Reading and Listening in 2023
by Sarah Tolmie
2023 was an awful year. I expect we’re all agreed on that. So bad was this year for so many people that it seems almost bizarre to enumerate personal sorrows or desires and reflect on how the pleasures of reading, viewing or listening alleviated them. But then, where does that leave us as individuals? Or as makers or consumers of art? What levels of misery (personal, national, global) is art meant to combat, or record? Is the purpose of art the reduction of misery, and if so, by what means? Consolation, enlightenment, witnessing, activism?
These are the questions that bubbled up as I was racking my brains to try to think of works of art that I enjoyed this year. In retrospect they seemed few and far between. This has less to do with any present dearth of art than with the fact that pleasure that is not insane or irresponsible feels like an endangered category. Is it even okay to feel pleasure now? What a horrible, Presbyterian question. I can barely believe I asked it. Chilly ranks of ancestors in a faith my family abandoned generations ago clap their pale hands. Yuck. Back off, you misery goats! I insist that it remains right to like things! I will go on appreciating the crowning achievements of human consciousness that reside in the arts! To that end …
The two books that I liked most and thought about most this year were two volumes of essays by Ursula Le Guin. I bought both of them — in addition to the big fiction collections The Found and the Lost and The Real and the Unreal — in a paroxysm of grief right after her death but didn’t read them straight off. Indeed, I lost track of them. I found them a couple of months ago. The first, and arguably the more important, is Words Are My Matter: Writing About Life and Books 2000-2016, consisting as it does of commissioned essays and addresses, assorted introductions to classic authors or editions, and an astute series of her contemporary book reviews from the Manchester Guardian. This is the considered, astringent, public-facing Le Guin, knowing that she is writing in moments of consequence and doing so with her inimitable decorum.
Decorum without prissiness, goopiness or crassness is something I have always associated with her. She is the only modern feminist I can imagine who thought it worthwhile to spend her last novel thinking seriously through what it meant to be pius Aeneas. At the same time she is wonderfully forthright about the months of anxious editing and then the six minutes of terror that was the creation and delivery of her acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation medal in 2014; read that blast of the trumpet against the corporate profiteering of today’s publishing industry and imagine yourself speaking it aloud to a room full of Amazon apologists. Neither will you ever forget what she says (in an address to NARAL in 2004) about her own illegal abortion in 1950, especially if, like her, or my mother, or myself, you are a woman who has both had an abortion and raised a family and understood one as necessary to the other.
The second book is 2017’s No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters, a series of blogs collected from her website, blogging being an experiment she dd not begin until she was over eighty. Being pressed for time at that age — as she explains with marvelous directness — evidently contributed to the concision of these essays. Montaigne would read them with pleasure: they are chatty without being gossipy, casual without being dismissive, clever without being precious. They hit that amazing middle ground that she found in her middle age — along about the time of Tehanu — in combining deep thought and domestic detail. As usual, she is exact and profound about animals (cats, chiefly, plus one memorable encounter with a snake) and language. I was delighted to find that she had gone through a meditation upon the confusing adage “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” that was almost identical to my own (hint: try substituting keep for have). She gets into a moral quandary: is it appropriate to have an amanuensis, even just to help answer your fan mail? (The amanuensis question is highly relevant to female authorship all the way back to Margery Kempe.) All in all, both books, especially when taken as a pair, are golden.
And I listened to Anton Lesser’s reading of Great Expectations. Lesser is one of my favorite audiobook narrators; his Dombey and Son, for example, is a masterpiece. When you combine the talents of a powerful and unaffected voice actor, in particular one who has the rare skill of producing voices for both genders with equal conviction, with the dramatic unfolding of Dickens you really get a great thing. I’ve said before that I never appreciated Dickens until I began to hear his books read aloud; it clarifies a great many of his effects.
I remember liking Great Expectations when I read it years ago as an undergraduate, but it slipped my mind for decades afterward, and also became strangely fused in my memory with David Copperfield, a book I read much later. I admire the darkness and weirdness of the late Dickens, and Great Expectations certainly has those; the scathing ironic distance that Pip the belated narrator achieves about his self-regarding youthful self is masterful; and the book presents that almost unbelievably callous and systematic separation of the poor and the rich, the criminal and the complacent, that characterized the Victorian period, and that now seems eerily familiar to us again. The twenty-three-year-old Pip, numb and traumatized, witnesses the condemnation of thirty-two men, women and children, to death at one single assize; recollecting it years later he can barely sustain his astonishment beyond a single sentence. Which is worse? Great Expectations: it remains a great and terrible account of class apartheid.
Sacraments for the Unfit, which Aqueduct released earlier this year, is Sarah Tolmie’s sixth book with Aqueduct Press. Others include The Stone Boatmen, nominated for the Crawford Award in 2015, and The Little Animals, winner of the Special Citation at the Philip K Dick Awards in 2020. In addition to publishing short fiction, novellas and novels with Aqueduct, she has released two novellas with Tor.com, The Fourth Island and All the Horses of Iceland; the latter was listed as one of the top fantasy books of 2022 by The New York Times. She has also written three volumes of poetry for McGill-Queen’s University Press; the second one, The Art of Dying, was a finalist for the 2019 Griffin Prize for Poetry. In her other life, she is a Professor of English at the University of Waterloo. Her website is sarahtolmie.ca.
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