Books Read in 2023: Four-Star Fiction
Regarding Run Towards the Danger - I should have specified that the 'Cup of Tea' square in book bingo was subtitled 'Cozy or Dishing the Dirt', and I thought a good part of this was kind of dishing the dirt on the various productions she had been in.
The penultimate book review post! I'm usually in a love-hate situation at this point - scared of trying to figure out what to blog about when these posts are done, but also running thin on adjectives and insights.
We had freezing rain last night, and when I got home from work the plow row at the end of the driveway was a rock-hard mound of ice. I chipped away at it a little, but it's going to be ugly for a bit. On the happy side, when I opened the passenger door side of the rav to get my work stuff out, I found a mitten that I thought I had lost - a dark gray alpaca mitten from a pair that I bought because when I took Eve and her friends to the Van Gogh exhibit in Montreal in January 2019, just before everything went screwy, I lent one of her friends my gray alpaca mittens and one got lost. I was planning to search my mitten bin to see if I still had the remaining mitten and if it was the right one to make a pair with the current remaining mittens. I have now typed the word mitten so many times it has lost all meaning, but it makes me so sad when I lose one mitten of a good pair, so that was a good thing that happened in January.
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. Synopsis from Goodreads: Athena Liu is a literary darling and June Hayward is literally nobody. White lies When Athena dies in a freak accident, June steals her unpublished manuscript and publishes it as her own under the ambiguous name Juniper Song. Dark humour But as evidence threatens June’s stolen success, she will discover exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves. Deadly consequences…What happens next is entirely everyone else’s fault. With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media. R.F. Kuang’s novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.
I kept hearing about this book, eventually got the express ebook, and then it expired before I got to it. I then found it in a Little Free Library, which always seems magical, buuuuut for some reason I still didn't read it. Over the Christmas break my eye fell on it and I thought it would be nice to get it read before the end of the year, but had no idea that once I cracked it I would not be able to put it down. I have read so many reviews with competing assertions at this point that my thoughts are clang-y and confused about, well, ABOUT the book. I think a lot of the satire is very on-point, and the narrative energy was off-the-charts. There are opinions about Kuang using mouthpieces to state her own opinions, and about how much of her own life is in the book. I don't know that I care overly about that - part of the twisted charm is Kuang doing what white writers have done for years from the other side.
The Maid by Nita Prose. Synopsis from Goodreads: Molly Gray is not like everyone else. She struggles with social skills and misreads the intentions of others. Her gran used to interpret the world for her, codifying it into simple rules that Molly could live by. Since Gran died a few months ago, twenty-five-year-old Molly has been navigating life's complexities all by herself. No matter—she throws herself with gusto into her work as a hotel maid. Her unique character, along with her obsessive love of cleaning and proper etiquette, make her an ideal fit for the job. She delights in donning her crisp uniform each morning, stocking her cart with miniature soaps and bottles, and returning guest rooms at the Regency Grand Hotel to a state of perfection. But Molly's orderly life is upended the day she enters the suite of the infamous and wealthy Charles Black, only to find it in a state of disarray and Mr. Black himself dead in his bed. Before she knows what's happening, Molly's unusual demeanor has the police targeting her as their lead suspect. She quickly finds herself caught in a web of deception, one she has no idea how to untangle. Fortunately for Molly, friends she never knew she had unite with her in a search for clues to what really happened to Mr. Black—but will they be able to find the real killer before it's too late?
-"‘Right,’ he said. ‘So those two men you saw in that room? That bag they had? That was Juan Manuel’s bag. It wasn’t theirs. It definitely wasn’t mine. It was Juan Manuel’s. Got it?’
‘I understand, yes. We all have baggage,’ I paused, allowing ample time for Rodney to pick up on my clever double entendre. ‘That’s a joke,’ I explained. ‘Those men were literally carrying baggage, but the expression usually refers to psychological baggage. You see?’”
More like three and a half. There was a book bingo square for Most Popular from Your Local Library in 2022. Well, I wasn't going to go near Where the Crawdads sing, and this was next on the list. I liked it quite a lot, even though it was a little too... something for me (neatly tied up, slightly saccharine in places, a bit too deus-ex-machina at the end?). I liked Molly a lot, and the pleasure she took in her work. What a lovely and well-tempered world it would be if the right person could find the right work like this always, and people weren't judged for liking work that others find menial or demeaning. One of the reviewers I read doubted that people in the world could still be this clueless about people on the spectrum, and I strongly disagree - many, many people lack the curiosity and compassion to comprehend neurodivergence, leaving aside the people who just haven't come across it. The whole 'nefarious plot' part of the, um, plot, I could have done without, but I guess it advanced the narrative. I would have liked a little more subtlety, but I still wanted to keep reading.
Like One of the Family: Conversations From a Domestic's Life by Alice Childress. Synopsis from Goodreads: Like One of the Family, which provides historical context for Kathryn Stockett's novel, The Help, is comprised of a series of conversations between Mildred, a black domestic, and her friend Marge. They create a vibrant picture of the life of a black working woman in New York in the 1950s. Rippling with satire and humor, Mildred’s outspoken accounts capture vividly her white employers’ complacency and condescension—and startled reactions to a maid who speaks her mind. As Mildred declares to a patronizing employer that she is not just like one of the family, or explains to Marge how a tricky employer has created a system of “half days off” to cheat her help, we gain a glimpse not only of one woman’s day-to-day struggle, but of her previous ache of racial oppression. A domestic who refuses to exchange dignity for pay, Mildred is an inspiring conversationalist, a dragon slayer in a segregated world. The conversations in the book were first published in Freedom, the newspaper edited by Paul Robeson, and later in the Baltimore Afro-American. The book was originally published in the 1950s by in Brooklyn–based Independence Press, and Beacon Press brought out a new edition of it in 1986 with an introduction by the literary and cultural critic Trudier Harris.
A little tough to rate in some ways. I think I might have read about this in Well-Read Black Girl, but don't quote me. Some of this is pretty repetitive, and some of it verges close to wish-fulfillment, but the fact is it's just good to read, and I would hope is encouraging to write, this character who is so empowered, courageous and unapologetically willing to speak plain truth to her white employers.
When Everything Feels Like the Movies by Raziel Reid. Synopsis from Goodreads: School is just like a film set: there's The Crew, who make things happen, The Extras who fill the empty desks, and The Movie Stars, whom everyone wants tagged in their Facebook photos. But Jude doesn't fit in. He's not part of The Crew because he isn't about to do anything unless it's court-appointed; he's not an Extra because nothing about him is anonymous; and he's not a Movie Star because even though everyone know his name like an A-lister, he isn't invited to the cool parties. As the director calls action, Jude is the flamer that lights the set on fire. Before everything turns to ashes from the resulting inferno, Jude drags his best friend Angela off the casting couch and into enough melodrama to incite the paparazzi, all while trying to fend off the haters and win the heart of his favourite co-star Luke Morris. It's a total train wreck!
--”They made portraits of me too. They were my graffiti tabloids. I was totally famous. I’d imagine that the drawing in the handicap stall of my alleged crotch with ‘Hermafrodite Jude/Judy’ sciribbled next to it was the cover of the National Enquirer. Misspelled headline included. I was addicted to them. I’d look all over the bathroom and on all the walls in the hallway, and if there wasn’t one waiting for me on my locker for Jim to paint over at the end of the day, I was crushed. I wanted them to hate me; hate was as close to love as I thought I’d ever be.”
-"So when everything feels like the movies/ Yeah you bleed just to know you're alive" - Iris, Goo Goo Dolls
This was a Canada Reads book in the past. one of the years I tried to read all five but didn't get to the
last one. Also a book bingo square for a banned book. Not a comfortable or enjoyable read, but a brutally effective one. It's hard to like Jude - a blazingly bright character, a genderqueer 15-year-old at the intersectional points of several minority statuses. His determined cinematic sensibility is both persuasive and heartbreaking in the face of the very real emotional and physical threats he faces daily. With a choice about being invisible or obnoxiously in-your-face flamboyant about his identity, he's chosen the latter, and who can blame him, as infuriatingly self-destructive as it seems. This won the Governor General's Award for YA literature and is, predictably, very polarizing (oh ha-ha, yes it's YA, I am just utterly incapable of categorizing things correctly is what's happening here).
Also, I was long finished the book when I realized that When Everything is Like the Movies is from a Goo Goo Dolls song, which just goes to show how being an un-hip fifty-year-old can rob you of questionably valuable additional context for some things. In case that was ever in doubt.
Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam. Synopsis from Goodreads: A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong. Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they've rented for the week. But with a late-night knock on the door, the spell is broken. Ruth and G. H., an older couple who claim to own the home, have arrived there in a panic. These strangers say that a sudden power outage has swept the city, and - with nowhere else to turn - they have come to the country in search of shelter. But with the TV and internet down, and no phone service, the facts are unknowable. Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple - and vice versa? What has happened back in New York? Is the holiday home, isolated from civilisation, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one another?
Look At Me by Anita Brookner. Synopsis from Goodreads: A lonely art historian absorbed in her research seizes the opportunity to share in the joys and pleasures of the lives of a glittering couple, only to find her hopes of companionship and happiness shattered.
I read this for book club, and it was a paper book that I borrowed so I didn't end up making notes, which is both good and bad, because I probably would have ended up copying down most of the book. I don't think I've read any other Brookner, Apparently comprehensive character studies of lonely people are where she excels, which is shiningly evident here. The level of detail here is splendid and a little claustrophobic - the world is so well made that I could feel myself falling into it and sometimes felt like I couldn't escape.
My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley. Synopsis from Goodreads: Bridget's mother is dying. An extrovert with few friends who has sought intimacy in the wrong places; a twice-divorced mother-of-two now living alone surrounded by her memories, Helen (known to her acquaintances as 'Hen') has always haunted her daughter. Now, as together they approach the end, Bridget looks back on their tumultuous relationship - the performances and small deceptions - and tries to reckon with the cruelties inflicted on both sides. With so little time left, can these two warring women find a bruised accord?
Also read for book club, also a slender paperback. Not dissimilar to the Brookner, but on an even more microscopic level. This character study of Bridget's parents almost feels as if it was detached from a larger work. Again, the level of scrutiny feels a touch suffocating, but is also extremely convincing.
Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett. Synopsis from Goodreads: Feverish and forthright, Pond is an absorbing chronicle of the pitfalls and pleasures of a solitudinous life told by an unnamed woman living on the cusp of a coastal town. Broken bowls, belligerent cows, swanky aubergines, trembling moonrises and horrifying sunsets, the physical world depicted in these stories is unsettling yet intimately familiar and soon takes on a life of its own. Captivated by the stellar charms of seclusion but restless with desire, the woman’s relationship with her surroundings becomes boundless and increasingly bewildering. Claire-Louise Bennett’s startlingly original first collection slips effortlessly between worlds and is by turns darkly funny and deeply moving.
-"Names in books are nearly always names from real life and so already the reader is bound to have some knowledge about a person with a particular name such as Miriam and even if that reader's mind is robust and adaptable some little thing about Miriam in real life will infiltrate Miriam in the book so that it doesn't matter how many times her earlobes are referred to as dainty and girlish in the reader's mind Miriam's earlobes are forever florid and pendulous."
-"I turned on the cold tap and watched the water swish away my surplus and I opened the window and didn't move. If we have lost the knack of living, I thought, it is a safe bet to presume we have forfeited the magic of dying."
Another polarizing read, for the form a bit more than for the content. Stream of consciousness doesn't always work for me, but this seemed just this side of nonsensical, and individual bits are so clever and amusing and sharp. I'm not sure I really 'got' what Bennett was going for here - if there was some clearer shape that was meant to rise through the blanket of the wider narrative, I may have missed it. Regardless, I enjoyed the journey immensely.
Hotline by Dimitri Nasrallah. Synopsis from Goodreads: A vivid love letter to the 1980s and one woman’s struggle to overcome the challenges of immigration. It’s 1986, and Muna Heddad is in a bind. She and her son have moved to Montreal, leaving behind a civil war filled with bad memories in Lebanon. She had plans to find work as a French teacher, but no one in Quebec trusts her to teach the language. She needs to start making money, and fast. The only work Muna can find is at a weight-loss center as a hotline operator. All day, she takes calls from people responding to ads seen in magazines or on TV. On the phone, she’s Mona, and she’s good at listening. These strangers all have so much to say once someone shows interest in their lives--marriages gone bad, parents dying, isolation, personal inadequacies. Even as her daily life in Canada is filled with invisible barriers at every turn, at the office Muna is privy to her clients’ deepest secrets.
-”In this city, no one has ever had to walk home along Sherbrooke the day after the passengers of the STM’s 24 bus had been slaughtered with machine guns. When was the last time a car bomb exploded outside the McGill University gates? A militia would never attack the Imperial
movie theatre. It’s unthinkable. Montreal is prosperous enough to build a new city of neon and tile right underneath the old one. People here worry instead about things like losing weight.”
-’It’s 1987, and I might as well just be a weight-loss consultant,’ I say to myself in the mirror now that the steam has cleared. A hotline operator, a phone-order taker, a shipper of boxes, an ear whose only purpose in life is to swallow the sadness of strangers.”
I did it! I read all the Giller Prize shortlist books and all the Canada Reads books for 2023 for the first time ever! (Not a huge accomplishment in book total, but in overcoming procrastination and disorganization? MAJOR). Except I didn't, I recently realized I read all the Giller Prize shortlist books for 2022 and I am baffled as to how I screwed that up, but whatever, still counting it. This takes place in Montreal so I stretched it a bit and called it a local author for book bingo. I liked it - a realistic, touching portrayal of a single-mother immigrant struggling to raise her son and make a living. Not entirely sure how I feel about the depiction of the weight-loss industry - there's basically only one point where she feels any doubt at all about recommending the products - but that's a different issue and doesn't take away from the effectiveness of the story, and honestly, moral compunctions were a luxury she could have ill afforded. I appreciated that Muna's relationship with her missing husband isn't told as a flawless perfect love story - it would be hard to believe that a relationship wouldn't be impacted by the stress and struggle of war and hardship. Muna's voice is clear and sympathetic, and I was fully engaged in the details that evoked the hardship of multiple immigrants and the ones that were individual to Muna herself.
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell. Synopsis from Goodreads: 2000. Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful forty-two-year-old English teacher. 2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa, and now Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past. But how can Vanessa reject her first love, the man who fundamentally transformed her and has been a persistent presence in her life? Is it possible that the man she loved as a teenager—and who professed to worship only her—may be far different from what she has always believed? Alternating between Vanessa’s present and her past, My Dark Vanessa juxtaposes memory and trauma with the breathless excitement of a teenage girl discovering the power her own body can wield. Thought-provoking and impossible to put down, this is a masterful portrayal of troubled adolescence and its repercussions that raises vital questions about agency, consent, complicity, and victimhood. Written with the haunting intimacy of The Girls and the creeping intensity of Room, My Dark Vanessa is an era-defining novel that brilliantly captures and reflects the shifting cultural mores transforming our relationships and society itself.
-"'I just feel...' I press the heels of my hands into my thighs. 'I can't lose the thing I've held on to for so long. You know?' My face twists up from the pain of pushing it out. 'I just really need it to be a love story. You know? I really, really need it to be that.' 'I know,' she says. 'Because if it isn't a love story, then what is it?'"
I told myself I wasn't going to read this, based on hearing a rough synopsis and assuming it was romanticizing the relationship between a student and a much older teacher. Then a couple of friends read it and liked it and I was pretty sure they wouldn't like it if it did that. So I read it.
It's a hard read. Vanessa is a complicated, sometimes infuriating character - not nearly as infuriating as the older, manipulative, self-indulgent, self-deluding, hot mess of a teacher, of course. The way the relationship casts a suffocating shadow over her entire life is almost panic-inducing to read, while thinking that this exact thing happens to millions of girls all the time. The way the school and her parents are never really on her side is also enraging, and the way she sometimes seems to not be on her own side as well, although how could she be when this whole goddamned thing started when she was fifteen? The relationship IS romanticized at times, which is down to the character, not the author, but it gets hard to discern the difference at times, particularly once some of the backstory about the author comes out.
It's hard not to lapse into indicting the whole of patriarchy while I just want to review the freaking book. I think the book was well done, and I wish I could never think about it again.
Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley. Synopsis from Goodreads: Kiara and her brother, Marcus, are scraping by in an East Oakland apartment complex optimistically called the Regal-Hi. Both have dropped out of high school, their family fractured by death and prison. But while Marcus clings to his dream of rap stardom, Kiara hunts for work to pay their rent--which has more than doubled--and to keep the nine-year-old boy next door, abandoned by his mother, safe and fed. One night, what begins as a drunken misunderstanding with a stranger turns into the job Kiara never imagined wanting but now desperately needs: nightcrawling. Her world breaks open even further when her name surfaces in an investigation that exposes her as a key witness in a massive scandal within the Oakland Police Department.
-"An orchestrated love is almost more precious than a natural one; harder to give up something you spent that long making."
-"Inside, the heat of the room pushes down from the ceiling and this is a different kind of bodies on bodies: these ones grind and, instead of joy, there is so much wanting, everything Mama says not to do. We're all wanting something, though; most of us replacing what we really want with skin, which works until you wake up and the mirror is a blur of time twisting around the throat."
I kept seeing this book in the library ebooks and being annoyed by the title and synopsis because it didn't define what Nightcrawling was. I put the question out to my Facebook friends and no one else associated the term 'nightcrawling' with prostitution right off. Any, beyond having a silly amount of trouble getting over my annoyance, the book is very good, in a terrible, excoriating, anguishing sort of way. This is both an illustration of the multiple ways our society is broken and corrupt, and a vividly rendered story of an authentic character and her experiences.
Really well-written and evocative. At one point I thought "why are immigrant parents often so hard on their kids?" and then immediately realized "oh right - because of all the racism, they feel like they have to make sure their kids are perfect". Characters with strong personalities who all come through, and of course vivid descriptions of food.
Snow Road Station by Elizabeth Hay. Synopsis from Goodreads: In the winter of 2008, as snow falls without interruption, an actor in a Beckett play blanks on her lines. Fleeing the theatre, she beats a retreat into her past and arrives at Snow Road Station, a barely discernible dot on the map of Ontario. The actor is Lulu Blake, in her sixties now, a sexy, seemingly unfooled woman well-versed in taking risks. Out of work, humiliated, she enters the last act of her life wondering what she can make of her diminished self. In Snow Road Station she decides she is through with drama, but drama, it turns out, isn’t through with her. She thinks she wants peace. It turns out she wants more. Looming in the background is that autumn’s global financial meltdown, while in the foreground family and friends animate a round of weddings, sap harvests, love affairs, and personal turmoil. At the centre of it all is the lifelong friendship between Lulu and Nan. As the two women contemplate growing old, they surrender certain hard-held dreams and confront the limits of the choices they’ve made and the messy feelings that kept them apart for decades.
-"Closing her eyes, Lulu saw her dressing station overtaken by Olivia's crap and the visual blow landed a hard second punch, decades old, of switching on the light in Tony's bathroom to see another woman's earrings on the back of the toilet. So it takes a matching pain to wake up the earlier one. Friction, she thought. Two sticks to start a fire."
-"Then the further thought sank in that everything around her had been swung at or chopped down at one time or another. And that living in the woods helped you get used to things being over, because you were closer to the living truth that soon they would be gone."
Book bingo square for a book suggested by someone in the group. I had read two or three other books by Hay and liked them, but not the one that features some of the same characters as this one. For the first three or four chapters I was having trouble staying engaged - I felt like I was too aware that these were characters someone was writing a story about. Then rather abruptly the edges disappeared and I was completely in the story. Simple yet complex, beautifully descriptive about how landscape can affect mood and behaviour. Carefully pulls apart some of the ways people hurt each other, and how healing can sometimes - not always - be possible. Deliberate, vibrant writing. I couldn't wait to pick it up again, it was just really lovely.
Summer of My Amazing Luck by Miriam Toews. Synopsis from Goodreads: Lucy Von Alstyne sends fictitious letters to her friend Alicia, pretending to be the father of Alicia's twins, and the two welfare mothers and their five children set off on a journey to find him, facing along the way the complications of living in poverty and raising fatherless children.
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. Synopsis from Goodreads: Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice: on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned. But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker--or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other? A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama, and immersion in character. A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.
-"To have talked himself down from a more drastic course of action gave Tony a pleasing sense of his own judiciousness and clemency, and when he finally traipsed downstairs a little after one o'clock, ravenous, and not yet showered, it was with the calm conviction of a man who had faced a moral rest and chosen right."
-"He often acted out of impulse just so that he could then devote his leisure hours to mulling why; he relished self-analysis, though he had never undergone any form of therapy in his life, and never would. What thrilled him was the sense that he alone could understand himself."
Me looking at my last few book bingo categories for last year: "Shakespeare. Crap, what am I putting for that?" Me looking at the only book on the 2023 Giller Prize shortlist I've read and seeing that it's called Birnam Wood: "Hot damn!" (yes, we do interpret the categories very loosely at times).
Comments
I agree that is a 3.5-4 star read. It's good, but not as good as I wanted it to to be.
I refuse to read The Maid. I don't know why. It's like when too many people tell me to do something, I must rebel. I'll read it in ten years and act like I discovered it. I DNFed Nightcrawling. Maybe I should give it another chance.
Lastly, how exciting that you've read all the Giller Prize shortlist and all the Canada Reads books! I love to complete a good list.