It’s close to the end of the year. I thought I’d do a wrap up of my favourites. I know there’s a week+ more left in the year, but I think this list will stand anyway. So here we go.
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
This was incredible and it made me remember why I love Science Fiction. It’s pretty soft sci-fi, and it’s lovely. It is about the crew of a space ship that punches tunnels through space. The tunnels are made in a sort of parallel to space so people can travel faster from one end of space to the other. They get a job to make a new tunnel and the book tells the story of them travelling to the place where they’re starting the tunnel, and basically tells the story of the sort of weird and oddly put together crew, and their troubles and struggles. It’s so beautiful. It’s chock full of diversity of gender and sexuality. There’s an angle in it that I really love, which is the idea that humans discover that the universe is full of other species and aliens and humans are babies and at the bottom of the hierarchy and they have to submit and trust others. I really like that. I loved the characters and the way it looked at love and relationships, and I have never cried so much over an android in my life.
The Vegetarian by Han Kang
The Vegetarian is a South Korean novel about a woman who suddenly decides she will stop eating meat for no good reason. Her husband finds it really frustrating because he has to eat what she makes, and he doesn’t want to be vegetarian. She seems to be going towards a nervous break of some kind and no one can stop her. The book is told from the perspective of her husband, her brother-in-law and her sister so we never get the main character’s perspective on her vegetarianism and her mental breakdown. I really loved it, it’s so beautiful. It’s really weird, and really uncomfortable. The characters are all awful, the husband is horrible, her family is cruel and don’t understand, and it’s so weird. And I really want to read Human Acts as well.
Bruce by Peter Ames Carlin
This is a Bruce Springsteen biography. It’s really big and comprehensive. It came out a couple of ye
ars ago and it obviously goes from he was born and until today. I really love Bruce Springsteen, when I found out he was coming to Oslo to do a gig I made a weird noise. I have never made it before or again. I love him so much. Anyway. This was really great. I loved it. I think it’s probably a good place to start if you want to read about Springsteen. I should say I haven’t read other books about him, but this was simple to read and it was comprehensive and it was lovely. It’s not gossipy, but it does bring up things that Bruce did that weren’t great. He has a tendency to change on a dime and not think about how it will affect others, but just breaks up the E Street Band out of nowhere, leaving his band in the lurch. It always talks about him going from this man who just wanted it to be about the music, and then going; fuck it, I’m going to be political, because it cannot go on like this. He’s great.
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
This is my second Morrison book and it’s about Milkman Dead. He was born right after a neighbourhood man throws himself off a roof because he wants to fly. It’s a slightly different and odd coming-of-age story. It’s about a boy who doesn’t fit in with his father, and who is sort of turned against his mother by his father. He keeps complaining that he doesn’t have the life he wants, but for the most part he does nothing to change his life. Because he’s comfortable and has no impetus to actually change. He is judgy towards his sisters when they don’t lead the lives he wants. And finally he just sort of tries to change his life. And it’s weird and not particularly well thought out and oddly funny. And it’s a stunning comment on race in the States around the time of Jim Crow and a really horrifying way a group of black men try to fight back against institutionalised racism. It’s so good.
Signs preceding the end of the world by Yuri Herrera
This 
is a very small book about a young woman who walks across the Mexico-US border to find her brother who emigrated to the States and who they haven’t heard from in years. She meets a motley crew of people who help her over. She’s in danger because she has basically smuggled something over so she can go over the border, pretty much to pay her way. It’s written in this very spare and sparse style and in a sort of stream-of-consciousness way. It reminded me a lot of Cormac McCarthy, Herrera doesn’t really use punctuation or quotes so it might not be for everyone. It really didn’t bother me, I don’t mind that. I actually thought it helped the story and the language. It was beautiful.
The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas
This is a Norwegian novel about two girls, Unn and Siss who live in a small Norwegian village. Siss has lived there her whole life, and Unn moves there at the beginning, and they become friends over night, in the way that you do when you’re like ten years old. Then Unn disappears and Siss falls apart. It’s so beautiful. There’s something fairy tale-esque about it. It’s also very Norwegian, which is not something I can explain, it’s just something that I associate with Norwegian literature. It’s steeped in ice and cold and it’s so beautiful and I want to read more from him. I obviously read it in Norwegian and it’s sort of in Vesaas’ dialect. I don’t know how they’ve translated it, but I’ve heard it’s great.
Shrill: Notes from a loud woman by Lindy West
Shrill i
s Lindy West’s memoir. She is a journalist/writer/comedian and she is awesome. This is about her growing up being shy and awkward, and then becoming loud and feminist and unapologetic, and it’s great. I had heard about Lindy West through a This American Life podcast where she confronts a troll who has created a twitter account that says it’s her recently deceased father. And it’s an amazing podcast. She says he’s the only troll who has ever apologized to her and realized that what he did was heinous. It’s incredible. She also tells this story in the book. She also talks a lot about being a fat woman, which is something I really appreciated, since I am also a fat woman, and I grew up being pudgy and shy and awkward. And I really loved that. She talks a lot about things that sort of is just part of your life as a fat person and it was really cool. I’ve since listened to a lot of podcasts with Lindy, because I love her now. I listened to this on audiobook and I think that was a good choice. Lindy read it herself and it means you get her tone and she knows how she meant things so her snark and sarcasm comes through really well. It was just incredible.
The Geek Feminist Revolution by Kameron Hurley
This was a collection of essays by science fiction writer Kameron Hurley. It’s basically a collection of essays she’s published online, in newspapers and everywhere else. I’ve never read them before so to me that was great. They’re about feminism and geek culture, and trolling. And it’s also about herself and her life and her own chronic illness and how it impacts her to have diabetes. It’s also about her own sci-fi writing and how she had to confront her own privilege and her own preconception and how she has worked actively to change how and what she writes. Which I thought was great. It’s always hard to admit you’ve fucked up, especially when you’ve tried really hard to be inclusive and do good. It’s also about the slog of writing, it’s not always easy, it’s not always something you can live on. It’s really cool.
Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
Bryan Stevenson is a civil rights lawyer who works with people on Death Row, trying to get them off. And particularly people who have been wrongfully convicted. The book and story is focused on the case of Walter McMillan, a man who was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to die. Stevenson spends years untangling the mess of a case that Walter had. The book also goes into other cases Stevenson has worked. He focuses on helping the poor, children, women, minorities, people who have trouble getting help anywhere else. At the same time it’s a coming-of-age story for Stevenson who goes from being a young idealistic newly educated lawyer to becoming an experienced, still idealistic lawyer who fights for equal rights, and who argues for compassion. It made me so angry to read about the cases he has litigated, it made me so angry to hear how people are treated in the American justice system, like a small 14-year-old boy who is placed in general population in an adult prison when he should probably be placed in a low security juvenile detention centre. It’s so heart breaking, and Stevenson is so inspiring, and he’s a fabulous writer.
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine
This is a prose poetry book. It’s a comment on race in the US. It’s also a lot about Serena Williams and her brilliance, and the racism that Williams faces all the time. I don’t think I can explain how much I love Serena Williams, which is slightly weird, but you know. So I really loved reading about her, because it’s really interesting to watch Williams play tennis, because it’s such a white, upper-class sport, and she spends a lot of her time policing how she behaves so she won’t be called out on completely normal behaviour. She is often called too exuberant, or too angry just for being her, and it’s really unfair. The poems looks at racism in everyday life, on TV, online, on the tennis court, on the soccer pitch, and it’s wonderful and powerful.
Korea. She grew up in a fairly well-to-do family by North Korean standards. Her father was a smuggler and it means they had an okay life. Then her father was caught and put in prison and the Park family fell into poverty. When Yeonmi was 13 her sister Unmi ran away, defecting, and when Yeonmi and her mother are told this and that they can be helped out of the country as well they defect and go to China. They go to look for Unmi, and hope that their father can join them. Yeonmi talks about her experience being trafficked in China, and working with her trafficker to survive. Eventually they are helped across the border to Mongolia and then taken to South Korea, where Yeonmi keeps searching for, and reaching out to, her sister.
Mukherjee is a cancer physician and researcher, and he originally hails from India, but lives in America. He uses his own family as a sort of through line in the book. His father’s brothers in India struggled with mental illness, one being schizophrenic, one being bipolar, and both of them going to pieces when they get wrongly diagnosed, and because they live in abject poverty. Mukherjee finds out that it’s quite common to have this pairing, a father having two sons where one is schizophrenic and one is bipolar, and it travels down the generations. He wonders if he carries it inside him, and should he inform his wife in case they have sons? It was a fascinating history. I haven’t had any biology since I went to high school, which is apparently 10 years ago. I’m fine. It was still fairly easy to understand and it was comprehensive. Obviously it’s not completely comprehensive, cause it’s 500 pages, and you can’t cover Aristotle to 2016 in 500 pages, but if covered the basics and the big lines, and it was great. I really want to read his other book which is about cancer.
version of if, where he gives a history of the 13 sort of most important presidents, or most profiled presidents I guess, and then gives like a quick two-sentence profile of the rest. It was written in 2008, so the last president mentioned is George W. Bush. It was really interesting, and there are definitely things about the US presidents that I didn’t know, because I’m not American, so our school curriculum doesn’t focus too much on them. So what I know about them I have from popular culture to be honest, therefore it was really interesting to hear about these presidents and their lives. I think I want to read some presidential biographies, and this made me want to pick one up quicker. I do have a gripe with the audio book. It’s read by the author and he consistently reads English, and French, German, Russian, names and place names with a Norwegian accent. Sometimes I it didn’t bother me, sometimes it was incredibly jarring (Gerald with a hard G? I’m not sure it’s even Norwegian). Other than that it was a fine audiobook performance.
her life. Some of them are about her life right now, some are about her early life with her late husband and with her family. It was really beautiful. They mostly focus on places she goes to. A lot of them starts with her going to her favorite café just down the street from where she lives and how that is often the start of her day. It is just a sort of rambling group of stories and essays. She goes on quite a lot of trips and has friends all around the world. She has travelled a lot of these places with her husband, Fred Smith, who passed away in 1994. She keeps remembering them going to these places together, and it’s very beautiful. She has all these memories of him that she can evoke by going somewhere. I really liked it and I want to read Just Kids as well. 
his was a book I’d had on my Kindle for years, and I finally read it. Finally. So this is about a man named Marlow who tells his story of travelling in the Belgian Congo looking for an infamous ivory trader named Kurtz. He becomes obsessed with Kurtz, he doesn’t know much about him, but he has this intense need to know him. It’s about Marlow struggling his way through the jungle to find this enigmatic man, and how it affects him. It’s an interesting novel. It was really beautifully written, like, it was gorgeous, I read it pretty quickly, it was fairly easy to understand. It was real racist, obviously, colonialists going to the middle of the Congo were racist, shocking. I know it’s how people talked in the Victorian age, still really racist. Anyway. It was beautifully written and the story was fascinating, I’m glad I read it.
Noam Chomsky talking to each other about Palestine and Israel. Frank Barat also joins in the conversation, usually to ask questions and suggest topics. The book also has essays and speeches by both Pappé and Chomsky on the topic of Palestine. I always found the story and history of Palestine and Israel fascinating, and always want to learn more about the conflict. Pappé and Chomsky are on the side of Palestine and they very much discuss how Israel’s occupation is criminal and can be compared to apartheid in South Africa. I thought it was really interesting and I definitely want to read more. Although I align with Chomsky and Pappé on the side of Palestine I also want to read something written by someone on the side of Israel. I think that would be interesting. Pappé and Chomsky also discuss what could be the solution to Palestine and Israel, and how the two-state solution seems to have failed, but everyone trying to help still holds onto it as the only solution, and maybe we need to come up with a new solution, which was really interesting. So yes, more of this.
man’s struggle to fill the spiritual void. Despair gives you purpose and it changes you and whatever. I was in no way intelligent enough for this book. It went straight over my head. It’s basically about humanity philosophizing on their own existence and the despair they feel around their own existence, Kierkegaard was an existentialist, so that makes sense. A lot of it focuses on whether or not you know you have a self and whether or not you can accept having a self. And it looks at your willingness to admit that you depend on others because you depend on love and companionship and all that jazz. As I said, it went over my head, I felt incredibly stupid. I should try to read more philosophy.
It’s the story of Wendy, John and Michael Darling who live in London with their mother and father, and who meet Peter Pan. Peter Pan is from Neverland and he has come to London to find a mother for the Lost Boys, his group of orphan boys who live with him in Neverland. Wendy and her brothers come with Peter to Neverland and have an adventure, and Mr. and Mrs. Darling sit in their room and worry about whether they’ll come home. I really liked it. It’s so sweet and beautiful and it’s so vicious. I had only really seen the Disney cartoon, and I was not aware of how much murder there is. Like they kill pirates and Indians and that’s just, so much fun. Peter is so ruthless and cruel, like young boys can sometimes be cruel. It’s sort of a thing that all children are, but grow out of when they get older, but Peter won’t grow up, so he just stays that way. He’s narcissistic and arrogant and cruel, and the book is incredibly beautiful. It was so nice.
e called Middlemarch. The main character, I guess, is Dorothea Brooke. She lives with her younger sister Celia and her uncle. She marries a much older man, Edward Casaubon, and effectively traps herself in a loveless marriage. It’s about Casaubon’s nephew Will who falls in love with Dorothea, it’s about Celia who also marries, it’s about Fred Vincy, who is a sort of hapless young man who has trapped himself in debt and who has no way out, and he has to get out if he’s going to get to marry the woman he wants. It’s about his sister Rosamond who marries young doctor Lydgate, and their marriage sort of collapses in on itself. And a whole bunch of other people. The copy I read was about 830 pages. It was interesting, it was fascinating, but it was just so long, and I read it on my Kindle so I got no impression of how much I’d read. Gripe over. Nothing much really happens, it’s just this everyday story of people living their lives, which I liked. I don’t need a lot of action. I still feel like I got a bit bogged down though. There are so many people all the time. I feel like I happily would have read a book only about Dorothea, Casaubon and Will, or Lydgate and Rosamond. I liked it, but ultimately it felt a bit too long. It was a fun experience though. Maybe a shorter Eliot novel next time. Also I would have been really helped by a family tree, because I was confused a lot of the time about who people were and how they were related.
The Girl on the Train
woman in the world. And how existing in the world as a woman is. She talks about how she was sexualized from a young age and victimized, but how she never really thought to call it sexual assault, because it felt wrong to call it that. Jessica Valenti has also been subject to a lot of internet abuse and has been trolled quite a lot. Mostly because she’s a woman who talks about politics and feminism. The book gives you a look at how her inner life is a lot different from her tough, badass persona. She’s scared and vulnerable and worried she’s not doing enough. She talks about her drug use and how she was terrified of disappointing her parents by dropping out of college. She talks about her difficult pregnancy and her daughter’s difficult first years, and the family’s continued struggle with their daughter’s selective mutism, and how she and her husband really had to work to stay together. It’s so honest it’s almost painful sometimes. It’s so beautiful and Valenti feels so warm and strong, and she’s so willing to share, which was really wonderful.
his is a short story about a vampire named Carmilla. It is told from the perspective of Laura, a young English woman who lives with her father in a castle in the Austrian Empire. When Laura is 18 a carriage has an accident outside their gates and a girl of Laura’s age comes to live with Laura and her father while her mother goes somewhere, and is supposed to return in three months, because she can’t be delayed. Laura and Carmilla become close friends, but Laura starts having nightmares of a cat like creature biting her on the chest, and she starts getting sick and weak. Turns out, spoiler, Carmilla is a vampire and likes biting young women. It was fun. It was quite campy and at once wonderful and ridiculous and I liked it. It was lovely.
The Pirate Librarian 