This year was a hard reading year for me. I started keeping track of the books I read for pleasure in 2012, at the suggestion
of the late David Hartwell. In 2012 I read 68 texts, not including academic
works and re-reads. In contrast, in 2019 I read a disappointing total of 35
books for pleasure. I suspect I read a *few* more than that which I forgot to
record, but any which way, one of my resolutions for the new year is to read
more.
Fiction-wise, my favorites of the year were mostly Gothic novels:
Dear Hollywood screenwriters looking for great material:
pick up this book. Ward brilliantly weaves together multiple timelines in this Gothic
tale about a religious cult in a remote part of Scotland. Decades
after the cult’s murderous implosion, the lone survivor begins writing letters
to a detective. Ward’s novel merges the atmosphere of THE LONEY with the
psychological intensity of Tana French’s IN THE WOODS in a narrative that unfolds in
a Hitchcockian series of plot twists. Seriously, this novel should be more widely known than it is. A must read.
LaValle’s beautiful dark fairy tale tied with LITTLE EVE as
my absolute favourite read of the year. Beautifully written and compelling,
LaValle has a knack for blending realism with the fantastic without making the “realist”
parts of the story seem fabulist. It's also a tale of race in America, and the conflicts that arise between African-American and white immigrant communities, but it's processed at the level of a very particular (and fantastic) set of family relationships. Wonderfully done.
Somehow I’d never come across this Waters title, even though
FINGERSMITH and THE LITTLE STRANGER are two of my favourite novels. A lonely Victorian lady visits a women’s prison and develops a relationship
with a spiritualist imprisoned there. Heart-breaking complications ensue.
Unlike the other titles on this list, Tommy Orange’s THERE
THERE is *not* a Gothic novel in the way most people think of that word.
However, the Gothic theme of a traumatic past continuing to haunt the present
is also here in Orange’s brilliant series of intertwined short stories about a
collection of Native Americans living in Oakland, California. Orange’s tale is
alternatively funny and tragic and it offers a refreshing perspective on the indigenous
experience in a particular part of the United States.
Alderman’s SF novel about a world in which women suddenly
gain the power to wield electrical forces is a discussion-provoking read that
would teach well alongside THE HANDMAID’S TALE. I enjoyed it.
I’ve always been a fan of Datlow’s anthologies and her “Best
Horror” series is one I’ve followed for years. I found this year’s to be exceptionally
strong, with great work appearing by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Kristi
DeMeester, Michael Wehunt, and Damien Angelica Walters, among others. Full
disclosure: I have a story in this year’s anthology. Setting that aside, and
looking at the anthology as a reader, I found it to be one of Datlow’s
strongest, in part because of its mixture of high concept horror (e.g. Hill’s
and Davidson’s stories) and subtler, more “literary” pieces (e.g. Shearman and Holmes’s
stories). Right at the border there is arguably my favorite piece in the
anthology, Adam Troy Castro’s “Red Rain,” which translates the post-9-11 image
of the ‘falling man’ into surreal apocalypse.
Non-fiction recs will be in the next post.
Comments
Post a Comment