January, 2022 (Reading): “Hope Smiles from the threshold of the year to come, Whispering 'it will be happier'...”

Starting off the New Year with a quote from Tennyson.

Only managed to read 81 books in 2021--and not nearly enough poetry--so that's one of my resolutions.

Beginning today...

Finished Inhibitor Phase. Not one of the better Revelation Space novels. One of the main plot twists was completely fumbled, and the Inhibitors themselves feel a little second-hand these days.

Read the third Discworld novel, Equal Rites. I'm pretty sure I read this back in the 1980s. but if so nothing had stuck. A great improvement on the previous two books, with some actual laugh out loud moments and a plot that wasn't your usual comic fantasy plot.

Next, Between Planets, which I think was originally published as a juvenile, although it didn't read like one. Basically it's "libertarians on Venus!", and they're fighting the nasty imperialist Earth. Totally unconvincing set-up, even for the late 1940s.

The Ends of the Earth is a collection from 1991, and Lucius Shepard really was bloody good. This is top-class genre fiction. Perhaps Shepard tackled the same themes a little too often, and he seemed to like to write at novelette length, but this is excellent stuff. Recommended.

Liz Jensen's novels are definitely worth reading. In Egg Dancing, a stay-at-home mother discovers her scientist husband has been trying to genetically engineer a baby - their own son, she learns, was an early attempt - and she determines to stop him. With the help of her control-freak civil servant sister, and their mother, who is in a sanatorium. Which is where the scientist's wife ends up after she confides in her mother's psychiatrist and he conspires with the husband to have her sectioned. It sounds grim but this is a genuinely funny novel. Recommended.

Fugue for a Darkening Island may have been published nearly fifty years ago but it reads in parts like a playbook for the current crop of corrupt chancers in Westminster. In the novel, nuclear war on the African continent creates a refugee crisis, and 2 million land on British shores, at a time when the right is in power... Cue collapse of civilisation. In fact, only 28,000 refugees made it to the UK in 2021, but the policies introduced by BoJo and Patel are much worse than those in Priest's novel.

I finally finished Titus Groan. It was surprisingly slow. Some lovely descriptive prose, and everything off-kilter. But the verbal tics got a little wearying after a while and, well, not much actually happened. Definitely worth reading. Pretty sure I'm going to read the two sequels at some point.

Northanger Abbey– Jane Austen
Audio book performed by Donada Peters
4****

Catherine Morland, a charming young girl extremely fond of novels, meets the sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who invite her to their father’s mysterious estate – Northanger Abbey. There Catherine runs into both real difficulties and imaginary dangers, and learns how to tell the difference between books and real life, between false friends and true ones.

This is a wonderful parody of the late 18th-centry Gothic style, with fainting heroines, haunted medieval buildings, unrequited love, misunderstandings, secret engagements, and parental disapproval. Our main character, Catherine, has a rampant imagination fueled by over-the-top romantic suspense novels. It is the first novel Austen completed, though one of the last to be published. It clearly shows the writer she will become. The dialogue is witty and clever. The reader must know that the lovers will triumph in the end; still, the intrigues and obstacles make for a fun journey. Catherine may not be quite so well drawn as Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice or the Dashwood sisters of Sense and Sensibility, but she is still delightful.

Donada Peters does a great job performing the audio version. She has great pacing and sufficient skill as a voice artist to differentiate the characters. I particularly liked how she voiced Catherine.

Update: 2021
What a delight to listen to this again. Having done so previously, and also having watched the PBS miniseries, I have an even greater appreciation for Austen's send-up of gothic novels. It's just a charming story and so well told! And, of course, we have a romantic HEA ending! What's not to like?

First book of the year and it's a doozie.

Mario Levrero's THE LUMINOUS NOVEL. Recommended by a literary critic I follow on Twitter and, man, am I grateful I took a chance on it (having never heard of it or its Uruguayan author before).

What a book. A writer receives a sizable grant to complete a book he started years ago. Rather than committing himself to that task, said author uses every pretext and device to avoid writing the book, his procrastination, by turns, hilarious and maddening.

Not a tome for everyone, hundreds of pages where the central character does very little except play video games, watch on-line pornography, read cheap detective novels, ANYTHING to avoid working on his magnum opus.

Remarkable book, original and literate.

This one will head my 2022 "Best of..." list, I'm certain.

Unbelievably good.

Here's an essay on the aforementioned THE LUMINOUS NOVEL that better sums up its many attractions. Illingworth is one smart, literate dude.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/avoidance-strategies

Girl, Woman, Other – Bernardine Evaristo
Book on CD performed by Anna-Maria Nabirye
4****

Evaristo’s collection of short stories earned her the 2019 Booker Prize, the first black woman to be so honored. As the title implies, the stories all focus on women and girls from childhood to old age and are primarily set in current-day Britain.

Evaristo populates the book with a wide variety of unforgettable characters: a jaded teacher, a lesbian playwright, a nonbinary social media influencer, an ancient matriarch still living on her family’s farm. The stories are loosely interconnected, and the structure reminds me a little of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, though there is no central character that is in every tale.

I am a fan of the short story format and loved the way Evaristo managed to give us a complete picture of these women’s lives using this form. The novel is structured in chapters, with each chapter having three characters’ stories, though all three characters appear in each other’s narratives. I cheered for most of these women (as in real life, there are some stinkers here that I was happy to see go), and found the epilogue, which ties up one story arc beautifully, very satisfying.

I can hardly wait for my F2F book club discussion!

I listened to the audio performed by Anna-Maria Nabirye, who does a marvelous job. She has a lot of characters to deal with, virtually all of them women, and she managed it quite well. Her narration was seamless, and I was never confused about who was speaking. I did have a copy of the text handy, and it is written in a style that eliminates capitalization and punctuation; it has an appearance of poetry on some pages. I don’t think this would have bothered me at all had I read the text, but for those who find non-traditional styles problematic, try the audio. You won’t regret it.

>6 BookConcierge: I met Bernadine at a science fiction convention last year. She was there supporting her husband, David Shannon, who has a dystopian sf novel out from a small UK press (Howul). The nice thing was that she treated the whole exercise as David's show and she was in support. I didn't get the chance to ask her how she found an sf convention in comparison to some of the more "literary" events she's done since winning the Booker...

Think I shall start posting links to my reviews on Medium. Hell, why not.

My most recent, The City in the Middle of the Night. Find it here...

https://medium.com/p/the-city-in-the-middle-of-the-night-charlie-jane-anders-560...

>7 RobertDay: How lucky! Must've been a great experience (the entire SF convention, I mean).

Jack Maggs – Peter Carey
3***

From the book jacket: A novel of Dickensian London .. the 1830s. Jack Maggs, a foundling trained in the fine arts of thievery, cruelly betrayed and deported to Australia, has now reversed his fortune – and seeks to fulfill his well-concealed, innermost desire. Returning “home” under threat of execution, he inveigles his way into a household in Great Queen Street, where he’s quickly embroiled in various emotional entanglements – and where he falls under the hypnotic scrutiny of Tobias Oates, a celebrated young writer fascinated by the process of mesmerism and obsessed with the criminal mind.

My reactions
I had heard that this was inspired by and perhaps even a retelling of Dickens’ Great Expectations. I can see similarities, though there is no Miss Havisham, and the focus is not on Pip but on Magwitch.

I did get quite caught up in Jack Maggs’s story and wondered a few times how Carey was going to wrap this up. The plot is definitely convoluted in places, with many twists and turns, though Maggs’s goal remains the same. I enjoyed the relationship between Maggs and Mercy, and the complication of Mercy’s relationship with her employer, Mr Buckle. But I felt Carey took a wrong turn by relying on Tobias Oates and his efforts at hypnotism / magnetism. And the subplot of Toby’s romantic entanglements did little to advance the story (other than providing some motivation for his final journey with Maggs).

Carey’s writing is very atmospheric, and the city of London is explored in some detail, especially the impoverished slums and criminal underbelly.

Another big book, ENEMY ON THE EUPHRATES by Ian Rutledge.

Covers the years after the First World War, when Britain tried to enforce control over Mesopotamia (Iran and Iraq). Once the people in the region figured out that the Brits were there to stay, they rose up en masse and tried to chuck out their overlords.

Obvious parallels to recent history and a good, balanced account of that era.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies – Deesha Philyaw
4****

This is the author’s fiction debut, though she has written a number of nonfiction works. In this wonderful collection of short stories, Philyaw explores the modern African-American woman and her hopes, dreams, relationships, and actions both in and away from church. The stories feature all ages, from children to great-grandmothers.

These “church ladies” write about their love lives, their secret desires, their disappointments, their anger and their joys in stories that range from a professional woman meeting a scientist at a convention, to a woman connecting with a man who, like she, is visiting a mother who is dying, to a young girl who mistakes the preacher who beds her mother for God, to a teenager with a crush on the pastor’s wife (and the great-grandmother who is raising her and worried about her soul), to a woman struggling to care for her mother with dementia, to a lesbian couple struggling to make a go of it in a cold northern city far from home.

Philyaw does a marvelous job of bringing these many characters to life. Even when our circumstances were very different (basically every story), I could still relate to and understand their feelings and actions. I could see a few of these stories expanded to novel length, but I find them satisfying in and of themselves.

I look forward to reading more of her works in the future. In the meantime, I’m gonna have to learn to make peach cobbler …

Recent reading:

Mockingbird, Walter Tevis - not entirely sure what to make of this. It feels very old-fashioned for a novel published in 1980, and yet some aspects are clearly more modern than the rest. It's pretty much an alternative take on Jack Williamson's 'With Folded Hands', in which robot care has reduced humans to drooling hippies. It feels a a bit like an old-timer rant against counter-culture initially, but as the book progresses the plot turns more interesting, and I ended up liking it more than I had when I was halfway through.

A Plague of All Cowards, William Barton - a very early work, his second novel, in fact. I'd read it several years ago, and thought it pretty much failed at what it tried to achieve, and having now read this self-published updated ebook addition, I still think it fails. But the essays about the the book, the universe it's set in, and his career with which Barton has bookended it are fascinating. It's also interesting seeing how the universe developed over the four published an one unpublished novel set in it.

Ilario: The Lion's Eye, Mary Gentle - set in the same alternate history as Gentle's brilliant Ash: A Secret History, albeit a century or two earlier. The title character is a hermaphrodite whom, after being manumitted by the King of Taraconensis (in Spain), travels to Carthage to learn about the new form of painting (ie, the use of perspective), and becomes embroiled in a plot involving all of the nations around the Mediterranean. Part travelogue, part historical thriller, it's perhaps unevenly paced, and the jeopardy is often too easily overcome, but the period detail and world-building is excellent. Gentle is one of the best sf writers the UK has produced. Recommended.

And a review of Phillip Mann's space opera Master of Paxwax and The Fall of the Families - https://medium.com/p/the-story-of-the-gardener-phillip-mann-616c0a87b0f9

FLIGHTS by Olga Tokarczuk.

I believe one of our other members praised the book here and let me second their view.

It's a remarkable book: meandering, episodic...yet there are connections that can be drawn between the disparate sections and I like this notion of a door that occasionally opens to allow us to make changes, sometimes drastic ones, to our lives.

Intelligent, challenging novel.

Recommended.

>14 CliffBurns:
Oh yeah, that was my favorite book of 2021, by far. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is bit of a mess but it has Tokarczuk's distinctive voice, which I love. She writes with the sensibility of a poet. The Books of Jacob is supposed to be her masterpiece just got translated, it's coming out in February.

John Le Carre's "last" book (who knows if there will be another posthumous manuscript they discover and release), SILVERVIEW.

In the afterword, the author's son Nick says the novel was discovered, basically finished except for some proofing and corrections, and he was puzzled why his father didn't send it to his publisher. He submits one possible reason and I won't steal his thunder.

SILVERVIEW is quite good, not of the same caliber as A PERFECT SPY or the Smiley trilogy, but still a diverting and entertaining read (I polished it off in an afternoon).

It does no damage to Le Carre's literary legacy, and I can recommend it to his fans without reservations.

Finished John Cooper Clarke's memoir, I WANNA BE YOURS.

Great fun, though not as bitchy as I expected. He doesn't seem to have any professional or personal axes to grind. Managed to survive a serious heroin habit and today is a devoted husband and father, frequently selling his face and reputation to various commercial enterprises.

I guess a bloke has to make a living.

Recommended.

THIS WEIGHTLESS WORLD by Adam Soto.

Of two minds on this one: it's well-written but the two timelines that make up the narrative seem contrived, the science fictional elements unnecessary or tacked on as an afterthought. Edit out the SF stuff, this could have been a decent mainstream novel of tainted love.

I'm curious what someone else who reads it would think.

Three stars out of five.

Another reading round-up:

The Disciples of Apollo, Eric Brown - a reprint collection, published by PS Publishing a couple of years ago in a nice slipcase, bundled with The Ice Garden and Other Stories. Bizarrely, one of the books is signed and numbered but the other isn't. This is pretty much a "best of" collection, and there are some excellent stories here. Most I'd read before, but there were one or two I hadn't. Wasn't so keen on the Salvageman Ed stories - they later became a fix-up novel, which I've not read. (Annoyingly, the touchstone is incorrect - this is not a short story, but LT records seem to use some canonical record which can't be edited, and this collection appears to have been linked to the record for the title story.)

Fifty Words for Snow, Nancy Campbell. Does exactly what it says on the tin. Fifty short pieces about snow, each one based on a term for snow in a different language. Fascinating stuff. Recommended.

The Waving Rye, Johannes V Jensen. A Danish Nobel laureate. I forget where I originally came across his name, or why I even thought he might be worth reading. This is a collection of short stories and mood-pieces, mostly autobiographical, which the translator calls "myths" in a foreword, as if Jensen had invented the form. Lots of nature writing, which is good. One story about a man on a penny farthing is very funny. (The stories range from 1901 to 1941. Another story, 'Did They Catch the Ferry?', I'm pretty sure was made into a short film by Carl Theodor Dreyer.

Also, a new review:
Some Kind of Fairy Tale, Graham Joyce - see https://medium.com/p/some-kind-of-fairy-tale-graham-joyce-df13e225b30e

>4 CliffBurns: I'll look into that one. Sounds as if it's a good deal in common with Television by Jean-Philippe Toussaint : world-class procrastinator with a book to write turns to television screen & every other conceivable dodge to avoid writing it. (Has one of the very few passages in book that made me cry from laughing.)

Have been reading more fiction than usual, thanks to a pile of books ordered from the dirt-cheap shop--Milagrosa. The Book of Lies, Quatermass 4 by Kneale, Infinite Ground'. First two enjoyable but will trade in because my newish criterion for keep or ditch is, would I regret having to return this to a libaray? Keeping Quatermass because I so enjoyed the series and Infinite Ground because although it had a fewpassages too long/points too laboured I want it to hand--even went on to buy McInnes's other novel.

Finished Solitude & Company: The Life of Gabriel Garcia Marquez by Silvana Paternostro. At times cloying, at times unfocused, but it has a lot of interesting information and is presented with a lot of Caribbean flavor. Do not expect forceful questions or deep examinations, this is light reading, intended mostly for Gabo worshipers (Gabolatras in Spanish).

Mexican Gothic – Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Digital audiobook performed by Frankie Corzo
3***

1950s Mexico City. Noemi Taboada is a charming, witty, vivacious debutante occupied by parties and the latest fashions. Then her father receives a letter from her recently wed cousin, Catalina. It’s cryptic and odd and Catalina seems in danger or perhaps mentally unstable. So Noemi is dispatched to the mountainous area where Catalina lives with her English husband, Virgil Doyle, on his family’s estate, High Place.

This is not the kind of book I normally read, but I was fascinated by the story and gripped by the tension. The atmosphere is dark and chilling. It reminded me a bit of The Ruins by Scott Smith, and/or Stephen King’s The Shining. But it is entirely Moreno-Garcia’s own story. I did wonder why she incorporated an English family with their English-style mansion; perhaps she recognized the trope from so many gothic novels and felt her readers wouldn’t identify with malevolence in an adobe hacienda.

And can I just say that I absolutely LOVE the cover!

Frankie Corzo does a fine job of narrating the audio, though I was confused a few times by whether Francis or Virgil was speaking. Small quibble.

THE CHRISTIAN ARCHETYPE: A JUNGIAN COMMENTARY by Edward F. Edinger.

The terminology is a bit of a turn off but an interesting perspective on the life and legacy of Christ.

Not my usual cup of tea, but I'm fascinated by both Christ and Jung--put the two together and I'm in your back pocket.

NORA: A LOVE STORY OF NORA AND JAMES JOYCE by Nuala O'Connor.

Fictional biographies don't come any better.

Ms. O'Connor has clearly down her research and has gained real insights into the mind of Nora Joyce, the great author's long-suffering spouse.

Suffer she did, but not without complaint, and this book provides a convincing, three dimensional portrait of a strong, loyal woman who wasn't afraid to assert her will or speak her mind to her reckless genius of a husband.

Highly recommended.

The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
3.5***

Eugenides’ debut work focuses on one family in a Detroit suburb. The five Lisbon sisters chafe against their mother’s strict rules and attract the attention of the neighborbood boys. Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary and Therese are beautiful and eccentric, and off limits. And then one commits suicide, and the four remaining sisters struggle to find their way out of grief – both their own and their parents’.

The novel is narrated by a group of thirty-something men, looking back on their own early high-school years, and the way they were obsessed with the Lisbon girls. Watching – or more accurately, spying on – them, looking for clues as to what they were thinking and what they might do. They applaud the efforts of one jock to take the object of his affections, fourteen-year-old Lux, to the homecoming dance. And they watch as a missed curfew results in Mrs Lisbon’s ever restrictive rules. The boys are certain they will somehow rescue the girls. They cannot see that the troubles the girls face are much deeper than just being grounded.

I read Middlesex first and loved it. Eugenides can write characters that fairly jump off the page, they are so real and so passionate about their feelings. But this book is somewhat different. There is an ethereal quality to this novel. We never really know what happens inside the Lisbon home, we have only the memories of men who, some twenty years later, cannot let go of the events of that year. What they remember most clearly is how they felt – their hopes, dreams, passions, fears. And although the boys witnessed the girls’ final acts, they are haunted by what they did not – and never will – know.

THE WALK AND OTHER STORIES by Robert Walser.

Kafka was a big fan of Walser's and I sort of see the attraction--they do share similar difficulties with actually coming up with endings for their stories.

Walser had a very tragic life, eventually suffering a breakdown, not writing for decades and then dying during a walk on the grounds of the asylum where he was housed.

PAUL CELAN: COLLECTED PROSE, translated by Rosemarie Waldrop.

A thin volume but a difficult, abstract read, Celan's prose as complex and unique as his verse.

His aphorisms are wonderful, reminiscent in some ways of Kafka's snippets.

I'll be dipping into this one over and over again in the months and years to come, hopefully gaining more insights into a troubled, passionate, brilliant mind.

The Yellow Wallpaper and Selected Writings – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
4****

The title short story is Gilman’s classic story of a woman driven mad by her husband’s controlling “remedy” for her post-partum depression. Told in first person, the woman relates how her physician husband, John, has secured a colonial estate for their summer getaway. He is a very practical man and sure of his scientific facts. His prescription for his wife’s malaise is completely rest, and so she is locked in her attic bedroom, with its hideous yellow wallpaper and ordered to do NOTHING. No, not even a walk in the garden. And slowly she goes mad. Frankly, I was not a great fan of this story and dreaded reading the rest of the collection as a result, but I’m glad I persisted.

First published in 1892, Gilman’s story ignited some controversy, and she has been hailed as a feminist. She certainly is that. Among the stories in the collection is one involving a woman-developed pair of communities, where men take second place, and women run the show, and which prosper in a determined obscurity. Other stories show women stretching their wings and engaging in additional education or business pursuits despite their husband’s (or father’s or brother’s) objections, and succeeding, not just in their businesses but in life.

While the focus of virtually all these stories is the lives of women –how they are repressed, how they overcome, how they succeed – there is one notable story, Mr Peebles’s Heart, that shows the advantages to the man in the relationship from also spreading his wings and giving over some of the duties traditionally assigned to men to a woman in his life (wife, employee, sister, etc).