101 – Feed
Zombie apocalypse books all tend to feel the same, I find. Unless they can take a genuinely innovative approach in how they tell the story (such as the sublime World War Z), they all tend to suffer from a lack of variety in the setting. Fast zombies, slow zombies, whatever – it’s all about feral humans chewing on an ever diminishing number of survivors.
For years I wrote and ran a MUD based on a zombie apocalypse. When I started writing it, the premise was stunningly original. By the time it was in a playable state, it was already thematically overplayed. So when I say ‘I don’t really care for zombie fiction’, you need to understand it’s not because I don’t like the ideas. Just the execution . What has always been interesting to me is how people rebound from an apocalypse, not how they were gruesomely eaten by the revenants that were once their friends. I’m Scottish, and I could just go to Hampden Park to see it in action.
So, Feed is quite nice in that respect in that it’s a book about a society that has made its peace with zombies and learned how to live with their presence. And, fittingly for a book set in the near future, one of the ways in which people live with Zombies is through the equivalent of TikTok. All mainstream media has decayed, leaving journalism in the hands of a bunch of bloggers and instragram applause monkeys. Society has rebuilt with safety in mind – an authoritarian medical junta has put in place protections against infection, and any hint of contamination is a death sentence.
Feed is the story of what happens when a pair of reasonably obscure bloggers and videographers get given access to the political campaign of for the Presidency, and the conspiracies that the access opens up as a consequence.
It’s an endearing framework, and the characters involved are all likeable enough. The premise is gently satirical – it’s not a takedown of modern online discourse, but rather a celebration of it. The story is fun, and it’s written functionally well. The word ‘functionally’ though is definitely relevant because there’s precious little in the way of artistry or flair in the text. It’s fast paced, simply constructed, and very readable. I’d be hard-pressed to recommend it on the basis of it being beautifully written or full of deep, thoughtful messages. I did though practically inhale it, which is quite a trick for a book that is over 570 pages long.
Yes, it’s a book well worth sitting down with and if you like it you’ll find the sequels are interesting too in that they provide a radical reinterpretation of everything you thought you knew. That’s always compelling.
102 – The Golem and the Djinni
At this stage in my reading project, I’d accomplished what I set out to do and was comfortably into the final stretch goal. The Golem and the Djinni is a great example of why it was worth keeping on because if I had simply stopped at the 100 mark I would have missed out on this little gem. It’s an extraordinarily beautiful, thoughtful and philosophical book. Feed was a chocolate bar, full of sugar and empty calories but perhaps not very good for you. The Golem and the Djinni was a carefully considered meal, rich in flavour and nuance. It tells the story of Chava Levy, a golem constructed largely as a servile sex-toy for a wealthy man. That man places her in his luggage and heads off to New York, where he dies on the way. Chava awakes, ownerless and alone, in a city she has no framework for navigating. Contemporarily, in the Little Syria district of New York, a tinsmith unwittingly releases a jinni from a bottle and takes responsibility for his safety. Inevitably, as two alien intelligences within a vast, unfathomable city they find themselves drawn to each other – bound together by fate and yet unable to understand the nature of their connection
Helene Wecker, the author of the book, can write – that’s not in doubt. But more than the carefully constructed language is a sense of real authenticity within – of how cultures clash, how tribes are constructed, and how our fundamental natures may pit us against the world in which we find ourselves. The universe, as Carl Sagan once said, has no obligation to be in line with human ambition. Society has no obligation to bend itself to our unique circumstances. Loneliness is not a feature linked to the people around us, but rather a function of how those people connect to us. The Golem and the Djinni is a novel that reverberates through each page with an inexpressible, depthless sorrow where the protagonists cleave together as much out of desperation as they do affection. They attract each other. They repel each other. And in that dynamic they create reverberations within the communities within which they hide. It’s Barber’s Adagio for Strings in the form of a novel. It’s a story that might best be expressed as a series of equations about magnetism. It’s a gem of a book.
It would have been nice if it had been a flawless book, but to be fair it does suffer a little in its pacing. It is ponderous in its often exhaustive exploration of the motivations and backstories of characters that only really seem to exist in order to give a bit of fizz to the story. I don’t think it was needed, really – but I guess the idea of ‘books as a vibe’ wasn’t really quite as well established in 2013 as it is now. I think you could carve maybe 100 pages out of this and end up with a better book, but even those excisions would be of a higher average quality than many published novels in their entirety.
103 – The Once and Future Witches
I absolutely adored the Ten Thousand Doors of January, as you may recall. And so, Alix Harrow became a ‘must buy’ author – so far, that hasn’t been something I regret. The Once and Future Witches is a little bit more ragged as a story – it feels as if it’s gone through something of a fragmentation by virtue of orbiting too close to the black-hole of mediocrity that is BookTok. I’d say though it emerges mostly unscathed. It’s a story of a group of sisters who find themselves at the centre of a Edwardian era witch-hunt, and lean into it by turning the Womens Rights movement into a Witches Rights movement. If The Raven Tower reminded me a lot of Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, this one was very reminiscent of how Pratchett spoke about the dynamics of witchiness in the Discworld novels. Magic that is something more akin to psychology than it is showy spellcasting, except tinged with the genuinely occult when it’s needed. A three-pronged coven structure that mirrors – in a kind of millennial style – the maiden, mother and crone dynamic of Granny, Nanny and Magrat. But there’s also a really nice undercurrent of a palimpsest of magic, in which powerful spells and rituals are found hiding in nursery rhymes and folk tales. That too has an agreeably Pratchettian sense to it, particularly harkening back to the Tiffany Aching books.
But I’m not saying in any way this is a Pratchett knock-off, although God knows I’d be happy with more people exploring the territory he mapped out. This is noticeably its own thing, and likely shares common inspiration with Pratchett as opposed to being directly inspired by his work. And Alix E. Harrow is a writer of considerable skill, deftly combining meaningful characterisation, empowering themes, and a reasonably pacy plot (albeit with some pacing issues) into an absolutely excellent book.
104 – Gone Girl
I’ve read of all Gillian Flynn’s novels at this point, and they are all fantastic. Gone Girl is easily her best-known book and maybe also her best book? It’s certainly the one that is most propulsive in its plot and I think most articulately misleading in its construction. As with all books of this nature, a plot summary is essentially the same thing as a spoiler so I’ll leave that out. But what’s most remarkable here is how, even knowing the shape of the story (I’d seen the movie) you can’t help but be drawn into the funhouse-mirror style characterisation. I deleted about two paragraphs of review here because I realised that even talking about the vague essence of the book gives away too much of what it is.
Look, Gillian Flynn can write. As with Helene Wecker, that’s not remotely in dispute. She can also put that writing in service of genuinely electrifying stories in which you can hate everyone in the book and still find yourself connecting with their struggles. So that’s why you should read Gone Girl.
But…
I think this is probably her best novel, and it’s certainly the one I devoured at the fastest pace. But it’s also easily the book with the ropiest ending and I don’t think really endings are her forte at her best (Dark Places, for example, has a ludicrous ending that I complained about at the time). The book hits a notable peak at about the 75% mark and then starts to come apart as you are forced to suspend your disbelief in ever less justifiable ways. It all sorts of flops to an ending. Perhaps it’s not possible to really energise a story like this in the first and second acts without paying the price in the third.
Read it though.
105 – The Winter of the Witch
The last of the Winternight books ends the trilogy well, although perhaps not as well as I might have liked. I’ve written quite a bit already about these books and so I won’t overly rehash it. It’s The Girl in the Tower and the Bear and the Nightingale, but with the plot moved on a bit. It’s Tiffany Aching in Imperial Russia. It’s beautifully written. It’s inevitable you’ll read it if you read the first two books.