Tag: book chat

My favourite books of 2022: non-2022 publications

fiendfullyreading

As usual, I feel a need to give a shout out to my favourite books I read in 2022 that were not published this year. Apparently this is how I found the particularly good fiction this year (particular note for The Haunting of Hill House and Lost Souls for both living up to expectations) and a poetry anthology that I know I will be returning to over and over again.

See my favourite fiction and poetry books of 2022 for the more up-to-date offerings.

fiction

  • The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson – My review of this at the time was simply “Oh right yeah it is THE haunted house novel, fair.” and I stand by that. The writing, the atmosphere, the house. Watch Control, Anatomy, and the Legacy of the Haunted House on YouTube for more great haunted house stuff.
  • Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead – Someone living in the big city has to return to their roots is a classic formula, and in this book, young Two-Spirit Jonny Appleseed has to attend the funeral of his stepfather and bring together the elements of his life.
  • A Safe Girl To Love by Casey Plett – Any short stories that can make it onto one of my lists must be impressive as it’s a form I often have issues really enjoying, but Plett’s range of trans girl experiences is a fantastic collection.
  • We Are Made of Diamond Stuff by Isabel Waidner – I read this whilst trying to kill time sitting outside and in a cafe and it really transported me into a surreal world of British culture to explore national, queer, and migrant identity in a very weird way.
  • Lost Souls and Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite – It was finally the year, after wanting to since my teenage horror/vampire loving years, to read both Lost Souls and Exquisite Corpse and they were so far up my street. The former is The Lost Boys run through a Dennis Cooper novel (who I also read a lot of this year) and the latter the serial killers in love novel you didn’t know you needed. I’m actually glad it took this long to read them so I could fully appreciate them rather than just like the vibes as a teenager.
  • Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo – As I wrote when I finished it: “Loved this southern gothic street-racing in-love-with-your-best-friend suspicious-academia haunting horror novel.”

poetry

  • Ports by Calum Rodger – This pamphlet from SPAM Press reimagines poems through the lens of video games and I just really enjoyed the playfulness and form, plus what you could get about poetry, narratives, and games from doing that.
  • Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Díaz – There is a lot of poetry about bodies, but this collection really stands out. I’d been meaning to read it for a long time and was very happy that I did.
  • We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics ed. by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel – A beautiful anthology that’s perfect if you’re a poet as it’s packed full of inspiration and great if not just because there’s a lot of great innovative and experimental trans poetry in there.

My favourite books of 2022: poetry

fiendfullyreading1 Comment

As I mentioned yesterday, I read a lot of great poetry in 2022, so it was tricky to put together this list. A lot of my poetry reviews boil down to ‘vibes good’ and ‘imagery or lines that just hit me in the chest’ so this isn’t the most articulate list of why these collections are good, but just some of my favourites of 2022. Links to full reviews in the titles where I’ve written them.

  • Please Press by Kat Sinclair – A powerful pamphlet that I sadly cannot say anything else about because I am many miles from my copy currently and I did not write anything about it at the time. But go get it from Sad Press and see why it’s great.
  • Limbic by Peter Scalpello – I ended up with two copies of this, one from each of the book subscriptions I had in 2022 (Cipher Press and Lighthouse bookshop’s poetry subscription), which tells you it must be a good intersection of my taste. Sex, queerness, tracksuits, tiny moments – there’s plenty to enjoy.
  • All The Flowers Kneeling by Paul Tran – A collection exploring violence and storytelling that was so compulsive I accidentally stayed up late reading it, not something I tend to do with poetry.
  • A Little Resurrection by Selina Nwulu – Some of my favourite parts of this great collection was the use of imagery and the engagement with space, as poems look at race and place and bring in elements of climate and convenience.
  • Yo-yo Heart by Laura Doyle Péan – Powerful poems moving through a breakup to show the political nature of healing, filled with wit and sadness.
  • The Moral Judgement of Butterflies by K. Eltinaé – I loved the form of these poems, which explore trauma and immigrant experience and the idea of home. One of the books I got from my Lighthouse bookshop poetry subscription and wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.
  • Time Is A Mother by Ocean Vuong – Beautiful and highly readable. I expected a lot from Vuong and wasn’t disappointed.
  • At Least This I Know by Andrés N. Ordorica – Going to steal a line from my own review to sum it up: “I knew I was going to like the collection from the first poem ‘November 16th, 2014’, which is a perfect opening for it: a moment at border control, encapsulating fear and desire for a place to belong, and a poem that almost makes you laugh and cry at once.”

My favourite books of 2022: fiction

fiendfullyreading1 Comment

It’s been an interesting year for me for reading. As well as a lot of new and upcoming books, many of which did not make the cut for these lists, I read a lot of horror (including a month of it in October) and plenty of poetry. So much of the poetry was good that I’ve split up fiction and poetry into two different ‘best of 2022’ lists, so we’ll start with fiction. 

A lot of fiction I read this year was good, but not so good as to be one of my top books, so it is quite a brief list this year. Not only that, but two of them aren’t actually from 2022, only first published in the UK in 2022, which I’ve decided to count on a whim. Links in titles to full reviews where I’ve written them.

  • Nevada by Imogen Binnie – I’m counting the UK publication this year as making it released in 2022, though clearly it’s not from 2022. I actually read it right at the start of the year, before this rerelease, but still. Classic trans roadtrip novel.
  • Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li – This book was just very fun and I thought highly of it for that, plus it’s basically a genre of a film I enjoy. Chinese-American students do heists to steal artefacts and have various drama along the way. Ridiculous but great to read.
  • The Arena of the Unwell by Liam Konemann – A coming-of-age novel about male mental health and queerness in the grimy indie music underbelly that retains humour whilst looking at a toxic relationship and the realities of NHS cuts.
  • Shredded: A Sports and Fitness Body Horror Anthology ed. by Eric Raglin – Such a fresh way of viewing both body horror and the whole world of fitness, with a really diverse set of sports, characters, and takes on the brief. There was a lot around who can find places within sports and fitness (and what kinds of bodies), which felt like the perfect use of body horror.
  • Summer Fun by Jeanne Thornton – Truly an epic. Another one where I’m counting the UK publication as making it a 2022 book, this is a complex tale of a trans woman obsessed with 60s band the Get Happiness and their mysterious leader B—. Fascinating look at music, creativity, self, and constructing stories and histories.

The Spite List 2021

fiendfullyreading

I used to always do a yearly ‘spite list’ of the books I hated, but last year I moved to more of a ‘trends/stuff I hated in books’ list, not so much to avoid harshness as just because too many things were just a bit rubbish rather than worthy of proper vitriol. Also then people can just fill in whichever books they hated in that category too. I only count things I’ve actually read, so there’s no spite for the genres I’m not a fan of, or things too terrible for me to pick up. Anyway, the spite:

  • Disappointing / irredeemable / ‘offensive and not even doing it well’ horror – In the year I fully got back into horror books, I also read some duds. Usually it’s books that made some random bad choice (whether narrative/character wise or just like some really off dialogue) and then don’t make up for it or make it work. For one of these books I actually worked out a whole different plot line keeping the same premise that worked much better, though I’ve forgotten it now. But yeah. I want good ‘what the hell’ in horror, not bad ‘what the hell’.
  • Non-fiction that just drags and takes up way too many words to say anything – This is the year I finally actually read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. I’m saying no more.
  • Poetry that just really didn’t click with me – I find it weirdly hard to review poetry beyond ‘I liked this one and this one’ or ‘their writing style really pleases my brain’, but sometimes I read a collection and I just don’t really enjoy any of it. So this award goes out to those books, one of which I gave away in a ‘if you don’t like it keep passing it on, as it did have good reviews’ way.
  • Books that seemed like they might be similar to The Secret History but weren’t – One of my greatest disappointments is when something seems like it might have a good ‘getting weirdly too deep into some kind of academic subject and then it gets weird’ vibe and then it turns out not to be like that. This one is really on me: I should stop assuming books will be like that.
  • Books mentioned in the same breath as Sally Rooney – I really liked Conversations with Friends, I thought Normal People was fine, I didn’t hate reading her new one, but I never have a good time with other hyped books that are mean to fit into a similar space as Sally Rooney. I just tend to find the protagonists frustrating and don’t really get their angst about that somewhat naff office job and complex relationship with an annoying man.

And finally, the real question: what book things I hate will 2022 bring?

My reading trends of 2020

fiendfullyreading

I usually do a ‘spite list’ or something similar, a list of the books I didn’t enjoy in 2020, but considering the year, and the fact I mostly found a lot of books just okay rather than actively bad, I’ve decided to go for something more like a list of general observations (some complaints) about books I read this year. Not really based on what came out this year, just what I happened to read.

  • Disappointing sequels – I should’ve expected this one, as I started the year reading The Testaments when I’m not a huge fan of The Handmaid’s Tale. After that, however, I had sequels to books I did enjoy that were a let down, most notably Mantel’s The Mirror & the Light (which I read a lot of on a transatlantic flight and whilst jetlagged, desperately trying to get through it) and Ali Smith’s Summer (I loved Spring most of the quartet so it was a shame, though a friend reread the other three before reading Summer and said it worked better that way, ready for all the references to the others).
  • Just not that interesting – In-keeping with the general ‘meh’ vibe of a fair few books I read this year, I found that I kept finding books that just didn’t really grip me in any way: not the plot, or the characters, or the writing. There were a good few let down endings, or books that sounded good but turned out to be hard to be bothered to finish.
  • A return to horror – This is very much just what I decided to read, but from October onwards I made a concerted effort to read more horror, both some old Point Horror books and a few more recent ones from a library app. As a teenager I’d progressed from Goosebumps to Point Horror to Stephen King, but I’d fallen off reading anything in recent years  The Point Horror ones in particular were a joy of how enjoyably trash they are, and it’s been nice to get back into horror even if I’m yet to find new stuff that’s really gripped me.
  • Really needing to read some less recent books – Thanks to the year there’s been a lot of books to review this year, and it’s been great in a lot of ways (I don’t normally get much poetry or drama to review at all, and I did get some this year), but I’ve had a backlog to review for much of the year. That meant I couldn’t catch up on my other ‘to read’ books and in particular couldn’t read much that wasn’t from this year or next year, except the odd library ebook that otherwise would’ve been returned unread.
  • Not much that was actively ‘bad’ – I mean, a good thing, but I only gave two books 2 stars this year. One was a naff technology book about digital minimalism and the other was a book about a working class Oxford student befriending an old woman that combined an info dump with some slightly dodgy depictions of class that felt like weird stereotypes. Otherwise, most books were decent, if not mind blowing (the main book in the mind blowing category was Boy Parts, not very original, but as I love the cult American Psycho vibe and the trashy yet pretentious art school vibe, it was wonderful).

What will 2021 bring? A load of pandemic novels? Me buying more secondhand Point Horrors and remembering how little 11-year-old me understood American culture? We’ll just have to see.

My favourite non-2019 books I read in 2019

fiendfullyreading

It always feels unfair to only document my favourite books I read during a year that came out that year, so I’m also listing my favourite catchily-named-non-that-year books, as I did last year and the year before. This year my comments on each may have become a little more facetious, as the actual books got more heavy-going.

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor – The version I read was technically published this year, but seeing as it was published before it’s going here. This is Ovid for the modern day: a 90s LGBT culture shapeshifter story with a picaresque vibe.

The Arsonists by Max Frisch – Thanks to watching Philosophy Tube this year, I discovered not only works of philosophy, but also some more-modern-than-my-early-modern-degree plays, and this one had me sat up reading it in one go. In short, don’t play with fire.

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo – I live-tweeted my response to reading the book I had never read due to irrational dislike until the BBC adaptation tempted me to give it a go. On here because it was actually an enjoyable, if occasionally digressive, experience.

No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre – I said I’d got into 20th century plays (that aren’t just Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead).

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus – Yes, really. Was it not a year for the absurd?

To Save Everything, Click Here by Evgeny Morozov – I keep recommending this or bringing up concepts from it to everyone so it has to go on here. Why finding tech solutions to everything isn’t always the answer.

Hello World by Hannah Fry – My year really was all existentialism or technology. Fry’s account of how algorithms shape our world and what we can do about it is engaging and deeply interesting. Plus it helped me shape some of the articles in our online Digital Wellbeing course.

Radical Technologies by Adam Greenfield – Another one, I know. Each chapter is about a different technology and how it has or might change our world, and it is surprisingly possible to even understand the chapters on blockchain and cryptocurrency (mostly).

My favourite books of 2019

fiendfullyreading

That time again: for reading through lists of books and thinking ‘oh yeah, I did mean to read that this year’. My list seems shorter this year, possibly because I read a lot of decent books that came out this year, but not that many which count as favourites (and you can see the Spite List for the other end of the scale). My favourite books that came out in 2019, in order of when I read them (links to full reviews where written):

Fiction

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes – Another female retelling of the Trojan War, but this time epic in scope and style.

Water Shall Refuse Them by Lucie McKnight Hardy – Eerie heatwave coming of age gothic set in 70s Wales.

Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn – Set between Jamaica and America, this novel tells the story of Patsy and her daughter Tru and their struggles with identity, sexuality, and finding a home.

Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson – Winterson’s retelling of Frankenstein to feature AI, gender, and what is life and death – not always nuanced, but interesting.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong – Lyrical prose about telling your story in Vuong’s debut novel, about trauma, addiction, and growing up.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone – Two rival agents fall in love across the battlegrounds of time in this short novel that seems to have made a lot of people fall in love with it and its two female protagonists, ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’.

Meat Market by Juno Dawson – If you’ve read her previous novel Clean, you won’t be surprised that this is a sharp, sometimes shocking look at the fashion industry, abuse, and teenage models, aimed at but not only for a YA audience.

Birthday by Meredith Russo – Part of this made me cry on a plane, but it’s okay because it has a happy ending – a YA novel about Morgan and Eric, best friends whose love story is told through their shared birthday each year.

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead – A tense novel about a reform school’s corruption and abuse, combining the history of a real institution with a well-plotted narrative.

Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston – What would happen if the son of a female US president realises his rivalry with the Prince of Wales might not be about dislike after all? Everyone raved about this feelgood read and eventually I overcame the monarchy aspect to agree that it is very sweet and funny.

Nonfiction

Underland by Robert Macfarlane – My real surprise of the year was enjoying this account of subterranean travel and thought as much as I did.

The Creativity Code by Marcus du Santoy – What AI can (and can’t) do with creativity, but written in a way that is pretty accessible.

No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference by Greta Thunberg – Must be on so many lists, but it really is powerful and short enough to just give to everyone to read.

Mindf*ck by Christopher Wylie – The story of Cambridge Analytica, from the inside. Brings it all together in a terrifying way (I should add that’s the actual title, I didn’t censor it).

The Spite List

fiendfullyreading1 Comment

Or, the worst books I read in 2019

I didn’t do a proper spite list last year, but I had to do one this time if only for 3 and 5 on this list. Do not fear, my favourite books of the year (both published this year and not) will be following soon to get past the negativity, but for those who prefer spite, here it is. The books I didn’t get on with, in order of when this year I read them:

Microserfs by Douglas Coupland – I used to be really into 90s American fiction, and I currently read a fair bit about tech companies, so I thought this would be up my street. Instead, it turned out to just be boring. Microsoft employees…get fed up of working for Microsoft. Some of it could’ve been amusing with hindsight if I was overwhelmed by how much I didn’t care about any of it.

Miracle Workers by Simon Rich – The premise – two angels need to stop God closing down Earth – sounded, again, like something I might like. The execution, again, was boring, and possibly too amused by its own concept.

Fall, or Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson – Here begins the real spite part of my list. I wrote a review of why I didn’t like this one, but basically, it is far too long, the second half is almost unreadable, and the ideas could have been just as interesting in a fraction of the space. Also I would argue it doesn’t deserve the title at all (but maybe that’s because the title is what made me interested in it). Apparently I shouldn’t have trusted books about any kind of afterlife this year.

The Club by Takis Wurger – I picked this up due to my inability to not read books that promise to be about shady things at Oxbridge (or other elite universities). The few reviews of it should’ve warned me, but it was both not a very interesting example of that not-really-a-genre and used a handful of outdated slurs and ‘no homo’ moments for seemingly no reason (other than presumably avoiding the inherent homoeroticism of all ‘shady things at elite university’ novels).

Find Me by André Aciman – I also wrote a proper review of why I didn’t like this one, but the tl;dr version is: what was the point of this other than trying to cash in on the popularity of Call Me By Your Name and failing? The narratives just feel aimless and I wasn’t sure why I was meant to care.

A Lukewarm Defence of Yet Another TV Adaptation

fiendfullyreading

If you follow my Twitter, you’ll probably know that I just read Les Misérables (in Donougher’s nicely approachable translation). You may have also picked up that I used to hate Les Mis despite never having consumed any media relating to it. And the only reason I went from irrational hatred to picking up what cannot be described as a ‘quick read’ is the recent BBC TV adaption of the book.

Whenever there’s a new TV adaptation of a classic book, there tends to be fuss around how faithful it is, the casting, the directorial choices, and whether we really need more TV adaptations of classic books. There are plenty of other stories to be told, after all. Making more adaptations often seems to just give English teachers more options when they need to show the class a screen version of the text as a treat/bribe/[insert better reason here] (watching the 1970s ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore film at A Level was more of a punishment, to be honest). Fresh adaptations of newer books give more stories a chance and possibly lessen period drama fatigue.

Regardless of this, I seem to be defending to some extent making more of these adaptations of old books. There’s plenty of good reasons to defend them—a chance to update interpretations of the text on screen, lots of old ones are quite bad, can finally make that very faithful or incredibly not faithful version that was needed—but I’m going to go with my personal one: bringing new audiences to books and ideas.

I hated Les Mis because I was on the internet around the time that the film of the musical of the book (must be said like that for full adaptation value) came out. Those who weren’t on the internet around this time may not be aware of quite how many people were obsessive about Les Mis. There was endless debate, screenshots, jokes, calling it ‘The Brick’ like everyone knew exactly what you meant, being obsessed with characters who turn up a long way in and then die not a huge number of pages later, and the songs. Oh, the songs. I hadn’t even heard the songs, but I felt like I had.

So I hated it. I don’t like musicals so that felt like justification, but really it was the fact so many people wouldn’t shut up about it. I lived my life for a number of years happy in my dislike of it. I had no interest in the news there was a TV adaptation. In fact, one of the main reasons I was willing to try watching it was because I spend a lot of time around people who study the eighteenth and early nineteenth century who were also going to give it a go, and they said the first episode was good. So I watched it. And it was.

Now, I don’t care if you think it was a good adaptation or a good piece of drama or what the hell was that font. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that I enjoyed it, hooked on the story and Javert’s endless “Jean Valjean!” and the fact there was less dialogue than there was David Oyelowo and Dominic West glaring and doing a lot of silent acting at each other. And because I enjoyed it, I gave up my irrational dislike and a few months later, actually read the book.

I conclude my lukewarm defence of all these damn classic book screen adaptations by saying maybe it doesn’t matter if people read these books or get into them, but at least the adaptations are ways people can get into these stories which are often referenced in other places and are also ripe for reworking and retelling in updated and interesting ways. Though that is venturing worryingly far into saying adaptations are good for creating the kind of annoying fandom that made me hate Les Mis in the first place.

The holiday book conundrum

fiendfullyreading

There’s no good way to start a post about going on holiday without sounding like you’re showing off, or so I’ve decided in the past five minutes. Regardless, I am going on holiday in a week, and I have a big decision to make. One that may change my entire life (with a little imagination). Which book should I take with me?

Plenty of books are marketed as ‘holiday reads’. The phrase conjures for me an image of thick paperbacks you might take on the beach, in whichever genre you may like best. Lots of thrillers seem to be touted as travel companions, presumably in case your holiday is so rubbish you need escapism. Articles suggest recent popular books that you might want to catch up on now that you’ve got some time away from the daily grind. A quick Google brought up Waterstones’ page of ‘holiday reads’, which seem to have the defining feature of being books that exist (actually, they’re paperback books that exist, for easier packing I assume).

None of this helps my decision. I’m only going for a few days and only taking a backpack so the book must be singular. There’s not likely to be much reading time, but I still want to take a book. My previous two cheap European city break holidays don’t offer much inspiration. When I went to Rome as an undergrad I took the major works of Byron so I could continue reading Don Juan (and did sit on the top bunk in a shared room in a comic book themed hostel reading it). I don’t remember which book I took to Berlin (a hunt through our holiday photos and a bit of squinting reveals it was Steppenwolf), but I know I bought a Reclam copy of A Clockwork Orange with endearing German footnotes. I could read something related to my location, but I’ve already read a few Czech books in translation thanks to having a Czech friend and I’ve been reading Kafka as some kind of pre-holiday homework.

image

With this in mind, here are my thoughts on what may make the best holiday reads:

  • A book that doubles up as something else – With baggage restrictions and limited space, you need a Swiss army knife of a book. Either something thin that could also be a fan, or something hefty that could be a doorstop or a weapon.
  • A book featuring characters visiting exciting locations that aren’t the one you’re in – Then you get two holidays: the one you’re on and the one you’re getting vicariously through a novel.
  • A book listing the best holiday reads – Would take the decision away, meaning you can just flick through pages looking at what you could be reading.