The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I’m genuinely not sure how I pulled that off, given that this isn’t a summer month– Storygraph has me at just barely under 7,000 pages for October, which looks ridiculous until you realize June was 11,500.
At any rate, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride is Book of the Month, followed very closely by Mark Twain. Hastings’ Vietnam book is excellent as well but I’m only about halfway through it.
No, no, not a review of Ron Chernow’s book that happens to be called “Mark Twain.” I’m reviewing Mark Twain. And reading Book Mark Twain has caused me to lose a surprising amount of respect for Person Mark Twain. He gets three stars out of five.
Y’all, this dude was weird.
The person Twain is pictured with up there is Dorothy Quick. She is eleven years old in that picture. She and Twain were not related, and they literally met on an ocean voyage in 1907 and Twain, a man in his seventies, just decided to treat her like she was his best friend. They exchanged letters until he died, and he occasionally arranged for her parents to bring her for visits at his home. Multi-day visits.
And she wasn’t the only one. At two different points in his life Twain started a club for girls between ten and sixteen years old, and both times he was the only male member. He called the second group of girls his “angelfish.” They had membership pins. Chernow is quick to point out that there was never any kind of contemporary accusation that Twain’s relationships with these girls were sexual or predatory, but it becomes clear after a while that he recognizes how Goddamn weird the whole thing is and genuinely isn’t sure what to do about it. There’s lots of talk about substitute granddaughters– only one of Twain’s four children survived past her twenties, and his only grandchild was born after he died– but do you really need enough substitute grandchildren to call it a club? And do you stop talking to your substitute grandchildren after they get to be too old for you? Because that happened too. Once his angelfish got into their late teens he lost interest in them. This is not a joke.
Don’t even ask me about Lewis Carroll. Chernow talks about him in a throwaway sentence at one point (literally something like “at least he wasn’t drawing naked pictures of his preadolescent girlfriends, like Carroll was”) and oh my god I hate to talk about falling down a rabbit hole when literally discussing Lewis Carroll, but … yeah.
Twain was terrible at business, prone to falling for outrageous scams, deeply in debt for most of his adult life despite his royalties and his wife being ultra-rich, and held onto a grudge like Kate Winslet on a floating door. There was something vaguely Trumpian about him, where all his friends and business associates were brilliant, salt-of-the-earth, wonderful people until the moment they were no longer useful or Twain felt the need to blame them for something and then they were the worst poltroons and scofflaws in the history of poltroonery and scofflawism.
Like, I’ve read dude’s books. The fact that he was a sarcastic, irascible motherfucker is one of the things I like about him. But I feel like Chernow would have been a lot happier had he just had a chapter called “Look, this guy was a prick,” and gotten everything off of his chest.
There’s nothing genuinely damning in there. I’m never reading anything by any number of authors ever again because of their assorted bastardries and nothing Chernow reveals about Twain rises to that level. Even the angelfish thing is more of a massive ongoing WTF than something that was immoral or should have been illegal. But the last time I came out of a biography or autobiography feeling like I had less respect for its subject than I did going in was Ralph Abernathy’s And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, which I read nine years ago. The only other example I can think of is Jefferson Davis’ memoirs, and I didn’t exactly have warm feelings about that guy going into those books. It doesn’t happen all that often.
Chernow’s book is still a five-star read. Twain still has a ton of five-star books out there for you to read. Twain himself? Three. At best.
This book represents an interesting milestone for me in a couple of ways. First, I am rarely offered nonfiction ARCs for review, something I’d like to encourage more of. Second, I don’t think I’ve ever read a biography of someone I was less familiar with prior to reading the book than I was with Charles C. Diggs. While I don’t think I could claim to have never heard of him– I have read too much about the Civil Rights movement to have never encountered his name before– I couldn’t tell you much other than that he was a Black congressman. I certainly wouldn’t have recognized a picture of him. I was a little worried that this might hurt my enjoyment of the book; as it turns out I have more than enough context around his life that that wasn’t a problem.
The interesting thing here is that, sitting here, I’m struggling with the urge to make this piece a review of Diggs rather than a review of the book. At the same time, though, you weren’t sent a copy of this for free, so I kind of feel like if I’m going to convince you to read it you probably need to know a little bit about the fellow you’ll be spending a few hundred pages with. To wit: Charles C. Diggs Jr. was the son of one of Detroit’s most influential Black businessmen. His father was the founder of the slightly-oddly-named House of Diggs, a funeral home that at one point handled just over half of the deaths among Detroit’s Black citizenry. Charles Sr. had a short-lived political career as a Michigan state Senator but mostly kept his business empire running; Charles Jr. started his political career in his father’s seat in the Michigan Senate but was elected to Congress in 1954 and never looked back. He would remain in office until 1980, when a financial scandal led to him being censured by Congress, forced to resign, and briefly imprisoned. He holds the distinction of being the victim of one of Newt Gingrich’s first acts of assholery, as the future Speaker of the House and fellow resignee-in-disgrace began agitating for Congress to expel Diggs almost as soon as he took office.
When Diggs entered office, he was one of only three Black congressmen, joining William Dawson of Illinois and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. of New York. He proved himself to be skilled at coalition-building and incrementalist approaches to civil rights– one of his first legislative accomplishments was desegregating airlines, for example– and eventually became one of Congress’s foremost experts on and advocates for Africa as well. Soon after taking office he traveled to Mississippi to sit in on the trial of Emmitt Till’s murderers, which made national headlines, particularly as Mississippi at the time had absolutely no idea how to handle a Black Member of Congress.
But let’s talk about the book. House of Diggs is a very strong political biography and a worthy addition to my library about the Civil Rights movement and is somewhat less successful as a biography of a person. Which, honestly, kind of fits with its subject anyway, as Diggs was quite successful as a politician and much less successful as a person. His children are barely mentioned, but his four wives, three of whom had children with him, would have described him as a poor father anyway, and you won’t find out about any of the three divorces until nearly 80% of the way through the book. He had a gambling problem and was absolutely terrible with money, which is part of what led to his own downfall and at least tangentially led to his father’s business empire slowly disintegrating after the senior Diggs died by suicide in 1967. The finance issues that led to his resignation and jail time are a bit too complicated to go into detail about here, but I felt Orr did a really good job of explaining the details of what happened, both in a literal factual sense and in how Diggs’ own personality flaws led to his eventual indictment. It also seems to be true that the practices that took Diggs down were quite common in Congress at the time, and Orr doesn’t neglect the role of racism in his prosecution while never losing sight of the fact that, no, “everybody else was doing it” isn’t really a top-10 legal defense.
All told, I’m really glad I was sent this, as it’s from a university press and I likely wouldn’t have even encountered it otherwise. If political biography is your thing or you have an interest in the Civil Rights movement, I highly recommend taking a look.
House of Diggs releases September 16.
I’m going to review this book by writing a bunch of sentences that will all, individually, be true. “But wait,” you might be thinking to yourself. “Isn’t that how reviewing things usually works? You don’t often tell lies in reviews.”
True! However, in this case, what you need to understand is that some of those sentences are going to contradict other sentences. As it works out, this is quite appropriate for this very, very odd book. You are simply going to have to live with the fact that while each individual sentence of this review is true, the entire review may, somehow, not be.
Roll with it, is what I’m saying.
So, the following are true:
So yeah. Maybe you’ll read this. I’m glad I did. I think.
This week involved– this is not a joke– both having a condom thrown at me and being inadvertently punched in the balls by a student, so, having survived it, I was in serious need of some retail therapy. I went to Barnes and Noble.
Do both of us a favor and don’t add up the cost of any of this.
I purchased Ron Chernow’s doorstop-sized, thousand page, recently-released biography of Mark Twain immediately, but not from Barnes and Noble. This one was expensive enough that I actually ordered it from Amazon, while still in the store, for 2/3 of the cost. It’ll be here tomorrow.
What I’ve started doing when I’m in bookstores is buying books I wasn’t previously familiar with, rather than grabbing things that are already on my wish list. I’ve learned that if I walk into my local B&N looking for something specific I am sure to be disappointed. It will not be there. (To wit: I have the absolutely gorgeous Broken Binding edition of Joe Abercrombie’s new book, The Devils, and was looking for the standard edition as a reading copy. Couldn’t find it. Unbelievable.)
Anyway, this caught my eye, and as a standalone and a debut novel it felt like the perfect kind of bookstore buy.
Then I decided to look around for a specific book that I’d seen the last time I was in the store, The Lion Women of Tehran, by Marjan Kamali. It wasn’t there! Again, any time I’m looking for a specific book, it is never there. But her debut novel was:
So, two or three purchases depending on how you’re counting, one by an established author that I’m certain to enjoy, two debut novels that I’m rolling dice on, no series fiction. So far so good! But then this one caught my eye:
I’m not even completely sure what drew me to this, and I picked it up and put it back down a couple of times, as the plot feels a little been-there-done-that in some ways, but by this point I was in full “fuck it” mode. Speaking of:
I did not buy any Dungeon Crawler Carl books, but these hardcover editions are appealing to my inner book-collector magpie; they’re big chonky bois in bright, appealing covers and I bet they’ll look great on the shelf. I also suspect they might be terrible? I dunno. Anyone read them?
My final purchase was this one:
This was actually the first book I physically touched after entering the store, as I saw it before the Twain book. I have not heard of the author, nor have I heard of his first book, and after flipping it over I realized that I have also not heard of any of the three authors with big pull quotes on the back, nor have I heard of any of the five books of theirs that were mentioned, and the quotes are genuinely wankstrous. Shit, this was probably a literature. I put it back.
Then, while looking for the Kamali book, I went back to the new fiction section to make sure it wasn’t still there, and … well, it turns out that Kamali and Larison are right next to each other on the shelf. So I picked it up again, leafed through it a bit, and put it back again.
Then, while deciding on The Outcast Mage, I decided that even though I’d had a vague plan to pick up three standalone books, and Outcast wasn’t one of those, I could still get it if I bought another standalone in addition to it, and somehow I ended up walking out of the store with The Ancients as well, figuring that this was a pretty precise example of how sometimes the books decide I’m buying them and not the other way around. I think this is the literary equivalent of being adopted by a cat. Hopefully I enjoy it.
I almost want to make this a separate post, but it is just my Barnes & Noble that is really hitting customer service and talking about books super hard, or is that a corporation-wide thing? Because the woman at the register was practically fucking interviewing the two people in front of me, making each transaction take so long that they had to call someone else to run a register because the line was building up. I was simultaneously stressing out about the conversation– what the hell is the name of the book I’m reading? Who is the author again?– and quietly scorning some of her choices, because I swear by God and sunny Jesus that if I walk up to you with a handful of fantasy books and you do what she did to the guy in front of me and ask if I’ve heard of Brandon fucking Sanderson, I may not be able to keep the look of disdain off of my face. She pivoted from “have you heard of the single most famous author in this genre in a generation” straight to recommending the Licanius trilogy by James Islington, making the second time in a row that I have been at that Barnes and Noble and someone has recommended those books, and I had the same reaction both times, which is that I usually don’t believe people when they tell me they’ve read them.
Also, there are like fifteen steps in fantasy book-reading between Brandon Sanderson and James Islington. It’s like finding out someone enjoys Goosebumps and recommending Lovecraft to them.
Anyway, the new register person ended up helping me, and did so without any unnecessary questions, which is good, because there was no way I was getting out of that conversation without some form of idiotic faux pas.
The end.
My lovely wife has returned from her long sojourn, and all is right with the world again. After lazing about and whining all day yesterday, I was a veritable dervish this morning, managing to tidy, vacuum and dust every room in the house other than the office, which still got a lick and a promise. I read two books today and built half a Lego set on top of everything else. I think I can call the last Saturday of break a success.
Reading two books in a day isn’t the accomplishment it might sound like, because both of them were novellas. I’ve seen a bunch of students over the last couple of years reading these two books, and because the covers are striking (and I pay attention to what they’re reading regardless) I asked a couple of kids about them last year, and was greeted with enthusiastic recommendations. I didn’t get around to it last year and then when I recently found another couple of kids reading them before Spring Break decided to jump on them.
I … don’t get it.
So, Osamu Dazai was born in Japan in 1909, which already places him well outside of anything my students are usually willing to read. His books are obviously translated, and both of these books were written post-war, in 1947 and 1948, right before Dazai died of suicide at 38, in a scenario that appears (I haven’t done a ton of research other than reading a Wiki article) to precisely match a suicide attempt described in No Longer Human. The books sound like they were written in the late forties, frankly, which isn’t a criticism but is another reason why I’m surprised that my students are reading them, because the style of a novel from the 1940s and 1950s is wildly different from the modern YA or romantasy that I catch them with most of the time, and that’s before you have to deal with the cultural unfamiliarity of being translated from Japanese.
The closest analog to No Longer Human that I can think of is that it feels like a Japanese Catcher in the Rye. It’s about a young, profoundly alienated man, and it’s casually misogynistic in the way work from that era frequently is. It’s written in first person and is semi autobiographical; the framing device is that it’s written as three notebooks by the narrator, covering a couple decades of his life, and there’s another unnamed individual in the preface and epilogue who talks about how the notebooks were given to him. I read The Setting Sun cover to cover in a single sitting and I can’t tell you what the hell its deal is. I mean, I can describe the plot, that’s simple enough– it’s another first-person narrative, this time of a woman named Kazuko in her late twenties, a member of a formerly aristocratic family that has fallen apart after World War II. Her mom dies. Her brother is a drunken mess who eventually kills himself. She tries to have some love affairs. Then she gets pregnant and the book ends. There’s some obvious symbolism scattered throughout– a bit about burning snake eggs, and snakes constantly showing up around moments of despair– but it’s mostly a pretty straightforward narrative.
So, yeah, I get the plot. I just can’t tell you why it’s a book, if that makes any sense. I feel like I get No Longer Human, and part of me can sort of see why it might appeal to teenagers, who respond to alienation narratives. I don’t know why the hell there’s a copy of Setting Sun in our school library or why the kids are professing to enjoy it as much as Human. There are strong themes of addiction and alcohol abuse through both books and a ton of suicidal ideation and successful suicides along with some genuinely terrible family situations. I dunno; I’m gonna ask some questions on Monday and maybe send an email to the kid who was most interested in me reading these last year. Don’t misunderstand me; neither are bad books, and No Longer Human is genuinely good, but I don’t see the appeal to 14-year-olds in 2025. I need answers here, y’all.
And. We. Are. Back.
This is the twelfth post in this series that I have written; I spent some time thinking about doing a Best of the Best list and when I realized how many rereads that would require– believe it or not, when you read 100+ books a year it tends to hurt your recall a little bit, like, I’ve literally read well over a thousand books since writing the 2013 list– I abandoned the idea. I am back to 15 books this year because right now I’m at 181 books read for the year and since it is only the 29th I may very well be at 184 by New Year’s Eve; hopefully I don’t read anything too brilliant in the next couple of days because it’s gonna have to wait until next year.
As always, don’t take specific rankings all too seriously– this started as a shortlist of 31, then got cut down to 17, and going from 17 to 15 was really hard, and honestly anything in the top seven or so could have ended up at number one if I’d woken up in a different mood. Also, the asterisk up there means that these books were new to me in 2024; the oldest book on the list is from 1975. I’m pretty sure a majority of them are 2024 releases but it’s definitely not all of them.
Previous lists:
And we’re off!
15: Math in Drag, by Kyne Santos. One of my reading goals for 2025 is to read six books about math and/or teaching math, right? And one of the reasons it’s only six books is that books about teaching and books about math tend to be dry as hell, and despite wanting to improve my craft as a math teacher I like to enjoy what I’m reading.
Kyne Santos needs to write a lot more books about math, is what I’m saying here. Drag queens who post mostly about mathematics is somehow a subgenre on social media, and Santos is the most visible of the group (if you’re on TikTok, check out Carrie the One) and this book is a whole bunch of things at once– a memoir, a history of math, a math textbook, and a history of the drag movement– and it’s tremendous on all levels. I actually took one of the chapters about negative square roots and turned it into a warm-up activity for my 8th graders, and then ensured that they would all look up the book on their own by telling them that I could give them the author’s name but not the actual name of the book. Which, for the record, probably wasn’t true, but I teach in Indiana.
14. How to Say Babylon, by Safiya Sinclair. It’s at this point where I realize there’s more nonfiction or at least nonfiction-adjacent (you’ll see) books on this list than usual, as Sinclair’s book is also a memoir about growing up in Jamaica in the eighties and nineties. Her father was a hard-core Rastafarian and a reggae musician, and growing up smart and female in a very patriarchal religious structure is a big part of the book.
The other fascinating thing about this one is the language; the dialogue is mostly in Jamaican English, which isn’t quite far enough from American English to qualify as a patois (which is a whole other thing, to my understanding) but it means that things like pronouns aren’t going to work quite like you’re used to, and you are going to hear every word her father says whether you normally hear dialogue or not. Sinclair is an award-winning poet, and while I’m not likely to check out her poetry, if she writes any more prose works in the future I’ll be in line for them.
13. Shōgun, by James Clavell. I have never seen either of the miniseries that were based on this book, either the original one from the 1980s or the apparently far superior one Hulu did this year, but I swear that if I ever start watching television again, I’m gonna, dammit. I picked this up (for the record, it’s printed in two volumes because it’s 1500 pages long, but it’s one book) based on a bunch of people being very enthusiastic about the miniseries and the strength of the cover.
Okay, that’s a lie, I picked this up because of the precise shade of blue-green used on the new covers, which sounds ridiculous and I don’t care, it’s true. Luckily for me the book is really good, and a lot less racist than you might guess “book written in the 1970s by a white guy about Japan” might be. The main character, a navigator named Blackthorne, is just open-minded enough of a character to make it possible to get into his head, and the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century were a fascinating period of history both in Japan specifically and the world in general. This book is a heavy damn lift in more ways than one, but I really enjoyed it and I’m glad they didn’t reprint it with a boring cover.
12. King: A Life, by Jonathan Eig. The Civil Rights movement is my favorite period of American history, and easily the one I know the most about, so you can probably imagine that I have a bunch of books specifically about Martin Luther King, Jr. on my shelf, as well as a couple that aren’t officially about him but may as well be. What sets Eig’s version of his life apart from the rest is his focus on King as a human being and not as a man whose face would eventually be carved into marble as a national memorial. It isn’t quite a psychological biography, if that’s even a real thing, but it may not surprise you to learn that King struggled with depression and anxiety for his entire life as well as a healthy dose of imposter syndrome (the man was in his twenties during the Montgomery bus boycott, and was only 39 when he was murdered) and he doesn’t come out and say it, but it’s strongly suggested that his mental health struggles led to his well-known issues with adultery, drugs and alcohol.
What, you didn’t know Martin Luther King dabbled in drugs? Yeah. Sorry about that. But unlike, say, Ralph Abernathy’s book, there’s no sense of score-settling in King: A Life; Eig talks about these things because they were important, and he’s not trying to knock King off his pillar so much as talk about a guy who would have been deeply uncomfortable up there in the first place. When you’ve read as much about King as I have it takes a lot to write something new and impressive, and Eig has certainly delivered here.
11. Seal of the Worm, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This is the first of two books on this list that should be understood as endorsements of the entire series rather than the individual books I’m writing about, and in the case of Seal of the Worm I’m talking about his Shadows of the Apt books, a ten-book, 6000-page series, most of which I read in 2024.
That isn’t to say that Seal of the Worm isn’t the best book of the series, as even just from a technical level capping off that massive of a work in a satisfactory manner is an impressive achievement all on its own, but what if I told you that Seal of the Worm manages to introduce an entire new antagonist and kicks the legs out from underneath all nine previous books, something that has already happened once in the series? Tchaikovsky may be science fiction and fantasy’s most underrated author, and I still don’t know anyone else who has read this series, which is a Goddamned crime. They’re right there, and you can buy them. What are you waiting for, other than the time to read six thousand pages? Please, somebody, read this.
10. Light from Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki. Another mini-theme of this list that is going to start becoming more apparent is books that are batshit nuts, and … man, this book has a little bit of everything in it, and I think would wear a “batshit nuts” badge with absolute and undeniable pride.
I mean, check out how many whole entire books are superglued together here: Light from Uncommon Stars features 1) a young, transgender runaway who is 2) a world-class violinist who 3) meets a mentor who has made a deal with the Devil to 4) corrupt seven young violinists into also selling their souls to the devil and 5) is looking for number 7, and meanwhile 8) there are aliens who 9) are stuck on Earth and 10) running a donut shop while they’re stuck here. It is complete madness from the first page to the last, and I recommended it to one of my trans orchestra students during the last school year and I should really find out if they ever read it or not. Meanwhile, you should read it too.
9. The Phoenix Keeper, by S. A. MacLean. Slightly less nutty (but still pretty nutty) is this book about an autistic, anxiety-riddled zookeeper in a zoo filled with fantasy animals, the first and sole representative of what the kids are calling cozy fantasy on this list. I got sent this one by Illumicrate and it wouldn’t have really crossed my radar otherwise, but I read it more or less cover-to-cover during a car trip and it was exactly the book I needed at the time. I have read more romance books than I ever expected to this year, and am reaching the point where I am heartily tired of romantasy, which is a thing, but this isn’t that; there is a bit of a romance subplot but it’s not about that, so don’t pay attention to the blurb on the cover. No, this book is about a nerd who really really wants to be the best zookeeper in the world and wants to raise phoenixes, and it’s really obviously based on the efforts zoos went to to keep the California condor from going extinct, and I absolutely loved it. There are setbacks and obstacles to be overcome but, again, this is cozy fantasy and you know everything is going to work out just fine, and this book is more about relaxing into the details and the characters than the conflict. I like zoos. I like books set at zoos. Zoos with phoenixes are better than regular zoos. This is a great book.
8. Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography, by Staci Robinson. I am tempted to say “this exists and therefore you should read it,” but that’s kind of unfair to both the book and the author even if it’s more or less completely true. I’m listening to Kendrick Lamar while I write this post, and Kendrick is one of Pac’s more obvious spiritual successors in hiphop nowadays, but it’s impossible to overstate the impact this guy had on rap music and on two or three generations of kids and still counting. I think it’s probably fair to say that there’s not another musician from the nineties (or a whole bunch of other decades, for whatever that’s worth) that still has as much influence as Tupac does, and reading a book written by someone who knew him well and was handpicked by his mother to write the book was an absolute pleasure. The guy’s life was fascinating, and while books about musicians can sometimes become formulaic (“he released this, and then he released this, and then there were the drug problems, and then he released this,”) this manages to keep away from that. The one weakness is that it literally ends with the moment of his death; I feel like another chapter about the LAPD’s investigation reaction to his murder was probably warranted and we didn’t get it. Still, I’m glad to have read this.
7. The West Passage, by Jared Pechaček. I still don’t know how the hell to pronounce his last name, but this book is the first one on the list that, on a different day, I easily could have called the best book of the year, and if you want to draw a line between the first eight books and the last seven and ignore the ratings completely after that, it’s entirely reasonable. The West Passage is also the second representative of the Batshit Nuts genre, drawing inspiration from Gormenghast and Shadow of the Torturer and Through the Looking-Glass and China Miéville’s Bas-Lag series and coming up with something where characters will be talking about a beehive, and you’ll think to yourself okay, I know what bees are, and I know what a beehive is, and then the beehive will walk over to the characters on its legs and extend a urethra and piss out some honey for them. The crumbling castle this book is set in is one of the wildest settings I’ve ever encountered in fantasy literature, and God damn it did I seriously read six more books this year that I thought were better than this one? That shouldn’t be possible, because this book is incredible, but … well, keep reading.
6. Mornings in Jenin, by Susan Abulhawa. I read several books this year by Palestinian authors, and two specifically by Abulhawa, whose Against the Loveless World was also on my shortlist, but Mornings in Jenin is the superior of those two books. This is not a memoir but feels like it (Abulhawa herself is Palestinian, but was born in 1970 in Kuwait, so she’s narrating events from before she was born, although I’m sure her own life experiences made their way into the book), and it begins with the creation of Israel and runs up to more or less the modern day, as it ends in 2002 or so, a few years before its release in 2006. This is easily the most important book on the list, and the main character, Amal, is a young girl at the beginning of the book and an old woman at the end of it, so you more or less get the entire history of the Palestine-Israeli conflict through her eyes. Go right ahead and make a list of all the content warnings you can think of, as this is a really hard book to read if you’re possessed of even a modicum of human empathy, but it’s something that I think most people and certainly most Americans definitely need to pick up.
5. Incidents Around the House, by Josh Malerman. I called this the scariest book I’d ever read when I wrote about it the first time (my post cannot, in any meaningful way, be called a “review”) and while I wasn’t able to stick by that– you’ll see in a minute, and frankly parts of Mornings in Jenin are horrifying in their own way as well– it’s certainly the scariest horror novel I have read, at least in a long, long time, time having worn the edges off of some of the other books that might belong on that list.
Incidents is about Bela, an eight-year-old, who lives with her mother and father in a nice, comfortable house. But there’s also Other Mommy, who no one else in the house can see, and who asks Bela every day if she can “go inside her heart.” Bela is smart enough to realize that this is probably a Bad Idea, possibly one of the Badder Ideas in the entire history of Bad Ideas, and … well, Other Mommy isn’t very happy about that.
Don’t read this book. You don’t need it in your head. I didn’t need it in mine, but it’s there now, and the book is still in the freezer, and I have to reward how fucking effective this book is in scaring the absolute shit out of a grown man who himself lives in a nice comfortable house even if I am never letting it out of the freezer ever again.
4. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty. I haven’t used the word delightful in this post yet because I feel like I overuse it lately, but I feel like there’s probably no way of getting through writing about this book, about a female ex-pirate captain who has retired and settled down to raise her daughter in a magical world full of djinn and treasures and adventures and her pain in the ass mom and awesome, but this was probably the most fun I had reading anything this year, and if you can look at that cover and not immediately want to read this than you and I probably can’t be friends. I’ve read several of Shannon Chakraborty’s books, and this is better than anything she’s written before– and those were all books I enjoyed! I want twelve thousand more books about Amina al-Sirafi and I want them right now. Have you ever noticed that when I get excited about things my sentences tend to get longer? Look at the first sentence of this entry. I read this book months ago. It still makes me that happy to talk about it. Go read it.
3. Blood over Bright Haven, by M.L. Wang. This is the fourth book in a row where you’re going to feel a particular emotion over and over again while reading it, and the second of the four where rage is going to be that emotion. Blood over Bright Haven has a bunch of very interesting tricks under its sleeve, and chief among them is the way it’s going to kind of blindside you partway through with what it is actually about and, even more amazingly, who its main character is. This is one of the angriest books I’ve ever read, and again, one of the books I just finished writing about is about a Palestinian refugee, so that’s a pretty high bar. I enjoyed Wang’s Sword of Kaigen but not nearly as much as I expected to, and this book sat on my shelf for a while before I got to it. It should be this book that people can’t stop talking about, not Kaigen, and the reason I’m not talking about the plot very much is that this is definitely one of those books where you need to go in knowing as little as possible. Just sit back and let it take you for a ride. And if you can, grab it soon while you can still get the cool red-stained edges. The first hardcover edition is sweet.
2. Nuclear War: A Scenario, by Annie Jacobsen. Remember a couple of books ago, where I called Incidents Around the House the scariest horror novel I’d ever read, and said that I’d explain in a minute? Yeah, that’s because Nuclear War: A Scenario isn’t a novel, and it is fucking terrifying on a deep, existential level that no fictional novel can really touch.
If you grew up in the eighties, you remember what living in fear every day of impending nuclear war felt like, and you might remember the occasional “hide under your desk and kiss your ass goodbye, because it’s not going to help” drill from school. Jacobsen’s book starts with North Korea detonating a one-megaton nuclear bomb over Washington DC, and ends seventy-one minutes later with more or less all of human life on Earth extinguished. It is probably best classified as near-future science fiction, as the events described have not, in fact, happened yet, but Jacobsen is repeatedly clear that the events of the book could happen tomorrow, and while there’s clearly some fictionalization happening here and there (she has to invent a US President and Vice-President, for example, and what happens with the president pro tempore of the Senate almost verges on comedy) I have shelved this with my nonfiction and history books, because all of the research that went into this puts it more firmly into the realm of those books than fiction.
I, uh, want to die in the first thirty seconds, preferably entirely unaware of what just killed me, if there’s a nuclear war. I’ve said this before about more fictional apocalypses– I also want to be patient zero if there’s ever a zombie outbreak– but it would be great if I was, say, in Chicago when the bombs hit, and if that first exchange involved more than the one bomb. I’d prefer not to die in a nuclear apocalypse, mind you, but if I’ve got to go that way, I really don’t want to see it coming.
1. Godsgrave, by Jay Kristoff, is my favorite book of the year, and my annual irritation with WordPress that it will not allow me to begin a paragraph with a one and a period without indenting it automatically or Performing Shenanigans to keep it from happening. I am capable of indenting things myself if I want to, or you should at least pay attention if you automatically indent something and I delete it, dammit! But yes: this is the second single-book-as-a-stand-in-for-an-entire-series, and Kristoff’s Nevernight Chronicles is one of the most amazing series I’ve ever read. In broad strokes, the series feels like something you’ve read repeatedly– a young girl who trains to be an assassin so she can seek revenge is not on the top 10 of most original scenarios– but once you get past that original setup and the series gets moving, you’re going to be surprised over and over and over and over by the story decisions Kristoff makes, and the reason I picked Godsgrave, the second book in the series (the first and last are Nevernight and Darkdawn, respectively) is that it ends on a cliffhanger so potent that I literally screamed when I finished the book, and if I had had to wait for Book Three to come out and hadn’t had it sitting on the shelf waiting for me (I read all three books in a single gulp) I might have had to move into his Goddamned house until he finished it.
I love so many things about this series. I love what an unapologetic asshole Mia Corvere is. I love that they make her an assassin and then don’t back away from all the killing that implies. I love that Kristoff sets up what feels like a bog-standard YA love triangle and then blows it to hell. I love how much of the worldbuilding is stuck into what feels like inappropriately snarky footnotes, and I love how the footnotes suddenly make sense at the end of the book. I love how meta the series gets, and I love how no one is safe, ever, and how Darkdawn keeps you on your toes for its entire length and keeps getting more and more batshit, at one point indicating a story development with margin changes, and God Damn I want to sit down and reread this whole series before starting the Stormlight reread in a few days.
The Nevernight Chronicles is the best series I read this year, and Godsgrave is the best book of The Nevernight Chronicles. Go forth.
Honorable Mention, in No Particular Order: A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe, by Mark Dawidziak; The Honey Witch, by Sydney J. Shields; House of Hunger, by Alexis Henderson; The God and the Gumiho, by Sophie Kim; This is Why They Hate Us, by Aaron Acevedo; The Bone Ship Trilogy by R. J. Barker; Somewhere Beyond the Sea, by T.J. Klune; Blood at the Root, by LaDarrion Williams; The Vagrant Gods series, by David Dalglish; Morning Star, by Pierce Brown; Bookshops & Bonedust, by Travis Baldree, Moon of the Turning Leaves, by Waubgeshig Rice, and The Fury of the Gods, by John Gwynne.
It was White People Shut Up Day yesterday, and one of the absolutely great things about the fact that I’m no longer on Twitter is that I made it through the entire day without unwillingly encountering any idiot Republicans’ takes on Martin Luther King. I say this every year: the fastest way to find out how someone would have felt about Martin Luther King is to ask them how they feel about Jesse Jackson, or Al Sharpton, or, hell, Barack Obama, or if you’re feeling adventurous, Jeremiah Wright, if the person you’re talking to even knows who Jeremiah Wright is. Fully 62% of Americans held a negative view of King when he was killed, and that number had been increasing steadily for years as he moved away from civil rights and began talking more about poverty and the Vietnam war. White people hated Martin Luther King, and most of them would still hate him today if he were still around.
And, well, I don’t necessarily need to do a lot of talking up of a new biography about King to help you decide if you’re going to read it, do I? Probably not. I probably know more about the Civil Rights era than any other time in American history, and there hasn’t been a new major biography of King in ages, so there was little to no chance I wasn’t going to pick this up, and I know enough about the man’s life already that a bullshit take on him isn’t going to get past me easily.
(almost starts another paragraph with “and, well”)
Here’s the thing: for better or for worse, Jonathan Eig’s take on King is the most human I’ve ever seen him. At this point, fifty-five years and some change after his death, we’re bordering on historical Jesus level of mythologizing cruft around this man, and at certain points by treating King like a person Eig almost feels disrespectful. Like, if you aren’t already aware of some of his failures as a pastor and a person– chief among them that he was a massive horndog, cheating on his wife every chance that he got– this book is going to be shocking. I was aware that there were allegations that he’d plagiarized parts of his dissertation but I wasn’t aware just how comfortable he seemed to be with lifting other people’s work more or less whenever he felt the need to. And, perhaps most striking to me personally, he had enormous struggles with anxiety, depression, and imposter syndrome; Eig never comes out and says it directly but it’s hard to not form the opinion that part of the reason for all of the adultery was 1) a massive self-destructive streak and 2) sex, drinking and smoking being one of the few ways the man allowed himself to blow off steam.
I’m not justifying anything, mind you, but I’m also not especially interested in dwelling on his failures that much, particularly when it’s made clear that Coretta knew exactly what was going on and turned a blind eye.
The broad historical strokes of the man’s life are already well-known, and I suspect most Americans who have read even a single book about the Civil Rights movement or Black history in America specifically could do a half-decent job of tracing the major events. It’s as a psychological analysis that this book is interesting, and it’s also what makes this book depressing. Because thinking of MLK as a … person … really and genuinely does come off as kind of rude. It just feels funny. It’s well-written, and well-sourced, with a couple hundred pages of footnotes at the end, and I’m absolutely glad that I read it, but … damn. Y’know? Maybe you don’t. I dunno.
Look at how tired he looks on the cover. That’s absolutely not an accident.
At any rate, read the book.
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