October 2024 book reviews
by Alana
Fall has been beautiful this year, and I find the change of seasons – dark mornings, crisp nights – always turns me introspective. I want to say no to all the things (hah), stay in, and cuddle up with my cat, strong tea, and a good book.
As we approach year’s end, I’m checking in on my reading goals for 2024:
Reading around the world: 20 books set in 20 different countries
Crushed this one – 27/20 countries. Countries/continents and number of books from each:
Antarctica: 1
Australia: 1
Austria: 1
Botswana: 1
Canada: 5
China: 7
Democratic Republic of the Congo: 1
England: 11
Fiji: 1
France: 8
Germany: 2
Greece: 1
Guatemala: 1
India: 1
Ireland: 2
Malaysia: 1
Nigeria: 1
Poland: 1
Russia: 2
Scotland: 1
South Korea: 2
Sri Lanka: 2
Sweden: 1
Switzerland: 1
Ukraine: 2
United States: 21
Vietnam: 22
In a feat of extreme procrastination, I also mapped my reads for this year. Still pondering what I learned from this exercise:
GoodReads reading challenge: 130 books in 2024
Worried about this one. I’m only at 102! Last year I read over 150 books, so I thought I’d take things slower this year. I think next year I will set an even lower goal.
In the meantime, if you have a short, good books to recommend, please share! I will be over here, madly trying to read 28 books in two months…
October reviews
The Night Tiger – Yangsze Choo
Another gem of historical fiction and magical realism from an author I am growing to love. Set in 1930s British Malay, Choo’s novel brings to life the humid world of Hindu, Buddhist and Christian traditions, rubber plantations and city dancehalls, British expats escaping their pasts and Chinese orphans finding family. The story follows Ren, a young boy working for a British doctor, and Ji Lin, a woman trying to prove her worth in a society that limits her options. Ren and Ji Yin have 49 days to complete a dying man’s wish, and for every day they tarry a beast – maybe tiger, maybe human – stalks the town.
Choo captures the intersecting identities of Malaysia in the early twentieth century, from the native Malay to imported labour from the British Raj to the white overseers and Chinese immigrants.
Rakesfall – Varja Chandrasekera
Weirdest book of 2024. A collection short stories delivered in a slippery prose-poetry mélange. The tales are linked by Annelid and Leveret – two children who met before the Sri Lankan civil war and are reincarnated across time. Annelid assumes different identities in every context, and we follow the evolution of Sri Lanka, and of the Earth, as unspecified forces nudge human history along a specific path.
Weaving fiction, folklore, and fact and defying genre classification, this book demands patience and rewards it with moments – whole stories or sentences – that resonate somewhere in the soul. Not for you if you like linearity. A more inventive Asimov’s Foundation and an even less grounded This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.
Severance – Ling Ma
A depressing book about a plague-fueled end of the world. Written before the COVID pandemic (2018), I can see why this novel about who we become when civilization collapses experienced a recent upsurge in popularity. We follow Candance Chan, a Holden Caulfield-esque unfulfilled narrator working in Bible publishing in a Manhattan office tower. She is one of the last to flee the New York as Shen Fever – an illness that causes people to repeat tedious motions endlessly until they die – overtakes it. A commentary on the costs of slavishness to capitalism and on power structures and right to rule.
Someone recommended this to me, but I can’t remember who? (Michaela? Justine?)
I Who Have Never Known Men – Jacqueline Harpman
The most thought-provoking book I’ve read this year. Published in 1995, Harpman’s dystopic, speculative story follows an unnamed narrator who is trapped in a cage with thirty-nine other women. They have no memory of how they arrived there and aren’t allowed to communicate with the male guards who keep them imprisoned. The settings and situations change, but the central questions remain throughout.
How do we define ourselves in the absence of all the conventional markers of status (names, histories, job titles, wealth)? Why bother living if you’re not ‘getting anywhere’? Is there anything more human than wanting answers? Impossible to do this little book justice – just go read it if you want something to make you ponder what it means to be alive.
Recommended by Emily
The Silence in Between – Josie Ferguson
Equal parts devastating and hopeful, Ferguson’s debut novel traces two stories. 1940s: Lisette on the German home front and the terror of the Soviet occupation after Berlin falls. 1960s: the Berlin Wall is erected and Lisette, who lives in East Berlin, is separated from her son in the NICU of a West Berlin hospital. Lisette’s daughter Elly plots to save her mother from her grief by sneaking across the wall to rescue her brother.
Simple but incisive prose and a rapid pacing made this book a powerful, quick read. The cost of silence is the prevailing theme: the weight of secrets on family bonds, the way hurts magnify across time if left unspoken, and the scars we can’t see etched into the places and people we love. This book was gifted to me by a friend when I returned from Berlin, and it gave me goosebumps reading these very real, tragic stories about places I’d just been.
Recommended by Anton
A Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemingway
A tiny memoir of Hemingway’s time as a young broke artist in 1920s Paris. He wrote this book in the 1950s, looking back on these years before he broke out with Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, but after his years as a Toronto Star reporter. Told with the same self-effacing concision of his novels, these essays show how, in so many ways, the life of a struggling artist hasn’t changed much. Hemingway is broke and starving all the time, intrigued by his (at the time) more famous friends like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound, and just wants people to leave him alone so he can get some goddamn writing done.
A short read, only recommended if you like Hemingway. Part of my ‘read all of dad’s favourite authors’ goal.
Ripper – Isabel Allende
A meandering murder mystery set in San Francisco. A varied cast that includes an ex-Navy SEAL from the task force that hunted Bin Laden, a hippie energy healer that everyone is madly in love with (for reasons that weren’t very apparent to me, other than her curves), her awkward murder obsessed teen daughter and their fractured, mixed-raced family.
Like of Allende’s novels, the plot (finding the serial killer) takes a back seat to the complexities of interpersonal relationships and questions of identity – whether that’s for Latino immigrants, survivors of child abuse, or socially isolated kids in online spaces. Not by favourite Allende read by far, but a complete and quick read.
Warrior Girl Unearthed – Angeline Boulley
An Anishnaabe coming-of-age story that follows Perry Firekeeper-Birch through bumpy summer internships featuring murder, kidnapping, heists, sexual abuse, and institutional corruption. Explores NAGPRA, a US federal law requiring museums and colleges to return stolen Indigenous artefacts to their rightful owners, all the ways institutions resist such mandates. With all the big feelings of youth, Perry is a stubborn narrator, struggling to navigate the question of how best to advocate for her people. Do you work within inherently corrupt systems, or do you skirt the law to do what’s right?
The second book I’ve read in Boulley’s Sugar Island setting, a Chippewa community on the American side Sault Ste. Marie. I always learn so much from her well-researched books.
Pet – Akwaeke Emezi
An Afrofuturist YA story in a world where monstrous crimes are supposedly a thing of the past. But when the protagonist Jam accidentally brings a creature from her mum’s spooky painting to life, she realizes that the stories her parents tell her about their world aren’t true. Jam and Pet, the creature from the painting, search for a criminal who is hurting Jam’s friend. A thoughtful conversation starter about how to build a utopia and the fine line between fact and propaganda.
Recommended by Erin
The Comfort of Ghosts – Jacqueline Winspear
The eighteenth(!) and final installment in the historical Maisie Dobbs series. No point reading this if you haven’t read the other seventeen books, and I haven’t met anyone who has. A complete and quiet conclusion to a story that spanned post WW1 England, to WW2 on the home front and abroad, to a war-ravished Britain trying to rebuild. I’ll miss this comfort-read series but am excited for whatever Windspear does next.
Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity – Peter Attia
Tough-love nonfiction if you want to know the seven hundred different ways you’re being lazy and not doing enough to live a long and active life. Peter Attia is a Canadian doctor who now practices in the US and charges thousands to work with clients privately to enhance their lifespan. His book combines scientific research, deeply personal anecdotes, and expert interviews to make a compelling case for the usual suspects of good health – exercise more (an in the very specific ways that he outlines), sleep better, and take care of your mental health.
Recommended by Emily
