to say about it, but I do love it (and the sequels) so much. The characters, at this point, are like old friends that I return to for comfort. I love Rivers, and Prior, and Sassoon, and all of them. It’s such a warm book, despite the subject matter. That’s typical of Barker.
The Eye in the Door - Pat Barker*: I’m glad to be rereading this trilogy. This one is probably the best of the three, but the hardest to read. It’s much more frank than the first, about what these men go through and why they go through it. I like spending so much time with Billy Prior, but his head is not always a pleasant place to be.
The Silence of the Girls - Pat Barker*: It was good to reread this; I’ll be interested to see what my bookclub thinks of it. It’s not an easy book; the subject matter is tough, obviously, but there aren’t any easy characters or easy solutions; there can’t be. We can’t be comforted by Briseis becoming a heroine, she never does. She just survives. She can’t win because she’s already lost, and that’s what war means. This is what invading armies do to women, every day.
The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey Into the Dark Side of the Brain - James Fallon: Extremely weird read. I think I’m done with pop-psych books about psychopathy for a while. It’s interesting, you’d think the writer would have some special insight into the topic but of course he has very little; he seems to be someone who thinks about himself constantly but thinks about other people so little that he has barely any understanding of his own behavior because he literally never considers himself as a social creature. His reveal of his politics (libertarian, of course) made me laugh, because, obviously. Obviously he’s a libertarian, he doesn’t even understand society as something that exists. He doesn’t think he has any social obligations. So there were many moments when he recounts friends or relatives confronting him, or cutting him off, and he says he didn’t know their concerns, or the concerns were “vague,” but then he’s very vague about what he actually does with these people. It was chilling, in a way that a text by a stereotypical psychopath wouldn’t have been. Interesting, but very weird.
The Ghost Road - Pat Barker*: I’m so glad I revisited this trilogy. This is such a beautiful closer, and she left it exactly as it needed to be left. I always want it to be different, I want Prior to make it, for he and Rivers to meet again, but that can’t happen. It’s one of the saddest novels I’ve ever read. It’s so good.
The Troop - Nick Cutter: This was very scary. I don’t know why I keep reading books about young boys in danger, I can barely handle them the way I used to. This was good; well written. All of the voices were very believable, and I liked how the premise kept twisting on itself.
Lone Women - Victor LaValle: This was so fucking good. I was sobbing by the end of it, it was so beautiful, and it didn’t sacrifice any of the actual fear to get there. I liked spending time in this world so much, I didn’t want the book to end. I’m almost afraid to read something else because I don’t think it will be as good. I’ll have to read more LaValle, obviously.
The Waves - Virginia Woolf: What an odd novel. I think it might be my favorite of the Woolf I’ve read; Mrs. Dalloway is still greater, probably, but I enjoyed this one more. It was somehow apocalyptic in a way I can’t quite pinpoint. I liked all of the voices. It reminded me of As I Lay Dying, in some ways.
Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation - Kristin Kobes du Mez: This was good, if dry. It was a thorough history, and Kobes du Mez did a good job of bringing a lot of different cultural strands together. I would have liked to read more about the economics of it: there was a glancing mention of Amway but I feel like companies like that are really key to the whole mess America finds itself in. At least half of evangelical women are caught up in MLMs and there are reasons for that. But it was good; worth reading.
We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops and Corruption - Justin Fenton: I liked this, but I didn’t gain anything from it that I didn’t get from prior reading, apart from a fairly convincing case that Sean Suiter killed himself. I’m still not sure about that one, but I do think it fits the facts. The problem is that other things could fit the facts too, and the idea that there would be no point to murdering Suiter since all of the dirty cops were charged already and a bunch were taking pleas, only holds water if you think they were the only dirty cops in the BPD. And I think you have to be very naive to think that.
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us - Ed Yong: This was wonderful. Ed Yong is a great writer, and I felt I was getting an accessible version without any sacrifice of complexity. Yong is very good at distinguishing between what we know and what we’re guessing at, what we can confidently assume and what is certain. It’s such a rich subject and I think it made me see so many things differently. One of my favorites of the year.
We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America - Roxanna Asgarian: This wasn’t a long book but it hit me like a ton of bricks. I think about these kids, and their birth families, all the time, and knowing more details about what was done to them, the ways they were all failed over and over while people who hurt them were given the benefit of the doubt over and over - it broke me a little bit. I’m so angry for them, for all of them. It can never be put right, not ever.
What Jesus Meant - Gary Wills: This was nice. Nice is probably the best word for it. Hardly revelatory, but Willis is always thoughtful and interesting at his worst, and I like reading him on religion. He actually makes me believe there’s something worth it about Catholicism, in spite of everything.
The Women of Troy - Pat Barker*: I’m glad I reread this soon after rereading The Silence of the Girls. I still think it’s weaker, and one of the weakest of Barker’s novels, but I liked it more than I remember. There’s a lot of good stuff in it. And I’m glad she’s writing a third. I’m rooting for Briseis. For all of them.
The Word for World is Forest - Ursula K. Le Guin: Sometimes I think to myself that I’ll just stop reading anything but Le Guin until I’ve read everything she’s written. As per usual, this is an incredible book. Beautiful and difficult, heartbreaking and funny and so true, about the things people do to each other and for each other. Every book she wrote was like a miracle.
You Should Have Left - Daniel Kehlmann: This was really good. I saw it on a list of “literary” contemporary horror fiction, and I don’t think I would have found it otherwise. It was very spooky; a well-done ghost story. It was just as long as it needed to be, and didn’t waste any time getting to the point but still managed to build suspense. Nothing like a good haunted house.
A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin*: I haven’t read this since I was a kid, and I don’t think I appreciated it as much as I do now. She really was a beautiful writer, and it’s such a pleasure to just spend time in her worlds. Everything is so carefully considered. It’s meticulous. I love every book Le Guin wrote.
Nightbitch - Rachel Yoder: I don’t know what I think of this book! Some of it was painfully relatable, but it’s oddly so difficult for me to see myself in a lot of books about motherhood. I wonder whether that’s my problem, not the book’s. The book is very good, well-written, and very funny. It’s sharp. There is appropriate ambivalence about the entire endeavor, and I’m not sure that’s entirely resolved. Or at least, I’m not sure I completely buy the resolution. I’ll have to think (and talk) more about it. But for me, at least, the problems with motherhood aren’t going to be solved by feeling empowered or embodied in my animal nature. They’ll be solved by concrete things: free childcare, and more paid leave than just a measly ten weeks.
The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War - Jeff Sharlet: I’ve liked Sharlet’s writing since I discovered Killing the Buddha back in highschool, and I liked this book very much. I wasn’t sure how much of a cohesive thread there was between these essays besides This Is The Way We Live Now, but he pulled it off - it felt like a whole when I finished it. It was sad, obviously; there’s little to hope for at the moment. But there are people, imperfectly figuring things out. The book opens with a story about Harry Belafonte and ends with one about Lee Hays, and both of their lives, in different ways, end sadly - Harry turned into an elder statesman, stripped of his radicalism and watching his movement turn into catchphrases, and Lee mostly forgotten, a historical footnote with a body falling apart. But they lived, they created moments of great beauty and truth, and as Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie would probably say, who knows. Their art left them and entered the world, so who knows what it may yet bring forth. My son loves Harry Belafonte, who died this year, when he was just a year old. Who knows.
Blood Meridian: or An Evening Redness in the West - Cormac McCarthy*: I decided to reread this after McCarthy’s death. I’m glad I did, but I’m also very glad to be done with it. I appreciated it more this time, I think for the stark beauty of the language which is undeniable. It’s not a book that leaves you with good feelings.
We All Hear Stories in the Dark - Robert Shearman: Finally I finished this. It took forever; finding the actual map helped. It was an interesting project, for sure. I don’t think every story was successful, but that’s not the point - the effect is cumulative. Each story is about grief, in a different way. This book wasn’t like anything else I’ve ever read.
I Who Have Never Known Men - Jacqueline Harpman: I can’t remember reading another book quite like this one. Initially I thought it was boring, nothing was happening, but I realized that was the point. I found it almost unbearably sad by the end. A very interesting experiment; it was appropriate that so little happened and nothing was answered. The disappointment, and the loneliness, were the point.
The Deep - Nick Cutter: I liked this very much; probably more than The Troop which I did like as well. It was intensely scary; it’s a coincidence that I read it not long after the Oceangate submarine disaster, but the ocean is looking especially deadly lately. I liked the use of voyaging to the deep ocean as a kind of metaphor for exploring trauma; that was very effective. Again, need to stop reading books where bad things happen to kids. There are so many of them though.
Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times - Lucy Lethbridge: This was a fun read, and illuminating. What was especially striking was the fact that domestic service died in Britain not because people didn’t need servants anymore, but because people didn’t need to be servants anymore - there were too many other opportunities. Upper class people didn’t adopt labor saving tech in their homes until they had to, because they preferred servants taking care of them. Pathological culture, truly. I liked the contrast between the culture of domestic labor in Britain vs. the cultures of domestic labor in English homes in the empire, like India or Nigeria. I’d like to learn more about that.
The Devil in Silver - Victor LaValle: I liked this very much. Perhaps not quite as much as the other LaValle novel I read this year, but it was still good (and a page turner, typical of his stuff). The characters were so likable and their struggles felt so real and vital despite the supernatural elements. The ending also felt right to me, with Pepper still in the institution but knowing that he had helped other people and knowing he would keep doing that. It was very satisfying.
Felix Holt: the Radical - George Eliot: This was not my favorite Eliot, but it was far from my least favorite. I liked all the characters, and of course there’s no one better at conveying the psychology of a small community (though it’s obviously best in Middlemarch, and Toni Morrison is probably just as good). I want to know more about the politics of this period; I know a bit, but some context was missing for me.
The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture - Vincent Woodard: This was interesting; certainly a rich topic. It was very, well. Very theory, not history. Woodard was an English scholar, not a historian, and I’m always a little annoyed when theorists and literature people venture into history because they sometimes seem to think they can analyze actual facts using the same tools as you would use to analyze literature. So there is a lot of blurring of literal acts of consumption or sexual assault with symbolic acts, which is fine when you’re talking about fiction but I’m not sure how useful it is as a way to talk about actual history. Certainly it matters that the enslaved communities that lived near Nat Turner believed his body was used to make castor oil, but there’s no effort to see what evidence is there either way. I liked this, but I’d like something on this subject more rooted in material realities.
The Beast You Are: Stories - Paul Tremblay: These stories were all really good. The title story was a very interesting experiment, more of a verse novella, and I enjoyed it. I think my favorites were “I Know You’re There,” and “Last Conversation,” but they were all great. Tremblay is reliably excellent.
Her Body and Other Parties: Stories - Carmen Maria Machado*: I was really glad to reread this, for my book club, though I’m not sure how much more I have to say. The first story is still my favorite, though I really enjoyed “Inventory” and “Eight Bites” and especially “Mothers” quite a lot this time. I still think “Especially Heinous” is very silly.
The Fisherman - John Langan: I like John Langan a lot, though I haven’t yet read anything by him that I like as much as I liked House of Windows. He’s still very good, and I can see why this one has the reputation it does. It’s very New England Spooky, but in a Lovecraft or Melville way rather than a King way, which means I liked it. I can see, of course, the Moby-Dick influence. Langan is on record as categorizing Moby-Dick as a horror novel, and I agree with him.
Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver: I had mixed feelings about this, but liked it overall. It was more of a one-to-one retelling of the Dickens than I expected, which I think lessened some of the impact - I could always tell what was coming. But it was beautifully written and felt very timely in its concerns, as I suppose David Copperfield must have felt at the time.
The Journalist and the Murderer - Janet Malcolm: I found this interesting but not fascinating. The relationship between a journalist and their subject is worth exploring and Malcolm does it well, but the subject isn’t one that feels especially stimulating to me. Nobody’s fault.
The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin*: I think this book makes me sadder every time I read it. There’s this mournful quality to it that I really love, and it is incredible how un-dated it seems despite its age and subject. Not my favorite Le Guin, but I like it so much.
The Long Walk - Stephen King: I don’t especially like Stephen King and I’m going to stop trying. I just don’t! I don’t like his characters and I think he’s too sentimental. He’s best when he’s nasty and he rarely lets himself be nasty enough in his novels. I like the premise here but I cared nothing for the characters and it never really came together for me.
The Year of the Flood - Margaret Atwood: I really liked this; of the more recent Atwood I’ve read it might be my favorite. I want to read more from this world, but I don’t know that I’ll read the first one. I’m mostly interested in these women and what happens to them, what they’re thinking and feeling. Glenn and Jimmy weren’t especially compelling to me, though maybe if I’d already known them I’d feel differently. Anyway, it was beautifully written and compelling. I’m glad I read it.
Poverty, By America - Matthew Desmond: This was fine. Well-written, and Desmond obviously cares passionately about this subject. But he got just up to the edge of a breakthrough - he almost realized I think that capitalism needs poverty, and poor people, in order to function, but still he insisted that we can have a nicer capitalism that won’t work that way. A lot of his ideas are good ones - good technocratic ideas that will help a lot of people but will face massive resistance on the part of capital because capital simply does not want to solve the problem. For capital, it’s not a problem. Desmond gets that on some level; he gets that poverty keeps prices low and stock values up. But he seems to think we could just make a few tweaks and maybe prices will go up a bit and stock values go down a bit and taxes on the wealthy will go up a bit and that will work. But poverty will always be there as long as people’s relations to property and capital remain what they are.
The Strange - Nathan Ballingrud: I borrowed this from the library on a whim, not knowing anything about either it or the writer. I’m really glad I picked it up. Kind of an exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin novel, in that it’s billed as a Bradbury-Portis mashup. The plot obviously owes a lot to both The Martian Chronicles and True Grit, but Ballingrud has his own prose style and concerns, and the veer away from straight sci-fi and towards cosmic horror was well-done and appreciated by me. I liked this world and its characters a lot, and though the ending felt a little abruptly sad, that also felt appropriate. The protagonist had to stay where she was, there was world enough for a full life there. This was a really rewarding novel.
Ulysses - James Joyce*: Really glad to have tackled this monster. I listened to an audiobook version this time, which I think is the way to do it. Easier to follow and absorb the language if you hear it. I think this is an underrated hang out book; a Dudes Rock book, even - I really saw the influence on people like Roddy Doyle this time around. I do love it. It deserves its reputation, it really does.
101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered - Sadie Hartmann: Eh. I added some things to my to-read list, and I think I can reasonably trust the recommendations since some of the books on the list were ones I’ve read and liked. That’s what this was good for, really - don’t go for analysis or insight; maybe my dissatisfaction was misplaced, in that I shouldn’t have been looking for those in the first place. I did not like the writer’s tone; there’s this sort of chummy fandom speak that always gives me hives. I just want to read horror and read about horror, I’m not especially interested in joining a subculture. Still, was glad to get so many ideas of things to read.
When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson - edited by Ellen Datlow: Mixed bag, as anthologies like this tend to be in my experience. There was only one Jackson, after all, and her particular talent at horror is more elusive than I think a lot of people think. It’s not just a matter of things being simply not quite right. There has to be a sense of…something being kept back, deliberately. Something to invoke paranoia, either from the characters or the reader. The other characters have to be hiding something from the main character, or the main character(s) has to be hiding something from us. And they have to know it, and we do, and that tension can’t and shouldn’t be resolved. That’s where the horror comes from, from the lack of a reveal, from the tension never being resolved. Paul Tremblay really gets that, and his story was my favorite of the collection - because it ends with you not knowing, but having to accept this building dread that won’t dissipate. The others weren’t as good, even from authors I really like.
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer - Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin: I’m glad I read this; it’s a well-done biography. It made me feel terribly sad, in the end, of course, for all that genius spent on something so terrible, for the lives put off course in different ways that rippled out and still do. What is there to say, really. It is tragic, and stupid.
Fingersmith - Sarah Waters: Not my favorite Waters (probably The Little Stranger) but definitely the most impressive. I was spoiled for the general plot, but the twists were all so well done that I didn’t care. It had interesting things to say about trauma and criminalization and pornography of all things - Sarah Waters always brings so much historical knowledge and complexity to her work. I like her a lot.
The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry - Ned Sublette and Constance Sublette: This was a long book that took even longer to read than I expected; I kept needing to give myself breaks. Every time you read about slavery there’s some new, horrifying detail - something that was even worse than you thought. This was exceptionally well-researched and searingly written. Worth reading.
Severance - Ling Ma: I really liked this, and I actually liked more the sections of the novel taking place in the time preceding the (fictional) pandemic and during its earlier stages, rather than the dystopian stuff after total societal collapse. I really enjoyed Candace; she felt very human and alive to me. I’ll have to look for more of Ling Ma’s work.
Breath, Eyes, Memory - Edwidge Danticat: This was so wonderful and I’m kicking myself for never reading Danticat before - I want to devour everything she’s written now. The characters felt so vital, so sad and weak and strong and funny. Everything was perfectly and appropriately done, no line out of place, no false moves. An incredible novel.
Whalefall - Daniel Kraus: This was honestly kind of silly. I found the style, sadly, grating in a way I can’t quite put my finger on, except to say that it was very YA. The protagonist was literally a young adult, so I suppose that’s fine - I’m happy to read books about people who are young, but I don’t love it when the book is talking to me like I’m young, like I share the characters lack of emotional regulation. Anyway, this was an interesting idea, but I found it neither frightening nor moving, in the end. Fine for what it is, but it wasn’t for me.
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy*: This is one of those novels where the sheer weight of it can be almost unbearable until you remember, of course, that that’s the point - the weight of living is unbearable, the centuries and millennia of history and generations of ancestry piling on you, the way relationships can decay in fits and starts over periods of years, without there ever being a final explosion or confrontation, the way things that ought to lead to change never do. It’s long because life is long, because learning to be the best versions of ourselves takes, if we’re lucky, a lifetime. The feeling you’re left with, at the end, is gratitude. I’m left with it, anyway.
Everyday Utopia: What 2000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life - Kristen R. Ghodsee: Middling. Like the last book I read by Ghodsee, I thought this was extremely well-intentioned and a little unserious. She has a tendency to play a little loosey-goosey with the facts and interpretations of, for instance, Plato - and I get why, but it’s a little frustrating when you’ve actually read The Republic to see her misstating its arguments so baldly. An indicative issue was her idyllic description of an Israeli kibbutz as a utopian experiment that we could try more of; it’s hard to see them that way after the last few months. The horror, both of what was done to many people living in kibbutzim on October 7th and the horror of the walled ghetto that many of them directly abut makes it hard to see them as especially safe or wonderful. It was a bit like reading the first half of The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas - I kept waiting for acknowledgement of the violence that made all the happiness possible, and that never came.
Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror - edited by Jordan Peele: Anthologies like this tend to be uneven, and this was, but there were quite a few gems in here, including ones from authors I didn’t know yet but will now look for. I really, really liked “Wandering Devil,” by Cadwell Turnbull, “Pressure” by Ezra Clayton Daniels and “The Norwood Trouble” by Maurice Broaddus - interestingly, each of these three were much more Shirley Jackson-like than the stories in the Jackson inspired anthology I read recently. Horror about racism lends itself to her mode of horror writing, I think; the feeling of not being able to trust the world as it’s presented to you, yet knowing that the world will deny and dismiss those feelings of mistrust. From the writers I already knew, I liked the ones by Jamison, Roanhorse and Due; they didn’t stick with me like these previous three did, but they were all really solid horror stories as you can expect from these writers.
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World - Naomi Klein: This was a really interesting and finally very sad book; funny and insightful as I expected. It was much more respectful than I thought it would be, which I appreciated - it seemed that Klein really wanted to get this right. She retains her status as The Good Naomi.
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories - Angela Carter*: It was good to reread this. I really appreciated, this time, how the stories build on each other and deepen the complexity of what you’ve already read. The title story is still my favorite, for sure, and I think I loved the ending even more now; probably due to being a mother myself. But they’re all good - I feel like I finally get “The Snow Child,” basically. And I really like “The Erl King” on this read.
The Auctioneer - Joan Samson: Interesting, though I don’t have much to say about it. I liked the idea, certainly, but it didn’t become as frightening as I think it needed to. Not that it needed to be more explicit, but the tension wasn’t high enough. And the folksiness seemed kind of forced to me; none of these people seemed especially real. It seemed like an attempt at Shirley Jackson’s New England but without her paranoia (or skill, frankly).
Fire Walk With Me: Your Laura Disappeared - Scott Ryan: I feel like a bad fan; I don’t think I’m a fan in the way other fans are. I’m not really interested in trivia about the art I love - I like a little bit, but I want analysis. The only trivia I care about is whatever deepens my understanding of the art as art. This book was mostly trivia, and it’s too bad, because there were brief moments of insight that the book didn’t dwell on. It’s so interesting that Madchen Amick highlighted the line “this is where we live, Shelly” as the key to both her storyline and Twin Peaks (series and film) as a whole. I want to hear more about that, and less about what the producer was doing and how he decided to come on board. I want scholarship and that’s not what other fan’s want, I guess. It’s too bad.
The Future - Naomi Alderman: I didn’t like this as much as I liked The Power, sadly - less of a compelling premise I think. Or at least, it’s compelling, but it also felt to me like something I’ve seen already. I didn’t feel an investment in the central relationship until the very end, which was well-done. It was more hopeful and less bleak than I expected, I will say.
Home - Toni Morrison: A minor Morrison is still Morrison, so it’s written with an almost staggering, unworldly beauty and deep empathy. The ending really made the novel come together for me - one of those reveals that makes you reevaluate everything you knew but not in a cheap way; I felt sickened but not so much that the I felt like I had been tricked unfairly. It felt appropriate that the character would hold it back from the reader, and appropriate that he would finally reveal the truth when he did. It’s quite an accomplishment, like everything she wrote, and I wouldn’t call it a top-five for her I’m glad I read it, as I always am with Morrison.