A Year’s Review of Fiction
Whilst on a hiking trip on a weekend in September this past year, my brother and I had to navigate fog, which is an experience one should count on when hiking some of the high peaks of Appalachia. In a moment of surrealism and silence, as far as I can remember it, my brother stared into the vast unknown cloud outside the windshield as I drove on and whispered, “This is the finale…” Immediately following this extravagantly wild and hilarious comment, I burst out laughing. It became the defining quote of the trip. Months later, it’s still a brotherly inside joke. Whenever something out of the ordinary is happening, a pursuit is particularly complicated, or something challenging is being tackled, we whisper slyly, “this is the finale,” and laugh.
The recent past has seemingly been one giant conglomeration of finales. I can recall news of Kobe and Gigi Bryant dying as if it were yesterday and how young we all were then. It feels as if it’s ages away in the past too. I’m considered an essential worker in the job I have now, and quite honestly, I never saw such extremity from the sidelines before. I would see friends with concern in their masked facial expressions as they asked questions like “how are you getting on, love?” and “everyone’s stayin’ safe?” Honestly, nothing really changed for me: I had to put in a couple more hours a week and wear a mask at all times. That was the extent of the changes the pandemic forced on me.
It is strange though, how even from the sidelines, you can still be affected. That bit of the human experience has always intrigued me; how being privy to something going on over there or to a friend or a classmate could have such an effect on me. Like most people living in America at the start of this decade, I think most everyone felt the extreme ends of emotions relatively every couple of days. A spectrum didn’t really exist: it was replaced by what could only be described as a see-saw in the shape of a non-contact thermometer with an American flag patterned on the outside.
I think many people resort to describing 2020 as a strange year because what word encompasses all emotions simultaneously? There is indescribable, although I’ve always felt that adjective to be weak and with a positive connotation. The adjective strange references the cacophony of events that transpired (or didn’t transpire but were supposed to) and offers a bit of unfelt comfort because most of the time, when we can’t label something (especially here in America), we get agitated. Labeling lets us breathe as we put away something in the massive filing cabinet in our minds. It lets us push away a climax. A finale, if you will.
What perhaps didn’t help my secondhand depression, even if it kills me to say this, was the massive arsenal of novels I read that dealt with the variety of human emotion—from falling into John le Carre’s world of spies and espionage to the lucid world of pre-revolution England and smallpox to coming of age stories like The Kite Runner or extreme satire from many New Yorker fiction pieces. My reading habits seemed to parallel the expressions I sensed on my friend’s and acquaintance’s faces, expressions of deeply held emotions like grief and angst and joy at the thought of returning to pre-COVID-19 times.
So help me God if I ever hear the sinfully coined phrase “unprecedented times” again.
However bleak and disastrous the year behind us ended up being, the novel untangled some of the angst in us. Me especially. I think reading has become both a pastime, a pleasure, and, to some extent, a coping mechanism. I hate to call it escapism because I’ve always hated how true that ism is. But if one has had enough of the world, facing finale after finale, and needs a story to live in to evade their own for a few pages, take a gander at the best I read last year.
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How I Became of Famous Novelist
Steve Hely
Hopefully, I’m not alone when I say that I love books about books. Seriously. There’s something regarding a plot about an author that I find comforting and fascinating, yet I don’t want to boil the reason down to “it’s because I want to be an author.” No, I want the reason to be something like “books are lovely and should be rejoiced; therefore we should have books on books and art on art on art on…” Alas, it is because I want to be an author, so these gems are interesting.
Pete Tarslaw is our main guy, working in a business set up by his slightly out-of-touch friend. He concocts a crazy scheme he imagines all the best-selling authors in the world use to create a best seller of his own design. From there, the story just takes off. What’s funny is how wild Pete’s book ends up being. It’s called The Tornado Ashes Club for reasons the reader uncovers, and the plot involves absurd schemes, time travel, a grandmother (gasp!).
It’s really a comment on the publishing industry and a rather surreal love letter to book lovers. The climax is definitely a satisfying one, though not for our main character. It’s the defining literary personification of coyness. If you like books, and hopefully you do, pick this title up beaten and bruised because you’ll fly through the pages with Nascar adjacent speed.
John le Carré
I may have to devote an entire post to the stellar quality of these novels. 2020 was the year I sank deep into the waters of the spy novelist master, reading all the George Smiley books plus a few others, and acquiring more outside of that as additions to my to-be-read list. Quick aside: I first bought Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in high school, thinking it would make me look smart and educated (what a fool!). Then one day, I actually tried reading it. To me, then, it read like The Scarlet Letter: dry and disorientating and with too many characters all speaking at once. But at least a first effort was made, however self-absorbed the original impetus appeared.
Out of the whole George Smiley series, I managed to love the two most critiqued out of the set. This one, the sequel to the best seller and most notable book The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, delivers quirky relationships, a sense of urgency, and the most haunting ending I’ve ever read in a novel (this isn’t even adjacent to the horror genre). This particular book has Smiley on the fringes of the story, carefully playing and being coy with the main characters and their endeavors.
A particular faction of the Circus (the fictional name of Carré’s British Secret Service), dubbed the department, looks to restore the previous glory it held during wartime. When a random situation arises, they pursue a quick solution, jumping on the opportunity. What follows is the sad, somewhat twisted affair that the department engages in: taking its newest recruit, the Mr. John Avery, and sticking him closely with the spy Fred Leiser, a German-speaking Polish man, throwing both into a chaotic context influenced by wartime in England even though the setting is years after the war ended. It is best described as harrowing with such a disturbingly memorable conclusion that it could fit in a Stephen King novel.
Khaled Hosseini
One of the things I learned to practice better, especially related to books, is not reading the reviews of something you love. At least not all the time. Assessment is often a necessary thing, yes. It can reinvigorate the reasons why you love something and get you to think critically. That’s with good debate, though. And who defines it can only be the one reading it, unfortunately.
I learned that many people either loved or hated The Kite Runner. Published in 2003, it tells, in my opinion, a beautifully written coming-of-age story that made me angry, happy, cry, smile, throw pillows in the air and scream.
The main character, Amir, goes from having an indulgent lifestyle to having to flee from his native Afghanistan after the Russian invaders claim his town. Then the Taliban takes over. He finds a friend and brother in his servant, Hassan, who lives with him and his father, although (and this is where I find the story frustrating) Amir often puts Hassan at the butt of his jokes, his lifestyle, and his convenience. He often recounts his feelings of remorse, especially after a pivotal event that takes place early in the book, which drives the story along. That’s all I can really say in a blurb without giving much away.
The book is satisfying and relinquishes a kind of hope to the reader. It’s a story you want to live in all the way to the very end, which comes quickly yet isn’t hurried. The prose is concise, the dialogue is fluid, and conflict is ever-present in Amir’s life. And if you finish this book loving it, that’s amazing. If you finish this book hating it, that’s alright too. These things are subjective.
John le Carré
There’s a creative hustle between when the reader first meets George Smiley and sees him in the series’ sixth book. I believe this was the longest book I read last year, and in my honest opinion, it should have been broken up into two. But it contains the best of the spying world even if it is a little long-winded, a characteristic of which may be its biggest criticism. Again, the reader encounters the Circus and Smiley a little in the fringes and corners of the story, yet they play a much more crucial role in managing the decisions and the operations of Jerry Westerby, the spy running in the field.
The basic premise is as follows: in the wake of discovering a Russian mole within the Circus’s ranks, Smiley and his team contract Mr. Westerby to go after an asset of Karla, the Russian recruiter and Smiley’s dubbed nemesis. This asset, a Mr. Drake Ko (and his spritely assistant/bodyguard Mr. Tiu), is the distracting figure and face of an alleged money laundering scheme to set up air routes into China for Karla. His brother Nelson is an integral part of the plot however he hasn’t shown himself at all except in the form of Circus briefings and word of mouth. Among the central conflict lies several twists and turns, including a lost pilot, a newfound love, murder, strong brotherhood, car bombs, and Hong Kong nightlife.
This is a shotty attempt at summarizing the book, but, after all, it’s just a tick over six hundred pages.
The book is all about atmosphere, even more so than Carre’s other novels. It takes place both in England and Asia, and the diction lends itself well in giving the reader the smells, the look, even the taste of a tense room in England, or a bustling street in Hong Kong, or the war-ravaged jungles of Vietnam. It is about employing the largest amount of information over several chapters. It is a bunch of hurrying up and waiting and nail-biting until the very last pages of the novel. It’s long, but it moves swiftly.
The Last Confession of Thomas Hawkins
Antonia Hodgson
I have recently discovered the angering tick I have for picking up a book, reading it, loving it, only to find it the second or third book in a series. I tend to neglect the facts that characters seem established in these subsequent books, and I overlook that their relationships are not explained. You’d think this would give me a clue, but nope, I hurry through nearly half of the book before I have this epiphany.
Yes, this book is the second in the series by Antonia Hodgson, the first one being The Devil in the Marshalsea, which, of course, establishes in great detail how these characters have come to be intertwined in each other’s lives. Nonetheless, this story is chock full of conflict, danger, and suspense transpiring over many subplots. And they all wrap up well with no loose ends. Having escaped death in jail at the Marshalsea (read the first one), Thomas Hawkins is running an adult pamphlet shop with his love Kitty Sparks. Many neighbors disapprove of their choice of business as well as their relationship, yet the story gains headway as one prominent neighbor, the Reverend Joseph Burden, is found dead with a dagger shoved into his chest. With the Reverend’s death, Hawkins is thrust straight into the role of prime suspect number one and a deemed public danger. Amongst that chaos, Hawkins becomes entangled with the Queen and devotes his loyalty to the Queen’s mistress, vowing to protect her from her violent husband. Through unfortunate circumstances, his questionable reputation, and his ties to London’s most ruthless shadow gang (belonging to Samuel Fleet), Thomas Hawkins has to bear, yet again, the weight of not knowing who will come through for him in another venture to prove his innocence and escape the gallows. It’s written beautifully and with a tragically humorous twist in every chapter. Our man Hawkins simply can’t go on without falling into some sort of trouble.
It’s an enthralling book from cover to cover, however, I do recommend reading the first one first. It is just as suspenseful, and the second one will be better for it (as the author intended).
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Mark Haddon
There were many firsts in 2020 for me. I read and raved about the critically acclaimed George Smiley series, finished the equally acclaimed book The Kite Runner nearly hours after I started it, and read Mark Haddon’s arguably most well-known work.
But, just like those above titles, this book has been sitting on my shelf patiently waiting for me to pick it up and actually read it. And what I loved most after having finished it is how we live inside the main character’s head. I understand why it’s on so many required reading lists and why it has over 1.2 million ratings on GoodReads. I also read somewhere that’s it has been translated into over thirty different languages. It’s a fabulous demonstration of how we, the readers, get to see the world through another set of eyes, eyes with different emotions, different settings, different ways of relating to the contexts surrounding them.
Through the eyes of a fifteen-year-old boy named Christopher John Francis Boone, we witness an estranged investigation into the seemingly random murder of Wellington, the dog belonging to his neighbor. We witness not only the point-by-point investigation Christopher conducts but also the routine activities of his life. Though nowhere in the book does it state it, it’s implied that Christopher is somewhere on the spectrum of Autism, which adds to the story’s uniqueness. The settings change drastically even if the physical location doesn’t as much.
If you’re like me, and the allure of a book is learning as much as you can about the characters in it, this book will satisfy your love of fantastic character development. I hadn’t any expectations for this book only because I didn’t know what to expect from it. Yet the story blooms like a butterfly in Spring. It leaves the reader with a certain contentment knowing that everything they learned about the main character resolves with an astute gracefulness.
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Welcome to the inner workings of a mind facing writer’s block!
I could take the easier way out and cop the blame to a severely damaged psyche due to the pandemic, but the truth is I didn’t record enough about the books I liked last year. There’s a handful of sentences reacting to the newly read novel, a few sticky notes placed here and there highlighting some parts that I enjoyed, but for the most part, three months yielded hardly anything. Thus, we get a post of my favorite novels from last year four months into the succeeding year. Editing can also damage deadlines, as I probably rewrote several lines over and over again to make them fit into the image I had for them in my head.
Nevertheless, this year seems to have taken off wonderfully, like a rocket charging into the atmosphere with only the expected issues. There’s a much better journalistic system in place for me to record all the things I’ll read this year and my feelings on them. I do this because it helps me understand why I like some things and not others, helps me relate to the things I’ve read, and helps me think about them critically (basically, what I did when I was in college for six years).
Onward and upward out of the begrudging misery of 2020 and into the resounding optimism of the rest of the decade. May you only face one finale in the coming days!
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Simple Plan — I’d Do Anything
The Paper Kites — Steal My Heart Away
Monica Heldal — Wallowa Lake
Wild Cub — Colour
Collective Soul — Better Now
Tycho — Cypress
Buy My Ticket Home 