an explanation

first things first: what is this? my friend kirin gave me the idea to start a newsletter that was essentially tracking the books I read for my friends and other people who, for whatever reason, are interested in what I read. goodreads used to serve this function, but in my quest to divest as much as possible from all Bezos-related services, goodreads is now dead to me. goodreads alternatives have not really stuck, and so this is where I’ve landed.

my plan is to send one of these in the middle of every month (from now on) listing the books I read the previous month. I will note my favorites and include little blurbs. if I really hated something perhaps I will mention that but I will try not to be an asshole. I may also include a capsule essay as the mood strikes me. I would like to talk to YOU about books as well, so send your recs back in my direction or let me know if you’ve read something so we can discuss.

*denotes favorite

denotes book club

january

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

*The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford

• we (I) like to make fun of contemporary British people for their weird nostalgia for the Blitz. this novel, published in 1945, suggests that people who lived through it were blasé about it in a somewhat concerning way! it’s a drawing room comedy until it’s really really not.

Austral by Carlos Fonseca

Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner

*Things Invisible to See by Nancy Willard

Old Filth by Jane Gardam

Labrador by Kathryn Davis

february

*The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner

• a book about a fifteenth-century nunnery where almost nothing happens except for thoughts about music, tapestries, who will be the next abbess, and poems, and it’s UNPUTDOWNABLE. the best kind of historical fiction, where people live their lives in earnest, not to Teach You About Events.

*Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake

• these books are so funny and deranged and imo better than Lord of the Rings. every name he invents is more perfect than the last (Sourdust, Opus Fluke, Dr. Prunesquallor), and every description is incredible.

  But there was nothing on fire except the tobacco in his pipe and as he lay supine, the white wreaths billowing from his wide, muscular and lipless mouth (rather like the mouth of a huge and friendly lizard), he evinced so brutal a disregard for his own and other people’s windpipes as made one wonder how this man could share the selfsame world with hyacinths and damsels.

Gliff by Ali Smith

Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B. Calhoun by Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden

Siren Queen by Nghi Vo

Ring Shout by P. Djéli Clark

Save Our Souls: The True Story of a Castaway Family, Treachery, and Murder by Matthew Pearl

*Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls

• to paraphrase Pedro Pascal, shut the fuck up and read this book

march

Maddalena and the Dark by Julia Fine

*Kingdoms of Elfin by Sylvia Townsend Warner

*The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf by Kathryn Davis

• not a perfect novel but ambitious and rambling and strange — a book, like Biography of X, about how making art can make you a monster, but without the unwieldy alternate history baggage. and what a great first line!

  In the thirty-fourth year of my life, tragedy having turned my basic languor to indolence, my skepticism to sorrow, I came to be haunted by the ghost of a woman almost twice my age.

The Bell at Sealey Head by Patricia A. McKillip

The Antidote by Karen Russell

Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us by Sam Kean

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugrešić

A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

and now a capsule essay

gliff & the dystopian novel in an actual dystopia

ali smith is a rightly-lauded novelist who has written many books I like. I was excited enough about this book to put it on hold before it came out, and I got it from the library right away.

then I started to read it.

it’s the story of a near-future family who becomes “unverified,” no longer allowed access to the perks of modern society. here are some reasons a person can become unverified, from the text:

Another had found herself declared unverifiable for writing online that the killing of many people by another people was a genocide. Another had been unverified for defaming the oil conglomerates by saying they were directly responsible for climate catastrophe. Another had been unverified for speaking at a protest about people’s right to protest.

a person is made unverified by red paint. if you come home one day and find a red circle around your house, congratulations, you have been ostracized/unverified. most of the book is about the narrator, a teenager named Bri, and their sister trying to find a place in a world that insists on constant surveillance and compliance. Bri, in case you were wondering, finds solace in the power of libraries. eyeroll, I thought at first. this middle-grade dystopia was marketed to adults? this was several weeks before the trump admin started disappearing people off the streets for doing the things quoted above.

look, the world is a mess. it’s full of evil tech overlords with bad haircuts and monstrous autocrats, and is often literally on fire. it kind of is a middle-grade dystopia, and many of the people with power lack subtlety or moral complexity, just like villains in books written with all the finesse of a hammer blow to the head.

so what is it about this type of fiction that bothers me so much? why does it feel so tedious?

I am really trying to figure it out. Bri, a teen protagonist, has nothing to do with how society became so awful. even later in the novel, when they have become a very new adult participating in the capitalist/authoritarian system, they never lose the sense of victimhood. all of this has been done to them. there is no space for a character reckoning with the world their choices have created. but adults are the intended readers, at least according to the way this book was marketed. my current suspicion is that, at least in this particular novel, there is a missing level of complicity. it’s not like I need to see some both-sides bullshit on book banning, but maybe (especially in a book that references brave new world SO MUCH) it would have been compelling to see how certain segments of society sleepwalked into the abandonment of libraries.

or maybe I just want fiction to offer me complication because the real world just gives me people so cartoonishly evil that they blot out “realism.” is it actually escapist to read something where people and ideas are complicated instead of as obviously nihilist and venal as possible?

what do you think? is realism the true fantasy? help me pick this apart!