In any case, out of the eighteen books on the shortlist, I read all but one of them. (I skipped one due to content ooginess.) Listed below you'll find them in the order I read them; I haven't ranked them at all. I'm not sure how I would this time around? Rather than commentary, I've given you two pull quotes from each of the books I read.
They're all worth a read, though YMMV depending on your mood.
- The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt
"The fall feeling," said Jill, "is the knowledge of a long dusk coming on." She looked at him with an expression of significance.
"Why read at all? Why does anyone do it in the first place? Why do I? There is the element of escape, which is real enough—that’s a real-enough comfort. But also we read as a way to come to grips with the randomness of our being alive. To read a book by an observant, sympathetic mind is to see the human landscape in all its odd detail, and the reader says to him or herself, Yes, that’s how it is, only I didn’t know it to describe."
- Cold People by Tom Rob Smith
Having always presumed that warmth meant life and cold meant death he now accepted this assumption was wrong--cold was a different way of life.
"Survive! We all say that word like...it explains anything. Like it justifies anything. But surviving at any cost is not surviving. Surviving means holding on to what is great about people. Our humanity, our love, our joy, our sense of fun."
- What You Are Looking for Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama
What are you looking for? she had asked me.
I think about it. A place for these dreams that I don't know what to do with?
"I want to try and change. Thanks to this book."
A broad smile lit Ms. Komachi's face. "You may say that it was the book, but it's how you read a book that is most valuable, rather than any power it might have itself."
- American Mermaid by Julia Langbein
Once it made sense to you, once teaching made any sense to you, then logically it was impossible for much of the outside world to make any sense.
"How does she die?" I ask about the person I created, the woman whose heartbeat I sometimes felt as I wrote her pulsating bodily expeditions into the cold, electric sea. How does she die? I hear myself ask a bro and a failed actor I met six weeks ago who might help me get rich.
- Open Throat by Henry Hoke
I want to thank my people but I know if they see me it'll fuck up our relationship
she runs away and I hear more of her screams and I feel powerful and also guilty as fuck
I look at the lamp in pieces on the floor
I can't fix this
I have no idea what it's like to be a person and to be confronted with a me
- The Guest by Emma Cline
Ha ha, Alex thought. That man is my boyfriend, she thought. His daughter is not a good singer. I can't go back to the city because I've done stupid things.
It made Alex uncomfortable, someone demanding love so overtly, showing all her cards. As if it were that easy, as if love were something you deserve and didn't have to scramble to earn.
- The Auburn Conference by Tom Piazza
On two separate occasions during the year preceding, I had made the mistake at faculty gatherings of suggesting that our American literary production might be worthy of academic attention. I could as well have suggested installing a porcupine as the Institute's president.
"We're supposed to be talking this morning about literature and America," he said. "I never made the distinction."
- The Shamshine Blind by Paz Bardo
The rah-rah America thing wasn't really to my taste. But telling folks it was their personal responsibility to be unaffected by Hope Depletion Events was what really turned me off.
The wave of Slate Gray that had built up during the ride rolled over me like a one-night stand with an actuary.
- Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Every day she woke up ashamed that she had continued for this long, but having Staxxx in her life, having something real to hold on to, made it easier to let go of her fans, her fame, all the pretty decorations that obscured the fact that the state was trying to kill her and that even though she was ashamed of her life and did not think she deserved to live, she would not let them.
Staxxx reminded anyone lucky enough to see her that there were parts of a human that could never be chained.
- The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
He was a man without a country living in a world of ghosts, for having no country meant no involvement and not caring for a thing beyond your own heart and head, and ghosts and spirits were the only thing certain in a world where your existence was invisible.
Chona had never been one to play by the rules of American society. She did not experience the world as most people did. To her, the world was not a china closet where you admire this and don't touch that. Rather, she saw it as a place where every act of living was a chance for tikkun olam, to improve the world.
Brainwyrms by Alison Rumfitt
I didn't read this one! It started out with the following content warning:Brainwyrms features (very) taboo sex that many would consider unsafe or unsanitary, as well as sexual violence and child abuse.
Then I was like, Can it be that bad? I read the introduction, which was quite compelling! Then I went to Goodreads and read the more detailed content warnings some very kind (and positive) reviews of the book listed and decided…nope. Nope. Not gonna read this one.
- The Lost Journals of Sacajewea by Debra Magpie Earling
Bia held my face and whispered, Men do not know Woman carries a voice inside her to help her live. When you stop hearing your voice you are nothing more than snare bait. You are bone crackles in Weta's teeth.
Do not trust anyone who tells you you cannot tell your story.
Do not trust anyone who tells you there is only one story.
If there were only one story
Or one way of seeing things all stories would die.
- Boys Weekend by Mattie Lubchansky
- Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova
"I shouldn't have told you this story."
"Are you afraid?"
"I don't like hungry things."
A passport is a booklet with your name picture on it. Mine says Santiago Jansen de la Mora. Capitalized letters. It doesn't say human because only humans get a passport. Mine comforts me like an alibi.
- The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
Everything was coming to an end, everything was closing down, everything had been carried off on the flood. Her schooldays, her family, her boyfriend, the men, the drinking, she would leave it all behind, like a sloughed skin; or she was the skin, and she would be sloughed, and dissolve in the night.
Perhaps he'd misheard when they said the building was haunted, perhaps they'd said the building haunted, i.e. had itself become a ghost. Perhaps that was why the previous resident had made the fire on the floor, to keep it away, the room.
- Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel
"He never loved any place more, not even the sea," according to the author of an article I surreptitiously ripped from a magazine at the Subaru dealership way out on Beechmont, folding it in half, then in fourths.
Together we stared at it like it was a Rorschach test, or like it was one of those drawings in which you can see, alternately, two different things, like a rabbit and a duck.
Like a Grand Idea and an Awful Mistake.
Like adventure and quarantine.
Like marriage, and marriage.
- Big Swiss by Jen Beagin
After hearing her whole story, which had taken ten weeks to tell, the shrink diagnosed her with emotional detachment disorder, which seemed like a stretch to Greta, who preferred to think of it as "poise" on a bad day, "grace" on a good one, and, when was feeling full of herself, "serenity."
"Are you transcribing our conversation?" Big Swiss asked.
G: I am now.
- Blackouts by Justin Torres
"It's true, all erotic experience can be reduced to crudeness, nene. But does that mean it ought to be?"
Juan had pushed me to grasp two concepts: (1) the idea that stigmatized persons live in a literarily defined world; and (2) the value of getting lost, or absorbed--sometimes haunted, sometimes enriched--by what's been said and written about you and your kind, and what's been erased or suppressed.
And that's all for this year! What a fascinating and weird collection these ToB books always compose.
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