I’m wrapping up so many things right now — the term, my last column of the year, numerous academic obligations — and I’d love to know how things are going with you. So, a question: what’s a book you are desperate to get other people to read? Not necessarily a favourite, not necessarily “best,” not necessarily one that came out this year! But a book you really really want someone to read so they can talk about it with you.
If I’ve done this right you should all be able to leave comments, regardless of your subscriber status. I’ll leave my own answer in comments!
My answer of this exact second: Lynda Barry’s MAKING COMICS, which came out earlier this month. I can’t stop thinking about it and bringing it up in conversations about craft! Her insights into drawing as a numinous practice are so compassionate and nourishing and wonderful, and I want to seek ways to translate those insights into storytelling in prose fully as much as I just want to draw under her guidance!
Beyond Time War, you mean? I just started reading one of LeGuin's more obscure works: "Always Coming Home". It's a polished gem of a work about an entirely fictional culture who maybe will have lived in future California: their stories, poetry, songs, death practices, religion, etc etc. It's marvellous. I would love to geek out about it with a friend.
As everyone in VP23 knows, I recently read When Breath Becomes Air, and it shattered me to pieces with sadness and beauty. In part it's because of how my father died. I want to talk to more people who have read it so I can better process the book and maybe some life stuff, too. I've never cried like that with a book before.
Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer! She's a botanist, and indigenous, and this book is such a wonderful, sad, inspiring, and wise book about culture, plants, botany, and taking care of our world. I recommend it to everyone.
For the last couple of months it has been SOMEONE WHO WILL LOVE YOU IN ALL YOUR DAMAGED GLORY by Raphael Bob-Waksberg, creator of BoJack Horseman. It's a collection of short stories that are funny and moving and clever, and it includes a story that has made me reconsider a lifetime of insisting that superheroes don't work in prose.
I also love the audiobook, which is read by a number of great performers. (Stephanie Beatriz reads the superhero story.)
Michael Swanwick's "The Iron Dragon's Mother." Third in a setting (not really a series) with industrialized faerie world where they steal away human children to work in the iron dragon factories, and the iron dragons are jet fighters.
I have a lot of (very divergent) feelings about the first two in that setting, and this one... it's rich and deep and complex, it has a weird episodicness and some notable oversights, the final plot-end bored me but the thematic-end brought me to tears. It's either loose and meandering or utterly perfect and I don't know which.
Long story short, I need to sit down and chew this book over in discussion with someone so I can figure out what the heck I thought about it.
I'd love for more people to read or have read Elizabeth Knox's The Vintner's Luck. Also Annie Dillard's The Writing Life--a slim and lovely volume on writing. :)
Factfulness by Hans Rosling. I have found it a valuable resource when helping my teenager not feel so distressed about the state of the world. Not everything is as awful as it generally feels.
I am in the midst of a re-read of Terri Windling’s The Wood Wife and it is pushing my buttons in all the most pleasing way. I want more people to know of it! And 2), I am reading the Diabetes Code, because I was just diagnosed, and need to know all of the everything about my new life.
I wonder if my therapist will end up reading IN OTHER LANDS because so much of what Elliot is going through (has gone through?) in his journey surrounding love, is what I am going through. My sessions are bringing in his most heart wrenching epiphanies to my therapist, and then sobbing the entire time.
I've been pushing Aliette de Bodard's "In the Vanishers' Palace" on everyone I can. It packed so many meaty dynamics into such a short novel, and I really want to have more discussions about it beyond "YOU HAVE TO READ THIS".
I’m not even done with it yet, but I’m desperate to find people that have read Bunny by Mona Awad because it’s not even remotely what I was expecting and is so weird and interesting!
Well, in addition to this cool book about rival spies traveling on the strands of time, this year in speculative fiction I’ve adored Alix Harrow’s Ten Thousand Doors of January, Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth, Seanan McGuire’s Middlegame, Elizabeth Bear’s Ancestral Night and River Solomon’s gorgeous The Deep. And if you make me choose AGAIN Amal, I will cry. O.o
And in historical fiction, Alice Hoffman’s The World That We Knew was utterly luminous.
I just finished “Lady from the Black Lagoon” by Mallory O’Meara, a biography of Milicent Patrick, who designed the “Creature from the Black Lagoon” costume, Universal’s last great monster, and saw her career cut far short by the pervasive sexism of the times. Super interesting.
A month or so ago the book The Palimpsets by Aleksandra Lum appeared at the bookstore I work at and no one could figure out where it came from. I spent a few minutes reading the back matter and all I could figure out about it was that I had no idea what kind of book it'd be besides deeply clever and absurd. So I read it. It turns out to be one of the stranger and more fascinating books I've read in the last year. It centers around the politics of writing in your non-native language and what makes someone a "native" author, all conveyed through the writings of a polish author locked up in a Belgian sanitoriam because he refuses to stop writing in Antarctican. It's a deeply surreal, comedic and tragic novella. I can't recommend it enough to anyone intrigued by a strange little work about language and writing.
The book I’ve read this year that I’ve wanted to talk about but have known no one else who read is The Fox and Dr. Shimamura by Christine Wunnicke. It’s got a surreal tone, but it’s based around the life of one of the scientists who was sent from Japan to Europe to learn The Modern Ways, and there’s some really interesting stuff in there about race and class and the ways we try to make magic fit uneasily into the box of science. Hopefully someone will read it someday!
Stress levels are pretty high at the moment and reading, and often sleeping, are what's suffering. With that in mind, I'd recommend Giant Days. A magnificent, deeply funny and occasionally fiercely odd series about three University students. They're all brilliantly realized women, the book has a rich vein of surreal northern UK humor and it never fails to make me laugh when I need to.
Gideon The Ninth. It sings to my lonely teen queer goth heart and is wonderful. Gormenghast, Resident Evil and Battle Royale atmospheres and unsentimental death, unsentimental romance, humour and grimness. I have no way of telling if people who weren't lonely teen goths would find it as compelling but I adore it.
I just finished Spinning Silver and Uprooted by Naomi Novik and loved those so much.
I finished the last issue of Saga before all of my Saga reading friends because I read it month to month while the others waited for the graphic novel to come out. I had to keep quiet about it even though I had so many feelings, for a whole year-until my last friend read it. I won’t say anything else in case of anyone on that is reading it or thinking of reading it. I envy them.
Since I'm reading another of his books right now, I'll say The Tiger and the Wolf, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I just love his worldbuilding & his characters & their relationships and it all feels like epic fantasy but somehow more gentle, more personal. Really wonderful series.
I've had bpNichol's "Martyrology" on my To Read shelf for twenty years, and I've only ever read the first two books. I would love some company (and an excuse) to go back and read the whole thing.
A book I specifically want to scream with people about is Natasha Pulley's The Lost Future of Pepperharrow, a sequel to The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. SO GOOD. She really pulls off writing a book about someone who can tell and therefore shape the future, which is extremely hard to do, and there are some exquisite images in it, like a message made of moths. It's the sort of book you read once without knowing what's going to happen and then immediately read again to spot all the sneaky little ways it sets up the ending. And the protagonists are a gay couple (one English, one Japanese) and their autistic adopted daughter, mostly in late-19th-century Japan, and GOSH how she writes Japanese is fantastic and I love it.
I just finished an ARC of My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland and it was a revelation. I loved the direct queer reading of McCullers’ life, how the constant searching between the lines defines queer life & reading & seeing how researching the book (even when it wasn’t a book yet) changed Shapland. I love it so much. I work at a library & it is the only book I’ll recommend in February.
I want all my girlfriends to read The Paper Wasp by Lauren Acampora so we can talk about it and I want everyone to read A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions by Muhammad Yunus because we need to talk about better systems to run human society!
It's an older series now, but I'm just getting into the LINESMAN trilogy by the Dunstall sisters (who write together as S.K. Dunstall). I listened to the first two on Audible, and I'm waiting to return to work next week so I can listen to the third one. CONFLUENCE, on the train every morning.
What's different about them is that they're action science fiction novels, with blasters, FTL ships. space battles, kidnappings, an Emperor and a Princess, assassins, political intrigue, and a galaxy poised on the brink of war.... and yet the hero, the man at the center of all the action. is NOT an Alpha male, and in fact, is far from it. He's extraordinarily passive, and acts only to protect his friends and his employers, and even then only rarely.
I've read reviews that call him "loathsome," but I think his passivity is the point. He's disinterested in the intrigue and the coming war, and far more interested in the poetry and music that makes ships move through space. If he could make the universe see things the way he does, there wouldn't be war.
It's a minor miracle that the Dunstall sisters have created an SF action-epic with a truly pacifist hero at its core. I didn't think it was possible, but these books are great.
I'm guessing most people here have already read "Time War" and Mary Robinette won a Hugo for "Calculating Stars", so that doesn't need to be promoted. So I'm going to go with Fonda Lee's Green Bones series - "Jade City" and "Jade War". They are urban fantasy in a setting quite close to post World War II Asia where jade is magic and its wearers run organized-crime syndicates based on the Mafia.
The worldbuilding is epic, the characters are three-dimensional and even the worst criminals have motives beyond pure evil. They are trying to survive or protect/avenge their families.
One word of warning, though. If you start getting attached to a character, something horrible will happen to them.
I love Laurus by Evgeni Vodolazkin and would recomment it to everyone I know, if it weren't for all the miracles that happen in the book - some people read this as magical realism, but I still figure that reading about a 15th century fictional russian saint is not everyone's cup of tea. This was written by a historian of medieval Russia and as such feels very authentic, with all of the details of the day-to-day life, the fear and the reality of plague, the superstitions, etc. What I like the most about this book, though, is that the main character is finally a Good Guy and I always leave the book with a very peaceful feeling. In terms of recommendations, I've had about the same amount of success as with my 2018 favourite (The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett), i.e. none, but this one is a much easier read.
Amal, if you're seeing this, thank you for the Travel Light recommendation in Time War! I gifted it to my dad for his birthday and he really loved it, especially the end. I can't wait to read it (once I'm done with finals. small detail.)
Vita Nostra by Marina & Sergey Dyachenko is surreal, dark, weird, and expansively ambitious. It follows this ...student? Recruit? at an arcane Russian school which has the atmosphere of a bizarre, barely logical training camp for spies but they seem to be magic students. The main character is a teenager tapped for this by an enigmatic, cruel stranger who tasks her with completing bizarre endeavors while at the beach with her mom, prior to inviting her to the aforementioned academy. Apparently there is a sequel, but while avoiding spoilers, I CANNOT for the life of me figure out where they'd go from then end of this one. Translated by Julia Meitov Hersey.
I really enjoyed the Murderbot Diaries series of novellas by Martha Wells, and the Wayward Children series of novellas by Seanan McGuire. Been busy with life so novellas have been perfect for reading on the bus between school and work :)
I love Rebecca Solnit's journalism and her writing from various protest movements, but my favourite of her books is A Field Guide to Getting Lost. It's a collection of philosophical and autobiographical essays where she starts with an image, say the colour blue, and then goes off by way of the blue over a salt lake that she visited, into meditations on distance and ... It's a beautiful, restful book and it has some of the loveliest writing I've ever come across outside of Time War, paragraphs that you just have to stop and re-read to enjoy them again.
One of my more recent reads: "Undermajordomo Minor" by Patrick Dewitt. It's a fairly odd love story with some pretty quaint and eccentric characters, but I found myself unable to put it down...
THE RAVEN TOWER by Ann Leckie. Love seeing a really unusual kind of power, and a very strange narrator. But the things that make it SO COOL are all spoilers. And the narrator leaves out so much, so some of the more interesting bits have to be pieced together slowly afterward. I need more people to talk to about this book.
Shameless plug, but surprisingly appropriate for this serendipitous thread... I was literally trying to figure out how to contact you earlier today because you're one of the very few people I know even slightly (I took your workshop at SIWC last year) who might really appreciate a long poem I've just released in book form.
"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Ham: a medieval miscellany" is a goofy, sober, fun, serious take on the extremely strange Medieval romance "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight", in which King Arthur's famously courteous nephew, Sir Gawain, accepts a challenge from the Green Knight to a "beheading contest": he can chop of the Green Knight's head if the Green Knight can subsequently have a go at chopping Gawain's head off.
The original is in Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse. My tale--which isn't by any means a translation, but rather a riff on the original that travels far afield--is in anapestic tetrameter, mostly, although it keeps the "bob and wheel" of the original, which is a little dangly bit hanging off the end of each verse.
It has jealousy, honour, sex (well, very nearly), violence, a quest, adventures, wild men, seductive women, wise women, noble and not-so-noble knights, an outlaw and his maid, a band of wandering pilgrims who tell each other stories, a riddle contest that makes fun of J.R.R. Tolkien, and pigs!
At about 2200 lines its as long as the original, and if I've done my job properly people who "don't know anything about poetry" will be able to read and enjoy it in a pretty prose-like fashion, while poetry lovers will find a lot going on just beneath the surface, and possibly deeper.
I'd like to believe narrative poetry is about ready for a serious renaissance, and this is part of my attempt to make that happen.
It's available on Apple Books and Amazon, in Canada and elsewhere.
Also, to keep fully within the spirit of the thread: if you've not read Pat Barker's "The Silence of the Girls", I can't recommend it enough. It's the Illiad told from the perspective of Briseis, the captive woman claimed by Agamemnon from Achilles, which claiming was the cause of Achilles' wrath. Easily the best thing I've read this year, and it sent me back to Fagles' Illiad with a new and deeper perspective. As someone who is personally prone to being a bit prickly, Barker's deep sympathy for humanity is something I struggle to emulate, in my work and life.
My answer of this exact second: Lynda Barry’s MAKING COMICS, which came out earlier this month. I can’t stop thinking about it and bringing it up in conversations about craft! Her insights into drawing as a numinous practice are so compassionate and nourishing and wonderful, and I want to seek ways to translate those insights into storytelling in prose fully as much as I just want to draw under her guidance!
Beyond Time War, you mean? I just started reading one of LeGuin's more obscure works: "Always Coming Home". It's a polished gem of a work about an entirely fictional culture who maybe will have lived in future California: their stories, poetry, songs, death practices, religion, etc etc. It's marvellous. I would love to geek out about it with a friend.
As everyone in VP23 knows, I recently read When Breath Becomes Air, and it shattered me to pieces with sadness and beauty. In part it's because of how my father died. I want to talk to more people who have read it so I can better process the book and maybe some life stuff, too. I've never cried like that with a book before.
Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer! She's a botanist, and indigenous, and this book is such a wonderful, sad, inspiring, and wise book about culture, plants, botany, and taking care of our world. I recommend it to everyone.
For the last couple of months it has been SOMEONE WHO WILL LOVE YOU IN ALL YOUR DAMAGED GLORY by Raphael Bob-Waksberg, creator of BoJack Horseman. It's a collection of short stories that are funny and moving and clever, and it includes a story that has made me reconsider a lifetime of insisting that superheroes don't work in prose.
I also love the audiobook, which is read by a number of great performers. (Stephanie Beatriz reads the superhero story.)
Michael Swanwick's "The Iron Dragon's Mother." Third in a setting (not really a series) with industrialized faerie world where they steal away human children to work in the iron dragon factories, and the iron dragons are jet fighters.
I have a lot of (very divergent) feelings about the first two in that setting, and this one... it's rich and deep and complex, it has a weird episodicness and some notable oversights, the final plot-end bored me but the thematic-end brought me to tears. It's either loose and meandering or utterly perfect and I don't know which.
Long story short, I need to sit down and chew this book over in discussion with someone so I can figure out what the heck I thought about it.
I'd love for more people to read or have read Elizabeth Knox's The Vintner's Luck. Also Annie Dillard's The Writing Life--a slim and lovely volume on writing. :)
Factfulness by Hans Rosling. I have found it a valuable resource when helping my teenager not feel so distressed about the state of the world. Not everything is as awful as it generally feels.
I am in the midst of a re-read of Terri Windling’s The Wood Wife and it is pushing my buttons in all the most pleasing way. I want more people to know of it! And 2), I am reading the Diabetes Code, because I was just diagnosed, and need to know all of the everything about my new life.
I wonder if my therapist will end up reading IN OTHER LANDS because so much of what Elliot is going through (has gone through?) in his journey surrounding love, is what I am going through. My sessions are bringing in his most heart wrenching epiphanies to my therapist, and then sobbing the entire time.
PALACES FOR THE PEOPLE:
How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life
by Eric Klinenberg
Bulgakov's Master and Margarita :)
I've been pushing Aliette de Bodard's "In the Vanishers' Palace" on everyone I can. It packed so many meaty dynamics into such a short novel, and I really want to have more discussions about it beyond "YOU HAVE TO READ THIS".
I’m not even done with it yet, but I’m desperate to find people that have read Bunny by Mona Awad because it’s not even remotely what I was expecting and is so weird and interesting!
Well, in addition to this cool book about rival spies traveling on the strands of time, this year in speculative fiction I’ve adored Alix Harrow’s Ten Thousand Doors of January, Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth, Seanan McGuire’s Middlegame, Elizabeth Bear’s Ancestral Night and River Solomon’s gorgeous The Deep. And if you make me choose AGAIN Amal, I will cry. O.o
And in historical fiction, Alice Hoffman’s The World That We Knew was utterly luminous.
I just finished “Lady from the Black Lagoon” by Mallory O’Meara, a biography of Milicent Patrick, who designed the “Creature from the Black Lagoon” costume, Universal’s last great monster, and saw her career cut far short by the pervasive sexism of the times. Super interesting.
A month or so ago the book The Palimpsets by Aleksandra Lum appeared at the bookstore I work at and no one could figure out where it came from. I spent a few minutes reading the back matter and all I could figure out about it was that I had no idea what kind of book it'd be besides deeply clever and absurd. So I read it. It turns out to be one of the stranger and more fascinating books I've read in the last year. It centers around the politics of writing in your non-native language and what makes someone a "native" author, all conveyed through the writings of a polish author locked up in a Belgian sanitoriam because he refuses to stop writing in Antarctican. It's a deeply surreal, comedic and tragic novella. I can't recommend it enough to anyone intrigued by a strange little work about language and writing.
The book I’ve read this year that I’ve wanted to talk about but have known no one else who read is The Fox and Dr. Shimamura by Christine Wunnicke. It’s got a surreal tone, but it’s based around the life of one of the scientists who was sent from Japan to Europe to learn The Modern Ways, and there’s some really interesting stuff in there about race and class and the ways we try to make magic fit uneasily into the box of science. Hopefully someone will read it someday!
Stress levels are pretty high at the moment and reading, and often sleeping, are what's suffering. With that in mind, I'd recommend Giant Days. A magnificent, deeply funny and occasionally fiercely odd series about three University students. They're all brilliantly realized women, the book has a rich vein of surreal northern UK humor and it never fails to make me laugh when I need to.
Gideon The Ninth. It sings to my lonely teen queer goth heart and is wonderful. Gormenghast, Resident Evil and Battle Royale atmospheres and unsentimental death, unsentimental romance, humour and grimness. I have no way of telling if people who weren't lonely teen goths would find it as compelling but I adore it.
I just finished Spinning Silver and Uprooted by Naomi Novik and loved those so much.
I finished the last issue of Saga before all of my Saga reading friends because I read it month to month while the others waited for the graphic novel to come out. I had to keep quiet about it even though I had so many feelings, for a whole year-until my last friend read it. I won’t say anything else in case of anyone on that is reading it or thinking of reading it. I envy them.
Since I'm reading another of his books right now, I'll say The Tiger and the Wolf, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I just love his worldbuilding & his characters & their relationships and it all feels like epic fantasy but somehow more gentle, more personal. Really wonderful series.
Honestly? At this exact moment?
I've had bpNichol's "Martyrology" on my To Read shelf for twenty years, and I've only ever read the first two books. I would love some company (and an excuse) to go back and read the whole thing.
A book I specifically want to scream with people about is Natasha Pulley's The Lost Future of Pepperharrow, a sequel to The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. SO GOOD. She really pulls off writing a book about someone who can tell and therefore shape the future, which is extremely hard to do, and there are some exquisite images in it, like a message made of moths. It's the sort of book you read once without knowing what's going to happen and then immediately read again to spot all the sneaky little ways it sets up the ending. And the protagonists are a gay couple (one English, one Japanese) and their autistic adopted daughter, mostly in late-19th-century Japan, and GOSH how she writes Japanese is fantastic and I love it.
Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace! It's not new new anymore but I'm not done raving about it yet.
I just finished an ARC of My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland and it was a revelation. I loved the direct queer reading of McCullers’ life, how the constant searching between the lines defines queer life & reading & seeing how researching the book (even when it wasn’t a book yet) changed Shapland. I love it so much. I work at a library & it is the only book I’ll recommend in February.
I want all my girlfriends to read The Paper Wasp by Lauren Acampora so we can talk about it and I want everyone to read A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions by Muhammad Yunus because we need to talk about better systems to run human society!
It's an older series now, but I'm just getting into the LINESMAN trilogy by the Dunstall sisters (who write together as S.K. Dunstall). I listened to the first two on Audible, and I'm waiting to return to work next week so I can listen to the third one. CONFLUENCE, on the train every morning.
What's different about them is that they're action science fiction novels, with blasters, FTL ships. space battles, kidnappings, an Emperor and a Princess, assassins, political intrigue, and a galaxy poised on the brink of war.... and yet the hero, the man at the center of all the action. is NOT an Alpha male, and in fact, is far from it. He's extraordinarily passive, and acts only to protect his friends and his employers, and even then only rarely.
I've read reviews that call him "loathsome," but I think his passivity is the point. He's disinterested in the intrigue and the coming war, and far more interested in the poetry and music that makes ships move through space. If he could make the universe see things the way he does, there wouldn't be war.
It's a minor miracle that the Dunstall sisters have created an SF action-epic with a truly pacifist hero at its core. I didn't think it was possible, but these books are great.
I'm guessing most people here have already read "Time War" and Mary Robinette won a Hugo for "Calculating Stars", so that doesn't need to be promoted. So I'm going to go with Fonda Lee's Green Bones series - "Jade City" and "Jade War". They are urban fantasy in a setting quite close to post World War II Asia where jade is magic and its wearers run organized-crime syndicates based on the Mafia.
The worldbuilding is epic, the characters are three-dimensional and even the worst criminals have motives beyond pure evil. They are trying to survive or protect/avenge their families.
One word of warning, though. If you start getting attached to a character, something horrible will happen to them.
I love Laurus by Evgeni Vodolazkin and would recomment it to everyone I know, if it weren't for all the miracles that happen in the book - some people read this as magical realism, but I still figure that reading about a 15th century fictional russian saint is not everyone's cup of tea. This was written by a historian of medieval Russia and as such feels very authentic, with all of the details of the day-to-day life, the fear and the reality of plague, the superstitions, etc. What I like the most about this book, though, is that the main character is finally a Good Guy and I always leave the book with a very peaceful feeling. In terms of recommendations, I've had about the same amount of success as with my 2018 favourite (The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett), i.e. none, but this one is a much easier read.
Amal, if you're seeing this, thank you for the Travel Light recommendation in Time War! I gifted it to my dad for his birthday and he really loved it, especially the end. I can't wait to read it (once I'm done with finals. small detail.)
Vita Nostra by Marina & Sergey Dyachenko is surreal, dark, weird, and expansively ambitious. It follows this ...student? Recruit? at an arcane Russian school which has the atmosphere of a bizarre, barely logical training camp for spies but they seem to be magic students. The main character is a teenager tapped for this by an enigmatic, cruel stranger who tasks her with completing bizarre endeavors while at the beach with her mom, prior to inviting her to the aforementioned academy. Apparently there is a sequel, but while avoiding spoilers, I CANNOT for the life of me figure out where they'd go from then end of this one. Translated by Julia Meitov Hersey.
I really enjoyed the Murderbot Diaries series of novellas by Martha Wells, and the Wayward Children series of novellas by Seanan McGuire. Been busy with life so novellas have been perfect for reading on the bus between school and work :)
I love Rebecca Solnit's journalism and her writing from various protest movements, but my favourite of her books is A Field Guide to Getting Lost. It's a collection of philosophical and autobiographical essays where she starts with an image, say the colour blue, and then goes off by way of the blue over a salt lake that she visited, into meditations on distance and ... It's a beautiful, restful book and it has some of the loveliest writing I've ever come across outside of Time War, paragraphs that you just have to stop and re-read to enjoy them again.
One of my more recent reads: "Undermajordomo Minor" by Patrick Dewitt. It's a fairly odd love story with some pretty quaint and eccentric characters, but I found myself unable to put it down...
I want everyone in the world to read MY BEST FRIEND'S EXORCISM and talk to me about it, because I am forever obsessed with Grady Hendrix.
THE RAVEN TOWER by Ann Leckie. Love seeing a really unusual kind of power, and a very strange narrator. But the things that make it SO COOL are all spoilers. And the narrator leaves out so much, so some of the more interesting bits have to be pieced together slowly afterward. I need more people to talk to about this book.
Shameless plug, but surprisingly appropriate for this serendipitous thread... I was literally trying to figure out how to contact you earlier today because you're one of the very few people I know even slightly (I took your workshop at SIWC last year) who might really appreciate a long poem I've just released in book form.
"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Ham: a medieval miscellany" is a goofy, sober, fun, serious take on the extremely strange Medieval romance "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight", in which King Arthur's famously courteous nephew, Sir Gawain, accepts a challenge from the Green Knight to a "beheading contest": he can chop of the Green Knight's head if the Green Knight can subsequently have a go at chopping Gawain's head off.
The original is in Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse. My tale--which isn't by any means a translation, but rather a riff on the original that travels far afield--is in anapestic tetrameter, mostly, although it keeps the "bob and wheel" of the original, which is a little dangly bit hanging off the end of each verse.
It has jealousy, honour, sex (well, very nearly), violence, a quest, adventures, wild men, seductive women, wise women, noble and not-so-noble knights, an outlaw and his maid, a band of wandering pilgrims who tell each other stories, a riddle contest that makes fun of J.R.R. Tolkien, and pigs!
At about 2200 lines its as long as the original, and if I've done my job properly people who "don't know anything about poetry" will be able to read and enjoy it in a pretty prose-like fashion, while poetry lovers will find a lot going on just beneath the surface, and possibly deeper.
I'd like to believe narrative poetry is about ready for a serious renaissance, and this is part of my attempt to make that happen.
It's available on Apple Books and Amazon, in Canada and elsewhere.
Also, to keep fully within the spirit of the thread: if you've not read Pat Barker's "The Silence of the Girls", I can't recommend it enough. It's the Illiad told from the perspective of Briseis, the captive woman claimed by Agamemnon from Achilles, which claiming was the cause of Achilles' wrath. Easily the best thing I've read this year, and it sent me back to Fagles' Illiad with a new and deeper perspective. As someone who is personally prone to being a bit prickly, Barker's deep sympathy for humanity is something I struggle to emulate, in my work and life.