Fall 2024 Book Report 📚

All ten books I read in the last 2 months, or: Whoops, this exceeded the email limit.

In the last two months, what we might call “early fall,” I’ve been writing and thinking a lot about getting offline (see: Exercises on Paying Attention or We Exist in Real Life).¹ However, one of the highlights of my early fall was the wedding of a friend I met on the Internet, attended by several friends I’ve talked to online for over a decade but had not met in person until now. When it’s good, the Internet is so good! I take it all back - stay online and talk to people in niche communities about shared interests. Like Substack, a little bit? I hope so! 

Lest this turn into a diary entry, here is a list of the books I read in September and October. There’s a wide variance in quality here. Rather than chronological or thematic order, I have arranged all nine books into: “Huh???, “Huh.” and “Huh!!!” categories. I think it will be clear what this means. 

Huh???

The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels - Janice Hallett

In the midst of a chaotic 24 hours in which my beloved dog needed some unexpected medical treatment (she’s fine now!), I picked up this thriller from the library to provide a full mental distraction while waiting for updates. 

This book is a mystery told via emails, documents, and text messages — a format I’m deeply drawn to. I love books that constrain the structure of a the story, get a little weird with it! Unfortunately, this book took that format to its logical limit, broke the limits, and continued running at full speed. Characters exchange unnatural, stilted text messages that do not resemble natural human communication. People happen to document experiences so conveniently it starts to feel a little insulting. 

The basic premise: a true crime writer investigates the unresolved case of a cult and a missing baby. 

This plot ultimately resolves by using (minor spoilers to follow, but please don’t read this book) not one but two unrelated journalists stumbling on the crime scene and writing down an account for our main character to find later, and not one but two unrelated cover-up stories coinciding with each other. That’s four coincidences! This book said: let’s reject Occam’s Razor and make the writing clunky while doing it. Thrillers don’t need to feel “real” to be enjoyable, but with too many coincidences and characters coming back from the dead, it does start to feel like you’re inside the author’s Pepe Sylvia diagram. 

This book inspired me to write Mystery Novels For Snobs, also known as ‘mystery novels that are actually good.’ After writing that, and really concentrating on what I think makes a good mystery — believable characters, premise, or a good conceit — I then proceeded to read two more bad mystery/thrillers. There’s no one to blame but myself.

Conclave - Robert Harris

I read this for my book club. The movie, starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, and many other Guys comes out this week. My review of this book is: it will make a better movie. It has high stakes taken extremely seriously, big campy melodrama powered by gossip and in-fighting, and most importantly, people wearing fun outfits in cool locations. Cinematic! 

The novel opens with the Pope unexpectedly passing away. The recently deceased pope bears more than a little similarity to the current pope, Pope Francis (both reformers and ascetics, controversial with traditionalists). The novel follows the process of electing the next Pope. I could summarize the themes, but the novel has an absolute banger of a summary on its cover: “The power of God. The ambition of men.” 

A rapid-fire list of my thoughts on this book, presented in bullet point to save myself the effort of constructing an argument:

• The cover: there’s a certain type of Guy (boomer dad) who goes crazy for that thin, serif font and foreboding red colour scheme! This observation comes from a place of understanding — a vast array of books with thick, blocky fonts in primary colours calling to the millennial heart. 

• Dan Brown but with a whiff of research 

• The politics of this book are deeply baffling but require spoiling the ending to unpack

• So much of this book is men walking quickly in long flowing garments — again, great stuff for a movie adaptation

• Every plot resolution is at an absolute 10 and the only subtlety in this book is in how it depicts the protagonist's faith, doubt, and celibacy, all very internal struggles 

The Sleepwalkers - Scarlett Thomas 

I’m losing steam writing about bad mystery novels. The Sleepwalkers was simultaneously a little hysterical (in the extreme sense, not comedic) and forgettable. It had too much going on to deliver any bite on its themes or plot. 

It is also told in collected fragments, including two letters that do not read as something someone had written — are we to believe someone is sitting down (under duress!) and writing out full dialogue from memory? Letter writers paraphrase! But that’s a minor quibble I am willing to put aside. 

The plot: a woman and her husband are on their honeymoon in a boutique guest house on a Greek island as a storm rolls in. Drama and coincidence, both in their acrimonious past and their increasingly tense present, follow. 

At a certain point, it’s reasonable to ascribe some of these bad reviews to user error — I’m picky about mystery novels and should read them more sparingly. 

Huh.

Vera Bushwack - Sig Burwash

It’s safe to judge graphic novels by their cover. My local library branch has a small but well-stocked comic/graphic novel section. During the same period in which I was scrambling for a thriller to keep my brain occupied, I went to that section and chose Vera Bushwack based on the cover alone. 

It’s a fairly simple little story, plot-wise: Drew has moved to remote Nova Scotia with plans to build their own house in the woods. Along the way, we learn a bit of back story, watch them start the process of building a remote refuge, their interactions with the locals, and their delight as they pick up a chainsaw and transform poetically and literally on the page into their alter ego, Vera Bushwack, a hero with a chainsaw in assless chaps. It’s a quick read that edges up to some heavier themes of gender, violence, and safety while spending most of its pages on beautiful landscapes and power tools. It has a clearly drawn (pun intended) message about the safety and peace of creating refuge on your own terms.

I highly recommend it. It has lushly filled pages and incredibly expressive character art, making it a lovely way to spend a few hours. If you’re a dog person, there’s a great dog in this. The publisher, Drawn & Quarterly, has a sample of the pages. 

Martyr! - Kaveh Akbar

I wrote at some length about Martyr! here. It’s the story of Cyrus Shams’, a queer, Persian-American, recovering addict and general well-meaning layabout’s search for meaning. Perhaps more specifically, a meaningful death. This is not a metaphor or oblique: he states this goal many times. It’s an especially poignant search given that we quickly learn of his mother’s meaningless death in an airplane shot out of the sky by the USA (the very real Iran Air Flight 655), and his father’s unexpected heart attack after tireless, back-breaking years spent providing for his son by working in a chicken factory farm. To all of this bleakness, Akbar brings poetry. 

It’s a beautiful but imperfect book. My issues with it, the things that knock it down a tier, have more to do with plot choices in the last quarter and perhaps an overabundance of ideas. The book lands in a strange middle ground where it either needed  100 more pages to fill out and indulge all the narrative strains and forms, or needed to be edited down by 50. That said, it has an intensely ambiguous ending that it pulled off beautifully, so be prepared to leave with more questions than answers.

Self Help - Lorrie Moore

Despite the subtitle “stories,” this is less of a short story collection and more of a series of vignettes; they’re experimental little fiction morsels - not so much telling a story as much as unraveling a specific idea. The chapters are thematically similar: almost all are about the experience of being a mother, daughter, or both; many touch on adultery, and submitting yourself to the love of another person on faith alone. Several are told in the second person, framed instructionaly with titles like “How To Be an Other Woman.” 

There’s a reason that Lorrie Moore is one of the most respected contemporary short fiction writers; I’m not sure I have much to add to this estimation. The writing is light, sometimes feeling like the wafer-thin 80s diet crackers it’s easy to imagine the characters eating, but occasionally hammering home the intensity of their emotions. Overall, I recommend this if you’re interested in reading stories that play with storytelling and craft. It may also appeal if you read more than one #girlhood essay when they were briefly published in abundance a few months ago. 

Tropic of Violence - Nathacha Appanah (translated by Geoffrey Strachan)

Per Regan’s review, this novel moves like a ghost story. Several characters speak to us from beyond the grave (if there is a grave to be had) and it reads like a haunting. This is an intense and brutal novel telling the story of Moïse, the adopted son of Marie, a French woman who has immigrated to Mayotte, an island near Comoros in the Indian Ocean and the 101st department of France. When Marie dies, Moïse finds himself navigating the shantytowns ruled by violence and teenage gangsters. 

It’s a violent, upsetting novel that does not hold back. There is no love or joy anywhere to be found in this dark world. Briefly, Marie longs for a child and has that longing fulfilled, but we spend more time with her ghost than her living desires. Her love for her son does not protect him from a violent world in which he cannot understand his place. In this novel, anytime someone tries to do something positive for another person, the world responds with pain.

All of this makes it hard to recommend this book. It is beautifully told and excellently translated. The writing is stark and poetic, told from multiple voices (Moïse, Marie, and more) fluidly moving between them putting the pieces together of this non-linear and atmospheric story. 

It illuminates an island whose politics and stories I was completely unfamiliar with until reading the novel. It is not the type of book that explains the intricate history of this colony and how the shantytown that populates the book came into being. Instead, it keeps a tight focus on this specific story of mother, son, and the migrant crisis’ impact on France’s poorest, most neglected department.  

Huh!!!

The Hunter - Tana French

The previous book, and the following two, are serious novels that unpack the long legacies of political and personal crimes. So, it feels worth acknowledging that The Hunter is a mystery novel about a fictional event in an imaginary town. Those acknowledgments made, French is a master at work here. The characters in this novel are believable, compelling people motivated by the turnings of the real world: climate change, economic policies, social exclusion, and conformity. 

This is the story of retired American police officer Cal Hooper and the teenage girl he’s spent two years trying to set straight, Trey Reddy, as her deadbeat dad returns to town, threatening to steer Trey off the course Cal had so diligently been charting. The narrative voice is rhythmic, lilting along the novel’s slow burn. Tana French writes murder mysteries, which this novel does not become for several hundred pages. It sets up the town’s social dynamics, the long and newly formed bonds of loyalty that tangle Cal, Trey, and everyone in the novel into knots. 

I specifically recommend the audiobook of this. The narrator, Roger Clark, is excellent and French’s writing lends itself very well to being spoken aloud. It’s more of a summer book, set in the crippling heat of an unexpected heatwave, but French’s atmospheric writing lends itself to any season. 

Enter Ghost - Isabella Hammad 

I wrote at length about Enter Ghost in my last post. It is fairly straightforward literary fiction, which is to say: a single-perspective told linearly keeping the same form and voice throughout. Upon reflection, I read many books that play with all of those things recently, and perhaps helped me appreciate the deftness and skill of this novel. 

The protagonist of this book, Sonia Nasir, is a British-Palestinian actor who is visiting her somewhat estranged sister who has returned to live in their family’s ancestral home in Haifa. She’s there to deal with the emotional fallout of an affair and a general lack of purpose in her career and life. In Haifa, she finds herself drawn into the orbit of a charismatic director putting on Hamlet in the West Bank. Joining the play puts her on a path back to understanding her sister, Palestine, and herself. 

This novel is worth reading for so many reasons. For one, the political context in which we live, in which Palestinian voices are being silenced by bombs bought with our tax dollars. It’s also a well-told story with memorable characters whose dreams and histories are meaningfully explored and which will stay with you.  

Twilight Zone - Nona Fernandez (translated by Natasha Wimmer)

When thinking about this novel, I was reminded of Laurent Binet’s HHhH. Both are sort of, ostensibly, novels that want to tell real historical events accurately, but struggle with what accuracy means, and both focus on a particularly heinous actor in those real historical events. Binet’s story is about the covert mission to assassinate Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich in 1942. 

Fernandez’s book focuses on a real figure, Andrés Valenzuela Morales, a former officer in the Chilean military dictatorship who provided an extensive confession to a magazine journalist about his participation in the abduction, torture, and murder of civilians as a member of the dictatorship’s secret police. Twilight Zone opens with the narrator’s imagining of Valenzuela’s arrival at that magazine office. What follows in the book is a meditation on this person himself, as well as an account of the crimes he was involved in, how they played out in Chilean society at the time and remain in its memory. 

Like Binet’s book, this ‘novel’ is obsessed with truth and history. Fernandez starts many sentences with “I imagine,” reminding us that this is conjecture. In other instances, it changes to: “I know, I do not imagine,” when the record is clearer. It is an effective technique in a story about crimes happening in secret that are now commemorated with museums that invite the perpetrators of these crimes to their commemorations. 

The novel’s title refers to a subject repeatedly referenced in the book, the American television show of the same name from the 1950s. In the television show The Twilight Zone the real world is often overlaid with horrific, strange, or fantastical alternate realities. In the very real alternate worlds that this book shines a light on, mundane corners of modern life are overlaid with the horrors of the past. Andrés Valenzuela Morales is identified by name a handful of times but otherwise, he is called “the man who tortured people” in nearly every other mention on page after page. His crisis of conscience, the details he provided to reporters and to later court commissions, never undoes this description. But this dichotomy makes him a fascinating figure, one worth compassion and examination. 

The novel outlines a dizzying number of real names and crimes, including the narrator’s personal overlap with the daughter of a military general. It is an incredibly compelling book, that both provides historical context and details of a historical period and region I was less familiar with. All this while Fernandez makes it clear that this is just a slice, a portion, of a reality, feels impossible to truly understand and yet still intermingles with living memory: 

Time isn't straightforward, it mixes everything up, shuffles the dead, merges them, separates them out again, advances backward, retreats in reverse, spins like a merry-go-round, like a tiny wheel in a laboratory cage, and traps us in funerals and marches and detentions, leaving us with no assurance of continuity or escape.

Twilight Zone is easily one of the best books I read in the last two months. The unique quality of its storytelling is worth reading for alone, with its mix of fact and fictionalized perspective. It manages to be deeply compelling without another layer of plot: the narrator is imagining and telling the story of this man’s life and crimes. She exists as a filter through which the story is told, and her life (family, children, partnership, memories) is invoked when necessary to add weight and additional dimension. 

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Recently I attempted a week without media. No reading (books, articles), no social media, no podcasts, minimal TV and movies (forgive me). Overall an active attempt to decrease external noise to “tune into my inner voice.”² The problem turned out to be manyfold. For one, being honest, I don’t need help tuning into my inner voice. I’m loud. I gave myself a Substack because a husband, two roommates, and many group chats weren’t an outlet enough. 

The idea behind the reading deprivation, in addition to channeling your voice, was part of a broader exercise about tuning into your divine internal creativity.³ What the process has made me realize is that creativity and curiosity, the drive to learn, create, and humble yourself, is not entirely at your own feet. I exist in community and conversation with the world. Books and media bring you into dialogue: I don’t need to be in conversation with myself. 

I look forward to reading again. Next on the docket are The Adult by Bronwyn Fischer and The Sisters K by Maureen Sun. If you’ve read either, please feel free to share your thoughts. I read several truly excellent books in the last two months, and I hope to read fewer duds in the future.

1.  Perhaps it’s clear that my mental state in the past two months has overall been: well, hanging in there!

2.  This was part of the Artist’s Way. See the previous footnote. 

3.  See footnote 1.