Trudy J. Morgan-Cole's Blog, page 20

Ten Favourite Books from 2022

Coming up with a “Top Ten” or “Top Anything” list of favourite books from the past year is a little project I’ve been doing since, oh … 2006? Some years it’s easy, and other years it’s frickin’ difficult, mostly because I’ve read so many good books in a given year that I can’t narrow it down.

This was one of those years. I could probably generate a Top 25 (or so!) list, but narrowing it down any further than that simply becomes arbitrary. For this year-end favourites list, I picked 8 novels and two non-fiction audiobooks that I really enjoyed, ones where something about the story or the experience of reading (or listening to) it lingered with me long after I’d finished the book. But it was a fairly arbitrary choice and for every book on here, there are at least two more that I really enjoyed that I left off the list. It’s been a good reading year, folks, and these are good problems to have.

If you want to read my reviews of the books above, they are (in no particular order, because if picking a “Top Ten” was pretty arbitrary, ranking them would be even more arbitrary!):

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin
Devil House, by John Darnielle
Dark Tides (and also Dawnlands, next in the series), by Philippa Gregory
The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich
All the Seas of the World, by Guy Gavriel Kay
The Wolf Den, (and its sequel, The House With the Golden Door), by Elodie Harper
Small Game, by Blair Braverman
The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell
Unmask Alice, by Rick Emerson
Where the Light Fell, by Philip Yancey

I always like to track — more for my own interest than anyone else’s — a few stats about the kinds of books and kinds of writers I have read during the year. Sometimes these are more estimates than hard numbers, since I don’t always have full information about who a writer is and where they come from, but I like the big-picture element of tracking some of my own reading trends over time. So, in that spirit, a few 2022 stats:

Total books read: 125Fiction vs non-fiction: 107/18New books vs re-reads: 112/13Women writers vs men: 100/24 (one book had multiple authors. Didn’t read any writers that were, to my knowledge, non-binary this year).Newfoundland writers: 11 (from here originally, or primarily based here)Writers from the rest of Canada: 20Writers from the UK: 44Writers from the US: 42Unknown or from other countries: 8Writers who are BIPOC or otherwise would identify as racialized or “not white”: 16

That last stat is really interesting to me because a few years ago I started making a concerted effort to read more book by Black, Asian, Indigenous and Latine authors, and in the year that I started consciously trying to do that, my stats were about 70% primarily white-identifying authors, to about 30% other writers. What I’m learning is that if I don’t make a concerted effort to diversify my reading, it’s very easy to default to reading mostly white authors (and thus missing a lot of great books along the way!)

So that’s my reading “journey,” if you want to call it that, for 2022! Onwards!

The Wards, by Terry Doyle

This will likely be my last book review for 2022, and honestly, I may have saved one of the best for last. I knew from reading Terry Doyle’s short stories that he’s a vivid and incisive writer who can depict slices of contemporary Newfoundland working-class life like almost nobody else writing today. I was excited to see what he could do with the space of a novel, and I wasn’t disappointed. I started reading The Wards after midnight last night, when I finished the other book I was reading and wasn’t sleepy yet. Stayed awake until almost 1:30 reading it, then woke in the morning and didn’t get out bed till I’d finished it — that was how compelling I found it.

That’s not to say that this is a book that’s going to pull you along with a mystery plot or anything else that will keep the pages turning to find out “what’s going to happen?” Only one major thing is going to happen, and it happens between the halfway and two-thirds point of the book. What will keep you reading is not trying to resolve suspense or solve a puzzle, but seeing how one simple, though devastating, event affects every member of a family whose characters are sketched in relentless but loving detail.

The Wards — Gloria, her husband Al, their 19-year-old daughter Dana and 23-year-old son Gussey — are a middle-class St. John’s family, their lifestyle (house on a cul-de-sac, giant lifted pickup truck in the driveway) sustained by pipefitter Al’s stints working away from home on various megaprojects, currently at Voisey’s Bay. Gloria and Al seem — not exactly happy, but contented and used to the rhythm, and the annoyances, of their marriage. Dana is trying to spread her wings at university and fly beyond her family’s limited circle; unemployed Gussey, whose main interest is smoking weed with his best friend Mark, seems to be forever stuck on the ground. Completing the circle of characters is Gloria’s sister Paula, who lives on the same street; with a husband who has left her and two sons working away in Alberta and rarely in touch, she envies Gloria’s life.

None of these people — not even Dana, with her aspirations to an educated and broader life — is good at handling, or talking about, emotions. The person who might be most in touch with his feelings is not one of the Wards, but Gussey’s loser friend Mark — a guy portrayed as so incompetent that, in a hilarious appropriation of a real-life event for fictional purposes, he is the person who painted “DRIVE TRUE” on a drive-through restaurant’s pavement. Mark scribbles poems (which he calls “lyrics” although he’s not a musician; he recognizes that a young man who admits to writing poems is about 5000x more vulnerable than one who says he’s writing lyrics) in a notebook that nobody sees, but he can’t articulate what he’s feeling any better than any of the Wards can.

It’s a galactic distance from the St. John’s world of the Wards to the upper-crust British world of The Crown, yet something that I said when I first watched that TV series came back to me in reading this book: “It’s quite an accomplishment to make an entire dramatic series about a group of people whose guiding principle is to show as little emotion as possible.” The emotional incoherence of the Wards and their family and friends does not stem from exactly the same sources as the British stiff-upper-lip philosophy, but it’s not entirely different either. You do what your sphere in life requires you to do — whether that’s working away from home at a job you hate, or keeping a family together when they seem to have no desire to be together — and, crucially, you don’t complain. Or rather, you “piss and moan,” as Al accuses Gloria of doing at one point in the novel, but you don’t ever open up about how you really feel, or have an honest conversation about difficult emotions with someone you care about.

So the central question at the heart of The Wards is (for me, anyway): when people who are so distanced from their own emotions and any ability to talk about them get hit with one of life’s Big Events, how do they process it? How do they deal with themselves, with each other, with loss, with change? That’s what this book is about, and there are no huge epiphanies or giant about-faces: the Wards are not those kind of people. There are only small moments: a tiny self-discovery, a mute attempt at connection, a missed opportunity to love. The book isn’t flawless, but it’s beautiful and sharply observant and a little heartbreaking, in all the best ways.

Also, there’s a dog in the book, and I have an ongoing beef with author Terry Doyle about the fate of dogs in fiction that goes back to a short story in his collection Dig and a conversation on my podcast. When I heard him read the first few pages of this novel, in which Gloria buys a dog off Facebook Marketplace, I was very concerned for the fate of the dog. I won’t do a “Does The Dog Die” style spoiler here, but I will say — the dog probably makes out better, in the end, than most of the Wards do.

The Rabbit Hutch, by Tess Gunty

It’s very rare that I don’t finish a book I start — there’s only been one I didn’t finish in 2022, and that’s mainly because it was essentially three novellas in one volume and I decided it was OK to read only the first two. I almost didn’t finish The Rabbit Hutch, but ultimately I decided to finish it, and I’m not sorry I did.

The concept sounded intriguing, which is why I picked up the book in the first place. Four young adults recently aged out of the foster care system are sharing an apartment in a low-rent building in a dying middle-American town. The novel culminates in an act of violence; we know from the beginning that it’s going to happen, but what exactly happens and why unfolds throughout the pages. At the centre of the story is Blandine, the only girl in the apartment, a brilliant, troubled young woman who is obsessed with the lives and legends of female mystics, and longs for an ecstatic experience such as the saints claimed to have experienced. Her desire for mystical transformation is at odds with the grim realities of her everyday life and the setting in which she lives.

This is, in itself, an interesting enough story, and quite strong enough to hold up the novel. Where it gets iffy is in the author’s decision to focus not just on the stories of this central quartet, but also to write from the point of view of several other people who live in the same apartment building, or whose lives intersect with theirs in some way. I love the idea of this — the classic concept of telling a story from the point of view of many different people in a community, but with the twist that there is no real community here; these people are so isolated by the bleak landscape of poverty in capitalist small-town America that they are like separate planets orbiting the warmth-less sun of the apartment building. It’s a good idea, but I think the execution is uneven; some of the stories are linked to the others either plot-wise or thematically, while others seem to be off in their own cul-de-sac — for this reader, more of a distraction than an enrichment to the central story.

That’s why I almost gave up partway through — too many pages spent on subplots that didn’t interest me and didn’t seem to go anywhere, and while the writing is often beautiful, there’s also some of what I would consider over-writing — long passages of dialogue where a character speaks for three or four pages without stopping, for example. But there was something intriguing in it, so I stayed with is, and it paid off as I got more engaged in the second half of the book and found the ending very satisfying and even a little bit beautiful.

Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson’s latest is another straightforward historical novel in the vein of A God in Ruins or Transcription, set in 1920s London. The Twenties are indeed roaring in this story of nightclubs, crime, drugs, and young girls who mysteriously disappear from the streets of London. The central character of Nellie Coker, owner of a string of nightclubs, is loosely based on a real-life woman, but Nellie is only one of a huge cast of characters, including the large brood of children who will inherit her empire, a policeman who wants to bring down the criminal aspects behind Nellie’s business, a former war nurse who goes undercover to explore the world of Nellie’s clubs and search for two missing girls, and a teenaged dancer who runs away from home to seek fame and fortune on the London stage. I found this very immersive and vivid, and while it’s not going to rival Behind the Scenes at the Museum or Life After Life as my favourite Atkinson novel, it’s a solid entry in her catalogue.

Middlegame, by Seanan McGuire

I couldn’t decide whether to categorize this as sci-fi or fantasy, but it’s compelling, weird, and beautifully written. A power-mad alchemist is attempt to rule the world (of course) by a mechanism that involves creating perfectly twinned pairs of bio-engineered babies who (once the perfect pairing matures and all the unsuccessful pairs have been eliminated) will grow up to, between them, control all space and time. So, it’s a pretty big concept — but it’s also a deeply personal story about a boy and a girl, Roger and Dodger, who grow up fostered by two different families but forge a telepathic connection as children. I found it fascinating and totally engaging.

This Time Tomorrow, by Emma Straub

This novel was a quick and generally enjoyable read, but didn’t pack as much of an emotional punch as I thought it could have. The premise is good, especially for a reader like myself who really enjoys stories that involve time travel or otherwise play around with time. The main character, Alice, is about to turn 40, and while she’s not unhappy with her life, she’s discontented, feeling that things could be better. Her beloved father is dying, and she wishes she had more time with him. Looking back through her life, she wishes she’d made some different choices. And then, suddenly … she wakes up and it’s the morning of her sixteenth birthday. She gets to relive that day again, then finds herself back in a new version of her 40-year-old life, now changed by the choices she made when she was 16.

It’s a great premise, and I don’t think the book handles it badly, but whether it’s the way Alice, her father Leonard, and the other characters are developed, or the way the high-concept premise of revisiting and change your own past plays out in this particular story, I didn’t feel as engaged by Alice and her life and her choices as I thought I would be. Put this one in the “liked it; didn’t love it” category.

The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell

If, like me, you somehow inexplicably had to study Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess” in English class in Grade 9, 10, AND 11 (why??), you might have spared a moment to wonder who the Duchess in question was, or if there ever was a real woman behind the poem. Maggie O’Farrell brings a historical novelist’s rich imagine to this question, creatively filling in the gaps around the little bit of knowledge we have on the short life of Lucrezia de’Medici (married at 15, dead at 16). Rumours that her husband murdered her appear to have swirled around this poor girl almost from the time she died, so there’s rich ground here for the kind of vividly historical, psychologically real portrait of a little-known historical figure that O’Farrell did so well in Hamnet and Judith. I really loved this book and found it quite engrossing.

Dawnlands, by Philippa Gregory

What can I say that I haven’t already said about the Fairmile series, of which this is book 3? I have loved every book in the series; it’s my favourite thing by far that Philippa Gregory has ever written, and I genuinely love all the characters, their diversity and complexity, and the way their stories are woven into the history of England and its colonies in the 17th century. This novel is set against the backdrop of the Glorious Revolution that dethroned King James II in favour of his daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange; some of the action also takes place in the English colony of Barbados. I had thought this was going to be the final volume of a trilogy, but Gregory seems to have left it open-ended enough (and with lots of younger characters, which is always a good set-up in a multigenerational family story) that she could keep it going for several more books, and I hope it does.

James Acaster’s Guide to Quitting Social Media, by James Acaster

I’d definitely only recommend this book to someone who was already a fan of comedian James Acaster, but even then, I think I would ask you, “Which James Acaster are you a fan of?” Do you like his quirky, far-fetched stories that begin by sounding like they might be drawn from real life but quickly spin off into absurdist humour, as in his book James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes (2017) and his Netflix series Repertoire (2018)? Or did you prefer the tragicomic searing honesty of his book Perfect Sound Whatever and his stand-up show Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999 (both 2019), in which he turned his own very real struggles with mental health into revealing comedy and biting satire? Because your expectations of what you’re getting in a James Acaster book are going to depend a lot on your answers to that question.

Having enjoyed all of Acaster’s previous work, I definitely enjoyed the more recent stand-up special the most and felt like he was on a trajectory from the whimsical absurdity of his early work to the darker, more autobiographical material in his later work. I knew he actually had quit most if not all social media within the past few years, and with book I was expecting — yes, some quirky absurdist humour in the form of a self-help book, for sure, but threaded through with material drawn from the comedian’s real life experiences of being on, and then off, social media. It felt like writing about social media in 2022 would be a natural continuation from talking about having a mental breakdown in 2019, and I was expecting this book to be funny and twisted but also dark and revealing, a further step into the territory explored in Cold Lasagne.

This … is not that.

It’s also not a genuine self-help book about how to quit social media, although honestly, if that part wasn’t obvious from the title, the cover, and everything about the book, you probably are not prepared for James Acaster’s comedy and you should just back away slowly and go find something that’s more your style (comedy being so wildly subjective and all).

James Acaster’s Guide to Quitting Social Media returns to the wacky, offbeat spirit of the Netflix specials, in which Acaster writes in first person as a character who is … well, named James Acaster, but a sort of parallel-universe James Acaster. who deals with his addiction to social media by painting over the screens of all his devices with tar and leaving them in a storage locker in a small town in Wales, then returns to London to live in a castle with a bizarre band of misfits who are similarly devoted to the internet-free lifestyle. It’s absolutely bonkers, and lots of fun, as long as you weren’t relying on this book to actually teach you anything about quitting social media.

An Immense World, by Ed Yong

Ed Yong’s book An Immense World is a great example of the kind of non-fiction audiobook that I listen to with great interest even though I only understand and retain a small fraction of it. It’s about the sensory lives of animals — how dogs understand the world through smell, what it really means to be blind as a bat, and things far more arcane than that. The writing is lively and engaging, and listening to the book was a great way of exposing myself to a vast world of knowledge that I was almost completely ignorant of. I definitely couldn’t pass a test on the contents of a book just from one casual listen-through, but I was left with a reminder that the world and the other creatures we share it with are far more rich, strange, and varied than my human understanding reveals to me.