Month: December 2018

Considering that 2018 took about 10 years to finish, it should come as no surprise that I ended up finishing over 60 books. That’s not necessarily that big a number, but it’s the most I’ve read in years – or at least since I kept track of this sort of thing. As an ironic counterpoint, though, since 2018 was a year filled with anxiety, dread, and depression, I made it a point to try to emphasize quality over quantity. Anything that didn’t immediately grab me, I put down. Fortunately, most of what I read this year was excellent.

The other thing, with respect to everything I read this year, is that I tried my damnedest to expand my reading horizons beyond primarily white cis men. I read more women this year than I think I ever have before, and I read more than a few books translated from other languages.  I say this not to earn a pat on the back; I’m just saying it because it’s true.  

An earlier draft of this post was going to have a few words on every single book I read or attempted to read, but I soon realized that wouldn’t be fun for anybody.  So I’m gonna condense a bit on focus on the highlights.

Next up was Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon, which was enjoyable even if it never quite lived up to my hopes for it.  (I’m not sure anything will ever top The Gone Away World, which is one of my all-time favorites, but if anybody can do it, I’d like to think he could.)   Then there was Void Star, which I sadly couldn’t get into – I would like to give it another shot – the premise is really interesting – but the writing was almost too poetic and flimsy.

At some point I decided to dip back into my backlog and finally read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and, well, yeah, that book is incredible.  I followed that up with some earlier George Saunders that I’d never gotten around to – In Persuasion Nation and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.  (This was, as it turns out, the beginning of this year’s infatuation with short story collections – I also finally got around to Laird Barron’s The Imago Sequence.)  I should also note that the afterword in CivilWarLand is one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever read.

And then I read The Sky Is Yours by Chandler Klang Smith, a fun bit of world-building with three great and distinct characters; Tim Wirkus’ The Infinite Future, which never quite delivered what it promised; A.J. Finn’s The Woman In The Window, which is a fun homage of Rear Window that will certainly make for a fun movie; and then The Gone World, which is a time-traveling murder mystery which gets buried under its own flowery prose.

And then we got to Red Sparrow, which was the year’s first book I deliberately and angrily put down and refused to finish.  Shitty premise, shitty writing.

At this point I needed to cleanse my palate a bit and decided to re-read the first two mega-epics in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive, so as to then read Edgedancer (a mini-novel that bridges the gap between book 2 and book 3) and then Oathbringer.  I appreciate Sanderson’s prolific nature, and his world-building continues to be among the best in the business, but that’s 3500+ pages of nonstop Sanderson and I definitely needed a palate cleanser.

So I read a bunch of short fiction.  Samantha Hunt’s The Dark Dark was not quite what I thought it was going to be, but it was really quite good; Stephen King’s The Outsider was a really good way of bridging the gap between his procedural Bill Hodges trilogy and his usual supernatural horror; Fuminori Nakamura’s The Thief was a very interesting and brief philosophical meditation on pickpocketing.

I finally got around to reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which was staggering.  It didn’t necessarily knock me out the way it did for friends of mine, but it’s still quite something.

I think I wrote here earlier this summer about Phenomena, Annie Jacobsen’s non-fiction account of the US Government’s research into paranormal activity, which is definitely the sort of thing that scratches certain itches of mine.  It’s a fantastic read, well researched and full of remarkable revelations.

At this point I started moving to some darker fiction.  Joe Hill’s Strange Weather is probably the best stuff he’s written – at any rate, I do think I prefer his short fiction to his novels.  Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin At the End of the World is seriously fucked up, which is to be expected from Tremblay.  Harold Schechter’s Hell’s Princess is a lurid and morbid true-crime story that never quite arrived at any conclusions, which kinda defeated the book’s purpose.  The Price You Pay, which is written by “Aiden Truhen” (a pseudonym that might belong to Nick Harkaway) is essentially what the Crank movies would look like if they were books.  V.E. Schwab’s Viscious was, well, viscious – I do need to get to the sequel.  Arkady Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic is a perfect example of why reading books from other cultures – especially science fiction – is so necessary.  Laura van den Berg’s The Third Hotel did not quite wow me as much as I’d hoped it would, but it was remarkably surreal – as was Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, which is exactly what it sounds like.

I’m trying to keep things moving along but I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention David Demchuk’s The Bone Mother, a super-spooky collection of dark stories, and Karen Dionne’s The Marsh King’s Daughter, which was deep and dark and moody and absorbing.

I was one of the many who got sucked into the Netflix adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, but I made sure to read the book first.  I understand why fans of the book hate some of the choices that were made in the series; I still liked them both.

Emma Donaghue’s The Wonder was fantastic, and I can only wonder how I’d react to it if I weren’t a parent.  There’s certainly a straight line running between this and her earlier Room, to be sure.

Tana French’s The Witch Elm was a refreshing break from her Dublin Murder Squad books; it also might be one of the best things she’s written.  Likewise, Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore was much better than the last few books he’s written, though it suffers from some of the same weird tics he’s developed (i.e., super-creepy attempts at erotica, passive protagonists, etc.). 

I also got to Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, which I liked, though I’m not quite sure the third section held together for me; I also suppose I need to start reading Philip Roth (I have three of his books in my to-read list, of course).  And Ling Ma’s Severance got quite a lot of end-of-year hype, and for good reason; I’ve read quite a lot of apocalyptic fiction in my time but this was a unique take on it. 

All in all, this was a tremendous year for reading; there wasn’t much that I didn’t like, and even the lesser things in my pile were very quickly devoured.  If there’s one good thing about living in a nightmare, it’s that I’m very easily distracted, and nothing helps the time go by like getting lost in a ton of great books.