Last year, I decided to read one hundred books, a goal that went from gentle resolution to a constant measure of fortitude and self-worth thanks to Goodreads' embedded meter that shows you how many books "ahead" you are of said goal. I began 2018 five or six books ahead at the end of January but barely crawled to a photo finish, helped across the line by many slim volumes of contemporary poetry, on December 31.
In 2019, I decided to head my self-competitive streak off at the pass by reading "only" seventy-five books, so that I could relax and read for pleasure and like myself even during weeks that I didn't read at all. That lasted for a few days, and now I am ten books "ahead" on Goodreads, a pace that I will absolutely not sustain. I was eleven books ahead, and then I lost a book, and I already hate myself and feel that I am failing to win. It also makes for a not-tiny tinyletter, so I've put the full review of each book at the end and I'll summarize my month by genre here; if a book sounds interesting, skip down to its full review.
Fantasy, both escapist and not.
No one* in my real life lets me talk to them about fantasy novels so HA! Here we go!
I began my year by re-reading The Magicians Trilogy (Lev Grossman), which I liked a lot but also felt vaguely betrayed by back in 2014 when I first read it. I think, then, I wasn't ready for its darkness or how it destroys the escapism of fantasy by merging it with everything that's real and difficult about our world, but this time I loved it, loved its precision and imagination and the way it pays tribute to why we care so much about magical stories in the first place. (*apologies to Nell Klugman who has discussed this trilogy with me at length.)
The Library at Mount Char (Scott Hawkins) is similar in some ways, dark (horror, actually) and firmly embedded in the "real" world, but it turned out to be more escapist--less concerned with what magic can and does mean, more willing to bend the rules of morality even as its characters bend the literal shape of the universe. The Poppy War (R.F. Kuang) makes the same attempt as Grossman and Hawkins do to problematize the fantasy genre, in this case by diving into the real horrors of war instead of eliding them in a general ~epic battle happened~ way, but it's the least successful of the three--a fault of the writing and, sadly, of how tough it is to read 400 pages of gruesome warfare.
The Winter of the Witch by Katherine Arden is very different--more the kind of book that The Magicians is *about,* an archetypical fantasy that immerses you completely in its own world and feels like discovering fantasy (even reading!) for the first time, all over again. Lovely. Sometimes I just wanna escape!! It's 2019 and the real world is a complete wreck!!!!
YA, arguments for and against.
I unabashedly love Young Adult novels (particularly Young Adult fantasy), but I also believe that some of the worst writing being published is in this genre. Ask me to rant about it because I will, at length. Accordingly, my feelings about these books swung wildly this month. I began on a very low note, with a truly bad book--They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera, which I had high hopes for because it's both m/m romance and vaguely fantastical, both things I really love. The fact that this book was so bad was even harder to take because my hopes were up! It was everything that disappoints me about YA--juvenile writing, a sense of "HOW did this get published," paper-thin plot, lazy worldbuilding, unconvincing romance. Please actually scroll to the full review for this one, which includes a few choice quotations.
I tried hard to cleanse my palate after that and mostly succeeded, with both a classic of the genre (The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery) and a new-to-me novel by a YA author I mostly trust (Maggie Stiefvater's The Scorpio Races). In both of these books, the writing is wonderful, with lovely descriptions of place that help you understand what it means to grow up in and because of the world around you. At its best, that's what YA should be, of course--novels that don't just include young adults but that actually hit on some truth about what it means to be one.
Fiction, historical and "contemporary," which sounds like dental music.
I don't just read genre fiction (she says, whining), I also read The Important New Books, like Esi Edugyan's Washington Black, which was so good I devoured its nearly 500 pages in about two days. I loved this book for its defiant imagination and for its note-perfect period syntax, the latter of which can really make or break a book for me. McGlue by Otessa Moshfegh was also historical fiction, but a strange contemporary novella version: here, the writing, still convincing, was also full of gore and horror and confusion. A weirdo of a book that endeared itself to me more than I wanted it to.
On the other end of the time-scale: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (Gail Honeyman), enjoyable but anodyne and not particularly embedded in any real truths about time and place, and Sally Rooney's wonderful Normal People, which is both completely and precisely about being a young person at this particular moment in time and, timelessly, about what it means for any one person to relate, fumbling and tender and messy, to another. I similarly enjoyed Lisa Halliday'sAsymmetry for its precise story about a human relationship, but that's only 1/3 of the three-part novel, and the other two parts (while good) didn't appeal to me on a basic plot level quite as much.
Mystery--or is it!
I was very lucky and thrilled (hehe) to get an ARC of Lucy Foley's upcoming The Hunting Party from a friend, and I loved reading it because of the way it made me think about genre: marketed at least in part as a pure mystery ("for fans of Agatha Christie," which I certainly am), but fitting in more with the Woman in the Window or On the Train/unreliable narrator psychological thriller genre. By the end, I had a definition: "mystery" is when the death happens at the beginning and we search in an orderly fashion for clues to both character and plot, through or with a mostly-trustworthy friend. "Psychological thriller" is when the death is implied at the beginning but doesn't actually happen until the middle or end, and all our clue-searching is internal and about figuring out whether what the narrator tells us really happened, and everyone is drunk and the timeline is BONKERS. (This is official and I refuse to hear other arguments; it also makes The Hunting Party definitively a psych thriller). You'd think I'd like thrillers more based on that, because they sound way more fun, but I actually prefer an old-school plodding mystery. They're my comfort books.
That's all for this month! Potential topics in future months include why book reviews always summarize plots (just read the blurb!), why YA books are always written in first person (unbearable), the unbelievable satisfaction of reading negative reviews of a book you hated (one of life's major pleasures).
Detailed book summaries below! You can pretend the tinyletter ends here if you want it to be a normal length.
January 2019 books, in order:
1. The Magicians, Lev Grossman [*****]
2. The Magician King, Lev Grossman [*****]
3. The Magician's Land, Lev Grossman [*****]
A re-read of this trilogy, 5 years later. The quick summary: these books are the answer to "but what if Harry Potter/Narnia were real, actually," as in what if magical schools and worlds existed in our world, which is full of very gray morality and depression-spectrum mental illness and people who don't know what to do with themselves after they become more powerful than they ever knew was possible. I think it answers those questions well, and accurately, which also makes for occasionally-tedious books: mostly, a main character who is childish and whiny and deeply frustrating, but whose slow maturity across the three books of the series was easier for me to see this second time through.
I do think I liked these books more this time, and I did like them last time--but I was kind of shocked, then, by their darkness (sometimes extremely, graphically dark). I was ready for it this time, and, prepared, found myself instead impressed by the way they imagine and honor what magic and magical stories mean to the people who love them.
4. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman [***]
This book was enjoyable and forgettable in equal measure, a story that tried to be both sweet and shocking and mostly only managed the first. Imagine a Law and Order: SVU episode that's also a romance; that's an accurate entertainment level metric (I *love* SVU).
5. They Both Die at the End, Adam Silvera [*]
Fam: I did not like this book at all. This is (allegedly) a m/m YA romance (fun and convincing to read a romance that includes, at no point, any moments of tension/noticing/physical description/growing awareness between the characters) about a world where you find out on the day you're going to die that your death is inevitable--two boys who each get the call find each other, strangers, and spend the day together. The fact that they fall "in love" by the end of the DAY is only the first problem here. The primary problem (also: the worldbuilding is flawed, the romance is flabby and unconvincing) is that to write a good, or even a not-bad, book about falling in love and living life to the fullest in the moments before you die, you have to really actively work to avoid any hint of a "seize the moment" cliche.
This author RAN in the other direction. Here are just three of the sentences that ended chapters in this book:
"Lidia will never know how Mateo is spending his End Day, but she hopes her best friend finds whatever he's looking for."
"'My Last Message would be to find your people. And to treat each day like a lifetime.'"
"Life isn't meant to be lived alone. Neither are End Days."
Unfortunately I had a lot more to choose from. This book is almost unreadable, from the plot to the writing to the (hahah) ending. Here's the thing: a lot of YA writing is bad, and this is some of the worst I've read. Young adults deserve better. M/M romance deserves better. I deserve better and so do all of you. (Do not get me STARTED on this book's Goodreads rating).
6. Asymmetry, Lisa Halliday [***]
There are three very distinct, nearly unrelated sections in this book. All of them were good, in the sense of well-written and interesting, but only the first (about a young woman who has an affair with a much older famous writer) is something I would choose to read about on its own. Accordingly, I loved the first third of this book and liked but didn't care about the rest of it. The writing, though, which is lovely and deft, was definitely a relief after They Both Die at the End.
7. The Blue Castle, L. M. Montgomery [*****]
Read this old-school children's/YA book for the first time, still vaguely searching for something to wash the taste of #5 from my brain. And this delivered! It's a classic for a reason, which is always nice to discover: a beautiful story and my favorite kind of children's narrative, about a repressed and sad young person finding a way to bloom. (On that note, this is what Eleanor Oliphant probably wanted to be and didn't quite achieve).
8. The Library at Mount Char, Scott Hawkins [****]
A really good scifi/fantasy/horror novel, with an intricate built world and equally intricately detailed plot--all of which comes together in a satisfying (relievingly so--this book is *bonkers* and could have gone off the rails easily) conclusion. It's extremely gory--parts are actively disgusting--and the morality of the ending is not convincing, but those were my only complaints. Those with a strong stomach and an appreciation for plotting that makes you gasp should read this book.
9. The Scorpio Races, Maggie Stiefvater [****]
I heard a theory once that all women were once, as middle schoolers, either Horse Girls, Wolf Girls, or Dragon Girls. I, a Dragon Girl, liked this book for its lovely writing and exquisite sense of place (score another one for the YA redemption campaign), but didn't care much about the wild-magical-horse-centric plot. If you were a Horse (or even Wolf) girl or boy who still reads YA, you will love it.
10. The Winter of the Witch, Katherine Arden [*****]
The final in a series of books that have been my favorite pure reading experience in years. These are books you can escape into: the world is deep and complex, dark and lovely, and full of just the right, carefully-wrought pieces of magic, the central character is flawed and complicated and heroic and loveable, the plot is intimate and epic at the same time. This is what fantasy should be--these books feel like instant classics, like diving back into everything that made you love reading in the first place.
11. Normal People, Sally Rooney [*****]
Ordered this book from the UK (only $18.99 US including shipping!) because I loved the author's first novel, Conversations with Friends, so very very much. I liked this one less than that one, which isn't saying much--I still loved it. I felt it faltered slightly when it tried to expand from looking at the small precise details of human relationships to Big Issues--it was disorienting, sort of. But it still gets the true things so true, like Rooney is writing about me. It's eerie, to read a book like that, and oddly comforting, and ultimately moving.
12. The Poppy War, R.F. Kuang [**]
This is a clunky book that has a lot going for it but doesn't really take advantage of those things. It has some genre trouble, first of all--opens as a classic YA magic school narrative but then takes a sharp, sharp turn into the horrors of warfare and the morality of genocide (that that phrase even exists tells you something about how bizarre that part of the plot was). The whiplash is one thing, but the plot gets so bogged down in the gruesome details of war that I forgot how initially glad I was that the author was being realistic about what war means, even in a fantasy novel, and became deeply bored--where was the magic and the coming of age and the interpersonal relationships that drove the beginning of the story?
13. Washington Black, Esi Edugyan [*****]
After I loved this book and recommended it to my father, he told me he didn't like it because it wasn't realistic enough. I don't disagree with him, but I think its unreality -- the way it flirts, even, with magical realism -- is exactly what this book does right. It is at once a detailed, unsparingly precise period novel, note-perfect in its use of language and viscerally horrifying (more so than any other book I've ever read) in its description of the reality of slavery, and a wonderfully imaginative book that ignores the "realistic" limitations of time and setting to envision a narrative of wonder, adventure, and discovery for its formerly enslaved main character. That it does all this without simplifying or excusing its time or its white characters, that it manages to really assess the complexities of its relationships, that it so coherently weaves together horror and wonder, fear and magic, is astounding. Five hundred pages and this book FLEW by for me. A book about discovery and, itself, a revelation.
14. The Hunting Party, Lucy Foley [***]
Very much in the vein of recent blockbuster psychological thrillers, like The Woman in the Window and The Girl on the Train (or is it Girl in the Window? Woman on a Train? Gone Train Window Girl?)--complete with drunken British narrator(s), secret sociopathy, and plenty of sex and jealousy. I like all of these things and I liked this book, but what's there is exactly what's on the tin. Dead Dove, Do Eat.
15. McGlue, Otessa Moshfegh [****]
Had this languishing at three stars on Goodreads for weeks and, writing this tinyletter, decided it deserves four, mostly for the way I can't get it out of my head even though I kind of want to. Brutal and gruesome and hard to follow, unlikeable and odd, it gets under your skin and stays there. Credit where credit is due for a book that won't let itself be forgotten.