Top 4 novels I did not like that much

I don't want to be so mean on my blog and generally I have positive things to say about the novels I read since I know that just because something wasn't for me, does not mean it isn't for anyone or that it lacks in quality at all.

So, without further ado, here are the 4 novels that I read this year that did for some reason or other did not connect with me.

1. Greenwood - Micheal Christie

 

In a desolate future a woman works in one of the very last forests on earth. When she finds out a forgotten bit about her family's past, the reader takes a journey through family history, step by step from 2038 all the way to 1908, before traveling back to 2038, stopping at the same stations.

The concept is innovative, I'll give the novel that. Also it's beautifully written and touches on worthwhile issues. It's just that from the summary and quotes I assumed it would be hopeful (and I believe that was the author's intent, too) but by god did it feel extremely depressing to me. Almost all the characters lived miserable lonely lives and died miserable lonely deaths, which apparently await us all as the first trees in the last forest, too, become infected. 

2. Dust - Hugh Howey 

 

Dust is the third and final installment in the Silo trilogy, which now has a TV adaptation. In a post apocalyptic future what is left of humanity lives in Silos underground. Over the course of the trilogy the truths the Silo head tells the population are put into question and a rebellion is formed that works to uncover what was kept hidden. In this last novel, the characters must reckon with the lies they were told and find a way forward when their tentative peace is destroyed.

At this point I was just so bored by everything being so very bad all the time. For example, a child character is all but kidnapped and forced into child marriage for a chapter before she escapes. It took me all the way out of the story. I do think the ending is beautiful, though.

3. The Penelopiad - Margaret Atwood

 

Down in Hades, Penelope tells her story. From being chosen as a consolation price over her experiences during the Trojan war and after. 

I usually enjoy these types of perspective shifts, ancient Greek story telling, and Margaret Atwood, but little elements in the way this shift is executed bothered me. The way Helen was portrayed in particular rubbed me the wrong way. I understand that Penelope is an unreliable narrator, trying to position herself as the protagonist of the story, but still, Helen as this manipulative cruel being who causes destruction for the fun of it felt not good to read.

I do like the regular interludes of the maids in different poetic styles, who are killed at the end of the story. Giving those who are not only sidelined but condemned a voice and a humanity is interesting to me.

4. All That's Left in the World - Erik J. Brown

 

In this novel two boys, who lost everyone once dear to them, have to navigate a post apocalyptic society, find safety, find themselves, and find each other.

While I had actual criticisms about the other novels on this list, this one only did not hit me as I thought it would. Likely, I am simply too old for this, as it is a YA story. I truly did like the development of the boys' relationship and their different perspectives on the apocalypse.

Top 5 novels of the year

 Last year I gave you a rundown of all the novels I read that year. This year, however, I read 30 novels and have therefore decided to instead tell you about the five best novels I read this year and maybe about the five I liked the least.

1. Our Wives Under the Sea - Julia Armfield

 

A beautifully tragic love story in retrospect, Our Wives Under the Sea tells of a woman whose wife returns home after being lost on a deep sea mission for 6 months, as well as the wife's experience on the ocean floor. While lost, whatever Leah found in the darkness and deep, left her forever changed. Miri has to adapt to the new status quo and find that the process of grieving for the woman that embarked on her journey 6 months ago is far from over. 

The novel is an elegy that can be read both as an allegory for terminal illness as well as a tale about the transformative nature of the ocean and how despite it all, the love we have for each other is all that counts. It is also just so gorgeously written with lyrical phrasing centering the emotions of the two women.

2. Convenience Store Woman - Sayaka Murata

 

Keiko Furukura is 36 years old, single and works in a convenience store in Tokyo. She is, by all accounts, content with her life and feels fulfilled in the minutiae of her job. Everyone around her, however, insists that there is something wrong with how she chooses to live her life, her coworkers, her friends, her family, and Keiko feels the omnipresent pressure to try and mold herself into a form they might accept. 

When I read the novel I felt so charmed by the poetic description of the daily routine in the store (credit, too, here to Sayaka Murata's English translator Ginny Tapley Takemori) communicating so clearly that Keiko felt at peace there, a cog in a well-oiled machine, part of something bigger that matters to people. I also found myself deeply relating to her - ultimately fruitless - attempt to fit into what society expects of her and rejoicing at her realizing that above all she needs to stay true to herself. 

3. A Psalm for the Wild-Built - Becky Chambers

 

It is not surprising that a Becky Chambers novel would land on my top 5; she is, after all, one of my favorite authors. This novel is a meditation on themes of purpose and usefulness and identity. In a solar punk future that came centuries after a destructive industrial age which ended when the newly sentient robots left humanity to walk into the wilderness of the moon they live on, a monk called Dex in search of the meaning of life leaves the outskirts of civilization and becomes the first to run into a robot. 

The novel  is beautiful, soft and gentle. Just like Dex helps people with teas and lending an ear, this novel takes your hand through feelings of purposelessness and inadequacy. As in her Wayfarer series, the worldbuilding here is intricate and gives us a glimpse into a possible world where humanity lives in tandem with nature and hope is thriving.

4. Gingerbread - Helen Oyeyemi 

 

This was one of the last novels I read this year and I adored it. A woman is forced to confront her past when her daughter almost dies. She has to grapple with her childhood in a country that for all intents and purposes does not exist and her relationships to her mother and the family responsible for her leaving the country of her birth. 

I was immediately drawn in by the dreamy prose that gives the world, especially the non-existent country but also the present in England, a fairytale feel, with all the whimsy and uncanniness that implies. Harriet and her struggles, anxieties, hopes and dreams, felt solid and real to me and I loved exploring what made her who she is in themes of belonging, legacy and origin.

5. Assembly - Natasha Brown

 

The narrator of this tour de force of a novel is an ostensibly successful Black British woman. She has made it in a predominantly white patriarchal corporate world. A promotion is on the horizon and her rich white boyfriend just invited her to  family garden party. As she preaches to young girls that they, too, can get where she is, she feels her world to be a constant struggle and her 'dream' a lie, the success nothing more than a cage society's systems keep her in. When she receives a life-changing medical diagnosis, her inner turmoil reaches a breaking point.

The visceral and inventive writing style does not sugarcoat exactly how trapped the narrator feels and makes the reader feel with her. The issues discussed - racism, sexism, classism and sexual harassment -  are portrayed so real and inescapable, you understand how she comes to the decision she makes in the end.

Some of my favorite horror media 1

 I always used to say I don't like horror as a genre. That is not quite true, or it is not quite true anymore. Horror is such a varied genre with a multitude of utterly different subgenres that it is hard to decry the genre as a whole. And while it is true that still there are horror stories or subgenres I generally do not enjoy and would not usually seek out (slasher horror in most cases, anything revolving around torture, for example), there are also many horror stories I do like greatly, that affect me and that I connect to. So for this Halloween I decided to recommend to you some of my favorite horror media. 

Hard mode, I cannot recommend anything I have recommended before which tragically eliminates one of my absolute favorite horror short stories Brian Evenson's Smear. Check the recommendation tag for those. 

Let's start off with a simple definition. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica a horror story is "a story in which the focus is on creating a feeling of fear". The Encyclopaedia stresses the genres roots in folk tales and as such it is a genre as old as storytelling itself. Ever since there were people weaving tales for each other, they were telling scary stories intended to frighten. And so I, too, like to be disturbed.

I'll give you five for this year. 

 Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House (not to be confused with the show with the same name) is to me a quintessential haunted house tale. A researcher invites guests into a mansion to study their reactions to the buildings supposed haunting. One of the guests, Eleanor, who takes care of her sick mother and lives a withdrawn life, sees more of the haunting than the others do and begins to be drawn into the house and its ghostly effects. The main selling point to me is the entwining of the characters' psyches with the haunting itself. It's not just ghosts - it's your loneliness and your grief and your trauma. Fantastic example of the genre I like to call 'the house is only haunted because you are'.

I've watched the TV show Midnight Mass because I do love vampires and everything to do with them. It's got a great atmosphere of slow and creeping unease and a - to me - fresh take on the vampire mythos. The beloved priest of a small and isolated island town returns from a pilgrimage transformed into his young and healthy self. This is not, however, the only transformation. I greatly enjoyed how the priest recontextualizes his vampiric transformation into something pure and divine and how he convinces (almost) everyone around him so he may hold onto his belief. The vampire here is grief and an inability to let go and the destructive powers those hold.

 

Jeff Vandermeer's novel Annihilation (not to be confused with the movie of the same name) hit me so deeply that I found the movie - although it is brilliant - and its changes hard to stomach. I have since made my peace with the movie on its own merits but still hold the novel dear. A woman sets out to research a mostly unknown area where her husband formerly disappeared and later mysteriously reappeared. As soon as she and her companions enter the boundaries between what is real and not as well as between her and the area begin to blur. I adore the protagonist's gradual loss of identity as well as a connection to the theme of alienation. This novel may have been the start of my appreciation of leaving the audience guessing, of not explaining and the unknown.

I found  Which Super Little Dead Girl (TM) Are You? Take Our Quiz and Find Out! by Nino Cipri in a Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy collection. It's short horror fiction in the form of a personality quiz. You can find out which Super Little Dead Girl TM, a group of heroic dead girls, you are. During the quiz you find out about the girls and their gruesome and tragic deaths. Apart from the unusual storytelling style I love the unsettling answers that hint at the reality of the girls.

Maybe it's cheating to recommend a Magnus Archives episode because I have written about it. But that wasn't technically a recommendation, so: "Killing Floor". In the story Jonathan Sims, the archivist of an institution collecting spooky stories, reads out the story of a man who works on the killing floor of a meat processing plant. The horror here is both about consumption and flesh as well as the inescapable nature of the meat grinder that is having a job under capitalism. Extremely unsettling to me.