Category: Uncategorized

POOR THINGS by Alasdair Gray

Here is an very fruity book about SPOLIER ALERT someone creating a living woman from the body of a dead woman and the brains of her fetus. 

It was pretty interesting as a concept, but I found I struggled to care on some level.  Everything was so wild and magically real that it was hard to feel that anything meant anything or would have any consequences. It made me think about FRANKENSTEIN, and especially why the monster in that book is male and not female.  Because, let us face it, if some mad scientist in the nineteenth century thought he could bring someone back to life he would 1000% have tried with a woman because, obviously, sex slave.  Perhaps because Mary Shelley was female it did not go in that direction, but you know realism-wise it ought to have.  Also, I’ve just been in a Wikipedia deepdive about Mary Shelley, and let me give you the sobering reflection that she wrote FRANKENSTEIN when she was just 19! However she had already led a big life, having got together with Shelley when she was 16 (and he was married), after meeting him secretly at her mother’s grave (why), and then running away with him because even though it’s 1819 she believes in FREE LOVE.   What a baller. 

THE TRIO by Johanna Hedman

I had a lot of confused feelings about this book. On the one hand, it was quite more-ish, and I finished it very quickly.  On the other hand, I felt kind of annoyed, and I can’t really explain why.  It tells the story of a sort of love triangle involving undergraduates in Stockholm.  If this is giving you fun TWILIGHT vibes, let me stop you right there.  It is way more tortured than that, and ends with the girl getting with the wrong guy.  Mostly because they DON’T COMMUNICATE.  I was like: just talk to each other! How hard is it to say: are you my boyfriend?!  Or: my feelings were hurt when . . .

Not to sound like I’m so perfect at relationships, but jesus.  Also annoying was the almost mind-boggling level of safety in which these Swedish people live.  It is deeply disorienting to read a book, especially a book about young people, that is not drenched in economic anxiety. 

I spent a good 4000 pages in Stockholm a few years ago (shout out to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s MY STRUGGLE) so I feel eerily familiar with the upper-middle class of this city that I have never even visited.  This book is very much of that world. There is a lot of describing grocery story visits and eating simple and healthy foods (grr!).  There’s also a lot of this kind of writing:

That summer, August and I would bike to Djurgarden in the mornings, and pick a tree close to the water where we’d park our bikes and lay out our towels and then spend the day swimming, sunning and reading.  I’d bring a thermos of coffee and August would come with tuna sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil.  The empty wrapping glittered in the sun after we’d eaten.

That last sentence in particular gives you a flavour of what we are dealing with.

WHAT I READ IN 2023

This year my favourite books are pretty clear.  AS MEAT LOVES SALT by Maria McCann, a wonderful, bloody love story set in the English Civil War, that made me feel weirdly proprietary about centuries-old battles (I’m looking at you siege of Basing House!).  Then IN MEMORIAM by Alice Winn, which I see in all the bookshop windows and deservedly so: it’s a heart-breaker.  Big props to this author for having the guts to think there was something new to say about WW1.  Also BOOTH by Karen Joy Fowler, a weirdly riveting account of the family of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin; THE SECRET RIVER by Kate Grenville, about the life of a man transported to Australia; and Honourable mention to AKENFIELD by Ronald Blythe, a lengthy, factual account of rural life in nineteenth century Sussex that was sort of boring at the time but which I have thought about often since. 

My real life included a lot of London and Europe, and a little of America and Southeast Asia, but my reading life was much more varied: not one but two memorable shipwrecks (both with cannibalism), shoplifting in Uganda, the decline of a Bavarian family in the 1800s, the journey of Livingstone’s heart out of the Congo, and etc.  It is also interesting to see which books I maybe did not ‘love’ as much, but which still stayed with me.  There were AKENFIELD, but then also a biography of the author Sybille Bedford, which introduced me to a life in which working-for-money played no part, and no one expected it to, a kind of mind-bending and liberating proposition for me.  Or there was the WHITE TIGER, a novel of rural Indonesian life, which I have almost totally forgotten other than this one haunting line, from a man who lies dying: “The years had gone by so quickly, life receding in the distance like a train narrowly missed”

This year was 66 books, surprisingly about three-quarters by women.   As ever, it’s been a relief from daily life and a solace, and I can’t imagine what I would do without it. 

DON’T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT by Diana Athill

GREAT GRANNY WEBSTER by Caroline Blackwood 

SEVERAL SHORT SENTENCES ABOUT WRITING by Verlyn Klinkenborg

STAY TRUE by Hua Hsu

MONKEY BOY by Francisco Goldman

THE ART OF SCANDAL by Regina Black

MOSCOW STATIONS by Venedikt Yerofeev

BOOK LOVERS by Emily Henry

HAPPY PLACE by Emily Henry

BEACH READ by Emily Henry

YOU AND ME ON VACATION by Emily Henry

THE ENCHANTED APRIL by Elizabeth von Arnim

YOU, AGAIN by Kate GoldbecK

ANGEL by Elizabeth Taylor

MISS LONELYHEARTS by Nathaniel West

BUDDENBROOKS by Thomas Mann

WILLIAM’S WIFE by Gertrude Trevelyan

THE MOOR’S ACCOUNT by Laila Lalami

ALL THIS COULD BE DIFFERENT by Sarah Thankam Mathews

THE PRIVILEGES by Jonathan Dee

AN INSTANCE OF THE FINGERPOST by Iain Pears

SYBILLE BEDFORD by Selina Hastings

IN MEMORIAM by Alice Winn

THE MARCH by EL Doctorow

THE L-SHAPED ROOM by Lynne Reid Banks

KINTU by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

THE RED AND THE GREEN by Iris Murdoch

AS MEAT LOVES SALT by Maria McCann

CLEOPATRA AND FRANKENSTEIN by Coco Mellors

VLADIMIR by Julia May Jonas

PINEAPPLE STREET by Jenny Jackson

IN THE CUT by Suzanne Moore

DEAR GIRLS by Ali Wong

THE STRANGER IN THE WOODS by Michael Finkel

FOREVER YOUR ROGUE by Erin Langston

BURMA BOY by Biyi Bandele

WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDES OURSELVES by Karen Joy Fowler

THE WAGER by David Grann

RAINBOW’S END by Lauren St John

QUIETLY HOSTILE by Samantha Irby

BOOTH by Karen Joy Fowler

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY by John Le Carre

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES by Jane Austen and Seth Graham-Smith

OUT OF DARKNESS, SHINING LIGHT by Petina Gappah

THE RIVER AND THE SOURCE by Margaret A Ogala

A WREATH FOR THE ENEMY by Pamela Frankau

WHO WAS CHANGED AND WHO WAS DEAD by Barbara Comyns

AKENFIELD by Ronald Blythe

SARAH THORNHILL by Kate Greville

I’M A FAN by Sheena Patel

THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder

THE CITY AND THE STARS by Arthur C Clarke

IT ENDS WITH US by Colleen Hoover

THE SECRET RIVER by Kate Grenville

FOR THY GREAT PAIN HAVE MERCY ON MY LITTLE PAIN by Victoria Mackenzie

THE TWO KINDS OF DECAY by Sarah Manguso

REALLY GOOD, ACTUALLY by Monica Heisey

I’M SORRY YOU FEEL THAT WAY by Rebecca Wait

TRESPASSES by Louise Kennedy

ACTS OF DESPERATION by Megan Nolan

CALEDONIA by Elspeth Barker

MAN TIGER by Eka Kurniawan

DRIVE YOUR PLOUGH OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD by Olga Tokarczuk

RIDDLEY WALKER by Russell Hoban

NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS by Angela Carter

FOSTER by Claire Keegan

SEVERAL SHORT SENTENCES ABOUT WRITING by Verlyn Klinkenborg

A fantastic and pragmatic book about writing. The most interesting part was when he said most of what blocks you from writing is worrying about whether it’s in-general-good-enough. In fact, if you just work on fixing whatever sentences hit your ear oddly, then there is nothing to be blocked about. I found this quite inspirational

YOU, AGAIN by Kate Goldbeck

I had Covid (second time round) and felt dreadful, so decided to read this fun romcom recommended to me by Instagram. I’ve never read anything quite like it before. I think it is what is called commercial fiction, and I am ready for MORE. It was a sort of classic friends-to-lovers story, and it was a towering achievement of EDITING. There was nothing in it that was not fun, funny, or moving the plot forward. The time flew by. TOLSTOY TAKE NOTE. It is not easy to cut a story down to only the parts you want to read. Now to be fair, I cannot any more recall much about what it was about, or the characters, or anything, but it passed the time most delightfully

THE MARCH by EL Doctorow

A novel showcasing a really remarkable skill. It tells the story of Sherman’s march south during the American civil war through many tiny vignettes of people of all kinds. What artistry! What ability! I don’t know who this EL Doctorow is, but he is amazing.

Writing aside, it was also interesting to learn more about the war. Sherman apparently went along burning down houses and towns to get the South to surrender, only not burning them down if the Southerners had already done it themselves. Particularly extremely heart-breaking to read about is how the slaves waited on their plantations for Sherman to arrive, and when he did, simply followed him away. It is just wild and sad and happy to read about their first days of freedom