Katheryn Thompson's Blog, page 8

Top Reads of 2020

I read more books than usual in 2020 (you can read all about them here), which has made choosing my top books of the year even harder than normal. But I've finally whittled it down to my top 10 (with 5 honourable mentions). Here goes...

1. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë



After much internal debate, Jane Eyre gets the top spot, because rereading it last year confirmed it as one of my all-time favourite books. Also, look how beautiful the edition I bought last year is.

2. Hinton Hollow Death Trip by Will Carver



Hinton Hollow Death Trip is the third book in one of the most inventive crime-fiction series I've ever read, and it is quite simply brilliant.

3. The Middle of a Sentence from The Common Breath



The Middle of a Sentence is an anthology of short stories, which I was able to completely lose myself in. I can easily imagine returning to these stories time and again.

4. Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin



Jane Eyre might be my book of the year, but James Baldwin is my author of the year. Of the books of his I read, Giovanni's Room is the one that most impressed me and stayed with me.

5. Full Throttle by Joe Hill



I often judge a book by how long it stays with me for. I read Full Throttle in March, but I'm still thinking about the brilliantly creative stories in this horror anthology.

6. Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman



Good Omens is another incredibly inventive story, which is still on my mind almost a year after reading it.

7. The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch



Iris Murdoch gets the next spot, because 2020 is the year I treated myself to the Vintage Classics Murdoch set. I'm loving the books in this beautiful collection, but The Sea, The Sea is my favourite thus far.

8. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen



2020 was also the year I discovered Jane Austen, which is why she appears next on the list. I surprised myself by loving all the books of hers I read, but none more than Pride and Prejudice. I see a lot of myself in Elizabeth Bennett.

9. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes



I ticked off a few more classics last year, including Don Quixote. This one was a bit of a slog, so I'm quite pleased with myself for reading it, but it was also an absolute blast.

10. The Sellout by Paul Beatty



Despite some tough competition, The Sellout made the final cut. I really liked this one, but it also represents to me how much my reading was shaped last year (and will continue to be shaped) by the Black Lives Matter discourse.

Honourable mentions

1. Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

2. Everything Under by Daisy Johnson



3. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

4. Afropean: Notes from Black Europe by Johny Pitts



5. Frankissstein: A Love Story by Jeanette Winterson

Here's to the books 2021 brings!

2020 in Books

Writing this blog post, in those timeless days between Christmas and New Year, it's easy to feel as if I haven't achieved much this year. However, I have actually achieved two things this year that I'm very happy with: I achieved a Distinction in my Master's (in Renaissance Literature), and I read over a hundred books this year.

In a nutshell, here's what my 2020 in books looked like:

Academic Books

I started the year with Dante's love poems, La Vita Nuova, but I also read the works he's better known for, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. I'm really pleased I took the opportunity to read and study Dante's Comedy, but I can absolutely see why most people stop reading after the Inferno. Another classic I'm pleased my Master's allowed me to tick off the list is Don Quixote, which was a slog but also an absolute blast. I also read Gargantua.



I'm also pleased that I ticked off some more Shakespeare this year: All's Well That Ends Well, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Antony and Cleopatra, The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor, King John, Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, The Tempest, Titus Andronicus, and Love's Labour's Lost.



I also read some plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries: The Virgin Martyr and The Fatal Dowry (Massinger), Englishmen For My Money; Or, A Woman Will Have Her Will, A Knack to Know an Honest Man: 1596, The Jew of Malta (Marlowe), A Knack to Know a Knave: 1594, Antonio and Mellida (Marston), A Woman Killed with Kindness (Heywood), Eastward Ho! (Jonson), The Miseries Of Enforced Marriage, 1607, and The Witch of Edmonton (Dekker). Unfortunately, only one of the plays I read was by a woman, Love's Victory by Lady Mary Wroth.

I don't tend to read entire books when it comes to secondary reading, but I did read Shakespeare and the Drama of his Time, and Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800.

Classics

I also caught up on some classics in my free time, including Little Women, Wuthering Heights, Brave New World, Dubliners, and David Copperfield. I especially loved the last two.



I discovered Jane Austen this year, in the form of Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility. I also found new favourites in Iris Murdoch, reading The Sea, The Sea (my favourite thus far), Under the Net, The Black Prince, and The Sandcastle, and Patricia Highsmith, reading Carol and The Talented Mr. Ripley.



I also reread (and fell in love with all over again) Jane Eyre.

Black Lives Matter

The discourse around the BLM protests this year made me realise (with much embarrassment) how white my reading is, so I made more of a deliberate effort this year to read books by BAME authors. I fell in love with James Baldwin, and read three more classics: Giovanni's Room, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Go Tell It on the Mountain.



I also read The Sellout, which I hadn't heard of before but really loved, Half of a Yellow Sun, Queenie, and Streets of Darkness. I didn't read as much poetry as I would have liked this year, but I did read Surge, and Milk and Honey. The latter wasn't for me, but I'm glad to have finally tried it.



For non-fiction, I finally read Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race and It's Not About the Burqa, which had been on my to-read list since they were published. I also read Don't Touch My Hair, The Good Immigrant, and Afropean: Notes from Black Europe. These are all fantastic books, but I especially loved Afropean. Inspired by the BLM discourse, I also read The End of Policing.

Crime Fiction

Streets of Darkness wasn't the only new crime-fiction series I discovered this year. I read Missing, Presumed, after coming across Remain Silent and realising it is actually the third in a series. I also read Murder as a Fine Art, The Pinocchio Brief, To Catch A Rabbit, The Various Haunts of Men, and A Dark Matter (my last book of the year). These are all series I would love to continue reading.



I completed the Millennium trilogy with The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. I also continued beloved crime fiction series with The Killings at Kingfisher Hill, the latest Poirot story from Sophie Hannah, and JD Robb's Golden in Death and Shadows in Death. I returned to the Kopp sisters with Miss Kopp's Midnight Confessions and Miss Kopp Just Won't Quit, which made me wonder why I ever left them in the first place, and I also read Will Carver's Nothing Important Happened Today and the brilliant Hinton Hollow Death Trip.



I also read Agatha Christie's The Pale Horse, The Last, Day of the Accident, The Godfather, and The Hunting Party. The latter is particularly well suited to this time of the year, if you're looking for something seasonal to read.

Page to Screen

I love reading a book and then watching an adaptation of it. I did that with several books this year, including Little Women (dir. Greta Gerwig), Pride and Prejudice (first the BBC then the film adaptation), Sense and Sensibility, The Talented Mr Ripley, The Pale Horse, and The Godfather. I also reread Jane Eyre before watching the film adaptation (while I'm waiting for No Time To Die, since both are directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga).



Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch was the first book I read purely for pleasure in 2020, and I followed it with the BBC adaptation. I also read and then watched Normal People and Fingersmith (I watched The Handmaiden).



I actually reversed the pattern for both Carol and If Beale Street Could Talk, both of which I happened to have already watched. I still prefer my usual order, but I did enjoy alternating it for a change.

I reread and rewatched the entire Twilight series (Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn) during a particular stressful period on my Master's course. I also watched a few different Shakespeare productions this year, my favourite being the NT production of Antony and Cleopatra starring Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo.

Short Stories

I read some excellent short story collections this year, including Best British Short Stories 2019, Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Tales from the Café, and one of my favourite books of 2020, The Middle of a Sentence.



I found some comfort reading in a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories selected by Arthur Conan Doyle himself, Favourite Sherlock Holmes Stories. I also read two books which I received as presents, the beautiful Russian Stories for my birthday, and the witty Fairy Tales for Millennials: 12 Problematic Stories Retold for the Modern World for Christmas (2019).



I absolutely loved Full Throttle, a collection of short stories by Stephen King's son, but was also very impressed by Their Brilliant Careers: The Fantastic Lives of Sixteen Extraordinary Australian Writers.

I also read the translated novella Fever Dream.

Fiction

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and The Discomfort of Evening were two other translated books I read this year, both of which are well suited to the winter season.



I loved Everything Under, and have no idea why I left it on my to-read shelf for so long. I also finally read The Silence of the Girls, which I got for Christmas (2019), Frankissstein: A Love Story, which had been on my to-read list since it was published, and Leonard and Hungry Paul, which absolutely lived up to its reputation. If you're looking for something uplifting to read and haven't yet read Leonard and Hungry Paul, I highly recommend it.

The Mars Room, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and Autumn had also been on my to-read list for some time. While I enjoyed all three, none of them blew me away.



I received The Beekeeper of Aleppo for my birthday, and took advantage of an offer to download a free copy of The New Guy, which I read during a bout of insomnia. I also read, and absolutely adored, Meddling Kids.

Non Fiction

I was hoping to read some more non-fiction towards the end of the year, once my academic studies were over, but the temporary closure of my local library made this difficult. However, I was pleased I finally read The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper and Mary Beard's Women & Power: A Manifesto, which was even better than I was expecting.



I also read Notes from a Small Island, which I bought for my Dad for Christmas (2019) and then borrowed, and Long Live Latin: The Pleasures of a Useless Language and How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy, which I was given for Christmas (2019).



I read two Formula 1 biographies this year, in between watching races, Niki Lauda: The Biography and Damon Hill: My Championship Year. I also read The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin and Funny You Should Ask . . .: Your Questions Answered by the QI Elves. I particularly enjoyed the latter.

The Middle of a Sentence

The Middle of a Sentence is a short prose anthology from The Common Breath, a publishing imprint based in Glasgow.



It opens with a wonderful introduction from Brian Hamill, the managing editor of The Common Breath, who discusses the form of the stories in this collection. He explains that they have rejected all descriptive labels with this anthology (such as micro-fiction, flash fiction, fragments, and prose poems), since "Story is a story is a story is a story." I loved the variety of stories in The Middle of a Sentence, all of which packed an incredible amount of detail and power into a few pages, sentences, or even lines.

Hamill also talks, in his introduction, about the immersion of the reader, using an excellent line from The Overcoat (Nikolai Gogol, 1842) to illustrate his point: “…only then did he realize he was not in the middle of a sentence, but in the middle of the street…” I felt this level of immersion not only in all of the stories in this anthology, but in the anthology as a whole.

Some of my favourites from this anthology include That Here They Call Castles by Ranbir Sidhu, Blood Cancer by Wayne Connolly (his biography at the end was a delightful conclusion), Posterity by Stu Hennigan, and The Space Between by Kirsten Anderson. But there are so many more I could have named here.

Of course I enjoyed some stories more than others, but it was the experience of losing myself in this anthology that I loved. The Middle of a Sentence is definitely one of my favourite books of 2020. You can order a copy here.

Reading Round-Up

I've found myself reading some seasonally appropriate books recently, so I thought I'd share my favourites. But be warned, they're not the usual festive fare.



Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
In a remote Polish village, Janina Duszejko, an eccentric woman in her sixties, recounts the events surrounding the disappearance of her two dogs. She is reclusive, preferring the company of animals to people; she’s unconventional, believing in the stars; and she is fond of the poetry of William Blake, from whose work the title of the book is taken. When members of a local hunting club are found murdered, Duszejko becomes involved in the investigation.

This is a dark and beautiful story. I loved the bleak setting, the idiosyncratic narrator, and the melancholy reflections on life.



The Hunting Party
In a remote hunting lodge, deep in the Scottish wilderness, old friends gather for New Year. The beautiful one; the golden couple; the volatile one; the new parents; the quiet one; the city boy; the outsider; the victim.

I was drawn to The Hunting Party for its remote setting, and small number of suspects - I'm far from the first reviewer to describe it as Agatha-Christie-esque. But what I really loved was how well it was plotted and paced. This is definitely one you won't want to put down.



The Discomfort of Evening
Jas lives with her devout farming family in the rural Netherlands. One winter's day, her older brother joins an ice skating trip; resentful at being left alone, she makes a perverse plea to God; he never returns. As grief overwhelms the farm, Jas succumbs to a vortex of increasingly disturbing fantasies, watching her family disintegrate into a darkness that threatens to derail them all.

A dark coming-of-age story, whose language is as beautiful and brutal as the landscape. This is not one for the faint-hearted.

Best British Short Stories 2019 edited by Nicholas Royle

I'm on a run of great books at the moment, and I should have known that one of the Best British Short Stories anthologies would be a safe bet to keep that run going. I've never been disappointed with Salt.



I haven't actually read that many collections of short stories, but every time I do read one I wonder why I don't read more. I love the variation, getting a taste of different writers' styles, and knowing that even if there is one I'm not keen on, it won't last long and there will be plenty of stories to make up for it. I do think, however, that I need to get better at following up on my favourite authors from the anthologies I read.

Best British Short Stories 2019 is an excellent collection of imaginative short stories, shining a light on the darker side of everyday life. The stories which stand out as my favourites are 'Smack' by Julia Armfield, and 'Reality' by John Lanchester. While there were obviously some stories I enjoyed more than others (my least favourites being slightly too cryptic), there were none I didn't enjoy. I liked that there was only really one story written in an unconventional style, but that there were more than a few stories whose writing style I admired. This one comes highly recommended.

I also highly recommend that you check out the other books that Salt publish.

The Pinocchio Brief by Abi Silver

This one originally caught my eye because it's published by Lightning Books, an independent publisher who have never let me down, and because I can't resist a good legal thriller. I finally got round to reading it when I saw it was available (as an ebook) at the library, and I wasn't disappointed.



A 15-year-old schoolboy is accused of the murder of one of his teachers. His lawyers, the guarded veteran, Judith, and the energetic young solicitor, Constance, begin a desperate pursuit of the truth, revealing uncomfortable secrets about the teacher and the school. But Judith has her own secrets which she risks exposing when it is announced that a new lie-detecting device, nicknamed Pinocchio, will be used during the trial. And is the accused, a troubled boy who loves challenges, trying to help them or not?

A book set largely in a courtroom might sound a bit boring, but I love a good legal thriller (preferably set in England). I like books which pay attention to detail, and I especially like realistic crime fiction. I also like that I usually learn something interesting when I read a legal thriller. You can tell that Abi Silver used to be a lawyer; reading this one, I really felt like I was in the courtroom with the main characters.

While crime fiction was my first real love as a reader, I'm always wary of tiring of the well-trodden genre, so my favourite kind of crime fiction does something a bit different from the rest. Legal thrillers are already a little different, but The Pinocchio Brief has a fascinating twist in the 'Pinocchio' lie-detecting software used during the trial. I was worried that this invention might be a bit distracting or implausible, but I couldn't have been more wrong.

The Pinocchio Brief is the first in a series featuring barrister Judith Burton, and solicitor Constance Lamb. I look forward to seeing what Abi Silver thinks of next (in The Aladdin Trial), especially since it means spending more time with these intriguing characters.

Eye and Lightning Books really are worth checking out, especially if you're still looking for Christmas presents. UK shipping is always free!

Reading Round-Up

The first book is actually one from the shelves of unread books we bookworms like to collect and ignore, preferring to buy or borrow new books to read. So that's exciting. How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy was a Christmas present, so I've felt even guiltier than usual about ignoring it for so long.



How the World Thinks offers a whirlwind tour of the philosophies of the world, their origin and their relevance to twenty-first century life. Through his own travel, reading, and interviews with thinkers from around the globe, Baggini not only explains lesser-studied (in the West) systems of thought, but also makes the case for comparative philosophy. By gaining greater knowledge of how others think, we take the first step to a greater understanding of ourselves.

This is a very well-written book. Baggini writes with concision and clarity, and his focus on 'how the world thinks' means that we are not simply faced with a deluge of information. Each chapter concentrates on a different concept (such as logic or liberation), and how that concept is thought about in different parts of the world. This format makes it easy to see the relevance of what we're reading. To give some specific examples, I particularly enjoyed Baggini's discussions of progression and Islam, belonging in Britain, and the either/or mindset in Western philosophy and democracy. I have struggled with philosophy in the past, largely because I found it pointless, and thus uninteresting. This book has encouraged me to give philosophy another go. I might even start with Baggini's 'further reading' list.

My local library is still not open for browsing, and the 'click and collect' option is difficult to use for a number of reasons, so I returned to their collection of ebooks, and was thrilled to find that Frankissstein: A Love Story was available.



In Brexit Britain, a young transgender doctor called Ry is falling in love – against their better judgement – with Victor Stein, a celebrated professor leading the public debate around AI. Meanwhile, Ron Lord, just divorced and living with Mum again, is set to make his fortune launching a new generation of sex dolls for lonely men everywhere. Across the Atlantic, in Phoenix, Arizona, a cryonics facility houses dozens of bodies of men and women who are medically and legally dead … but waiting to return to life. But the scene is set in 1816, when nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley writes a story about creating a non-biological life-form.

I really like the different places Winterson takes the idea of Frankenstein: the hybridity of transgender identity, the man vs machine debate of artificial intelligence, the interplay of creator and created we see in the fact that Frankenstein so often gets mistaken for the name of the creature, not to mention numerous musings on the soul, eternal life, and the place of woman. Yet, ironically, I don't think these parts ever quite come together to form a coherent whole. That doesn't have to be an criticism, of course. I liked the way quotations, different storylines, and speech and narration flowed into one another. But, as another review brilliantly puts it, here the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. My only real criticism is that there were a few moments where it seemed Winterson felt it necessary to provide some background information. These moments really pulled me out of the story.

If you enjoyed this one, I'd think you'd also enjoy Murmur; the story of Mary Shelley coming up with the idea for Frankenstein reminded me of the Doctor Who episode The Haunting of Villa Diodati (12.8); and if you're looking for more stories about transgender experiences, I'd recommend Everything Under and A Fantastic Woman (2017).

The third, and final, book is also courtesy of the library's collection of ebooks: Meddling Kids.



In 1977 the Blyton Summer Detective Club unmasked the elusive Sleepy Lake monster - another low-life fortune hunter who would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids. By 1990 the former detectives are haunted by strange, half-remembered events that cannot be explained by a guy in a mask. Andy, the once-intrepid tomboy now wanted in two states, wants answers. To find them she will need Kerri, the former kid genius now drinking her ghosts away in New York with Tim, an excitable Weimaraner descended from the original canine member of the club. They will also have to get Nate, the horror nerd currently residing in an asylum. Luckily Nate has not lost contact with Peter, the handsome jock turned movie star who was once their leader … which is remarkable, considering Peter has been dead for years.

I absolutely adore the premise for this one, and am pleased to report that the book lived up to it (unfortunately not always the case). The characters don't map exactly onto each other (and there are also echoes of the Famous Five), but, in many ways, this is the story of what happened when the Scooby Doo gang grew up. It's a nostalgic adventure set in the real world. Cantero also has a really unusual writing style, perhaps best described as metafictional, which I loved. If you're looking to read something different, I'd recommend giving this one a go. It's one hell of a ride.

Also, if you enjoyed Meddling Kids, I think you'd also like The Last Days of Jack Sparks.

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

This is the third James Baldwin book that I checked out of the library, having first discovered his lyrical writing through the documentary-film I Am Not Your Negro. Go Tell It on the Mountain is actually Baldwin's first novel, so it might sound odd that I left it to the end. I never know what order to read an author's books in, so I usually just stick to reading what I'm in the mood for.



Drawing on his own childhood in a religious community in 1930s Harlem, Baldwin tells the story of young Johnny Grimes. Johnny is destined to become a preacher like his father, Gabriel, at the Temple of the Fire Baptized, where the church swells with song. But he feels only scalding hatred for Gabriel, whose fear and fanaticism make him cruelly abuse his family. Johnny vows that, for him, things will be different.

I couldn't help but compare Go Tell It on the Mountain to the other Baldwin books I have just read - which is where the order I read them in becomes important - and I did prefer both Giovanni's Room and If Beale Street Could Talk. I found this one took a bit longer to get going, although it is the longest of the three books, but by the time I was about halfway through I was hooked. I really liked the way different chapters focused on different characters, and I found that more of Baldwin's characters had more depth in Go Tell than in his other books that I read. This isn't a criticism of the other books, merely a comment on their style of narration, but I especially liked the female characters in this one more than I have in Baldwin's other books.

I liked the theme that ran throughout of children wanting to live different, better lives from their parents. This is both recognisable and unrecognisable, since this is a very different struggle for the African-American characters of the book than any I can imagine. The brief introduction (which I read after I had read the novel) explains this context well. I also liked the recurring theme of hatred, especially in characters who wanted to come to God but didn't want to let go of their hate - a conflict made more problematic by the fact that this hatred was associated with a preacher of God's word. I think this has relevance beyond its immediate religious context.

Baldwin is definitely a new favourite, but, at the moment, I still think his best book is Giovanni's Room.

Spoiler Warning! I was a bit disappointed when it was revealed that Johnny wasn't Gabriel's biological son, since I think this was too simple a solution to his favouritism for Roy. I understand that it fitted well with the exploration of sin, and made a neat parallel with Royal, but I think it might have been more interesting if Gabriel's bias didn't have a reason.

If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

I usually like to read a book before I watch the film, but this time I read the book about two years after I watched the film. I really enjoyed remembering vivid snippets of the film, especially picturing the characters as their actors, while I read.



If Beale Street Could Talk is very much about its plot - the story of a young, Black man being falsely accused of a crime - but it is also about so much more that the book wasn't ruined by already knowing what happened, especially since changes always take place between page and screen. In particular, although I knew the story didn't have a happy ending, the way Baldwin wrote it still broke my heart.

I came to James Baldwin because of his eloquence, and the poetry that I so much enjoyed in Giovanni's Room (you can read my review here) was also one of my favourite aspects of If Beale Street Could Talk. I am in awe of not only the way Baldwin writes, but the way his mind works. I don't agree with everything his narrator and characters say, but there is an undeniable truth to everything he writes, just because of the way he writes, the way he sees the world.

I read a review that described it as a relief to read the story from Tish's point of view, and I completely agree. Somehow, If Beale Street Could Talk manages to be both heart-breakingly real and irresistibly hopeful. The film adaptation pulls this off too. I think a lot of this is because Tish, so clearly supported by her loving family, is our narrator. So don't be put off by thinking this is a depressing book; it's not. It's beautiful, and heart-breaking, and uplifting. I especially loved the descriptions of Fonny sculpting - one artist to another.

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

At the end of June, I watched the BBC's I Am Not Your Negro, a documentary film based on Baldwin's unfinished manuscript Remember This House. I immediately ordered all his books my library had. I finally got my hands on them on Friday: Giovanni's Room, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Go Tell It on the Mountain. But the delay is serendipitous, because today - the day that I finished my first book by James Baldwin - is Baldwin's birthday. He would have been 96.



David, a young white American in 1950s Paris, is waiting for his fiancée to return from Spain. But when he meets Giovanni, a handsome Italian barman, the two men are drawn into an intense affair. After three months Hella returns, and, denying his true nature, David rejects Giovanni for a 'safe' future as a married man. His decision eventually brings tragedy.

I wanted to read James Baldwin's books because, watching the documentary, I was enthralled by his eloquence. He seemed to have a gift for coining the perfect turn of phrase, and for making language speak the truth. His eloquence was also physical, in the way he looked and the sound of his voice. It was this genius for language that I most enjoyed about Giovanni's Room; not only the way Baldwin expresses things, but the way he sees things. I frequently found myself rereading a certain phrase, in a way that I do with Shakespeare or with poetry.

The story itself also feels truthful. This isn't just a story about two men falling in love in a time and place where it wasn't acceptable. I love how Baldwin evokes the society of men David and Giovanni meet amidst, forced into the shadows not by the law but by societal pressure. We feel the power of internal forces more than external forces. I also liked that Baldwin's characters could be uncertain, even unreadable.

This isn't just a beautiful story told in a beautiful way. Baldwin balances style and plot, and the book's structure is difficult to pin down but works so well. I kept reading to find out what happened - not just in the plot, but to the characters, to the story.