January 2022 Book Reviews

I post reviews to Twitter and Instagram within a day of finishing a book. Here are the books I read in January.

The Etched City by KJ Bishop

A surrealist celebration of violent, beautiful squalor set in a unique, densely textured swamp city with more opium dens than hospitals. More fantasy should draw from Decadent lit & art like this book does.

This story and its city, Ashamoil, sit comfortably alongside Harrison’s Viriconium, Mieville’s Bas Lag, and VanderMeer’s Ambergris, all of which I’ve really enjoyed for their pure imaginative strangeness if not for their prose (this is a Mieville jab). I hate using this description because it’s so overused, but the city is certainly a character here — almost moreso than the actual main characters — and I have a real appreciation for this kind of lived-in setting, where you can feel all the life happening outside the frame.

It’s a pretty psychedelic story, full of wild images: A lotus blooms from a man’s navel. An artist’s work develops from the grotesque to the depraved. A priest hatches butterflies from his palms. A widower gets revenge with an axe that fills its wounds with flowers. But even with all its capital-w Weird trappings, The Etched City is ultimately an intimate portrayal of flawed people seeking some kind of absolution, of facing their violent pasts and trying to move toward something better.

The language gets a little overblown sometimes, and some of the Gen X sideshow goth vibes haven’t aged all that well. But this is a pretty remarkable first novel, and I’m surprised it hasn’t stayed in the weird fiction conversation like some of its contemporaries.

Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami

It’s tough to describe a Murakami novel without simplifying it to the point of absurdity. Like you could say Dance Dance Dance is about a bad writer solving murders with the help of a 13-year-old psychic, and you’d be right, kind of. But this novel, like other Murakami I’ve read, is so much more (and less?) than you think. On the surface, not much happens — the unnamed narrator travels, hooks up, hangs out — but there’s a supernatural mystery humming along beneath it all.

This is my favorite kind of detective story: an ordinary person (i.e. not a cop) stumbles into something strange and feels compelled to work it in a sort of shaggy adventure. There’s a lot of humor and Lynchian dreaminess in this version of that story, and I’m here for it. I read and really loved 1Q84 last year, and while I think that book is better, they certainly share a lot of DNA. Murakami’s writing is so direct and accessible that it makes the grounded elements feel very real and all the weird shit just sings. I really dig it.

The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Infodump: this is the sequel to the most annoying book I read last year, and while all the things that annoyed me about the first book are still here, I’ve decided I do actually like it.

The thing about all the exposition in the first book is that it’s coming from a dyed-in-the-wool loner, someone who spends far more time talking to herself than anyone else, so you could read the constant infodump as an angry kid just trying to make sense of a bad situation. There’s a point in The Last Graduate where the narrator, El, takes one of her regular soliloquy breaks in the middle of a conversation and her friend calls her out for it. There are other points where people gently remind her that no one is thinking about her as much as she assumes.

This is really a book about a bunch of kids breaking out of their silos (and pseudo caste system) & coming together for a greater purpose, and it’s nice to see how that reshapes the narration. It’s still kind of annoying, but I’ve accepted that’s probably more on me than Novik. I don’t mean to damn this book with faint praise, but it’s, like, pretty good. Did it blow my mind? Not really. But it’s well-structured, emotionally honest, fun and often funny — a great way to spend a sick day. I’ll take it.

I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins

I’m having a hard time sorting out how I feel about this book. I liked reading it a lot — the desert setting, the dark humor and touches of weirdness, the overlapping family history. It’s a good book. But do I like it?

This is a fictionalized version of Watkins’ decision to break out of her bougie tenured writer’s life and return to the Nevada desert where she was born. It’s autofictional–the narrator is Watkins herself, the family history her own. But it’s not a memoir. This is warts-and-all storytelling, an unflattering self-portrait I’m sure has already been called “brave” (there’s even a meta joke about it). And while I appreciate the honesty, it’s tough to root for a successful novelist who abandons her family to fuck around in the desert.

Maybe that’s the point? To use a wrestling metaphor, this is a kayfabe story and Watkins herself is playing the heel. The thing she wants isn’t the morally correct thing — she has “chosen darkness,” and on some level we all have to respect that, even if it sucks. I don’t think Watkins should have written herself to be more likeable — it’s important for female characters (and writers) to be able to be unrepentant dirtbags, too. And her shittiness does not go unexamined here, even if it’s ultimately embraced on some level. If it makes me uncomfortable, it’s probably because I see my own shittiness in Claire, too — the parts of myself I have the hardest time accepting. Sometimes you have to be the heel in your story, and there’s power in that.