Asking the Wrong Questions

Most recent reading roundup are a grab-bag without much of a unifying theme. This batch of novels, on the other hand, seem to share a certain sense of the unheimlich. They are stories about apocalypse, war, environmental collapse, or just people who are struggling to find their place in a hostile world. I suppose there are conclusions to be drawn from that—about the kinds of books I'm reading, or the kinds of books that inspire me to write about them. Either way, this means that alongside my recommendations—and this is a particularly strong group of books—I also have to issue a warning. If you're particularly worried about the state of the world right now, these might not be the books for you; if you're looking for something weird and disturbing, however, you might find your next read here. The Invisible Hotel by Yeji Y. Ham - For most of its length, Ham's debut novel keeps you guessing about its genre. Is it a horror story, or a naturalistic one? Another way of puttin...

For a number of reasons, I found myself neglecting my literary fiction reading in the first half of 2015.  I tend to bounce back and forth between litfic and genre--too much of the mimetic stuff and I find myself longing for something about more than a few people and their emotional issues; too much SF or fantasy and I end up wishing for something more concrete to hold on to.  So this last month I've been indulging in the "respectable" end of the literary spectrum (not all of the books below are properly litfic, but most of them are marketed that way), and, unsurprisingly, finding the same mixture of good and bad there that I do in genre. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North - There was some surprise when North's novel ended up on this year's Clarke shortlist.  Or, at least, there was on my part, because the plot description for Harry August , in which a British man experiences his life during the middle decades of the 20th century again an...

Charles Palliser's novels keep improving on me. His first and probably best-known work, 1989's The Quincunx , is a dense Victorian pastiche, recalling Dickens and Collins as it charts the rising and falling (but mostly falling) fortunes of an innocent boy and his rather foolish mother as they become entangled in a decades-old conspiracy of hidden wills, secret paternities, shady financial schemes and the occasional murder. The Quincunx is an accomplished novel but also a rather chilly one. Palliser's period recreation is pitch-perfect, but he takes far too much pleasure in educating his readers. A good half of The Quincunx 's generous page-count is given over to (admittedly fascinating) lectures about the inner workings of some obscure aspect of life in England in the 19th century--the secret society of sewer-combers, who make their living by sifting offal for discarded cash and valuables; the intricate pecking order that governs the downstairs sections of a grand hous...

Yup, it's that time again--time to even up the book-posts-to-TV-posts ratio! Recent reads include: Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter--Carter's Wise Children has maintained its position as one of the finest books I've read this year, but Nights at the Circus cements my suspicions that Carter is going to turn out to be one of my all-time favorite writers. One of the most refreshing aspects of Carter's writing is that she's not afraid to be funny. Both Circus and Wise Children could be termed comedic books, and ignored in much the same way that writers like Terry Pratchett often are (although Carter's humor is cleverer and more delicate than Pratchett's), but Carter uses humor as a way to penetrate her readers' defenses. In only a few pages, we have lost our hearts to Fevvers, the winged woman born (or hatched) and raised in a brothel, and now the toast of Europe as the star of a circus act, and to the host of strange and heartbroken characters wh...