My Year in Books
Adam's Notes for December 11, 2024
It’s the end of the year, so time for a couple of lists. Last week I looked at movies, this week it’s books.
Books I reviewed
Scott Mitchel May’s Awful People is the one that started it all for me. Malarkey Books publisher Alan Good put out a call saying that he had a bunch of ARCs available and he was looking for reviewers. I can’t find it now, but he had this line about how doing stuff leads to stuff, which sounds a bit vague when I write it, but what he meant was if you want to be, say, a writer, it helps to do related stuff in that field. Playing in that space can help you build skills, contacts, knowledge, etc, so that even if it doesn’t get you where you want to go, it can help you figure out how to get there, I guess. I wish I could find where Alan said that.
Anyway, I was feeling confident from being longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize and I wanted to try something new, so I asked for an ARC, telling myself if I couldn’t find a lit journal to take my review, then I could post it here or on my Goodreads account. In the end, Jeff Chon was kind enough to publish it at Heavy Feather Review. Awful People is a great book about dirtbags being dirtbags. It’s a book about being kind of grimy and sleazy in your twenties and then looking back on that ten years later. It’s stuff that rings to me as true but that you don’t see a lot of. I won’t blame wokeness (that’s dumb), I think it’s more that North American media is trained not to look at regular people, you have to make people rich or give them super powers to get people to look. This was published by Death of Print, an imprint of Malarkey Books, “with a mission to publish books that have been abandoned in some way by the publishing world,” I think in this case the original publisher shut down. Malarkey really is doing God’s own work in publishing, and they’re running a Kickstarter that I really hope you’ll check out.
After Awful People I downloaded an eARC of Special Envoy by Jean Echenoz on Edelweiss or one of those sites, trying to see if I could do it again. It’s a French spy thriller with a lot of metatext elements that I found to be really curious, and somehow that review got published at Sage Cigarettes before the first one had even come out. Then I happened to read Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon and just new I had to write something about it. That review got published at Exacting Clam. It’s a novel set in Ancient Greece about regular, working class guys who happen to love Athenian theatre, and decide to put on a play with captured soldiers—and instead of doing faux high Victorian diction, Lennon uses the working class vernacular of his native Ireland. Then I found a promotional service called River Street Writing that promotes CanLit—that’s Canadian Literature for my American followers. CanLit is in some ways it’s own little world, but one I’ve always enjoyed following. I got some more ARCs from River Street and before long I had two more reviews out, at Rain Taxi and The Temz Review.
I published another review at Sage Cigarettes, this time of Rick Claypool’s Skull Slime Tentacle Witch War. It’s by far the weirdest book I read this year, and was kind of a challenge to review, even though I really liked it. It’s like he wrote the thing in claymation, somehow. I also reviewed Gail Simone’s Red Sonja: Consumed for the New Edge Sword and Sorcery Magazine’s blog. This was a challenge in a different way, because it’s a tie-in novel for a comic book character, and the level of prose seemed kind of weak even taking that into account, which is strange when you consider that although this is Simone’s debut novel, she’s a veteran comic book writer who normally knows how to tell a story. And yet, the stiltedness of it all reminds me of Robert E. Howard, the pulp master who created Red Sonja (sort of, it’s complicated). I don’t think it was an intentional homage to REH, but it feels like one. In some ways it really felt like it broke loose from the confines of mass market fantasy and tie-in novels. Does that make it good? I don’t know.
Finally, I reviewed Munir Hachemi’s Living Things, about a quartet of Spanish louts who think they can make easy money working France’s grape harvest only to find out it’s been cancelled, and then getting trapped in the grim reality of modern agriculture. This review isn’t out yet, but should be, soon.
Books I wrote about for Adam’s Notes
Contra Amatores Mundi by Graham Thomas Wilcox
Waste Flowers by Bryn Hammond
Hurled Headlong Flaming by Matt Holder
Dark Queens: The Bloody Rivalry That Forged the Medieval World by Shelley Puhak
Kenneyism by Jeremy Appel
Fulgentius by César Aira
Something Will Happen, You’ll See by Christos Ikonomou
Annihilation by Houellebecq and Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes — I get enough shit as it is for being a Houellebecq reader, and now he’s not even trying. Despentes was kind of half-assing it, too, but she can still get away with it.
Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou
Wild Town by Jim Thompson and The Motel Life by Willy Vlautin
Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru
Three Preludes to the Song of Roland. Looked at Gui of Burgundy. Part two.
My favourite books that I didn’t write about
except maybe on Goodreads or Twitter
War by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Holy shit. Worth it for one of the all-time great dinner party disasters. It’s also something rare for Céline, being more of a straightforward story than a style exercise. And yet it’s still extremely stylish. You, uh, may have read some bad things about this guy, but put that aside until you’ve read his work. His writing transcends his biography.
Lazarus Man by Richard Price. My Goodreads review:
Very little plot or tension here, but I didn't even care for most of the novel because I could hang out with Richard Price characters nonstop, Royal Davis the undertaker being the standout. I think the lack of tension does rob the ending of some of its punch, though. I wasn't super invested in the is-he-a-grifter debate because it seemed a little too clear that Anthony's heart was in the right place, and there was no indication that Mary might be onto something until the very end of the novel.
The Communist by Guido Morselli. I really liked this review by Don aka getfiscal. I think hearing about it on his podcast is what made me finally pick it up.
Erdogan Pizza by John Dolan. Dispatches from John Dolan’s peripatetic life. The guy just can’t catch a break.
The Looking Glass War by John Le Carré. My Goodreads review:
Le Carré didn't want his books to be seen as romances, but I think you can't help but read a little of that into The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Yes, it's an indictment of the intelligence services, but it still has a hero and a love interest. The Looking Glass War is a corrective to that. It's a deadly serious farce. The Department undertakes three related missions, and everything they do is wrong. Le Carré's scorn is practically dripping off the page. And of course the real enemy isn't the Ruskies, or even the East Germans. It's their rivals in the intelligence community, Control and George Smiley and the whole of the Circus. Maybe my favourite le Carré so far.
A House in Norway by Vigdis Hjorth. This is the good shit. A little domestic drama that’s also sort of a roman à clef about geopolitics.
City of God by Cecelia Holland. Historical fiction set in the height of the Renaissance. I’m still reading this one, but it feels special. Like it’s one of those books that feels like it was written just for me.
The Trees by Percival Everett. I was late to the game on Everett, but he’s as good as everyone says he is.
Swords Against Death by Fritz Leiber. Sometimes you just need an adventure.
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. Read this for the first time when I was thirteen or fourteen, and decided I wanted to revisit it after enjoying the two new films with Eva Green and Vincent Cassel. So many great parts: d'Artagnan's triple dual, the machinations and intrigues of Cardinal Richeliu and Milday, the picnic in the enemy bastion during the siege of La Rochelle, that one Swiss guy.
Also real Adam West Batman vibes re-reading this and realizing it's not the matter of high seriousness I once took it as, but actually it's quite intentionally funny. And also realizing that none of the history matters. In fact, I quite liked how all the intrigue constantly boiled down to a love affair or the like, and never had anything to do with the conflict between Catholics and Huguenots (itself an antiquated conflict at the time of publication). A very lib sentiment, I know, but must've been felt refreshing to have something that felt political but had no absolutely no political content in it, especially considering all the proletarian turmoil in France in the 1840s.
One major demerit in that Dumas is very longwinded, never failing to say two or three times something he could say once. Would love to read some of the sequels to this, but even the shortest one is like 700 pages long.
Books I didn’t really care for
Alien Hearts by Guy de Maupassant — My rule is that anytime a french guy starts talking about coquettes you can safely ignore him.
Resolution by Irvine Welsh — The good news is he’s not trying to have a debate on trans stuff anymore. The bad news is he’s still trying to be a crime writer. The good news is he usually knows when he’s exhausted his readership’s patience, and he’s going back to giving us the good stuff next year with a new novel about the Trainspotting crew.
Ways of Going Home by Alejandro Zamba, Nothing Left to Fear from Hell by Alan Warner, Dark Constellations by Pola Oloixarac. I’ve really enjoyed previous writing from all three of these authors, but these books just didn’t do it for me.
In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway. He has like sixteen short story collections with some variation of this title. Mixed bag.
Books I enjoyed that I haven’t already mentioned that were mostly just okay
Intimacies by Katie Kitamura. Sort of a literary thriller, so not really a thriller. Good bits on the Hague as a city, the idea of an international court, the Dutch Golden Age of Art, the art and work of translation. My notes say that I liked the detached style of writing, but truth be told not a lot of this one stuck with me.
Dirtbag: Essays by Amber A’Lee Frost. One of those memoirs that won’t be appreciated until later, when it becomes more apparent that it offers a valuable snapshot of a certain moment in time, in this case the post-Occupy moment. You get that a lot with leftist memoirs, I think.
Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan. Mixed feelings about this. It’s flawed but I thought that NYRB piece was unnecessarily harsh.
The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany. Gets a bit tiresome after awhile, but still fun and has that otherworldly feeling that people talk about getting from Tolkien.
Kingdoms of Elfin by Sylvia Townsend Warner. The same as the above but even more so, and even more fucked up. Also “worldbuilding enthusiasts” should take note at the way she uses contradictions within her stories to heighten the otherworldly feelings. Embrace contradiction! Embrace life!
After a Dance: Selected Stories by Bridget O’Connor. Looking back, I have no idea what compelled me to read this. I must’ve read a review somewhere, but there’s nothing on any of the usual places I go to for book reviews. Anyway, there’s a good story about a guy who befriends his muggers, and one about a homeless woman scheming to steal a harp. The rest are hit and miss, with just enough hits that I didn’t feel like I wasted my time.
Right as Rain by George Pelecanos. An early crime novel from Pelecanos. I’ll check out the rest of the series, but I really prefer his books about millennial P.I. Spero Lucas.
Okay, that was my year in books, more or less. I read a bunch of history books too, but I don’t want to get into that now, because I have to judge them based on how useful they are to me, which I don’t have an answer for yet because I haven’t finished the project I’m reading them for. Have you read anything good this year? Let me know.
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