What I Read in January, 2023

My reading year began splendidly, with a big, fat, delicious novel, bought by me and for me in the week before Christmas, just for that purpose. It was followed by a few good mysteries, a memoir comprised of essays, and a couple of novels thoughtfully illuminating some difficult history through the voices of some compelling female protagonists. And as I’ve been doing for a few years now, I’ve made a few notes about each book in my handwritten Reading Journal. If you’ve been here for a while, you’ll know that when I began doing this, I saved myself time — and also met a personal goal of focussing on good old-school analogue materiality, pen and paper and messy script! — by simply photographing those pages and posting them here after a brief listing of titles, authors, and genres. (Here’s an example, my October Reading 2020 post.)

But at some point (probably around when I merged the reading blog with this main one), I began transcribing the notebook entries along with the photos of the pages, for all those readers who found my writing too difficult to transcribe. And quite quickly, those messy photos faded away, so that you will only see those handwritten words via the italicized text within each entry below. I take a few seconds to repeat this regularly to clarify why these brief responses are neither polished nor copy-edited. They’re not intended to be proper book reviews, just quick notes made within a few weeks of finishing a book, so that I can capture my impressions of it — or, at the very least, recall something of the Who, What, and Where.

Okay, then, Vai, Francesca, Avanti!!

1. Fayne. Ann-Marie MacDonald. Literary fiction; Historical fiction; Speculative fiction; Mystery; Romance; Coming-of-Age; LGBTQ; 19th-century Medicine; Feminist; Eco-criticism.

I treated myself to a hardcover of this when Paul and I did a pre-Christmas visit to Hagar’s Books to gift each other (ourselves). It’s a big book! 720 pages, perfect for sinking into in the quiet wintry days of January.

Charlotte is 12 — she lives with her father and a handful of servants in a centuries-old castle on their estate — Fayne — on the borderlands between Scotland and England. It’s the late 19th century and Charlotte is surprisingly well informed of classical literature (she has an astonishing photographic and auditory memory) but knows little of the changes to the world beyond the moorlands where she’s carefully isolated due to her “Condition.” Somehow, this Condition has never been explained to her, so has taken on a connection with the brother (Charles) who died, a toddler, before she was born — and with her mother, who died delivering her.

But the “birthday gift” of a tutor who introduces Charlotte to the wonders of science triggers a questioning that persists even after he leaves, seemingly abandoning her after awakening a thirst for more knowledge. Her Condition is declared no longer a threat and she is allowed to meet the (respectable) daughter of the local minister, in whom she’s surprised and delighted to find a friend and confidante.

However, shortly after having “entered her womanhood,” she finds herself under different restraints, those of the “appropriate” clothing she’s sent by her Edinburgh aunt. Dressed up as the “young lady” she’s now deemed to be, she embarks with her father to the big city where she believes her beloved father has arranged for her to sit an exam for medical school. Instead, after protracted delays she learns a shocking fact about her Condition and, indeed, about her identity.

As well, everything she has been told becomes suspect, and Charlotte must find her own way to reliable knowledge. Who can she trust if her father, her aunt, the household servants have all been withholding the truth from her? Or lying outright?

And the discoveries Charlotte makes, overturning truths she’d held absolute, parallel 19th-century changes in thinking, as evidenced by the experience she has with several medical doctors — and also by the care she sees new friends giving to the needy, particularly to poor women and children.

Another complication is that 19th-century greed for making land “profitable” is pitted against Charlotte’s love of the ancient bog and all its “magick.” MacDonald weaves all these elements together into the most delicious and satisfying novel of a transformation that returns Charlotte to her true self — with a big surprise for Charlotte and for readers.

Highly recommended — but sadly for those of you not living in Canada, you will probably have to wait a bit, as it has not yet, I’m told, been released in other countries. Make a note, though, and grab it when you see it. And let me know what you think when you eventually get your eyes on a copy.

My Instagram post about Fayne.

2. The Mountains Sing. Nguyēn Phan Qué Mai (my accents aren’t correct, but closest I could manage on my keyboard). Historical Fiction; Family Saga; 20th-century Vietnam; colonialism; Wartime survival & resilience; Women’s lives; Coming-of-Age.

My daughter recommended this; I love the little connection of us reading the same book across the miles.

Guava, the narrator of this family saga, recounts Vietnam’s 20th-century history of colonialism and conflict as she remembers her grandmother’s stories and the years they spent together. Her first memory: running to find a bomb shelter holding her grandmother’s hand in 1972 Hanoi, both her mother and father having left to help the fight against the South. Gradually we learn how the family has been separated — and how Grandma’s family had been torn from their ancestral home in 1942 and the family suffered violence at the hands of Japanese soldiers.

The narrative switches back and forth between chapters in the grand-daughter’s voice and chapters in the grandmother’s. In the latter, the grandmother tells her granddaughter of long difficult treks, re-settlement, and then, years later, a time of great hunger of conflict, a struggle for survival, of the grandmother’s desperate attempt to keep her young children (including the grand-daughter’s mother) alive even when it meant leaving them with strangers she met along the route.

One trauma seems to follow another, but Guava’s Grandmother manages not only to survive but also to continue to believe in and work for a family home, even as one after another is destroyed or stolen from her (The chapter on The Land Reforms of 1955 when neighbours denounced the family as bourgeois landowners is the most painful).

So many losses throughout, and yet the novel is a redemptive one, although never flinching from the ugliness of war, the cost of uniting the country, the need to heal after such a prolonged civil war.

Worth noting that this is the first novel the author has written in English, having already had eight books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction published in Vietnamese.

3. The Binding Room. Nadine Matheson. Mystery/Thriller/Crime; Police Procedural; Inspector Angelica Henley series; Black female detective; Serial killer; Set in London.

One of Paul’s picks at our visit to Hagar’s books the week before Christmas; even he is susceptible to the charms of a new mystery in trade paperback format.

I found this well-enough written, and it’s good to see a Black woman as Inspector and to have one of the Black officers who work with her speak about the racism he faces within the force — and having his less racialized co-workers hear him clearly.

Religion and gullibility are targeted, class as well. Numerous instances of infidelity and dishonesty. The crimes being investigated are grisly (as apparently was the case with the first book in the series).

Honestly, I was entertained enough, but some of the pages I was turning quickly because I thought the action was unnecessarily protracted; the book could have used some tighter editing. Personally wouldn’t have bought a copy, but it kept me reading until the end. Probably won’t seek out another in the series, but would read one if someone passed a copy along.

4. The Crane Wife. C.J. Hauser. Creative non-fiction; Memoir; Essays; LGBTQ; Coming-of-Age; Women’s Lives; Women’s Bodies.

Essays as memoir I think I’ll call this book. Provocative, thoughtful, often funny, often poignant, sometimes startling essays about a young woman’s relationships, her willingness (sometimes desperation) to mould herself into what her male partners need, even as at least part of her knows she’s not meeting her own needs, or even acknowledging them. Trying to fit a script that includes husband, child, house & garden, she last-minute cancels one wedding, but it will take several more failed, fairly traditional heterosexual relationships before she learns that she can enjoy having a house of her own and filling it however and with whomever she likes. And that she can do the same with her body, which she slowly comes to love rather than wants to change.

Posted an excerpt from the memoir on IG.

5. A Heart Full of Headstones. Ian Rankin. Mystery; Police Procedural; John Rebus series; Set in Edinburgh.

One of the best Rebus novels in the series. Very impressive that Rankin manages this by leaning into Rebus’s physical frailties (he’s always leaned into his character flaws, his drinking, his willingness to bend the rules, the law). Rebus seems to be around 70 now, with something like COPD. Not smoking, but still drinking, if moderately. Breathing hard after a flight of stairs.

Investigating the possible reappearance of a man long presumed dead — at the behest of Big Ger, even more diminished (or is he?) than Rebus. And of course “our man” interferes with Siobhan’s case and risks compromising her integrity as he skirts the law for what he is sure is the greater good. Except . . . . this means he once again has to (at least be seen to) get into bed with the wrong sort. . .

And although he’s unlikely ever to feel much remorse, readers can’t help seeing how close Rebus has been to the “wrong side” in the past. And even he would like his daughter and granddaughter to escape that knowledge.

The novel begins with Rebus as the accused in court, and each page that follows has us deducing what the actual charge might be — and whether John is going to spend much of his old age in jail. I can tell you no more. Recommended (but if you haven’t read any of the Rebus series before, you have some serious catching-up to do. I envy you!).

6. A Trace of Smoke. Rebecca Contrell. Mystery/Thriller; Historical Fiction; 1930s Berlin; Female protagonist; LGBTQ.

Set in Berlin in the lead-up to the Third Reich — a young crime reporter, Hannah Vogel, tries to find out how and why her younger brother, a flamboyant gay transvestite with some powerful suitors, ended up dead. Her efforts are complicated by items her brother has left in her care — dangerously compromising items of considerable value — and by a 5-year-old orphan who is left on her doorstep.

Well-written, illuminates aspects of the city’s dark history. There’s a love story as well, but a lesser thread. Impressively resourceful female protagonist. I’d read more of this series.

7. Against the Loveless World. Susan Abulhawa. Literary Fiction; Historical Fiction; 20th-century Palestine; Protest Literature; Refugee Life; Women’s Lives; Palestinian-American Writer.

Another book recommended by my daughter. A book that made me think — and feel, empathizing especially with the female protagonist. She’s a Palestinian refugee who grew up in Kuwait and, unlike her parents, loved her life there, but then was displaced again when the US invades Iraq and her family is forced to take refuge in Jordan.

A young woman whose (arranged marriage) husband abandons her, who is then manipulated into sex work . . . and who eventually manages to escape that and get herself to Palestine where she begins to educate herself, where she falls in love, makes friends, and gradually becomes a political activist.

She narrates her story from the Israeli solitary confinement cell which has held her for years as a political prisoner. I abhor the idea of violence and don’t want to accept that sometimes it is the only way to effect change — or at least to speak back to, to refuse the demands of a tyrannical state. But reading protagonist Nahr’s account of the historical injustices experienced by Palestinians, it’s easier to understand how such action seems the only option. And to wonder what I might do . . .

My Instagram Post about this book.

That’s it, that’s my January reading accounted for, and not a moment too soon as we’ve only ten days left before I’ll be putting a February report together (and oh, this is a good reading month as well! Almost makes me not mind the rain . . . almost!). Now, what about you? Have you read any of my January titles? Agree or disagree with my responses? But mostly, I’d just like to know how your reading year has begun. Any books you’d like to recommend from your recent bookstack? Any interesting reading challenges ahead? Open for all the comments below; you know I love our book chats!