Mexican Gothic
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
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I was looking for a spooky read for the Halloween season, and Mexican Gothic fit the bill pretty well. In the story, a young woman from Mexico City, Noemí, gets a letter from her cousin, who has married into a wealthy English family and is living in their mansion. The letter is full of fear and madness, and Noemí sets out to investigate. Of course, she uncovers disturbing secrets in the scary moldy old house and has to save herself from being trapped there as well.
From that setup, the horror comes from both the racist and misogynist attitudes of the patriarch of the house, and the let’s say unconventional biological methods (read: gross body horror stuff) that he’s employed to extend his family and wealth.
It’s a fun book to read, but I was slightly dissatisfied with how the some of the secrets were revealed through dreams and hallucinations. I always prefer protagonists to take an active role in finding out the truth, rather than having it just beamed into their brains.
Trash! A Garbageman’s Story
by Simon Paré-Poupart
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One of my pet peeves about the stories that we consume in our culture is how often writers write about being a writer. It’s an unfortunate economic fact that art as a product tends not to be lucrative, and so the people who can afford to spend their time producing it don’t often have experience in jobs that are associated with the poor. The author of Trash!, Simon Paré-Poupart, breaks this mold. He occupies a niche that we don’t see very often: that of an educated intellectual, doing menial labour, more specifically, collecting garbage.
Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley
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I’ve never read this classic before, but I am of course aware of the iconic Frankenstein monster that has become part of horror and Halloween culture. I was slightly surprised by just how different Shelley’s original work is from the ideas that it spawned. For one, we never actually see a scene of the monster being created. In fact, the narrative focusses much more on the interiority of characters than on showing events as they happen.
Far and Away
Reporting from the Brink of Change
by Andrew Solomon
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Andrew Solomon’s Far from the Tree and The Noonday Demon are in my pantheon of best non-fiction books. He treats his subjects with such openness and curiosity, and writes in such a calm, soothing style, that I would want to read anything he publishes, no matter the topic.
Far and Away is a collection of articles from over the course of his career, all centred around his reporting on places that are foreign to him. Early in his career, he filled the niche of writing about artists living in countries undergoing social change, like Russia and China. Much of history is captured in art, and it’s fascinating to see how artists react to history as it’s happening.
Gardens of the Moon
Malazan Book of the Fallen #1
by Steven Erikson
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I discovered this fantasy series through Jeff Cannata, one of my favourite podcasters. He has released a YouTube “book club” series where he discusses the entirety of the 10-book Malazan saga, which made me interested in reading along. After Foundation, I was looking for another big series to dive into.
The novel takes place in the Malazan Empire, and we spend time with two main groups of characters: on the one hand, we have soldiers and mages who fight on behalf of the Empress, and on the other hand, we have the citizens of the city of Darujhistan, the next target of the empire’s conquests.
The series has a reputation for being confusing and difficult to get into, and I would have to agree. We often encounter scenarios that are already in progress, and the context is left unexplained until you read further and the pieces come together. Add to that the sheer number of characters, all with shifting loyalties and secret agendas, and it can be a head-scratching reading experience at times.
The Years
by Annie Ernaux
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The back cover copy of The Years by Annie Ernaux describes itself as a “collective autobiography,” meaning that it eschews the singular first-person focus of traditional memoirs and replaces it with the plural. It starts in the period just after World War II, which traumas strengthened the French people’s national identity:
From a common ground of hunger and fear, everything was told in the ‘we’ voice and with impersonal pronouns, as if everyone were equally affected by events.
Pick a Colour
by Souvankham Thammavongsa
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This novel takes place in the same world as Souvankham Thammavongsa’s short story, “Mani Pedi,” which was one of my favourites from her collection, How to Pronounce Knife. The novel’s narrator, Ning, is the owner/manager of a beauty salon, and the characters from the short story are mentioned as competitors from another shop.
There’s not much to tell by way of plot: the book covers only a single day, as a variety of clients come in for manicures, pedicures and other… procedures? (I’m so unfamiliar with this world that I don’t even know how to describe it.) The customers seem eager to share the deepest parts of their personal lives, which prompts the narrator and her colleagues to deride and mock them in their shared non-English language. A lot of playful humour comes of this, which is basically the exact setup of this old Seinfeld plotline, but there’s way more to Ning’s character than just being a joke.
A Half-Built Garden
by Ruthanna Emrys
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In A Half-Built Garden, a giant spaceship lands on Earth in the near-ish future, and the aliens make contact with humans, proposing to rescue us from the climate crisis by welcoming us to their civilization. There are two species of aliens, and they’ve learned to live in symbiosis onboard space stations, choosing to abandon their respective home planets because of ecological decline. Conflict arises because the humans—represented by the narrator Judy and her family—have a desire to stay on Earth. The systems that created the climate crisis, in this imagined future, have been dismantled, and people are learning how to live in a sustainable society.
Having been a long-time Star Trek fan, I’ve seen many versions of the first contact story. In Star Trek, it usually plays out with the human protagonists meeting a previously unknown species of alien, and then learning a lesson by interacting with the aliens and understanding some crucial difference in their way of life. From a storytelling perspective, even though the human crew is living in a utopia future, they tend to represent the traditions that we hold in the real world, while the aliens represent more progressive ways of life. (For example, see “The Outcast,” in which Riker falls in love with a non-binary person.)
The interesting thing about A Half-Built Garden, which makes it unlike anything I’ve read before, is that the roles are almost reversed. The aliens run their society in a hierarchical way, with mothers holding the most power. It feels familiar enough to our social structures, whereas the human species have changed their society so much that they are the ones that feel alien.
The Singularity
by Dino Buzzati
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Last fall, I travelled to Italy and purchased a few books by Italian authors. The Singularity by Dino Buzzati tells the story of a secretive government project taking place at a military base. At the beginning of the novel, we follow an engineer named Ismani who has been recruited into the project, but is told nothing about what he’ll be doing. The first third of the book has a satirical bent, as Ismani and his wife try to cut through military bureaucracy to find out just one little bit of information about the project. It’s a futile exercise as one soldier after another dodges their questions, and I thought it was a little bit funny, but in hindsight, it does kind of feel like the author himself was stalling to get to the meat of the story.
Ultimately, it’s revealed that the secret project involves the creation of a supercomputer, and in a further twist, the scientist in charge of the operation has imbued the machine with the consciousness of his dead wife. To me, it became predictable rather quickly, because in our time, we’ve seen this type of story depicted many times. (For example, the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back”.) But I have to give Buzzati credit for being prescient because he wrote this in 1960.
Love of Perdition
by Camilo Castelo Branco
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I recently visited Porto, Portugal, and one of the top attractions there is a bookstore called Livraria Lello. It’s got a beautiful interior with a curvy, kind of sexy, central staircase, making it just as picturesque as the numerous churches that you find in Europe. In fact, it’s become so popular that they charge admission to get in, and there’s a queue of eagerly waiting tourists/customers outside the door. Fortunately, the ticket price is applied to any book purchases, so naturally, I bought something.
The store sells a bespoke series of classic public domain works called “The Pop Collection”, and I picked one by a Portuguese author: Love of Perdition by Camilo Castelo Branco. To add even more local flavour, the novel was supposedly written while the author was imprisoned in a jail just around the corner from the bookstore. The book is small and fit nicely inside my satchel, and I carried it with me for the rest of the trip, reading it while sitting in public squares or park benches. It was cool to come across mentions of places—Viseu, Coimbra, and of course, Porto itself—that I had visited days before.
I’m spending a lot of time talking about the context of my reading experience because sadly, I didn’t enjoy the story itself very much. It follows a young couple who fall in love, but are kept apart because their fathers hold a grudge against each other. Their passion is unstoppable, and they refuse to give each other up, resorting to violence and eventually murder.