2023 was a good year for reading! For some reason it was an entry into the Horror genre for me. I didn’t realize that horror books are very different than horror movies- they are usually less gory, but can be a lot scarier! If you want to give one a try, look at My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones (which comes before Don’t Fear the Reaper which was excellent), or if you really want to be creeped out, read A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay.
After a couple of years of feeling distracted and disengaged from reading, this year delivered a bounty of titles that monopolized my imagination and stretched some brain cells in the process. I’m sad to only get to share 10 (so I added a few more – don’t tell). Also, if you notice an Irish theme, it’s been that kind of year.
Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor: This is the first of a trilogy about history and power and greed in India. It’s an amazingly thrilling ride.
Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land by Jacob Mikanowski: I loved the way it was written through themes, like myth and religion, peoples and cultures, and politics.
Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry: A devastating portrait of the effect of trauma through generations set in Ireland. Crazy beautiful writing.
Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens: An old-fashioned western that’s not so old-fashioned. A scrappy young girl finds work in a brothel and finds friendship and romance in the process. The Wild West through a new lens.
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck: Erpenbeck’s a contemporary German author – this novel is set in East Germany right before the fall of the Berlin Wall and centers on the relationship between a young woman and an older man – the disintegration of their relationship mirrors the ruin of East Germany. So good.
Foster by Claire Keegan: a moving novella that captures a young girl’s summer spent as a foster at her aunt and uncle’s. Coming from a poor Irish family with siblings galore, it was a special time where she was doted on and made to feel special.
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray: This was my favorite of all I think. Another Irish author, Murray dissects the fall of a family through the voices of all the members – we get to know their histories, motivations, and desires. Each voice is unique and the writing is incredible. It’s long, but it’s worth it.
The Fraud by Zadie Smith: Smith’s first work of historical fiction tells the story of a trial in 19th Century Britain. Told through the eyes of a housekeeper and cousin of a famous writer, we also travel to the sugar plantations of Jamaica and learn about the lives of the people living as slaves there. It’s worth it for that alone.
North Woods by Daniel Mason: This one is about a house in New England, as told by various residents over the years. There’s an apple farm, a catamount, a seer, and an artist, among others.
The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut: A novel about the life of a Hungarian scientist, a genius who worked on the atomic bomb and computers, and whose insight led to AI. Told from the perspectives of his friends, wives, and co-workers, it’s a frightening look at the responsibilities of science.
Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang: I listened to this audiobook and it was weird, and sensual, and made me slightly more hopeful for life after climate crises.
The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue: Yes, another Irish title, this one a little less literary, but no less moving. It really captured early 20s friendship and it made me laugh out loud!
Bonus with no image: Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Suntanto: I listened to this one – and it was funny and clever, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
The story centers around Tova, a widow and night janitor at an aquarium; Cameron, a young man looking for his long-lost parents; and Marcellus, a wily octopus with a penchant for escaping his tank. These characters paths cross suddenly and unexpectedly. An interesting novel about finding closure and clarity after loss. Bonus- full of interesting facts about octopi! Lisa
A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher
“After archaeoentomologist Sam Montgomery’s dig gets put on hold, she drives to her deceased grandmother’s house in rural North Carolina to spend some time with her mom. The vulture waiting for her on the mailbox doesn’t seem like a good omen, nor does the strange absence of insect life; her mother’s anxious, odd behavior; or Sam’s new, mysterious bouts of sleep paralysis. Sam digs into her family history in the hopes of discovering medical information and scientific explanations for the weirdness—but instead she finds deeply buried horrors that are out to destroy Sam and her mother.” Linnea
All-Night Pharmacyby Ruth Madievsky
Poet Madievsky’s debut novel follows an unnamed narrator’s meandering mishaps in the LA bar scene as she continually tries and fails to free herself from the toxic sisterhood and intergenerational trauma that, ironically, seem to be all she has. Annelise
Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo
Wandering cleric Chih returns in the third adventure in the Singing Hills Cycle, this time taking a journey into the wild riverlands. Accompanied by a motley crew of fellow travelers who may be more than they seem, Chih learns that there is always more than one side to a story. A feminist, wuxia-inspired fantasy from prolific author Nghi Vo. Shannon
A Twisted Love Story by Samantha Downing
Wes and Ivy were almost the picture-perfect couple in college, moved in together after graduation, and slowly small irritants became big issues causing them to part ways, so began their cycle of breaking up and making up. And then Ivy reported a stalker to the police, with Wes as the prime suspect. Considering their past relationship, could Ivy’s concerns be true, or did she just go too far in the troublesome game they like to play. If you enjoyed Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and you don’t mind deeply narcissistic characters, this was a fabulously wild ride! Enjoy!! Stacey
The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue.
Rachel and James become fast friends working at a bookstore in Cork during the Irish recession. Young and broke, they decide to move in together, chasing love and lust as you can only do in your early 20s. When James falls for Dr. Burns, Rachel’s English professor, hiding the secret threatens to ruin their dreams. Laugh out loud funny, touching, and really well-written, it’s a delight that you won’t want to end. Dori
Spells for Forgetting by Adrienne Young
August Salt vowed never to return to Saorise Island off the coast of Washington state, but his mother’s last wishes changed that. He returned to the place where his first love, Emery, still lives, and where he is still suspected of the murder of a teenage girl and hated by most of the residents. He intends to spread his mother’s ashes and be on the ferry back to the mainland as soon as possible, but the island, an ancient place full of secrets and forces that some of the stronger women can tap into, has different ideas. August must face Emery, who he has never stopped loving, the murder, and the evil secrets that run deep in Saorise while fighting to survive. Sara
Quietly Hostile Essays by Samantha Irby
The most recent collection of essays from writer Samantha Irby does not disappoint. Quietly Hostile. Irby shares her wide range of experiences; everything from writing for the HBO Just like That to challenges to adopting a dog during the pandemic. Another hilarious collection from Samantha Irby. Greg
Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H (memoir)
A queer, Muslim, coming of age story about never fully being accepted in any community until they find the strength to make their own community. Christine
Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens
In this traditional Western, Bridget finds herself, her queer sexuality, and her destiny. Christine
We were supposed to choose our top ten, but some I read were in a series, so I grouped them together – cheating? nah, just a way to promote more books! Changes from previous years – I read a lot more nonfiction that I usually do – and not as much literary fiction, though there were a lot of enticing releases. Here’s the list, in no particular order.
Non Fiction: Gender Studies, LGBTQ+, History “Hugh Ryan’s When Brooklyn Was Queer is a groundbreaking exploration of the LGBT history of Brooklyn, from the early days of Walt Whitman in the 1850s up through the queer women who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II, and beyond. No other book, movie, or exhibition has ever told this sweeping story. Not only has Brooklyn always lived in the shadow of queer Manhattan neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and Harlem, but there has also been a systematic erasure of its queer history–a great forgetting.
Ryan is here to unearth that history for the first time. In intimate, evocative, moving prose he discusses in new light the fundamental questions of what history is, who tells it, and how we can only make sense of ourselves through its retelling; and shows how the formation of the Brooklyn we know today is inextricably linked to the stories of the incredible people who created its diverse neighborhoods and cultures. Through them, When Brooklyn Was Queer brings Brooklyn’s queer past to life, and claims its place as a modern classic.”
Fiction: Horror/Paranormal “IN AMERICA, DEMONS WEAR WHITE HOODS. In 1915, The Birth of a Nation cast a spell across America, swelling the Klan’s ranks and drinking deep from the darkest thoughts of white folk. All across the nation they ride, spreading fear and violence among the vulnerable. They plan to bring Hell to Earth. But even Ku Kluxes can die. Standing in their way is Maryse Boudreaux and her fellow resistance fighters, a foul-mouthed sharpshooter and a Harlem Hellfighter. Armed with blade, bullet, and bomb, they hunt their hunters and send the Klan’s demons straight to Hell. But something awful’s brewing in Macon, and the war on Hell is about to heat up. Can Maryse stop the Klan before it ends the world?”
Fiction: Teen, Fantasy, Witches “On the way home from a party, seventeen-year-old Ivy and her soon-to-be ex nearly run over a nude young woman standing in the middle of a tree-lined road. It’s only the first in a string of increasingly eerie events and offerings: a dead rabbit in the driveway, a bizarre concoction buried by her mother in the backyard, a box of childhood keepsakes hidden in her parents’ closet safe. Most unsettling of all, corroded recollections of Ivy and her enigmatic mother’s past resurface, with the help of the boy next door.
What if there’s more to Ivy’s mother than meets the eye? And what if the supernatural forces she messed with during her own teen years have come back to haunt them both? Ivy must grapple with these questions and more if she’s going to escape the darkness closing in.
Straddling Ivy’s contemporary suburban town and her mother’s magic-drenched 1990s Chicago, this bewitching and propulsive story rockets towards a conclusion guaranteed to keep readers up all night.”
Fiction: Fantasy “Out on the Yorkshire Moors lives a secret line of people for whom books are food, and who retain all of a book’s content after eating it. To them, spy novels are a peppery snack; romance novels are sweet and delicious. Eating a map can help them remember destinations, and children, when they misbehave, are forced to eat dry, musty pages from dictionaries.
Devon is part of The Family, an old and reclusive clan of book eaters. Her brothers grow up feasting on stories of valor and adventure, and Devon–like all other book eater women–is raised on a carefully curated diet of fairy tales and cautionary stories.
But real life doesn’t always come with happy endings, as Devon learns when her son is born with a rare and darker kind of hunger–not for books, but for human minds.”
Fiction: Historical “Isobel Gamble is a young seamstress carrying generations of secrets when she sets sail from Scotland in the early 1800s with her husband, Edward. An apothecary who has fallen under the spell of opium, his pile of debts have forced them to flee Glasgow for a fresh start in the New World. But only days after they’ve arrived in Salem, Edward abruptly joins a departing ship as a medic–leaving Isobel penniless and alone in a strange country, forced to make her way by any means possible.
When she meets a young Nathaniel Hawthorne, the two are instantly drawn to each other: he is a man haunted by his ancestors, who sent innocent women to the gallows–while she is an unusually gifted needleworker, troubled by her own strange talents. As the weeks pass and Edward’s safe return grows increasingly unlikely, Nathaniel and Isobel grow closer and closer. Together, they are a muse and a dark storyteller; the enchanter and the enchanted. But which is which?
In this sensuous and hypnotizing tale, a young immigrant woman grapples with our country’s complicated past, and learns that America’s ideas of freedom and liberty often fall short of their promise. Interwoven with Isobel and Nathaniel’s story is a vivid interrogation of who gets to be a “real” American in the first half of the 19th century, a depiction of the early days of the Underground Railroad in New England, and atmospheric interstitials that capture the long history of “unusual” women being accused of witchcraft. Meticulously researched yet evocatively imagined, Laurie Lico Albanese’s Hester is a timeless tale of art, ambition, and desire that examines the roots of female creative power and the men who try to shut it down.”
Fiction: Science Fiction, Humanity/Identity “Set in the glittering art deco world of a century ago, MEM makes one slight alteration to history: a scientist in Montreal discovers a method allowing people to have their memories extracted from their minds, whole and complete. The Mems exist as mirror-images of their source — zombie-like creatures destined to experience that singular memory over and over, until they expire in the cavernous Vault where they are kept. And then there is Dolores Extract #1, the first Mem capable of creating her own memories. An ageless beauty shrouded in mystery, she is allowed to live on her own, and create her own existence, until one day she is summoned back to the Vault. What happens next is a gorgeously rendered, heart-breaking novel in the vein of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Debut novelist Bethany Morrow has created an allegory for our own time, exploring profound questions of ownership, and how they relate to identity, memory and history, all in the shadows of Montreal’s now forgotten slave trade.”
Fiction: Horror/Apocalyptic, Transgender “Beth and Fran spend their days traveling the ravaged New England coast, hunting feral men and harvesting their organs in a gruesome effort to ensure they’ll never face the same fate.
Robbie lives by his gun and one hard-learned motto: other people aren’t safe.
After a brutal accident entwines the three of them, this found family of survivors must navigate murderous TERFs, a sociopathic billionaire bunker brat, and awkward relationship dynamics–all while outrunning packs of feral men, and their own demons.”
Fiction: Asian American, Literary “Twenty-one-year-old Reed is fed up. Angry about the killing of a Black man by an Asian American NYPD officer, he wants to drop out of college and devote himself to the Black Lives Matter movement. But would that truly bring him closer to the moral life he seeks?
In a series of intimate, charged conversations, his mother–once the leader of a Korean-Black coalition–demands that he rethink his outrage, and along with it, what it means to be an organizer, a student, an ally, an American, and a son. As Reed zips around his hometown of Los Angeles with his mother, searching and questioning, he faces a revelation that will change everything.
Inspired by his family’s roots in activism, Ryan Lee Wong offers an extraordinary debut novel for readers of Anthony Veasna So, Rachel Kushner, and Michelle Zauner: a book that is as humorous as it is profound, a celebration of seeking a life that is both virtuous and fun, an ode to mothering and being mothered.
Fiction: Thriller, Historical, LGBTQ+ “Lavender House, 1952: the family seat of recently deceased matriarch Irene Lamontaine, head of the famous Lamontaine soap empire. Irene’s recipes for her signature scents are a well guarded secret–but it’s not the only one behind these gates. This estate offers a unique freedom, where none of the residents or staff hide who they are. But to keep their secret, they’ve needed to keep others out. And now they’re worried they’re keeping a murderer in.
Irene’s widow hires Evander Mills to uncover the truth behind her mysterious death. Andy, recently fired from the San Francisco police after being caught in a raid on a gay bar, is happy to accept–his calendar is wide open. And his secret is the kind of secret the Lamontaines understand.
Andy had never imagined a world like Lavender House. He’s seduced by the safety and freedom found behind its gates, where a queer family lives honestly and openly. But that honesty doesn’t extend to everything, and he quickly finds himself a pawn in a family game of old money, subterfuge, and jealousy–and Irene’s death is only the beginning.
When your existence is a crime, everything you do is criminal, and the gates of Lavender House can’t lock out the real world forever. Running a soap empire can be a dirty business.”
Fiction: Mystery/Thriller, Anisfield-Wolf Winner “Percival Everett’s The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.
The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in a fast-paced style that ensures the reader can’t look away. The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on America’s pulse.”
Fiction: Science Fiction, Robots, Gender Non-Conforming “After A Psalm for the Wild-Built comes this tale of hope and acceptance in the second volume of the USA Today bestselling Monk and Robot series. After touring the rural areas of Panga, Sibling Dex (a Tea Monk of some renown) and Mosscap (a robot sent on a quest to determine what humanity really needs) turn their attention to the villages and cities of the little moon they call home. They hope to find the answers they seek, while making new friends, learning new concepts, and experiencing the entropic nature of the universe. Becky Chambers’s new series continues to ask: in a world where people have what they want, does having more even matter?”
Fiction: Psychological, Women, Japan, Pacific NW “In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace–and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine.
Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox–possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.
Full of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.”
Happy Valentine’s Day! Why not use today as a good excuse to show some love to one of your favorite books and give it another read? Personally, I love to revisit A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. First published in 1962, this young adult fantasy novel won the Newbery Medal, the Sequoyah Book Award, and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award.
Thirteen-year-old Meg Murry is unhappy. Although really smart, she struggles in school, she faces bullies on a daily basis and more than anything, wishes her missing physicist father would come home. Life for Meg is forever changed when she meets her eccentric new neighbors, Mrs. Whatsit and Mrs. Who, and their third companion, the disembodied voice of Mrs. Which. These three strangers are actually supernatural beings who transport Meg, along with her small brother, Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O’Keefe on a journey through time and space in search of Mr. Murry, who disappeared while working on a government project.
When I first read A Wrinkle in Time as a middle-schooler, I loved the book for its girl-power messages and for how it introduced me to the idea of time travel and got me interested in science. Today, when I reread this adventure-filled, coming of age story about the fight between Good and Evil, it is like being wrapped in a cozy blanket of nostalgia. Go ahead and rediscover your own favorite book today.
The theme for the 2021 Cleveland Humanities Festival is Identity, and RRPL has embraced this theme by offering the Book Club Kit, Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar. This book was chosen as one of the NYT’s Best Books of the Year 2020, one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2020, and best book of 2020 by the Washington Post and O Magazine.
An immigrant father and his son search for belonging in post-Trump America, and with each other.
Check out our Book Club Kits for 6 weeks and you will receive 8 book copies, a set of discussion questions and other pertinent information about the author and title, all inside a canvas library tote. Inquire at the Adult Reference desk for more information.
Read it or Weep 