everything i read this winter!

a much overdue catch up! lets chat about the nine books i read!

Yesterday was 29 degrees, today it is 4 degrees, and last week it snowed. I don’t know what this means for the status of spring, but I do think it means winter is over, so what better time than now to catch up on the nine books I read this winter!

new releases

Half His Age - Jeannette McCurdy

I was very excited for Jeannette McCurdy’s debut novel and while I don’t think this book was a total disappointment, it was not as strong as I thought it would be. Half His Age follows an illicit relationship between a student, Waldo, and her high school english teacher Mr. Korgy.

There were parts of this novel which felt really salient, namely McCurdy’s depiction of youth. The blunt and bordering on over explanatory prose felt like a very realistic and relatable depiction of the inner monologue of a teenager. Waldo’s intense shopping addiction and meticulous beauty routines, followed by her tangents about the sweat shops all her cheap Shein clothes are made in, felt realistic to a very specific brand of chronically online teenager and revealed Waldo’s self perception of maturity while showing the reader how immature she can be.

This is a novel about desire, and having Waldo’s sexual desires mirrored with her material desires worked really well in tying together the themes of misplaced desire—Waldo doesn’t really want Mr. Korgy or that Shein skirt, she wants to be someone else and is clawing at anything she thinks might complete the transformation.

In some ways, this novel seemed more than anything concerned with the idea of late stage capitalism, but even this was unfortunately undercut by the novel’s misplaced setting in Anchorage (read this great review for more on the mischaracterisation of Alaska in this novel).

The mother daughter relationship in the novel really worked for me in this novel, it reflected the cyclical nature of abuse, neglect, and insecurity but mapped onto two very different women. This contrast was compelling and kept the novel propulsive, I was often more invested in Waldo’s relationship with her mother than Mr. Korgy.

Where this novel really falls flat for me is in its handling of its primary subject matter. It is difficult not to compare this novel with My Dark Vanessa which is a phenomenally disturbing depiction of lifelong grooming and abuse, and in comparison this book just doesn’t even register. Despite being jam packed with plot, no ones actions ever really have consequences: things that are supposed to feel important and impactful happen almost entirely separately from one another. The nature of the plotting also makes the novel miss the mark in landing any salient critique on the many cliches it employs. Most importantly, Waldo’s character transformation is just completely unbelievable and happens entirely on a whim in the final pages of the novel.

I thought McCurdy’s characterisation and prose show promise and I will absolutely pick up what she writes next, but I overall feel that this novel under delivers on its core premise, and never quite manages to cross the finish line on its themes nor its plot.

re-reads!

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë

I love a Jane Eyre re-read to start off the year. Every time I read this novel I am moved by its uneasy relationship with romance, but what really stuck out to me on this read was Jane herself.

I have always admired Jane’s unquiet rebellion and perseverance, but on this read I found myself focusing more on the bildungsroman of it all with particular keenness. Maybe it is because I am in a particularly transitional time in my life, but it struck me more than ever how slippery Jane’s identity is. How she repeats the cycle of transformation and destruction of self throughout the novel. So often she gets so so so close to the happiness she wants, to the person she wants to be, only to have it slip through her fingers. Yet every time she manages to rebuild and get in fact, closer to true happiness and self.

Every Heart A Doorway - Seanan McGuire

Every Heart A Doorway is a novella about a school for wayward children, namely children who have slipped through magical doors to other worlds, but have been unceremoniously returned to ours.

I read this first when I was a teenager and I think it was probably my first ever portal fantasy. The novel is very of its time which funnily enough is why I didn’t enjoy it as much when I first read it, whereas now it reads with a healthy dose of nostalgia. As a reader I have never enjoyed reading about characters or circumstances that are too tangibly relatable and I think at the time the teenage angst, interpersonal teenage dramas, and specifically the dialogue between characters about queerness was felt too real for the angsty closeted teenage version of myself.

Now I can read this novella and see it for what it is, which is a fairly lighthearted story about belonging and teen angst. Unexpectedly very much worth the re read.

miniature tbr!

If you read my miniature tbr’s post, you will know that I suggested a miniature tbr comprising of Wuthering Heights, Jamaica Inn, and Reservoir 13 as a trio of books with an increasing focus on the natural world. After testing this tbr, here were my thoughts!

Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë

I think everyone on earth read or re read Wuthering Heights this winter, so I think discussing it in the context of this miniature tbr is an interesting divergence from the current discourse. However, if you want my thoughts on the recent Fennell film adaptation, I wrote a fun post on faeries and Fennell and the Heights!

Wuthering Heights is notoriously the English moors novel, the harsh, inhospitable conditions of the moors make our characters who they are and frankly is the only believable backdrop in the world for a tale so twisted and otherworldly.

In fact, I will here further specify my miniature tbr’s parameters as not simply being novels concerned with nature, but novels concerned with what it means to call a place to violent as the moors your home.

In that sense, Wuthering Heights is a tale of people accepting and rejecting the moors. The moors are not a place of great transformation or transgression, it is in fact the Heights and the Grange are places of unwilling transformation, of violence disguised as civility. The moors are representative of a distorted purity, a place where our characters are most human and in some ways the most alive.

This idea is most alive to me in Catherine, who undergoes great transformations throughout the novel, and is sustained, often unwillingly, by the magic of the moors.

The most haunting passages in part one of Wuthering Heights, speak exactly to this theme of accepting and rejecting. In chapter 3, when Lockwood goes to deal with the branch tapping against his window only to reach out to the ghost of Catherine Linton:

The intense horror of nightmare came over me; I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed,
“Let me in—let me in! […] I’m come home, I’d lost my way on the moor!”
As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child’s face looking through the window—Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed-clothes; still it wailed, “Let me in!” and maintained its tenacious grip, almost maddening me with fear.” -p. 39

and chapter 12, where Catherine is sick and mad and begs Nelly Dean to open the window:

“Oh, I’m burning! I wish I were out of doors—I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy and free… and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them! Why am I so changed? Why does my blood rush onto a hell of tumult at a few words? I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills… Open the window again wide, fasten it open! Quick, why don’t you move?”
“Because I won’t give you your death of cold,” I answered.
“You won’t give me a chance of life, you mean,” she said -p. 142

In contrast, young Cathy from the second portion of the novel, that is Catherine and Edgar’s daughter, is notably not brought up out of doors. Her ability to traverse the moors is heavily restricted by her father. This results in a single character amongst the cast who is not of the moors, it is, to me, the singular reason why she is able to overcome the trauma of her kidnapping and abuse at the hands of Linton Heathcliff and Heathcliff and close the cycle of abuse through her love of young Hareton.

Are the moors a force for good or a force for evil? Is it fair to ascribe morality to the moors when it is the people on them who inflict the violence? Do characters of the moors represent the worst, most twisted parts of what it means to be human, or in fact the realest version of humanity? These are the kinds of questions that arise for me in this specific reading of Wuthering Heights.

Wuthering Heights is an endlessly fascinating novel and one I could go on about forever, but I will leave it at this hopefully convincing argument for it as the starting point to an exploration of the way nature shapes people!

Jamaica Inn - Daphne DuMaurier

I was nothing short of floored by this novel, and I must speak of my love for it before getting into it as part of this miniature tbr.

This novel turns up the volume on what a gothic novel is: a moral education and transformation through terror. Where Gothic novels often feature darkness operating on an internal or metaphorical level, this novel is jam packed with horrible people committing horrible crimes. The terror in this novel is very literal and often very physical.

In terms of a moral education, Mary Yellan (newly my favourite gothic protagonist of all time) turns everything on its head. She comes in already fiery courageous and in some ways goes through not a transformation of self, but a rediscovery of self in the face of true terror.

One of my favourite things about this novel (and something I am temped to write a full essay on) is the way the novel contends with gender. Mary describes herself often as a man or wanting to life a mans life, even her love interest Jem describes her as a boy. There is such a twisting of Victorian understandings of gender identity in this novel, a queering, if you will, of the Gothic that was just fascinating.

I digress, the natural world in this novel is rich and Mary Yellan is, quite literally “bred to the soil,” she “[belongs] to the soil” (p.122, p.260). As a countrywoman, Mary’s experience of the moors is singular and something I found fascinating was how the moors nurtured the reclamation of the courage and hope that she already held within her.

So Mary would strike off on her own at midday, with nothing but the sun to guide her and a certain deep-grained common sense which was her natural inheritance as a country-woman” -p.37

I will not go into as much detail here as I did for Wuthering Heights for the benefit of leaving the plot unspoiled, but Mary spends large swaths of this novel traversing the moors in various dangerous and inclement conditions. Unlike Catherine, Mary is not of the moors, she is of the earth (the country specifically) and this makes her a very different protagonist.

This novel is both an of anti pastoral novel and an argument for the moors as a site for a pastoral novel? Much like in Wuthering Heights the moors have a supernatural quality to them in this novel, but for Mary Yellan the moors are benevolent, it is truly man who make the moors a place of evil. At the same time, this novel does feature characters who are entirely of the moors, who are able to escape their fate of violence and cruelty.

This novel begs many of the same questions I posed in regards to Wuthering Heights, but I think comes to some very different conclusions. It makes for a perfect companion read, I think.

Reservoir 13 - John McGregor

I was sort of disappointed by this book overall, and definitely don’t think I stand by it for the finale of the miniature tbr. Reservoir 13 is about a small, isolated village on the moors (Derbyshire) that is wracked by the tragedy of a teenage girl gone missing. The novel follows the disparate and intertwined lives of the villagers, month by month across 13 years.

The natural world in this novel is more of a complement to the insular action of this small town, and while it sort of haunts the narrative, nature doesn’t feel like a force in the same way it does in Wuthering Heights and Jamaica Inn. This novel is more concerned with the idea of time, and how differently time passes for different people, especially in the wake of a tragedy. Within that exploration of time, nature and its persistent cyclicality is what keeps the reader distinctly aware of the passage of time, even when it is at a standstill for the characters.

On the whole, this novel just didn’t really work for me. It is very experimental in its storytelling and is written in a nonstop, interwoven free indirect discourse that is quite difficult to get into at first, especially with the large cast of characters. I did feel by the end as though I knew these characters intimately in a strange sort of uninvited observer kind of way, but I can’t say I truly enjoyed the writing style.

In terms of plot, this is the kind of book where nothing happens, but also a lot happens. I wasn’t necessarily dissatisfied with the lack of explosive action in this novel—in some ways it really had its shocking, climatic moments—it’s more that I felt as though the constant tension in the novel became sort of exhausting, and at times boring. I say this knowing that this may have been entirely the authors intention, but again, I just didn’t enjoy it.

I will have to have some thoughts as to a different novel that could conclude this miniature tbr, as I think the first two make for a really compelling reading experience.

somehow the only real fantasy novel i read all winter

The Lies of Locke Lamora - Scott Lynch

Usually I am all about grimdark and high fantasy in the winter, but this was actually the only fantasy novel I have read this year. The Lies of Locke Lamora is your quintessential fantasy heist novel, our protagonist is the classic best to have ever done it with a heart of gold and our supporting cast is full of laughs and friendship.

Locke Lamora and his gang are in for their biggest score yet when the precarious criminal underbelly of Camorr becomes wracked with political unrest. Unluckily for Locke, the mysterious vengeful villain who wants to seize power seems to have a role for Locke to play which will threaten his livelihood, his crew, and his life.

This book worked for me on every level, the plotting and pacing were excellently crafted and the fantasy world was so vivid. I especially love it when authors are committed to incorporating food into their fantasy worlds, and I loved the scenes in the novel where our gang would be cooking and eating elaborate, whimsical meals together.

If you are a fantasy reader who finds Brandon Sanderson intimidating or a little devoid of whimsy, then Scott Lynch will be the perfect author for you. This novel is a solidly entertaining fantasy story, and despite there being a second novel the first book wraps up satisfyingly enough that you definitely don’t have to commit to the entire series.

manifesting spring in my reading habits

My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante

So ridiculously brilliant. My Brilliant Friend is the first novel of the Neapolitan Quartet, a series of bildungsroman novels that take you through the life and friendship of Elena and Lila, set to the backdrop of post-war Italy.

The prose in this novel is nothing short of stunning and the character work is so real it feels insanely vulnerable to admit relating to any of the novel’s characters.

Something that really stuck out to me in this novel was it’s relationship with time: personal, internal time and historical time. As much as this novel is about Elena and Lila, it is about a changing Italy, a changing social and economic landscape which affected most of all, women. The front half of the book, titled ‘CHILDHOOD’ makes almost no mention of time, and is told in a narratively non linear fashion, quite literally how you might imagine a child telling a story, anchored not by chronology, but by memory and theme. The second half, titled ‘ADOLESCENCE’ is structured almost entirely linearly, and begins to make explicit mentions of the passage of time, the awareness of time, and eventually the awareness of ‘the times’ in Lila and Elena’s sudden education on fascism, communism, and the economy.

Anyway, Elena Ferrante could write a book about a parking garage and I would devour every page.

The Story of a New Name - Elena Ferrante

I am in the middle of this novel, but wanted to include it here anyway, seeing as it is the second book in the Neapolitan Quartet.

This second novel seems to contend so far more heavily with identity, duty, desire, and performance. Lila and Elena’s actions are no longer guided by impulses and desires, they have both been (in differing, but similarly violent ways) forced into womanhood and an awareness of themselves within the world around them. Both women fluctuate significantly from chapter to chapter to disparate versions of themselves. They perform versions of themselves they want to be and versions of themselves they believe they must be to survive.

The longer I spend with these women the more I realise how much they both want and how in different ways they suppress and misunderstand their own desires. I am curious to see how both characters continue to contend with desire in the rest of this instalment.

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ta da!