September & October 2022 Books

I read some fantastic books in September and October, some of which made it onto the all-time favourites list! Even those books that I had problems with were rewarding or interesting in other ways, and I can only hope the last couple months of the year are this strong.

The Great

Stoner by John Williams

This quiet novel follows William Stoner, a man whose life is, by most accounts, unremarkable. Born on a farm in the early twentieth century, he finds himself attending the University of Missouri, where he unexpectedly falls in love with English literature and teaching. But he marries the wrong woman, his career is frustrated by a decades-long feud, and his only great love affair ends without spectacle. Despite all this, this account of his life, shows it to be anything but unremarkable. Williams deftly shows how little we see of life when all we see is outward success. He shows us a life of occasional drudgery, yes, of disappointment and heartache, absolutely. But he also shows us how Stoner’s life is shot through with love, with tenderness, with beauty, even at those most painful moments. He allows us to sympathise with Stoner, despite his flaws. Not much happens in this novel, and yet a whole world is captured beautifully. This was almost universally beloved by our book club (a rare feat, I feel!) and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

The Ends by James Smythe

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this novel, especially as it is actually the concluding book in Smythe’s Anomaly Quartet. I figured my reading would probably be hindered by my having not read the preceding books (as I was reading this for review for the ST, I didn’t have time to catch up). But I was very pleasantly surprised by it!

The ‘Anomaly’ has finally enveloped the Earth. While the previous books deal with its discovery and its slow movement towards our planet – and I think they are dominantly space-based – this one examines what happens when it finally reaches us. Once enveloped by the Anomaly, you can’t die. Instead, it will loop you back to where you were when you were first enveloped, with no memory of the life you’ve led up to that point. Sort of like a video game, I suppose. Except Smythe delicately handles the real-life consequences of such a concept. What it means for life, and what it means for death.

More specifically we follow Theo, a man with a life-threatening virus who should have died decades ago. He hears reports of his estranged wife being sighted in London, thousands of miles away from him in LA, and decides to embark upon one last journey to find her and find out what happened between them. I liked this novel not just for the sensitive treatment of its concept, but also for its old-fashioned journey narrative. Theo makes his way across the ravaged, post-apocalyptic post-Anomaly landscape, discovering what’s left of society. Smythe even references The Road here, and whilst the two novels are very different (as you’ll see I re-read The Road too this month), there is something deeply satisfying about the long-distance journey wrought into words.

When we came to the concluding pages of this book, I found myself quite moved by it. Smythe writes at the end that the book was written in two halves, some pre-pandemic and some after. In many ways, it does feel like a pandemic novel, though not in an overt, hackneyed sort of way (ahem, Emily St John Mandel). It feels touched by the sadness and confusion of that time, in a way that brings greater poignancy to it as a whole. It works well as a standalone, though I would like to get to the other books at some point.

Vita Nostra by Marina & Sergey Dyachenko

I wouldn’t usually include a re-read on this list but seeing as we picked this one for book club, I thought I would write a few more words on it. I listened to this book back in July 2020 so you can read my original review here. But on a second read (this time reading rather than listening), I found myself more captivated than ever by it. It makes for a sometimes frustrating and confusing read, but there is theoretical treasure to be found here. Even better, the next book is finally being translated and released next spring! So there’s plenty of time to catch up if you haven’t read this one already.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

I read this book a long time ago. So long that I actually have no record of the dates even on my Goodreads. I suspect it must have been at least ten years ago. I vaguely remembered liking it and finding the writing style quite striking. Sort of vague, for an apocalyptic book. I’d read it because I’d enjoyed the film and heard a bit about it. It’s funny the things that stick with you years after reading a book. Whilst I was reading it, I was thinking to myself how strange it was to have read all these sentences before, but barely remember any of them. I think I probably had a sense of its power but didn’t fully get to grips with it.

This time around I didn’t just like it, I loved it. It follows a man and boy in the aftermath of some apocalyptic event that is never fully explained (vague, as I remembered). The world (somewhere in America) is just grey ash as far as the eye can see. The man must find them food and protect the two of them from bands of thieves and cannibals. They are making their way sort of south, towards the sea. I found the relationship between the man and boy to be incredibly touching. McCarthy manages to paint their bond with a light touch, showing it through small moments, through brief, terse dialogue. There is terrifying action here (it made for a good October read, sometimes slipping into full-blown horror), but there are also slow, monotonous moments too. At the same time, at times it reads like a parable – not surprising, given one of its major themes is faith. This novel will not be for everyone, but its quiet, unassuming take on the apocalypse genre appealed to me. It reminded me to read more McCarthy.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

This year’s Booker prize winner! Considering I couldn’t even finish last year’s winner, The Promise, I wasn’t necessarily expecting a huge amount from this book. Thankfully, I ended up enjoying it and find it to be a worthy winner. Speaking of last year’s longlist though, although I didn’t read much from it, Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North was quite wonderful. It is extremely different from Seven Moons stylistically, but both consider the Sri Lankan Civil War from the perspective of young men. It seems Sri Lanka is really producing some fantastic authors at the moment.

Set in Colombo in 1989, we follow Maali Almeida, a photographer who will sell his pictures to anyone; the Tigers, the army, the foreign press. He is also firmly in the closet, taking part in a clandestine relationship with a minister’s son, though he is not exactly faithful. We meet him in the aftermath of his death, where he finds himself in a vast chaotic waiting room. He has seven moons in this in-between land before he needs to pass on into The Light, otherwise he’ll be stuck here. This liminal space allows him to travel all over Colombo, witnessing the repercussions of his death, and maybe influencing what happens…

The first hundred pages of this book failed to capture me. They are quite hectic, as Karunatilaka assumes the reader’s knowledge of Maali’s life (he addresses us second-person as if we are Maali throughout much of the novel) as he navigates this kaleidoscopic afterlife, which takes some getting used to. I think this is partly a lack of attention and focus on my part (after all, you’re supposed to pick up on clues and work it out), though it is the case that the plot becomes more linear and easier to follow after this point. I didn’t know whether I was going to end up caring for Maali and his friends, but in the end, I did have an investment in them and wanted them to succeed in unearthing his most controversial photographs, showing Sri Lanka the full extent of the atrocities of its Civil War. It was a moving and engaging picture of 1980s Colombo, the psychedelic afterlife overlay bringing real freshness to this narrative. It definitely reminded me of Marlon James’ work, so if you are a fan of his you may like this one, too.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

A lovely little novella that was also on the Booker shortlist. It’s set in the 80s in a small Irish town where Bill Furlong – dedicated husband and father to five girls – finds his world rocked by a discovery about the young girls living in the local convent. It’s a quiet story that champions the small things in life, as well as examining societal complicity in corrupt structures of power, and those moments where we can choose between the easy road or the right thing to do. This is a lovely, elegant piece of writing, and it is also set at Christmas, so worth reading soon if the sound of it appeals to you.

The Good

Beyond the Burn Line by Paul McAuley

This is a novel with a really unusual, ambitious premise, and sometimes that alone can elevate it amongst its peers. In this book, an intelligent animal species has inherited the Earth. They were the former slaves of a race of intelligent bears, who fell victim to a ‘mind-wrecking plague’ a few hundred years prior. Humans are a distant memory, having caused our own destruction through catastrophic climate change. The ‘burn line’ of the title refers to the archaeological record of this – the ‘burn line’ being the moment of our destruction. It reminded me at times of the Fifth Season, in that this is a future world that seems returned to an older way of life. This new people mostly live in small, pre-industrial communities. The first half of the novel follows a person called Pilgrim Saltmire, who wants to continue his late master’s work of investigating strange sightings of ‘others’. The second half puts us even further into the future, though I won’t say more for fear of spoiling the plot.

I liked the writing style of the opening sections; I think I read someone compare it to Ursula Le Guin’s writing and though it isn’t quite as graceful, there’s something to this comparison. It feels warm and inviting, and the worldbuilding is well executed. I was less enamoured with the second part of the novel, and in general, felt it to be overlong. I felt I wanted it to dive more into the idea of people vs. humans, as well as inventively look at other ways people might live on Earth. I also wanted the storyline to be a bit more complex as after a certain point it’s quite predictable, but overall I enjoyed it and found it to be an unusual, enchanting, and worthy contribution to the sci-fi genre.

The Trees by Percival Everett

Another Booker shortlister. And you may remember that I recently read and loved Telephone by Everett, so I was looking forward to this one. It’s a satire, poking fun at the detective novel, as well as elucidating the enduring difficulty of race relations in the US, showing the enormous and often understated impact that decades of lynching had on its society. It opens with two murders in the town of Money, Mississippi, only one of the dead bodies seems to get up and walk out of the morgue of its own accord soon after. This book is dark, painful, twisted. At times I felt the satire got too much in the way of the narrative – there is not much here to emotionally connect to, though there are a couple of memorable brief moments which might just devastate you. It is also repetitive, though this is undoubtedly by design. On the whole, it didn’t work for me as a novel quite as much as Telephone did, but it is an inventive and interesting work that is a worthy read.

The Good with More Flaws

Expect Me Tomorrow by Christopher Priest

From the author of The Prestige, this novel takes on the ‘sci-fi set across a few hundred years with interconnecting characters’ genre that seems to be extremely popular at the moment. Just this year I can think of How High We Go in the Dark, Sea of Tranquility, or To Paradise. Of course, Cloud Atlas would be the father of this genre, though I could never manage to finish that one (perhaps it’s time to revisit?) In fact, my track record with this genre is pretty bad. Whilst this form always seems impressive, I often find its execution to be uneven. Sustaining a narrative across a few hundred years, especially when you add in a speculative element, is no easy task.

All in all, I think Priest manages it pretty well here. In one timeline, we follow a glaciologist from the nineteenth century discovering the beginnings of climate change, in the other, we follow Chad, a man living in our near future, on the crumbling south coast of England. Chad has access to a new technology via his job with the police (from which he has recently been let go), and with it he manages to make contact with his antecedents, stumbling upon important knowledge in the process. This is an engaging novel – I particularly liked the science-y parts from the glaciologist – that ends up at the more optimistic end of climate fiction. There were some parts that struck me as pretty odd. Why the inclusion of the real-life story of John Smith, the man who tricked women into giving him their money and belongings in the 1870s? This story seems initially very important and is integrated throughout and in the ending, but I wasn’t sure why, when the real crux of this novel seems concerned with climate change. But overall I found it to be a solid read, though I’m still not completely sold on this subdivision of sci-fi just yet.

eden by Jim Crace

This novel is set in the garden of eden many years after the casting out of Adam and Eve. A small community lives there now in paradise, alongside a group of feathered angels who appear like enormous blue birds (the big man himself is noticeably absent from the narrative, bringing various questions into play). I enjoyed reading Crace’s take on this story, as he indicates just how boring this paradise would be. With no death or real suffering, some of the inhabitants of this eden find themselves frustrated with their lives, and curious as to what’s outside the walls of their home. The writing is gently biblical, and the description of a life of tending to the garden is nicely done.

Nonetheless, I ended up being a bit underwhelmed by this book. The narrative about how boring this life is becomes a bit… boring. In many ways, it is a retelling of the Edenic story, but I’m not sure what new interpretation it brings to us. It probably doesn’t help that the ‘Devil’ character is more nuanced here. There’s no real drama to keep you interested, and as the characters are so removed from what we might recognise as humanity, there is little there to charm you. I was left wanting more.

The Fine

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

This is one of those books that after I posted it to Instagram, I got a lot of messages about it. It’s famously tricky and famously clever. And whilst there were things I liked about it, unfortunately there were a fair few things I didn’t.

It opens with Johnny Truant, a club kid from LA. His friend Lude lives in an apartment building with an old blind man named Zampanò, who only leaves his apartment once a day to walk around the courtyard with a bunch of cats. When he dies, Lude invites Johnny around to poke around his flat, where they find masses of writings. For some reason Johnny takes it upon himself to put together these writings from the scraps he inherits, uncovering a somewhat amateurish academic work about a documentary called ‘The Navidson Record’. Only Johnny can’t find a record of this documentary anywhere, despite there being hundreds of pages with full footnotes suggesting its authenticity. House of Leaves is made up of this story within a story, with footnotes and writing dancing around the page in an effort to conjure up the feeling of parts of the story and draw you deep into its labyrinth. Because The Navidson Record is about a house that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

This is a good story – The Navidson Record – wrapped in a lot of extraneous material. Johnny’s sections in particular are pretty awful throughout. Most of them document his various drug-and-drink-fuelled sexual encounters with vulnerable women. There are a lot of ‘mommy issues’. In general, the footnotes and tricks of this book are overdone, without there being much good reason beyond confusing the reader and adding to its own apparent cleverness. I liked the academic satire – lord knows academics deserve it sometimes – but the book was often overloaded with information to the detriment of some of the more interesting things Danielewski was doing. The female characters are generally badly handled. And it tripped a few of my pet peeves when it comes to literature and theory (and theory has a big role here). It’s undoubtedly strongly influenced by deconstructionism and post-structuralism (and not the good kind), as well as the work of Baudrillard. And then as you might have guessed from the ‘mommy issues’, it’s also got a hefty dose of Freudian psychoanalysis, too. I have to say I don’t find these bodies of theory particularly convincing (at least not in the grand scheme, though I can appreciate their place in its history and development), and in fact find them very grating. The complete uncertainty that the whole novel conjures up (unstable Johnny putting together fragments of writing about a fictional documentary) means that you could make almost any reading of it, which takes away from the fun. I always find this sort of novel to be devoid of a real centre or heart – kind of the point, especially with the description of the house, but nonetheless, I can’t fully get on board.

So what did I like about it? I finished it after all, and I’m glad I did, though I’m not sure I would rush to recommend it. The core story, as I say, was very good. There were lots of interesting points made about the house and the role of a house throughout, though they easily get lost in the mix. It was gripping at its best, and also very creepy. There was so much potential here, but the execution just didn’t quite live up to its reputation for me.

Family Business by Jonathan Sims

There was lots of potential here. Sims’ writing is smooth and readable, and I was initially easily drawn in by the story. Diya has recently lost her best friend, and in her grief accidentally stumbles into a job cleaning up after the dead in a family business - though not her own. She starts having strange visions whilst on the job, leading her to feel like she’s going mad, but also prompting questions about what’s going on with the family she works for…

All good horror fodder, but ultimately I was left disappointed. After the initial third, I found the book to be lagging and it was becoming repetitive. I wasn’t particularly bowled over by the conclusion to the mystery, either. I did appreciate what the book had to say about those most vulnerable in our society, forgotten by the rest, and its anti-establishment sentiments. But overall I was left a bit underwhelmed by it.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid

Again, this is a re-read but I thought I would write a little something as I have changed my opinion on this one a bit. I found it to be weaker this time round, knowing the ending. Of course, it’s filled with clues as to the conclusion and it was fun to see all the moments that Reid hints at what’s to come, but in general, I found the story and execution to be a little too muddy for me. Knowing the storyline meant that I was close-reading it a lot more this time, and it felt lacking on a few points, the plot holes a bit more gaping. It still felt creepy and atmospheric though, and I would consider picking up more of Reid’s work on this basis.