September to December 2023 Books

It’s been a while since I put one of these together, but it’s finally time to round up all the books I read in the last part of 2023. Considering how warm September and October were here in the UK, it feels a bit like I’m casting my mind back to the last vestiges of summer (which was a very long time ago now…) You’ll see I’ve split these into quite a lot of gradations of good. I don’t know exactly why, it’s just what my ~book sense~ told me to do. Sometimes there is a negligible difference between the quality of two books, and yet you connect more with one over the other. It seems to me to be a chemistry thing much of the time. Anyway I read a lot of fantastic books, so let’s get into it…

The Great 

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell

I had to put this one into its own category this month simply because it’s one of those rare books I wouldn’t touch with my theoretical editing pen. But that doesn’t mean those in the below categories aren’t also fantastic books, this one just stands out to me somehow in the stack. It’s a tale told retrospectively; an old man is reaching the end of his life and dwells on a moment in his youth when he should have reached out to a close friend, but didn’t. This nagging memory prompts him to tell us the story of what led to this moment, entangled as it is with a murder case in the small town where he grew up.

This novel is only short—about a hundred and thirty pages long—and yet Maxwell conjures up this town in rural Illinois with such clarity, these characters with such depth and richness. The narrator loses his mother to the flu epidemic at an early age (something Maxwell himself experienced and which he explores in a number of his books), and the writing on grief is some of the best I’ve ever read. It is not often you read an author of this generation who writes with such open-hearted vulnerability.

It's easy to read this novel; it has flow and narrative tension, and there is nothing challenging or difficult about it at a sentence level. So you’d be forgiven for not quite noticing the masterful changes in register Maxwell manages here. We move from a Capote-esque recounting of the murder in the opening pages, to a luminous section on boyhood and grief, through to a reimagining of the narrator’s friend’s world, sometimes even through the eyes of his dog. The threads of this novel and the imagery that unites them are perfectly balanced. And in the end, it sings. A plaintive, lucid, quiet tune. I’m so looking forward to reading more Maxwell.  

The Very, Very Good

Possession by A. S. Byatt     

Ah, Possession. We read this for Book Club and it really split the crowd. You might be able to tell from my placement that I was on the side of absolutely loving it. But how to begin discussing it…

We follow Roland and Maud, two academics in 1980s England, as they uncover a previously unknown affair between two Victorian poets. One, the already famous and prolific Randolph Henry Ash, and the other the underappreciated Christabel LaMotte, only recently gaining attention from some feminist scholars. The book contains long stretches of letters between the two, along with a lot of their poetry. These poets are entirely fictional, and one of Byatt’s greatest achievements here is how successfully she conjures these two figures up, with their distinct writing styles. Not to mention that the poetry is actually good. Honestly, it’s up there with some of the best character work I’ve ever read.

Only, this has a somewhat limited appeal, as one can imagine. The modern narrative is subsumed by the past narrative at times, and the letters and poetry exasperate many a reader. And I get it, most of the time when I see lengthy poetry/song sections in books I wince (*ahem* looking at you Tolkien). “Literary critics make natural detectives” Byatt comments at one point, and certainly a familiarity with literary criticism is helpful when going into this one (though by no means a requirement). For me, I read this intensely over a short space of time, writing copious notes and acting like a detective myself, searching the two narratives and the poetry for clues as to where it was headed, and how they interacted with one another. All of this made for a fantastic and deeply fulfilling reading experience. Sometimes it’s nice to use a book like this one as a sort of brain exercise, but I can see why it would feel like an absolute slog in different circumstances.

But wow, what an accomplishment this book is. The way the theme of ‘possession’ is carefully woven into all the layers of the narrative, the ways the characters grapple with the huge upheavals either of the Victorian era or the 1980s, the meticulous attention to detail in the poetry, the sheer number of themes and ideas discussed, the fact of it being a romance and yet playing with the very idea of the genre. And then there’s the vitality of Christabel LaMotte. She was unanimously our most loved character. She is nuanced, flawed, at times downright confusing and yet magnetic; full of a force of will unlike any of the other characters.

And finally, I cried like a baby at the ending. Maybe the most I’ve ever cried at a book. I was a mess. Zak was worried about me.

So why isn’t it in my Great category, you ask, even though its easily a book I’ll be thinking about for a long time, and probably an all-time favourite? There are parts of this book that haven’t aged as well, particularly with regard to queer and feminist theory, and at least one of the other female characters (justice for Val) so I can’t claim it is an absolutely perfect whole. But it is really a document of its time, which is valuable in itself, laying bare the anxieties that academia was going through in the 80s, particularly the havoc that poststructuralism was wreaking. And of course, I can’t wholeheartedly recommend this to everyone. But for those it suits, this one will linger long after you’ve closed it. I can see me rereading this in a few years’ time and finding even more than I did the first time.

The Very Good

Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin

So I mentioned this wayyyy back in my August round-up, because this book is the final instalment in a fantasy trilogy of Le Guin’s called Annals of the Western Shore and I have also been talking about it lots over on YouTube. I finished it back in September and overall was left with such a good impression of the series. 

I listened to the first book, read the second and listened to this third book. I have to say, when I listen to a book I definitely have a lesser grip on it, and I do wish I’d read this particular instalment. As all three books can be read as standalones set in the same world (though with some links), they do feel different from one another. I don’t think this one worked so well for me on audio, but its difficult to tell whether that was because this was my least favourite book or because it just wasn’t as strong of a narration. So one day I’ll have to return to these and read them properly. Of the three I think my favourite still remains the first, Gifts. Something about the narration just worked (I listened to the James Colby version).

But this was still wonderful, I just felt slightly less connected to it than I did the other two. We follow Gavir, who escapes slavery and must find his way in an uncomfortable, dark world. A story of freedom, coming of age, justice, a story exploring what healing might look like. As always, Le Guin explores the grey areas with aplomb. As I’ve said before, as a lover of Earthsea, these books also exhibit the brilliance of her fantasy writing. She’s less didactic than she can be in the science fiction, and the gentleness and warmth bring balance to her difficult themes.  

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Well this was a very fun re-read! How much do I really need to say about this iconic novel? Only, Austen is a wonderful writer of dialogue and character. There’s real verve to her writing that a few modern authors could certainly take notes from. It’s hard not to visualise her characters before you, and the chemistry between Lizzy and Mr Darcy is more than evident. Not to mention that I literally laughed out loud at some of the Mr Collins sections. I don’t read a lot of romance, so the fact that Austen continues to win me over with her books is testament to how good they still are, hundreds of years on.

Side note: It can be a little tricky to get to grips with the Georgian writing style if you’re not that familiar with it (it is denser than Victorian, I’d say). I think many years of practise are on my side with that one, but perhaps starting with a well-rated audiobook can help you get some of the rhythm of the language. Once you get it, Austen is a smooth read.

Stardust by Neil Gaiman

I listened to this a few years ago. I liked it a lot, I thought of it as a good contemporary fairy tale, playing with the genre in interesting ways. Of course, like many before me, I was a little meh on a romance storyline in which a woman becomes enamoured of her erstwhile captor.

And then I read it again for Books on Film and I found Gaiman to be much more aware of this and exploring Yvaine’s complex predicament in a more nuanced way than I had noticed before. The ending, for example (which is very different in the film and takes away some of its complexity…) seems to point to a more subtle reading. In fact, it is very easy to read Gaiman without noticing some of these choices he makes. One to consider for my note-taking series, perhaps.

There is also something—for want of a better, more complimentary word—flat to the writing of this. I think this is Gaiman embodying the slightly disembodied fairy tale voice, and it works for me, especially as someone who is a fan of the film (despite its flaws) and has the energy of the onscreen version in mind when reading it. But I can also see this getting lost for some readers, so going in with that in mind might help. Either way, I was left with an impression that this book was much more interesting than I had the first time round. I have noticed a bit of a pattern recently with some of my reads whereby the flaws or knotty problems of a book are what is most interesting to me.

The Fawn by Magda Szabó

Another Book Club pick that led to some fantastic discussion. Translated from the Hungarian and set in the 1950s, we pick up with actress Eszter in the aftermath of some calamitous event, though we don’t know what has happened until the end of the book. Over the course of The Fawn’s pages, we learn of Eszter’s childhood as the daughter of an impoverished aristocrat, and her bitter rivalry with another local girl that stretches into adulthood.

Eszter is probably one of the least likeable characters I’ve read in recent months, she is bitter and caustic, and makes bad choices at seemingly every turn. And yet we know why; we see the difficulties of her childhood; we can see how the silences of her life add up to a woman like this. We follow her wandering mind from moment to moment, so whilst it isn’t full blown stream of consciousness, it does sometimes require a little extra from you in placing yourself in the narrative. Overall, this is a fantastic and fascinating character study, from an author who is clearly talented at a sentence level and in the handling of her themes throughout the work. I am assured though, from the Szabó fans from the Patreon community, that this is probably one of her lesser works. A touch more disjointed and awkward than books like The Door, Abigail and Iza’s Ballad. So I very much look forward to getting to one of these later on this year.

A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr

This is a lovely little book that is perfect to read at the tail end of summer. Tom Birkin, a WWI veteran struggling with PTSD comes to a small English village to restore a recently rediscovered medieval mural in the local Church. He meets another veteran there, who is has been commissioned to find an ancestral grave, and the two of them strike up a friendship. This novel is quiet, reflective, meditative, sometimes funny. We don’t go into the graphic depths of Birkin’s trauma, only the way it haunts him in the shadows at the edges of his vision. We see the beginning of Birkin’s healing as he encounters the village folk, breathes in the country air, pours himself into his work. It’s about loneliness, friendship, the role of art in healing trauma, and most poignantly I think the feeling you get sometimes that you’re in a pivotal moment in your life, particularly a happy one. You’ll never return to it, it is a kind of bubble, and yet everything about it will colour every other moment you ever live. The romantic storyline probably doesn’t need to be there, but other than that it is a great little read.

Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au 

Another very fine slip of a novel. We follow a Chinese-Australian woman who travels to Tokyo with her mother in an attempt to find a deeper connection again in adulthood. The two meet there, and we are treated to a dreamlike sequence of their activities in Tokyo, but also some reflections and memories of the narrator’s childhood experiences. Whilst this novel feels a little like walking through a mist of consciousness, it is deftly handled by Au who never lets you get completely lost in it all. A wonderful rendering of what it is like to be a woman in today’s world, particularly a second-generation immigrant. And at all times you are wondering if there’s something quite other happening here on a deeper level; this slightly uncanny addition elevated this book for me above others exploring similar themes. Read it in as few sittings as possible for the best experience.

Poor Things by Alasdair Gray

You’ll have heard of this one recently if you’ve not been living under a rock, because it has of course just been made into a film (one of the main reasons I shortlisted it for our Book Club). Now I haven’t seen the film yet, so I can’t compare the two, but the book is quite remarkable in and of itself. Gray is an iconic Scottish author, and much of his work is worth reading. I always think of him as adjacent to or part of the first contemporary wave of The Weird; when I first read Jeff VanderMeer I instantly thought of Gray, which was confirmed by the former recently on his Twitter.

We follow Victorian medical student Archie McCandless who falls in with a local eccentric, Godwin Baxter. Turns out, Baxter has discovered how to reanimate bodies, and he has created a woman, Bella Baxter. The prior owner of said body committed suicide while pregnant, and so Baxter has taken the brain of the foetus and put it inside the body of this twenty-something woman, creating Bella. Yes, this is obviously completely and utterly unconscionable on about a thousand levels, and Gray is aware of this (to some extent). Not to mention what follows is Bella’s sexual awakening, Archie falling head over heels for her, and her generally running all the men in the novel ragged for the remainder of the book. We have a lot of framing narratives going on here (we also have sections of Bella’s diary), as well as a lot of extra material and drawings of Gray’s (a bit of a hallmark of his).

At times this novel seems to veer into the territory of full-blown feminism, and then you realise the ways in which Bella’s narrative and body are coopted by the male characters and the male writer of the novel. But then Gray inserts a fictional version of himself into the book, and you wonder just how much of that is actually intentional. This obviously makes the novel wonderful for discussion, and you’ll have to decide for yourself how ‘feminist’ you think it is. Its certainly of a particular period, too (add in, of course, the fact that it’s a retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Shelley’s relationship to feminism through her mother, and her fraught relationship with Percy Shelley, and the fact that Mary Shelley is an iconic female figure in the whole creation of the science fiction genre…) As you may be able to tell, there’s a lot going on here (I haven’t even gone into the fact of its Scottishness, and I hear that the film has removed that completely!? Terrible). Is it always a smooth read? No, not really. What it is, is weird and wacky and beguiling.

Tar Baby by Toni Morrison

Whilst this isn’t my favourite Morrison, such a thing as a bad Morrison simply does not exist, so it was obviously still great. If you like some of Morrison’s books I do think it’s well worth building to becoming a Morrison completist; as an oeuvre it is incredibly impressive, and each work builds on new and old themes in fascinating ways.

We open in a household on a—practically private—Caribbean island. There are the Streets, a white American couple who own the property based on wealth from a thriving confectionary business. Then there is Sydney and Ondine, their black American butler and cook, who relocated with them when they moved semi-permanently from Philadelphia. Then there’s Jadine, Sydney and Ondine’s niece, who has become a beneficiary of sorts of Valerian Street’s money and aid. She eats at the family dining table with the Streets, and is by now an honorary family member. She’s also sophisticated and beautiful, working as a fashion model in Paris while getting a top-quality education. Finally we have Son, on the run from something—we don’t yet know what—he turns up on the island by chance and begins to ingratiate himself into the household, much to many of the other characters’ surprise. Ultimately this is a love story between Jadine and Son, as they navigate their differences in class and their conflicting senses of blackness and race. The love story element is sometimes awkward and a little dated, but the illustration of the ways class, race and capitalism intersect are masterfully done. The opening parts of the book, too, felt like a new experiment for Morrison, with dialogue heavy scenes that almost felt like her interpretation of a comedy of manners. When I think of this book, I think of the characters arranged around a dining table in discussions where every utterance has different layers of meaning, and yet a levity and wit to them, too. I also can’t think of another Morrison that isn’t set mostly in America. Worth reading for both of those reasons, amongst many others.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

I know not everyone loves a Brontë, but let me tell you, I very much do. I haven’t read Wuthering Heights since I was an angsty teen though so don’t judge me too harshly. I would say that this book is quite unique, and led to yet more wonderful discussion as we also read this for Book Club in November.

A young farmer, Gilbert Markham, recounts a pivotal moment in his life to a friend in a(n extremely long) letter. We open with him as a young farmer, and the scenes of village life, sibling rivalry and an overbearing mother are wonderfully wrought with real animation. Then a young woman, Helen, moves into the rundown manor nearby with her five-year-old son. She is mysterious and haughty, and Gilbert can’t help but be drawn to her. Eventually we find out her story via a lengthy journey through her very own diary, before returning back to Gilbert by the end. Helen is a strong character who overcomes much in the novel (do check the trigger warnings on this one), and the way she approaches parenting her son and wresting back her agency from an abusive husband is the beating heart of this book. You can feel Anne Brontë’s passion for this subject burning through the pages, and in this way it makes it one of the more singular Victorian novels I’ve read. It’s a little overlong, probably, and there are some awkward decisions made at a plot level, but overall it’s very much worth a read if you want a classic novel charged with emotion.  

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

This is a really successful book that describes the great migration of black Americans from the Southern states up into the North. Whilst this migration involved millions of people and changed the face of both the North and South alike, before Wilkerson wrote this I think it was generally underreported at least in more mainstream books outside the world of academia. Wilkerson carried out hundreds of interviews for this book, and her knowledge is comprehensive. But she also structures this well, and includes a lot of good storytelling to keep it engaging throughout. She focuses on three individuals particularly, one woman and two men, from across the period of the migration (which lasted decades) to illustrate the overarching movement and themes of the story, which I think works really well. By the end I was sad to say goodbye to them, and I think Wilkerson makes good use of their stories to cover a lot of ground. Overall, this is such a vital puzzle piece in one’s understanding of how race functioned over place and space in America both through the twentieth century but also for Americans today. At times it’s a little repetitive and drawn out, but generally a very worthy read. I listened to this and felt it worked well on audio, though very occasionally I would lose myself a bit in the narratives as it is quite long.

Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology ed. by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

Another superb VanderMeer anthology. When I look back at the stories in this book, I’m amazed at how consistent the quality is. While I didn’t connect deeply with all of them, pretty much every single one gave me things to think about and brought something new to my reading. Sure, some are a little dated now and again, but overall, a very impressive look at women’s speculative fiction writing from around the 70s to 90s generally (I’m pretty sure that’s the general timeline). There are some familiar names here; Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, Angela Carter, James Tiptree, Jr. But there are many I wasn’t as familiar with, whose stories I loved, like Eleanor Arnason, Kelly Barnhill, Karin Tidbeck and Susan Palwick. Highly recommend this to any speculative fiction fans, I’m sure you’ll find something to take away from this one.

The Good

There’s nothing in this category but it does exist in theory ;)

The Fine/Solid but Flawed

North Woods by Daniel Mason

There are things to like about this book, but because I expected more from it, I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed. And I’m not convinced on Mason’s purpose here, or whether he achieves it. Unusually, in this book we focus on a house in New England over a period of four hundred years, watching inhabitants come and go. In a sense this novel has got to function as a good selection of short stories as well as an overarching piece. The opening section is really promising; the stories are very different from one another in style and substance, and generally interesting in their own right. But then it was like Mason was very reluctant to leave them behind, and we begin with the accumulation of ghosts, with a particular emphasis on those characters we met in the first few chapters. Whilst I generally appreciate a little sprinkling of the supernatural, here it didn’t feel fully realised. It was like he was stuck between giving us a great historical piece or a great magical realist piece, and instead we got caught awkwardly in the middle. The later chapters didn’t stand very well on their own, and there wasn’t near enough about the house and also the nonhuman inhabitants for me, which again were promising in the initial parts. Ultimately I was left feeling it lacked the depth I wanted, and felt a little half-hearted, or like a first draft. Not to mention it had revisionist tendencies that seemed to want to elide the violence of the States in the early years, which annoyed me a little.

Penance by Eliza Clark 

This book was solid; confident writing style, at times gripping, but at others quite slow and meandering. I think it was let down by its blurb and marketing for me. It purports to be a takedown of ‘true crime’, but to me it just felt like a replication of it without much commentary beyond ‘look at how silly and exploitative this is’. The clunky framing narrative reveals too much too soon, and generally it shows its hand a bit too much even in the main bulk of the text (of which there is too much). Overall, then, I was disappointed with it as I expected more, but I can see why people do like it. There is a decent storyline in here and the viciousness of teenage girls is written well, but some of its best bits are buried under unnecessary ‘contextual’ detail.