As with last year, music and film and literature continues to act as balm and root. Last year, I read 151 books - 154 if you include books I started but didn't finish in 2021. So far I have made it to 132 books this year.
And so, as with the past two years, I will now dive into some of the books I've read this year, in chronological order, once again excepting any books in a series, and provide my thoughts on them. Title, author, order by start date, and read dates are included. I read multiple books at any given time and so please do not take that I am finishing the longer titles in only a day or two. There are occasional spoilers.
We All Hear Stories in the Dark
Robert Shearman | 3 | Jan. 5 - 14
This is a monumental short story collection, combining the concept of the Choose Your Own Adventure books with that of the 1001 Nights, with the end result that, after the frame story, the reader is given the choice of one of five stories, and is given that choice after each story. Only one path will take you through all 101 stories - and there are millions of potential paths. So this is less a review of the collection so much as a reaction to the path that I happened to take.
Shearman is an incredible writer. These are capital-w Weird stories, but in a manner totally different from the New Weird which exclusively comprises China Mieville and Jeff VanderMeer (and so far as I can tell nobody else). They are comical, absurd, horrifying; light and dark married close together; and artfully constructed, without a word out of place. I can't wait for my next dive into it.
The Fifth Season
10 | Jan. 15 - 23
The Obelisk Gate
17 | Jan. 30 - Feb. 6
The Stone Sky
22 | Feb. 7 - 13
N.K. Jemisin
Really fantastic fantasy - structurally ingenious, inventive in the way it utilizes different modes of viewpoint and makes them totally integral to character. (E.g. one character who experiences grief has her story told through the second-person, and the resulting depersonalization makes that grief more potent.) Many of the familiar tropes of fantasy are used and then twisted in ways that make them resonate differently and freshly.
And vital to the whole thing is racism: specifically, Jemisin's experience of it, and the way it informs this trilogy. It's fantasy built from knowledge of the experience of oppression, which is fresh and fertile ground, and the familiar tropes that have been twisted here have their freshness and resonance precisely because of that. It's good stuff, basically. (One final word for the finale - it's much lower-key than the traditional finale, and thank heaven, because I couldn't bear something "action-packed.")
The City and the Pillar
Gore Vidal | 28 | Feb. 17 - 21
One of Vidal's earliest novels, and I think one of his best. The protagonist here is not somebody aged relating their life to somebody younger, or through memoir (as in Julian, Messiah, Burr) but somebody young. The prose is drier, cleaner, unadorned with the fragments that mark his later work. His wit is present, but it's not cleverness for the sake of showing off and so the witticisms have a different effect. There's a heart and emotional core, here. I enjoyed it.
This novel was published, if I remember right, in the 40s, and it's one of four notable novels published after WWII that dealt with homosexuality as a major theme. (The others are Djuna Barnes' Nightwood [already read], Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms and Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye. Eventually I'll get around to the other two.)
From Hell
w. Alan Moore, art Eddie Campbell
32 | Feb. 22 - Mar. 7
A story massive in scale, taking the notion of holistically solving a crime and saying that to do so one must solve the society that crime occurs in; this, the starting point for treating the Jack the Ripper murders as the secret key to the Victorian era and as a magical ritual which gave birth to the twentieth century.
The Men Who Stare at Goats
Jon Ronson | 44 | Mar. 26 - 31
I'm not entirely sure if Ronson succeeds in really tying together MK-ULTRA of the 50s with the First Earth Battalion-inspired psychic unit of the 70s with the PsyOps and human rights abuses in Iraq in the 2000s, but it's a fascinating account of what happens when very powerful people start to believe in very strange things - it's funny, and it's also dangerous.
The Prophets
Robert Jones | 45 | Mar. 27 - Apr. 6
Gorgeously written, but still a little disappointing. The lead characters, Isaiah and Samuel, felt somewhat airless and abstracted - meaning that all the chapters focusing on other characters came out rather better. An odd book in that way.
The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon
Anthony Summers | 55 | Apr. 21 - May 5
Not so much a traditional beginning to end biography as a portrait of its subject's character defects and criminality, an almost totally negative picture of Nixon as a dark, unhappy, unstable man of many villainies. It's an anti-hagiography. It's an enjoyable and entertaining read, and Summers clearly researched it rigorously.
Jerusalem
Alan Moore | 63 | May 6 - Jun. 16
Verbose and intelligent, and dense. Difficult reading for me, not, I think, because it's actually difficult reading so much as it's very stylistically different from most fantasy books. It's a fundamentally modernist book.
It's an epic read, over a thousand pages, a mythologization of Northampton combined with an exploration of the 'block universe' and how Moore believes time, life and afterlife, and the human perception thereof, works. I expect it'll reward a reread.
Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth
Gitta Sereny | 86. | Jun. 24 - Jul. 23
Not a demonization but instead a portrait, an exploration of individual psychology, told through Speer's papers, through interviews with Speer, through interviews with those who knew Speer. It's detailed and it's smart reading, and central to it is the question: did Speer know of the Holocaust? was he present at speeches which laid out, explicitly, that it was the official policy of the Third Reich to kill Jews?
I am not convinced Speer ever did admit that he knew of it. Speer's tactic, which worked out very well for him indeed, was to claim a general guilt and complicity, and also insist that he knew nothing of the specifics, the details, the Holocaust itself.
But he obviously did. Historical documentation now makes this obvious, and it can be seen now - perhaps it could be seen then, perhaps Sereny deceived herself - that Speer was a liar with a lot of skill at PR. And at some point I will read Martin Kitchen's Speer: Hitler's Architect for a truer portrait. Where that leaves Sereny's book, I don't know. Probably it is fair to say that she was taken in by Speer. And maybe it is fair to say that she let herself be taken in.
The Great Mistake
Jonathan Lee | 99 | Aug. 15 - 17
I refer you to the review I wrote and posted shortly after reading.
Shards of Earth | Final Architecture #1/3
Adrian Tchaikovsky | 121 | Oct. 31 - Nov. 5
The Expanse, in book form, didn't hook me, despite my love of almost everything else Daniel Abraham has written. I got bored halfway through the first book of Dread Empire's Fall, when the action started. Ancestral Night was better, but still not quite right. Space opera still isn't quite my genre, but I enjoyed this one.
Tchaikovsky employs a pretty big grab bag of old ideas, though he gives each one just a little bit of a spin to keep things a little bit fresh. Of the seven-person crew that starts the novel, about half of them are decimated. Perhaps what really carried me through was the prose - it's just a better read than the other three.
Children of Time | Children of Time #1/3
Adrian Tchaikovsky | 124 | Nov. 3 - 6
Incredibly imaginative science fiction, starring spiders. It's a magnificent and powerful book, told across the scale of thousands of years, as evolved spiders grow into a society, deeply imagining what technology might look like for a spider, whilst the last remnants of humanity struggle to survive.
I have Thoughts about the ending. It's a good ending, and it's exactly what the rest of the book was leading up to, but nevertheless. Eventually I'll write it up.
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