The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2022, pt. 1: Octavia Cade

 

Fascinating Reads in 2022

by Octavia Cade

 

I can’t honestly say that 2022 has been an easy reading year. I seem to have fallen behind in my reading goals, and I’ve left a number of books unfinished. They weren’t even bad books. I wanted to finish them, but I just didn’t. There were, however, some books that really stuck out for me—books that basically forced me to finish them, no matter how lazy or distracted I was. Five of them are below.

This isn’t a complete list. Some of them I read for work, some of them I stumbled over at the local library. The books you don’t know you’re looking for, I find, are often the books you end up liking best. In no particular order, then:

 

(1) Homegoing  by Yaa Gyasi. This was absolutely outstanding, and this author’s a must-read for me now. She had an uphill battle, to be honest. Intergenerational, historical family narratives can often be a hard sell for me, as they tend to be longer than I care to tackle. Homegoing, however, created an epic in less than 400 pages: two sisters are separated by the slave trade. One is sold to the United States, the other gets involved with a slaver and remains in Ghana, and the novel follows both families, generation after generation, until they come together again. The considered illustration of trauma, and how it lingers through generations, is just so well done. It’s not an easy read, but it is an enormously compelling one.

(2) Another not-easy read is The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea, by an author known as Bandi. These short stories, smuggled out of the country and into South Korea, are both excellent and horrifying... primarily because they are likely inspired by real life. The story that sticks with me most, I think, is that of the young mother who is punished because, instead of attending a mandatory parade, she chooses to stay home to look after a sick child. I don’t know who the author is. It may well be safer for them if their name never becomes widely known. I do know, however, that they have both enormous bravery and enormous talent. 

 

(3) Challenging in a different way is the ongoing comic series Pretty Deadly, by Kelly Sue Deconnick and Emma Ríos. I’ve read much of the series before, but pitched a last-minute paper to an academic anthology called Visions of Death, which was looking for chapters about death in speculative fiction. These comics, featuring Deathface Ginny, reaper of vengeance and the daughter of Death, are a weird mix of historical fiction, western, and fantasy. What most appeals to me about them, however, is that they are like little puzzle-boxes. Pieces fit together in interesting and reflective ways, and it can sometimes be quite difficult to decipher what’s actually going on. I enjoy that, and I can’t wait for the next volume!

(4) Another paper I wrote this year (forthcoming in Hélice journal early next year) includes a close reading of Locust Girl: A Lovesong by Merlinda Bobis. It’s a sort of magical realist dystopian novel, where a little girl is buried alive in the desert, after her community is destroyed by bombs. She wakes up, ten years later and still the same age, with a locust embedded in her forehead. The locust dreams, and little Amadea is the recipient of those dreams, traveling through a desperately impoverished landscape and trying to reconcile that destroyed environment with the people who scrape a living there. It’s a weird and fascinating book!     

 

(5) Finally, I read a collection of horror short stories by Carlie St. George. You Fed Us to the Roses is clearly heavily inspired by young women in horror films, and each story here follows a girl who could herself be the heroine of a slasher film, as she tries to navigate the tropes and make a life for herself and the people around her. I was absolutely riveted all the way through; this is the best collection I’ve read in ages. I want every horror fan I know to grab a copy and read it for themselves, because the way that these stories illustrate trauma, and (crucially) ways of surviving trauma, is just incredible. I knew the second I’d finished it that this was a book I’d read again and again... I can’t emphasize enough just how good this book is. Walk, don’t run! You’ll love it too.

 

 Octavia Cade is a New Zealand speculative fiction writer and science communicator. She has sold close to seventy stories to markets including Clarkesworld, F&SF, and Asimov's. Her latest book is the climate fiction novella The Impossible Resurrection of Grief, published by Stelliform Press. Octavia attended Clarion West 2016, and will be spending the first half of 2023 as writer in residence at Canterbury University. Aqueduct Press published Octavia's Mary Shelley Makes a Monster in its Conversation Pieces series in 2019, which was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award in the "Superior Achievement in Poetry Collection" category.