December, 2022: Reading “Cold in the earth and fifteen wild Decembers, From those brown hills, have melted into spring.”

This month's quote from Emile Bronte.

Starting off December by finishing my 99th book of the year, Italo Calvino's INVISIBLE CITIES.

Book #100 will be, wait for it, Cormac McCarthy's THE PASSENGER.

Ha, I didn't notice.

I'll leave it that way as an example of my utter idiocy.

The Five Wounds – Kirstin Valdez Quade
4.5****

Amadeo Padilla can never catch a break, but maybe now, finally, he’s on his way. He’s been chosen to play Jesus in the annual Good Friday procession, and he’s determined to give it his all. But on his big day, his fifteen-year-old daughter, Angel, shows up, hugely pregnant and needing shelter.

The opening chapter of this marvelous character-driven work was a short story in Quade’s collection, Night At the Fiestas. I admit that I could not imagine how she would turn that short story into a full-length novel, but she did a marvelous job of building on the idea to flesh out the characters.

What I wrote about the short-story collection holds true here as well: ”What Quade’s characters share is that desire to “be someone else” and/or somewhere else, but no real means of achieving that. They dream, but are somehow powerless to change their circumstances, falling back on old patterns of behavior, afraid to let go of their past to head into the future.”

Amadeo, his mother, Yolanda, and Angel all struggle with the unfairness of life. With limited education and few opportunities to succeed they stay stuck in a pattern of repeated mistakes. Yolanda has never stopped babying Amadeo, her youngest child and the prized son, whose father died too young. She has never allowed him to learn how to fail and, more importantly, how to recover from failure. He’s like a full-grown toddler in his approach to life. He’s dependent on his mother for shelter, food, gas and beer money. And he is powerless to help his own daughter, whom he’s barely seen since she was a tiny child.

Yolanda deals with her problems by denying they exist. She soldiers on, taking one exhausted (and exhausting) step after another, with no way out of her difficulties. She cannot bring herself to ask for help or to accept it if it’s offered … but who would offer since she doesn’t let anyone know there IS a problem.

And Angel, the poor kid, is genuinely trying her best to finish high school, get the right nutrition for her baby, ensure that the infant is cared for and nurtured to develop appropriately. I loved the scenes where she would talk to him to enrich him and encourage the development of language. But the reader cannot forget that she is still a child herself. And desperately seeking love wherever she can find it.

Quade gives us a marvelous cast of supporting characters as well, from Tio Tive (the family patriarch) to Brianna, who leads the program for teen mothers at Angel’s alternative school, to Angel’s mom, Marissa, all of them are fully realized and add to the dynamic of this family’s difficult relationships.

Despite how they infuriated me, and how often I wanted to just shake some sense into them, I wound up really loving these characters. Some of that was because Quade often gave the reader some hope for a change in circumstances (often short-lived hope, but hope nonetheless). One character sums it up best: Love is both a gift and a challenge.

Recent reading...

One False Move, Robert Goddard - I've been reading Goddard's novels since first stumbling across them in the 1990s. They're fast, easy reads, usually with a non-too-plausible twist towards the end. He has, however, written a pretty good historical trilogy, set in Victorian times, and in his last two novels he has changed tack completely - one is about a shy Japanese woman visiting London in order to uncover who murdered her private detective boos, and the second is about the after-effects of the Algerian Civil War and French interference. Both are good. One False Move is from a couple of years earlier and is more like the fiction he used to write. It's... okay. A large successful computer game company attempts to recruit an undiscovered young computer genius living in Cornwall, but it seems he's been helping out some powerful international criminal organisation with their money-laundering and they're not keen to lose his services. Except it's not about that at all, but instead a senior figure in the intelligence services who has been spying for the Chinese for decades and somehow the computer genius is important to the Chinese. Not one of his best. The criminal element is plausible enough, but the book loses the plot completely when it turns into a spy thriller. Missable.

Restoration, Rose Tremain - probably her most famous novel. It's a first person narrative by Robert Merivel, a doctor-turned-painter, who wheedles his way into the court of King Charles II, to be then used as a beard for the king's favourite mistress. Life is good for a while, but then the painter falls in love with his "wife", which draws the wrath of the king... Merivel ends up volunteering at a Quaker lunatic asylum in the fens, before making a fresh fortune in London... only to lose everything in the Great Fire. A comic novel, but it makes serious points for all that. Merivel is extremely well-drawn, as is the setting. It made Tremain's name, and it's easy to see why. Highly recommended.

The Telling, Ursula K Le Guin - a late edition to Le Guin's Ekumen and one I suspect is often forgotten when discussing her Ekumen-set novels. an Ekumen observer, a woman from Earth, is sent to Aka to help document their culture. Aka is a global corporate state, in which everything is subservient to the government plan to build a starship. The observer's knowledge of Aka, however, is based on data sent by an earlier mission from Earth, which is all from before the corporatist take-over. The observer is given permission to visit a poor town up in the mountains, where she discovers traces of the culture obliterated by the corporatists, as well as learning more of the world's recent history. There is a twist, however. In other hands, the twist would have been the point around which the plot revolved, but Le Guin treats more as an aside. She seems to be more interested in showing off her invented culture. I think I first read this book about 15 years ago, and thought it unmemorable. I liked it better this time around, but, ironically, given the title, the story Le Guin tells is not the main story.

The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson - speaking of "telling", KSR's approach to narrative has always been more inclined to reportage than drama, and this one is definitely more at the reportage end of the scale. It's about climate change and the immediate consequences of the world's governments' failure to act to mitigate it. There are a handful of actual narratives threaded throughout the novel, but much of it is lectures and notes on the drastic steps needed to prevent climate crash. It's fascinating - and scary - stuff, but it's not really a novel. That's sort of in its favour, as it gives the story more authority, and this is an important story. I wouldn't recommend it to people interested in science fiction, or near-future fiction, but I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in climate change or who wants to know what needs to be done if the human race is not to die out in 100 years.

Black Opera, Mary Gentle - I like and admire Gentle's fiction a great deal, but even I was surprised that she managed to make a novel about an opera - and I really do not like opera - into a very readable fantasy novel. It's set in the early 1800s, in the Kingdom of Two Sicilies. A powerful underground Manichaeist society plans to use an opera to ignite the volcanoes of the Campanian volcanic arc, and so use the death of millions of people in southern Italy and the islands as a "blood sacrifice" to bring god back to Earth. They tested out their theory by triggering the eruption of Mount Tambora and caused the Year Without a Summer. King Ferdinand employs Conrad Scalese to put write and put together an opera to counter-act the underground society's "black opera". But he has only six weeks to do it. Enjoyed this a lot more than I expected - or rather, I enjoyed the subject a lot more than I expected. I also suspect some of the name-checked operas are in-jokes, but I'm not sure. Definitely worth reading.

Finished Calvino's INVISIBLE CITIES and it was just as good second time around.

I was gonna read the latest McCarthy next, but Mick Herron's DEAD LIONS might've jumped the queue.

I do love a good espionage novel when the weather turns cold and dreary (-35 windchill for the past two days).

>6 CliffBurns:, I have only read his If On a Winter's Night a Traveler and Cosmicomics, not sure where to go next with him.

I don't think it's possible to go wrong with Calvino. Did he ever write a bad book?

My copy of INVISIBLE CITIES was part of a lovely 3-book boxed set I got yonks ago for about two bucks at a library sale. Prime condition.

He has a collection called THE WATCHER AND OTHER STORIES that might ease you back into him.

Another review on medium, this time of CJ Cherryh's Foreigner - https://medium.com/p/foreigner-cj-cherryh-14ed1db92b0d

OPEN SEASON, the first "Joe Pickett" mystery, by C.J. Box.

Cool notion having a conservation officer as hero/detective. Powerful interests are threatened, a new pipeline going through territory that may or may not contain an endangered species and Pickett is caught in the middle.

Fast-moving and entertaining.

Recommended.

The Last Coyote –Michael Connelly
Book on CD performed by Dick Hill
3.5***

Book # 4 in the Harry Bosch series has our detective on ISL – Involuntary Stress Leave – after an “incident” involving an altercation with his supervising officer. In addition to having had to turn in his badge and his weapon, his home has been condemned after the latest earthquake. He doesn’t agree that it should be torn down, so he’s sneaking into it and living there while doing repairs on his own. And he’s using his “time off” to investigate a cold case – a prostitute found dead in a dumpster in 1961.

This is a pretty dark episode in the series. But the reader gets to know much more about Harry and the way he operates, his background and what drives him. To say he suffers from PTSD is putting it mildly, but that trauma is NOT all related to his service in Vietnam. As his therapist helps to peel back the layers a slightly more vulnerable Harry comes out.

Still, this is typical suspense-mystery-thriller, with lots of action, many clues (including red herrings), more than one suspect, and a fast-paced plot. Any fan of the genre will be interested and engaged from beginning to end.

Dick Hill does a great job of performing the audiobook. I really like the way he interprets Harry, and despite his natural low vocal pitch, he does a reasonable job of voicing the women characters as well.

Letters From Father Christmas – J R R Tolkien
4****

This lovely volume – I had the centenary edition – duplicates the letters from Father Christmas which were sent to Tolkien’s children beginning in 1920 and continuing for the next twenty-three years. The letters relate the many adventures Father Christmas and his helpers – The North Polar Bear, elves, etc – have both in preparation for the big day and throughout the year.

Tolkien seriously disguised his handwriting / printing, using a very shaky hand that is quite difficult for these old eyes, so I’m grateful for the printed text accompanying the photos of each letter. If I were a young person I would probably try to memorize Polar Bear’s unique alphabet and use that to write notes to my friends (something I did with Tolkien’s Elven runes back in the day after reading The Hobbit). I much enjoyed the inventiveness of these missives and loved the hand-drawn illustrations of the Northern Lights, or a Goblin War, or a flood caused by … well, I won’t spoil it for you.

My only disappointment is that we don’t see any of the letters Tolkien’s children wrote back to Father Christmas.

Still, it’s a treasure to be enjoyed by more generations of both children and adults.

MEMORY by Philippe Grimbert (translated by Polly McLean).

Came across this book by chance, hadn't heard of it but decided to pluck it up based on the awards it had won.

The author's parents survived the Holocaust but it left them both damaged...the the extent that one day they stepped off a balcony together and plunged to their deaths. This book, part memoir, part novel, attempts the discover the mindset that led them to do what they did.

Incredibly sad and powerful--recommended.

BACK OF BEYOND by C.J. Box.

A page-turner but a bit heavy on the tail-end, too many plot complications and talky-talky.

A beach read...or, in this case, for cold, dull nights in the igloo.

THE SECOND SLEEP by Robert Harris.

I'm getting soft in the head.

Forgot that I read this at least 5 years ago.

Still, a diverting adventure and a well-told tale.

Finished Cormac McCarthy's latest, THE PASSENGER, long bouts of deep reading, as the novel demands.

Filled with reflections on existence, higher physics and philosophy, the missing passenger alluded to in the title a mere "mcguffin".

This is but one of the many sentences/paragraphs that gave me pause (I posted a longer segment on Twitter):

"Mercy is the province of the person alone. There is mass hatred and there is mass grief. Mass vengeance and even mass suicide. But there is no mass forgiveness. There is only you."

Brilliant, demanding and enthralling.

The Burden of Proof – Scott Turow
Digital audiobook narrated by John Bedford Lloyd
3.5***

After the international success of Presumed Innocent Turow turns his attention to the defense attorney in that first effort and centers the action on Alejandro “Sandy” Stern. It opens with a shock – on returning from a business trip, Sandy discovers his beloved wife dead in their car in the garage, an apparent suicide. As he struggles to deal with this loss, he turns to his adult children, and becomes enmeshed in their problems as well as those of his brother-in-law.

This is a complicated legal mess, involving securities / commodities trading, that frankly lost me in its complexity. But I really loved how Turow wrote Sandy and his relationships with these various characters. Sandy struggles between his professional demeanor and responsibilities, and his personal relationships. It’s a messy situation (or three), and I sometimes struggled to keep things straight.

This is really more character-driven than most legal thrillers. But the plot complexities, however puzzling to me, were also what kept me interested and engaged and wondering and guessing right to the end … which is a stunner.

John Bedford Lloyd does a fine job of narrating the audiobook. He maintains a good pace and I really liked the way he interpreted Sandy.

Didn't write a press release this time but here is the moment the industry has been waiting for: my "best books I read this year" list.

In 2022 I read 34 books. These are the ones that got 4 or more stars. Didn't realize that I read so many Latin American writers this year. I guess I was nostalgic. My scoring is completely biased.

5 stars
Seven Madmen- Roberto Arlt
Labyrinths- Jorge Luis Borges (reread)
Things We Lost in the Fire- Mariana Enriquez
Train Dreams- Denis Johnson
When We Cease to Understand the World- Benjamin Labatute
Pedro Paramo- Juan Rulfo (reread)

4 stars
My Dog Tulip- JR Ackerley
Sodom and Gomorrah- Marcel Proust
Abigail- Magda Szabo
The Hearing Trumpet- Leonora Carrington
The Peregrine- JA Baker
The Summer Book- Tove Jansson
Chasing Me to My Grave- Winfred Rembert
The Guermantes Way- Marcel Proust
The Copenhagen Trilogy- Tove Ditlevsen
Within a Budding Grove-Marcel Proust
Hunger- Knut Hamsun (reread)
Solitude and Company- Silvana Paternostro

Currently reading The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector. Still on the fence on this one. Lispector is immensely talented and with an unmistakeable voice. It's easy to see why she has a cult following in Brazil. The collection, however, is uneven and kind of repetitive. Lots of women on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It does have many unquestionable gems.

NIGHT SKY WITH EXIT WOUNDS by Ocean Vuong.

This is the second volume I've read by the poet and I have to say, I believe him to be over-rated. This? THIS deserves a MacArthur "genius" grant?

I will concede he can come up with some zingers for closing lines--

"what becomes of the shepherd/when the sheep are cannibals"

--but for the most part I find him windy and self-absorbed.

I realize I am totally in the minority with this view, but what the heck.

I've finished both Sodom and Gomorrah and The Lies of Locke Lamora. Last time I can string that sentence together, tis sad.

Last reading round-up of the year:

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré - the book that made le Carré's name. It was his third, and its plot mentions events in his first, Call for the Dead, but it's a novel that's much about Cold War espionage than the first two books. Leamas, head of Berlin Command for MI6, is pulled back to London, given a make-work job, and promptly hits the bottle and falls into a self-destructuve spiral. At his lowest, he's picked up by the Soviets, and accepts money to tell them what he knows. But even that goes wrong, and he's taken to East Germany to provide evidence against an official high in the GDR secret service. It's wheels within wheels within wheels, and plots and counter-plots, and cleverly done. What is especially good is that le Carré manages to keep the reader guessing as each new twist is revealed. The nine Smiley novels were on offer on Kindle a few months ago, and I'm glad I bought them.

The Monster, the Mermaid, and Doctor Mengele, Ian Watson - a new novella from a veteran British sf writer, now resident in Spain. Watson is an institution in UK sf, an erudite raconteur, an extremely clever and amusing man. And he's written some excellent sf novels and short stories during his fifty-year career (including four Warhammer 40K novels in the early 1990s). His last few works have been novellas for UK small press NewCon Press. The Monster, the Mermaid, and Doctor Mengele conflates Frankenstein, the bride of Frankenstein's monster and Nazi medical experiments in a chatty, pun- and reference-filled narrative describing Mengele's hunt for a mermaid on a Paraguayan river. Slight, but fun.

Invader and Inheritor, CJ Cherryh - books 2 and 3 of the first trilogy of a series currently at 21 books. The plot stretching over the three books concerns the political upheaval caused by the re-appearance, after 200 years, of the starship which left human settlers on a world populated by the atevi. At the opening of the series, a conservative human government are trying to slow the flow of treaty-mandated technology to the atevi, while conservative elements of atevi society - seemingly inspired by Imperial China - are trying desperately hard to hang onto their history and culture. The ship is willing to deal with both parties, and needs them to build a spaceplane. By the end of the first book, Foreigner, the sole human translator to the atevi, the paidhi, Bren Cameron, is at odds with the human government, and the ship has parachuted down a representative to each of the governments. Invader has Cameron trying to bring the ship-paidhi up to speed, while being cut off from family and friends in the human settlement. In Inheritor, it all comes to a head, with a final battle that sees off the bad guys among the atevi, secures the friendly leader's rule, and forces a change in government among the humans. There is, to be honest, less action in these books than it feels like they contain, given so much of the prose is interior analysis of all the events and intersecting conspiracies by Cameron. The atevi, and their culture, are drawn well, the stupidity and venality of the human conservatives is all too plausible, and the plot is nicely complicated but still settles out smoothly in the end. I'm still a little boggled Cherryh managed to set 21 books in this world - but I do plan to eventually work my way through them all.

The Unwomanly Face of War, Svetlana Alexievich - it was still the USSR when Alexievich began collecting the reminiscences of women who had fought in World War II (the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets called it). The response to her researches were mixed, but mostly condemned by male veterans. The women were either horrified by the memories, or amused at their naivete and what they had to put up with, or disgusted at their treatment by the armed forces (they were all respected by those they fought alongside). It's widely accepted that the Eastern Front was probably the most brutal fronts of World War II. It's not so widely accepted that it was the USSR which won WWII - not the US, not the UK, not any of the other allies individually. And it cost the Soviets 20 million people - although a substantial number of them were killed by Stalin. This is a series of grim documents about a particularly grim part of WWII in the army of an especially grim superpower.

Pyramids, Terry Pratchett - this is the book, I suspect, where Discworld uncoupled itself from its sword and sorcery template. Previous books had been pastiches of the genre of best-selling fantasy, but Pyramids is set mostly in a Discworld nation which very much resembles Ancient Egypt. It's still very funny, though. And, I suspect, a little wittier than earlier books. The son of the king of Djelibeybi (yes, it's pronounced "jelly baby", which prompted a friend to complain about some US fans who had not got the joke) trains as an assassin in Ankh-Morpork, but has to return home when his father dies. Against the late king's wishes, the chief priest decides he should have the biggest pyramid ever built, but its size causes problems with reality and shifts Djelibeybi into a reality where the gods and Djeli mythology are real. There's also a running joke about camels being superlative mathematicians, but it's the weakest part of the book.

Dead Land, Sara Paretsky - the good thing about these books is that Paretsky wears her politics on her sleeve; the bad thing is that in order to take pot shots at topical issues her plots are becoming increasingly harder to swallow. In this one, a homeless woman in Chicago turns out to be a highly-regarded protest singer who disappeared a decade or so earlier after her partner was killed in a spree shooting at a peace rally (and she narrowly avoided being hit). Meanwhile, there are a series of murders linked to the redevelopment of part of the lake-shore, the same area where the homeless woman lives, and it looks like the proposed public park is actually going to be luxury apartments and a members-only golf resort. And then it turns out there are links to Pinochet's regime in Chile, and a rich and powerful Chilean family are involved with corrupt Chicago officials and big business... And it's all a bit too high-stakes and too openly corrupt to be entirely credible. I do like these books, but the last few have been somewhat forgettable.

Amberjack, Terry Dowling - a collection of fantasy, dark fantasy and science fiction stories. The best is a long story set in the future Australia of Rynosseros - and quite coincidentally, I have the boxed limited edition of The Complete Rynosseros, which I picked up cheap last year. The other stories are mostly good - I especially liked the Wormwood one, but I liked his earlier collection of Wormwood stories - although one or two are little too Bradbury-esque and I can't stand Ray Bradbury's prose. But a very good collection, over all, and definitely a writer worth trying.

Paper Money – Ken Follett
Audible audio read by Jonathan Keeble
2.5**

Before he rocketed to fame with Eye of the Needle, Ken Follett published a couple of crime novels under a pseudonym: Zachary Stone. In this one he explores how crime, high finance and journalism are connected through corruption, with the action taking place in a single day.

The relatively small volume is tightly packed, with a dozen (or more) characters and a complex plot. Follett structure the book by telling us the time of day, and then giving us several vignettes taking place simultaneously during that hour: a scene at the newspaper, contrasted with two or three scenes depicting the stories the newspaper is covering (or should be). It’s full of politics and scandal, and characters range from high-powered men to street criminals, and taking the reader on a tour of mid-1970s London from its tony neighborhoods to its slums.

Jonathan Keeble does a good job of reading the audiobook, but the many characters and some complicated financial elements taxed my ability to focus while listening. I might have rated it higher if I had read the text, but I’m not sure the story has really stood the test of time.

Last book of 2022, Rebecca Solnit's A FIELD GUIDE TO GETTING LOST.

Personal essays, with subject matter ranging from art to landscape to a particular fascination with the color blue.

Solnit is such an intelligent and insightful writer and this was one of the best non-fic titles I read in the past year.

Highly recommended.