Reader’s Report 2024

December 31, 2024January 4, 2025 by Andrew | Leave a comment

These books either consumed me or captured my curiosity in some way in 2024:

* Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep
* Benjamin Moser, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters
* Patrick Grant, Less: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish
* Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
* Barbra Streisand, My Name Is Barbra
* Fiona Erskine, Phosphate Rocks
* Samantha Harvey, Orbital
* Joel Lane, Where Furnaces Burn

The Safekeep was my novel of the year. I found it gripping. Plot, setting, character, little details, big picture, unexpectedly relevant in a very important way. I also liked that I knew nothing about it. It gave surprises – so I’ll say no more.

The Upside-Down World: Meetings With the Dutch Masters is a thoughtful and reflective set of essays about painters and paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, interwoven with the author’s personal experiences and insights. I found it beguiling and took my time reading it. In this vein I also enjoyed Thunderclap by Laura Cumming. We made a trip to Amsterdam this year and maybe I’m impressionable enough to let that guide my reading. Maybe more field trips are required.

Less by Patrick Grant is a serious and well-informed investigation of what we buy and what we throw away. It has much to say about the pseudoscience of economics and the drug of consumerism, and it made me want to shop better and shop less and learn how to sew and repair. He’s also my author crush of the year.

I really enjoyed how both Orbital and Phosphate Rocks were doing something different with the form of the novel – in different ways each felt like hybrid forms of creative nonfiction, and though I read both of them early in the year they stuck with me. Lots of good science to digest in accessible ways, plus important political dimensions. I also enjoyed Fiona Erskine’s procedural thriller Losing Control too.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is a graphic novel that I got lost in. I love good hatching, and I love monsters. I have to read Book 2. And wow – what a story for author Emil Ferris too. After all the delicately observed nature writing and haiku that I’ve read in recent years, where I perhaps got distracted ‘finding beauty in the everyday’, it reminded me also to look out for the monstrous and the grotesque and relish them for what they are.

Keeping that strand of the ugly alive, Where Furnaces Burn just pipped in during the last week of the year. Like a cult literary X Files, it’s the Black Country weird noir that was written just for me. I also appreciated its structure as connected stories that are linked in some deeper way. I can’t believe it’s taken so long for me to read Joel Lane – look forward to reading more next year. All credit to Influx for bringing him back into print.

I listened to My Name Is Barbra, asides and all, and it was a feat. I only grew impatient when the namedropping of world leaders grew too too, and then when she started day trading tech stock so she and Donna Karan could rent yachts. Otherwise it’s a remarkable insight into the lives and works of a multitalented genius – singer, actor, director, producer and especially, I discovered, an editor in her capacity to feel her way into the bigger vision for a story as well as pay attention to all those important details.

(Btw are we *still* having the conversation about audio counting as reading? Everyone who naysays sounds like the most mimsy of commenters on the Guardian books page.)

There were other books I liked, but not so many that I really loved. I love to love a good book, so the absence of a few more books to be passionate about perhaps made 2024 slightly disappointing as a year of reading. So I just chose eight this year. I mean, we can add twenty pictures to an instagram carousel now, but it doesn’t mean we have to.

I also read a number of this year’s hyped and widely reviewed novels. They had their moments, but most felt predictable. I’m still waiting to read someone’s book about sisters and mothers, which I suspect could really strike home; instead I grew just a bit bored (again) of ramblings on the mating habits of heterosexuals, and was more interested in what became of the whippet, who turned out just to be a plot point. No! That’s not how we treat whippets – or draw them either: the one on the cover looks more like a greyhound or a lurcher. Then after a very good start I grew just a little bored of another writer’s furtive perving to the gallery of heterosexuals, and wondered if writing about lesbians might in fact be that writer’s forte, as that part was really well done and enjoyed a degree of inquiry and empathy. I found another blockbuster state of the nation novel bloated and cartoony. I did not enjoy Jane Austen’s Emma – I just wasn’t in the mood for it and will come back another time, or maybe it really is reactionary twaddle.

It has to be said that disliking books does give me a lot of pleasure. I try to be careful where I do it, and it’s always for books that are published and could have been edited or were just overmarketed. Manuscripts: you are safe. You still show promise and prospects. Perhaps there is no greater and more exciting reading than a manuscript that’s yet to be pinned down.

I reread The Grapes of Wrath for book club, and wondered where are the books writing about today so urgently. I am sure they’re there. Maybe they need to come to me, or I need to look harder.

Perhaps related to that, for some reason I didn’t read much in translation this year. I did resume Duolingo and am on day 38 of a streak.

I continue to do well with Twickenham library. I began reading most of the above titles as library loans, and also borrowed and enjoyed and appreciated many more: James, Stoneyard Devotional, Creation Lake. I read all of the Booker shortlist for the first time – thanks to the library.

Library books have loan periods, and I have developed a practice of skimming. At a certain point, if a book’s not biting I skim to the end. I might, for example, read the first lines of every paragraph or every page, and go further if something grabs me. Sometimes that’s enough, isn’t it?

I also buy books, especially to support indie bookshops and publishers. I think it’s important to support the indies, though some could be more helpful in supporting the customer, e.g., when the book you ordered six weeks ago finally comes in. Just saying.

I thought this Bookseller article rating editors on the basis of the prizes and bestsellers accrued by authors was a sign of much that’s clumsy and disappointing about the industry. Why measure the immeasurable?

I see continuing evidence of checklist publishing. ‘We’ve already got our gay book for the year’ – insert other identity categories to understand something of how both publishers and reviewers often operate. Publishers and reviewers need to do better. So could book influencers, who at times sound like deranged AI. I’ve come to realise a lot of BookTok and Bookstagram people don’t actually read the books. I’m so naive.

However, there are many good reviewers whose judgement I trust in both traditional outlets and especially social media. I’m not always sure about the ecosystem of Substack, but I read plenty of good criticism there, and I value the judgement of a lot of people on Instagram.

Many of the books that interest me most are published by indies, of course. I’m also thinking self-publishing looks increasingly attractive relative to the way some books get published without trace by the big houses.

I was lucky enough to see my goddess Robin Wall Kimmerer not once but twice. The Serviceberry is out now too. And though I haven’t finished the books yet one of the other great events this year was attending a British Library talk for Some Men In London edited by Peter Parker – it was sponsored by Gay’s The Word, and it was good to be in such a large space with my people, a space where we can enjoy different gay books plural every day of the year.

I was also pleased to attend good events for Ian Russell-Hsieh’s I’m New Here and Edward Carey’s new novel Edith Holler, both at Waterstones Trafalgar Square, where the staff seemed clued in and friendly.

I am most glad that Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft finally has a UK publisher and is available easily for British readers. It’s the craft book I recommend most.

Next year I’m going to try to remember to keep a record of the most interesting short stories and essays that I read, because they are so often the best writing. A few from this end of 2024:

* What Alice Munro Knew by Giles Harvey
* Between the Shadow and the Soul by Lauren Groff
* The Kidnapping I Can’t Escape by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
* For Isabella Rossellini, Acting Goes Beyond Words by Michael Schulman – because Isabella Rossellini
* Stories I Can’t Tell Anyone I Know by Bhanu Kapil in Best British Stories 2024

Telly provided some good fiction: Somebody Somewhere, Ripley, Girls, Shōgun, Interview With the Vampire, Slow Horses, English Teacher, probably others I should have noted down. Drag Race continues to be my soap opera. I can’t remember all the films I saw but right now La Chimera and Dune 2 stood out.

Books that are coming in 2025 that I am excited about:

* Jo McMillan’s The Accidental Immigrants – a most timely tale for right now (23 January)
* Eleanor Anstruther’s In Judgement of Others – finally coming in print, this darkly comic novel outdoes other treatments of its subject matter with wit and depth (28 January)
* Fiona Melrose’s Even Beyond Death – epic and funny and heartbreaking (6 February)
* Essie Fox’s Dangerous– an historical thriller about Byron in Venice (24 April)
* Antonia Hodgson’s The Raven Scholar– the first in a most promising fantasy series from the historical novelist (24 April)

The above are all pals. I’ve read the first three and can vouch for them enthusiastically, and I’m looking forward very much to the other two. I’m also very keen to read the new novel The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong and Is A River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane, both coming in May.

I go back to the fact that my favourite book of 2024 was written by someone I’d never heard of. At a time when so much is marketed and prepared for us, I feel that process of discovery has become a rare thing. More curiosity and imagination in 2025, please.

(Books mentioned here are also linked at Bookshop.org: Andrew Wille’s Reader’s Report 2024.)

Reader’s Report 2023

December 31, 2023December 11, 2024 by Andrew | 1 Comment

As I looked back on the books I read in 2023, I was given pause to think about how I read – in new ways and old.

First, I want to mention strategies I adopted in 2023 that made reading more fun. For example, I cast a drag queen as the central character of an Iris Murdoch novel, and that suddenly made a book about the strained mores of postwar poshos much more interesting.

Of perhaps greater consequence, I used the library probably more than I have since I was a kid. In recent years (decades), I’ve bought far too many books I don’t read and then I feel guilty about them lying in stacks all over the place unread – and that doesn’t include invisible stacks on my Kindle. The library is less risky in that way. I reserve a book at the library, and then wait a week or a month or two, and then it comes and I have three weeks to read it, and that creates a return deadline that focuses my mind. This pattern probably made me read more in 2023 than in many recent years.

Looking back over those books I did complete, though, I wonder if my reading was maybe a bit tame and I missed some of the indie treats and works in translation that I often enjoy most. No writer *really* captured me this year as, eg, Annie Ernaux or Lucia Berlin or Robin Wall Kimmerer have in years before. Could have been me! Perhaps that fixed loan period at the library focused my mind on finishing those sorts of bestsellery or reading groupy books that other readers request and are waiting to read. But even so: there were a lot of books I enjoyed there.

I also did a lot of sampling and skimming this year. If the opening wasn’t clicking, I’d scan the body of the book and skip to the end. Sometimes that’s enough, and library books make wider skimming possible. Skimming: ah! That’s a reading practice to embrace.

Breaking my wrist and having to do exercises three times a day also created extra reading time. (Exercises that allow reading: my kinda.) While the fracture was mending, I found it easier to read hardbacks (the library again) or my Kindle. Paperbacks with tight spines are more work to prop open.

So: I actually read (completed) far more books this year.

Though too: reading isn’t about productivity, is it? So much of my most significant reading is rereading.

I am never sure about the idea of ‘best’ books – best is so subjective, and often boring – so, most recent first, these are the books that probably left most of an impression on me in 2023:

* Paul Murray, The Bee Sting
* Naomi Klein, Doppelganger
* Zadie Smith, The Fraud
* Daniel Mason, North Woods
* Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds
* Tahir Hamut Izgil, Waiting to Be Arrested at Night
* Rachel Pollack, A Walk Through the Forest of Souls: A Tarot Journey to Spiritual Awakening
* Matthew Evans, Soil: The Incredible Story of What Keeps the Earth, and Us, Healthy
* Maia Kobabe, Gender Queer
* Helen Macdonald, H Is For Hawk

I haven’t finished The Bee Sting yet, but on the basis of the first 400 pages, which have consumed me over the last couple of days, its immersive storytelling is a winner.

The standout is probably North Woods. Formally clever, imaginative, poignant. Actually, maybe something did capture my attention this year. I would like to reread it.

Special mention also to Kent Haruf, whose entire canon I completed/reread this year. I think it’s very good to reread your favourites, and he is one of the great prose stylists. Britney Spears’s The Woman in Me surprised me – a lot is missing there, but too I realised, duh, it’s one of those awful child star stories. Other notables were Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree, Ada Calhoun’s Also A Poet, M. John Harrison’s Wish I Was Here, Rebecca Smith’s Rural, Justin Torres’s Blackouts, and Catherine Lacey’s The Biography of X (the last two have a similar feel, and I note both were published by Granta in the UK). Yellowface was fun, and one of the more astute descriptions of publishing I’ve come across in fiction.

I should also mention this year’s ongoing read of Ovid’s Metamorphoses aka Long Ovid. Next we are making a start on the Bible. Our original plans were to read the Old Testament in 2024 and the New in 2025, but we’ve decided simply to finish Genesis in January, then take it from there. I was exposed to the Bible a lot as a child, but I’ve spent less time there as an adult, and I’m curious to see what I remember, and also to think about literary as well as broader influences.

I’m currently listening to My Name Is Barbra – wow, surely the audiobook of the year, all 48 hours of it. Apparently the audio has lots of asides that aren’t in the print/ebook edition. Barbra Streisand is a wonderful narrator.

A special mention also for Bobbie Louise Hawkins, whose story The Child was picked by George Saunders for his Story Club.

Elsewhere, I encountered a LOT of namedropping. Some of it was amusing, some of it was embarrassing, most of it was crammed into three literary memoirs. Writers! As my husband said of one: this reads like a bunch of Instagram captions.

Also elsewhere: some fantastic manuscripts. It’s a real honour to be trusted to read work in progress, and sometimes this raw and unpolished writing enjoys an energy that perhaps only unfinished work can achieve. Hmmm, something for the editor to ponder. I hope these books get finished and find homes with publishers, or get out into the world in some way.

In watching, off the top of my head I enjoyed: The Last of Us, Happy Valley, The Diplomat, Fisk, Wheel of Time, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Reservation Dogs, Slow Horses, and a fantastic series of documentaries on wild dogs. And I’m glad Succession is over. It was too glib for my taste, and reminded me that good writing is about more than lots of shiny surfaces and showing off on social media.

Perhaps the most memorable viewing was Timothy Snyder’s 24-part Yale University lecture series on YouTube on the making of modern Ukraine – which is so much more than that too: a specific take on empire and colonialism and domination and take, relevant in many contexts throughout the world. A camera in a lecture theatre with a brilliant mind communicating brilliantly: sometimes that’s all we need. The words.

Also on YouTube I have recently enjoyed the comedy of Matteo Lane and Bob the Drag Queen. Again, a camera and a sharp mind being quick and very funny: bare brick walls, and words. (Note for sheltered minds: some of these words are also very, um, bawdy.)

Didn’t see a lot of art, but the Mat Collishaw exhibition Petrichor at Kew Gardens is out of this world.

My last post of 2023, on the last day of the year. Look for me on Substack in 2024. And support your local library! I’ve even started recommending books for our library to add to its collection.

And before I go, another mention for my new Zoom masterclasses on writing – to paraphrase one of my musical icons, we start at the very beginning, with Beginnings, on 8 January.

Happy New Year! For some reason, I’m liking the numbers 2 0 2 4. Here’s a pic taken outside Birmingham’s fantastic new library.

Books of the Year 2022

December 31, 2022December 11, 2024 by Andrew | Leave a comment

I can’t pick a single book of the year, so I’m choosing five that really left a impression on me in 2022:

* Annie Ernaux, The Years (translated by Alison L. Strayer)
* Julia May Jonas, Vladimir
* Annie Ernaux, Getting Lost (translated by Alison L. Strayer)
* Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard
* Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus

A few patterns emerge: campus novels; middle-aged women having affairs with younger Russian studs; natural history and geology; the house of Fitzcarraldo; the truth of closely observed details – of crazy obsessions, of everyday life in the suburbs, of wild birds in remote valleys I’ll never visit.

If I were to round out to ten books of the year, I’d also include:

* Lauren Groff, Matrix
* Ocean Vuong, Time Is A Mother
* Robert Macfarlane, Underland (narrated by Roy McMillan)
* Katia Oskamp, Marzahn, Mon Amour (translated by Jo Heinrich)* Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead

Other notable reads in nonfiction: Laura Cumming’s On Chapel Sands, Tim Flannery’s Europe, Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads, Helen Gordon’s Notes From Deep Time, Cat Jarman’s River Kings, Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks and The Old Ways (both narrated by Roy McMillan), Francis Rose’s Wild Flower Key, Henry Shukman’s One Blade of Grass, Stanley Tucci’s Taste, Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, and Boel Westin’s Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words (translated by Silvester Mazzarella).

And among works of fiction: Junior Burke’s Buddha Was A Cowboy, Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City (translated by Anton Hur), Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race, Sarah Tolmie’s All The Horses of Iceland, and Camila Sosa Villada’s The Queens of Sarmiento Park (translated by Kit Maude).

Special mention goes to short stories by Mavis Gallant – this is an ongoing project in reading, not rushed as I’m taking her advice: ‘Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.’ I imagine a volume or two of hers might appear among books completed next year, or the year after that. Another excellent story collection I’m working through is Florida by Lauren Groff.

Maybe I’ll keep another list for specific short stories and poems next year – alongside nonfiction, short fiction and poetry certainly outclassed novels for me this year. So much product from the spoon-feeding cookie-cutter hard-sell school of creative writing is either not to my taste or just plain boring. Don’t waste my time with high-concept formulas and cheap reveals: gimme voice, gimme character, gimme setting, gimme mood.

Telly is a bit of a blur, and a lot of tv reviewers need to find new jobs. Off the top of my head, a highlight was the Star Wars prequel Andor. What a wonderful slow burn that series achieved. Again, gimme character and setting and mood – gimme depth – and while we’re at it gimme wardrobe too: so much of that mood in Andor was achieved through the costumes. And after so frequently looking up details for its UK broadcast, I’m very much looking forward to the second season of Reservation Dogs. Oh – and incoming, incoming: last night we very much enjoyed the movie of White Noise – what a good adaptation.

I also enjoyed the Masterclasses of Amy Tan and Joy Harjo. I guess learning can be a form of entertainment too. Another profoundly good book-adjacent experience was the Introduction to UK Natural History that I took with the Natural History Museum. How exciting that natural history is going to become a GCSE subject on the national curriculum – let’s hope it will be available in all schools.

Another fascinating foray: the Druidcraft Tarot. I’m not sure I’d have chosen this deck myself, as these are not cultural associations I was particularly drawn to, but it was given as a gift, and it’s turned out to be a remarkably powerful and rich resource – and now I am making sense of those cultural associations too. There is perhaps something in that idea that special tarot decks are given to us, rather than purchased. I also discovered Jessica Dore’s Tarot for Change this year – highly recommended.

I’ve enjoyed a lot of Substacks this year too – though the cheerleading in some of the writing ones gets a bit wordy and cheerless for me (are they paid by the word?!). But ones worth following include: Austin Kleon, Chuck Palahniuk’s Plot Spoiler, Lincoln Michel’s Counter Craft, and Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press. In podcasts I enjoyed various interviews with Tim Ferriss, as well as anything with Kara Swisher, the sort of feisty, well-informed advocate anyone wants on their side in a culture war.

Digital subscriptions to the New York Times and the New Yorker are perhaps my greatest indulgences, but they feel well worth it – in particular the NYT’s coverage of the war in Ukraine shows the value of real reportage. I’m tired of British newspapers and the space they devote to property and panic-mongering, though maybe they are just reflecting their readers. The Cooking newsletter from the New York Times is perhaps the greatest joy in my inbox: great recipes, but also a lot of first-rate cultural writing.

Also, as a final note: praise be for libraries! They saved me a lot of money this year, and saved my bookshelves (and floors) a lot of space, and I also listened to numerous audiobooks on library apps. And in visiting the library in person I made a few discoveries too. I end the year giving thanks for libraries and librarians.

Books of the Year 2021

December 31, 2021December 11, 2024 by Andrew | 2 Comments

Some old, some new, some rereads – my books of the year, roughly in order of reading:

Raven Leilani, Luster
Isabel Wilkerson, Caste
Natalie Goldberg, Let The Whole Thundering World Come Home
Nora Krug, Heimat
Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life
M. John Harrison, The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again
Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman
Louise Erdrich, The Sentence
Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These
Frances Wilson, Burning Man: The Ascent of DH Lawrence
Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave
Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
Thomas Savage, The Power of the Dog

There were other good reads – Ash Before Oak, Three Simple Lines, Gathering Moss, Everybody, Just Kids, Miss Iceland, Red Love, Dragman, Second Place, The Weekend, The Promise, Oh William!, The Luminous Solution, Moonstone. Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up The Ghost was an excellent reread for book club. And this morning I finished The Fifth Season – what an introduction to the imagination of NK Jemisin, but maybe I need to let it linger a bit. If I’d finished listening to English Pastoral I suspect that might have made my selection too.

But the titles in the list above are the ones that really cast the greatest spell over me: drew my curiosity, got under my skin, fired me up, touched my heart, or equipped me with strength during what turned out to be a difficult year.

My standout read of 2021 is probably The Sentence. Before I read that, it would have been The Night Watchman. Clearly the year of Louise Erdrich. I love her. I just love her. Funny. I love that she is so funny. I love her characters: Tookie, Patrice. I love her political engagement. A couple of readers thought parts felt rushed, but to me that very rush of energy – the anticipation of what was coming – provided much of the pleasure of this book about books and book people set in a bookshop.

Enjoy this YouTube of Louise Erdrich’s launch interview held at Birchbark Books, which also provides the setting for The Sentence. ‘Sentences that bring people solace and comfort’ – just heard her utter those words again. And the thing about books is that you ‘can be alone but in the most splendid company’: another gem. UK readers: The Sentence comes in January.

If I had to ration myself, the other books I’d press on readers would be The Power of the Dog (clever western! fantastic prose! such pacing! such detours! see the movie too!), The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again (its mood! its mystery! its sense of place!) and Luster (the voice! the sheer bravura! the sheer lustrousness!). And Small Things Like These for an exquisite quickie, and Empire of Pain to fill you with fury and make you want to change the world.

There were a number of books I was looking forward to but their moment hasn’t come yet. The TBR piles teeter and totter.

And, as usual, hype (publisher/reviewer/social media) mars the experience of reading. Each to their own, etc., but! You *really* didn’t mind all those plot holes? You really fell for all that high-concept gush? I got the appeal of The Appeal – its format and its humorously observed characters were fun to start. But the closer you look, the less it makes sense. Surely those characters would be sending texts rather than emails, wouldn’t they? And don’t those insertions of additional evidence to the case seem a bit convenient? And those law students really hadn’t encountered this unusual legal case in the press: come on!? The foundation of the story’s drive starts to wobble, and isn’t this all getting a bit grating and silly now … But what do I know? It was book of the year here, a chain selection there, some notable blurbs. Are we really so easily pleased? Though I might not have cared so much if I’d not been led to expect something better. The hype: it was a problem.

And then Crawdads: insert horror emoji. It just didn’t add up for me – not least, one narrative prop is a poetry anthology that contains poems written maybe thirty years later than that book would have been published. A small detail – it’s not so much that it’s factually incorrect (I’m not that much of a purist), but it’s tonally off, and felt sloppy. At that point I started looking for flaws, and found many in the plot and the characterisation. I was no longer suspending disbelief that that child could have raised herself like that.

And then there was Kate Clanchy’s memoir, which in some ways is the book of the year in terms of how it generated, for me, so much thought about what constitutes good writing and good publishing. We can do better.

I sometimes feel bad about expressing criticisms of books. I mean, someone went to all that trouble, and authors can be sensitive souls (don’t tag them!). But I am a booklover, goddesssdammit, and making books better is part of my job. I task the writers I work with on ways to improve their manuscripts, but certain published books – and sometimes, it seems, whole genres – seem so mediocre that I wonder why I bother. Just rustle up a high concept that will satisfy the marketing department, then flesh out a synopsis (how I’ve come to dislike that word ‘twisty’), and hone a first page that will grab the attention of an agent or a judge. That sounds cynical, but so is publishing.

I really enjoyed Parul Seghal’s The Case Against The Trauma Plot in the New Yorker this week (27 December), not least as she seems to share my taste: Reservation Dogs was one of my favourite shows of the year. I like how this article identifies how trauma can provide too easy or tidy an explanation within stories:

The trauma plot flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom, and, in turn, instructs and insists upon its moral authority. The solace of its simplicity comes at no little cost. It disregards what we know and asks that we forget it, too—forget about the pleasures of not knowing, about the unscripted dimensions of suffering, about the odd angularities of personality.

Hanging on ‘twisty’ reveals that milked shocked responses to characters’ suffering, the trauma plot was what spoiled It’s A Sin for me on tv too (I’m clearly going against some grains of popular taste this year). Ooo, and trauma porn reminds me that the follow-up to A Little Life is out soon. I promise to read with an open mind, honest! But I retain the right to judge harshly.

Many of my favourite books this year did in some way or other go to the heart of suffering and injustice, but they did so without implausible contrivances and mawkish stitching. They worked their magic with humour, with affection, with complexity, with an awareness of mystery, with a sense of negative capability. They usually had well-crafted sentences and paragraphs, and a voice. A personality.

Though I carefully observe professional boundaries, I am giving a special mention to Jo McMillan’s The Happiness Factory, coming in January 2022. I read earlier drafts, and perhaps am biased, but it gives me great joy to see this very funny and bittersweet novel make its way to publication, and from the esteemed indie Bluemoose too. The premise is fantastic: an estranged daughter uses an inheritance to buy a sex-aid factory in China just as the country is opening up to the global economy. And the concept is matched with a real voice and plenty of heart.

I vowed to blog every month this year – and I did that, and even managed the first of the month most of the time. This one: the end of the month, an hour to go. Because. Sometimes these things become chores, and sometimes we need to move along a bit. I am going to blog this coming year only if/when I have something that requires the longer form.

Blogging, is it over?! Should I be doing a Substack? Newsletters are an exciting format, though I find I don’t actually have the time to read various of the ones I’ve subscribed to, and some are quite mansplainy. Austin Kleon’s is one I always find time for.

But what do I have to add? And everyone’s a teacher now, everyone has an offering. Masterclass does it so well. I loved the David Sedaris one recently, and we’re working through Shonda Rhimes currently – both are funny, both are practical.

One thing I’ve noticed during the pandemic is that there are lots of people with lots of things to say, but sometimes there’s a value in quiet. I’ve muted and unfollowed a lot of people this year. Maybe I’m just a bit jaded at the end of 2021. ‘Just sitting: what a relief in this busy world’ – something Natalie Goldberg said as she led us in meditation during a virtual retreat earlier this month.

The solace of sitting and sentences. Maybe that’s something to aim for in 2022. And tulips! And crocuses, and daffodils. More to plant this weekend while I continue listening to English Pastoral. Priorities.

You can also find me at my new Andrew Wille Writing Studio account on Instagram, which seems an easier place for engaged interactions. More there, and Happy New Year! I’ll leave you with this beautiful poem from Joy Harjo’s Crazy Brave: Eagle Poem.

Books of 2020

December 31, 2020December 11, 2024 by Andrew | 3 Comments

My stand-out read of 2020 was a brilliant work of nonfiction. If you have not read it, you have to:

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who is graceful, attentive, urgent, and supremely intelligent in her exploration of our relationships with the world of plants. The best sort of nature writing, and with messages we can’t ignore: about interdependence, consumption, reciprocity. I highly recommend the audiobook – the author is wise and good-humoured company, and her prose has a gorgeous tone. Also look out for podcasts with Robin Wall Kimmerer, such as this one from Emergence Magazine with Robert Macfarlane.

My other essential reads of 2020:

The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes fired me up! A book about land, and who owns it, and who gets to share in its riches. Another essential read, particularly as Brexit brings into question any number of power relationships for the English. Resist, my friends, resist!
Letters from Tove, by Tove Jansson. My hero! Edited by Boel Westin and Helen Svensson, and seamlessly translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death. It consumed me, I consumed it, and I shall be rereading. (There’s no audiobook yet … that would be perfect.)
Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart. My novel of the year. I KNEW it would win the Booker Prize! There is outright literary justice.
Surrender, by Joanna Pocock. Again, nonfiction exploring our relationship with the land, though here we are in the American West. I loved her curious mind.
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. I first read when I was thirteen, and it made a powerful impression on my emerging political consciousness. It came as a timely reread at the start of a year in which economic inequality and ecological degradation would be even more sharply obvious. CAN WE EVER LEARN?
The Beautiful Room Is Empty, by Edmund White. Why hadn’t I read this before? Because it was waiting for the hot summer of 2020, I guess.
Stasiland, by Anna Funder. Because East Germany. Very excited that we are getting Deutschland 89 in February.
Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up In America, by Natalie Goldberg. I took her online Writing Down the Bones course again this year. What a treat, what a grounding dose of sanity, what an honour to share the freshly composed writes of complete strangers. Natalie’s memoir is exceptional in showing how the practice of writing can wake us up to the unexceptional magic around us. I also read The Great Spring and The True Secret of Writing. More Natalie to come in 2021.
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Because I love craft books, I love St Ursula, and I LOVE the essential idea here and how it challenges conflict-driven theories of the world.
The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo. This novella is a real feat of imagination.
My Cat Yugoslavia, by Pajtim Statovci, in a translation from the Finnish by David Hackston that really captures a gorgeous tone in the telling. Because I love love LOVE it when works of literary fiction introduce the magical in not so everyday ways too. I’m reading his Crossings at the moment, and LOVING it.

Andrew Wille Writing Studio

creative writing & book development

Category Archives: Books

Reader’s Report 2024

Reader’s Report 2023

Books of the Year 2022

Books of the Year 2021

Books of 2020