March and April 2024 Reads

what genre didn't I read in march and april?

Alright the subtitle is probably a bit of an overstatement but as I’m looking at the stack on my desk, I feel like I covered a lot of ground in the last couple of months. We have literary powerhouses Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich, eye-opening nonfiction from Edward Said and Robin Wall Kimmerer, cult classic speculative fiction from Gene Wolfe, not to mention the classic from Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace. Somehow Keanu Reaves has slipped in there, too.

First, a quick commemorative statement for the first ever round-up I’m doing on Substack. I’ve been writing these for years (and you can read all my old ones on my blog) but it’s nice to think that alongside those of you who have been following along for a long time, they might find a new audience here, too. I hope to switch back to monthly rather than bi-monthly from now on, so you can expect one a month (I’m often a little late, though, I realise we are two weeks into May now…)

Before we get into the reviews, I wanted to note that I’m currently highlighting a fundraiser for a family and their community in Gaza and running a giveaway that would mean you could win a personalised package of books from me and free paid subscriptions to this Substack and my Patreon community for a full year when you donate. All details will be at the end of this post, but any donation would be much appreciated.

Also the links to the books below are affiliate links.

I always split them into random tiers that make sense only in my head (I gave up on star ratings a long time ago), so here we go. They are not individually ranked within the tiers, just grouped. But I think I may ruffle some feathers with their groupings…

the great

The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

For the uninitiated, this book is the first in a quartet of novels entitled The Book of the New Sun, and whilst it’s not received much acclaim outside the genre bubble of speculative fiction, it is considered a classic within it. Le Guin called Wolfe “our Melville” and Gaiman claims The Book of the New Sun is SF’s À la recherche du temps perdu (to which all I can say is, thank god it’s not, but more on Proust at a later date). It’s also generally regarded to be a challenging read. I have two editions of The Book of the New Sun and I found it amusing that in both introductions, Ada Palmer and Neil Gaiman are quick to offer qualifications for its difficulty, and tips and tricks for reading it. I found it amusing because I recognise so much of myself in those introductions, trying desperately to communicate on the one hand that a difficult novel is no picnic, but also please read it because the effort is rewarding. I’ll be doing my own version of this below, I’m sure.

If you know me at all, you’ll know just how tempting that challenge sounds. I want to play, I want to put the puzzle pieces together. Now whilst I won’t really know how the whole comes together until I’ve read all four novels (and I did consider waiting to write the review until I had), this book really delivered for me. This is Deep Future science fiction, to the point where it almost reads like fantasy because technology that far beyond us would look a whole lot like magic. There are also elements you’d expect from fantasy; there are swords and cloaks and the like. There is a certain baroque element to the worldbuilding which I really appreciated and you don’t see all that often in science fiction; Ada Palmer notes this accumulation of cultural “clutter” in her introduction. It gives a very deep sense of time to the novel. Because why wouldn’t the accoutrements of swords and cloaks come back in fashion over the aeons?

And (did you guess from the title?), the planet, the sun is dying. Whilst Urth heaves under the weight of all of humanity’s clutter, the sun too has begun its long death, so that the very colour of the sky would be unfamiliar to us. We are ushered into this world by Severian, an apprentice torturer living in an arcane guild, the only home he has ever known. In this instalment, we follow him through his childhood and adolescence, and eventually his travels beyond the walls of the Citadel. He is your typical unreliable narrator, and the story weaves in and out of episodes that appear more or less relevant (though we are assured by Palmer and Gaiman that everything is relevant). Frustrating for some readers; for me, I was hooked. If by nothing else than the description of the world itself; botanic gardens which seem to preserve whole ecosystems from the past and seek to trap you within its hothouses, the accumulation of towering labyrinthine buildings in the Citadel.

Purportedly translated from some Deep Future language into English by Wolfe, he uses a lot of arcane terminology here which will have you reaching for your dictionary more than once. In fact, someone has written a whole Lexicon Urthus with all the different terms but unfortunately apparently it’s riddled with spoilers. I think on this you need to strike a balance. It can take away from the experience to try and define each and every word, but some do bring new meaning to what you’re reading. Ultimately most people agree this book would bear a few readings, so I would err on the side of not getting lost in your online dictionary if you can avoid it, at least for the first read. Or I imagine an e-reader would be very helpful here.

The book is not without its issues. It was written in the 80s by a white guy. The treatment of the female characters is bad, and Severian is endlessly annoying about them (it is the first person narration of an adolescent boy growing up in an all-male guild so perhaps we can throw some grace Wolfe’s way). Luckily a few of my fellow buddy readers had got ahead of me and pointed this out before I got stuck in, and I think that actually helped me dismiss it when I saw it.

As I say, this book won’t be for everyone. It’s weird, it’s vague, nobody is very likeable, you’ve probably got to read it multiple times to truly catch everything that’s happening (and just the once through a four book series is a big commitment). But for me, I’m very much looking forward to The Claw of the Conciliator.

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich

It’s probably no surprise that this and Pedro Páramo were my other favourite books I read in the months of March and April, because we did both of them for book club. I read so much more carefully with the meetings in mind, and our discussions always bring so much to my experience. So, join a book club folks! Doesn’t have to be mine, but it can bring so much richness to your reading.

Anyway. I really liked this. I’ve had a funny Erdrich journey so far. The Night Watch I liked but I thought it was perhaps too meandering. It stuck with me, though, after reading it. The Round House I enjoyed reading a lot but I found the overarching plot line a bit questionable. But as I’ve been saying a lot recently, sometimes it’s in the flaws of a novel that it feels its most human, which can be a beautiful thing. I’ve read a few novels that feel like perfection, and that’s great. Not a word out of place. But I’m also coming to appreciate more and more those novels that in fact feel like the work of a soul, just another human person. Erdrich gives me that feeling, I find myself drawn to her work; it’s like she’s not trying to be ‘right’ somehow. Or perfect. She just is, she just writes. And often it’s very good. I remember reading in the end matters (😉) of The Round House how she has a car notebook and when ideas for stories occur to her while she’s driving she pulls over to scribble them down quickly. This woman lives to write, and I think you can tell.

We open the book with an ancient Father Damien, who has been living and working as a missionary in a town called Little No Horse on an Ojibwe reservation. He is coming to the end of his life and reflecting back on all that has happened to him. But it’s quickly revealed that Father Damien was in fact born as a woman called Agnes DeWitt, and fell into this role as a kind of traumatic accident. I’m not going to lie, I was a little nervous about this plot line, especially in a novel published in 2001. I was concerned how transgender identity would be handled here, but I was pleasantly surprised by its sensitivity. To Agnes, her gender identity seems by the by. Her transformation into Father Damien and everything she experiences as him is much more wrapped up in her sense of her faith and the role of the missionary than anything else. In practise, she considers herself like two people, both of whom are performances of a kind (not just Father Damien but also Agnes, too), embodying the same body. I primarily refer to her as Agnes here because that is what she calls herself in the privacy of her house, but it doesn’t seem to matter much to her. This lack of angst felt really refreshing to read, and I know that Erdrich took some inspiration from Ojibwe ways of being to formulate Agnes’ particular mode of transness.

Of course, Agnes does worry about being a woman in the context of the fact that women can’t be Catholic priests. She worries about whether all the things she’s done in Little No Horse will be cosmically undone by this discovery upon her death. Faith is at the heart of this book, and Agnes’ wrestling with her sense of Father Damien as a symbolic and literal emissary of colonialism and cultural genocide whilst also just another person providing real, tangible help to his community is where this book becomes quite spectacular. I was moved emotionally at multiple points, and had tears running down my face at the end. Through Father Damien’s conversations with local character Nanapush, the reader begins to ask, who is converting who, here?

As with the other Erdrich novels I’ve read, there is real richness and warmth to the dynamics between her characters and a gruff tenderness to their depiction. There is comedy and lightness here, in both tone and content, that keep it from feeling too dense and heavy. The more I write about it the more I think how much I loved it. It’s part of a series that follows a wider cast of characters, and although impossible now, I wonder what it would have been like reading this for the first time with the context of the five books that came before. Of course it can be read as a standalone, but perhaps the revelation about Father Damien (who appears in other novels I believe) would have felt more dramatic. I am now very keen to go back and read the others.

But! It wasn’t a total success with the group. It is very meandering and at times slow. Erdrich is a wordy writer, and her sentences have a framework of lyricism that means if you’re not used to them, it might not immediately flow. I like it because it really reminds me of the kind of novels I’d read on my contemporary American lit courses at uni, but it’s not a style that universally works for all readers. Of the three I’ve read, I would say this one is probably the most difficult to keep the thread of in its circular route to the conclusion—the other two being much more straightforward—but it’s by far my favourite.

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo trans. by Douglas Weatherford

This novel is widely considered a classic of Mexican literature and Latin American literature more generally, but for whatever reason has never quite managed to make it into the mainstream in its English translation like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ or Mario Vargas Llosa’s work has, both of whom cited it as a major inspiration. A few have pointed out that this is a translation issue. In this book, apparently Rulfo renders the oral cadences and diction of people living in rural Jalisco in such a way as to create real poetry out of it. None of that can really be translated into English. I quite like Weatherford’s minimalist dreamy translation of this that brings to mind the likes of Cormac McCarthy, but it probably doesn’t and can’t capture the original Spanish (but if you’re going to read in English, do read this version, it is thought of as the best translation yet).

And this is a strange, genre-bending little book, with a story and timeline that must be carefully pieced together from scraps to get the full effect. We follow Juan Preciado, a young man who goes to the town of Comala to look for his estranged father, Pedro Páramo, in the wake of his mother’s death. When he gets there, the town is abandoned, Páramo is dead, and he begins to wonder if the few people he does meet are even alive either. The atmosphere is dripping off this book, especially in the first half. It is everything I love in a novel; uncanny, unsettling, puzzling. The best way to enter this book is to visualise yourself in Comala listening to the scraps of conversation from ghostly passersby, from which you are to try and put together a whole narrative. Because unlike other fragmentary books, there is actually a distinct plot here, it just needs a bit of rooting out. You’ll move from fragment to fragment between timelines and points of view with little signposting, so just be on your guard.

I don’t think I’m spoiling much when I say Juan sort of disappears halfway through the book, and the story then focuses much more on Pedro Páramo, and the ways his despotism suffocated the town of Comala and everyone in it. I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed by this. I liked seeing how Juan was interacting with the townspeople and the contrast between him and them, it added dynamism to the exchanges. A story about a generally shitty tyrannical cacique appealed to me less. I suppose I wanted it to go somewhere else.

But overall, I really liked it, and I’ll be thinking about this one for a while. I can see its influence in so much that I’ve read, and I’m putting his short stories in my list, too.

the very good

Gogmagog by Steve Beard and Jeff Noon

This was absolutely batshit, and also quite wonderful. Former boat captain Cady Meade is approached by a young girl (/alien?) and her robotic butler to take them down a dangerous river so the girl can perform some sort of strange coming-of-age ritual. Why dangerous, you ask? Well the river is overlaid by the ghost of a dragon and said ghost is sick. As no one uses the river anymore, Cady has fallen into a kind of perennial torpor exacerbated by drunkenness and the hostile attitude of a grumpy old woman. Though initially reluctant to help them, she finally agrees. In some measure because she’s part plant witch, part human, is hundreds of years old and actually has a whole role of her own to play in the larger enfolding drama. Yes, really.

This world is totally bizarre and feels completely alien to read (rare when you read so much great speculative fiction). You’re dropped right in the middle and it takes a moment to get used to it. It is fantasy but in a mid-twentieth century setting, so it has a touch of steampunky goodness thrown in. It reminds me of China Miéville’s work in some ways. Cady is a great character for those of you who appreciate your older women protagonists who give absolutely no f*cks whatsoever. There are about five or six different types of peoples, all of whom felt really original to me. Plus I’m sure it helped that the dynamic between the girl and her Thrawl (or mechanised butler) reminded me of a book I loved from last year, The Strange. This book is infinitely weirder, but the character dynamics have a similar feel.

It has an episodic feel as the whole thrust of the book is the journey through different parts of the dragon’s ghost (like the fire, brain, liver…), and I liked being able to see more parts of the world in their progress. There’s also a second novel coming out later this year which I’m really looking forward to. This is definitely one of those books where we stop right in the middle of the story, so you may want to wait until they’re both out if you feel like that might be frustrating.

I really didn’t expect much from this novel and I think the surprise element endeared it to me even more. I would definitely recommend to those of you who like your weirder fiction.

Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Braiding Sweetgrass is one of those books which I’ll be thinking about intermittently for the rest of my life, so I knew I wanted to jump on the Gathering Moss buddy read this year. I listened to it because I so much enjoyed listening to Braiding Sweetgrass, but you do miss the opportunity to write down some of Kimmerer’s best insights. It is read by the author herself, though, and she does a fantastic job, I just love listening to her voice.

This was brilliant. You can tell its an earlier work than Braiding Sweetgrass, which reads like a (gentle and loving) call to arms. She is beginning to work through some of the ideas that become foundational in that later book. Kimmerer’s academic specialty was in mosses and she brings all her knowledge to bear here—both scientific and indigenous—to illuminate the lives of this plant that we might otherwise completely overlook. I’m always impressed by her ability to blend these things with anecdotes from her life and sections that read more like memoir. For me, this is the perfect nonfiction. One which holistically embraces the whole of being, and refuses the terms of objectivity apparently required to disseminate knowledge, particularly when it comes to science. I’d say read Braiding Sweetgrass first and then come to this when you need more Kimmerer (which you will).

Orientalism by Edward Said

I think anyone who has touched a humanities degree with a barge pole has probably come across Edward Said’s Orientalism. It’s a foundational work and is said to be one that touched off the huge body of postcolonial analysis that came after (though is not really a piece of postcolonial academic literature in and of itself).

Said was a prominent Palestinian-American who spoke often in defence of his people, but his academic career was rooted in Western literature and criticism, so this book is not the one to read to learn more about Palestine specifically (which he covers in The Question of Palestine and his memoir, Out of Place). It does, however, carry much relevance and weight in its wider themes, and I noted down many ways in which Orientalism still seeds our cultures and bolsters (neo)colonialism.

In Orientalism, Said posits that the West and East are completely socially constructed formulations, and that any Western writing on ‘the Orient’ is part of the creation of said Orient (would never use these terms myself but they are the ones used in the book and more to the point I think Said uses them intentionally to ruffle feathers, as by the 70s they were going out of fashion). This Western writing that is purportedly about ‘the Orient’ accesses no ‘true’ information about these regions, fundamentally because the creation of ‘the Orient’ doesn’t exist. This creation, in turn, forms the dichotomy, the foil, that also generates the idea of the West, or the Occident. The West being the place that is supposedly objective, rational, superior, that knows stuff about the East, that takes it and categorises it and codifies it. The East is not a place that knows stuff about the West, it is often gendered as feminine, as passive, as exotic, as irrational. Naturally this discursive creation of ‘the Orient’ fed into and fuelled colonialism. His focus is on the ‘near East’ in the book (Egypt, the Levant) rather than on the whole region that ‘the Orient’ would have covered just to prevent him from having to cover too much ground. We would perhaps use Global South these days instead (fraught with its own issues, I’m sure).

He makes his argument by analysing a number of Western texts and their depictions of ‘the Orient’, starting at Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt through to the 1970s. He focuses on French and British writing for the first two chapters, through to the takeover by American imperialism in the last.

The book is a vital puzzle piece in academic work at the time, and to understand so much of what came after I think you at least need to read the introduction to this book. I’d recommend the whole thing to those of you who want to see the argument unfold, and how he builds it. This is dense though, Said is an academic and his style is pretty dry. Over the years the book has been criticised for not being radical enough and unwittingly reinforcing the binary that it seeks to erode. But this work was a starting point, and it took Said to academic superstardom for a reason. Some of it may strike us as fairly obvious now, but that’s only because we are the beneficiaries of decades of work that came after and sometimes, because of Said.

I don’t recommend this to everyone because as I said, it’s dry. And so many of its ideas have now been made accessible by others who have read it. But I do recommend it if you plan to read any other theory or academic work, because it’s such a vital piece of the puzzle. It’s also just interesting to see how different academics tackle the laying out of arguments and how their styles differ from each other. People think academics write all one way, but there’s a lot of variation and artistry that goes into any kind of writing. I haven’t read Culture and Imperialism, but as a literature lover I wonder if I would prefer the reading experience to this one. This book doesn’t cover much fiction, where Culture and Imperialism does. So I think I may read that one next.

the good

River Spirit by Leila Aboulela

I want to put this somewhere between the above category and this one. There was a lot to like about this book, and very little to dislike.

I found this while looking for Sudanese literature, in the wake of learning about the war happening in Sudan right now. If you don’t yet know what’s happening, for up to the minute information Sara aka bsonblast on instagram/tiktok is a great person to follow (she also has a whole introductory series on TikTok which you can start from the top), as is the author of this post, Yassmin. I quickly came across some great reviews for River Spirit which had only recently been published, and I then saw that Tasnim had also read it and liked it which cemented it for me as high priority tbr (side note, Tasnim has been tirelessly posting about Palestine and Sudan for the last few months and has been a real inspiration, so please do go and follow her—she also likes good books).

Back to River Spirit, which is a historical novel set in 1880s Sudan, during a period when a man named Muhammad Ahmad proclaimed himself the Mahdi—a figure from Islamic eschatology (end times)—and began to gain power and popular support as a result. A quote from the epigraph, the Mahdi “will be sent at a time of conflict […] then he will fill the earth with equity and justice as it had been filled with tyranny and oppression.”

There are so many things about this book that I shouldn’t have liked. It’s told from multiple points of view and we don’t get extended time with many of the characters; it’s a sweeping panorama of a huge and complicated period of Sudanese history and Aboulela has to do quite a lot of explaining and historical exposition to catch us up, and it is at its heart a love story, which can be tricky to accommodate alongside everything else. But it just flows, and I found it to be really quite compelling. This is a testament to Aboulela’s skill because that is a tough ask. I think this skill lies in having a light hand with the prose, never allowing it to become overwritten but still bringing elegance and beauty into it. And she manages to do a lot with her characters in a short space of time that gives you something to fasten onto emotionally.

The central love story follows Akuany and Yaseen, who come from different worlds entirely and are thrown together somewhat by chance, only to then be variously separated and reunited over the years. I liked these two but I was particularly drawn to Akuany, who is the heart of this book. Overall I was also really impressed by Aboulela’s ability to get a lot of nuance into the text; she is no fan of the proclaimed Mahdi, and derides his religious fundamentalism that ignores the necessity for grace, practicality and flexibility in the lives of ordinary people. At the same time she acknowledges that there was only a space opened up for the Mahdi to seize so much power and appeal to the spirit of many Sudanese people because of the exploitation and violence of colonialism, first in the form of the Ottoman Empire who were taxing the Sudanese people out of all proportion, and then the British, too. She writes of the places were nationalism, colonialism and religion meet, and I felt I gained real insight into the way these entanglements might work in Sudan.

The only reason it is perhaps in this section rather than the one above is because it is so sweeping and has to move so quick, I don’t know that it’ll stick around at the forefront of my mind for a long time. However I do really want to look into Aboulela’s backlist as I felt myself in very confident hands here. I’d definitely recommend you read it, because unless you know a lot about this period of Sudanese history, it is sure to expand your world.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy trans. by Anthony Briggs

Preparing myself for some outrage at the fact that I didn’t absolutely love this novel.

Look, I liked reading lots of parts of it! But I thought it was flawed! That’s okay! And if you’d asked me in the hours after I’d just read endless pages of (rather vacuous) analysis about ‘History’ and ‘historians’ and ‘great men’ and how un-great Napoleon was, I’d have put it in The Meh, so you’re honestly in luck that a little bit of distance has reminded me that I did like large swathes of this novel. (Just to be clear, no fan of Napoleon myself, just didn’t need to hear about it over and over.)

I probably don’t need to explain War and Peace to you, but in brief we are following three families—the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs and the Bezukhovs—during the Napoleonic Wars. There’s a huge cast and it’s a sprawling story where the camera lens of Tolstoy’s narrative weaves from scene to scene, character to character, as Russia moves in and out of… you guessed it, war and peace. I thought the first half of this book was strong. I wasn’t bowled over by the prose style; of course it’s difficult to tell if this is a translation problem (and I read the Anthony Briggs because I hold no purist notions about the older translations when this one is described as the smoothest for English readers), though I suspect some of it might lie in the original text. I think this is because I’m a Dickens girl, and not only do I get to read him in his original language but his prose is also very lively and light-footed where this is more sombre and stolid. Call me uncultured. Anyway whilst I wasn’t bowled over by that, I did appreciate how Tolstoy was unfolding the narrative and the immense difficulty of holding all that story means you have to be really good at plotting and directing the reader’s attention, which is a mighty skill in itself. I was immersed, shall we say. I cared.

But then somewhere around eight or nine hundred pages, it began to lose me. Here’s something to know about War and Peace which I—perhaps naively—did not. It is interspersed with some long essays by Tolstoy about ‘History’, and readers, it is mostly utter tripe, at least from my own contemporary standpoint. The best of it is Tolstoy talking about how war is mostly just chaos and also pointless, but the rest of his insights are lacking. I can see that much of it might have been more revelatory at the time of publishing, but don’t have quite the same effect now. It very much feels like your grandad going on a rant at the dinner table right when he’s in the midst of a story you would quite like to hear the end of. It really destroyed the narrative tension for me, and worse, it gets pretty nationalistic and starts reading like propaganda. Going into reading a Russian novel at this particular moment in time when the invasion of Ukraine is ongoing, I knew I wanted to pay attention to the way this novel functions in the mythmaking of the Russian national consciousness (just like I’m acutely alert to hints of Empire in the British classics). And whilst I expected it to be there, I didn’t expect it to be quite so overt, and it ended up feeling pretty uncomfortable. Great men don’t exist but Russian commander Kutuzov was a great man… yeah, I’m not sure I buy it (thank you to this man and his review for making me feel sane). I know some editions collect all of this essay stuff and put it at the back of the novel and whilst it is fairly separate from the rest of the text so I can see how it might be done, I can’t help but feel that the novel does in some ways need it as filler for odd junctures where Tolstoy is not quite sure where to go next.

And let me issue another warning, the book ends with about fifty pages of it. So I didn’t even realise I had said goodbye to the characters for good when I did. You’re telling me I followed them for over a thousand pages and just kinda missed the farewell entirely? I feel like it might be the case that forewarned is forearmed on this one, and you can pay a bit more attention to those final moments than I did (though even if I had, I’m not sure I would’ve been overwhelmed by their poignancy).

Finally, the character work. Tolstoy is much loved for his characters. And to a large extent I get it. They do pop off the page, they do feel real, I did feel for them, a tear or two did escape my eyes from time to time. But I can’t help but feel that some of their overall arcs were pretty odd, even dismissive. The epilogue generally felt like an afterthought, even aside from the endless essay. Don’t get me started on how Natasha ends up, we’ll be here forever!

It sounds like I hate this book, and for a few hours, I did. But every now and then he’ll write a transcendent passage and you just think wow, what a talent. I think back through the first half and think there was a lot of potential there, enough even to keep it in The Good rather than The Meh, despite my disappointment on a number of points. I’m still keen to try Anna Karenina, I’m not giving up just yet.

They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell

Many of you will know I read and loved So Long, See You Tomorrow last year. That, to me, is one of those perfect novels, about which I had not a single complaint (rare, as I’m sure you can tell). That was Maxwell’s last book, and They Came Like Swallows was one of his first in a career spanning fifty years. It’s funny because when I read So Long I was sure that that book would at least be a contemporary of Stoner, if not older. It really has that modern classic feel. But it was actually published in 1979 in a totally different literary ecosystem. It looks like he really maintained that ‘classic’ tonality throughout his career, and They Came Like Swallows, published in 1937, feels similar despite the forty year gap.

Maxwell lost his mother to the 1918 flu epidemic, and this haunts both these novels. If I think too hard about that—that one of his first novels and his last novel explore that foundational trauma—I’ll cry right here writing this. It makes them really interesting to read together; I’d still go in with the better novel, So Long, first, and then explore this one if it interests you. This book is much more straightforward and probably is more directly autobiographical, where So Long takes a more circuitous route in its examination of the protagonist’s grief. Here, we follow Bunny in the months surrounding his mother’s death whilst he tries to find his place in the complex household dynamic. He is the younger, more introverted and less masculine son to his more typical older brother (a dynamic that appears also in So Long). This makes the loss of his mother that much more difficult, as she was his major ally.

The prose in So Long is distilled right down to a crystalline perfection. The inclusion of other elements in the story actually serves to highlight the passages on grief more, making them that much more impactful. This book is the first version of this. And it’s still quiet and beautiful and reflective and of course desperately sad, but it is not yet Maxwell at his full power. Still, as I say, one to look into if you loved So Long. With just that one novel, he has cemented himself on my list of authors whose body of work I’d like to complete some day.

The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose by Alice Munro

I’ve been meaning to read more Munro for absolutely ages and have had this sitting on my shelf staring at me for quite a while. Although Munro has only ever written short stories, this book came quite close to the novel form for me because we follow recurring character Rose as she grows up and moves from her small Canadian town to climb the rungs of class as an actress. It’s marketed as a book about the relationship between Rose and her stepmother, Flo, but whilst that was the focus of the first few stories, it’s absent through much of the middle. In general I found the opening stories to be the strongest; Munro writes the dynamic between Flo and Rose with precision and ease. She also examines Rose’s experience of childhood poverty and her subsequent movement into the middle class with pinpoint accuracy, in all its awkwardness and discomfort.

The middle section, though—which focuses on Rose’s marriage and dalliances—was less convincing. I wondered as I was reading whether this was an earlier work of Munro’s because it felt like she was emulating the voice of her contemporary male authors rather than fully writing in her own. I think if I could add to my list of dislikes in books, it’s the ‘I hate my marriage’ stories. I don’t know why, it’s just not a subgenre that I enjoy, and it’s quite prevalent in literary fiction from this around this time. Anyway, when I looked it up I realised that it was one of the first things she wrote, so I sense that she was still finding her voice as a writer through many of these stories. I’d read this if you’re interested in the dynamic between Flo and Rose that defines the opening stories, but not an essential Munro otherwise.

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

I listened to this and for the most part enjoyed it. Dr. Ha Nguyen travels to a remote island to investigate reports of an intelligent octopus species. Essentially it’s a first contact novel, but set here on Earth. It’s billed as a thriller and I suppose it is, but in that literary science fiction mashup kind of way.

I think the reason I liked this is because it is absolutely packed full of science, and so listening to it felt a bit like listening to a podcast with a bit of narrative. There were some interesting insights throughout and lots of great quotes to note. But as a novel I’m not sure it would be successful for everyone. First of all it takes itself suuuuuper seriously. I’d have liked to see some human lightness here, I think it would have added more dimension to the characters, who can read a bit flat. I suppose if I think back to the blurb I’m surprised about the direction Nayler took with it, but overall I feel that’s probably the blurb’s fault rather than Nayler’s. There is not as much progression or action in the plot as you might expect, and I wasn’t very interested in some of the secondary storylines. But if you’re looking for a good audiobook that’s easy listening but you might learn a thing or two, I’d recommend it.

Home by Toni Morrison

I read this one in just a couple of hours as it’s so slim. I’ve been on a Morrison kick for the last year or so, and have been working my way through her whole ouevre. And unfortunately this book did pale in comparison to some of her others, but it’s Morrison so I’m reluctant to throw any criticism her way.

Despite the impression from the blurb, I’d say we follow two protagonists here, Frank and his sister Cee. Frank is a veteran of the Korean War and is at somewhat of a loose end, experiencing acute PTSD and once more enduring the racism of his home country. Cee, meanwhile, has run from their small town and got herself mixed up in her own kind of trouble. This is definitely one of the easiest Morrison novels I’ve read, it is much more straightforward than some of her others. But I think that means it doesn’t quite pack the punch of her very best writing.

One of the problems with this book is that Morrison is trying to do too much in a small page count, not giving her time to fully explore the themes. She covers PTSD, alcoholism, racism, small town life vs. city life, gender roles, black womens’ role in the history of gynaecology, the Korean War. And by covering so much some of it becomes reductive; I wasn’t convinced by the treatment of PTSD; the glorification of small town life and people felt a touch patronising towards the end, and the gender roles veered into fairly traditional archetypes. As with many Morrison novels there are some deeply disturbing scenes in here, too, so please tread carefully.

Nonetheless her writing is always about a hundred times better than the next author’s, and I have so thoroughly enjoyed reading through her work. It has been really rewarding to see how she shapeshifts across her novels whilst still maintaining such a distinctive voice, but I’ll save all that for another day. I’ve only two left; A Mercy and God Help the Child.

The Book of Elsewhere by China Miéville and Keanu Reaves (ARC, release 23rd July)

I feel like everywhere I’ve talked about this book I’ve been like this! book! is! perfectly! good! It didn’t light my world on fire, but nor was it bad by any means. If you’re wondering what the hell Keanu Reaves’ name is doing there, let me explain. Reaves collaborates with another writer and an illustrator on a series of comics called BRZRKR (Berzerker) and now he’s teamed up with Miéville to do a proper novel following the same protagonist. It centres on an 80,000 year old man B/Unute who occasionally enters a fugue state where he loses executive control and commits unspeakable atrocities to whoever is nearby. We hear a little of his backstory here, and discover that he is now working for some elite military unit to do their dirty work for them. Only strange things start to happen which hint at other supernatural forces at work, and cause B/Unute to reexamine his own relationship to life.

This book is eminently readable. Miéville is a clever guy, and he’s almost definitely incapable of writing something crap. It’s more the storyline itself that probably didn’t appeal so much. If you’ve got an 80,000 year old man as your protagonist, I want some real in-depth thought going into what that might be like. And don’t get me wrong, there is some examination of it, it’s just not as sustained as I personally would’ve liked. But this book is just doing something else, it’s for a different kind of audience. It’s more action, it’s more thriller, it’s more military. These are not my topics of choice. I’m also wary of anything where the violence seemingly serves an aesthetic role, rather than an examination of violence’s relationship to power. Like why does this guy get violent in his fugue state rather than I don’t know, travelling to a particular time or place? I know it’s because they’re utilising the Berzerker concept, and because it looks cool in the comics presumably and it would look cool in the movie adaptation that feels inevitable, but it doesn’t make for a particularly enlightening examination or justification of violence. I imagine I liked the bits best that readers of these genres would find frustrating and distracting, which is the glimpses into B/Unute’s past that we get from time to time.

Also, there’s an 78,000 year old pig, so make of that what you will. This is part Miéville after all, and you can’t escape the weirdness. Overall, a well written version of this kind of novel, just not necessarily my thing to begin with. As an aspiring Miéville completist, I’m glad I read it.

the meh

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

This book is not an outright disaster but nor does it have any of the things that, for me, make a good novel. It doesn’t have the plot or character footholds to make it compelling, but perhaps if it was intended to be more experimental or poetic, it doesn’t have that challenging, puzzling aspect that will engage me in the absence of a more traditional story. BUT, that doesn’t mean others won’t like it. Indeed, I can see why many people would like this one, it’s just not my cup of tea at all. This book has flow to it, and is more of a softly lyrical song than a rigorous examination of its themes. I like the latter, but you may very well like the former.

So what is it about? This is literary science fiction, so as that’s one of my things, I was really looking forward to it. It follows a group of astronauts who are orbiting the Earth at some ridiculous speed so that they see sixteen sunrises and sunsets in one day. An interesting concept that might help you examine how tied we are to our planet through Earth’s unique twenty-four hour timescale. Alas, that idea does not quite come to fruition here.

This, for me, was the epitome of the ‘typing novel’. One of my red flags for this is lists. When authors start writing long paragraphs consisting of lists, I start to sweat. To me it speaks of a lack of confidence in what you’re saying thematically, so you just shove everything in and hope that something sticks. Whilst it has a nice, lyrical style, there were some generalisations and contradictions that just seem silly. In a matter of seconds on page two, “the earth is an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake”, then “the earth is a mother waiting for her children to return”… well, which is it? What are the differences in the moments when it feels like a lover, and the moments when it feels like a mother? Why later on does it feel like “in this moment [the space station], not earth, feels like home”? Where is the evidence for this beyond the words themselves? What does home feel like, viscerally, not just intellectually? What I think is intended is a poetic effect, and again this will appeal to many, but it’s not what I tend to look for in my literary sci fi.

There was little differentiation between the astronauts, who come from wildly different backgrounds; America, Japan, Britain, Italy, Russia. This absence of specificity means the potential depth of this novel instantly collapses into a kind of surfacey prose that doesn’t quite tap into… well, anything. It lacks a sense of materiality, as we float between the various (indistinguishable) thought patterns of the astronauts. I’m still going to try Harvey’s other work because I have been assured by Varsha that it’s really good. Perhaps a step into the speculative just doesn’t quite fit her style.

Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer

Ah, Jeff. I think we’re on first name terms at this point. I wouldn’t be surprised if many people associate my reviews with his work, and I have championed him many a time. Unfortunately I couldn’t love Hummingbird Salamander. I really wanted to, but I couldn’t. Honestly, I’m still not entirely sure what to make of this one; it feels messy somehow, like it has a bit of an identity crisis going on, but I’ll do my best.

It started off quite well, I think. We are following ‘Jane’ (an alias, we’re told) who is given a mysterious note one day by her barista which leads her to a storage unit inhabited only by a chair and a rare taxidermy hummingbird. This intriguing clue leads her down a rabbit hole to discover more about Silvina, a dead climate activist, and Silvina’s mission.

He had me in the first half. With VanderMeer, I’m acutely aware that he is going to thwart absolutely every expectation you have of him. This is a detective story of a kind, sure, but it’s not going to be a satisfying unravelling mystery. Instead it is sort of a character study of Jane, who is distinctly unlikeable. But it’s not even going to be a character study in the way some detective novels are, like Tana French’s In the Woods, because you’re not even going to get the payoff of the unreliable narrator concept. I initially enjoyed following Jane and wondering to myself if this was all a private delusion, as well as the nigh on laughable logical jumps she makes.

But it devolves into a kind of silliness that VanderMeer is a bit prey too, sometimes at the expense of what he wants to say. He seems to want to co-opt the thriller genre here to get more eyes and ears on his environmental message, but it all gets a bit muddied along the way with odd set pieces and endless meanderings. There’d be a great passage in there sometimes, but then a lot of boring Jane time. I read a review on Storygraph/Goodreads that I now can’t find for the life for me that mentioned how VanderMeer has a tendency to fall into misanthropy in his novels when it comes to his eco message. The books I like best that deal with environmentalism tend to be those that explore and acknowledge humans’ ability to live well with the land, our ability to act as stewards to it rather than destroy it, much of which comes to us from indigenous modes of thought. VanderMeer sometimes seems to want us to just disappear entirely, and this lack of hope and lightness in his vision sometimes leaves me feeling downcast. The problem is the extractive nature of capitalism, not the fact of us existing at all. I think he knows this, but he doesn’t acknowledge other ways of being enough for me sometimes.

I’m close to finishing all of VanderMeer’s novels, and I still love him. But this is not my favourite of his, and I was left feeling a bit confused and empty.

the painful

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Another potentially controversial ranking, but I hated this book, sorry. I really liked Slaughterhouse-Five, so I had especially high hopes which may have contributed to the crushing disappointment but yeah, not for me.

This is a classic satirical science fiction novel that follows narrator John/Jonah, a journalist wanting to know more about the enigmatic figure of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, co-creator of the atomic bomb. He ends up on the Caribbean island of San Lorenzo with Hoenikker’s offspring, where the world may just end up being changed irreversibly once again.

Oh, it’s so racist, so sexist, so ableist. It’s so uncomfortable to read. I get it, this is satire, I don’t think Vonnegut was a super bigoted guy, he’s trying to make a point about American imperialism and he’s doing it through the lens of the very gullible and generally morally bankrupt protagonist. It’s the 60s, so the satire is naturally going to be dicier than it would be today. But it’s just so unpleasant, really. I give a lot of grace to authors writing in a different sociocultural context, but I was grimacing the whole way through the second act. It’s the whole schtick, here, and I don’t think the payoff is good enough.

He’s trying to make a point about science and religion and the similarities between the two, which is great. He does have a way with words and the opening sections are quite promising. As a historical artefact about the Cold War, it’s an interesting contribution that should be studied. And in our Patreon discussions about this one, Melissa brought up the great point that probably a lot of this would have felt fresh and exciting upon first publication, but we've come a long way since then and the themes (which are really the whole basis of this book) just don’t feel as intellectually stimulating as they might once have been. Personally, I think it’s safe to skip.

conclusions and giveaway!

So that’s it, everyone. Sorry for the mammoth post, I hope you enjoyed my musings.

As I mentioned, I’m currently highlighting this fundraiser for Shady, his family and community in Gaza. I’ve been in touch with Shady and he’s told me how he’ll be using the money to provide food and aid for local children and his community as a whole, not only his family. He teaches dabke and has been sending me videos of the activities he has been organising for the kids, bringing them some small joy in the most unimaginably difficult times. I so want to support them to help them meet their goal of €20,000, and I think we can do it.

If you would like to be in with a chance to win a personalised book package, and free paid subscriptions to both this Substack and the Patreon community for a year, first of all please donate whatever you can to the fundraiser, with the suggested amount being €5. For donations less than this amount, I have set up a Buy Me a Coffee page as Gofundme doesn’t accept them, and I will transfer the balance to the fundraiser regularly. This will also work if you can’t donate to the GFM from your country! Screenshot your receipt or confirmation, and then add it to the end of this form (where I’ll also ask for some of your preferences so I know where to start with your book recommendations!) This will be running until the 21st May, when I’ll use a random generator number to pick a winner. Of course this is open to existing paid subscribers of either platform, too.

Thank you all, and speak soon!