My Year of Reading 2022

This has been a watershed year of reading for me. For the eight years prior, I was locked into reading for my job as programme director of a festival, which meant I was constantly reading new books and trying to keep up with the latest authors and conversations that festival goers might have a hankering for.

So at the end of last year, I embarked on a much more meandering reading life. I could read whatever the hell I wanted. I could just follow whichever interests I had at the time. The only bumpers that occasionally surfaced to guide me were those of the middle-grade children’s novel I was writing, The Grimmelings, now finished and on submission. I happily read books that fed into that — whether as research or just to immerse myself in the vibe of the thing. I loosely categorized some of these books as ‘children’s book writing’ and ‘folk horror adjacent’, but others fell outside that. Some books were books I’d already read which just hung around on my desk for when I needed them or for when I needed to absorb them by osmosis — notably Robin Robertson’s poetry collection Grimoire and Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks.

Inevitably, there were a few other factors that steered my reading — I agreed to chair two sessions at the excellent Marlborough Book Festival, with Kirsten McDougall and Paula Morris, and two sessions at WORD Christchurch, with Emily St John Mandel and David Mitchell. I also agreed to be a judge of the ARA Historical Novel Society Prize in the Children & Young Adult section — which led me to read about 20 historical novels for young people. As much as I enjoyed the experience (especially my conversations with fellow judges Paul McDonald and Deborah Abela), I was quite happy to see the back of historical novels for a while.

I’m going to start my reading year from Boxing Day 2021, on which I read Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, because I’m seeing the book make a lot of people’s best of the year lists and I’d hate to not add my voice to that chorus just because I was ahead of the pack by mere days. Hat tip to Liam McIlvanney for bringing the book to my attention. It was eerie reading it outside in blazing yuletide sunshine on Boxing Day while reading about freezing Christmas in Ireland, and of the girl locked in the coal shed. It was an exquisite book, the right length for what it needed to achieve, which was to unsettle quietly. I was moved to read it in one day.

The Labyrinth by Amanda Lohrey was a good example of a genre of which I’m fond: ‘lone woman escapes to derelict country/seaside cottage; creepy things happen’. Not my favourite, but it did the job, and did very well in Australia.

I started the year with two wonderful works of creative non-fiction connected with the landscape, outer and inner. Ingrid Horrocks’ Where We Swim ended up being about a lot more than swimming. It is also a self-aware travel memoir. In Medellin and in the Amazon she is conscious of being a tourist — including of the cultural and dark variety — and that awareness and self-examination adds to the story. The Amazon chapter is as gripping as a thriller.

Nic Low’s Uprising accompanied me on my family trip to Fiordland and back home to Ōtautahi. I think it should be read by anyone who lives in or visits Te Waipounamu, for its stories and history, for learning the Māori names that have mostly been erased from its landmarks. Like Where We Swim, there are parts that read like a good novel and when Nic gets caught in an avalanche, my heart started beating faster, even though I knew he came out (relatively) unscathed. I also learned a lot more about my friend and colleague Nic and how he operates, which would have come in handy when we were working together as co-directors of a festival!

Speaking of WORD, I had one of the best reading experiences of my life this year. It started when I finally got around to reading Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel, because the TV series had started and I wanted to watch it, but I kind of have a rule about reading books first. Both were masterful, in their own way. Once I heard that Nic had secured St John Mandel for WORD, I asked if I could interview her, which led me to reading Sea of Tranquility and The Glass Hotel back to back. Because I was running out of time (I’m a huge procrastinator), I also listened to them on audiobook, so I was completely immersed in them for several hours a day. I loved how the books were interlinked, something I hadn’t realised beforehand. I am a time travel nut, so to have such a beautifully written, atmospheric time travel novel, which had no gaping plot holes, was a huge pleasure for me. But to top it off, getting to talk to the author about the stellar books I had just read, and that were still swimming around inside me as good books are wont to do, was a perfect experience. I am not one to fangirl and author worship, so it wasn’t about that; it was just a really satisfying way of rounding off reading three books by the same author in one year. It felt like a huge privilege. The session was recorded, and I really hope WORD sees fit to release it, either as a video or at least as a podcast, along with the David Mitchell interview I did which was so much fun.

I had already read Kirsten MacDougall’s books, so only dipped back into them for our fun session at Marlborough Book Festival (an aside: of all the New Zealand festivals I’ve attended as an author, there’s really something quite special about this one, and it offers the best hospitality bar none). Kirsten has a great brain and is a great talker so the hour flew by. For Paula Morris, I read two of her books I hadn’t got to yet: Shining Land, her gorgeous collaboration with photographer Haru Sameshima, about Robin Hyde, and her essay/short fiction collection False River, one of the best books I read all year. I particularly loved her essays on Laura Ingalls Wilder and much more personal ones about her parents.

Book reviews I wrote were also influenced by the other reading I was doing at the time. When I started Noelle McCarthy’s gripping, uncomfortable and mournfully beautiful Grand (my review on Newsroom), I had just finished Alan Garner’s The Owl Service. It made me comment that if Grand had been fiction or myth, the women in Noelle’s family would have been doomed to repeat the trauma of their mothers, much like the tragedy of Blodeuwedd, her husband Lleu Llaw and her lover Gronw Pebr, played out through generations of the Welsh valley where Gwyn, Alison and Roger are caught in a frenzy of owls and flowers as Gwyn’s mother and the groundsman Huw were before them. In the TV series, also written by Garner, there’s a suggestion at the end, when the camera finds two boys and a girl playing by the stone, that it will all be set in motion again once the children are old enough.

When I reviewed Catherine Chidgey’s The Axeman’s Carnival, one of my year’s top novels of any I read, old or new, also for Newsroom, I had just finished Martin Shaw’s Courting the Wild Twin, a book that had such a profound effect on me, and on my understanding of the story and the characters I was writing that I can’t even put it in to words. I listened to it as an audio book and, this will sound silly, but I just sort of absorbed it into my being as I walked. At the end I couldn’t even remember much about it, but I emerged with that new understanding. I immediately bought a hard copy to read again, more slowly, because the problem with audio books is that you can’t easily go back and reread a paragraph, to let its full meaning sink in. It was from here that I took the quote in my review about the ‘invested dead’ of Tama the magpie’s brothers and mother, who “inhabit the nattering jawbone and mottled tongue of someone who suddenly speaks words you desperately need to hear”.

After reading The Owl Service, I read Alan Garner’s Red Shift which I found impenetrable and strange, and not in a good way. Not even listening to the Backlisted episode about it helped me. I much preferred the bonkers Treacle Walker, with its bog man Thin Amren, and the rag and bone man of the title. It was a fever dream. I think I only understood it slightly better than Red Shift but it was a much more pleasant experience. I loved the language that rolled off the page, words like stramash and glim and mirligoes. Those books fed into my reading of The Raven’s Song by Zana Fraillon and New Zealander Bren MacDibble, and into my review, as did the creepy 70s TV shows I’d been thinking about a lot as I wrote my novel. I was grateful to Newsroom for giving me the opportunity to write about a middle grade novel with as much care and depth as an adult book. I hope to be able to do more.

I had also just read Katherine Rundell’s excellent longform essay Why You Should Read Children’s Books Even Though You Are So Old and Wise, which everyone should read. I only quoted one passage from it, but I could have done much more. It stresses that books written for a child audience are often the best of what a book can be, and if you think those books aren’t for you, you’re missing out. Certainly with the novel I’ve just finished, I put as much into it as I have any of the adult novels I’ve written. The British novelist SF Said, author of Tyger (which is on my TBR pile), recently said something I love: “We call them children’s books, but really, they’re written for an audience that includes children, but excludes no-one. Children’s books are books for everyone.” I’m sure Alan Garner would agree. I think generally children’s writers who think books should only be read by children don’t put much care into their writing.

There are too many other children’s books I read (33 in total!) to mention them all, but some standouts for me were books that did something exciting with language and imagination, had depth to characters and relationship, and layers to burrow into, rather than skating across the surface. All of them are the “literary vodka” Rundell talks about and appealed to the adult reader in me. These included Verdigris Deep by Frances Hardinge, the exquisite October, October by Katya Balen, which created alchemy with words and squeezed a tear out of me more than once, and The Middler by Kirsty Applebaum, which was an unexpected find randomly picked off the library shelf, and though a simple story, had one of my favourite pages of prose in a children’s book this year, which I captured on my Instagram.

After hearing it discussed on Backlisted (a source of much of my reading inspiration), I read Diana Wynne Jones’ Fire and Hemlock for the first time and loved it. I think the love was enhanced by the Backlisted episode and going back for a second listen. Like The Owl Service, it plays with an existing folk story, that of Tam Lin (oh, writing that has just put the Fairport Convention song in my head), and in such an unusual way. It’s such an odd book, and quite creepy and inappropriate but I adored it. I also really enjoyed A Song for Ella Grey by David Almond, which was annoying because it featured an element that I had hoped to include in a future book of my own, and had a similar vibe –­ that feeling of mooching around with your friends, imagining your future, feeling special and a bit mystical. A wonderful mood piece.

I revisited an old friend, from my own childhood shelves — The Horse From the Black Loch (1963, my edition 1979) by Patricia Leitch — because my own new novel features a water horse and I was curious to see how similar our ideas of a kelpie are (not very). I’ll be writing about Leitch’s books in more detail for another project I’m (slowly) assembling. She certainly didn’t talk down to her young horse-mad readers. The first line of the book is, “High above me a single swan flew like an unshriven ghost through the lucid lime-yellow glow of the Highland evening.” I’m not sure a modern editor would allow ‘unshriven’ in the first sentence of a middle-grade novel now, but I hope I am wrong.

A Candle in her Room (1966) was brilliant. I sought out the author, Ruth M. Arthur, after hearing Andy Miller wax lyrical about another of her books, The Autumn People, on Backlisted (yes, I know. I listen to it a lot. You should too). I think he called it a cross between Jane Eyre, Rebecca, and The Omen, and folk horror for kids. Which is exactly the kind of atmosphere I was going for with my novel. It didn’t disappoint. Unsettling, beautifully evocative. It was lent to me by my friend Felicity who had kept it since her own childhood in the 1960s, for which I was grateful, because the books are out of print and there were none in the Christchurch libraries.

Notable New Zealand children’s books I read and would recommend to anyone as Christmas gifts for kids include: Fifi Colston’s delightful Masher; Steph Matuku’s Falling into Rarohenga (book cover of the year, and so gripping my teen raced through it in a couple of days); Amorangi and Millie’s Trip Through Time by Lauren Keenan (longlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Prize, and a great one for seeing Aotearoa history through the eyes of Māori children, which has not happened much and I hope will happen a lot more); Philippa Werry’s The Other Sister (a slow burner — maybe too slow for its teen audience but by the end I was in love with the main characters and her story); The Memory Thief by Leonie Agnew (winner of this year’s Esther Glen medal); The Ghost House by Bill Nagelkerke (a lovely quiet story especially good for Christchurch children as it portrays life in the Red Zone perfectly); and The Crate, a fun ghost story/mystery by James Norcliffe with a genuinely surprising and satisfying ending.

I read a bunch of thrillers at the times I needed to, including Lee Child’s Tripwire, Anthony Horowitz’s A Line to Kill (audiobook on a long car journey), Wrong Place, Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister (domestic noir plus time travel? Sign me up!), and Blake Crouch’s sci-fi thriller Dark Matter.

Other novels I enjoyed included: The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry (again finally got it off my shelf because I wanted to watch the excellent TV adaptation and loved it as I knew I would); Sarah Moss’s The Fell; The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg (oof! It crept up on me and I can definitely see what the fuss over her is all about); Vladimir by Julia May Jonas and its satire of campus life and desire (which had me at hello with the lines “…lightning bolts of anger shot from my vagina to my extremities. I’ve always felt the origin of anger in my vagina and am surprised it is not mentioned more in literature.”); A Summer of Drowning by Scottish novelist and poet John Burnside, who is a new discovery for me, and I think I’ll be reading more of his atmospheric, myth-infused dramas. I also picked up Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s quietly moving Notes on Grief. I won’t trouble you with the too-long list of books I didn’t much care for, some of them acclaimed in book media or blurbed by people I admire, which didn’t half make me grumpy.

Finally, since it was my year of writing as well as reading, I read a few ‘how to’ type books: I reread Anne Lamott’s comforting Bird by Bird to get my writing year started; I read Joan Aiken’s The Way to Write for Children, which offered sage advice long after it was written; and one I’m still working my way through is a collection of fascinating essays simply titled Writing the Uncanny: essays on crafting strange fiction (yes please!), published by an interesting UK imprint, Dead Ink. I also dipped into the beginning of James Wood’s How Fiction Works, which is really about reading and writing, and which I inherited from Chloe Lane when she was clearing out her bookcases to move back to America.

This was also the year that I have used the excellent Christchurch City Libraries more than ever in my life, apart from maybe when I was 12 and living in Hastings at a new school and away from my family. I have a terrible habit where I buy books on a whim, because my brain tells me I have to have them right now, but mostly because I am fooling myself that I am buying the time to read them. That habit has mostly crossed over to library books this year (fooling myself again, probably). It means I got out about five times more books than I actually read but it’s better than dropping thousands on books that sit on my shelves for years, only to be picked up when the TV series is about to come out.

Now I turn to my massive TBR pile, which currently has twelve library books (and hundreds of my own books) in it, and contemplate keeping an occasional writing blog here at Medium. Why not? I’m currently reading Penelope Lively’s first novel for children (first novel of any genre), Astercote, published in 1970, and I can already tell I’ll have something to write about. I’m looking forward to continuing to wander where my reading nose takes me.