The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2024, pt. 15: Gwynne Garfinkle

 

Reading Pleasures of 2024

by Gwynne Garfinkle

 

 

 

Kelly Link, The Book of Love. When three teenagers come back from the dead, they must figure out what happened to them and how to stay alive. From that premise comes a funny, sexy, magical, at times terrifying work, ranging through such subjects as romance novels, music from Barry Manilow to John Cage, shapeshifting, mind control, and, of course, love. My favorite novel of the year.

 

 John Wiswell, Someone You Can Build a Nest In. This story of a shapeshifting blob who falls in love with a monster hunter manages to be both scary/gross and heartwarming. (Carmen Rose's narration on the audiobook is marvelous.)

 

Gerardo Sámano Córdova, Monstrilio (2023). A mother cuts out part of her dead son's lung, which grows into a monster-child torn between his human ties and his carnivorous urges. A surprisingly tender exploration of family.

 

 

Tananarive Due, The Reformatory (2023). A twelve-year-old boy is sentenced to a stint at a hellish reform school in Jim Crow Florida. The fact that the reformatory is haunted may be the least terrifying thing about it. A nerve-wracking, powerful read.

 

Jennifer Thorne, Diavola. I couldn't put this book down, though it rendered me unlikely ever to rent a picturesque Italian villa. When a commercial artist joins her ridiculously dysfunctional family at a vacation rental, she's the only one not in denial when it becomes clear the place is haunted. Even worse, the family blames her for the increasingly creepy goings-on.

 

Rachel Harrison, So Thirsty. Harrison's latest book is about best friends who wind up getting turned into a sort of vampire Thelma and Louise (complete with a "bitches from hell!" shout-out). Like other Harrison novels, this one explores female rage and the complexities of female friendship.

 

Paul Tremblay, Horror Movie. This novel about an ill-fated 1990s indie film is both a dread-filled page-turner and a meditation on the horror genre.

 

Sofia Samatar, The Practice, The Horizon, and the Chain. An incisive dark-academia novella set on a caste-stratified generation ship. I also listened to the audiobook of Samatar's memoir The White Mosque (2022), beautifully narrated by the author.

 

Emily Henry, Funny Story. In Henry's latest romance, a woman and a man are dumped by their significant others (who had been longtime best friends). The heartbroken pair become roommates, then fall in love. In keeping with Henry's trend of bookish heroines, this novel's protagonist is a librarian. I also read Henry's People We Meet on Vacation (2021), which foregrounds the best-friends-falling-in-love trope. I listened to these on audiobook, narrated by the wonderful Julia Whelan.

 

Elizabeth McCracken, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (2008). This memoir about a pregnancy that ended in still birth is an exquisite exploration of joy as well as grief.

 

Emily Van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation. This important addition to Plath scholarship examines Plath's life and work through the lens of intimate partner violence. The book discusses Ted Hughes's attempts to control the narrative about his late wife (and his lover Assia Wevill, who also killed herself), and reveals how critics followed his lead. (I've read a lot of books about Plath, but this one contains some new-to-me examples of Hughes's staggering awfulness.)

 

Maggie Doherty, The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s (2020). Plath also appears, somewhat tangentially, in this account of Radcliffe's Institute for Independent Study, a program of paid fellowships for women. Among its early beneficiaries were authors Anne Sexton, Miriam Kumin, and Tillie Olsen, as well as visual artists Barbara Swan and Marianna Pineda. As this book shows in fascinating detail, these women thrived creatively during their time at the Institute, in no small part because of their friendships.

 

Holly Lyn Walrath, Numinous Stones (2023) and Jessica Lévai, The Night Library of Sternendach (2021).  Both of these speculative poetry books utilize poetic forms in ways that are fresh and moving. Numinous Stones makes dazzling, incantatory use of the difficult pantoum form. The Night Library of Sternendach is a propulsive novella in Pushkin sonnets about the romance between a vampire and the daughter of vampire hunters.

 

Brea Grant's and Mallory O'Meara's Reading Glasses continues to be my favorite bookish podcast. A great source of diverse book recs and ideas for improving one's reading life, it's also frequently hilarious.

 

Gwynne Garfinkle lives in Los Angeles. Her collection of short speculative fiction, Sinking, Singing, was published this year by Aqueduct Press. She is the author of a novel, Can't Find My Way Home (2022), and a collection of short fiction and poetry, People Change (2018), both available from Aqueduct. Her work has appeared in such publications as Strange Horizons, Worlds of Possibility, Fantasy, Uncanny, Escape Pod, Apex, and Not One of Us.