A Year In Books
This year, much of my reading has been led by a desire for comfort, reassurance, and escape as, I suspect, is the case for many avid readers. I have been revisiting favourite authors such as Ursula Le Guin, John Scalzi, and Stanislaw Lem, as well as particular books like The Lord of the Rings, The Tao Te Ching, and The Odyssey. Much of this is well-trodden territory for me and the familiarity offers consolation as well as the usual pleasures of reading. Alongside these favourites, there have been many books new to me, or newly released from authors I already know well, that have particularly struck a chord over the last 12 months.
Piranesi - Susannah Clarke
“Is it disrespectful to the House to love some Statues more than others? I sometimes ask Myself this question. It is my belief that the House itself loves and blesses equally everything that it has created. Should I try to do the same? Yet, at the same time, I can see that it is in the nature of men to prefer one thing to another, to find one thing more meaningful than another.”
Piranesi echoes much of the melancholic majesty of Clarke’s earlier trilogy of works, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell, and captures some of the off-kilter world-building which that trilogy made its own. In Piranesi, we find the titular character as one of just two inhabitants of The House, a vast, and inexplicable structure populated by endless statues and consisting of vacant ballrooms, vestibules, hallways, and grand staircases as well as lower floors swamped by the onrushing sea. It is through Piranesi that we come to learn more about The House and, in doing so, the mysteries surrounding Piranesi himself. The puzzle box aspects of this book are very deftly counterpointed by the personal conflicts that arise and heart-rending truths that come to light.
With the trappings of myth and classical legends, and evoking Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, and Madeline Miller, Clarke gives us a work that is both fantastical in its feel and intimate in its concern. Of course the world of Piranesi is soon disturbed and the central mystery of just who Piranesi is begins to unfold. I found myself drawn along by the mysteries of this book, at the same time as I was entranced by the bewildering and disturbing location in which it all took place. At once a book of escape as well as confinement, Clarke uses the metaphor of the strange and rambling house as a way to open up the psychology of her protagonist. Whilst there is a thick thread of pain and longing running through this book it is also a story of endurance, hope, and longing. Perhaps it lacks the narrative bombast and awesome set-pieces of her other works, but Piranesi takes much greater pains to give us the intimate interior life of our main character and, although the adventure is rooted in place, it is no less thrilling for it.
This Is How You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone
“Even poetry, which breaks language into meaning - poetry ossifies, in time, the way trees do. What’s supple, whipping, soft and fresh grows hard, grows armour. If I could touch you, put my finger into your temple and sink you into me the way Garden does - perhaps then. But I would never.”
This Is How You Lose the Time War is a very deserving winner of Nebula, Locus, and Hugo awards although a work that sat on my kindle for some time before I took the plunge. It is an intense, riveting, and arresting book that veers between the stories of two entwined protagonists, Red and Blue. Told through their letters, messages, and missives to one another, and by the alternating voices of the two authors, the dialogue that unfolds is one of intense connection and gives a guttural, overwhelming depiction of love and attachment. Set across a science-fiction timeline and using tropes and devices drawn from all manner of sci-fi writing, this is a book that is made possible by its use of science-fiction but which transcend genre from the first page.
With a lyrical, soaring style and the push and pull of powerfully different voices, This Is How You Lose the Time War is a book that is as much a meditation on love and devotion as it is on violence and loss. The central conceit is used, twisted, rethought, and reinvented endlessly and the sheer imaginative force of the story is striking. I am unsure I’ve ever quite read a book that felt like this nor one which used a central, structural mechanism so well and with such flights of creativity. This is a short book, even qualifying as a novella really, but it is an emotional tsunami that just sparkles with the joys of language and barrels along with a dazzling vibrancy.
The Starless Sea - Erin Morgensteen
“These doors will sing. Silent siren songs for those who seek what lies behind them. For those who feel homesick for a place they’ve never been to. Those who seek even if they do not know what (or where) it is that they are seeking. Those who seek will find. Their doors have been waiting for them.”
Like Piranesi, The Starless Sea is a book about a fantastical place that is both a refuge and a source of dark secrets. With the classic trope of the everyman protagonist finding himself drawn into some ethereal and inexplicable realm, Erin Morgentsteen goes on to craft a book that is one of the most powerfully and vividly imaginative works I have read in a long time. With layer after layer of extraordinary, exuberant narrative and some of the most incredible and breathtaking narrative sweeps, The Starless Sea frequently left me putting the book to one side whilst I took a deep breath and spent a moment taking in what I had just read. There is a vertiginous parallel throughout the book between the descent into the book-stuffed labyrinth that occupies the central role in the book and the plunging fantasy of the narrative that leaves you as dazed and astounded as the protagonist, Zachary. As enchanting and alluring as it is disorienting and distressing, this is a book of symbols, mysteries, and story itself. Reaching deep into our collective sense of just what a fable really is, this shakes and pulls at expectation and assumption.
With a central mystery that seems to lay out a simple route to resolution, The Starless Sea delights in subverting and overturning whatever you think the next chapter might bring. With there being quite so much detail, and complexity to the book, this is likely one I will be reading and rereading in the future and I suspect I’m unlikely to run out of new things to discover as I do. Whilst I have yet to read The Night Circus, Morgensteen’s acclaimed previous work, I will certainly be looking to spend some more time with this dazzling and innovative writer.
The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - Natasha Pulley
“Ito wondered how many generations of knights it took to produce one who came with a guarantee that even a Tokyo rickshawman could spot good breeding and get out of its way.”
Another simple narrative that takes an unexpected turn, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street initially reads much like a standard historical mystery - albeit one that is particularly well told and tightly written. Soon it becomes apparent that this is not the case at all and, as we meet our central cast of characters, things become fantastical and whimsical whilst also exploring a line of melancholy that is delicately and sympathetically handled. Within just a few lines of his introduction, I was hooked by the mysterious figure of Keita Mori, and would have followed him almost anywhere. With vivid depictions of Victorian London and Edo era Japan, Natasha Pulley paints. a beautiful backdrop for this inventive and thrilling story. Just as Clarke and Morgensteen above are playing with notions of space to explore the reaches of their characters interiors, Pulley is toying with notions of time. We are much accustomed to time-travel narratives, and even those that mess with the chronology of the story, but in Keita More we have a more complex, more human relationship with the vagaries of time. Pulley uses this device both to open up Keita and to drive the narrative forward, and neither ever feels as if it is being done at the expense of the other.
I was left with the sense of a book that explores both the longing and pain of separation from home, as well as occasions of estrangement and alienation from those around us. With enough pace and excitement to bring everything to a pulse-racing conclusion, this is a book that elevates this kind of fantastical thriller. So much did I enjoy this that I went on to read the sequel, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow, as well its ‘sister’ novel, The Bedlam Stacks and I loved them both.
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick
“Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.”
With so much of a focus on non-fiction in my working life, most of my own reading is fiction but there are exceptions and James Gleick’s exceptional biography of Richard Feynman was one of those exceptions this year. Having long been fascinated by Richard Feynman, and having not spent much time on physics since my university days, I was enthralled by Gleick’s account of the life of Nobel laureate, bongo-playing, safe-cracking, theoretical physicist Richard Feynman.
Whilst I would be reluctant to claim that I understood all of the science, Gleick does a superb job to focus on the ideas at the heart of Feynman’s work and makes this eminently accessible. Aware that Feynman is as much known for who he was as what he taught, there is also a fair degree of focus on the life and times of Feynman. Exploring his upbringing in New Jersey, his work on the atomic bomb and his engagement with the luminaries of 20th century physics, Genius provides a deep and resonant account of an incredible mind living through and incredible time.