Hello all. After a whirlwind second half of 2023 in which I mostly lurked (read: read other people’s work) on Substack rather than create my own, I am back! The next few days of posts will mostly focus on the books, podcasts, films, exhibitions & other media which I’ve appreciated this year. Enjoy!
2023 was the year I really got into using Goodreads to track my reading (as ever, waaaaaay late to the party on this one). Whaddaya know? It’s really helpful and motivating. This was also the year that my local library system came out with a brilliant app (which has just now stopped working so…less brilliant, come on, Idea Store Network) so I was hitting those interlibrary loans HARD. And it was amazing. All together I think my total was about 70 books, but here are the ones that really stood out to me — truly excellent, to a one.
BOOKS - Fiction
Our Wives Under the Sea - Julia Armfield. The first book I finished in 2023 and one that stayed with me all year. Sea creatures, marriage, grief, body horror, deep ocean travel.
You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty - Akwaeke Emezi. This book was audacious in all the best ways and I loved it. Our protagonist is Brooklyn-based artist trying to put herself back together (with a decent dose of self-sabotage) several years after her husband dies. She falls deeply in love with a celebrity chef on an unnamed Caribbean island…who happens to be the father of the guy she’s kind of dating? friendzoning? Messy. Wonderful. Loads of bi representation. I wanted to judge this book so harshly but it was actually amazing.
Cuddy - Benjamin Myers. Multivocal retelling of the ‘after-life’ of St Cuthbert. Almost an alternative mythology for the North of England. One I will return to to soak up its goodness again.
My Phantoms - Gwendoline Riley. The best description of life with a family member with a borderline or narcissistic personality disorder I have ever read. Could not stop.
Daylight, Black Oxen, and The Vintner’s Luck - Elizabeth Knox. Knox shot to the top of my ‘favourite authors of all time’ list this year. Having read her The Absolute Book last year and loved its complexity, unpredictability, and oblique style, this year I thoroughly enjoyed these other 3 novels of hers. Respectively they concern (1) nuns on the French/Italian border who may be vampires, (2) Revolution and magic in a fictional south American country, and (3) winemaking, love, angels and destiny in a French vineyard during the 18th century.
Menewood - Nicola Griffith. Those who know me will know Griffith is my favourite author. She dons and sheds genres with seeming effortlessness, her novels are always full of queer women, and she can switch between deep character-driven storytelling to ALL THE ACTION without blinking an eye. Menewood is the follow-up to Hild, chronicling the life of St Hild of Whitby, which was published in 2013. 10 years was a long wait, but this 700-page whopper did not disappoint. I have an entire review coming out on this one at some point, so keep your eyes peeled.
A History of the Island - Eugene Vodolakzin. Like Nicola Griffith, Vodolazkin is an author who never fails to astound me with his work. This novel is his latest to be translated into English from Russian. It purports to be a chronicle, assembled by many monks over many centuries, detailing the history of ‘the Island’ (a thinly-veiled Russia). A truer translation of the original title is The Justification of the Island; although this novel is in one sense a history, it is also a theological interrogation of leadership, morality, and the brutality of existence. Vodolazkin’s favorite themes are all here: time’s circularity, god (Christ) and godlessness, the hilarity of free will, the foibles of every form of human government.
Sisters of the Vast Black and Sisters of the Forsaken Stars - Lina Rather. These two novellas feature a (slightly-then-entirely) renegade order of Roman Catholic nuns in space just trying to live out their vows…and maybe take part in a long-in-coming revolution. (Is ‘religious order people in space my favorite subgenre? Probably yes.) The world-building and characterisation was deft, economical, and courageous. Oh, and the space ships are living, giant snail-cyborg beings! Yes please.
Honorable mentions:
The Neapolitan Quartet - Elena Ferrante. OK, so these are as good as everyone says they are. While on one level they are just a rollicking good soap opera, I also read Lila-and-Lenu as a sort of schizoid epic heroine who represents the south of Italy: divided in use of language, inhabiting class, approach to motherhood, approach to ambition, etc.
High Times in the Low Parliament - Kelly Robson. Look: this was sold to me as a ‘lesbian stoner buddy-cop fantasy romp’ and…need I say more? There was actually some quite good social commentary about modern Britain, too — and rather more subtle than that which appeared in another book I read this year (ahem, looking at you, Her Majesty’s Royal Coven, Juno Dawson).
BOOKS - Nonfiction & poetry
Thin Places - Kerri ni Dochartaigh. Captivating, if only for the amount of suffering I kept hoping the author would find a means to survive. The trauma of growing up in northern Ireland during the troubles and how that shapes a life, its paths, the strands of spirituality within it. Also read her Cacophony of Bone which I didn’t like as well, but which hit me weirdly close-to-home, in a year where the surprise of pregnancy became part of my story too.
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands - Kate Beaton. This memoir-in-comic-form (it didn’t feel quite like a ‘graphic novel’) was astoundingly good. The author tells the story of the time she spent working on the Canadian oilfields after graduating university with a degree but no idea what to do with it. Shreds of hope, grim sexual politics, realities of journeyman life, relations with indigenous communities, trying to forge one’s identity in the world…these were just some of the topics touched on in this astounding volume.
Black Sun - Toby Martinez de las Rivas. Poetry, sensual and apocalyptic, simple and viscous, charred and demanding that kind of self-awareness (but not self-obsession) that is not common in contemporary poetry. Whiffs of Blake (though perhaps not so many as less religiously-attuned readers might sniff) and, naturally, of the questions posed by the biblical Job and Qohelet.
The Serpent Lies Coiled in Naples - Marius Kociejowski. This is a doorstop of a book and I did not want it to end. I read it before delving into the Ferrante novels (in many ways this book is what gave me the push I needed to read the Ferrante novels!) and its deep, unflinching, celebratory, unsentimental look at what has made Naples was an utter joy to read. Fascinating.
Winters in the World - Eleanor Parker. Anglo-Saxon understandings of times and seasons, feasts and labors, months and moons and everything in between. I’ve loved Parker’s blog, ‘A Clerk of Oxford’ for many years and it’s a delight to see this book come together. I particularly like her resistance to the currently fashionable narrative that Christianity simply ‘appropriated’ certain aspects of paganism and pre-Christian cultural and religious practice. A true historian, she interrogates this with a keen eye and humor, too.