I feel like I’m a person who reads a lot, but when I look back over all my reading notes for the year, I don’t find as many books as I expect. Reading this year has been, as always, a refuge and a time in my own head, away from my toddler, my baby and the endless laundry pile. This is a selection of things I’ve loved this year - quite a few blockbusters and recent releases and not as many independently published books as I’d like, but something to fix next year. Reading goals: as good a new year’s resolution as any and better than most!
Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.
This was the first book I read this year and it’s one I keep returning to as I’ve read news items, a rather simplistic thought echoing in my mind, ‘well, if they’d just read this book, they’d know how to do it.’ It’s not utopian, it’s highly realistic but there is also a fierce and passionate optimism too and a belief that humankind and our more-than-human kin could make a better society on this planet and figure out a way through climate change. I was also deeply interested in the structure of it, the way it focused on different characters to tell a wider story and the concepts it explained. It challenged narrative ideas of a novel and I loved that.
Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann
Puckish, interestingly structured, beautifully written and totally unique, I read this on a rare solo train journey and as I sped through the East Anglian countryside on my way between London and Norwich I could not tear myself away.
The Love Songs of WEB Du Bois by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
The best multi-generational family saga I have read in a while, maybe ever. Just beautiful and I have recommended it to all my reader friends and family.
Saint Death’s Daughter by CSE Cooney
I love books like this, ones that are in love with words and their meanings and sounds, the more baroque the better. This has the added benefits of a thrilling world of lore, a wonderfully discursive style that delights in footnotes and asides and is generally an antidote to all those who say ‘less is more’. No, more is more and it’s great.
Gideon, Harrow and Nona the Ninth of the Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir
VERY late to the party on this series, but that’s the wonderful thing about wonderful books; they stay wonderful no matter when you read them. These books are going to have be re-read at some point because they are so intricately plotted that I know I’ve missed most of what’s going on. Although I’m not massively optimistic that I’ll grasp all the clues on a second reading, at least I’ll be able to appreciate the razor sharp wit again and try to see how on earth she does it.
Babel by RF Kuang
Translation, empire, the courage to go against all you’ve known… I inhaled this. A perfect alternate history in my opinion and a great example of using speculative fiction to tell the truth about a matter.
Liberation Day by George Saunders
What strikes me always about Saunders’ work is the radical empathy of it. It’s something I strive for in my own writing, to dwell in the grey of things, to think deeply about morality and concepts of good and bad. You feel so strongly that Saunders cares about the people he writes about in all their glorious ordinariness and the result is a complex but somehow warm and caring reading experience that leaves you better after the last page.