Happy new year, friends. Wrote a year-in-reading roundup to share, it’s published at the Cleveland Review of Books, I’ll link to the full below—spoiler, 2021 was a sick year for migraines. If you don’t know CRB already please check them out for their good criticism & coverage of indie books!
Love and hope and health and justice in 2022. —HP
Sick Books 2021: A Year in Sick Reading
In 2021, which is still going at time of writing, I’ve had 112 days of migraine—about 1 out of 3 days, worse than average but what are you going to do. You’re going to read one or two dozen books of detective fiction, as you have been since you got your first migraine, about 21 years ago now, since then thousands of neuro’d days. You read these books at a skim, your head’s fucked up, you don’t really remember them after, can’t follow exactly what’s going on, who cares, not the point, you’re passing time, staying calm, getting through. Often you only realize you’ve read this one before when you reach the absolute end. The best detective fiction is about a woman in a situation. A woman has no good options. She’s stuck in the fucked world, but she’s working the case, she’s trying, back up against the wall. No one gets out pure. Honestly no one gets out alive. The novel will be about a place, probably a city, it will be about money and who has it and who they took it from or made it off. Someone will be trying to do a job, a job that’s about justice, or at least that’s what she hopes it’s about, and there’s only a nearly impossible possibility, but thereisa possibility, of doing it in a way that’s a little bitright. The job, the trying, everything is part of the desperate world and its bad money, endless violence, endless injustice. (Cue the end of Chinatown, defeat of hope, is the detective’s best plan just to do the least harm, just do “as little as possible”?) I want to recommend extremely the works of Denise Mina and Tana French, but I didn’t read any of those this year, I think because I’ve already read every single book they’ve ever written. Started the year with A Deadly Divide by Ausma Zehamat Khan on the recommendation of my mother, who also gets migraines. This is a good series with two detectives…
Read the rest here