My book-buying levels are not as high as they were before I moved to Sweden, but they have been slowly creeping up. Since I want the TBR to go down, I try to read more books than I buy…
Not always successfully. In 2023, I read 152 books. Which is twenty-one more than the previous year. I also bought 156 books. So a net gain on the TBR of four. Ah well.
To tell the truth, my reading during the year was a bit all over the place. I reread some books I last read in the 1970s and 1980s, before I started recording details of the books I read. I also reread some books I last read in the 1990s, after I started recording details of the books I read. All of those books were pretty much as expected — most were worse than I’d anticipated, but one or two turned out to be actually better. It did, however, inspire me to try and finish several series I’d started decades ago and never actually finished, such as Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series… I still have a way to go on all of them. (It’ll take a while too, as I’m only buying cheap secondhand copies or ebooks on offer.)
There were other books too, of course. Some were new, some were old. Some were critically-acclaimed, some, well, I seem to be the only person I know who reads the author. Some were award nominees, others weren’t.
One book stands out as the novel of the year: The Things We’ve Seen (2021, Spain) by Agustín Fernández Mallo. Described as “the novel David Lynch and WG Sebald might have written had they joined forces”, there is nothing about this book that could not have been designed to appeal to me, from the dry reportage style to its metafictional narrative to the mix of fiction and little-known facts to the embedded photos.
Next is Concluding (1948, UK) by Henry Green, who once again demonstrated he was one of the premier prose stylists in British literature. The novel is also science fiction, although so subtle it’s easy to understand why so many readers missed it. The story takes place in an alternate UK after some kind of Soviet-style, or fascist, revolution, but is set entirely at a school for young women destined to go into “service” (yes, I read it that way too). The novel is amazingly understated, and as inconclusive as its title promises otherwise.
A couple of strong genre contenders for best of the year were Claire North’s Ithaca (2022, UK), a retelling of the story of Penelope, Odysseus’s wife, who ruled Ithaca while he was off on his, er, odyssey. The novel is narrated by Hera, who has been observing and protecting the three queens of Greece, Penelope, Clytemnestra and Helen. North is an author whose career I’ve been following for a number of years. The same is true of Dave Hutchinson, who also happens to be a friend, and his latest instalment in his Fractured Europe sequence, Cold Water (2022, UK), does not disappoint. More of a spy thriller than a science fiction novel, its near-future Europe is evoked brilliantly, its labyrinthine plot comes to a satisfactory close, and it throws in a neat science-fictional twist in its closing pages. North’s and Hutchinson’s novels each work across two genres, and are superior examples of both.
I wasn’t as taken with Martin MacInnes’s In Ascension (2023, UK) as many seemed to be, but I appreciated reading a science fiction novel with literary chops, which had actually been published as, ahem, literary fiction. A good start was let down by some nonsense about undersea vents, before finishing up with a climax better suited to a TV series. I was even less enamoured of Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory (2023, UK), despite the neat world-building and the clever plot re-sets. I guess I just have a problem with novels that seem to minimise bodycounts measuring in the trillions. The First Sister (2020, USA) by Linden A Lewis, I thought a better space opera, although it owed perhaps a little too much to Warhammer 40,000. Plutoshine (2022, UK) by Lucy Kissick, while old-fashioned in mode was bang up-to-date in style, and was a solid piece of hard sf that deserved its place on the Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist. Ken MacLeod, always a good read, dropped the second book of his Lightspeed trilogy, Beyond the Reach of Earth (2023, UK), which was fun, although it seemed to contain everything except the kitchen sink, and intrigued more for what it promised in the final book of the trilogy than for what actually happened between its covers.
A couple of non-fantastic novels worth mentioning. I’ve been dipping into Robert Irwin’s novels ever since reading his fascinating study of Mediaeval Arabic poetry, Night and Horses and the Desert: the Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (1999, UK) in 2006, and The Runes Have Been Cast (2021, UK) is clever, funny, and so chock full of references to early British ghost literature I learnt far more than I ever needed to know about MR James and his contemporaries. Then there’s Nineteen Seventy Four (1999, UK) by David Peace, which is genre but the genre is crime, and which has been sitting on my bookshelves for far too long and is exactly the type of prose I enjoy reading. It’s also set in the North — that’s the North of England, where I used to live, not the North of Europe, where I now live. I’ve yet to actually read any Nordic noir, but I definitely need to read more Peace.
Finally, because I support trans people, as we all should, and because I enjoyed the novels — although one was much better than the others — I’ll end by mentioning the Erin McCabe series by Robyn Gigl, By Way of Sorrow (2021, USA) and Survivor’s Guilt (2022, USA), which were fun, if somewhat over-egged, legal thrillers, with two more on my wishlist, Remain Silent (2023, USA) and Nothing but the Truth (2024, USA); and Detransition, Baby (2021, USA) by Torrey Peters, which was funny, eye-opening, and I’m eagerly awaiting her next book.
2023’s reading may have been a mixed bag, but on the whole I think it was a year of good reading. Sadly, I’m not sure which gives me a bigger glow of satisfaction: finishing a good novel, or ticking off another novel as read in a long series…
Is it okay to admit it’s the latter if you also admit you know it’s bad? Asking for a friend…
