Tuesday, 18 March 2025

Favourite Books I've Read This Year (in progress)

Non-Fiction: 

Manisha Sinha: The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920.
Wright Thompson: The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.
John Ganz: When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.
Richard Flanagan: Question 7.

Fiction: 

Colson Whitehead: The Nickel Boys. 
Trang Thanh Tran: They Bloom at Night.
Liz Moore: The God of the Woods. 
Liz Moore: The Unseen World. 

I read The Nickel Boys just before watching this year's cinematic adaptation by RaMell Ross, which will be somewhere on the top of my favourite films this year: this is a beautiful, painful book about two boys caught up in the horrors of a fictionalised version of the Florida's Dozier School for Boys, the same setting as 2023's The Reformatory by Tananarive Due. The transit from the gentleness, pride and support that Elwood Curtis experiences growing up under the tender care of his grandmother into the system of abuse and violence at the "school" he ends up in through no fault of his own is jarring - his inability to realise that the rules he has internalised all his life about fairness and equity do not apply here, his focus on truth and justice, doom him, as much as his friend Turner tries to guide him. 

Trang Thanh Tran's follow-up to She is a Haunting, this year's They Bloom at Night, is set in a fishing community on the Gulf of Mexico, where a mysterious algae has literally transformed life after a Hurricane. There is a sense that the world has already ended there in some way, that the cataclysm is in the past and the remaining inhabitants are slowly coming to terms with it: Noon, daughter of a shrimper, tries to solve mysterious disappearances in the town with the help of the corrupt harbourmaster's daughter Covey, but also begins realising that she herself has been transforming into something not entirely human anymore ("a story about a monster learning to love herself") - and the story is very much about the question of what is monstrous, in a world where truly monstrous acts are being committed by people because they fear what they do not understand. 

I came to Liz Moore's fiction after starting to watch the adaptation of Long Bright River, starring Amanda Seyfried. The two novels I picked up are The God of the Woods and The Unseen World, and the range between them is truly amazing. The first one is the story of two disappearances in a manor and summer camp - one in the past, the other in 1975. The lost children are siblings, son and daughter to the rich family that employs most of the people in this part of the Adirondacks, and in revealing the details of the investigation and the people connected to it, Moore tells a story about class (specifically the relationship between the blue collar workers and the rich who depend on their labour, in spite of their claims of "self-reliance", literally the name they've chosen for their estate) and misogyny, focusing on women struggling to be heard and to have agency over their lives. 

The Unseen World is a marvel that reminded me of the best of Richard Powers' fiction: the story of a single father raising a daughter, Ada, by himself. Ada grows up surrounded by her father's colleague at a computer research institute in the 1980s - her father is heading a team that is building an early version of artificial intelligence called ELIXIR. It's an unconventional education that centres curiosity that prepares her poorly for transferring to a regular school later on, where she struggles to understand the societal rules of teenage cliques. When her father begins exhibiting symptoms of Alzheimer's, Ada realises that he has kept secrets from her, and she begins a journey to try and find out who he really is. I'm excited that both of these books have been picked up to be turned into television shows. 



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