Books. Loads of books.
It has been a good year for my relationship with books. I managed to read loads of them and I think at least a couple read me right back.
This photo at the top of the email might make it seem like I'm trying to show off all the Serious Books on this list, but it is just cos these are the only ones I can find right now. I could take a picture of my Kobo instead but that's not very romantic is it.
In no particular order, here are some of my favourites.
FICTION
Short and sharp. Cannot say enough good things about this one. Invigorating, bleak and yet somehow not at all bleak. This is sort of a book about being young in the shadow of late stage capitalism, sort of about labour and class privilege, sort of about factory-farming, sort of about contemporary life and consumption. It plays fast and loose (and not without a little mischief) with the formal structures or at least expectations of the novel. It is a taut and lively book that is easy to smash through in just a few hours, and I whole-heartedly recommend the experience. Also, I've not eaten meat for decades but I'd be curious to know to what degree this book might convince a carnivore to think again.
Chain Gang All Stars - Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
This book goes hard. Excellent and devastatingly sad. Tight and punchy and heartbreaking. Loved it. It is speculative future fiction about capitalism, racism and the prison system. The allegories are not subtle, but it's a novel about prisoners being forced to fight to the death in sports arenas so I'm pretty sure being subtle was not on Adjei-Brenyah's list of aims.
My Lesbian Novel - Renee Gladman
This was really good. I found it kind of sad in a way I can't quite put my finger on. Probably something resonated in the way the author seems so desperate to confront ideas or feelings directly, but cannot help building this complex structure of a book within a book, kind of within another book. Overthinking much? Why can't anything ever just be simple? For all that it was compelling and enjoyable at every meta-textual layer it was being performed at.
Two years in a row for Dinan being in my favourites of the year. (Last year it was her debut Bellies). Disappoint Me was very good. Funny and incredibly sad. I didn’t want it to be over.
Creation Lake - Rachel Kushner / Intermezzo - Sally Rooney
Two very different flavours of literary juggernaut here. I read them back to back and that was fascinating, because reading Kushner somehow feels like it takes you out into the world and lets you move through it at speed, whereas with Intermezzo Rooney brings you inside the minds of its characters and it all comes to life almost entirely there. It is not that Creation Lake could be in any way described as an 'action' novel, and it is plenty cerebral/philosophical in its own way, but it is also hums with a particular kind of kinetic energy that hits very differently to Rooney's slower, precise (?), wonderful ability to make the reader fall in love with her ensemble of well-intentioned, flawed humans, all just doing their best to know and be known.
It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over - Anne de Marcken
I really don't know how to describe this book. To say it is a zombie novel is to summon entirely wrong expectations about what it is and what it is trying to do. In some ways it uses zombies to get to the core of what it means to be alive. And like a lot of the books mentioned here, it is simultaneously funny while being bruisingly, unflinchingly sad.
Bonus fiction I also really enjoyed in one way or another:
Neon Roses (Romance! Miners strike! 80s music!) / Perfection (Even upwardly mobile young professionals can be sad under capitalism!) / Ghosts (The pain and struggle of ever really being able to know other people!) / Heavenly Tyrant (It isn't entirely Maoism-but-with-giant-mechs disguised as young adult fiction, but also isn't entirely not that! Also: makes no sense unless you read Iron Widow first!) / Coffin Moon (Didn't quite stick the landing for me but up until then had the lean, tough tone of peak Stephen King!) / BRIAN (Oh, Brian! A lovely book that cares deeply about its protagonist, this should probably have been in the main list as it has lingered longer than I first expected!)
NON-FICTION
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This - Omar El Akkad
Bruising and quietly devastating. A clear-eyed witnessing of the genocidal horror unfolding in Gaza from the perspective of an immigrant to the United States, now an American citizen and journalist, living thousands of miles away in relative safety.
One of the promotional quotes on the sleeve of the book calls it "a howl from the heart of our age" and while 'howl' accurately describes the level of anguish conveyed by this book, what I found less howl-like was the dexterity with which El Akkad constructs his laser-like takedowns of his main target in the book: the kind of liberal mindset that spent the last two years shaking its head sadly while doing absolutely nothing to try to curtail the atrocities that even now are still taking place.
Who's Afraid of Gender? - Judith Butler
It turns out loads of people are afraid of gender! Popes! Politicians! TERFs! ...Losers. This book is very good. It delivers what, for me and I can only imagine for most people, are some obvious, simple truths about how 'being human' is something we all get to construct together, not some bio-mechanical-objective-law-of-nature. But it delivers it with the kind of gravitas and steely-eyed surety that comes with being Judith Butler Actual.
I thought I wrote about this one, but it seems like I just mentioned in passing here and there. If you care about music at all I would highly recommend this book. It is primarily about the way Spotify wields its power, data-gathering, AI tools and playlist algorithms to flatten culture and make music worse. More broadly it can be seen as a lens to look at how the culture industry's subsumption by giant tech platforms is really just another logical step in capitalism's endless quest for growth. SLOP FUTURE AHOY! Get off Spotify!
Not the kind of thing I'd normally pick up, and not exactly a favourite, but it's definitely stayed with me. I guess you might call it 80s football hooligan ethnography? Or undercover investigative journalism? Dunno. The writer embedded himself in the horrible violence that came as part and parcel of a lot of English football fans in the late 80s and early 90s, because he just wanted to understand why. Why were they like this? What was going on in their heads? I grabbed a copy after hearing it mentioned on an episode of TrueAnon as being a useful tool to try to understand and therefore be able to combat the collective mind of these crowds of fascist thugs that are once more on the rise. It is more readable than I imagined, kind of fascinating, those obvs also pretty bleak. I was not entirely sure of the author's intentions, but then again it seemed that he wasn't either.
Some bonus non-fiction that was worth the effort:
Enemy Feminisms (Sophie Lewis, as ever, takes no prisoners! Really strong even if a bit of an endurance test for me if I'm being honest! Worth it for her hating on JK Rowling!) / More Everything Forever (Those unhinged tech billionaires/'effective altruists' are even weirder than I thought!) / Slow Down (I already wrote about this!) / Minority Rule (if only all Marxist analysis was this fun to read!)
Alright, that'll do. Anybody read any of these? What's good that I missed?
Member discussion