Amid the cacophony of resolutions and reflections, I’ve begun reading in January before I’ve shared my thoughts on past and future reading years of 2022 and 2023. But The Australian Legend’s Week of Australian Women Writers, which highlights science-fiction writers beginning here, has inspired me to share my current stack (and last year’s reflections will appear tomorrow).
Bill’s interview with Jane Rawson is here and well worth reading, but be warned: if you’re not already reading her books, this will leave you wanting to read them all. The availability information is at the bottom of the interview and she shares her Substack link too.
Bill recommended Jane Rawson’s From the Wreck (2017) and I read it throughout the winter break, so that I met George gnawing on human flesh, while I was crunching through shortbread fingers and thumbprint cookies with red jam filling.
Don’t let the reference to cannibalism put you off: nobody really knows what happened, we only know that the few survivors of the historic 1859 wreck of the Admella (a ship named for its route between the Australia settlements of Adelaide, Melbourne, Launceston) were not rescued for weeks and had no reliable food source.
Note: The Wikipedia page includes a painting, some fascinating quotes and details, but the last line includes a single-sentence summary of this novel—with spoilers.
Anyway, we’re not meant to think toooo much about the wreck’s menu, because George thinks about it enough for everyone else (understandably). He’s not the only key character in From the Wreck however; rotating voices saturate the spare and exacting prose. They embody some central ideas—where does life come from and how is it sustained (or, not), considering vulnerabilities and strengths—but the focus remains on story, so that it was hard not to gulp the book (particularly in the final third), even though simultaneously I wanted to savour each page.
“Once upon a time there was a world all ocean. It fell wet across the whole world, nothing but water. The water was fat with life and with death. It had been this way always, though of course once it had been ice, a brittle ball of crisp blue-white with life squeezed into the tiniest corners and cracks, fidgeting its way to warmth for thousands and thousands and millions of years.”
Simple language, volatile ideas: readers needn’t study the prose, the concepts infuse the prose and subtly unsettle as we read. A world? Isn’t it our world? And “fell”? Isn’t that a curious choice—an active verb, enacted by an ocean, something many of us do not consider to be alive? But it contains life, at least…ooops, but also death. The time-frame is “always” but, wait, there’s a time before “always”, a time before “it” was called “ocean” and before “it” was “water” but, even then, “it” was “fidgeting.”
There are so many passages I want to share, so many characters I’m itching to discuss (a woman unexpectedly raising a child that’s not her own, an actress who agrees to play a terrifically problematic part to terrorize one of the wreck’s survivors, a younger brother who plays make-believe while navigating parental limitations, and more…see they’re ordinary, no flesh-eating).
Beneath all that, is another idea: are only others monstrous? what happens when we are the others? are we, then, monstrous? Here’s a passage that explores that literally, and exposes the concept of food chains and who devours whom (we prefer to think “who devours what”), but more interesting are the subtle nudges towards this idea, infused into the various storylines (the bits I don’t want to spoil):
“There wasn’t anyone in Port [Adelaide] who could fight a monster like that, a blood-drinking headless monster with a ferocious metal pole. Unless it was another monster. A bigger monster. A fiercer monster. A monster like that would come back to check the headless monster was still dead. And maybe kill it again if it hadn’t died properly the first time.”
Jane Rawson’s From the Wreck is the perfect herald for my reading in 2023, being both a personal recommendation of a book I’d’ve not discovered otherwise and a hard slap into a fresh perspective. It also fits with other reading about extinction and survival, in Derrick Jensen’s interviews in Listening to the Land (2002), the pieces collected by Amy Brady and Tajja Isen in The World As We Knew It (2022), and Edward O. Wilson’s Naturalist (1994). (More about recent reading in this vein on Wednesday. Edited to add that Wednesday’s link.)
Fitting, too, that my current short story collections are in the middle of the stack because the stories fit in among all the rest of my reading: Elaine Chiew’s The Heartsick Disapora (2020) which is a recommendation from Mel, Kim Bo-Young’s I’m Waiting for You and Other Stories (2021) which was a gift from Mr BIP, and Donna E. Smyth’s Among the Saints: Collected Stories (2003) which Naomi is convinced I will love (and if the first story—about a goose—is any indication, that’s true!).
Other novels in the stack include two others I’ve already read and one I have barely begun: T.L. Huchu’s The Library of the Dead (2021), the first in the Edinburgh Nights series—he’s previously published literary novels under Tendai Huchu.
I read Violet Browne’s This Is the House that Luke Built (2023) in one gulp. A tender and breath-taking love story, with a structure as layered and intricate as any long-time relationship. This passage nestles beautifully with the Jane Rawson novel, too.
“These men will be forgotten. Other men will take their place. They will grow from boys whose mothers will always mourn the moment they belong to another woman, into men who leave their wives and children on wharves as they cast off. Men who marvel at the pull of the water that takes them away form everything they own, bringing them to back-breaking labour and heart-wrenching freedom; who love, are loved, who bicker and argue; who hunt and are hunted; who live and die. It’s just the way life is.”
And I read J.D. Derbyshire’s auto-fiction Mercy Gene (2023) almost as quickly—just two evenings. As soon as I learned that they’d recast the voices they hear in their head as (among others) Peppermint Patty, Bob the Drag Queen, Margaret Cho, and Marcel the Shell…I knew we’d be friends. By the time they emerged as a character in a Miriam Toews novel, I was wholly hooked (it makes sense when they describe it). Their lists (particularly of triggers and glimmers) were an unexpected delight, reminding readers that pain management doesn’t always come in a little plastic cup, sometimes it’s dispensed between book covers too. “It’s hard to have any game in paper slippers,” they say…but J.D. Derbyshire’s got it.
What’s your first book of 2023? Are you deliberate about selecting the first, or does it simply…happen?
i wanted to echo Naomi’s thoughts and say how much I adore the cover of From the Wreck – and I completely intrigued, I want to read this book now! The cannibalism doesn’t put me off, although I understand its just a tiny part of the book anyway. I loved your reference to nibbling on thumprint cookies while George gnaws on fingers LOL
Thanks, Anne. There were a lot of baked goods from which to choose, so I appreciate that you caught my little joke! Hee hee
Other than some voice shifts to track, I think you’d find that the story brilliantly navigates the literary/thrillery border.
I just got the hold alert from the library, so I’ll be picking it up soon!
Oh a very good start to the year!
As for deliberating picking books to start the year, I’m usually already reading books that I started at the end of December so I just carry on 🙂
It’s very hard to establish a foolproof way to approach this idea of a “reading year” when there is consistently a blur for those of us with bunches of books to cater to various reading moods. Haha
Simply happens. Never deliberate. So this year’s was an excellent novel efsbrhg, fundamentally “manhood”or “masculinity”in the second half of the 20th century, Leaving Owl Creek.
I love how you’ve written about After the week, interrogating its language, and your overall description of its prose. I must read this one. But I have another of hers on my TBR which should come first.
I’ve got to investigate that post, I’ve been “monstrously” haha inconsistent with my online visiting. I feel like we’re sitting on the couch nibbling cookies through all these bookchats even so! (And of course I’m doing YWA this January because you got me hooked on her to start with, so we’re “doing that” together too! Hee hee)
Now that you mention it, I seem to remember having aimed for a different book of hers, but this was the one available in the library here (the SFF bookstore in Toronto wasn’t stocking her at all either, but of course they can’t house everything).
I love the cover of From the Wreck. And that quote about the ocean is fantastic. I think you’ve made a bold statement with your first book of the year.
I also love the quote you included from Browne’s book. I’m looking forward to that one. And Mercy Gene sounds like fun!
My first book of the year usually just happens. I’m usually already in the middle of one when the new year comes along. I never know if that one counts as the first, or if it’s the first book I read all the way through? In which case, it would be–like you–the one for Bill’s event!
Mostly I count by when I finished a book completely, but this year I felt as though the new year started when my “vacation” started, so I started counting from that (which makes sense only to me Heheh but, then, even though other people find reading stat’s interesting, ultimately they’re of most interest and value to the reader, I suppose).
I think you’d enjoy both books, and they’re both about loss in a way (but different kinds), so they make interesting reading companions. Looking forward to hearing what you think. I love that you can request newer books by ILL and I’m only a little bit jealous.
Thank you so much for the warm praise fir This Is the House That Luke Built!