Bookpost #1

Charles Vess's cover art for the Earthsea omnibus

 

Here's what I've read so far in 2024:

Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany (Katja Hoyer)

Incomplete but fascinating and much-needed. It has caused controversy in Germany because Germany remains deeply in the thrall of the far right and is forever trying to draw a false equivalence between the Nazi era and the communist era; many Germans believe that the one was no worse than the other, and thus that even faint and qualified praise of the German Democratic Republic is tantamount to Holocaust denial. (Never mind that the German right's tireless effort to memorialize “the forgotten victims of Soviet tyranny” and their whining whenever the Holocaust and the other crimes of the Nazi era are discussed without the crimes of the GDR placed alongside them represent a soft form of Holocaust denial. Even the most exaggerated, partisan estimates of the GDR's death toll put it at a few thousand, while neutral estimates are in the high hundreds. The Nazis killed twelve million or more.) Was the GDR perfect, or even good? No. It was truly undemocratic, and the Stasi were a decades-long waking nightmare. But it's incredibly depressing to see what the state accomplished in terms of women's rights in particular and how far even the most progressive corners of the developed world are from achieving the same, more than 40 years on. Hard to even see it as a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater—more like drowning the baby in the tub.

Same Bed Different Dreams (Ed Park)

Enthralling. The sort of book that fills me with envy and admiration: How did you make something this big, this ambitious, and this complex work this well?

Shark Heart (Emily Habeck)

In this novel, people sometimes turn into animals. This seems to be a metaphor for mental illness, degenerative illness, cancer, or some combination of those things; it's not very consistent. The characters treat the transformations not as metaphor but as long-established scientific fact, and yet the world they live in is just our world, with no accommodations for the transformed or any decent idea of what to do with them. If I were mean-spirited, I'd make a big fuss online about how this book's message is essentially “Disabled people should be cast into the wilderness to die or make their own society.” I'm not, and I don't think the author intended that kind of harm, but it's hard to read it any other way. Even apart from the simultaneous ugliness and unseriousness of the central conceit, there's not much to like here: one-dimensional characters, a raft of annoying stylistic gimmicks, Rupi Kaur platitudes.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery)

Charming, delightfully French, uncomfortably misanthropic, politically dodgy, ultimately let down by a hackneyed ending.

The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China (Christopher Beckwith)

Spends too much time and energy on its weakest evidence (make-believe linguistics) and most far-fetched claims (including the titular one, that there was a unified Scythian Empire stretching from Eastern Europe to Northern China). Some pretty cool and entirely plausible ideas about early Iranian history, though. Fun fodder for fantasy and alternate-history worldbuilding.

Persuasion (Jane Austen)

Every few years, I reread something by Austen and am shocked all over again at what a catty bitch she was. This one lays on the classism and fatphobia pretty thick and is also halfway to being a Royal Navy recruitment pamphlet. Still hilarious and 100% charming, of course.

Counterweight (Djuna)

Great big heaps of dry exposition interspersed with frenetic, sometimes disjointed action, and yet pretty enjoyable. Characters don't get a lot of room to breathe and grow but are nevertheless well drawn and distinct. Packed with cool cyberpunk ideas and images. Better than the sum of its parts.

Kairos (Jenny Erpenbeck)

If this doesn't end up being the best book I read in 2024, I will eat my hat (and praise the heavens for a year of superlative reading). Astounding. Heartbreaking. Puts everything else I've read in recent months in its shadow. It's rare to read a personal, probably autobiographical narrative this moving, and it's rare to read political allegory this compelling, but to unite the two so seamlessly, so that each operates perfectly without in any way interfering with or diminishing the other, is incredible. I read it in English translation and am looking forward to muddling my way through it again in German.

Berlin (Bea Setton)

One of those books that you think you're not really enjoying until you finish it, at which point you find that it sticks with you and that, well, yeah, you didn't enjoy it, but the ways in which it made you uncomfortable or exasperated or angry were strengths, not weaknesses.

The Siege of Krishnapur (J.G. Farrell)

A novel about a bunch of East India Company colonists starving, dying of cholera, and massacring nameless hundreds or thousands of Indians has no right to be this funny. Female characters are a bit thin, but some of the men are astonishingly fully realized. As profound and moving as it is hilarious.

The History of Love (Nicole Krauss)

Is it nakedly emotionally manipulative? Yes. Did I cry? Also yes.

Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine (Uché Blackstock)

I would have organized it differently, putting more of the hard facts of unequal treatment and outcomes for Black Americans front and center and then easing into the memoir elements…but I might not be the primary audience, working where I do and knowing what I do (although I am certainly part of the explicitly defined target audience, in more than one category). The facts remain harrowing, and although I knew a good deal about the subject already, I learned a good deal more.

The Laughter (Sonora Jha)

More than most books these days, it's clear that this one got literally no attention from any editor whatsoever. Unbearably sloppy, and I almost gave up in the first 20 or 30 pages. (And then again on page 74, where I encountered the single worst sentence I've read in print in years: “They have been to my home twice before in the past two days since the incident.”) By page 250, I was glad I hadn't—the narrator is a bit of a sock puppet, but some of the secondary characters are very well drawn and the themes are interesting—but by the end, I'd changed my mind again. The narrative's straining to remain believable and the narrator's straining to remain a coherent, plausible human being finally give out under the weight of some thuddingly didactic ripped-from-the-headlines twists. The author's ambition far exceeds her grasp here; I admire her chutzpah, but if you want to create a narrator in the mold of Humbert Humbert—and you make the comparison yourself, in the text!—your prose had better be flawless. I don't even like Nabokov (a self-obsessed, misanthropic, arch-misogynist reactionary who never had anything interesting to say), but credit where it's due: He was one of the greatest prose stylists we've ever had. Come for the king, better not miss, etc.

Tales from Earthsea (Ursula Le Guin)

Tales from the GOAT. Fantasy really doesn't get any better than this. “The Bones of the Earth” is particularly beautiful.