Partial information: Top 10 or 13 books of my year
Special midweek (i.e. I didn't bother to edit it carefully) post
Favorite comics were here; this is everything else. Usual caveat that I am about a year behind when I’m not fifty years behind.
NOVELS
1. Arkady Martine: A Memory Called Empire/A Desolation Called Peace
Memory was the most assured SF debut since maybe The Only Ones, while the more ambitious sequel Desolation wasn’t quite as perfect but might end up being more valuable. It’s intriguing and refreshing how much of the plot is driven by conversations between characters with partial information (including characters occupying the same head)—kind of like Henry James in space, except Isabel Archer never had to talk to someone from a species whose method of communication made her literally throw up (okay, maybe Caspar Goodwood.) The lived-in world Martine builds is very streaming series-ready, so read the prose before it gets bang banged.
2. David Diop: At Night All Blood Is Black (tr. Anna Moschovakis)
Short, extremely brutal novel about Senegalese soldiers in World War I. The protagonist’s oral-like storytelling is a compelling vehicle for his narrative of disembowelment and dismemberments and maybe worse. It resists moral analysis: well, war is dehumanizing, but you knew that.
3. Silvia Moreno-Garcia: Mexican Gothic
The main reason this holds up well next to the 19th century Goth classics is the protagonist. Mexico City debutante Noemí is spirited, spunky, and a little spoiled: uh oh, looks like someone’s going to learn a lesson by the end of the book! (As an educator I must note that making someone live in a haunted house with their culty sex pest in-laws is not an evidence-based pedagogical strategy.)
4. Damon Galgut: The Promise
Off-brand Coetzee can still be pretty good. In his tale of terrible things happening to a terrible-but-not-entirely-so Afrikaner family, Galgut tries to make up for some thematic heavy-handedness (gee I wonder what the Swart’s multigenerational dodging of responsibility to their Black former servant could be an allegory for) by being darkly funny rather than merely bewilderingly ironic. He mostly succeeds, especially as the series of funerals devolves from sacred ritual to a yoga guy hijacking the service of a non-yoga guy he hated.
5. Andrei Bely: The Symphonies (tr. Jonathan Stone)
Four “poetic” works from the 1900s (preceding Petersburg, which I intend to get to some time this decade) that propose four distinct excuses for overwriting, getting away with three of them. “Goblet of Blizzards” does go on a bit.
SFF SHORT STORIES
Nadia Afifi: The Bahrain Underground Bazaar
Catherynne M. Valente: The Sin of America/The Past Is Red/L’esprit de l’escalier
Suzan Palumbo: Laughter Among the Trees
Suzanne Palmer: Bots of the Lost Ark
Meg Elison: The Revolution Will Not Be Served with Fries/The Pizza Boy
Lyndsie Manusos: How to Burn Down the Hinterlands
Martha Wells: Fugitive Telemetry
John Wiswell: That Story Isn’t the Story
Caroline M. Yoachim: Colors of the Immortal Palette
E.A. Petricone: We, the Girls Who Did Not Make It
Also I hope there are enough female authors on that list for me to say that the Philip K. Dick Selected Stories is remarkably consistent.
NONFICTION
1. Ada Ferrer: Cuba: An American History
I’m no expert, but this very much gives the appearance of being scrupulously fair, so that axe-grinders of diverse ideologies are already using this as a sharpening stone. Especially vivid on the Spanish-American War (I knew it wasn’t exactly an act of altruism by the U.S.A., but Ferrer convincingly paints it as one of many times Cuba’s longed-for independence was snatched from it) and on contextualizing the rise of Castro (as with so many Great Men, it was pretty random.)
2. Melissa Febos: Girlhood
Pretty good mix of theory, memoir, criticism, and creative writing that gets really good when discussing her own girlhood. Add early puberty to the long list of conditions that can make being female in America uncomfortable-to-terrifying. The one about cuddle parties runs too long and she repeatedly brings up her time as a dominatrix like Al Bundy telling you about scoring four touchdowns in one game, but there are plenty of ideas worth engaging with, and her prose suggests all those Iowa MFAs are in better hands than I thought.
3. Michael Osterholm & Mark Olshaker: Deadliest Enemy
4. Martin Ford: Rule of the Robots
The good part of my big existential risk review (aside from expressing reservations about longtermism at the last possible moment before they became obvious) was the pandemics stuff. The AI section is already one chatbot out of date.
5. Eric Weisbard: Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music
If nothing else, those of us (“us”) in the crit biz have to hat-tip this as a piece of scholarship. You can argue with his emphases (major historians Jeffrey Melnick and Jody Rosen share half a paragraph), and the average interestingness of the books drops once non-academics start finding it hard to pitch anything longer than a 33 1/3, but there’s no shortage of entries—especially by Black writers—that made me go oooh, I want to read that, and it’ll be a years-long project to do so. So far: Blues People holds up great, who knew? Okay, you all did, but you didn’t tell me about James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which to me seems like one of the major American novels of its time. It has some music in it.
AVANT-WHATEVER
Tan Lin: Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004.
“As we all know, poetry and the novel should aspire not to the condition of music but to the condition of relaxation and yoga. A lot of people think great poems should be memorized. As anyone who has ever read a painting will tell you [like Ed Ruscha], paintings, like poems, are most beautiful [and least egotistical] at the exact moment in which they are forgotten, like disco and other Four on the Floor Productions.”
POEMS
I didn’t read that much non-Auden poetry this year, but the best of Diane Seuss’s Sonnets (“The famous poets came for us”; “The White Rabbit was before the high rise”; “The problem with sweetness is death”) were very strong.
PERSONAL BOOK OF THE YEAR
Three months ago I called Ingeborg Bachmann’s Three Paths to the Lake one of the great postwar short story collections and I’ve struck out since trying to think of a better one. Maybe the big selected Munro although I haven’t read that for yonks.