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

Non-Fiction:

Bruce Pascoe: Dark Emu. Black Seeds Agriculture Or Accident?.

Michelle Tea: Against Memoir.

Nicole Chung: All You Can Ever Know. A Memoir.

Fiction:

Courtney S. Stevens: Dress Codes For Small Towns.

Min Jin Lee: Pachinko.

Ann Leckie: Ancillary Trilogy, Providence.

R.O. Kwon: The Incendiaries.

Kelly Quindlen: Her Name in the Sky.

Sally Rooney: Normal People.

Lauren Karcz: The Gallery of Unfinished Girls.

Courtney Summers: Sadie.

Florence Gonsalves: Love & Other Carnivorous Plants.

Meg Wolitzer: The Female Persuasion.

Kirstin Chen: Bury What We Cannot Take.

Claire G. Coleman: Terra Nullius.

Kim Fu: The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore and For Today I Am A Boy.

Hsu-Ming Teo: Behind the Moon and Love and Vertigo.

Fiona Shaw: Tell it to the Bees.

Sharlene Teo: Ponti.

Becky Albertalli: Leah on the Offbeat.

Dana Mele: People Like Us.

Cristina Moracho: A Good Idea.

My favourite novel this year, Courtney S. Stevens' Dress Codes for Small Towns, is about a tightly-knit group of friends who are about to leave high school, and enter an after-school life that may tear them apart - Steven's protagonist Billie McCaffrey, is eager to preserve her beloved friends group, but what happens when individual desires interfere and people start falling in love? And what happens when the pastor's daughter just keeps getting herself, and by association, her dad, into trouble, in this small town that has narrow ideas about how girls are allowed to behave? (also, in the year in which Emily M. Danforth's The Miseducation of Cameron Post has finally become a film, it was even more awesome to find a similarly distinctive voice as Cameron in Billie McCaffrey).

And where Dress Codes for Small Towns is in part about religion and what happens when parents' religion clashes with their daughter's attempt to understand her own desires, which don't fit neatly into any category (both in terms of gender representation and maybe being in love with both of her best friends), Kelly Quindlen's Her Name in the Sky has two deeply religious protagonists who try to fit their queerness into their faith, while also trying to maintain friendships that are threatening to fall apart.

I read both these novels very closely to Becky Albertalli's Leah on the Offbeat, a sequel to Love, Simon, which was turned into a film this year, and the two novels share a concern about what happens to tightly-knit groups of friends just before college changes everything, and when individual members of the group develop feelings for each other that threaten to tear the fabric apart. At the same time, both novels have a shared endless love for that kind of friendship, and how it creates people, how it defines them within their communities. (and also, Claire Messud's The Burning Girl, about the falling apart through circumstances and identity, choices and things that seem inescapable).

So this year I caught up with all the YA that I never read as an actual youth, but it was an absolutely amazing experience to see how many beautifully written non-straight protagonists are ready to be discovered - in Lauren Karcz's The Gallery of Unfinished Girl, which again combines a strong voice in Mercedes, an artist who is struggling to find inspiration in her complicated life (an absent mother who is caring for her dying mother abroad, being responsible for her little sister, being in love with her best friend), with the magical realism of a building that brings forth perfect artistic creations, directly from the mind to the canvas, but doesn't allow the artist to take any of that into the real world. In Florence Gonsalves' Love & Other Carnivorous Plants, a friendship between two girls flails when their experiences start diverging, and individual traumas aren't shared anymore. And then, a surprising late entry, glimmering with so much heart and humour, J.C. Lillies' A&B which construes a world in which a wronged music competition show reject fights her evil side only to realise that this side may be more successful than her carefully cultivated facade of niceness is, at least until she falls in love with a former rival.

Dana Mele's People Like Us and Cristina Moracho's A Good Idea are two more or less hard-boiled crime novels that I came to having my mood set by a mixture of the above-mentioned novels about complicated friendships and romantic relationships and the television adaptation of Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects (in short, a love for protagonists with strong voices, and a not-too slight terror of small towns and communities that harbour secrets). People Like Us is located somewhere between The Secret History and Pretty Little Liars. Set in a prep school, Kay tries to solve a murder but also gets caught up in an intricate game that is set to make her pay for the crimes that she and her popular friends committed against less socially connected students. In A Good Idea, Fin returns to her small hometown from New York after her best friend has gone missing and discovers true horrors under the surface that is eating away at the lives of the kids left behind - a mixture of adults' carelessness and boredom, and emptiness that Fin doesn't seem to grasp now that she is an outsider, until it is almost too late.

In Courtney Summers' Sadie, there is barely anything left to beat back the darkness except for the love that the titular protagonist had for her sister, who has died, and the rage that she now carries against the man she thinks is responsible. In a novel constructed in different perspectives, one of which a fictional true crime podcast, Sadie pursues her goal without hesitation, with the limited resources of a teenager, and as the plot slowly reveals the horrors of her childhood, and the scars that she and her younger sister both suffered, it becomes increasingly clearer that this novel will not have a happy end for anyone. After Summers' other dark novels (especially All the Rage and Fall for Anything) - eloquently written, driven forward by strong young women who have suffered terribly, Sadie is the one that haunts me the most.

And a new Tana French - The Witch Elm, far away for the first time from the Dublin Murder Squad, or rather, still Dublin Murder Squad, but seen from the perspective of a suspect. A novel that is a marvel for somehow following around an insufferable protagonist, who has for all his life profited from the privilege of being white, straight and able-bodied but now comes to realise how hungry the world out there is without the safe protection of the things he has always taken for granted (and, arrogantly, dubbed "luck"). As a body is discovered in the old elm on his dying uncle's property, he has to examine what and how he remembers his youth - battering his own failing memory along with the pink glasses his particular privilege has put on him, while those less fortunate surrounding him point out to him how he's always got it wrong. Since we're trapped in Toby's mind, it's hard to figure out what's happening. As much as I love the Dublin Murder Squad, and especially Broken Harbour, I think this is a quiet favourite.

Moving on to college, as much The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer is about Greer's ambition, her travels through feminist movements via writing for magazines after a momentous encounter as a student (and the question of how to be authentic between personal ambition and loyalty to friends), the story here that captured me was that of her boyfriend Cory, who puts all of his own ambitions aside to move back in and care for his mother after a family tragedy (it's little bits of that story that will stay with me more than Faith Frank and Greer will, like towards the end, when Cory attempts to express his grief for his dead brother by creating a computer game that deals with grief - an odd coincidence, a concept that resembles what Cameron was trying to do with her unwinnable game in Halt and Catch Fire).
In R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries, Phoebe, a college student, becomes increasingly radicalised by an evangelical Christian group, led by an enigmatic extremist, and her boyfriend Will (who reminded me of Donna Tartt's Richard Papen, to cycle back to The Secret History) utterly fails at finding a way to save her.

Families through historic events, charting histories and individual ambitions versus mutual responsibilities, failing each other terribly, betraying each other, struggling with expectations - Min Jin Lee's Pachinko charts a family history from early 1900 Korea, through the difficult experience of being a Korean migrant to Japan, to the present day, through generations, through changing fortunes and tragedies.

The characters in Kirstin Chen's Bury What We Cannot Take are asked to make an impossible decision between their two children as they attempt to flee communist China - a novel that maps out the interior landscape of both children perfectly, as each of them reacts differently to the pressures of living in an authoritarian regime, without much help from the adults in their lives.

The trans protagonist in Kim Fu's For Today I am A Boy is as at odds with her traditional family as she is with a progressive community in Montreal, struggling to form a coherent self between the expectations of others and her own identity.

Sharlene Teo's Ponti is about a monstrous woman - a character in a film, the sole starring role of someone's mother, the starting point of an obsession and a family history of two girls in early 2000s Singapore, as the novel tells their story forward and the story of the actress in the film, backwards.

Vanessa Hua's A River of Stars, a different migration story, about making a life, about an unlikely friendship, about utterly unexpected bootstraps and motherhood.

And others - I finally got around to reading Ann Leckie's The Ancillary Trilogy, just as Providence, which is set in the same universe, was released, and beyond the world- and character-building, the ambitious way in which Leckie writes characters who do not comprehend conventionally gendered language is amazing.

Fiona Shaw's Tell it to the Bees, which has been turned into a film this year, is a beautiful novel about love between two women in a small village in 1950s Scotland, one that does not end tragically.

Sally Rooney's Normal People surprised me, because I did not expect for a story about the complicated friendship and love between its two main characters, eager-to-not-stand-out Connell and odd Marianne to affect me as much as it did - they change each other profoundly, but the best parts of the novel are Connell trying, and often failing, to express his feelings, to make sense of himself.

(and then there is my ongoing attempt to make sense of Australia, but as affecting as Hsu-Ming Teo's two novels Love and Vertigo and especially Behind the Moon, which is about three friends growing up together in Sydney, were, I don't think I'm any nearer than I was before. Claire G. Coleman's Terra Nullius is a dazzling science fiction story that starts with the brutality and terror of the invasion and ends in an invasion of a different sort.

Bright Wall/Dark Room: Hunger. On Food and Grief in A Ghost Story and Certain Women, December 5, 2018

Los Angeles Review of Books: Too Close, Too Compromised: Killing Eve and the Promise of Sandra Oh, December 4, 2018

The Intelligencer: May Faces Cabinet Mutiny As Brexit Deal Breaks Down, November 15, 2018

The New Yorker: How Russia helped swing the election for Trump, October 2018

Longreads: 'I Didn't Have the Language to Call it Racism': An Interview with Nicole Chung, October 2018

Bloomsberg: The Unsolved Murder of an Unusual Billionaire, October 24, 2018

The Lifted Brow: The Critic in the Episode "Me Too", October 22, 2018

The New York Review of Books: What to Expect When a Woman Accuses a Man in Power, October 5, 2018

The New York Times: Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father, October 2, 2018

Longreads: Hating Big Pharma Is Good, But Supply-Side Epidemic Theory Is Killing People, September 2018

Longreads: They Don’t Want to Know: Rebecca Solnit on Brett Kavanaugh and

the Denial of Old White Men, September 28, 2018