Summer 2022 Books
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Listing my summer books here feels like the perfect way to send the season off as I sit and write these reviews on a particularly gloomy Thursday. Whilst I didn’t have many five star reads over the summer, I did read a lot of good, solid books. Let’s get stuck in.
The Great
Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman
This novel took me by surprise, as some of the very best novels do. It’s been described as a ‘zoological thriller’, though quite why I’m not sure. I know that a lot of ecological fiction published at the moment is thriller-ish, so perhaps someone got confused somewhere, but when was the last time you read a laugh-out-loud thriller? Because really, this book is funny. Sure, there’s some drama in here. The stakes are high. Perhaps the difficulty is in fitting this book in any genre at all apart from science fiction, and even then it doesn’t read like your average sci-fi novel.
Of all the climate change tragedies that face us, this book reflects on impending mass extinction. I know what you’re thinking – that’s what’s supposed to be funny!? Yes, it is. This novel is caustic and playful and full of incisive analysis of the inner workings of late capitalism. For example, in a not-so-distant future, an ‘extinction industry’ has formed whereby companies can buy ‘extinction credits’ in order to guiltlessly bulldoze the safe havens of any endangered species. If that species is certified intelligent, these companies need only buy thirteen of them instead of one. Supposedly the money raised from these credits is used for good, but to the companies the cost is a drop in the ocean compared to projected profits. This is so disgustingly plausible, I want us only to protect this book from those people who would say – wow, what a fantastic idea!
We follow two strangers; Mark Halyard, who works in the extinction industry department of a mining company, and Karen Resaint, a biologist also working for said company, who is just about to mark venomous lumpsuckers – of all things – as an intelligent species. They are thrown together due to some unforeseen, unprecedented circumstances (aren’t we all familiar with those, these days), and these two unlikely friends must work together to somehow save the venomous lumpsucker from extinction. If anything, this is a buddy comedy. But a very, very nerdy one.
As a side note, I actually read an extremely bad take review about how this novel and Beauman’s writing in general is too ‘nerdy and blokeish’, and because it is women increasingly guiding the tastes of publishing these days, that’s why it isn’t more widely read. I want us all to go out there and buy this book and read it just to prove this reviewer wrong, honestly. This take is so bad, and so simplistic, that it hurts. My view is that perhaps he isn’t as popular because people that would love his writing simply don’t know books like this are being published today. Before this book, I’m not sure I would’ve! And perhaps it doesn’t help that it’s tricky to fit this into a particular genre accurately, or that it feels like unfamiliar ground. This makes it difficult to market, or for its potential readers to find it (especially if we just blindly assume women aren’t going to read it). And sure, it’s nerdy but it’s also very accessible, and very interesting. There is a lot of fascinating information here, and Beauman very successfully fleshes out this world and thoroughly examines all the different aspects of this bleak future (if it even feels like the future at all). Do I think everyone will get on with its sardonic style and slightly unlikeable characters? Of course not, but isn’t that true of every novel?
And it’s true, these two characters are not particularly likeable, but there is an undeniable warmth to this book, a real humanness. If there wasn’t I don’t think I’d like it anywhere near as much. That’s why I baulk even more at that review which claims Beauman’s writing ‘tend[s] to skirt the dramatic intricacies of the human heart’ because I’m not sure it does. It’s a tough gig to get me to care about someone like Mark Halyard, but Beauman manages it. To care about venomous lumpsuckers!? Just because there are lots of facts and figures doesn’t mean there isn’t heart, too. Anyway, enough ranting. I just want to finish by saying the novel’s ending is great. It’s ambitious and meaningful, and I’ll be thinking of it for a long time to come. I know I’ll be looking into Beauman’s backlist titles, and I hope you’ll consider this one.
The Good
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
Reading a classic work can sometimes be a bit nerve-wracking – will it live up to expectations? Especially when it’s written by one of your most beloved authors. And this Le Guin standalone is certainly a strange little book, but one stuffed with interesting ideas and gorgeous quotes. It follows George Orr, a man who discovers that his dreams can shape the world around him. He tries desperately to stave off dreaming using drugs – worried about the power he holds, and the murky imprecise medium of dreaming to enact it – but this only lands him in compulsory dream therapy, and his psychiatrist Dr. William Haber feels rather differently about Orr’s power. Indeed, the book reads like a strange dream, constantly shifting beneath your feet as these two men change the world, increasingly moving towards something alien and chaotic.
This short book covers so much ground; climate change, race, psychiatry and the balance of power in the patient/doctor relationship, what the purpose of humanity is (to do or to be)… the list goes on. It reads a little like an oversized short story, an extended thought experiment, and the use of dreams I think makes it sometimes difficult for the reader to find their emotional foothold, though it did move me at various moments, particularly towards the end. It achieves all it sets out to do and I would definitely recommend it. My Le Guin journey continues.
Appliance by J. O. Morgan
This book is made up of stories about what essentially amounts to a teleportation machine. You put things inside, they are analysed and reconstructed in another machine elsewhere, though exactly how it works is somewhat mysterious. The stories follow on from one another, showing how human society would change in contact with this technology, and how it develops alongside us in turn. I thought this was an accomplished work that rigorously worked through all the angles in each story, coming to some really thought-provoking conclusions. I’ve always liked thinking about the teletransportation paradox thought experiment, and this book certainly touches upon that among other things. Naturally as is the way with these things, some stories were more successful than others, both in terms of their ability to function as interesting stories and the ideas within them.
I particularly liked the way the novel explores how humans interact with technology and whether it always improves our lives in a meaningful way; the way we accept almost all new technology as a universal ‘good’, without even knowing how it works and what it portends for our humanity. And I liked that Morgan did this by looking at a technology that doesn’t exist and possibly never will, rather than writing what would have amounted to a more clunky diatribe about our addiction to our phones or screens.
I think perhaps as the book neared its end it petered out a little; I had hoped for a more ambitious ending. But in general, this is a really intriguing novel, and I read it in a matter of days, interested to see where Morgan would take us next.
Mama Day by Gloria Naylor
There is much to love about this book, though it didn’t completely capture me. I read it thinking it would be republished this year by Virago, and so I was going to include it in my ST round-up, but it looks like they’ve pushed this back to next year. You can still get hold of old copies though. Originally published in the 80s, it follows Cocoa, a woman from a mysterious island between Georgia and South Carolina that is not considered an official part of the United States, nor is it on any map. She has recently left her only surviving relatives – her grandmother and grandmother’s sister, a powerful healer of a woman called Mama Day – to go and make a life for herself in New York, where she meets a man, her future husband George. This island was supposedly freed through the work of the formerly enslaved Sapphira Day back in 1823; rumoured to be a witch and shrouded in mystery, her line comes down through Cocoa’s family and the place itself serves as a kind of paradise. Naylor is such an evocative writer, everything she writes about you can picture before you. Her characters, too, are real-life, breathing people. And we see them up close, we hear their thoughts and feel their feelings.
Indeed, that’s part of the problem with this book. We spend so long on the minutiae – the back and forth of Cocoa and George’s relationship, the small happenings on the island – that it moves very, very slowly. It took me a long time to get through it, and some of its magic is lost in the process. By modern standards, too, you have to wonder why Cocoa and George are even together. And the ending feels a little rushed. But! The way Naylor captures life is truly extraordinary, and it’s also possible I wouldn’t have found it so slow if I hadn’t been reading it more piecemeal whilst on the road. I’m glad to have been introduced to her writing, and I recommend this one if you’re in the mood to be dipped into a different world entirely.
The Pharmacist by Rachelle Atalla
This is an accomplished debut novel that manages to avoid some of the pitfalls and generalities of dystopian literature, culminating in a book with some real substance to it (this feels rare in the ‘debut dystopian’ world). That’s not to say it’s a perfect read or even one I would jump to recommend, but I certainly will be watching whatever Atalla writes next. It’s about a woman working as a pharmacist in a bunker after some sort of apocalyptic event. Supposedly the privileged few are staying put until the outside world is habitable again. Now, we never step outside this bunker, nor do we find out what this event was, which will feel unsatisfying to some. But I think instead it focuses the reader elsewhere, on what Atalla really wants us to look at, which is the claustrophobia of living inside the bunker, how tensions are managed and how power struggles play out. I think she does a wonderful job of capturing those feelings of sheer boredom alongside crushing anxiety and heartache, creating a realistic world for her characters, along with just enough propulsive plot to keep us going.
The Round House by Louise Erdrich
I have such mixed feelings about this one! It’s about a family living on the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. Narrated by her only son, Joe, Geraldine Coutts has been the victim of violent sexual assault and intimidation, sending ripples throughout the whole community. Joe is spurred then to seek justice and revenge, and to discover who tore apart his family. Now, instantly, alarm bells were dinging for me. Mostly because the rape of his mother becomes the catalyst for a coming of age for Joe, which doesn’t feel right. As readers, we are closest to his pain and his experience, as well as his search for revenge. This isn’t the most enlightened way of writing about sexual assault.
But nonetheless, I couldn’t help but feel moved by this novel. As in The Night Watchman, Erdrich brings the community to life with ease, and weaves a well-layered narrative that slowly unfolds over the course of the novel. You can’t help but feel for Joe and his family, and I always wanted to keep reading and come back to this book. The satisfaction of it is not in the ‘whodunnit’ plot, which is easily resolved, but rather Joe’s narration and his relationships with the people around him, particularly his friends. So whilst the content of the novel didn’t always sit right with me, I couldn’t help but be taken in by it. I’ll continue reading Erdrich’s work, as although I haven’t yet found my perfect novel from her, she does always get me thinking and reflecting on her writing.
Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer
Not my favourite of VanderMeer’s, but still a worthy novel with some interesting elements. Set in the world of Ambergris (one of my favourites of VM’s!), this novel follows a brother and sister duo – Duncan and Janice Shriek. Duncan is an academic with an unhealthy and unpopular interest in the Gray Caps, the creepy mushroom people that populate Ambergris’ underground. His supposedly outlandish theories lead to his ostracisation by academia and force him to explore the Gray Caps dangerous underworld alone, becoming infected with their spores. Janice, meanwhile, is a troubled woman who takes on various jobs throughout the novel, from successful owner of an art gallery to city tour guide. The novel has a strange structure, it is written by Janice as an ‘afterword’ to one of Duncan’s works in the aftermath of his disappearance, but she goes rather off-topic, recounting their lives, including their relationship to one another and Duncan’s failed affair with one of his students (eek…). Interspersed, however, are Duncan’s parenthetical comments about Janice’s writing (stay with me here). So even within the text the two are arguing with one another, but also essentially working together.
My main problem with this novel is that I didn’t care much for the Shrieks, and it’s pretty darn slow. I just didn’t ever feel the urge to pick it up. I do, however, absolutely love Ambergris. As I said, it’s one of my favourite VanderMeer worlds, and so whenever we got more details about it or an extended description of it, I always perked up. In this regard, the second half of the novel picked up the pace a bit. I always like VanderMeer’s experimentation with the novel form, too, though Duncan’s asides sometimes felt unnecessary or clunky. The way Janice’s environment creeps into her narration as she writes the afterword, though, felt successful and interesting. Overall as an existing fan of VanderMeer’s I’m glad I read it, and I look forward to Finch, too, which I think might be more of a success.
Booth by Karen Joy Fowler
It’s true, I am the target audience of a book like this. Fowler has variously written in many different genres over the course of her career, including weird and speculative fiction, so when an author like that also writes historical fiction, it’s my two favourite things combined. That’s not to say this is speculative historical fiction; it isn’t. But there are inklings of it in her writing that please me. A distancing method in the language, an eerie atmosphere, talk of ghosts.
And that suits this novel perfectly because here we have a family of Shakespearean actors, the Booth family. I knew almost nothing about Abraham Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth to begin with, but I thought the topic of the Booth family was a good one. John’s father and many of his brothers were actors, meaning there was plenty of drama from the outset. In the first section covering the siblings’ childhoods, I thought Fowler did a wonderful job of elucidating the subtle differences between experiences within the same family that emerge as entirely different personalities and political viewpoints further down the line. At the end of the novel, she writes that she wanted to explore how families of people who commit atrocities might feel about them and about their whole lives in retrospect; how it feels to love a terrible person. She says she wanted to do this without centring the perpetrator – in this case, John Wilkes Booth – and I think she does this quite successfully. Instead, we spend time mostly with some of his siblings, namely Edwin, Rosalie and Asia.
The middle section might not excite all readers, but I personally was captivated throughout; I have quite a high boredom threshold, especially when it comes to historical fiction it seems. I don’t know that it’s an absolute standout novel, but I certainly enjoyed it a lot, and it makes me want to read more of her work.
Persuasion by Jane Austen
My first Austen in many, many years! And I really enjoyed it. I forgot how wonderfully sharp Austen is; of course everyone says it but I think you need to read her to feel how vital her characters are, and how attuned her pen is to human foibles. Her characters jump off the page, and I chuckled to myself more than once over the course of my reading. Persuasion follows Anne Elliot, the forgotten middle sister of the ailing aristocratic Elliots of Kellynch Hall. She was forced to break off an engagement with a poor naval officer in her youth and now, at the grand old age of 27 (gasp!), her prospects are looking rather dismal. Cue the return of her former beau and some heartache at their long separation, in a classic will-they-won’t-they narrative.
As pointed out in the inaugural Zoom meeting of our new book club, this book was Austen’s last and perhaps is not so polished and perfected as some of her other work. It certainly feels like there could have been more padding in parts of the narrative. The ending feels rushed, and I don’t think the reader ever gets a chance to connect properly with Captain Wentworth. Having no background of their former love, I think in general it is difficult to understand the level of yearning going on here. At the same time as I think this novel could have been longer, sometimes it felt a bit slow. I did love the autumnal sections set in Uppercross, and all the family drama, but still it felt lacking in some sections. Overall, though, despite some of my mixed feelings I did enjoy this book and I think it’ll be time for another Austen soon.
The Not So Great
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
I’ve been recommended Mandel’s work many times over the last few years, seeing as I am a big fan of speculative fiction. But every time I’ve gone to read the reviews of her work, I sensed there that we would not get on as writer and reader. This novel mostly confirmed my fears. I know that some of her existing fans don’t like this book as much as her others, but I’m certainly not rushing to find out if I would get on better with another.
In general, I found it to be quite lazily drawn together. It’s a time travel book spanning four centuries, and whilst I’m not opposed to this kind of narrative it is difficult to do right; you really must differentiate each section and make each one interesting pretty much in its own right. The time travel element was half-hearted and full of plot holes (and begged the question… why?). The best section was by far the first, which had nice prose and a good, almost eerie atmosphere, set as it was in the wilderness of Canada. After that, they got increasingly rushed and less interesting. When you’re spanning four centuries, a good novel will be ambitious in its world-building, but again this element felt hollow and empty. It felt like Mandel was resting on her laurels for this one. She certainly can churn out a good sentence, but the best novels require much more than this.
Swanfolk by Kristín Ómarsdóttir
Honestly, I’ve no idea what to say about this book. Sometimes I saw flashes of brilliance, but in general I didn’t enjoy reading it much. Possibly I was a little distracted reading it and equally it reads much like a fable, which as we all know is not my favourite style, so I’m probably not quite the right reader for it, either. It’s very ‘literary’ and clever, but just a bit too impenetrable for me for an everyday fiction read, though I’m sure it’d make good essay fodder.
It follows a woman working in a meaningless government job (cue Kafkaesque comment). She seems a little isolated and odd herself, and she discovers a race of swanfolk living in the nearby area. These swanfolk are struggling to procreate, and she is variously taken in and repulsed by them. What follows is strange and dreamlike. It’s certainly got some interesting themes in there, from statehood and personhood, to mothering and procreation, but I wasn’t going to spend too long deciphering them. I do often like challenging literary fiction but for whatever reason this one just didn’t work for me.
Upgrade by Blake Crouch
I have no idea why I read this book all the way through. Decidedly not for me, and possibly so much so that I can just forever cross Blake Crouch off my list. The opening seemed promising, and the premise okay; in a world where genomes can be ‘hacked’, the protagonist Logan has been upgraded to a higher form of human against his will. Over the course of the novel, we look at how this might play out, why this was done to him and how it affects his relationships with the people around him. But the execution was overly simplistic to me (wouldn’t intelligence look different on everyone? what does it even mean?) and it relied too heavily on bland fighting scenes. The occasional interesting idea but ultimately too generic for my tastes.
