2021 Book Review Roundup

Since July of this year I’ve been writing short reviews of every book I finish and posting them to Twitter and Instagram. Some get more attention than others — and I am always excited to talk about books and give recommendations — but I’ve mostly done it to push myself to quickly and critically respond to the work I consume. As I’ve settled into this habit my reviews have grown in length and I have grown less self-conscious about my critical voice — a great feeling. Here they are, in chronological order.

Notes:
I buy most of my books used from thrift stores, but when I purchase new books I try to buy directly from independent booksellers as much as possible, or at least from bookshop.org, which supports indie stores. This year I’ve bought from Atomic Books and Normals in Baltimore, Book Moon in Easthampton, and Thank You and Little Professor in Birmingham.

Here are some of my favorites from earlier in the year:
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
Circe by Madeline Miller
A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Somatar
Little, Big by John Crowley
Tapping Out by Nandi Comer
Hold Me, Gorilla Monsoon by Colette Arrand

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

This one’s a chunker so it took me a while to get through it, but I finished it this morning. I’m not usually in the right zone for hard sci-fi or climate fiction like this but when it hits it hits. Robinson uses multiple points of view and a couple of complex, interesting central characters to tell a massive — literally global — story without it feeling like a world building notebook. But the research is totally there, too — and it’s astounding.

Coming out of a serious bout with anxiety and immediately reading a long novel about climate change was maybe not a great choice, but this is by far the most hopeful, near-utopian work of climate fiction I’ve ever read. Even though I’ve enjoyed (and added to) the recent wave of apocalyptic speculative fiction, this book’s eco-futurist voice is positively energizing, and I hope we see a lot more fiction with this kind of measured optimism and wild imagination in its wake.

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

Inherent Vice is a very shaggy neo-noir about a hippie PI and a lot of stuff happens but I’m not sure I could explain any of it. At points it feels very much like a distinctly Pynchon take on a Big Lebowski kind of story (which arguably tend to be Pynchonesque to begin with), where the dense plot is almost more of a setting for goofy character moments.

On the whole I liked it, but I had a hard time getting really into it so it took me like two months to get through. I could see the second or third reading being more rewarding, though, so this might be one I need to come back to.

And Go Like This by John Crowley

Crowley’s Little, Big was one of the best books I read this year (also in my entire life) so it was really interesting to read this collection of stories from the other end of his career, mostly from the last 10 years, published by the always-excellent Small Beer Press. These stories feel very personal, the first and last pieces in particular, which seem to flirt with autobiography. There’s Shakespeare, New England, academia, people dealing with disability and aging. There’s also a great little horror story about a killer librarian.

The writing is just stellar. Crowley writes with such an ease and clarity that the pages turn themselves. This was a really perfect palate cleanser after a bit of a slog through Pynchon. The real collection highlight is the last story, “Anosognosia,” a sort of alternate personal history told with a Twilight Zone device that hit me like a lightning bolt. I won’t spoil it but for me this story alone was worth the cover price.

Dark Entries by Robert Aickman

Feeling the Halloween spirit before October even hits with Aickman’s Dark Entries, a 1964 collection of strange tales, all of which fuckin’ slap. These stories really hit the horror sweet spot for me — foreboding houses, mysterious phenomena, complex eroticism. In each one, flawed protagonists trap themselves in cages of their own making, with evocative endings that decline to provide any answers.

I first read this collection a couple of years ago and it’s well worth the re-read. For me, the best horror is almost never about surprise or shock, but atmosphere and dread. It feels great to slip back into each of these micro-hells.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

After starting slow and reading just a chapter or two a day, I got sucked in and finished the back half of this one this morning. Can’t believe I’d never read it before because it’s incredible. You’ve read “The Lottery”: this is better.

On the surface this is such a straightforward story: the Blackwood family got poisoned–who did it, and why? But Jackson has zero interest in making the story about that mystery, instead turning it into a brooding contemplation on wealth, class, and family. Merricat Blackwood is a singular, fascinating POV character, her anxious narration steeped in a personal kind of folkloric magic that only occasionally becomes explicit. It’s a master class in first-person writing.

One of the things I love most is the villain: instead of some supernatural ghoul borne from the Blackwood sisters’ dark secret, it’s bourgeois mundanity come calling, intruding into their magical realm and trying to control it.

I put off reading this book for a long time because I thought I already knew its deal from references and adaptations. But I was wrong — nothing compares to reading it. Just a fantastic (and fast) novel. Can’t wait to read it again.

The People in the Castle by Joan Aiken

I started reading this collection as soon as it came in the mail and it felt like I had just opened every window in my house on a perfect fall day (maybe because that’s also what I actually did). I hadn’t read any of Aiken’s work previously, but a cool drawing of a castle and a Kelly Link introduction go a long way for me. I expected a bunch of seasonably spooky stories, but I got something different and better than that.

These are definitely stories in the strange tales vein, but with way more emphasis on true strangeness than the horror structures that typify the genre. Almost all of these could be horror stories, but Aiken always swerves into something more intimate — even heartwarming. Even the dark endings are funny or emotionally satisfying — villains get theirs, the lost find their way, death comes and isn’t so frightening.

They’re still weird stories, though, truly imaginative and evocative, each story with its own bizarre world peeking through every lovely sentence. The writing is impeccable — clear, concise, accessible but still beautiful. What a great book.

The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox

On paper this book has everything I look for in speculative fiction — libraries, mythology, demons, etc. — so much so that I accidentally bought it twice during a book buying spree a few months ago.

There are a lot of interesting ideas here about the nature of the supernatural, morality, heroism, even environmental stewardship, packaged as a far-ranging adventure. The best parts are the ones that highlight the ideas through dialogue; the action sequences get kind of murky.

It’s a thick book, a pretty quick read, and I generally enjoyed it. But I didn’t get a whole lot out of it — it’s more of a beach book for middle aged mythology nerds than the stranger/more literary stories I’ve been into lately (see Aiken, Crowley, Jackson, et al for that). If you’re into urban fantasy, Welsh/Norse/Arthurian mythology, demon boners, and faerie types doing wild magic shit, it’s definitely a good time.

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

I ripped through this collection. Chiang’s work scratches a really specific itch — each story an incredibly well-considered thought experiment, in some ways the most literally speculative fiction I’ve ever read. And I don’t call them thought experiments as a slight. My favorite part of philosophy of mind has always been this kind of puzzle: what is it like to be a bat, the coffee drinkers, philosophical zombies and homunculi.

Chiang gives us the best of that kind of inquiry while still writing affecting, humanist stories. Yes, we’re considering the cultural ramifications of time travel or AI or quantum universes, but always from the perspective of real, flawed human beings.

For me, this is what makes great speculative fiction: a commitment to exploring an idea by creating empathetic characters who experience it. It’s their story, not the idea’s. Chiang knows that and so pushes the form in a stunning, surprisingly emotional direction.

Middlegame by Seanan McGuire

I picked this up at the thrift store over the weekend, read the first 20 pages while I was still in the store, then kept reading it before I had even finished the other book I had going. “Page-turner” doesn’t quite do it justice: this is good shit.

I recognized McGuire’s name because she’s made a habit of cleaning up at the Locus/Nebula/et al awards the last few years, and while those awards don’t necessarily line up with my taste I know they don’t hand them out to just anybody. And look at that cover — obviously my vibe.

It’s a solid urban fantasy setup: alchemists try to gain power by embodying the universal building blocks of language and math in a pair of twins, separated at birth but impossible to keep apart. This leads to a lot of problems and some pretty neat time-twisting plotting. It avoids some of the pitfalls of other fantasy stories in this vein (i.e. The Magicians series) by finding the story in a lovingly rendered, realistically complex sibling relationship more than the external circumstances surrounding it.

If The Absolute Book (which I thought was fine but not great) is a beach book for middle-aged mythology nerds, this is one for 30-something recovering academics/occultism nerds, and I feel seen. So it’s probably not for everybody, but it’s definitely for me. What a blast.

Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer

I went in blind and this one surprised me. A tight, tense, noirish mystery that still has a lot of time for Jeff VanderMeer’s major themes — human impact on nature, culture in decline, Weird Shit™. I’m not a VanderMeer completist, but his Southern Reach trilogy had a massive impact on my taste & writing during a crucial development period. While I’ve enjoyed his other work (both pre- and post-Southern Reach), it hasn’t always hit the same way. But this book came very close.

While there are some clear speculative elements here, it’s a dark, violent mystery first, which I love. Chandler & Pynchon may be obvious references, but I’m also getting O’Connor & Faulkner, reminding me of underrated southern crime writers like Tom Franklin and John Biguenet.

VanderMeer is great at writing interesting, morally complex narrators who give the reader a view into totally alien worlds. The difference — and strength — here is how grounded and believable Hummingbird’s world is, while still being a massive departure from the narrator’s daily life.
This book doesn’t have the fireworks of Annihilation or the outre weirdness of the Ambergris stories, but does an incredible job of telling an intricate, exciting, grounded story with light but fascinating speculative touches, and that’s a lot harder to pull off. Killer book.

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

I don’t think I’ve ever been this annoyed by a book that I still felt compelled to keep reading. I think I ultimately liked it–not without reservations, but definitely without embarrassment because being embarrassed about a book is lame.

First, an admission: I have a serious weakness for the Magic School subgenre. Maybe because I also have a weakness for School as a life subgenre. I appreciate the school in this book being an adult-free deathtrap, and the cynical, pessimistic narrator is a fun window into it. That said, the narration is also the most obnoxious part of the book–half lengthy interior monologue, half extended infodump. Like, this is the most exposition I’ve ever seen in a book, and it keeps going right up to the end. No one needs this much explaining, ever. This is a really specific and fairly unique setting, so I can understand some amount of world-building as necessary to make the plot points hit, but if this was a third-person story that stuck to the action it would be like thirty pages long.

But even though I’m not a world-building fan, there’s clearly a lot of thought going into it, the world is darkly charming, and the main characters show signs of real depth once they start interacting. I ripped through it, even if I was rolling my eyes half the time.

So, did I have fun? Yes. Will I read the sequel that just came out? …maybe? I’m interested to see how the story progresses, and if it leans on the existing exposition instead of reiterating or heaping more on top, I could see it being a better novel. We’ll see.