The list I made last November with #NovNov in mind is a snapshot of an ambitious reader’s brain, high on bookish possibilities. You recognise the vague outlines that persist, when one is away from one’s bookshelves but in a planning mood, unbound.
The titles listed in black are all from my own shelves, except for the one with a cover similar to Stéphane Larue’s chunky novel The Dishwasher (translated by Pablo Strauss). This one I’d noticed one day in the local library, but not until I’d gotten home did I realise I’d left it behind.
I knew I could find it again, like a homing pigeon, on my next visit. And, after I had, I wandered the remainder of the stacks and picked up the titles listed below, in purple.
That Charles Yu quotation, I jotted down while browsing online one day, suspecting that these notebook pages would eventually contain book notes or book lists. I like the idea of being able to stretch the reading time in the present. And my novella reading plans from November have certainly stretched a long way. All the way into 2024.
From Last Year
P. Djèli Clark’s Ring Shout (2020) is propelled by dialogue and imagery, haints and half-faced creatures, rooted in folktales though the epigraphs from ex-slave narratives, translated from the Gullah, root readers in reality too. “Watching these Klans shamble down the street, I’m reminded of bales of white, still soaked in colored folk sweat and blood, moving for the river.” It ends with a bang and a cake: my favourite kind of story.
Lisa Dillman’s a master shape-shifter as translator of Signs Preceding the End of the World, Yuri Herrera’s 2015 genre-busting novella. Makina is on a quest, in search of her brother and of a kind of stability she’s never known. The struggles are of-this-world but also of epic proportions; the characters feel like mythic structures and, yet, there’s a sense of investment: readers want good things for Makina and her loved ones. The story feels like something you’ve read before and nothing you’ve ever read before, simultaneously. It’s both completely familiar and totally strange. (AndOtherPress, U.K. indie)
Keath Fraser’s Charity (2021) is a psychologically rich story about a network of family and love relationships that pulses and constricts as missed connections accumulate and refract. Everyone’s expecting something and nobody’s clear on anyone else’s expectations (sometimes not their own either). Both young and old, alike, are dissatisfied, yearning, in this uncomfortable but oddly compelling story. (Biblioasis, Canadian indie)
I read Hazel Jane Plante’s Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) (2019) over many days, one day for the segment which introduces the friendship permanently fractured by Vivian’s death and one day for each of the letters in the alphabet that catalogue elements of a fictional TV series the two women watched together obsessively (Vivian started it). The ABCs are part homage to their friendship and part homage to pop culture: playful and strange and, most of all, saturated with that peculiar density that exists when someone who’s never felt so completely understood in their whole life loses the person who was there when that happened. Thanks to Cindy for recommending this…it took me awhile. (Metonymy, Canadian micropress)
Shy (2023) by Max Porter was a birthday present from Mr BIP. Porter is preoccupied by loss and the unique fractures humans suffer in grief, the lingering trauma that holds a shape in one’s everyday. Shy isn’t good company for others in his life when readers meet him, and his world seems like it’ll never again be righted. But he is in the company of others who struggle: nice for him, but readers are antsy. “They each carry a private inner register of who is genuinely not OK, who is likely to go psycho, who is hard, who is a pussy, who is actually alright, and friendship seeps into the gaps of these false registers in unexpected ways, just as hatred does, just as terrible loneliness does.” Porter has explored this theme before and his expertise results in a taut and haunting form.
This New Year
Octavia Cade’s The Impossible Resurrection of Grief (2021) landed in my stack because of Arboreality; it arrived with a signed plate by the author tucked inside, which reads “More jellyfish than humans have been to space.” This made me sad, instantly, because I’ll never recover from Laika. But the novella is not a quiet, meditative piece on grief; it’s vivid and scenic, and things happen. To begin with, The Grief is a condition, a response to the extinction and devastation caused by the climate crisis. But Ruby—who’s described as a “a jellyfish kind of girl” as a result of her passion for creatures who have flourished in the climate crisis—is dealing with a personal grief, too, because one of her close friends suffered from Grief and Ruby couldn’t help her. When she receives a packet of letters in the mail, she follows the breadcrumbs into a wholly unexpected situation. This is one of those disappear-into-it-and-don’t-look-up novellas. (Stelliform, Canadian indie)
But one advantage of being late with this post? Now several of these are pertinent to #ReadIndies month!
Oooh your handwriting is so cool-looking and I appreciate the presence of the purple! I’m not much of a novella person though some of these, especially Charity, sound intriguing to me. Glad it sounds like you’re not being super judgmental about being late with this post and being able to view the positive in that.
Maybe it was easier to accept the post’s lateness cuz I actually read novellas all year round, whereas some events urge me to try something I don’t normally read? so it felt like it was still current? The family dynamics in Charity might feel like work/teaching for you: definitely complicated interpersonal relationships (i.e. real life stuff). Purple is my favourite fun colour!
I loved the Herrera, and have just read another by him – Transmigration of Bodies – equally familiar and strange simultaneously too. Shy was good too – although Lanny is my fave Porter so far.
I was going to ask what you loved about Lanny, but then I searched out your review instead: nicely done. It’s a book I admired more than I loved, but I do think what one’s reading alongside impacts a book, and I suspect that Porter’s books deserve a more solitary place in the stack; I might have not have been positioning myself to fully experience them.
I read Charity a long time ago and don’t remember much about it, other than the fact I liked it LOL. Ring Shout looks like a very interesting book, and wow, that cover is so powerful.
A long time from now, that’ll probably be what I remember of it too. The down-side of reading a lot.
Yeah, I buried it inside my stack when I was carrying it home, so nobody got the wrong idea!
I still remember reading the Herrera years later. A very striking opening! Ring Shout sounds fascinating and I have a copy of Shy in the tbr to look forward to.
Yes! I had the feeling that section had been reworked a lot (in a good way). Shy’s the kind of book you want to discuss with spoilers because you feel like you get to know the boy over time: I like that.
Better late than never! I’ve added your link into the comments of my NovNov post. Your handwriting is, as always, swoon-worthy. I love the sound of the Little Blue Encyclopedia. I stopped reading Porter after Lanny; I just didn’t enjoy the grit and darkness.
It’s “swoon-worthy”?! That’s a nice thing to say. I hope you were reading the post while sitting down so the fall wasn’t too jarring. heheh It’s tender and curious, I think you’d like it (Metonymy has epubs but I think you try to avoid them as much as possible?) Yes, Grief was one thing, Lanny was quite another, and this one feels more Lanny-ish to me.
I wondered what was the connection between Arboreality and Octavia Cade, but I see it’s Stelliform Press. Following up, I found an interview with Cade in Clarkesworld (May 2021) and from there, a short story in Clarkesworld (Aug 2017) which is apparently now a novel (184pp). I might have to read it. And she’s from NZ, just next door really.
Because I formatted the photo so that it would be quick to load on-screen for visitors, I don’t think it’s possible to read the notebook as easily, and that’s the only place I mentioned the Stelliform link, but you found it after all. That novel intrigues me too. LMK if you take the plunge and I’ll try to join. I’d meant to ask you if you’d “run into her” (on the page) before, given her proximity.
I’m on my desktop now, 23″ screen. Sorry, still can’t read your notebook.
Also, Cade’s novel The Stone Weta appears to be out of print (but I enjoyed its short story version).
Hah, okay, I’ve made it full-size. And I’ll try to remember to do that with other notebook posts. Maybe if the collection coming later this year from Stelliform does well, the novel will come back into print.
Next week I’ll have a post about a book that might suit your reading project!