Reading Pleasures, 2022
by Suzy McKee Charnas
What a year! Books I loved —
A Tidy Ending, by Joanna Cannon, is a clever, funny, wicked thriller that sneaks up on you under a bland (but often funny and unexpectedly perceptive) suburban surface, this is a brilliant book. You might easily find yourself finishing it with your eyes wide and your mouth hanging open, and then go back and read it again, this time with slightly queasy astonishment. I did.
Next up, We Spread, by Iain Reid. Reid takes us into the mind and experience of an elderly widow, a painter whose awareness is becoming patchy and unsure, who finds herself unexpectedly lodged in a deceptively cozy assisted living situation. It’s a gorgeous feat of the author's imagination, based on Penny's slow realization of just what unnatural (but oh so humanly natural!) drives underpin this sheltered life, even as her clarity of mind fades in and out, fighting for integrity of thought, identity, self.
For a completely different, clever, and charmingly funny fantasy of old age, try the third in Richard Osman’s series about a cabal of puzzle-solving oldsters, The Thursday Murder Club:The Bullet That Missed. These seniors bring the skills and wisdom gained through their lively pasts to bear on intricate and entertaining crises rising now. It's great fun, and a good place to jump aboard this clever series. There’s always the danger of a series going stale, or getting weighed down with accretions of too many new characters acquired along the way, or old ones turned into stock figures being moved around in formulaic plots. Get this charming stuff while it’s still fresh!
Then there’s The Ballad of Perilous Graves, by Alex Jennings, a rich and tasty phantasmagoria of and adventurous quest through a haunted, mystical New Orleans that draws on deep well-springs of local history. It runs deep and flies high on the irrepressible energy of music, not least the music of the language of a magical alternative city. This is a big, broad book, full of joy and danger; still a fast reader, I made myself slow down for this novel so I could better savor its discoveries and de- lights. This author’s debut is a doozie.
Finally, a gem of a book by Elizabeth Strout: Lucy by the Sea. We face our own strange, afflicted times both head on and obliquely, as the narrator’s plain, clear voice carries the reader through the disjointed upheavals of the first pandemic year. Uprooted from her New York apartment, Lucy and her ex view this jagged new era from a house on the coast of Maine. Lucy often says that she understands how others think and feel, and she shows us how and why she understands, using moments from her own fraught past. But there’s no security in understanding; time rolls on relentlessly, filled with spikes of the unexpected, waves of bafflement, bolts of far-off illumination, but above all, loss: loss of bearings, loss of home, loss of life, loss of the old familiar world being overwhelmed by an awful present. Here we are, clinging to what we can save, find, and improvise, even if it’s all so fragile: always dancing on the brink, but now we know it, every moment.
Suzy McKee CharnasSuzy McKee Charnas is the author of the four-novel Holdfast Chronicles, The Vampire Tapestry, Stagestruck Vampires and Other Phantasms as well as several other books. She's been honored with the Hugo, Nebula, and the Otherwise Awards. Aqueduct Press published her novel, Dorothea Dreams, as part of its Heirloom Books series, and have since released nine of her titles in e-book editions.
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