Books of 2023

1) Good Pop, Bad Pop– Jarvis Cocker
★★★★★

Jarvis clears out his loft, takes photos of various interesting junk items, and then uses each one as a springboard to talk about various periods of his life and work. Short, drily funny and really well done.

2) Lost in the Moment and Found– Seanan McGuire
★★★★☆

I’ve read most of this novella series and they’re a bit of a mixed bag. Some are really great (the one inspired by Christina Rossetti) and others are really rushed and nothingy. All of them take the same format: a child, normally a girl, faces some kind of social or family problem and escapes to a fantasy land, but there are far more consequences to that than your typical children’s book. Some of the stories can feel very tick-listy like “let’s do issue X today”.

This one was a very solid story though with some lovely writing: Antoinette’s father dies of a heart attack while they are in the supermarket, and a predatory stepfather soon moves in, causing her to run away, finding herself in a magical lost and found shop. However there’s a price to be paid in how time passes…

So like I said this is a really nice solidly written story you can read in an evening.

3) The Dispossessed– Ursula K. Le Guin (re-read)
★★★★★

A re-read of one of my all-time favourites- The Dispossessed by Ursula le Guin after recommending the series to a friend. The whole series uses anthropology as an underpinning to sci-fi. In this case exploring what life would be like in an anarchist society based entirely on Mutual Aid with no concept of money, and how someone from that society would adapt to life under capitalism. That makes it sound like a dry politics textbook, but it’s not, like the rest of Le Guin’s books it’s a beautifully written lyrical story.

200 years before the book’s setting, anarchist revolutionaries left their original world to create a new colony on the planet’s moon. Shevek is an idealistic young scientist, raised in this society apparently without money or hierarchies, who slowly becomes more and more disillusioned with the ways people still find to play power games and stifle creativity or originality in this apparently egalitarian and free society. He travels back to the original planet to take part in an important scientific research project that could revolutionise space travel, but has to learn how to survive in capitalism and avoid being caught up in an entirely different kind of political power grab. 12/10 you should read this. (The audio book version is really bad though).

It’s actually available to read in its entirety online here. (Scroll to the bottom of the page for downloadable file versions).

4) A Fisherman of the Inland Sea- Ursula K. Le Guin (re-read)
★★★★★

Anthropology meets space travel. Probably my favourite of the Ekumen series, however you should read this collection of short stories last, after all the other novels and collections.

5) The Second Stranger– Martin Griffin
★★★☆☆

A decent example of the 99p cheesy thriller, the junk food genre of books.

The manager of a remote highlands hotel is preparing to lock up for the winter season, when an extreme snowstorm strikes. Two men appear at the door, both claiming they are PC Donald Gaines, and the other is escaped crime boss Troy Foley, which one is telling the truth?

A competent, entertaining if somewhat ludicrous locked room thriller. Fine for 99p but I wouldn’t re-read it.

6) The Birthday of the World– Ursula K. Le Guin (re-read)
★★★★★

Another selection of short stories along the same lines as A Fisherman of the Inland Sea.

7) Conquest- Nina Allan
★★★★☆

The new book from one of my favourite current authors. A missing mathematician, alien lichen, and a Borges style network of fake magazine articles by the characters, and a cult 50s novel that’s a mocking pastiche of Ayn Rand does the Triffids. I was gripped for most of it, but the last section kind of petered out, so I wish it were longer. If you’ve read the Rift, it’s in a similar vein. 

A strong memory of this is also reading it in the grimmest work hotel I have ever been put it (in Graz). It had strong vibes of “youth offender’s institution circa 1992” and had clearly not been renovated in forever. I spent every night coughing, and when I was packing my stuff up to leave realised there was loads of black mould there.

(If you’re new to Nina Allan, then I’d start with The Silver Wind or The Rift)

8) Wavewalker: Breaking Free– Suzanne Heywood
★★★★★

I got this after reading an extract in the Guardian (link here). It’s a memoir of the author’s childhood in the 70s and 80s, living out her dad’s fantasy of sailing around the world on a yacht, which turns out to be much more dangerous and less fun than the dream version. (Ironically I read this as far away from the Pacific as you can get- the landlocked and flat border region between Austria and Slovakia).

Gordon Cook is a breath-takingly selfish man who doesn’t give a shit about anyone or anything outside of what he wants. When Suzanne is seven and seriously injured after he pig-headedly ignores advice not to sail into a huge storm in the South Atlantic, his first question to the doctor from the remote military base who helps them is “what happens if we just do nothing about her fractured skull?”. He’s an egomaniac who views his children as props for publicity and free labour on his boat, and is adverse to giving them any education. The mother is extremely passive, does anything for her husband, and sees her daughter as a rival once she hits puberty. Any time the kids make friends or get attached to anyone, the dad makes sure to separate them and force them to follow him on another voyage to yet another remote island. I’m sure if they were around now the parents would be social media influencers exploiting their children’s images. 

Once Suzanne becomes a teenager and starts pushing to get some qualifications via an Australian correspondence school so that she can one day go to university, the parents abandon her and her younger brother in New Zealand, a country where they don’t even have a long-term visa, and leave her with total responsibility for him. 

Well worth a read. It’s noticeable that after the author went to university she pursued the most strait-laced civil service and finance career going. I guess she’d had enough adventure to last a lifetime by the age of 16. Also when I googled her, there was a Daily Mail article from the brother going “she’s lying, we had a wonderful childhood because –I– got to go scuba diving all the time”, so I guess the apple didn’t fall far from the tree with him.

9) Nick Drake: The Life– Richard Morton Jack
★★★★☆

The authorised biography of Nick Drake, endorsed by his sister.

CW: mental illness and suicide 

I have some mixed feelings about this book. As it was officially approved the author was able to get more info from people close to Nick, but it treats his family oddly.

His family were creative, supportive and also rich. His dad was keen on music as well as being a very successful engineer, and sent his kids to boarding school, and then Cambridge and RADA. The book acts like nothing bad ever happened to Nick until he turned 18, he lived a golden life with the perfect family. Is this true? Is this possible? It feels like it glossed over some things to get the approval of the family.

It clears up a few rumours:
1) He wasn’t into heroin
2) Ex girlfriends think asexual rather than closeted gay
3) It was suicide
4) John Martyn was a nasty piece of work

All his friends describe him in the same way: introverted, private to the extent of being secretive (many of his friends only met at his funeral), kind, humorous, and dedicated to music. He never had any job except student or songwriter, but was incapable of doing the endless touring of rough gigs that was essential for a music career in the 70s. 

It goes into a lot of detail about the ugly side of his mental illness. There’s this sort of idea in the air that he recorded Pink Moon, and then, somewhat depressed, retired to his bed handsomely and poetically, and quietly died to provide a flawless artistic back catalogue.

The reality was more: screaming, smashing things and then being unable to speak for weeks, going missing, being in and out of institutions and electroshock therapy. It was only his rich, supportive parents that prevented him permanently being sent to one of the grim institutions of those days. Not picturesque poetic depression, probably schizophrenia.

10) The Art of Space Travel– Nina Allan
★★★★★

Nina Allan was my big discovery in lockdown, and one of my favourite contemporary authors. These short stories cover lots of her themes: reality shifts, people on the edges of society, near future social collapse, junk shops, weird stuff found on the internet, alien parasites, disconcerting bodily changes, bleak and forgotten coastal towns and housing estates, and “factual” essays about things that don’t in fact exist (such as imaginary Tarkovsky films).

If you like the Lathe of Heaven or Ubik, you will like Nina Allan. (I recommend starting with her novel The Rift however, rather than these stories). If you like nice straightforward books where everything is well-explained and unambiguous, you won’t enjoy her.

11) The Skeleton Key– Erin Kelly
★★★☆☆

 A murder mystery inspired by Kit Williams’ Golden Hare. I was expecting something completely different from this book than I got: maybe something eerie or mysterious? Instead it’s an entertainingly trashy potboiler centred around a dysfunctional arts family who start off in I Capture The Castle terrain and get darker and darker as the novel proceeds. An entertaining read, but nothing of substance.

12) Pathogenesis– Jonathan Kennedy
★★★☆☆

A history of the world through the lens of plagues at the recommendation of @kaitlinkostus. If you’ve studied history at university I don’t know how much information in this book will be new to you, but it’s an enjoyable general read. Generally more thorough than a bog standard pop history book.

13) Yellowface– RF Kuang
★★★☆☆

I tried to read the authors’ previous book Babel, but gave up halfway through (which is rare for me). The concept was great (colonialism explored through an alternative Victorian era) but the execution was lumpen, and the author had no ear for historical dialogue whatsoever.

I think the problem is that due to her academia day job, RF Kuang is marketed as a literary author, but she’s basically just a competent commercial one. She’s definitely much more comfortable writing in the present day.

This is a trashy fun thriller about the contemporary publishing industry, taking in aspects of Caroline Calloway, Cat Person and the kidney donation saga. The unreliable narrator’s friend, rising literary star Athena Liu dies in a sudden accident, and the narrator’s left holding Athena’s half-finished draft of a novel about China in WWI. Recognising a future hit, she finishes it off and publishes it herself, under a new pen name that implies she’s Chinese herself (she’s not), creating a nightmare web of deceit that slowly closes in.

Anyway it’s trashy fun that I read in one sitting, not the deep reflection on creativity and racism that it’s marketed as.

14) The Murders at Fleat House-Lucinda Riley
★★☆☆☆

A 99p detective ebook. It did the job, the mystery (set at a boarding school in Norfolk where the school bully is murdered via switching his medication) was fine, but the writing was downright embarrassing. Every chapter had a character expressing awe that the female detective looked like a supermodel. The dialogue could be written by a 14 year old. It was supposed to be set in the modern era, everyone has mobiles, but everyone behaves and thinks like it’s 1983.

Turns out it was started by the named author (who apparently wrote bestselling romance novels) back in 2006, and then finished off by her son posthumously and released last year. Which probably explains why it’s such a mess. I wonder which of them was responsible for the cringiest bits.

15) Julia– Sandra Newman
★★☆☆☆

1984 goes IP franchise mode. This does what it says on the tin, 1984 told from Julia’s perspective, authorised by the Orwell estate. Although it does skewer Winston Smith’s solipsism and sexism, and think about what life is like for women under the regime, this is no Wide Sargasso Sea.

It’s just kind of cheap and badly written, like 1984 has been grafted onto some generic dystopia thriller (ironically like the machine Julia works on in the story that auto-generates pulp novels), and the last third crosses over into ridiculous 24 type territory. The sections where dialogues or descriptions from the original 1984 are used stick out like a sore thumb due to the disparity in writing quality. Also despite the American author seemingly having lived in London, she has a weird lack of grasp of the city (for example Lewisham is presented as far-flung). I read it in one sitting, and have already forgotten a lot of it. Licenced trademark junk food. 

I think as well my disappointment with this book ties in to a wider trend I’ve noticed lately- of complete commercial fluff books being marketed like they are dense and literary. Maybe this ties in with the BookTok thing of sticking annotation tabs into very simple books to look like you are a Serious Scholar (most egregious examples evenly spacing the tabs along the spine for aesthetics).

16) The Earth Transformed– Peter Frankopan
★★★☆☆

I really enjoyed Frankopan’s Silk Road history books, and this should be right up my street, a history of the world focusing on the influence of geology and environmental factors, but it was dry as hell, and I never finished it. Maybe the author wasn’t even that interested in some of the sections? It felt like a dry summary of various facts strung together.

17) Emergency Skin (novella)– N.K. Jemisin (re-read)
★★★★★

In the near future, all the Musks and Bezoses have fucked off to another planet to create their fascist tech-bro paradise. A cloned slave man (who is essentially a soup of organs inside a featureless plastic bag) is sent to “ruined” Earth to get some Henrietta Lacks cells to keep his boss immortal. He has been promised a real face if he does.

It turns out with all of the billionaires gone, everyone has been having a lovely time without them and managed to solve quite a few environmental and social problems. The story is told as a dialogue between the clone man and Mission Control AI over his headset, with the orders getting further and further from the reality in front of him.

Ironically, this is some kind of Amazon exclusive, so I smell contractual obligations and extremely enjoyable malicious compliance.

(Also remember the halcyon days about 10 years ago when Grimes used to do music, instead of saying the most painfully stupid thing you’ve ever heard every time she opened her mouth?)