cellar door. we might as well be a symphony.: Favourite books I've read this year

Non-Fiction:

Ocean Vuong: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous.
Leslie Jamison: The Recovering. Intoxication and Its Aftermath.
Carmen Maria Machado: In the Dream House.

Alice Bolin: Dead Girls. Essays on Surviving an American Obsession.
Jia Tolentino: Trick Mirror.

Natasha Lennard: Being Numerous. Essays on Non-Fascist Life.

Jenny Odell: How to Do Nothing.

George Packer: The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.
George Packer: Our Man. Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century.
Stuart Schrader: Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.
David France: How to Survive a Plague. The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed AIDS.

Fiction:

Seth Dickinson: The Monster Baru Cormorant.

Rory Power: Wilder Girls.

Becky Chambers: To Be Taught If Fortunate.

Lisa Ko: The Leavers.

Crystal Hana Kim: If You Leave Me.

Esmé Weijun Wang: The Border of Paradise.

Chloe Benjamin: The Immortalists.
Tanwi Nandini Islam: Bright Lines.
Andrea Lawlor: Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl.

Ausma Zehanat Khan: The Unquiet Dead.

Elizabeth Hand: Generation Loss.

Laura McHugh: The Wolf Wants In.

Kristen Lepionka: The Last Place You Look.

Paul Tremblay: A Head Full of Ghosts.

Stephen King: Duma Key.

Stephen & Owen King: Sleeping Beauties.

My favourite novel this year is The Monster Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson's long-awaited follow-up to The Traitor Baru Cormorant. Baru navigates a growing world, struggles with newly discovered power structures, and we learn more about the past to give us a more complex picture of power. But the best thing about the novels is its complicated and now literally split protagonist Baru (backed up by a whole cast of other women).

Closely followed by Rory Power's Wilder Girls, which sometimes feels like it is set in Jeff VanderMeer's Area X, except it adds the genius twist of considering what the biological transformation that happens on its island would do to girls who are going through puberty. At Wilder Girls' centre is a boarding school on an isolated island in which a mysterious and unexplained infection (the Tox) has affected every single inhabitant - and is slowly transforming them into something else, a process that seems to inevitably kill the girls. The novel follows three girls - Hetty, Byatt and Reese, as they try to escape somehow.

I spent much of this year re-reading and catching up with the new novels of Stephen King. I started reading him when I was nine or ten, and then stopped abruptly (as far as I remember, the at the time most recent of his novels I finished was Dreamcatcher), with the exception of re-reading It every four years because it felt good to track my own progress as a reader by the novel that I remember vividly reading for the first time in the summer of 1998. I stopped doing that after I just couldn't get over how the book ends, how weird it is to read these scenes now (there's a reason why they were adapted differently in both films). I've not managed to read all the novels, but I did read examples from all the decades (the oldest I managed was The Shining, the most recent one The Outsider, even though I'm looking to finish The Institute before the year is over). I've still not managed to even begin the Dark Towers series, and the one story that I feel has influenced me the most, or stayed with me the longest, is the 1995 television adaptation of The Langoliers, which I must have watched not that long after it originally came out with my grandmother and my cousin, perhaps years before I read any of his books.

In any case, here are the novels that stood out from the re-read: The Stand (along with the television miniseries), which at the time contributed significantly to my love for apocalyptic narratives, even if it still weird to count this on the same list as Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend in a Coma, The Tommyknockers, which I like more than 90% of other readers, Insomnia, Duma Key, Under the Dome, 11/22/63, the Mr Mercedes series (which has its issues, and I'd argue that the television show is actually better than the books), and Sleeping Beauties, which he wrote with his son Owen King. This was the first time that I appreciated the range of genre as well as the recurring tropes in all of his stories (I think Sleeping Beauties profits immensely from having a second, younger voice in there). I did not re-read Dolores Clayborne, which I remember I used to count as my favourite especially because it was so unlike the others. I also didn't re-watch Stand By Me.

An aside here: I was re-reading Stephen King, but the horror novel that will stay with me longer than most of these books is Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts, which finds an incredibly interesting form for its story about a suburban teenager who is either possessed by a demon or suffering from a severe mental illness - the interpretation of her suffering becomes determined by powerful economic and ideological interests, which is maybe true of teenage girls' bodies in general anyway. The story is told from the perspective of Merrie, the younger sister of the girl who may be possessed (Marjorie), but then also features television episode reviews from Merrie as an adult of the reality show that was eventually made of Marjorie's suffering. It all inevitably ends in a catastrophe.

I also read a lot of crime fiction this year, especially most of Laura Lippman's non-Tess-Monaghan novels, all of which feature complex characters and great twists. I read both of Kristen Lepionka's Roxane Weary novels (The Last Place You Look and What You Want to See). I read the thriller-crime novels of Laura McHugh, which are particularly good at capturing the places in which they are set (Arrowood, The Weight of Blood, her most recent The Wolf Wants In, which is one of the greatest portrait of an economically deprived, oxycontin-ravaged area that I've read).

Also, Elizabeth Hand's Generation Loss, an accidental crime novel set on a remote island, a novel of photography as much as about the serial killer that haunts the protagonist who stumbles right in the middle of his artwork. And Ausma Zehanat Khan's Rachel Getty and Esa Khattak novel's, which are always about history and culture, about international conflicts translated into local crimes (The Unquiet Dead for example would make a great companion piece to Juli Zeh's Adler und Engel, which has a similar approach).

And - Lisa Ko's The Leavers, about a boy who loses his mother in the maze of immigration law and is adopted by a white family, and slowly unravels what happened, attempting to explain his trauma. Crystal Hana Kim's If You Leave Me, a complex family saga set before and after the Korean War, the portrait of an unhappy marriage. Chloe Benjamin's The Immortalists, four siblings learn when they will die from a future teller and we follow their lives as they unfold, questioning if they are determined by fate or by free will, painting a portrait of the decades as much as of the four characters. Esmé Weijun Wang's The Border of Paradise is haunting, and impossible to describe, but an essential read.

And Tanwi Nandini Islam's Bright Lines about a Bangladeshi family living in Brooklyn in 2003, a portrait of characters struggling to figure out who they are. And Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor, whose shape-shifting main character Paul (who thinks Orlando comes closest, but he himself never had the luxury of quiet servants) navigates what it means to be able to inhibit a body that can present as male or female.

Becky Chamber's To Be Taught, If Fortunate, her first novel set outside the universe she created in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet follows four astronauts who are sent on a long-haul space-flight to study the flora and fauna of exoplanets. It's a short novel, but it beautifully tracks their scientific excitement, the details of their work studying worlds that have never been visited by humans, the bonds of their lives together so far removed from the world they came from that news from Earth travels fourteen years before reaching them. There's more to it, and inevitable drama, but I highly recommend this for imagining what it would be like if the future held exploration and science in store for humanity, rather than exploitation of resources. And maybe this is as close to Ursula K. Le Guin's implicit comprehension of the connection between the environment and everything that inhabits it as we can get in 2019.

This year, I also applied for citizenship in the country that I have been living in for the past five years. It is difficult to explain the complex thoughts and feeling that I have about exchanging a citizenship in a country that I have always struggled with for one of a country whose history of colonisation and violence is unresolved in a different manner. The way I have decided to do it is to try and find an intellectual connection, an understanding of the debates and approaches to Australia - and I have been reading the diverse writings in Meanjin and The Lifted Brow to get started on something that will take a lifetime.

Also, The Habitat podcast.