My Year of Reading (and Writing) 2023
I had hoped to finish this by the end of the year but it became somewhat of a behemoth. As demonstrated in my last round-up, 2022 was a huge reading year for me. I revelled in reading wherever my interests led me and knocked off about 60 books (partly helped by the fact I judged an award). In 2023 I wasn’t quite so greedy. I think it was partly because I wasn’t immersed in one writing project as I was in 2022; instead I bounced around between different things (the lot of a jobbing writer I guess?). Therefore, my reading didn’t feel quite as immersive and wondrous — to be honest it was a bit all over the place – and maybe I started taking the reading freedom for granted a bit more. I tried to read a book a week but failed, possibly because I also consumed a lotof good television, which I love.
Last year I signed a contract for my new novel The Grimmelings (out 20 February — available to pre-order now! Shameless), with the fabulous team at Allen & Unwin for Aotearoa and Australia publication (and I can now share that it will be published in the UK by the gorgeous children’s publisher Guppy Books). So that meant that even though I’d ‘finished’ the book, there was a bit of rewriting and a fair bit of chopping thanks to the editing process, then proofreading and more tweaking to make it the best book it can be.
Earlier in the year I did Harry Ricketts’ Creative Non-Fiction class at the IIML, which was a chance to focus more on essays and memoir, spurred on by a book I am slowly shaping. I came out with three pieces, all of which are currently unpublishable (one is too long, one is too personal, and the other is part of the aforementioned book so it is too premature). It was a great experience though — Harry is such a wonderful mentor/teacher and had come highly recommended by respected writer friends. The weekly exercises (and a weekly deadline) unlocked some unexpected brain tangents that I enjoyed following. I’m thinking of publishing some of those on here as they’re only 600 words and some of them were quite fun to write.
I also wrote the first draft of a 20,000 word junior novel (and since I started writing this I have now finished it and it is on submission to my publishers), the beginning of what I hope will be a four book series, and I made a decent start (mostly thinking, planning, dreaming) on a new YA novel that I plan to finish by September this year. I will never take this kind of work for granted (unlike my reading), and because I had 12 years in the wilderness, I seem to have accumulated some steam and am now reaping the benefits (coincidentally I just heard the poet Robin Robertson say something similar when I re-listened to this 2018 WORD Christchurch session: “I work in a pressure cooker system… I hope that all this is stored up — images and phrases and ideas — so when I come to my retreat I can twist the top and there’ll be a satisfying hiss of released tension and I’ll be able to write.”). I am always conscious of the fact that writing books is not something everyone is in a position to do (I couldn’t for long periods of my life either) and it could all be pulled away from me at any point at the whims of the tides and the moon and the political situation, and at the same time I’m also weirdly conscious of the fact that I am operating in a society that sees my work as a hobby and a privilege, not a bona fide job. To me, books are more important now than ever, and they seem to be becoming a niche interest, which is kind of terrifying.
Before I launch into a rant, you can read what I wrote in The Press when our city’s mayor suggested that small local libraries are disposable.
Enough of that! I’m here to tell you about the books I read last year (the good ones at least). My reading can roughly be divided into four categories, and they were nearly all shaped by the work I do as a writer.
FICTION
I choose fiction that speaks to me at whichever moment I pick it up, and this year I have read fewer novels (those intended for adults that is) than probably any other year. Three of them were for book reviews. Four of them were for pure escapism in times of stress or sickness. The rest were all answering some call coming from inside the house (or inside my black, black heart), and were quite dark.
I started the year reading and reviewing for Newsroom Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton which was perfect holiday reading — propulsive and brainy. I learned a valuable lesson about reviewing: that you should always put in a couple of choice and inventive descriptive words that can be used as pull quotes otherwise you get stuck with seeing your very bland ‘a great book’ over and over. I’m pretty sure Steve Braunias keeps pulling it out to taunt me. A great book. SMH.
I wrote about Caroline Barron’s drama of nostalgia and memory, Golden Days, for the Aotearoa NZ Review of Books, the excellent new review site under the care of Paula Morris. I asked to review it because it is set in Auckland in the 90s, a period and place I’m very familiar with, and I was curious to see how it was portrayed. It’s a good holiday read, too.
I’m so glad I put my hand up to review Pip Adam’s Audition, my top (adult) novel of the year for its strangeness, its invention, its deep thinking. The Listener review is paywalled, but I think it’s okay to quote from myself for those without a subscription (by the way, bravo to the Listener and Mark Broatch for continuing to be the last bastion of New Zealand print media dedicating real space to book reviews):
“On one level, reading the strange and wonderful Audition is like listening to a concept album of experimental music that samples the familiar and turns it into the uncanny, where each track builds on the last until finally the listener floats off on an ecstatic bed of epic electronica. Rather than emulating what has gone before, it adds to a cumulative understanding of realms outside our ken, and asks us to critically examine our society — our systems, our prejudice and our violence – by imagining worlds beyond our own.”
On the subject of reviewing, I was chuffed and honoured etc to be awarded Best Reviewer at the 2023 Voyager New Zealand Media Awards in May. It was unfortunately the last of its kind as they have done away with the category for 2024, instead merging ‘criticism’ with column and opinion which I suppose is another nail in the book review coffin.
A few books saw me through exhaustion and illness. The Cassandra Complex by Holly Smale was the autistic time travel romcom I didn’t know I needed. It’s interesting that the US version of the book is called Cassandra in Reverse which negates the significance of the narrator’s name and its relation to autism and relationships. The Nancys by R. W. R. McDonald, a New Zealander who lives in Sydney, was a delight. Narrated by 11-year old Tippy Chan, about a girl and her visiting gay uncles in a small South Island town who solve the murder of a local teacher, it could have easily been read as a middlegrade mystery novel to begin with (it’s named after Nancy Drew after all) — until the wicked gay sex double entendres and the grisly murder details start to surface. I’m looking forward to reading the sequel, Nancy Business, soon.
Books I listened to as audiobooks and enjoyed: Yellowface by R. F. Kuang and The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly. Both books were over-acted by the person reading them which annoyed the hell of me — why can’t people just read the bloody book? In the case of Kuang’s, it also meant that the tone of the unreliable narrator was spelled out for me, when one of the strengths of the book is its ambiguity.
While I raced through the books above, there were three novels that demanded a slower read.
Here on Earth (1997) by Alice Hoffman drew me in with its cover quote (‘Wuthering Heights meets The Horse Whisperer’) and the early lines: “A person could get lost up here. After enough wrong turns he might find himself in the Marshes, and once he was there, a man could wander forever among the minnows and the reeds, his soul struggling to find its way long after his bones had been discovered and buried on the crest of the hill, where wild blueberries grow.” It was dense, lyrical and bleak, and demanded a slow read (it took me five weeks but at no point did I want to abandon it; I could only read it in smallish chunks). In this way, it reminded me very much of the other books I read in the ’90s, but I can’t quite put my finger on why — was it of its time stylistically? Have books changed since then? I believe they have but it will take some serious pondering to work out what I mean by that. The book cover, though, is iconically ’90s Vintage paperback.
The best thing about the experience was that I triumphed at the local pub quiz when one of the clues to the ‘who am I’ round was ‘Here on Earth by Alice Hoffman was a retelling of me’ and our team was the first to guess Wuthering Heights and I was a team legend for an evening.
Swansong (2018), by writer and musician Kerry Andrew belongs to one of my favourite sub-genres, which I’ve written about before: ‘woman escapes to remote place; creepy things happen’. I was drawn to it by the quotes from John Banville and Robert Macfarlane on the cover, and for its description of the protagonist “alone in this eerie, myth-drenched landscape”. Eerie, myth-drenched landscape? Sign me up! The writing is fresh, delightfully dark, with a slow — perhaps too slow — build-up of tension, and hints of violence. But also some humour and some nice descriptive writing. I loved this image: “Tufts of hair spiralled out around his ears, like he was trying to keep a load of wind-blown clouds under his cap.” I definitely felt the cool dampness of the Scottish lakeside air, smelled the earth, saw the black mirror of the loch, and when the myth finally made itself known to me, it was intensely satisfying and melancholy.
I’m going to slightly deviate to tell you about my love for the wonderful new Bookhub website. What a treasure! I love elegant, slim hardbacks and so when I decided to buy Sarah Bernstein’s Booker-shortlised Study for Obedience (I was sold by this atmospheric folk horror-ish reading by actor Bel Powley on the Booker website), I jumped on to find which shop near me might have it (rather than the paperback). It led me to the The Clocks in suburban Christchurch — a new find for me. It’s a delight — tables piled high with literary fiction and non-fiction, a huge section dedicated to crime, including classic crime, and cookbooks galore. The owner was very knowledgeable, and seemed to have read nearly all the books on the Booker shortlist. The only thing that was slightly lacking was New Zealand fiction. But what a great resource Bookhub is: not only does it save me ringing around bookshops, it actually led to me finding an entirely new (to me, not to the well-heeled residents of Strowan) independent bookshop. The website is now my first port of call when Scorpio Books or University Bookshop (my usual go-tos) don’t have something, so I can buy local instead of being tempted to shop online and send my money overseas.
As for Study for Obedience, though short (fewer than 200 pages), it was slow going — it took me nearly three weeks. Stylistically, the pages were full of very long paragraphs and long, run-on sentences. Usually comma splices give the impression of someone pouring words out in a breathless gush, but here it had the opposite effect. You had to slow down and read every sentence carefully to be sure of its rhythms and meaning. It’s self-referential as well — at one point, the unnamed narrator, who has gone to unnamed ‘northern’ country (I’m thinking maybe Russia?) to keep house for her controlling brother, describes her work as a transcriber, and how she is giving up on the rules of grammar. It’s an interesting read, for sure, but it wasn’t what I wanted at the time. I thought I was getting something sparse, atmospheric, and chilling (it’s on my ‘folk-horror adjacent’ shelf), but I got something much more esoteric. I think some reviewers have skimmed the book, because they mention that they think it’s set in the UK (clearly it’s not, because the residents use a Cyrillic alphabet and don’t speak English!) and that it takes place in an unspecified time (and yet there is mention of Microsoft Teams!). If you want something puzzling and intense, this could be the book for you.
Speaking of New Zealand authors, I also read Pet by Catherine Chidgey before it was released (I had the pleasure of chairing her session at the Auckland Writers’ Festival in May (you can watch it here), and The Axeman’s Carnival is still my favourite novel of the last two years), and it’s done deservedly well both here and internationally. I think one of my favourite things of this year has been seeing our writers being picked up internationally again (because it does feel as though there’s been a lull), with writers like Chidgey, Kirsten McDougall, Emily Perkins, Eleanor Catton, Becky Manawatu, Pip Adam, Rebecca K. Reilly, Anna Smaill and Michael Bennett (I’m sure I’ve forgotten some!) all receiving international press or celebrity social media attention (and commercial writers such as Chloe Gong and Graci Kim — I know there are more! — consistently making bestseller lists in the US). Long may it continue and grow.
I still brought home a lot more than I read and I’m going to spend at least a couple of weeks over summer reading some of the novels I didn’t get to. Top of the list: Lioness by Emily Perkins, End Times by Rebecca Priestley, and Bird Life by Anna Smaill (I was a huge fan of The Chimes, and I’m chairing her session at the Aotearoa NZ Festival of the Arts). There have been so many good New Zealand books published recently and I have no idea when I will get to them but here’s some others I spent my money on this year: Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts by Josie Shapiro; The Deck by Fiona Farrell; Ruin by Emma Hislop; How to Loiter in a Turf War by Coco Solid; Down from Upland by Murdoch Stephens; and Better the Blood by Michael Bennett. I’m sure there are more. And that’s just the New Zealand books. I’m so glad I’m not an Ockhams judge this year.
NON-FICTION
I didn’t read many books of non-fiction cover to cover but I dipped into quite a few as background reading for my writing: notably books on craft such as Diana Wynne Jones’ Reflections: on the magic of writing and Writing the Uncanny, the excellent collection of essays I started in 2022; and Mark Fisher’s books The Weird and the Eerie and Ghosts of My Life, which continue to feed into the essays I’m slowly assembling after the IIML workshop (sample: “Fisher, referring in particular to Alan Garner’s Red Shift, says, ‘If different historical moments are in some sense synchronous, would this not mean, not that there is no now, but that it is all now?’… Perhaps [George Mackay] Brown, who died in 1996, was uniquely placed to tap into the all now-ness of the stories and history of those islands.”).
Other essays I read that stuck with me were: Andrew O’Hagan’s devastating (and controversial) essay about child violence, ‘Have You Seen David?’ in the London Review of Books, Claire Mabey’s fever dream ‘This Dark Country’, and the wonderfully diverse collection Horse Girls (with the typically lengthy American subtitle Recovering, aspiring and devoted riders redefine the iconic bond), edited by Halimah Marcus. All feeding into my own writing.
One of my top reads of the year was the other non-fiction I read, The Stirrings by Catherine Taylor (don’t just take my word for it — Kiran Dass writes about it beautifully on her Substack The Gradual Shipwreck). From the opening scene of a teenage Taylor hovering at the edge of a cemetery, faced with both peer pressure and the furtive threat of a very real serial killer, I knew I would fall head first into it. Taylor writes about her life growing up on Sheffield in the 1970s and 80s (after being born in Hamilton, in the very same hospital as me) but this is more than an account of an ordinary life. It speaks of the times: of nuclear threats and threats that girls and women face; political upheavals and cultural touchstones; the adolescent struggle to fit in and find your feet. It also whispers of the unsettling fog of those times that I sense in my own past half a world away, where part of my childhood was also spent at the borders of a cemetery, in Karori.
It’s not just the events and the times, but the way Taylor writes about them, with precision and a care for language (with only the occasional overegging) that held me in an almost hypnogogic state throughout. I very rarely cry real, wet tears when reading a book, but reading of young Catherine and her flatmates in a big, malevolent old house and a tragedy that occurs there (which is heavily foreshadowed, so I read it with a stress knot in my gut as it approached) had me sobbing and aching as if I was looking back on an incident from my own life that I’d forgotten. This is the pinnacle for me of what memoir can be: not just a series of things that happen to a person but a gateway to something much more profound; a piece of art that engages on a visceral and psychic level. The parallels continue when the book more or less ends with Taylor moving to Southeast London in 1992, the very year I arrived there myself, aged 21. We were listening to the same music, watching the same Kieślowski films, probably going to the same gigs at the Brixton Academy.
I wonder too, if we are entering an era where my generation is writing about their lives, so this is just the beginning of more to come. The Stirrings has made me look at my own youth, its dark corners, with renewed interest.
POETRY
Well, this is embarrassing. I only read one poetry book cover to cover, and that was Anne Kennedy’s fantastical narrative poem The Time of the Giants, because Pip Adam mentioned it in her acknowledgements so of course I had to read it for my review (over-researching completist that I am). I’m glad I did. I dipped into but haven’t yet finished Elizabeth Morton’s wonderfully eerie Naming the Beasts, and Tusiata Avia’s bold, genius Big Fat Brown Bitch is on the top of my reading pile. What she has endured (and continues to endure since she deservedly won the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement) has been a real cultural lowlight in Aotearoa and her response is magnificent.
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
When it comes to fiction, I seem to write children’s books almost exclusively now. I am coming evermore around to the idea that children’s books are the most important books, because they can shape a young person’s whole outlook on life, and a love of reading in childhood builds adults who read, borrow and buy books. Not to mention all the other good things reading brings. And we will need those people in the future!
I loved what Katherine Rundell (yes I quote her a lot) said in the New Statesman: “The books you read and adore as a child become part of you: if the books are good enough, they get into your blood and bones, hair and eyes and fingernails, and live on inside you, for long after you have forgotten the details of plot or title.” Someone recently asked me if children can tell or care if a book is beautifully written. I gave an unsatisfactory (to me) answer about the how they are the most important of all, but it occurred to me later that it doesn’t matter whether they know about it at the time; those books, the ones that don’t patronise them, or cynically try and mine their parents’ wallets again and again, the ones that show them the magic of language as well as a racy plot or a belly-laugh, are the ones that will stay with them and help them become who they are. I am continually delighted by revisiting the books I loved as a child to find they are even better than I remembered them because they are operating on many different levels, and as an adult I find new things in them.
That is how I came to read over thirty children’s/YA books in 2023, mostly novels, because reading good books is essential to writing them, and because I enjoyed them in and of themselves. Not all of them were great, but some of them were outstanding, and I give you a selection below.
The first book I read this year was Tyger, written by S.F. Said and gorgeously illustrated by Dave McKean. As with The Raven’s Song, I finished reading it with so many questions that I went looking for an essay online about it because surely someone had written the in-depth review it deserved, some Blake scholar maybe, who could analyse and mine it for all its intellectual gems. The LRB maybe? The TLS? Oh wait. It’s a children’s book. The best I could find was a spot in a ‘round-up’. Lots of lovely, enthusiastic posts about it. But no serious literary media review space.
So I went to the source and asked for an interview, which The Sapling published later in the year. SF answered my questions beautifully. He dropped many pearls of wisdom but I especially appreciated this: “I believe children’s books are the most important books of all, so as a writer, you have to give them everything you’ve got — however hard it might be, and however long it takes.” It’s not too much to ask that they get taken seriously critically as well. I’m still looking out for that Blake scholar essay.
I won’t go into every book that I read, though it’s worth noting that I was drawn to dark, slightly creepy, folk-influenced stories as that is what I am writing. Here is a selection of the most notable.
Some magical, well-told stories I enjoyed: the gentle Dragon Skin by Australian author Karen Foxlee, about a girl who finds a baby dragon in an outback town, beautifully told with a strong sense of place, and a poignant story of grief and difficult home life; Fable House, by EL Norry, set post-WW2 in a children’s home for the abandoned offspring of white British mothers and Black American GIs, where a group of kids encounter the Black Knight from King Arthur’s court and open a portal to a sinister faerie realm; and The Witchstone Ghosts by Emily Randall-Jones, which lured me in with its comparisons to The Wicker Man, about a girl who moves to an island after her father drowns and encounters suspicious locals and an otherworldly mystery and hints of pagan sacrifice. I love anything folk horror-adjacent in middle grade books, and this does a solid job.
Illustrated books that grabbed me (and were obviously quite fast reads) were Jon Klassen’s superb, macabre and beautiful retelling of a Tyrolean folktale, The Skull; Thornhill, a hybrid graphic novel by Pam Smy, about a girl who moves in next door to a derelict children’s home and connects with a past resident; and Paradise Sands, a stunning picture book by the magnificent Levi Pinfold (I would die happy if he illustrated one of my books — he does beautiful horses). It doesn’t really feel suitable for young children, and I’m not sure who the target audience is, but I bought it to read multiple times.
I discovered the books of A.F. Harrold, who, like me, writes quite dark middlegrade books with a hint of supernatural but set in the real world with real world problems. He writes about complex things, and in the three books I read he explores: the grief of losing a child friend (The Afterwards); the consequences of wishing someone harm (The Worlds We Leave Behind); and bullying and keeping secrets safe (The Song from Somewhere Else). He also collaborates regularly with Levi Pinfold and the illustrations heighten the atmosphere of the books beautifully. I mean, just look at these!
I also discovered Lucy Strange, whose Sisters of the Lost Marsh I was drawn to because it has similar concerns to the YA I’m writing (Marshes! Folklore! Horses! A restrictive, superstitious and sinister society!) and it did not disappoint. Beautifully written and eerie, it turned out to have similar vibes to The Grimmelings as well. I’m looking forward to her next one which, like my new YA, is set on a windswept island and is another one with a dark, menacing tone (do we like scaring children? Yes we do).
I read two books by David Almond, one of my favourite contemporary writers for young people. He is so prolific that I’m happy to say I have many more Almonds in my future. Bone Music was mesmerizing — one of my top reads of the year in all genres. It was the kind of book that if you gave it to the right 13-year-old at the right time, it would shape their world view forever. Poetic and profound, it spoke of the hugeness of the universe and the awe-inspiring depth of time. I loved it. I also read the 25th anniversary edition of Skellig, beautifully illustrated by Tom de Freston. Melancholy, mysterious and moving, much like Bone Music. Both novels feel visionary, and will give children (and adults) a sense of power and the unknowable hiding just out of sight. One day I will write about Almond’s books and what they mean to me (once I’ve read a few more — Kit’s Wilderness is next on the pile). Bone Music is set in Northumberland, where some of my ancestors are from, and it made me want to visit. Soon.
I read and reread (and wrote about) a lot of old children’s books — I seem to have developed a penchant for books from the ’60s and ’70s, even if I missed them the first time around. I wrote about them twice for the Spinoff — here and here and included A Stitch in Time (1976) and The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy (1971) by Penelope Lively; The Time of the Ghost (1981) by Diana Wynne Jones; and Charlotte Sometimes (1969) by Penelope Farmer. I was looking forward to reading John Gordon’s The Giant Under the Snow (1968) as I kept seeing it mentioned in the same breath as The Dark is Rising. Reader, I was disappointed. The point of view was all over the place and it felt sloppy, hard-going. The parts I did like, however, were Gordon’s sense of the uncanny, of adults not to be trusted, of ancient forces wishing to cause children harm. The flying children, however, felt just a tad… silly. The Leathermen though… now they were disturbing, in a good way. That sense of the uncanny permeated his other book that I read and enjoyed a lot more, The House on the Brink (1971), which was much better-crafted. I saw someone describe it as having a “terse, poetic style”, which could be applied to lots of books from that time. It’s set in fenlands, which are frequently portrayed as liminal spaces, and has such a queasy sense of unease that it’s hard to think of it as a children’s book (like many books from the time).
More houses: The House on the Cliffs by Ruth Dallas a was joyful find in a secondhand bookshop. Published in 1976 by Methuen UK, it is set in what I think must be Karitane (north of Dunedin) or thereabouts and has a beautiful sense of place, if a very quiet story. I’m not sure I read any Ruth Dallas when I was a child, though her name was familiar to me, probably from the School Journal.
The other house was the haphazard pencil drawing made real in Marianne Dreams (1958) by Catherine Storr, a book I found so profoundly affecting — an utter masterpiece — and which so vividly dredged up all my memories of being traumatised by the television adaptation when I was about five, that I have decided to write an entire essay about it. Watch this space.
And so to 2024. So far my reading is once again dominated by reading around the books I am writing and the festival sessions I am chairing. But that’s all until the next installment of my annual writing diary. Hopefully delivered on time. Happy 2024 reading!
