Remember the heyday of Goodreads? Every year, on the first of January, a wave of reading challenge declarations would drown out my feeds, as friends and acquaintances pledged to complete 25, 50, 100 books in 365 days. Some ambitious souls would aim for more far-fetched numbers, which made little sense until you counted in graphic novels, comics, and short stories. In 2015, Goodreads congratulated me for reading 124 out of my 110 book goal. By 2020, the year I left the site, my goal was a more realistic 50.
The point of Goodreads was ostensibly to provide a space for readers to track their bookshelves and discover new reads, but in reality, it was all about competition. Competition between users, vying to set the most ridiculous challenge target. Competition between authors, and between authors and reviewers, whose clashes on the site regularly go viral. Like a worldwide version of your Year 5 Summer Reading Challenge, Goodreads brought together the most annoying members of the ‘reader community’ and pitted them against each other.
Amazon brought Goodreads in 2013, and as its interface gradually deteriorated and ethical committments turned users away, the site decreased in popularity. I quit in 2020, and haven’t kept any record of the books I’ve read since then.
Anyway, the point of this preamble is to say that I kind of miss it. Over the past few weeks, following the end of my Masters, I’ve been catching up on the literary fiction I’d been longing to read whilst trudging through seventeenth-century treatises. Rather than returning to Goodreads, I thought I’d discuss six of them here. Here are the literary morsels I’ve been sinking my teeth into as of late — taking the tender with the tough. This might be a series, it might not be. Let’s see how it goes.
Contains very mild spoilers. Like blurb-level spoilers. Don’t shout at me.
History, trauma, plague
Both of these books have magic trees in. Both also remind the reader that faith can be both a blessing and a curse, and that the weight of history hangs heavy over an individual’s tiny life.
The Raptures - Jan Carson
During my Masters, I took a class on historical subjectivity. In the fourth seminar, we tackled the impact of trauma on the self, looking at the way in which mass violence and collective trauma affect the individual psyche and its representation. One of the papers which stuck out explored how ghost-sightings and interest in the supernatural increased after the French Revolution, as the nation came to terms with its haunting past.
I was reminded of this whilst reading Jan Carson’s supernatural mystery The Raptures, set in Ballylack, a fictional small town in Northern Ireland, during the Troubles. The summer holidays have just started for eleven-year-old Hannah, a Born Again Christian whose zealous father holds her aloof from worldly activities like school trips and TV, when her classmates start to sicken and die from a mysterious, untraceable illness. To make matters stranger, Hannah’s dead friends appear before her, moments after passing yet aged into the teenagers they will never get to be — shorter hair, shorter skirts, a wish to experience life at its fullest. They speak to her briefly of their concerns, fears, and desires, before vanishing once again.
Earlier in the narrative, before the pandemic strikes, the class’s teacher asks them to write an essay imagining their future. She’s disheartened to read of clothes, boys, and most importantly, no parents, rather than an end to war and violence. The glimpse Hannah gets into an afterlife populated entirely by teenagers might be read as equally disheartening, a reminder of humanity’s perpetual capacity for harm — or alternatively, as a statement about youth’s radical vitality.
Carson writes about childhood with a realist’s sensibility — when Hannah sees her first dead classmate, sat on the toilet, her first fear is that a boy has seen her knickers, and that she will now have to use the downstairs loo. In one sense, The Raptures walks in the footsteps of the bildungsroman, tying together the formative, troubling years of Hannah’s life with the winding down of the Troubles in her homeland. Yet this is also a novel about community. Dipping in and out of the lives of Ballylack’s other residents, The Raptures presents a rounded portrait of Northern Irish Protestant life beyond the focus on sectarian violence. Carson’s character, from the taciturn, tortured farmer Alan to his independent mixed-race son, Bayani, called ‘Ben’ by his father and friends, are drawn with such compassion that each death hits the reader hard.
In the hands of a different author, The Raptures would be a horror or thriller. Jan Carson has shaped this darkly disturbing story of family and community trauma into a tender-hearted masterpiece which pays intense detail to the small intimacies of even the shortest life.
The Dance Tree - Kiran Millwood Hargrave
The first book I read after finishing my dissertation on women’s illness in the early modern era was The Dance Tree, a book about…women’s illness in the early modern era. Based on the real dancing plague of 1518 Strasbourg, when four-hundred people fell into a frenzied, unstoppable dance, or choreomania, The Dance Tree follows three women whose lives orbit around and intersect with the dancers: pregnant Lisbet, who cares more for her lost children and her husband’s beehives than herself; gentle, long-suffering Ida; and the enigmatic, tempestuous Nethe, once exiled to a convent to pay penance for an unnamed crime.
Coming to the novel with knowledge of the dancing plague, and a background studying early modern women, I was impressed with the depth of Hargrave’s research. The Dance Tree is saturated with little details which bring the historical setting to life: comets as omens, beeswax saints and poppy for sleep, the smell of spoilt flour and clotting blood, the threat of incubi and the cloying blanket of incense in a pre-Reformation church. Above all, a timeless theme: the simple cruelty of scared men. Hargrave is exploring female lives, however, and the novel’s heightened awareness of the body tugs the three women’s desires, hungers, and fears into a sensual, emotional rhythm — Lisbet counts her life in bloods, Ida in living children, Nethe in years of exile and prayer.
That being said, I wanted something more from The Dance Tree, though I’m not sure what. Maybe Hargrave’s dreamlike, poetic style stilted my engagement with her characters, or the twist felt predictable, perhaps I was left empty by a bleak ending shot through with only a few, meagre sparks of light. Whatever the case, despite my qualms, The Dance Tree does do justice to its fascinating subject matter and the experiences of the very real women who dance across its pages.
Eco-dreams and eco-nightmares
Two very different books about a world that is burning up, inside and out. Horror, hope, and human intimacy set against the backdrop of climate collapse.
Birnam Wood - Eleanor Catton
I am a wimp. I do not watch horror movies, and I had to hide under my boyfriend’s shirt last time he cajoled me into an episode of Endeavour. So I mean it as a compliment when I say Eleanor Catton’s literary thriller Birnam Wood gave me three days worth of nightmares, but it was worth it.
After a landslide cuts off a remote pass in rural New Zealand, guerrilla gardening group Birnam Wood sense an opportunity to plant their illegal crops on unmonitored land. When a chance encounter between the group’s leader and an enigmatic billionaire offers the group the chance to finally go public, their personal and political loyalties are pushed to the limit.
Not a single character in Birnam Wood is remotely likeable, from chillingly cynical billionaire Lemoine to self-centred activist Mira, and investigative journalist wannabe Tony, whose social politics are best described in an excruciating twelve-page scene consisting mostly of his self-righteous mansplaining. (A sample: ‘“Oh, give me a break,” Tony said. “Polyamory is so fucking capitalist.”’) Yet each is stunningly, entirely human in their flaws. The members of Birnam Wood might be concerned with community care and radical politics, but they’re just as self-obsessed as their capitalistic adversaries. I know these people. I have been them, loved and hated them. And by the end of Birnam Wood, I just wanted them to survive.
I had absolutely no idea what this book was about when I picked it up, and I feel that’s the best way to go into it, so I won’t spoil too much. There’s intrigue, high-stakes, and a dark undercurrent which simmers up to boiling point in the novel’s final act. I haven’t felt this gut-punched — or disturbed — by an ending since Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts. I can’t recommend it enough.
The Perfect Golden Circle - Ben Myers
A different kind of ecowarrior walks the pages of Ben Myer’s tender-hearted yet sharply political novel The Perfect Golden Circle. Set across the scorching hot summer of 1989, it follows soft-spoken, traumatised war veteran Calvert and his scatterbrained friend, Redbone, whose real name is a secret perhaps even to himself, as they create massive, magical crop circles throughout the English countryside. A celebration of male friendship and the healing power of human creativity, soaked in midsummer sun, I can think of no better book for this time of year.
The novel’s artistry lies in its language. Each sentence is a tiny, glistening poem, like a single kernel of wheat just budding in the English sun. At the solstic, ‘everything feels elastic in the gloaming’, ‘around the two men the unseen creatures of the hundreds of acres are skittish and moon-drunk’, and ‘ all living things are thin of skin and hot of blood’. The names Calvert and Redbone give their creations are as carefully crafted as the crop circles themselves, dripping with alliteration and evoking a deeper, ancient England, now buried under motorways and the sprawl of suburbia: ‘High Bassett Butter Barrel Whirlpool’, ‘Trapping St Edmunds Solstice Pendulum’, and the pair’s masterpiece, 'Honeycomb Double Helix’.
The Perfect Golden Circle is an elegy for a world in the process of vanishing: an England of ancient wetlands and sprawling fields, so large you can lose yourself in them, become one with the birds and beasts dwelling in the verges and the skies. Humanity’s gradual encroachment — pigeon shooting toffs, cops breaking up pagan festivals, the spectre of Thatcherism and the Falklands War — hangs heavy over this landscape. Set at the end of the ironically-named Green Revolution, the gentle magic of The Perfect Golden Circle is embittered by the knowledge of what comes next — birds falling from the sky, floods and fires. Describing the purpose of their artworks, Calvert says: ‘Really, this isn’t about the patterns or the crops, its about the land. The land. It's about getting people to learn to love it so that they don't take it for granted, and then feel compelled to protect it.’ I think Myers own mission is similar; to remind us of what we’re losing, and just how much more we have to lose.
As soon as I turned the final page, I wanted to read The Perfect Golden Circle again, with a pencil in hand, marking the sentences which affected me the most. I think I’d leave much of it underlined.
More unhinged women
The 2020’s favourite genre strikes again.
Acts of Service - Lillian Fishman
When will we reach peak unlikeable middle-class female protagonist in her mid-twenties experiencing existential ennui in a big city? Not yet, according to Lillian Fishman’s Acts of Service, which follows a queer woman in a loving yet unsatisfying relationship who becomes entangled with a heterosexual dominant-submissive couple after posting her nudes online.
This genre of book — My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Boy Parts, anything by Sally Rooney — is like sugar to me. I can’t get enough of it, but it leaves me feeling vaguely sick, and a little unsatisfied. Acts of Service leans more towards the sickening than the satisfying. Richly written yet unimaginative, like a fantasy for when you can’t really be bothered to think of anything sexier than a wealthy man in a suit. (No denying this is sexy. The problem is that Nathan, the dominant in the threesome, offsets his appeal by being incredibly cringe). I couldn’t bear the self-indulgent, cat-that-got-the-cream protagonist Eve, who spends most of her time thinking about her ‘perfect body’. Unlike the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, whose privilege and apparent perfection made her a more interesting character, I found Eve nauseating and uninteresting.
I wanted something more from Eve, and from Fishman, something which spoke to my own questions about sex, bisexuality, desire. Sometimes Acts of Service gives, when it lets Eve waver between the comfortable certainty of male attention and the cautious dance of female attraction, forever freighted with apology. Mostly though, much like its main character, it takes: ‘Had I ever fucked this way?’ Eve asks, thinking of both her girlfriend, and male lover. ‘With such devotion that I forgot myself?’. Acts of Service forgets itself in its own rhetoric, reifies what it claims to interrogate. The blurb calls it sincere, I found it self-centred. A Fifty Shades of Grey for people who read theory.
A few shreds of brilliance litter Fishman’s prose like hastily discarded clothing, but I found myself slogging through the novel, despite the promise of a ‘bold and unflinchingly sexy’ read (Vogue). It isn’t that the sex is poorly written; Acts of Service won’t be winning the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, I just don’t see it winning anything else, either.
Woman, Eating - Claire Kohda
Woman, Eating is a book about vampires. It’s also a book about the forces that hold a body in their grasp; the biological (hunger, desire), interpersonal (family, friendship), and global-historical (colonialism, capitalism).
Artist Lydia could be any young woman navigating the demands of twenty-first century urban life — a demanding mother, an unpaid internship with a predatory boss, and an unrequited crush. Lydia is particularly preoccupied with her ancestry; she never knew her Japanese father, and her Malaysian-British mother has raised her to see herself as a monster. Because Lydia is also half-vampire, turned by her mother to save her life as an infant. Striking out on her own for the first time, Lydia is forced to tackle questions of identity and independence, family and food.
I’ve seen reviewers criticise this book for its pacing. There is an unevenness to the second act, but the off-kilter tone serves a purpose, providing an insight into Lydia’s mental state. Kohda weaves a fog of depression around her protagonist as she rots on her studio floor, remnants of her last meal still festering in the sink. It’s a compelling and relatable image, a portrait of modern struggle — though for most of us, that meal isn’t a piece of carrion plucked from the Thames. The sharp contrast between Lydia’s gritty black pudding, the oats spat out, and the food she longs to eat — ‘sashimi and ramen, onigiri and udon’ — presents a powerful and painful picture of alienation which Lydia feels she can never fully escape. The question of whether she ever can drives the novel to its final pages.
Mild spoiler: The scene when Lydia finally does get to eat is luminescent, an explosion of taste and texture onto a canvas previously soaked in shades of grey. That a story about the bloodsucking undead can be such a powerful, whole-hearted exploration of human life with all its joys and terrors stands testament to Kohda’s talent. Woman, Eating does feel like a debut novel, but I can’t wait to see what Kohda writes next.
Got recommendations? Drop them in the comments and let me know if this sort of post is something you’d like to see more (or less!) of.
A bit of housekeeping: I find most of my audience via Twitter, but as we all know, it’s looking a bit WayStar RoyCo out there. I’ve remade a Tumblr in case worst comes to worst, as I feel it’s the next best thing for connecting with like minded communities, and I’d really appreciate a follow over there: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/21stcenturydemoniac