The key thing they emphasize: There's no actual standard for what makes a "good" book! None at all! These decisions are all subjective and according to taste! We all win because we get to read a bunch of interesting books, basically. (But there is an eventual winner.) If you go to this page, you can see links to alllll the past decisions and brackets in the sidebar.
You deny our brotherhood. Insisting as you do in your sly way that our genealogies and our socioeconomic standings have set us apart at birth in a manner not to be contravened. But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.
"The Passenger," Cormac McCarthy
Anyway, I've been keeping track of things for the past decade or so. Some years I manage to read everything! Some years I manage to start all the books, and then some of the novels languish on my shelves, partially completed, for years. Some years I just don't have the energy. Who can say what each year can bring? Last year, I managed all of them and was very proud of myself. This year, I thought, why not try that again?
Also, I've color-coded the various texts. Purple means I own/ed the book, green means I read it before the ToB shortlist was released, and blue means I read it after the shortlist came out. I'm not even going to indicate favorites here--the Tournament proper will churn out semi-finalists, etc, but as they state themselves, it's all quite arbitrary! (Except I DID indicate favorites. But not winners! That's...somewhat different, right?)
She did bring a book, but she wasn't reading it, just bullying the ink into sense. "It's pretty good," she says. "It would be brilliant if it weren't the literary equivalent of a shirtless mirror selfie, you know, like, if the author only flexed when he had to lift something."
"The Rabbit Hutch," Tess Gunty
I've also indicated the media/channel through which I read something, which I don't usually do for books, but it seemed kind of fun for ToB. (Instead of the Goodreads link to each book, I used TMN's referral links to Bookshop.org. Seemed only fair, y'know?) And yeah, I know there are a TON of problems with remaining within the Goodreads-Kindle-Amazon ecosystem, but using it allows me to collect all the passages I highlight in Kindle ebooks in Goodreads, which is an EXTREMELY useful tool for someone who archives favorite lines from every book read, so.
On to the books! In the order I read them, pretty much. Also, I was only midway through compiling this list when I decided to include multiple quotations, so the first few--some of which I read on paper and did not keep on my shelves--only have one pull quote from CYRT. Which means they are my very favorite pull quotes! But certainly don't get at the particular depth as having multiple examples, alas.
Note: I actually finished the last three books as the Tournament commenced! I'm not giving anything away in my notes here, but I figure it's worth confessing, given the spirit of activity.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow | Sea of Tranquility | Nightcrawling | Mercury Pictures Presents | Manhunt | An Island | The Passenger | The Rabbit Hutch | My Volcano | 2 AM in Little America | Mouth to Mouth | The Book of Goose | The Seven Moons of Maali Alameida | Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance | Dinosaurs: A Novel | The Violin Conspiracy | Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution | Olga Dies Dreaming
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, read on paper via a Book of the Month Club purchase
"I thought you were worried I was going to die," Sam said.
"No. You'll never die. And if you ever died, I'd just start the game again," Sadie said.
"Sam's dead. Put another quarter in the machine."
"Go back to the save point. Keep playing, and we'll win eventually." She paused. "Are you scared?"
I loved this book so much. I picked it up as a Book of the Month pick and gave it away to someone later because it felt like something that should be shared. (Which is why I have coded this as purple instead of green--ownership of books is a particular type of claim.) THAT SAID, it was maybe my favorite book of the year and I actually kind of want to give it to all my friends.
(BOTM is awesome and here is my referral link if you want to check it out--they've got an excellent selection, and you're essentially paying half-price for a hardcover bestseller, or two or three, every month. They also recently added audiobooks, if you're into those!)
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow does a couple of things that I really dig a lot: First, it digs into the complicated nature of an intense friendship that isn't (necessarily) romantic. How does the nature of expectations change the way people behave? How does it provoke and invoke possessiveness? How does it make disagreements more fraught, and absences more pointed?
Second, it makes you think through the rhetoric of games. That is, how is playing through a game, by its very nature, an exercise in complicity? How does it change the way you think? How does recognizing that shift your own worldview. (For example, I play a lot of World of Warcraft and Skyrim, and MAN, do I have to constantly reckon with the extractive nature of colonialism when I, in my game avatar, look at new animals and plants and think, What can I make with that if I collect it?)
NGL, I experienced a pang when I gave my hardcover copy of this away, but I'm hoping to someday see Gabrielle Zevin at a book festival so I can get a signed copy.
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel, read on paper via Timberland Regional Library
There's a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.
Emily St John Mandel, author of Station Eleven, is a wonderfully meditative author. She also is of a style that I read this book, then four months later checked it out from the library again because I did not remember reading it. (To be fair, I still haven't read The Glass Hotel, so I'd like to say I knew she had something I hadn't read yet and couldn't remember the title. BUT STILL.
Like, literally, even knowing that I read the book, even looking at this quotation that I pulled, I don't remember this story? Except it had a Cloud Atlas-style nested narrative structure--I always enjoy those.
This is quite disorienting.
Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley, read on Kindle through a skip-the-line Timberland Regional Library checkout
Streets always find you in the daylight, when you least expect them to. Night crawling up to me when the sun's out.
This book is frickin' harrowing, and I sort of knew that it would be going in, but when something pops up with a Libby "skip the line" alert, who am I to act in hesitation? Basically, the protag, Kiara, is a seventeen-year-old Black girl in Oakland, on the edge of being evicted. Her father is dead, her mother is in prison, and her older brother has dreams of stardom in his eyes. She can't get a real job because she has no actual resume, plus she's taken on care of Trevor, the kid next door who's been abandoned by his wandering addict mother. Out of desperation, she tries streetwalking, and pretty early on gets "rescued" by a couple of cops. Except she isn't rescued so much as she's subsequently treated like plaything for the local police force and it's awful. It's completely awful, and also she can't see a way out of it--because, despite all the supposed safety nets and authority figures she's supposed to rely upon, it's abundantly and explicitly clear that every single one of them has failed her. This book is so sad and icky, but also beautifully written, and Kiara's voice is so strong and, yes, loving despite the circumstances.
An orchestrated love is almost more precious than a natural one; harder to give up something you spent that long making.
Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra, read on paper through Timberland Regional Library
The better you know someone the less understandable they become. That's what intimacy is--not a threshold of knowledge but a capitulation to ignorance, an acceptance that another person is made as bewildered and ungovernable by her life as you are by yours.
I loved this read. Marra takes World War II and looks at it, mostly, through the lens of the Hollywood film community, which was actually comprised of a TON of immigrants who were--as the novel points out a lot--responsible for churning out American nationalist propaganda that espoused freedoms they, as immigrants, weren't actually granted themselves. The two major protagonists are Maria Lagana and Vincent Cortese, two Italians who both fled fascist Italy as youngsters and found themselves in the movie business. Even so, we dip into a number of other POVs, which grants breadth to the story: a Jewish man haplessly writing to a sister in Poland, a German woman whose son is still in Berlin, a Chinese-American man constantly typecast as Japanese villains, a Black veteran convicted of manslaughter because someone else was accidentally killed in his place, etc.
Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin, read via Kindle through the Arkansas Digital Library Consortium
A trio of harbor seals watched them from open water a few dozen yards away, wise and inscrutable with their whiskery mustaches and big, dark eyes. Ramona wondered what it would be like to live like they did, diving down into the silent dark, your whole body suited almost perfectly to your life.
This book is a post-apocalyptic horror fest in which its heroes are largely trans. It is super-gory and, naturally, quite focused on the body. Basically: What if the apocalypse was brought on by a virus that latches onto testosterone and turns the testosterone-heavy folks into unthinking, feral cannibals? What does that do to the landscape, and what happens to trans women and trans men and cis women in the aftermath? Felker-Martin does a masterful job of literalizing TERF fear-mongering what-ifs while ALSO showing how hateful and illogical TERF fear-mongering is.
The good news was that pregnancy was shorter now. Much shorter. The bad news was that the babies ate their way out.
While this is, I'd say, comedic horror rather than suspenseful, its actual cover could be a serious content warning. There's bigotry and hate speech and rape and dubious consent and EXTREMELY graphic violence. This is not a book for the faint of heart, but also, if you're into zombie horror novels, the splatter-goriness will be somewhat familiar. (Plus: Cannibalism. Not just the cis-men-monster cannibals. Folks in need of hormones post-apocalypse have found ways to make do, is what I'll say.)
"A TERF tried to kill me," she said spitefully, attempting not to relish the unassailable position of her victimhood too much.
There's also a thoughtful and thorough examination of the privilege that comes with money and, oh hey, conventional beauty. Trans women who can pass are treated very, very differently from those who cannot, and also differently from cis women who aren't WASP-pretty. And, of course, there's the usual post-apocalyptic revolutionary fol-de-rol of "we have become the monsters we fight against" stuff. You know.
You always could have done something, he thought as the van bounced over the speed bump at the motor pool’s threshold and passed through a loose clump of gate guards in full riot gear, faces smudged with soot, blood drying on their plastic shields. You were just afraid to be uncomfortable.
As you can see by all that I'm quoting, I thought this was a well-written book with a lot of interesting stuff in it. But also, it was a very unpleasant book to experience? There's some beauty in it, but it's mostly quite cynical, which is tough. I keep going back and forth on it.
An Island by Karen Jennings, read via Kindle through the Seattle Public Library
It was the prison blisters he remembered now, and it was like stepping back into the dream he'd been having, stepping back into it but finding it changed, and needing to locate himself in it.
There's a dreamlike quality to this story, where our protagonist, Samuel, is a man who has chosen to exile himself. More specifically, after he emerges from being held as a political prisoner for twenty-five years, he takes a position as a lighthouse keeper on an island where a couple of locals drop off supplies every few months. Otherwise, it's just him, the ocean, and the occasional dead bodies that wash up on shore.
Except one day, he finds a body still breathing. Someone made it! But now what?
The story takes place within an unnamed African nation, and our protagonist was imprisoned during a wave of rebellion that was, it turns out, part of an unending cycle of oppression-resistance-liberation-oppression. (Jennings had a great conversation about this with Electric Lit.) What's interesting about Samuel is how that paranoia and violence (or aversion thereof) has permeated his being, and how that inflects the way he perceives and interacts with someone who we assume is a refugee and with whom he does not share a language. He's an old man and he's used to his solitude and he's not inclined to expect kindness from anybody, even as he recognizes his own desperate loneliness.
In some ways, this is a very disorienting story--Samuel, in his age and solitude, very naturally falls into memories and dreams as circumstances trigger him, so we weave in and out along with him as he re-inhabits his past selves. (One can only imagine how his guest feels.) Then again, this is a pretty conventional story as well: This is someone who is lonely, but has also chosen loneliness after years of it being imposed. What happens when a stranger intrudes?
He should be more kind, he knew, but it was difficult releasing his pettiness, the resentments and paranoias he had cultivated over the past days. Difficult with his aged body, the oppressive tower, the long, long past dragging him downward, his mind a confusion of falsehoods and fear.
The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy, read on paper via Timberland Regional Library
I have mixed feelings about the modern literature move of not using quotation marks to denote dialogue. Like, I kind of get that it's supposed to elide the separation between speech and movement and thought, make 'em all one big morass of intention-in-action, but lordy, is it kind of annoying. Plus, variable relationships with commas and apostrophes.
Do you believe in physics? I dont know what that means. Physics tries to draw a numerical picture of the world. I dont know that it actually explains anything. You cant illustrate the unknown.
Anyway, it's the 1980s (mostly signaled by how everybody keeps lighting up cigars inside restaurants without any compunctions and it freaked me out every time), Bobby Western is a deep sea diver, and one day he and a buddy investigate a downed plane. There are all sorts of mysteries about the wreck, including that there is a missing passenger and no indication of where said passenger may have gone. Soon, Western's buddy has died in a mysterious crash, and he himself is slowly being encircled by mysterious Men in Black who suspect he knows more about whatever is going on.
But I suppose what I'd like to know is what does it have to do with my problem?
This country is your problem.
It is?
It's not?
I'd have to think about it.
Well. That's probably a problem too. You've already outstayed your welcome. But still you cant come to a decision.
That his father helped design the atomic bomb does not help his case, nor does the fact that he spent several years living off some gold coins his grandmother had buried decades previous. (The IRS gets kinda shirty about it, in fact.) People also seem to find a genius-level physicist doing freelance diving work kinda sus.
There's a whole thing where the main narrative chapters alternate, mostly, with flashbacks of Western's dead sister with her hallucinatory (she was schizophrenic and often institutionalized) companions. She was, like, a decade younger than Western, they were both STEM geniuses, and also in love, and I did not care about it at all, friends. Not at all. I legit rolled my eyes every time it came up. At one point, one of his sister's hallucinations pays him a visit and I was just like, okay, fine, I guess this is happening.
The women moved softly down the aisle. You believe that the loss of those you loved has absolved you of all else. Let me tell you a story.
Does Cormac McCarthy, like, think women are people? Because certainly none of the men in this novel, aside from our protagonist, do. It may be part of the author's commentary on, like, THE WORLD, but it sure gets tiresome.
Anyway, despite all my complaints, I actually enjoy Western as a protagonist, I think the increasing claustrophobia of the novel's core mystery is well-done, and McCarthy's writing has a spare beauty to it in many places. That said, will I read the sequel to this book? Not unless it makes it onto a future ToB list, honestly.
Ah, well.
The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty, read on Kindle through a skip-the-line Timberland Regional Library checkout
Authors/directors who rely on "absurdist" violence are maybe not really understanding how traumatic actual violence is. Or, this novel starts out by telling us the protagonist gets stabbed by her roommates eventually, and knowing that made me so, so tired.
She is not another young woman wounded on the floor, body slashed by men for its resources--no. She is paying attention. She is the last laugh.
Like, I think the violence against women is the thing the author is really critiquing, which is clearly evident in the text, right?
"I am so sick," Blandine says, "of violence against woman disguised as validation."
But points well-made, and lines well-written, don't diminish from the avalanche.
If she had to summarize the plot of contemporary life, the mother would say: it's about everyone punishing each other for things they didn't do.
Also, there's a middle-aged music teacher who seduces his Extremely Talented and Precocious Student and yes, the novel hangs a lantern on it, and no, that doesn't make it better?
"The trouble is that if you're a young woman, you can't opt out of the systems of economic production. Nobody can, not really, but at least a white man like you can approximate opting out. A woman can't even sort of opt out, no matter how hard she tries, because her body contains goods and services, and people will try to extract these goods and services with or without her permission."
This book actually had a lot of interesting and weird stuff going on! A whole running bit on sainted women manipulating the patriarchy! A side plot of the estranged son of a narcissistic celebrity acting out petty grievances by dancing naked in glow-in-the-dark paint in strangers' apartments! A minor protag whose job is moderating the comments of obituaries! An ENTIRE CHAPTER done in block print art! And yet.
My Volcano by John Elizabeth Stintzi, read on Kindle through the Seattle Public LIbrary
Dr Duncan Olayinka, a linguist living in Tokyo, traces folklore about a being named Tantrum descending from a volcano and destroying everything she touches. Dzhambul, a Mongolian shepherd, gets stung by a bee and transforms into a flowering, spiky, infectious plant dude. (Shades of The Last of Us, at least for me.) A white trans writer sits in their apartment in Jersey City and tries to write a novel about a volcano planet. Angel, a kid in Mexico City, runs very fast in a circle and finds himself in the middle of an Aztec city in 1516, inhabited by another soul and prophesying a great fire. And, oh, there's a volcano growing in Central Park.
As the news broke, networks happily moved resources to set up camp in the park again, flying in experts, shifting their coverage from the queer dead in Florida to make space for what they dubbed: the greatest threat to American lives.
There's some Metamorphosis shenanigans--yes, someone does, in fact, wake up as a giant insect. People deflate and become giant kites. An igneous golem takes shape.
Across sky and earth and sand, they moved--amethyst-eyed--clearing out villages and towns and cities as they went, going slow but still faster than the rumors about them. If something breathed, if something lived and could die, it was accumulated.
Being set very specifically in 2016 allows the author to, amongst all the weirdo magic realism, intersperse in memoriams to folks that were killed that year: Murdered by police. Slain in mass shootings. Stabbed to death for being trans. For being BIPOC. For being there.
"You never think you're seeing something new anymore. I figured it was old news. I didn't want to say anything because someone would tell me they knew; that everyone already knew. Also, I had six more miles to run."
There seem to be parallel realities happening, or doppelgangers, or SOMETHING both eerie and seeming to indicate something profound. Purple-eyed Otherwise people are traversing the city, riding in Baba-Yaga-style domiciles.
"We've been through worse and came out better," a father said to a daughter at the end of the last conversation they would ever have.
And some characters start to dream themselves as other characters, or see each other as visions. Shadows of the past come to whisper in people's ears.
She was a ghost in the machine of history, the sigh of a god, time's muse--fortune's poltergeist dragging forward the wheel.
What a weird book this is, about all the ways time and reality can slip and diverge, and how it would be nice if this world was one big experiment that we could just, like, stop and restart with a clean slate.
2 A.M. in Little America by Ken Kalfus, read via Kindle through the Arkansas Digital Library Consortium
The American catastrophe had meanwhile entered a new phase that drained the world of any cruel pleasure it had taken in our downfall. Now the overwhelming sentiment was pity. I followed the news with averted eyes.
I'm starting to sense a pattern.
"It was only a chat," I insisted. "We talked about text, subtext, and narrative. You know, typical American things."
What if AMERICANS were the refugees? these authors posit. Wouldn't it be IRONIC? I mean, yes, but also I'm pretty sure this was addressed in the end of The Day After Tomorrow? Ish?
Anyway, our protagonist is an American who is now a migrant worker, roving from country to country according to whatever customs and immigration laws he can take advantage of (or circumvent). The hook of the story, though? One day he accidentally sees a naked woman. Then he keeps thinking every woman he sees is that woman. And then he falls in love with someone who may or may not be that woman. And then years later, he moves to an American ghetto in an unnamed country and maybe that woman is there again and OH MY GOD.
Now I was reminded how much my idea of this woman had been a projection of whom I wanted her to be--but what object of romance was not?--and that I knew her only from the stories she told me. But what else can we know of each other? And what else can we know of the places we live or the lands we came from?These stories had been selected and edited, as they always were. They had elided several details, as usual. I had never fully believed them anyway. So who did I think I was kissing?
Seriously, dude cannot tell one woman from another and somehow I'm supposed to focus on, like, ANYTHING else? Sigh.
Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson, read via Kindle through Timberland Regional Library
Blackmail was one thing, secrets were another. He knew I was a writer. I was starting to think that that was the point, or had become the point. The self-portrait.
This story, like Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, reads the most like what we'd probably call "airport reads"--you know, propulsive suspense novels that end up being prestige TV series starring Reese Witherspoon or, at least, being selected for Reese Witherspoon's book club.
"Every once in a while artists try to come up with a work that can't be bought or sold. But the market always finds a way."
Our narrator runs into a friend from college at the airport. Their flight has been delayed several hours, and his friend invites our narrator to hang out in the fancy first-class lounge. Our narrator, being No Fool (c'mon, free fancy stuff), agrees, and finds himself subjected to what starts out as "just catching up" but turns out to be an in-depth confession.
See, several years ago, his friend saved the life of a very rich and very unethical man, and ended up benefiting from it tremendously. He's got a lot of feelings about it, because, well. Aside from the initial life-saving attempt, when could he say his choices were altruistic? When did he cross over into complicity? It's interesting.
"I say 'told myself' because--and this became clearer to me later, I didn't know this back then, I wasn't wise to it--to put it bluntly, we never really know why we do what we do. The part of our brains tasked with generating reasons don't care about truth…only plausibility."
The Book of Goose: A Novel by Yiyun Li, read on paper through Timberland Regional Library
The single lie--or the variations of the same lie--I had told in those years was to Fabienne: I made her believe that I was like a vacant house, my mind empty of any thoughts of my own, my heart void of feelings.
I was not aware of my falsity then.
This novel feels very much in the vein of My Brilliant Friend, TBH. It's got that feel--nostalgia for a girlhood spent in an imperfect place with a viciously wonderful bestie, framed by the troubles in post-war continental Europe. (Confession: I've only read the third book of the Ferrante series. So this is very much a vibe, not so much an obvious parallel in narrative.)
The geese are much more tranquil. They do not flap their wings at the slightest disturbance, and when they float in the pond, they stay still for so long that you know they would not mind spending the rest of their lives suspended in their watery dreams. Yet geese are never called passive.
However! Here's the neatness of the story: Agnes and Fabienne are best friends. Fabienne is the vicious wonderful smart one, while Agnes sees herself as passive and lacking, in comparison. One day, Fabienne decides they should write a book together, and get the recently bereaved postmaster to help them publish it.
AND IT WORKS. Except Fabienne doesn't want to be a named author--she tells the stories, Agnes writes them down, but in their scheme with the postmaster, Agnes is presented as having sole authorship. And she gets famous.
The running tension, of course, is that Fabienne and the postmaster both treat Agnes like she's just a pleasant receptacle for their ideas, but, like, Agnes is actually and evidently clever in her own right. (In a FASCINATING scene, their future publisher asks Agnes to write a couple of pages on the fly, to see if she's for real. And she delivers something that's incredibly good--and then doesn't tell Fabienne about it until the bit gets published in the preface of their novel.)
Then a narcissistic Englishwoman offers to take Agnes under her wing at boarding school and Fabienne practically pushes Agnes out of France her own dang self. It's rough.
Can we say that sunlight moves with wings, and moonlight as if on the back of a snail? The wings of the rooks spread and folded, spread and folded, before blending into the dusk, when the girls, coming out of prep, yawned their elegant yawns--it was in these gestures that their bodies moved away from girlhood, waiting for real life to begin.
The boarding school section isn't surprising in its own right--I think it's fairly easy to predict the tensions that spring up. Identity, authenticity, class discrimination, exploitation.
Love from those who cannot damage us irreparably often feels insufficient; we may think, rightly or wrongly, that their love does not matter at all.
This book is beautifully written, and I find Agnes to be a unique narrator. She doesn't want fame! She doesn't want money! She just wants to hang out with dazzling Fabienne in their village! But alas.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, read via Kindle through the Arkansas Digital Library Consortium
You wake up with the answer to the question everybody asks. The answer is Yes, and the answer is Just Like Here But Worse. That's all the insight you'll ever get. So you might as well go back to sleep.
So the story starts out with Maali having been murdered. Full stop, he is dead, there is no recourse. He has seven moons to go through the afterlife bureaucracy before Whatever's Next, but Maali is actually much more invested in getting his murder solved. Or actually, not so much solve his murder--though he has no memories of that night as the novel begins--but rather to make sure his work gets into the right hands.
You have seen dead bodies, more than your fair share, and you always knew where the souls had gone. The same place the flame goes when you snuff it, the same place a word goes when you say it.
Maali, it turns out, is a Sri Lankan photojournalist who is often paid to "fix"--act as an intermediary between foreign journalists and diplomats and Sri Lankan people of influence, including some de facto warlords. He is also, unfortunately, a gambler and a shit boyfriend, and that's where a lot of the emotional stakes in the story crop up.
In the flickering moonlight her skin looks made from snake. Her arms weave like cobras, her hair writhes like a nest of serpents and the burns on her skin glow like embers. Once again you lift your broken camera and take the photo without asking.
See, while Maali is being pushed to get ready for Whatever's Next, he's also being recruited by some afterlife demons and demons-in-training to, like, develop some poltergeisty powers and take vengeance on warlords and the Sri Lankan politicians who have enabled them. There's a lot of mythology in this book!
Being a ghost isn't that different to being a war photographer. Long periods of boredom interspersed with short bursts of terror. As action-packed as your post-death party has been, most of it is spent watching people staring at things. People stare a lot, break wind all the time, and touch their genitals too much.
Given the central narrative of this book is a dismembered photographer, this is actually a pretty funny book? Bleak, absolutely, and horrifying because if you don't know a ton about Sri Lankan history (I did not, certainly), well. But gallows humor juxtaposed with the grace of someone discovering they were loved? That makes for some beauty, a lot of the time.
Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance by Alison Espach, read via Kindle through the Seattle Public Library
Notes on Your Sudden Disapperance is essentially a story told by Sally to her sister Kathy, who dies in a car accident fairly early in the book. It's sad and intense, but also, I loved it?
Of course, walking out of Macy's, we couldn't imagine the way things would be different by the time the couch arrived. We couldn't imagine that by then, you would be dead.
Kathy is a few years older than Sally, and Sally idolizes her. (Though, in the telling, it's fairly obvious how, had Kathy lived, these two sisters would have fought like hell for several years.) In consequence, when Kathy falls in love with Billy in high school, Sally kind of falls in love with him, too.
Then, while driving Sally to school, Billy swerves to avoid hitting a deer, and Kathy dies when they hit a tree.
"Why learn a language you can never use in real life?" Valerie asked me, which is exactly what I liked about it. Finally. A language I'd never have to speak aloud. "A language that, in some sense, allows you to speak with the dead," Mr. Prim said on the first day of class, which actually did sound practical to me. You were the only person I wanted to talk to then.
In the wake of Kathy's death, and over several years, Sally and Billy develop an intense bond. Part of it is survivors' guilt, but part of it is they just kind of get each other, y'know? (See my aforementioned note about how Sally and Kathy would have fought. So much. SO MUCH.) Their bonding is also largely done in secret--on the phone and chatting online--because man, oh, man, does Sally's dad hate Billy a lot for Kathy's death.
"What'd you pray for," I asked.
"Everything," Billy said. "But mostly, forgiveness. You know. The usual."
"Oh yeah," I joked. "That's what I do. I just walk into church and say, Give me the usual!"
"One order of absolution, coming right up."
We follow Sally through high school and college into adulthood, seeing the way the loss of Kathy forms her--as well as how her parents react in their different ways. Her father, aforementioned hater-of-Billy, struggles with anger and, to some extent, drinking. Her mother, however, hoo boy. Her mother makes friends with a psychic--though, to be fair, the psychic is not charging her money at all, so it's not exploitative. It's just...really sad, how she cannot let go of Kathy in any way at all.
I like knowing that my problems exist within a large and respected tradition of problems. That ever since the beginning of civilizations, humans have been very upset.
Sally has such a fantastic voice--she and Billy are both so wry and witty, even when they're going through the very worst shit. I think this would be my favorite book of the Tournament, if not for the fact that Babel is also on the list.
Dinosaurs: A Novel by Lydia Millet, read via Kindle through Timberland Regional Library
What a quiet, lovely novel.
He didn't remember love, but he imagined it.
With the most fascinating narrator! Gil is extremely rich, first of all, though it's not apparent until a little later. But he happened into a crazily large inheritance and then just, like, decided he would do as much as he could to just be a quiet force for good in the world? Like, he lives well and doesn't want for much, but otherwise he's devoted himself to service. He volunteers but doesn't tell the staff that he's also been funding a bunch of the work! He doesn't have a job, not because he doesn't want to work, but because he feels guilty for taking a paying job when someone else might need it! He flies in coach until he realizes he's just too tall to do it without an air of martyrdom!
Of course, this all would have been different except that Gil was orphaned at a very young age, then raised by a grandmother who had very intense raised-during-the-Great-Depression vibes. When he gets his inheritance, it's a total surprise--and he almost gives it all away, until his lawyers are like, Dude, can we talk about this sensibly? And then he falls in love with someone who, it turns out, was in it for the money. (It is clear to all of us that this woman was all about the money, but Gil, oh, Gil. You sweet cinnamon roll.)
Both of her decisions, to stay and then to go, had been purely about herself. Her absence had not made him no one. Just as her presence had not made him someone. In all of her choices he'd been more like anyone. They'd had little to do with him.
So anyway, Gil gets his heart broken, and dude WALKS FROM NEW YORK TO ARIZONA because 1) he has the luxury of time and a considerable safety net and 2) he feels the need for some liminal space or something. I respect it. He gets to Arizona, moves into a nice upper-middle-class neighborhood, and then promptly gets adopted by the also-new-to-the-area family next door.
"In like five years nobody's dabbed."
"So what are you going to do? If you see someone dabbing?"
"I'd grab his arm, but not hurt him. I know! I'd put him in a wrist lock."
Tom would make plenty of kid friends in fifth grade, Gil thought.
There are, along the way, some emotional complications--the story of Gil's broken heart is a slow roll-out for most of the book--but largely, this is a story about Gil learning to emerge from an entire life spent in loneliness.
She measured success by career, the way most people did. And it was fair and accurate to say he'd never had one. He'd offered up his time, done what others needed him to do.
They could put it on his gravestone: He tried to be of use.
This is my third favorite book of the Tournament.
The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb, read via Kindle through Timberland Regional Library
So here's what you do if you're a Black guy trying to make it work in an unfamiliar world: You just put your head down and do the work. You do twice as much work as the white guy sitting next to you, and you do it twice as often, and you get half as far. But you do it. You just sit down and practice, over and over, and eventually someone turns to you and says, "Wow, you're way better than I expected you'd be."
I spent a good third of this book cringing, not because it was awful, but because it felt so true. There are SO MANY microaggressions, but also some horrifying macro-aggressions. See, Ray is a classical violinist, a frickin' AMAZING one, but he is also Black, and that is not something people in the classical music world are willing to accept. Also, ALSO, he inherits a beat-up violin from his grandmother that she says has been in the family since were enslaved, and it turns out the dang thing is a Stradivarius and HOLY GOD, a STRAD.
Naturally, the discovery of the violin's true origins pushes Ray's career into the next level--he's got the chops, it's very clear he's got the chops, but the PR of the Strad find means opportunities open up. Unfortunately, the family that used to enslave his tries to claim the violin as their own, and every single person in the novel has the same reaction we as the audience do: Are you fucking serious?
Then the violin gets stolen, a few months before a life-changing competition.
For an instant--less than a breath, less than a blink--regret washed over him: wishing his own violin were here, wishing his grandmother were here. But he could do nothing more. He had done all that he could. It was just him and the music now, and the future was endless.
While the mystery itself--the titular conspiracy--is interesting, the book is more about the arc of Ray's life up until the competition. What is it like, being Black in the classical music world? Turns out: It sucks. Even when you're good and you know you're good, it sucks. Which is why, in a lot of ways, it's the moments when Ray is playing that everything feels transformed. Ray loves the music--that's underlined a lot, when folks talk about how and why he's good--he loves the music, and when he plays, we feel it along with him.
The opening arpeggio soared into the vast space and he hung on the high E, demanding his audience--and Mozart--hear him, demanding they open themselves to him. He imagined his notes were water, or mercury, or silver--sliding into their ears, dissolving and thrumming into their blood. Their heartbeats were his.
I legit haven't even touched a violin in decades, but this book made me want to find one and play.
Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R. F. Kuang, read on paper via a purchase from Browsers Bookshop
I loved The Poppy War trilogy, but it was also dense as hell, and Babel did not look to be any less dense. Though: Linguistics! Translations! Academia! I was always going to read this, which is why I've flagged this as something I owned long before I started reading it. (It is also, I should point out, a two-month-long book club read for Books and Boba, so I was always going to read Babel eventually, no matter what.) And then I read it and OMFG. MY BELOVED.
Obviously, we start with colonialism and death.
By the time Professor Richard Lovell found his way through Canton's narrow alleys to the faded address in his diary, the boy was the only one in the house left alive.
Robin Swift--that is not his name at the beginning of the book, but he is not allowed to keep that name and so he chooses this new one--is taken in by an Oxford professor after his entire family dies of cholera. It becomes quickly evident that the professor, Lovell, is actually Robin's biological father and had been paying for the English lessons and such, but nobody's gonna talk about that, because Lovell is a piece of trash. A rich, educated, nationalist piece of trash.
But also, as Robin and we in academia would often counter, books! How does one turn down books? Babel is about, as much as anything else, the complicity of academia in the colonial and white supremacist endeavor. (But...books!)
It should have been quite distressing. In truth, though, Robin found it was actually quite easy to put up with any degree of social unrest, as long as one got used to looking away.
Lovell has been planning to bring Robin to Oxford to join the college's program in Translation. Like, yes, from language to language, but also magic! This is where the arcane comes in: When two words in different languages that share a root meaning are engraved into a bar of silver by someone who understands those languages on, like, a bone-deep level, and that person speaks those two words out loud? The silver will manifest the meaning that is lost in the translation between the two words.
Like, in the first example used in the book, Robin is cured of cholera by the matched pair of "treacle" and "triacle"--treacle is a sweetener, of course, but it is derived from the Middle English triacle, which actually meant antidote. Put into conversation with each other, Lovell is able to save Robin because the silver makes that space between "sweetener" and "cure" manifest.
Book nerds, language lovers, you may see how densely grokkable this concept must be.
Translation in the abstract. Translation in the arcane. But what does it mean, in concrete terms?
'But what is the opposite of fidelity?' asked Professor Playfair. He was approaching the end of this dialectic; now he needed only to draw it to close with a punch. 'Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?'
The use of silver is a handy signifier and intensifier, for the purposes of Babel, of the Industrial Revolution. England is able to use its abundance of silver--gathered through colonial violence, of course--and its access to a myriad of multiple-language-speakers--gathered through colonial violence, of course--to accelerate technological innovation and production, cost to human beings be damned.
It sounded so abstract--just categories of use, exchange, and value--until it wasn't; until you realized the web you lived in and the exploitations your lifestyle demanded, until you saw looming above it all the spectre of colonial labour and colonial pain.
The crisis point, of course, is that China does not really want anything that Britain has to offer, while Britain is desperate for pretty much everything China has to offer. But also, they do not want China to keep all that silver of theirs! They want it back! Obviously, the answer to this economic imbalance is the Opium Wars.
So yeah, the first half of this book is a familiar delight--a young group of people (and let's be clear, Robin is from China, and his best friends are Ramy from India, Victoire from Haiti, and Letty, a disinherited British girl) discover the beauty of being rewarded for their tremendous nerdery. The second half is full-on Dark Academia: By what ends, and to what ends, does academia function? Who is being damaged in order to preserve the Ivory Tower?
He had a sudden, very clear vision of the tower in ruins. He wanted it to shatter. He wanted it to, for once, feel the pain that had made possible its rarefied existence. 'I want it to crumble.'
Victoire's throat pulsed, and he knew she was thinking of Anthony, of gunshots, of the wreckage of the Old Library. 'I want it to burn.'
Burn it all down.
Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez, read via Kindle through the Arkansas Digital Library Consortium
"What's your secret?"
"I already told you. I'm a hoarder."
She giggled.
"So, what's your secret?" Matteo asked.
"I'm a terrible person."
Olga is a Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican wedding planner. She makes a ton of money by catering to rich white people and, well, she kind of hates herself for it? Her brother, Prieto, is a congressman, and her parents were Young Lords. So kind of like Robin in Babel, Olga is facing a similar crisis of conscience: Does she continue to prosper doing a thing she's, let's be clear, EXTREMELY good at doing, or does she confront what her participation in a system of exploitation actually means?
And so, Olga, you must see yourself and my absence not as one little girl missing her mother, but as a brave young woman who knows that in a world of oppression, achieving liberation will require sacrifice.
It does not help that her mother, decades ago, fucked off to become a revolutionary in various arenas across the globe, and has confined her parenting to occasional letters to her children about how they will never be good enough for her because they aren't part of The Struggle, really. (Their mother sucks.)
She wanted to know the size and shape of the hole that had been left in his heart that required so many objects to fill it. She found herself envious that he had identified something to pack it with.
This is also a novel about gentrification in New York, and about the impact of Hurricanes Irma and Maria on Puerto Rico in 2017. It's a story about diaspora.
Like milk in coffee, the potency of the neighborhood was diluted with each shining new edifice. As with all forms of white conquest, Olga knew that by the time acquisition was complete, the soul of whatever they were after would have already been destroyed.
For multiple reasons, both Olga and Prieto are made to confront where they exist and how they've been existing. The tensions are kind of neat, because it's not only how they've become complicit in systems of oppression (Prieto, while not accepting bribes for his votes, is being blackmailed for being a closeted gay man), but also how actually, it would be impossible for them to live up to their mother's burn-it-all-down demands. How it's damaging to try to live up to those standards--and especially to want love from somebody who won't accept anything less than sacrificing everything.
"But, ma, you realize the solution to Olga's dilemma is in the poem?"
"Wait," Olga asked, "how do you mean?"
"I mean it's a tale for you to learn from. It's about not chasing an external ideal, not trying to fit someone else's vision for you and instead building with the community of people who simply accept you as you are."
"Somehow, I don't think that's what my mother got out of it."
So how do you become your real, authentic self when you're being pulled in multiple directions? When you're always going to disappoint somebody? When you're always going to anger somebody, simply because you are?
But, after an hour or so, she felt remarkably good. Like she'd come to the end of a Scooby-Doo episode and pulled off her own mask, revealing that all this time she'd been playing the part of Happy-Go-Lucky Party Planner when in reality she was the terrifying Educated Woman of Color.
I felt this so hard.
And that's it! I did it! I did the Tournament of Books! I tend to struggle with the books that are Literary-with-a-Capital-L, because WHO CARES, GEEZ, but the writing, y'all. The writing is always so gorgeous.
1 comment:
ten years! gah!
I have been pining for some good replacement for goodreads for months and months. maybe I should just keep a blog section of books read and to-be-read...
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