Part 2 and Last, unfortunately - it was that sort of year.
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The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers, and Life (Richard Russo)
I bought this book by accident, in a used book shop in Hoboken NJ, thinking it was a novel rather than a collection of essays. Richard Russo is one of my favorite authors. His novels tend to be warm-hearted and centered on people who aren’t going to be counted among life’s winners no matter how hard they work because that’s now how life is, and they’re well written. This, however, is – as it really does say on the cover for anyone paying attention (i.e. not me) to see – a collection of essays, some of which I enjoyed and some of which I did not. On the plus side, there are a number of essays on the craft of writing and the role of the storyteller that stood out as worthwhile, particularly the title essay on Russo’s own awakening as a writer of fiction rather than as a scholar of literature, and one entitled “What Frogs Think: A Defense of Omniscience,” on the virtues of the omniscient author voice. On the down side there are essays such as “The Gravestone and the Commode,” which uses a rather odd metaphor to justify being rude to people in the name of free speech, and “Imagining Jenny,” an extended treatment of a conservative man trying and ultimately failing to come to grips with the fact that his friend is trans and has taken medical steps to act on that, an essay that displays a startling lack of imagination and empathy for someone whose job is mostly about imagination and empathy. Russo is not anti-trans in the performatively cruel and immoral way that the modern American right revels in these days. He just seems to be at a loss about how to make the shift he needs to make and to recognize that it is in fact he who needs to make that shift and not his friend. I will continue to read his novels because he is a phenomenal writer, but I will admit I came out of this collection a bit disappointed in the man himself.
Midnight in Sicily (Peter Robb)
The more I read about Sicily, the more I understand why my ancestors left back in 1907 or so. For most the last two centuries it has been a poor, arid, rigidly conservative, and grievously oppressed place held in bondage by the Mafia – an organization which did not officially exist in Italy until the 1980s, in law or language. Peter Robb loves southern Italy and lived in Sicily for years, and in this book – originally published in 1996, with postscripts added in 2003 and 2007 – he goes into painful detail about how the Mafia and its mainland cousins in Naples and Calabria exerted control over both Sicilian and Italian life in the second half of the twentieth century. It is a story of murder and violence, of political corruption on a scale that beggars the mind, and the glacially slow efforts of Sicilians and Italians – two different groups of people, after all – to deal with it. He visits hostile towns and aging countesses, artists and writers, and if there is the occasional Australian term thrown into the narrative that reflects Robb’s origins but confuses the rest of us reading the book it does not detract from the clarity of his story. There is a grim sort of fatalism to it all, and a history of lost opportunities and powerful forces willing to kill with impunity to make sure they stay lost. It’s a thoughtful and informative book, but not a cheerful one.
Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef (Gabrielle Hamilton)
Sometimes I think I like travel memoirs and sometimes I think I just like memoirs. People are interesting. Gabrielle Hunter is the owner and chef of Prune, a small restaurant in New York City, and this basically is the story of how that happened and what it cost. She grew up in the northern exurbs of Philadelphia around the same time I was growing up in the western suburbs, so a lot of the places in the early part of her story are familiar to me, but her life was very different. She grew up in a large, boisterous, and fairly poor family, with a French mother and an artist father who divorced when she was 13 and then basically abandoned her and her siblings. She spent some time running wild before discovering a talent for kitchen work in restaurants. She tried to go to college and eventually succeeded. She somehow managed to get an MFA in creative writing. She went from a committed lesbian relationship to an Italian husband and, eventually, two sons. And she opened Prune. She makes no secret of her need for control, her many and fascinating screwups, and her burgeoning love for Italy and her husband’s family, even though both make her crazy. It’s a fun read, if often a bracing one.
The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese (Michael Paterniti)
This is a story about a cheese called Páramo de Guzmán, perhaps the greatest cheese in the world and certainly the most expensive one sold at the little store where Michael Paterniti worked in his youth. It’s the story of the cheesemaker, a larger-than-life contrarian and storyteller named Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras, who lives in the tiny village of Guzmán in the forbidding region of Castile in Spain and who mourns the old ways. It’s the story of a betrayal, how Ambrosio (always referred to by his first name) brought the cheese into the world and had it taken away from him, and perhaps how that betrayal wasn’t quite what Ambrosio said it was. It’s the story of Michael Paterniti, who tracks Ambrosio down and becomes part of Ambrosio’s world, even bringing his wife and two young children to live in Guzmán for nearly a year. But mostly it’s a story about stories, about how Paterniti struggles to make sense of the story of Ambrosio and his cheese, how to reconcile the different versions that he hears from different people, and how to understand the ways in which Ambrosio’s story envelops him and makes him simply another character. The “telling room” is a Guzmán tradition where you go to one of the bodegas – not a corner market, as it is in New York City, but a cave where wine and cheese can be stored – and sit at the table to drink and swap tales. Paterniti’s tale spirals out and circles back just as he insists all Castilian tales do, covering Spanish history, legal maneuvering, friendships broken and brokered, and ultimately a sense of the impossibility of fully entering the story of another no matter how hard one tries.
Look Alive Out There: Essays (Sloane Crosley)
I downloaded this book for our trip last summer because I enjoyed the other collection of her essays that I read on our previous summer trip, and while this wasn’t quite up to that standard it was still an enjoyable book to read. Crosley is an essayist with a knack for finding herself in odd situations that she faces with a fairly bleak sense of humor. There’s an essay about how much she hates the privileged teenager next door to her New York City apartment because of his endless noise and partying. There’s one on her neighbor Don, whom she gets to know in that distant NYC sort of way. She visits her Uncle Johnny, a long-retired porn star, and gets her eggs frozen when she realizes she does eventually want children but not with anyone in her life now. She tries to climb a mountain in Ecuador despite having no training or equipment for doing so, with predictable results. She arranges a meeting with the man who bought her domain name when she inadvertently let it expire and then charged her two months’ rent to get it back. She’s an engaging and revealing writer, and if many of these essays slide easily into and then back out of your mind without leaving too much of a mark, well, that’s enough.
Mad Travelers: A Tale of Wanderlust, Greed, and the Quest to Reach the Ends of the Earth (Dave Seminara)
This book had the potential to be a lot better than it was. It probably would have helped if it could decide exactly what it wanted to be first, though. On one level, it is the story of competitive traveling, a niche activity enjoyed by some of the least introspective people on the planet. They collect countries visited and regions seen the way other people collect coins or Star Wars memorabilia, and while the first hundred and fifty or so countries are fairly simple to get to, the last few – uninhabited remote islands, restricted military areas, war zones, and so on – are not. On another level it is the story of William Baekeland, who passed himself off as one of these travelers and, more importantly, one of the people who could arrange trips for these travelers, but who turned out to be a fraud. There’s also a fair bit of research into the concept of wanderlust and the psychology behind novelty, curiosity, vagabondage, and similar things – much of it painfully outdated and explicitly drawn from the early 20th-century eugenics movement. Now and then there also seems to be some personal soul searching from Seminara himself, who hints at being one of the competitive travelers he discusses and analyzes, but it never really comes together and after a while the disparate parts of the book start to drift further and further apart without any real sense that they will ever wrap up into a coherent story or that it would be worth finding out if they do. There is a definite sense of missed opportunity about this book and I gave up on it a hundred pages in.
The Last Chairlift (John Irving)
At some point in a sufficiently celebrated author’s career they decide that they don’t need editors anymore, and John Irving has reached this point. This is a 900pp book that could easily have been a much better 300pp book, but Irving is in his eighties now with a list of literary achievements as long as your arm and he’s going to do what he’s going to do. One suspects as well that this is his swan song and he wanted to stuff in everything in that he could before signing off. Nobody is going to say no to John Irving at this point in his career. Pretty much everything you would expect to see in a John Irving novel is here – wrestling, Vienna, Iowa, New England, Exeter Academy, writing as a profession, a persistent obsession with the size of women’s breasts, a cavalcade of well-crafted sentences and complex characters, and a muted sense of both absurdity and anger directed at the Vietnam War, the Catholic Church, and the American right wing in general – plus a few things that are new, such as ghosts (friendly or otherwise), skiing, two different 100pp movie scripts, and a fair bit about the Hotel Jerome in Aspen, Colorado. It is, for the most part, a long shaggy dog story about the sexual awakening and history of Adam Brewster, who is presented as the main character of the book though later reflection does lead to questioning regarding that idea. When the novel opens he is a child living in Exeter with his free-spirited mother, Little Ray, and his grandparents. When it ends he is a successful author (also in his 80s). In between are a raft of odd-duck girlfriends, two unexpected dads, a long-running pantomime comedy act in New York City, and a whole lot of skiing. Really, quite a lot of skiing. Irving also has a tendency to refer to characters in this book by description rather than name – “the ski instructor,” “the little English teacher,” “the trail groomer,” “the snowshoer,” and so on – which gets odd after a while. Other than Adam’s grandmother, the aforementioned English teacher Mr. Elliott, and his cousin’s partner Em, there are vanishingly few likeable characters in this book. Adam himself is a boor – shallow, endlessly self-centered, prone to sexual misconduct of many and varied kinds – and done no favors by his mother. John Irving has long been one of my favorite authors. I have read every book he has ever published and even middling Irving is better than most of what’s out there, but this is not one of his best.
6 Billion Others: Portraits of Humanity from Around the World (Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Sibylle d’Orgeval, Baptiste Rouget-Luchaire)
People are interesting. They have lives and stories and, very often, things to say. Even the people you least suspect will surprise you that way. For this book, interviewers fanned out across the globe, to all of the inhabited continents and often far away from the centers of power and wealth, to ask questions of the people they found there. What were your dreams as a child? What does family mean to you? In your experience, what is war? What does nature represent to you? What do you think happens after death? The book is organized by question, with maybe a dozen or two dozen answers per question presented. Each of the interviewees on a page (4 to 8, depending on how long their answer was) has their photograph on a facing page along with much smaller photographs of others who presumably were also asked the question. It’s not a light book, either literally (it’s 320pp of tightly bound, heavyweight glossy paper) or figuratively (there is almost no humor, a startling lapse if you think about it) but it is an interesting one.
Tress of the Emerald Seas (Brandon Sanderson)
There is a world of difference between reading a book and listening to a book. With an audiobook you get different voices and cadences. With a paper book you can move at your own pace and in your own voices. Kim was listening to this book when we drove up to northern Wisconsin in October and I heard roughly the middle half of it. We do this – I’m happy to listen to bits and pieces of novels that way and generally don’t feel any need to follow up on them. But after we got back she checked it out of the library and handed it to me so I could finish it, and it was a lovely little book. It’s a YA novel and, as is pretty much the definition of the genre, it’s mostly about the coming of age of the protagonist – a young woman nicknamed Tress. At the beginning of the novel she is a window washer carrying on an illicit but extremely chaste affair with the son of the duke who rules her island. When Charles is – eventually – kidnapped by the Sorceress who lives on her own island in the Midnight Sea, she sets out to rescue him and after some machinations finds herself on a pirate ship named The Crow’s Song. The crew slowly accepts her as she makes herself useful, though the captain does not, and from there the story spins out. Tress’s world is a different place than ours, with a dozen moons all dumping their own variety of spores into separate oceans – spores that react strongly, often violently, to any contact with water. The oceans themselves are made of spores, not water, which requires a different kind of sailing. Tress is a clever, resourceful, and kind character and she finds herself long before she finds the Sorceress. Sanderson also has a sly sense of humor that peeks in from time to time to lighten things up.
Zimmer Land (Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyan)
This is actually a fairly short story, part of a larger book called Friday Black, but Lauren read it in a class she was taking in the fall and thought I’d appreciate it. This was a good call. It’s a powerful, quiet story about what happens when racial violence gets commodified and sold to the public as entertainment. Isaiah works in Zimmer Land, a theme park of retributive justice that is named for George Zimmerman, who murdered a black man in cold blood in 2012 but got away with under Florida’s “stand your ground” laws and thus became a hero to the white supremacist mob that is the American right wing these days. Isaiah’s role is to be the black man walking through the white neighborhood, and people pay money to play one of the homeowners so they can confront him and “kill” him, though his armor protects him from coming to much actual harm from the gunshots. He does this multiple times a day. Eventually the owners decide to open a new wing of the park that caters to children. It’s an angry story, as it should be, and a thought-provoking one.
Dear Committee Members (Julie Schumacher)
Jay Fitger teaches English at Payne University, the sort of liberal arts four-year institution of higher learning that so troubles American right-wingers by its very existence these days. He is by any estimation a crank. He shares the campus with his ex-wife and several ex-girlfriends, all of whom dislike him to one degree or another as do most of his colleagues. To his credit Fitger is well aware of all of this and blames no one but himself for any of it. He finds himself inundated by requests for letters of recommendation from students, colleagues, former classmates, and fellow travelers alike, and this short epistolary novel tracks a year in Fitger’s life through those letters. Letters to employers for students looking for jobs. Letters to other campuses for colleagues looking for jobs. Letters to the campus administration theoretically about job seekers but mostly complaints about the defunding of his department and the liberal arts in general, the indignities of the ongoing construction project in his building that has led to the pampered princes of the Economics Department being safely evacuated while their department space is renovated while the paupers in the English Department remain behind to fend for themselves, and his own personal travails. Letters to Writing Workshops on behalf of a wide range of people. And, as a recurring theme, letters to some or all of the above regarding a particular student working on a novel. Fitger is an entertaining if sometimes bilious companion, and the letters get more frantic and more serious as the story goes on. This is the third time I’ve read this, in part because it really is that good and in part because I recently discovered that Schumacher had written two sequels and I wanted to refresh my memory before moving on to them.
The Shakespeare Requirement (Julie Schumacher)
After the events of the previous book, Jay Fitger has become a man besieged. As the newly appointed chair of the English Department at Payne University he must contend with a host of forces both personal and academic, all of which want to bring him down. His colleagues are a fractious and quarrelsome bunch, unable and unwilling to recognize the threat posed to them by both the university administration and, more pressingly, the Economics Department that is slowly and intentionally claiming most of the English Department’s space as lebensraum and looking to force them out of their building entirely. Some of this centers on an elderly Shakespeare scholar who insists that the English degree require a full semester of Shakespeare, something his more modern lit-crit scholars deride though it all does end up as something of a cause célèbres. Additionally, Fitger has a new admin assistant (Fran) who doesn’t particularly respect him and has her own agenda, and he’s trying to work out a friendly relationship with his ex-wife Janet, now over at the law school, all while looking after his students – particularly Angela, a conservative small-town girl adrift at a large secular university. It’s a fairly straightforward academic satire rather than an epistolary novel like the first book, and if it’s less humorous it is far more recognizable to anyone who has ever served in a liberal arts department in these mercenary times where training is valued over education by people who can’t tell the difference between the two. Schumacher makes the supporting characters fully human, with interests, flaws, and virtues of their own, as people are. Fitger will tilt at his windmills, flailing all the while, and in the end he finds himself in what is perhaps a better spot, though whether this counts as victory is kind of an open question. He is a fascinating character – generally good-hearted, often exasperating, and perhaps not the guy you’d want to hang out with on a quiet Saturday afternoon, but not a bad soul for that.
The English Experience (Julie Schumacher)
The last person anyone at Payne University wants to lead the annual three-week study abroad class in the UK is Jay Fitger – an assessment Fitger wholeheartedly agrees with – but when the designated professor can’t do it and literally nobody else can, it falls to him anyway. There’s a motley collection of students – smartly introduced through their application essays, each with their own conflicts, agendas, and expectations – and over the following weeks in England nothing much will go right but they will get through it somehow and perhaps learn a few things along the way even if they’re not necessarily the things Fitger wants them to learn. Schumacher returns to a more episodic and epistolary form in this third model – she builds the student characters by letting us read their homework essays, for example, and there are any number of small throwaway moments that don’t necessarily move the plot forward but do fill out who these people are – and it’s funnier than the middle installment of this series. The students emerge as fully individual people, and even Fitger finds some grace in the end. Schumacher also puts in a sort of “where are they now” postscript in the form of a late assignment from one of the students, and I have always loved that sort of thing.
The Ministry of Time (Kaliane Bradley)
It’s somewhere in the indeterminate near future – close enough the present to be familiar, far enough away to see the crises of climate change starting to have real geopolitical impact – and the British government has discovered time travel. Through the “time door” they are able to retrieve a handful of people (carefully vetted to be people facing imminent death so their disappearance affects nothing from their own time) and bring them into the present where they are assigned a handler (a “bridge”) to get them acclimated. Among these are a WWI veteran, two people from various points in the 17th century who don’t like each other much, and someone parachuted out of the French Revolution. Some adapt better than others. One of the bridges – the narrator of the book and the unnamed daughter of a Cambodian mother and a white father, a heritage that receives considerable attention in the story – is assigned to Graham Gore, a Royal Navy officer on the ill-fated Franklin Expedition through the Arctic in 1847. Engaging, disciplined, and intelligent, Gore and his bridge bump heads and explore the present together while crises at the Ministry of Time slowly close in on them and the other time expats and their bridges. Nothing is quite as it seems and the expats are not the only fish out of water in this story. Part science fiction, part spy novel, part romance, it’s an interesting look at the sort of nuts and bolts of what bringing people out of their own time and place might look like – which is where the parallels with unnamed bridge’s heritage comes in – and as such is something of a cautionary tale. Bradley keeps it all moving along fairly smoothly until the end, which gets a bit muddled in the way time travel stories tend to do, but it’s a fun book.
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Books read: 29
Total pages: 9552
Pages per day: 26.1
Happy reading!
Saturday, January 4, 2025
Friday, January 3, 2025
Books Read in 2024, Part 1
I read. That’s what I do. Though in recent years that has become harder to do for some reason, and my book totals have been steadily declining since 2021. I managed to hit just slightly more than half of my goal this year, for example, though fortunately I am not being graded or paid for any of it so it’s not a huge deal, I suppose. Some of the decline is just having too many other things to do, some of it is not having enough spoons to focus on anything more than scrolling through my phone looking for funny memes (a sad state of affairs) and some of it is [waves vaguely at the state of the world]. But even so, I read and I keep track of the things I’ve read. I’ve been posting the results since 2009, and now you have this year’s version. Enjoy!
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La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language (Dianne Hales)
Dianne Hales has no particular connection with Italy – she descends, she says, from Polish peasant stock – but she loves the Italian language with the heat of a thousand suns and with it, of course, Italy. Because, she insists, there is no real way to separate the language from the culture, the nation, or the people. Italy is a country created by and sustained by its language, the one thing that has unified it over the centuries even though it is basically a thousand dialects in a trench coat. She makes her case well, though, discussing the long history of Italian and those who spoke and wrote it, covering literary masterpieces, food, love, history, and of course all the words that never quite make it into the textbooks but which give any language much of its flavor. She peppers the book with examples drawn from her research, her frequent visits to Italy, and her friends, and she tells an engaging and enlightening story in the process. It’s a fun book to read in many ways.
Weird Walk: Wanderings and Wonderings Through the British Ritual Year (no author given)
This is, as the title suggests, a weird book. It is weird in the modern sense, in that there is no author given and there are two different titles depending on whether you look at the spine (where it is entitled Keep Walking Weird) or the front cover. And it is weird in the archaic sense of being focused on the eerie, the otherworldly, and the pagan spiritual. There is an awful lot of “woowoo” in this book, and it’s hard to tell sometimes whether the unknown authors believe it or are simply reporting it in order to promote the sites they describe, but so it goes. This is a walker’s guide to some of the ancient sites of Britain. It lists maybe 35 or so sites, complete with photographs, descriptions, a bit of history, directions for walkers and for parking, and those multi-digit coordinates that the British use to direct you to places, all divided by season according to criteria never fully explained (Stonehenge, for example, falls into the Winter chapter rather than the Summer one, despite the summer solstice being its biggest draw these days). The sites vary from ancient stone monuments to modern towns with dances and rituals, and the book is both sturdy and colorful. It is a bit strange to see how the authors describe places I’ve actually been to and can compare impressions of – Avebury, Stonehenge, Silbury Hill – but if you are a rambler with an interest in the ancient sites of Britain this would be a lovely resource. It was a gift from Oliver from when he was in the UK in December 2023, and while a bit outside my usual reading it was enjoyable.
Babel: An Arcane History (RF Kuang)
The fact that this book was blocked from the 2023 Hugo finalist list is a travesty and I’m glad the organizers of that conference have paid a price for their nonsense. Babel is one of the most well-written books I’ve read in a while – complex, thoughtful, with a lot to say about some fairly difficult subjects, and more than deserving of awards and accolades. At a basic level it fits into the same broad category as Harry Potter or Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, following the lives of a small group of young scholars at a school of magic, combined with the sense you got from Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell that magic is just another skilled trade in the first half of the 19th century in Britain. But on this simple foundation a much more impassioned story is built. The story follows Robin Swift, a young boy in Canton whose family dies of cholera and who is then spirited off to Britain by an Oxford don. He grows up in the don’s cold and formal household, groomed to enter Babel – the school of translation and silverwork at Oxford. Robin is himself a bit of a translation, a foreigner in a very white England (something Kuang is always at pains to point out with a number of characters) with his Chinese birth name long lost, and therein hangs the story. In this Britain, silver has power that can be unlocked by the correct pair of translated words – a word in one language gets engraved on one side of a small bar of silver while a translated word in a different language is engraved on the other, and since translations are never perfect the small gaps between the word pairs can be harnessed to perform tasks. Thus is the Empire run. Robin enters Oxford and meets his small cohort – Ramy, from India; Victoire, from Haiti; and Letty, a white English girl from a wealthy and privileged background. They bond, they have hijinks, they do the things university students do, but as the concerns of Empire make themselves grimly felt on students who are, after all, mostly from the colonized world, the story grows darker and more urgent. Kuang has a lot to say about the difficulties of translation – of words from one language to another, and by extension of people from one culture to another – and about issues of culture, race, and colonization. In the end there will be blood, though whose and to what end (if any) is not always obvious. It’s a book that will be remembered long after the 2023 Hugo organizers are justly forgotten.
Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel (Suzanne Roberts)
Some travel memoirs are about finding the humor in places and others are about finding the life lessons, and this one is definitely in the latter camp. It is a disjointed collection of essays, each one labeled with a place and time that come in no particular order, and each one focusing on an experience that usually involves her poor judgment in men, alcohol, travel arrangements, or some combination of all three. Suzanne Roberts likes to travel and she regards it as both therapy and adventure. Over the course of the book she has affairs, divorces her first husband, and finds a new one. She travels with female friends, by herself, and with the Practical Boyfriend who will become her second husband, and she goes through any number of places in Central and South America and Asia. It’s a very introspective collection, for all of the traveling, and she learns a great deal along the way. I’m not sure I’d want to travel with her, but she was an entertaining companion in a book.
Seasons in Basilicata: A Year in a Southern Italian Hill Village (David Yeadon)
Aliano is a small village in Basilicata, the region of southern Italy where my great-grandparents came from. It’s a mountainous area with villages perched precariously on steep slopes, reachable only by imposingly narrow, switchbacked roads. It was for centuries a region of grinding poverty, a region whose inhabitants were looked down upon by other areas of Italy as peasants, barely human at all. For this reason, when Carlo Levi was creating problems for Mussolini in the 1930s he found himself banished to Aliano as a punishment. He came to love the village and its people, though, and his book Christ Stopped at Eboli is a touchstone for anyone who wants to understand Basilicata. David Yeadon is the sort of travel writer who can just pick up and go places, often for extended periods, and he loves Levi’s book so it seemed natural for him and his wife Anne to decide to live in Aliano for a year and get the rhythms of life there. He arrives in the early spring and finds an apartment overlooking the main piazza, and his wife eventually joins him from her teaching job in Japan. They meet the locals, who are often suspicious of these stranieri at first but open to them in that generous and demonstrative way Italian culture seems to demand. They eat well – very well indeed – and explore some of the surrounding towns and mythologies. And then they leave. I think this would be a lovely thing to do, actually – to go somewhere and stay there long enough to get to know people and live the daily life there, knowing that you are certainly not a native but neither are you quite a visitor. Basilicata in general and Aliano in particular are poor areas still and even now rather neglected by the rest of Italy, but they have a vibrancy of their own that is worth exploring. I have now been to Basilicata twice, and I hope someday to return.
Christ Stopped at Eboli (Carlo Levi)
If you read anything at all about southern Italy, you will run into this book. It rises like a mountain over all discussions of that hot, poor, neglected part of the country, and it is easy to see why. Levi was an evocative writer, vividly able to capture a place and a time despite his insistence that it was both timeless and beyond the map of civilization. Levi was a doctor from northern Italy who ran afoul of Mussolini’s Fascist government and found himself exiled to the small southern hill village of Aliano – Gagliano in his telling – in 1935 and 1936. Fascism was in full swing in Italy at the time, and the Italian conquest of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) was in progress as well, but for the peasants of Gagliano those all happened offstage in another world. The title refers to the idea that Christ, the Savior of humanity, never got to this part of Italy – He stopped at a village some miles away, leaving the peasants of Gagliano beyond His reckoning. Levi details the poverty, the superstition, the internal feuds and petty abuses of what passed for the elites in that town, the rigid and seemingly eternal passive culture, the low state of the church. He paints. He is pressed into service as the town’s doctor and runs afoul of the elites in Gagliano by doing so. He develops some affection for the peasants, but never really becomes part of their world – he views them as most northern Italians did as animals, though he at least sees them as good animals worthy of being treated well. He is a man of his time and some of his discussions of the women of the town sit oddly for the modern reader, but they are clearly meant with affection. Levi was released from his internal exile in 1936 and finished writing this in 1944, but despite his intentions he never went back to Gagliano in that time. Perhaps he did later. The book was published in 1946, with Mussolini safely dead and WWII over, and it shamed the Italian government into paying attention to the south and trying to improve the lot of its residents, though southern Italy remains poor, neglected, and very, very hot to this day. Not many tourists visit the region – certainly not compared with the crowds that find their way to Rome and the northern Italian cities – though having been one of them I can attest that it is well worth the time.
Anxious People (Frederik Backman, translated by Neil Smith)
Somewhere in a small town in Sweden it is the last day of the year, and on that day a sad and desperate person will try to rob a bank. It will not go well – it turns out that some banks in Sweden are cashless – and the bank robber will flee across the street into an apartment showing and then the whole thing will turn into a hostage crisis. Except, as Backman notes on the first page, it really isn’t about that at all. “This is a story about a lot of things,” he says, “but mostly about idiots. So it needs saying from the outset that it’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is.” Because this is much more than a story of two failed attempts to commit crime. It’s a story about a decade earlier, when a man jumped off a bridge and another man couldn’t stop him and how that echoes down through the people involved. It’s a story about Jim and Jack, father and son, now the lead police officers on the scene. About Zara, a bank manager who visits apartment showings to pass the time. About Julia and Ro, newlyweds expecting a baby. About Anna-Lena and Roger, trying to stay married after a lifetime together. About an older woman named Estelle, a man named Lennart, and a real estate agent. About a psychologist named Nadia and, of course, about the bank robber. It’s a story about redemption and humanity, and yes about idiots because that’s who we are as a species. There are parts of this book that are laugh-out-loud funny, in a bittersweet and world-weary sort of way, and there are parts that are thoughtful and touching in ways that you don’t expect. The bank robber and the hostages slowly get to know each other, and in the end they are all people trying to do the best they can in a story that allows them the grace to do that. This was the best novel I read in 2024, and I will have to find more of Backman’s books.
Sure I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere (Maria Bamford)
Sometimes you’re driving along the interstate looking for a random audiobook to pass the time and you land on something funny, and that’s pretty much what happened with this book. Maria Bamford is a stand-up comedian and an actress – she does a lot of voice-over work in particular – and in some ways this is a fairly typical actor’s memoir, filled with early talent, hard financial times while waiting for the Big Break that may or may not ever happen, and glimpses into the process of how it all works in that field. But underneath this, as the subtitle says, is the story of someone who never felt accepted or welcomed despite coming from a fairly stable and happy home, and who compensated for this by joining every 12-step program, support group, and oddball conglomeration of misfits she could find. It is very funny at times, as you’d expect from a comedian, but also rather serious at others – she openly discusses her suicidal ideations and other low points, even while reassuring the listener that she would not do such things now. I’d heard of her before this, without quite knowing why, but now I have a much better sense of her story.
Titanium Noir (Nick Harkaway)
Both halves of the title are relevant to the story in this near-future science fiction murder mystery. Roddy Tebbit has been murdered, and this becomes Cal Sounder’s problem because Roddy was a Titan – someone who is effectively immortal thanks to a new form of genetic therapy that renews and heals the body but which also causes it to grow again. Titans are tall, heavy, and privileged in this tangled city and Cal is the guy the police lean on whenever there is a crime involving one. Like any noir story there are crosses, double-crosses, and hidden stories that creep out at the worst possible time. There are larger forces at play, corruption aplenty, and a narrative that clips along at a breakneck pace, and if the solution to one mystery involves the solution to older ones, well that’s the genre for you. Harkaway is one of my favorite authors for the sheer artistry of his writing, and I was glad to discover he’d published something I hadn’t seen before.
The Price You Pay (Aidan Truhen)
Imagine my utter delight at discovering not only a new book by Nick Harkaway (above), but also two older books written by Harkaway under a different name, of which this is the first. The hero – rather loosely defined – of this book is Jack Price, a small-time cocaine dealer in a bustling city, a charming rogue who thinks ahead and plans big, and who is by his own admission “crazier than a fibre-glass hairball.” Jack is a fascinating combination of violent sociopath, raconteur, and Man With A Plan. Early in the novel his downstairs neighbor Didi – whom he disliked, but not enough to wish her harm – is murdered execution style, a crime which makes no sense to Jack since Didi was nobody. Waste of resources, he thinks. He decides to poke around and ask questions, which eventually sees him beaten nearly to death for his troubles. When he subsequently discovers that there is a contract out on him with the Seven Demons, an international group of murderers renowned for their ruthless violence though rarely hired for small-time gigs like this one, it is, he says, the happiest day of his life. Jack is now free to let his sociopathic creativity loose as he declares war on the Seven Demons. What follows is a fast-paced, bleakly funny festival of murder and mayhem, leavened with some odd sex and a large dollop of self-aggrandizement as the Seven Demons come face to face with the fact that Jack is The Price You Pay.
Seven Demons (Aiden Truhen)
If you’re looking for a rollicking good time of sociopathic violence and criminal intent, the Seven Demons books are a very good place to start. Nick Harkaway clearly had a great time writing these. They come at you fast and don’t let up, they’re often laugh out loud funny in a darkly comic sort of way, and they feature one of the great voices in noirish crime novels, Jack Price, whose knowing if stilted way of looking at the world and speaking about what he sees is the beating heart of this series. Price has now become the First of the Seven Demons, taking over the group that had tried to take him out in The Price You Pay. Several of the characters from that book also return as new Demons, though at least one of them is very unhappy about it, or would be if he knew. The new Seven Demons have been hired to rob an impregnable bank in Switzerland, but even before the story gets going the betrayals, twists, violence, and downright absurdity of the situation makes itself felt. Eventually Jack takes on the persona of Banjo Telemark, ambiguitionist modern artist, bullshit peddler, and all around gladhander, and over the course of the story he has to deal with a 9-year-old killer in training, a team of French Nazi thugs, a Swiss police officer who may be attracted to Jack and whom Jack might also be attracted to in return except that he knows very well that his extremely competent and even more extremely psychotic girlfriend would kill the both of them in creative and seriously disturbing ways were either of them to act on that, a series of murderous doors, a pig farm, an anarchist collective in the middle of straight-laced Switzerland, and at least two separate pilots each stranger than the other. Then it gets weird. These are the sorts of books you love to read but are never sure who to recommend them to, and that’s not a bad slot to be in.
Shades of Grey (Jasper Fforde)
In a world where your perception of color defines your social status, it is a dangerous thing to see shades of grey. Edward Russet is a Red and he finds himself accompanying his father to the village of East Carmine on the fringes of the Collective. His father is a Swatchman, someone who heals by exposing people to color, and Edward is there as a punishment for not-quite-violating some of the Collective’s strict, repressive (if not always coherent) rules. But East Carmine is a snake pit of internal politics, and Edward will run afoul of all of them. In this village he meets any number of people. There’s Tommo, who would cheerfully sell his own grandmother if he saw a benefit to him. There are the Gamboge and deMauve families, vicious internecine fighters who see Edward as an expendable obstacle to their plans. There’s the Apocryphal Man, whom nobody is allowed to acknowledge in any way and who therefore has both freedom and information to share. There’s Violet, the most poisonous woman in East Carmine, and apparently destined for Edward. And there is Jane, a Grey in a world of color, who is very much her own person in a society that finds that treasonous. For there is more afoot than meets the eye here. The Something That Happened changed things, in ways the Collective no longer remembers, and Munsell’s Epiphany is both the guiding force and the straitjacket that Edward and Jane will confront. This was originally going to be the first of a trilogy when it was published in 2009, but after fifteen years Fforde has finally published the second and concluding volume, so at last I can find out what will happen to Edward and Jane.
Red Side Story (Jasper Fforde)
Picking up precisely where Shades of Grey left off, we find Edward, Jane, Violet, and indeed the entire village of East Carmine in all sorts of trouble. Edward and Jane must avoid being sent to the Green Room or catching the Mildew (both invariably fatal) by defending their actions from the previous book. There is the Jollity Fair, at which pointless competitions will be won or lost, Edward will meet the Rainbow Brotherhood, and things will go from bad to worse. And throughout there are hints and revelations about the true nature of Chromatacia – what Utopiainc is, what the swans are, and the validity of the Somewhere Else theory. In the end it will be Jane, Edward, and Violet in a world beyond their imagination, and getting from one end of that story to another is a wild and entertaining ride. Jasper Fforde is an inventive writer who stuffs his books with oddities that make a strange sort of sense, characters that stand out as interesting people, and more allusions than one can possibly catch on a single read through (as with one of the Thursday Next novels, there is an entire page of dialogue in this book lifted verbatim out of Star Wars with no attention called to it – you just have to know). I’m not sure if there will be a third book in this series – Fforde certainly left room for one, though he could just as easily leave those characters where they ended up as well – but for my sake I’m hoping there will be.
A Stroke of the Pen: The Lost Stories (Terry Pratchett)
Terry Pratchett was a prolific writer, as anyone who has ever worked their way through all 40+ books in the Discworld series can attest. He often published two Discworld books a year, and he had any number of non-Discworld books to his credit as well. But he started out as a journalist in the 1960s and 70s, and one of his responsibilities was to write short stories, often aimed at children or teenagers, to be published by the local papers he worked for. This is yet another posthumous collection of those stories, most of which had been previously unknown to be his as they had been published under the pseudonym of Patrick Kearns. They are all short, light-hearted, humorous in a dry sort of way, and recognizably of a piece. If you are a Pratchett fanatic, it is interesting to see him work out bits and bobs of his future style. If you’re a casual fan or even new to Pratchett, you may want to wait to become a fanatic before reading these.
Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes (Rob Wilkins)
Neil Gaiman, in his introduction to Terry Pratchett’s collection of non-fiction works entitled A Slip of the Keyboard, went to some length to try to dispel the idea of Pratchett as a “right jolly” old elf churning out light, humorous trivialities. The Pratchett Gaiman knew – and knew well, as both a friend and a colleague – was incandescently angry at the injustices of the world, large and small, and it was precisely that anger that he channeled into becoming the greatest satirist in the English language of the last two centuries, bar none. Yes, Pratchett’s books were funny – it is a rare reader who can get through a Discworld book without laughing out loud at least once – but underneath that humor was a deep humanistic moral framework built from a strong sense of how the world ought to work and a rage at the fact that it didn’t. Pratchett died in 2015 of a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease – a particularly cruel end for a gifted writer – and never got to write the autobiography he had planned. This project got left for his personal assistant, Rob Wilkins, who knew him better than anyone not related by blood or marriage and possibly better than some of those. It covers everything, from Pratchett’s childhood in a small English village to his career as a journalist and his family life, to the heights of fame and the final, bitter moments. He often frames stories through his own experiences with Pratchett, but never to the exclusion of the main man here – something Pratchett would not have tolerated if he had. Wilkins is unsparing in his descriptions of a man he obviously loved and respected, and Pratchett’s voice comes through on every page, even on those pages where that voice was stilled before death. It’s a comprehensive, sympathetic, but clear-eyed portrait of a complicated man and if you are any sort of fan of the books Pratchett wrote it is a must-read.
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La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language (Dianne Hales)
Dianne Hales has no particular connection with Italy – she descends, she says, from Polish peasant stock – but she loves the Italian language with the heat of a thousand suns and with it, of course, Italy. Because, she insists, there is no real way to separate the language from the culture, the nation, or the people. Italy is a country created by and sustained by its language, the one thing that has unified it over the centuries even though it is basically a thousand dialects in a trench coat. She makes her case well, though, discussing the long history of Italian and those who spoke and wrote it, covering literary masterpieces, food, love, history, and of course all the words that never quite make it into the textbooks but which give any language much of its flavor. She peppers the book with examples drawn from her research, her frequent visits to Italy, and her friends, and she tells an engaging and enlightening story in the process. It’s a fun book to read in many ways.
Weird Walk: Wanderings and Wonderings Through the British Ritual Year (no author given)
This is, as the title suggests, a weird book. It is weird in the modern sense, in that there is no author given and there are two different titles depending on whether you look at the spine (where it is entitled Keep Walking Weird) or the front cover. And it is weird in the archaic sense of being focused on the eerie, the otherworldly, and the pagan spiritual. There is an awful lot of “woowoo” in this book, and it’s hard to tell sometimes whether the unknown authors believe it or are simply reporting it in order to promote the sites they describe, but so it goes. This is a walker’s guide to some of the ancient sites of Britain. It lists maybe 35 or so sites, complete with photographs, descriptions, a bit of history, directions for walkers and for parking, and those multi-digit coordinates that the British use to direct you to places, all divided by season according to criteria never fully explained (Stonehenge, for example, falls into the Winter chapter rather than the Summer one, despite the summer solstice being its biggest draw these days). The sites vary from ancient stone monuments to modern towns with dances and rituals, and the book is both sturdy and colorful. It is a bit strange to see how the authors describe places I’ve actually been to and can compare impressions of – Avebury, Stonehenge, Silbury Hill – but if you are a rambler with an interest in the ancient sites of Britain this would be a lovely resource. It was a gift from Oliver from when he was in the UK in December 2023, and while a bit outside my usual reading it was enjoyable.
Babel: An Arcane History (RF Kuang)
The fact that this book was blocked from the 2023 Hugo finalist list is a travesty and I’m glad the organizers of that conference have paid a price for their nonsense. Babel is one of the most well-written books I’ve read in a while – complex, thoughtful, with a lot to say about some fairly difficult subjects, and more than deserving of awards and accolades. At a basic level it fits into the same broad category as Harry Potter or Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, following the lives of a small group of young scholars at a school of magic, combined with the sense you got from Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell that magic is just another skilled trade in the first half of the 19th century in Britain. But on this simple foundation a much more impassioned story is built. The story follows Robin Swift, a young boy in Canton whose family dies of cholera and who is then spirited off to Britain by an Oxford don. He grows up in the don’s cold and formal household, groomed to enter Babel – the school of translation and silverwork at Oxford. Robin is himself a bit of a translation, a foreigner in a very white England (something Kuang is always at pains to point out with a number of characters) with his Chinese birth name long lost, and therein hangs the story. In this Britain, silver has power that can be unlocked by the correct pair of translated words – a word in one language gets engraved on one side of a small bar of silver while a translated word in a different language is engraved on the other, and since translations are never perfect the small gaps between the word pairs can be harnessed to perform tasks. Thus is the Empire run. Robin enters Oxford and meets his small cohort – Ramy, from India; Victoire, from Haiti; and Letty, a white English girl from a wealthy and privileged background. They bond, they have hijinks, they do the things university students do, but as the concerns of Empire make themselves grimly felt on students who are, after all, mostly from the colonized world, the story grows darker and more urgent. Kuang has a lot to say about the difficulties of translation – of words from one language to another, and by extension of people from one culture to another – and about issues of culture, race, and colonization. In the end there will be blood, though whose and to what end (if any) is not always obvious. It’s a book that will be remembered long after the 2023 Hugo organizers are justly forgotten.
Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel (Suzanne Roberts)
Some travel memoirs are about finding the humor in places and others are about finding the life lessons, and this one is definitely in the latter camp. It is a disjointed collection of essays, each one labeled with a place and time that come in no particular order, and each one focusing on an experience that usually involves her poor judgment in men, alcohol, travel arrangements, or some combination of all three. Suzanne Roberts likes to travel and she regards it as both therapy and adventure. Over the course of the book she has affairs, divorces her first husband, and finds a new one. She travels with female friends, by herself, and with the Practical Boyfriend who will become her second husband, and she goes through any number of places in Central and South America and Asia. It’s a very introspective collection, for all of the traveling, and she learns a great deal along the way. I’m not sure I’d want to travel with her, but she was an entertaining companion in a book.
Seasons in Basilicata: A Year in a Southern Italian Hill Village (David Yeadon)
Aliano is a small village in Basilicata, the region of southern Italy where my great-grandparents came from. It’s a mountainous area with villages perched precariously on steep slopes, reachable only by imposingly narrow, switchbacked roads. It was for centuries a region of grinding poverty, a region whose inhabitants were looked down upon by other areas of Italy as peasants, barely human at all. For this reason, when Carlo Levi was creating problems for Mussolini in the 1930s he found himself banished to Aliano as a punishment. He came to love the village and its people, though, and his book Christ Stopped at Eboli is a touchstone for anyone who wants to understand Basilicata. David Yeadon is the sort of travel writer who can just pick up and go places, often for extended periods, and he loves Levi’s book so it seemed natural for him and his wife Anne to decide to live in Aliano for a year and get the rhythms of life there. He arrives in the early spring and finds an apartment overlooking the main piazza, and his wife eventually joins him from her teaching job in Japan. They meet the locals, who are often suspicious of these stranieri at first but open to them in that generous and demonstrative way Italian culture seems to demand. They eat well – very well indeed – and explore some of the surrounding towns and mythologies. And then they leave. I think this would be a lovely thing to do, actually – to go somewhere and stay there long enough to get to know people and live the daily life there, knowing that you are certainly not a native but neither are you quite a visitor. Basilicata in general and Aliano in particular are poor areas still and even now rather neglected by the rest of Italy, but they have a vibrancy of their own that is worth exploring. I have now been to Basilicata twice, and I hope someday to return.
Christ Stopped at Eboli (Carlo Levi)
If you read anything at all about southern Italy, you will run into this book. It rises like a mountain over all discussions of that hot, poor, neglected part of the country, and it is easy to see why. Levi was an evocative writer, vividly able to capture a place and a time despite his insistence that it was both timeless and beyond the map of civilization. Levi was a doctor from northern Italy who ran afoul of Mussolini’s Fascist government and found himself exiled to the small southern hill village of Aliano – Gagliano in his telling – in 1935 and 1936. Fascism was in full swing in Italy at the time, and the Italian conquest of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) was in progress as well, but for the peasants of Gagliano those all happened offstage in another world. The title refers to the idea that Christ, the Savior of humanity, never got to this part of Italy – He stopped at a village some miles away, leaving the peasants of Gagliano beyond His reckoning. Levi details the poverty, the superstition, the internal feuds and petty abuses of what passed for the elites in that town, the rigid and seemingly eternal passive culture, the low state of the church. He paints. He is pressed into service as the town’s doctor and runs afoul of the elites in Gagliano by doing so. He develops some affection for the peasants, but never really becomes part of their world – he views them as most northern Italians did as animals, though he at least sees them as good animals worthy of being treated well. He is a man of his time and some of his discussions of the women of the town sit oddly for the modern reader, but they are clearly meant with affection. Levi was released from his internal exile in 1936 and finished writing this in 1944, but despite his intentions he never went back to Gagliano in that time. Perhaps he did later. The book was published in 1946, with Mussolini safely dead and WWII over, and it shamed the Italian government into paying attention to the south and trying to improve the lot of its residents, though southern Italy remains poor, neglected, and very, very hot to this day. Not many tourists visit the region – certainly not compared with the crowds that find their way to Rome and the northern Italian cities – though having been one of them I can attest that it is well worth the time.
Anxious People (Frederik Backman, translated by Neil Smith)
Somewhere in a small town in Sweden it is the last day of the year, and on that day a sad and desperate person will try to rob a bank. It will not go well – it turns out that some banks in Sweden are cashless – and the bank robber will flee across the street into an apartment showing and then the whole thing will turn into a hostage crisis. Except, as Backman notes on the first page, it really isn’t about that at all. “This is a story about a lot of things,” he says, “but mostly about idiots. So it needs saying from the outset that it’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is.” Because this is much more than a story of two failed attempts to commit crime. It’s a story about a decade earlier, when a man jumped off a bridge and another man couldn’t stop him and how that echoes down through the people involved. It’s a story about Jim and Jack, father and son, now the lead police officers on the scene. About Zara, a bank manager who visits apartment showings to pass the time. About Julia and Ro, newlyweds expecting a baby. About Anna-Lena and Roger, trying to stay married after a lifetime together. About an older woman named Estelle, a man named Lennart, and a real estate agent. About a psychologist named Nadia and, of course, about the bank robber. It’s a story about redemption and humanity, and yes about idiots because that’s who we are as a species. There are parts of this book that are laugh-out-loud funny, in a bittersweet and world-weary sort of way, and there are parts that are thoughtful and touching in ways that you don’t expect. The bank robber and the hostages slowly get to know each other, and in the end they are all people trying to do the best they can in a story that allows them the grace to do that. This was the best novel I read in 2024, and I will have to find more of Backman’s books.
Sure I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere (Maria Bamford)
Sometimes you’re driving along the interstate looking for a random audiobook to pass the time and you land on something funny, and that’s pretty much what happened with this book. Maria Bamford is a stand-up comedian and an actress – she does a lot of voice-over work in particular – and in some ways this is a fairly typical actor’s memoir, filled with early talent, hard financial times while waiting for the Big Break that may or may not ever happen, and glimpses into the process of how it all works in that field. But underneath this, as the subtitle says, is the story of someone who never felt accepted or welcomed despite coming from a fairly stable and happy home, and who compensated for this by joining every 12-step program, support group, and oddball conglomeration of misfits she could find. It is very funny at times, as you’d expect from a comedian, but also rather serious at others – she openly discusses her suicidal ideations and other low points, even while reassuring the listener that she would not do such things now. I’d heard of her before this, without quite knowing why, but now I have a much better sense of her story.
Titanium Noir (Nick Harkaway)
Both halves of the title are relevant to the story in this near-future science fiction murder mystery. Roddy Tebbit has been murdered, and this becomes Cal Sounder’s problem because Roddy was a Titan – someone who is effectively immortal thanks to a new form of genetic therapy that renews and heals the body but which also causes it to grow again. Titans are tall, heavy, and privileged in this tangled city and Cal is the guy the police lean on whenever there is a crime involving one. Like any noir story there are crosses, double-crosses, and hidden stories that creep out at the worst possible time. There are larger forces at play, corruption aplenty, and a narrative that clips along at a breakneck pace, and if the solution to one mystery involves the solution to older ones, well that’s the genre for you. Harkaway is one of my favorite authors for the sheer artistry of his writing, and I was glad to discover he’d published something I hadn’t seen before.
The Price You Pay (Aidan Truhen)
Imagine my utter delight at discovering not only a new book by Nick Harkaway (above), but also two older books written by Harkaway under a different name, of which this is the first. The hero – rather loosely defined – of this book is Jack Price, a small-time cocaine dealer in a bustling city, a charming rogue who thinks ahead and plans big, and who is by his own admission “crazier than a fibre-glass hairball.” Jack is a fascinating combination of violent sociopath, raconteur, and Man With A Plan. Early in the novel his downstairs neighbor Didi – whom he disliked, but not enough to wish her harm – is murdered execution style, a crime which makes no sense to Jack since Didi was nobody. Waste of resources, he thinks. He decides to poke around and ask questions, which eventually sees him beaten nearly to death for his troubles. When he subsequently discovers that there is a contract out on him with the Seven Demons, an international group of murderers renowned for their ruthless violence though rarely hired for small-time gigs like this one, it is, he says, the happiest day of his life. Jack is now free to let his sociopathic creativity loose as he declares war on the Seven Demons. What follows is a fast-paced, bleakly funny festival of murder and mayhem, leavened with some odd sex and a large dollop of self-aggrandizement as the Seven Demons come face to face with the fact that Jack is The Price You Pay.
Seven Demons (Aiden Truhen)
If you’re looking for a rollicking good time of sociopathic violence and criminal intent, the Seven Demons books are a very good place to start. Nick Harkaway clearly had a great time writing these. They come at you fast and don’t let up, they’re often laugh out loud funny in a darkly comic sort of way, and they feature one of the great voices in noirish crime novels, Jack Price, whose knowing if stilted way of looking at the world and speaking about what he sees is the beating heart of this series. Price has now become the First of the Seven Demons, taking over the group that had tried to take him out in The Price You Pay. Several of the characters from that book also return as new Demons, though at least one of them is very unhappy about it, or would be if he knew. The new Seven Demons have been hired to rob an impregnable bank in Switzerland, but even before the story gets going the betrayals, twists, violence, and downright absurdity of the situation makes itself felt. Eventually Jack takes on the persona of Banjo Telemark, ambiguitionist modern artist, bullshit peddler, and all around gladhander, and over the course of the story he has to deal with a 9-year-old killer in training, a team of French Nazi thugs, a Swiss police officer who may be attracted to Jack and whom Jack might also be attracted to in return except that he knows very well that his extremely competent and even more extremely psychotic girlfriend would kill the both of them in creative and seriously disturbing ways were either of them to act on that, a series of murderous doors, a pig farm, an anarchist collective in the middle of straight-laced Switzerland, and at least two separate pilots each stranger than the other. Then it gets weird. These are the sorts of books you love to read but are never sure who to recommend them to, and that’s not a bad slot to be in.
Shades of Grey (Jasper Fforde)
In a world where your perception of color defines your social status, it is a dangerous thing to see shades of grey. Edward Russet is a Red and he finds himself accompanying his father to the village of East Carmine on the fringes of the Collective. His father is a Swatchman, someone who heals by exposing people to color, and Edward is there as a punishment for not-quite-violating some of the Collective’s strict, repressive (if not always coherent) rules. But East Carmine is a snake pit of internal politics, and Edward will run afoul of all of them. In this village he meets any number of people. There’s Tommo, who would cheerfully sell his own grandmother if he saw a benefit to him. There are the Gamboge and deMauve families, vicious internecine fighters who see Edward as an expendable obstacle to their plans. There’s the Apocryphal Man, whom nobody is allowed to acknowledge in any way and who therefore has both freedom and information to share. There’s Violet, the most poisonous woman in East Carmine, and apparently destined for Edward. And there is Jane, a Grey in a world of color, who is very much her own person in a society that finds that treasonous. For there is more afoot than meets the eye here. The Something That Happened changed things, in ways the Collective no longer remembers, and Munsell’s Epiphany is both the guiding force and the straitjacket that Edward and Jane will confront. This was originally going to be the first of a trilogy when it was published in 2009, but after fifteen years Fforde has finally published the second and concluding volume, so at last I can find out what will happen to Edward and Jane.
Red Side Story (Jasper Fforde)
Picking up precisely where Shades of Grey left off, we find Edward, Jane, Violet, and indeed the entire village of East Carmine in all sorts of trouble. Edward and Jane must avoid being sent to the Green Room or catching the Mildew (both invariably fatal) by defending their actions from the previous book. There is the Jollity Fair, at which pointless competitions will be won or lost, Edward will meet the Rainbow Brotherhood, and things will go from bad to worse. And throughout there are hints and revelations about the true nature of Chromatacia – what Utopiainc is, what the swans are, and the validity of the Somewhere Else theory. In the end it will be Jane, Edward, and Violet in a world beyond their imagination, and getting from one end of that story to another is a wild and entertaining ride. Jasper Fforde is an inventive writer who stuffs his books with oddities that make a strange sort of sense, characters that stand out as interesting people, and more allusions than one can possibly catch on a single read through (as with one of the Thursday Next novels, there is an entire page of dialogue in this book lifted verbatim out of Star Wars with no attention called to it – you just have to know). I’m not sure if there will be a third book in this series – Fforde certainly left room for one, though he could just as easily leave those characters where they ended up as well – but for my sake I’m hoping there will be.
A Stroke of the Pen: The Lost Stories (Terry Pratchett)
Terry Pratchett was a prolific writer, as anyone who has ever worked their way through all 40+ books in the Discworld series can attest. He often published two Discworld books a year, and he had any number of non-Discworld books to his credit as well. But he started out as a journalist in the 1960s and 70s, and one of his responsibilities was to write short stories, often aimed at children or teenagers, to be published by the local papers he worked for. This is yet another posthumous collection of those stories, most of which had been previously unknown to be his as they had been published under the pseudonym of Patrick Kearns. They are all short, light-hearted, humorous in a dry sort of way, and recognizably of a piece. If you are a Pratchett fanatic, it is interesting to see him work out bits and bobs of his future style. If you’re a casual fan or even new to Pratchett, you may want to wait to become a fanatic before reading these.
Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes (Rob Wilkins)
Neil Gaiman, in his introduction to Terry Pratchett’s collection of non-fiction works entitled A Slip of the Keyboard, went to some length to try to dispel the idea of Pratchett as a “right jolly” old elf churning out light, humorous trivialities. The Pratchett Gaiman knew – and knew well, as both a friend and a colleague – was incandescently angry at the injustices of the world, large and small, and it was precisely that anger that he channeled into becoming the greatest satirist in the English language of the last two centuries, bar none. Yes, Pratchett’s books were funny – it is a rare reader who can get through a Discworld book without laughing out loud at least once – but underneath that humor was a deep humanistic moral framework built from a strong sense of how the world ought to work and a rage at the fact that it didn’t. Pratchett died in 2015 of a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease – a particularly cruel end for a gifted writer – and never got to write the autobiography he had planned. This project got left for his personal assistant, Rob Wilkins, who knew him better than anyone not related by blood or marriage and possibly better than some of those. It covers everything, from Pratchett’s childhood in a small English village to his career as a journalist and his family life, to the heights of fame and the final, bitter moments. He often frames stories through his own experiences with Pratchett, but never to the exclusion of the main man here – something Pratchett would not have tolerated if he had. Wilkins is unsparing in his descriptions of a man he obviously loved and respected, and Pratchett’s voice comes through on every page, even on those pages where that voice was stilled before death. It’s a comprehensive, sympathetic, but clear-eyed portrait of a complicated man and if you are any sort of fan of the books Pratchett wrote it is a must-read.
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