2022 Media Roundup: Books
Dec. 28th, 2022 03:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabby This being Wednesday, my dudes, let's talk about some books I read!
I read a lot this year, exceeding my goal of 50 by quite a margin, and not including (for the most part) betaing works that were not quite in their final form (I did include two in the list that were basically ready fo publication). So it's hard to pick favourites! I'm at a place in my life where the vast number of books I read are quite good, actually, because my reading list comes from friends who know my taste. If you want to read more extended raves, you can search my "books" tag to get more details about what I thought.
Otherwise, I'll briefly talk about eight books that made enough of an impact that I can't not talk about them. I'm focusing on newer books, but not exclusively—my favourite read of the year was published in 2016 but I'd never heard of it before a co-worker dropped it on my desk.
The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa. This is a dark, meditative fairy tale on the nature of memory, grief, and loss. On an island, citizens are regularly ordered to forget certain concepts—birds, perfume, flowers—and dispose of any in their possession. Only a tiny minority of people retain the ability to remember the concepts. The narrator is not among them, but her mother was, and was disappeared by the Memory Police, who enforce the collective amnesia. And so is her editor, who she hides in her basement as she struggles to finish a story while words still exist. It's surreal and haunting and very much captures the 2022 mood of being perpetually gaslit.
Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin. Sometimes you can judge the value of a book based on who it pisses off. If you mention Manhunt, TERFs and conservatives will get angry because in a throwaway sentence, it offs JK Rowling in an extremely entertaining way. Tenderqueers will get angry because Felker-Martin is a brutal writer who does not write her characters as Queer Role Models and Good Representation and this is a violent, angry howl of rage with zero punches pulled. And also, it is really good. Manhunt is about a gendercide apocalypse that kills off anyone with a certain amount of testosterone, sparing most (but not all) cis women, trans women on hormones, trans men not on hormones, prepubescent children, and nonbinary folks depending on hormone levels. The remaining men are transformed into hideous cannibalistic monsters. But they're not nearly so scary as the culty TERFs who have made it their priority to purge the world of trans people. It is dark and gory and relentless and I couldn't put it down.
When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O'Neill. Two little girls in 1870s Montreal, who happen to be the reincarnations of Marie Antoinette and the Marquis de Sade, fall in love, fall apart, feud, and reenact the French Revolution. It's relentless and scathingly funny from a master of blackly satirical writing.
Assassin of Reality by Marina and Serhiy Dyachenko. The latest mindfuck from two brilliant authors, Assassin of Reality is the sequel to my favourite fantasy novel, Vita Nostra. It continues Sasha's story as she wrestles with the nature of what she's become, adulthood, love, and magic. All of it is grounded in a gritty post-Soviet small town. No one, for my money, captures the uncanny and unsettling the way the Dyachenkos do, or injects strangeness into the everyday with such skill.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. This is one of those thiccboi books that is meant to readjust your thinking. Some of the research is apparently sloppy. But the fundamental thesis—that there is no linear evolution from hunter-gather bands to globalized capitalism and nation-states—is solid and important. Early human history is stranger, more diverse, and more interesting than I thought possible. As I read about it, I thought about the high school teacher who really ignited my interest in ancient civilizations and felt the temptation to look him up to see if he'd read it and what he thought about it. It's one of those books that makes you think about human ingenuity and potential and what the shape of future civilizations could look like if we got our shit together.
A Short History of the Blockade: Giant Beavers, Diplomacy and Regeneration in Nishnaabewin by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. This is so short, you can read it in an hour and you definitely should. It's about Indigenous land stewardship and defence, and ecosystems, and kinship, and beavers. It's non-fiction but it's also poetry. It's a provocation. It's inspiration.
The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher. This is a non-fiction book both gentle and scathing, exploring the role that race, class, and sexual orientation play in pandemics—particularly HIV and covid. It's full of profound insights and simmering rage at how populations and individuals are abandoned to die. I would pay money to put a copy in the hands of every public health official if I thought there was any chance of them reading it. You owe it to your own survival to check it out.
Finally, my favourite book of the year:
LaRose by Louise Erdrich. I've been thinking a lot about Great Literature and what it means for a novel to hold the kind of meaning that makes it timeless and important. And obviously that's a very fraught discussion that lends itself to disingenuous arguments. But. This book.
It's about two families, one Ojibwe, one white, whose fates become intertwined after one man accidentally shoots the son of the other, and offers his own son in exchange. It's about generational trauma and intergenerational healing, our duty to end cycles of violence, and how reconciliation is an action, not a state of being. It's about choosing a nonviolence that is anything but passive. It's about justice and what that looks like—not in the abstract, but grounded in the specific reality of fully-realized human characters.
This is a special kind of book. This is a book that contains layers of meaning and unfolds like a delicate flower to reveal itself. This is a book that makes you better for having read it. I could probably read it a thousand times and find something new it it to talk about, and I just might.
I read a lot this year, exceeding my goal of 50 by quite a margin, and not including (for the most part) betaing works that were not quite in their final form (I did include two in the list that were basically ready fo publication). So it's hard to pick favourites! I'm at a place in my life where the vast number of books I read are quite good, actually, because my reading list comes from friends who know my taste. If you want to read more extended raves, you can search my "books" tag to get more details about what I thought.
Otherwise, I'll briefly talk about eight books that made enough of an impact that I can't not talk about them. I'm focusing on newer books, but not exclusively—my favourite read of the year was published in 2016 but I'd never heard of it before a co-worker dropped it on my desk.
The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa. This is a dark, meditative fairy tale on the nature of memory, grief, and loss. On an island, citizens are regularly ordered to forget certain concepts—birds, perfume, flowers—and dispose of any in their possession. Only a tiny minority of people retain the ability to remember the concepts. The narrator is not among them, but her mother was, and was disappeared by the Memory Police, who enforce the collective amnesia. And so is her editor, who she hides in her basement as she struggles to finish a story while words still exist. It's surreal and haunting and very much captures the 2022 mood of being perpetually gaslit.
Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin. Sometimes you can judge the value of a book based on who it pisses off. If you mention Manhunt, TERFs and conservatives will get angry because in a throwaway sentence, it offs JK Rowling in an extremely entertaining way. Tenderqueers will get angry because Felker-Martin is a brutal writer who does not write her characters as Queer Role Models and Good Representation and this is a violent, angry howl of rage with zero punches pulled. And also, it is really good. Manhunt is about a gendercide apocalypse that kills off anyone with a certain amount of testosterone, sparing most (but not all) cis women, trans women on hormones, trans men not on hormones, prepubescent children, and nonbinary folks depending on hormone levels. The remaining men are transformed into hideous cannibalistic monsters. But they're not nearly so scary as the culty TERFs who have made it their priority to purge the world of trans people. It is dark and gory and relentless and I couldn't put it down.
When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O'Neill. Two little girls in 1870s Montreal, who happen to be the reincarnations of Marie Antoinette and the Marquis de Sade, fall in love, fall apart, feud, and reenact the French Revolution. It's relentless and scathingly funny from a master of blackly satirical writing.
Assassin of Reality by Marina and Serhiy Dyachenko. The latest mindfuck from two brilliant authors, Assassin of Reality is the sequel to my favourite fantasy novel, Vita Nostra. It continues Sasha's story as she wrestles with the nature of what she's become, adulthood, love, and magic. All of it is grounded in a gritty post-Soviet small town. No one, for my money, captures the uncanny and unsettling the way the Dyachenkos do, or injects strangeness into the everyday with such skill.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. This is one of those thiccboi books that is meant to readjust your thinking. Some of the research is apparently sloppy. But the fundamental thesis—that there is no linear evolution from hunter-gather bands to globalized capitalism and nation-states—is solid and important. Early human history is stranger, more diverse, and more interesting than I thought possible. As I read about it, I thought about the high school teacher who really ignited my interest in ancient civilizations and felt the temptation to look him up to see if he'd read it and what he thought about it. It's one of those books that makes you think about human ingenuity and potential and what the shape of future civilizations could look like if we got our shit together.
A Short History of the Blockade: Giant Beavers, Diplomacy and Regeneration in Nishnaabewin by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. This is so short, you can read it in an hour and you definitely should. It's about Indigenous land stewardship and defence, and ecosystems, and kinship, and beavers. It's non-fiction but it's also poetry. It's a provocation. It's inspiration.
The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher. This is a non-fiction book both gentle and scathing, exploring the role that race, class, and sexual orientation play in pandemics—particularly HIV and covid. It's full of profound insights and simmering rage at how populations and individuals are abandoned to die. I would pay money to put a copy in the hands of every public health official if I thought there was any chance of them reading it. You owe it to your own survival to check it out.
Finally, my favourite book of the year:
LaRose by Louise Erdrich. I've been thinking a lot about Great Literature and what it means for a novel to hold the kind of meaning that makes it timeless and important. And obviously that's a very fraught discussion that lends itself to disingenuous arguments. But. This book.
It's about two families, one Ojibwe, one white, whose fates become intertwined after one man accidentally shoots the son of the other, and offers his own son in exchange. It's about generational trauma and intergenerational healing, our duty to end cycles of violence, and how reconciliation is an action, not a state of being. It's about choosing a nonviolence that is anything but passive. It's about justice and what that looks like—not in the abstract, but grounded in the specific reality of fully-realized human characters.
This is a special kind of book. This is a book that contains layers of meaning and unfolds like a delicate flower to reveal itself. This is a book that makes you better for having read it. I could probably read it a thousand times and find something new it it to talk about, and I just might.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-28 10:21 pm (UTC)Just wanted to leave my thanks
no subject
Date: 2022-12-28 10:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-28 10:24 pm (UTC)Ooh. I've read The Memory Police, but it was back in the Before Times of 2019— I wonder if it would resonate more with me now.
I also read (and loved) both When We Lost Our Heads and LaRose this year!
no subject
Date: 2022-12-28 10:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-28 10:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-30 12:36 am (UTC)I just got The Viral Underclass from the library and requested LaRose.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-30 02:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-30 04:09 pm (UTC)It discusses climate grief and the solutions that we still need to come up with, and fairly rails a bit about the Canadian government’s failings on this (he’s a Canadian, so it makes sense that he’s targeting his local government), but also goes over some of the incredible things that B.C.’s government has done with housing codes - literally everything new there is being made to zero-emission standards.
I know that a lot of folks aren’t going to like some of the solutions in his book, but he’s right that we need cities where amenities like food, medical care, entertainment, and employment opportunities are close enough to housing that it’s practical to walk and/or cycle for the vast majority of the inhabitants, with a thriving electricity-based public transit system taking up the slack. And that means more density and more public transit, and fewer cars and standalone homes. A standalone home requires a lot more energy than a duplex, and a duplex takes more than a triplex, and a triplex takes more than an condo or apartment building.
I think the most exciting thing for me is his vision of the future: that it isn’t about scraping by or doing less. It’s about creating vibrant cities where people are happy to be there, the streets are full of pedestrians and cyclists interacting rather than cars clogging bumper-to-bumper. It doesn’t have to be that our future is a choice between burning alive or a crappy existence where we go without and lose quality of life. It can instead be a future where we recreate our spaces to prioritize people over things, clean power over dirty, experiences and worthwhile purchases over desperate, soul-numbing consumption. I want this new future (that is already coming in in some areas of the world, and continues to spread).
no subject
Date: 2022-12-30 04:48 pm (UTC)...we have?
I'm not being sarcastic—I honestly was under the impressions that we're hurtling towards it.
I think the most exciting thing for me is his vision of the future: that it isn’t about scraping by or doing less. It’s about creating vibrant cities where people are happy to be there, the streets are full of pedestrians and cyclists interacting rather than cars clogging bumper-to-bumper. It doesn’t have to be that our future is a choice between burning alive or a crappy existence where we go without and lose quality of life. It can instead be a future where we recreate our spaces to prioritize people over things, clean power over dirty, experiences and worthwhile purchases over desperate, soul-numbing consumption. I want this new future (that is already coming in in some areas of the world, and continues to spread).
This is the kind of thing I need to read. Because I'm intellectually aware of the fact that we need to radically change the way we live, but inside me is a petulant child who doesn't want to stop flying and, more sympathetically, has a cringe reaction to the thought that things like glasses and medication that I need to live might go away. The more we can articulate a vision of abundance that's not austere anarcho-primitivism the more people I think would sign on.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-30 05:18 pm (UTC)The book does cover his frustration that it’s still being reported about as if our end is nigh, because when people have no hope for the future, the pace of positive change slows down. He wrote it partially as a way to counter that.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-30 05:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-30 06:55 pm (UTC)The book makes the case in much greater detail than I can. I look forward to hearing your thoughts once you’ve finished it. :)
no subject
Date: 2022-12-30 07:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-30 10:54 pm (UTC)Basically I really need some optimism.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-30 02:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-30 02:13 pm (UTC)