This is a shallow dip into some the things I’ve read and loved this year. Most of it was published well before this year, so it’s not at all a ‘best of 2019’ post, just a reflection of what I’ve been drawn to and influenced by during these twelve months, the books I think will have most effect on me and my writing in the year to come.
The Wormwood trilogy (Rosewater, Rosewater Resurrection and Rosewater Redemption) -Tade Thompson
I’m not the only one to feel like this trio of books is a game changer for the genre. Alien invasion in a future Nigeria, with an exploration of consciousness from multiple points of view and it is so pacey I felt a little breathless as I turned the pages towards the end of each book. I was enthralled by the way Thompson challenges the reader- he never apologies and never explains and the result is a more immersive, thought-provoking world.
Rivers of London- Ben Aaronovitch
I discovered this series this year and hunted down each book until I was up to date, and now I’ve got the next instalment on reserve at the library. How to count the things I loved? The folklore, the magical creatures, the smart dialogue, the impeccable plotting, the depictions of my beloved home city, which I moved away from this year? These books feel like the creamiest of lasagnas to me: delicious and so easy to digest but nourishing for body and soul too.
A Scots Quair- Lewis Grassic Gibbon
I’ve written about this trilogy before, but it just blew me away. It’s got a kind of rhythm that seamlessly evokes the landscape and the social world of rural Scotland in the early twentieth century. The first book, A Sunset Song, was the one that snagged at me most. The story of Chris Guthrie, a young girl growing up the daughter of sad, proud parents who then becomes the wife of a proud man made sad by war trauma. The way Grassic Gibbon invites the reader into the text, implicates you in the beaten down, but still luminous world he writes of is so beautiful. This will be a re-read in years to come.
Flight Behaviour- Barbara Kingsolver
This is a book about climate change, environmentalism and rural communities that seems to have predicted the conversations we’re having now about privilege, opportunity and climate chaos. It came out in 2012 but the politics of how we talk about climate justice, and what different people perceive to be just is precisely right for now. The North American continent’s population of monarch butterflies has migrated to the wrong place, almost certainly due to climate breakdown, and when Dellarobia Turnbow becomes involved with studying them it changes her life. Fiction, for me, has always been a kind of empathy practice, a way of seeing - or, really, feeling - a situation from another’s point of view, and often many points of view at the same time. This book made it clear to me just how many competing interests there are stopping us from really addressing our environmental woes at a systemic level and has given me a lot of ways to think about my privilege.
Under Milk Wood- Dylan Thomas
I bought this book and then I listened to a recording of it while reading along and it stunned me. I’ve been listening to radio plays for the past couple of years, finding a lot of pleasure in the way I experience the narrative with a different part of my brain to when I read a novel, but this now seems to me the gold standard. I keep getting the book out to look again at the way he uses words - this special ability poets seem to have, to place words in just the right way to make their sense and sound sing together. Lines like these: ‘…the sloeback, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat bobbing sea’ make me swoon.
Middlemarch - George Eliot
This was one of those canonical books I often saw referenced and always intended to read one day, when I got around to it, when I felt as though I had the headspace to be able to dedicate to such a long, complex, involved novel. I suppose books choose you as much as you choose them; sometimes it feels like they come along at exactly the right moment for them to move you, sometimes it feels like they completely pass you by and you put them down wondering what all the fuss is about. I read this at exactly the right time in my life to appreciate it, although it’s the kind of book that will have wisdom to offer whenever you encounter it. There is so much tenderness in my empathy for Dorothea Brooke’s naive expectations of her marriage, the timelessness of her disappointment and her determination to live by her decisions. I think this is due to Eliot’s own tenderness towards her characters, the gentle way she presents all their complexity. The inhabitants of her provincial town are some of the most ‘real’ I have found on the page. I will re-read this one day and I know I’ll find more to chew on inside its pages as it grows with me.
Underland - Robert Macfarlane
I had this on reserve at the library for ages before I got the front of the queue and it didn’t disappoint. We’re forever looking up at our world (although we might be forgiven, there’s just so much to look up at) in wonder, but this book has made me think about what I might miss if I don’t look down. Mycelial networks, catacombs under Paris and the poetics of burying nuclear waste, this felt like nature writing of the future; the human impact on our planet, the nature of the anthropocene.