FAREWELL 2022. I WELCOME A NEW YEAR WITH A 6-STARS-OF-FIVE REVIEW!

It's time to get my 2023 house in order. 2022 saw me pass out 77 4.5* or higher reviews of 393 total, or 19%. Quite a good year indeed. I think the most amazing part of my reading year was the consistently good quality of my non-fiction reading, from Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America and Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World: What China's Crackdown Reveals about Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere through to Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism and High-Risk Homosexual. I read with a slack jaw and a wildly beating heart the beautifully unconventional Before All the World, not one single thing about that read has dimmed a notch in my memory's lantern. I became misty and sad and still uplifted when I read Natasha Pulley's gorgeously wrought The Kingdoms, alternate history that has the one and the only truthful and accurate to my own experience portrayal of non-consensual heterosexual sex where the woman is the rapist. It was stunning. It was freeing to read on a page that someone else knew. I am forever in her debt for this alone, and am always eager for more like 2022's The Half Life of Valery K. There's a peak reading year in those reads alone! HOWSOMEVER....

It's my annual six-stars-of-five read! Kibogo (my book review), a beautiful tale of colonial-era Catholicism meeting, battling, and suffering defeat at the hands of Kibogo, the Rwandan folk-religion's organizing spirit. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Literature in Translation. It was the most unforgettable book I read in a year chock-a-block with wonderful reading. It explored the many ways colonialism tries to destroy the colonized, insidious personal invasions that are masked by pious mouthings and cold, cruel hearts crossdressing to seem unthreatening. And it still told a fine and exciting tale!

In 2022, I posted 370 reviews here, and 393 on my bookish social media sites. I don't think I can sustain such a pace at my time in life, but there's no sense setting meager goals is there. In 2023, my goals are:

To post 395 reviews of all sorts here

To post at least 120 Burgoines here and on my bookish social media sites of ARCs
      and/or DRCs from before 2022

To review at least 50% female or -presenting authors across genres

To post a review every day during #PrideMonth and #WomeninTranslationMonth

If I've learned nothing else in my *hack*ty-three years, it's to keep the goals from being the focus. It's the achievements I'm after, not the check-box ticking!

Happy 2023 to all my readers, and to your friends and your families and your companion animals (unless they're cats) and your delivery providers and...everyone we've ever met in our entire lives, to misquote Maureen Stapleton.

KIBOGO, latest treat from Scholastique Mukasonga AND A FINALIST for the National Book Award—Translated Literature!

KIBOGO
SCHOLASTIQUE MUKASONGA (tr. Mark Polizzotti)
Archipelago Books
$12.99 ebook editions, available now

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION IN TRANSLATION FINALIST!

One of LitHub's 38 Favorite Books of 2022!

Rating: 6* of five It's my annual six-stars-of-five read!

The Publisher Says: In four beautifully woven parts, Mukasonga spins a marvelous recounting of the clash between ancient Rwandan beliefs and the missionaries determined to replace them with European Christianity.

When a rogue priest is defrocked for fusing the gospels with the martyrdom of Kibogo, a fierce clash of cults ensues. Swirling with the heady smell of wet earth and flashes of acerbic humor, Mukasonga brings to life the vital mythologies that imbue the Rwandan spirit. In doing so, she gives us a tale of disarming simplicity and profound universal truth.

Kibogo's story is reserved for the evening's end, when women sit around a fire drinking honeyed brew, when just a few are able to stave off sleep. With heads nodding, drifting into the mist of a dream, one faithful storyteller will weave the old legends of the hillside, stories which church missionaries have done everything in their power to expunge.

To some, Kibogo's tale is founding myth, celestial marvel, magic incantation, bottomless source of hope. To white priests spritzing holy water on shriveled, drought-ridden trees, it looms like red fog over the village: forbidden, satanic, a witchdoctor's hoax. All debate the twisted roots of this story, but deep down, all secretly wonder--can Kibogo really summon the rain?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Come and sit down. Settle in for a winter afternoon's pleasure-reading of someone else's culture's stories. This novella-in-stories is, in under 150pp or about three hours'-worth of reading, going to tell you about Rwanda. Not the country that threw itself a genocide in 1994. The foreign colony undergoing coerced christianization, the colonizers whose need for men and food to fight a war on another continent was the only thing they saw, the people of Ruanda-Urundi whose bodies and souls were the raw material and the means of production but never just themselves. What happens when Nature decides to withhold her usual munificence and deny Mankind her fecundity is always very, very educational to the mass of the people.

What Kibogo does, then, is tell you the stories of the people. They're funny, they're poignant, they're sometimes befuddlingly different from our Global Northern expectations. But they are alive, they sing on the pages of this book, they make their world felt and heard and seen through Author Scholastique Mukasonga's careful, gentle, unsparingly honest eyes. Translator Mark Polizzotti comes in for a heap of praise as well. I could hear Author Scholastique speaking to me, and he is the reason I wasn't slugging through the book with La Petite Larousse ten centimeters from my elbow at all times.

Kibogo is a god, a divine creature whose rule over Ruanda's people is challenged by the Catholic priests. If you know anything about that religion, the focus of worship is what they start with changing...Jesus, not Kibogo...while syncretizing as much of the pre-christian myth structure and storytelling architecture as possible. In the event, who's the god isn't always clear...it comes down to the name one calls when one is in extremis...and that name can surprise even the caller.

The worst part of believing in a super-natural being, a creature above the natural world we must perforce inhabit, is that there is always, always a loose end to tuck in, a wrinkled page to smooth out and make readable. When a man works to make this his life's gift to the world, he neglects the woman whose gift the world is in: No birth happens without a man and a woman agreeing to make it happen. The issues for the Ruandan god's bride and the Catholic church's groom grow urgent. Both seek a spirit, see a world for what it has and can be made into; the world, meanwhile, just Is. How can this end except in tears? Watch and learn, people without belief.

Or just follow Author Scholastique as she, seeming as bemused as the rest of us, watches the borning Rwandan African attempts to put flesh on the hollow bones of ancestral skulls. It is here that I felt the sting of tears as, not free of sarcasm, Author Scholastique offers up the flesh of a bumbling, pompous Western world in sacrifice to the simple, bright, carnivorous land we all must share. The land is the only god worth worshiping because it is the only god we can touch and who responds to us, who feeds our families and accepts our worn-out remains for its eventual reuse, recycling what can not be reduced more than it is by the myriad eating mouths and excreting guts of Life.

This was a rare, perfect reading experience for me. It came exactly when I wanted and needed it. It answered some call I made, unknowing, as I looked for a reason for winter's cold and brilliance not to weigh me down. Thank you for it, Author Scholatique, Translator Polizzotti, and Archipelago Books via Edelweiss+. Gifts of this great value come when they're most needed.

COVE, beginning my 2021 reviews on a Cynan-Jones-caused 5-star high

COVE
CYNAN JONES
Catapult
$19.95 hardcover, available now

I can not forget this read. I refer to it in my head, I think about its stark, vividly limned images. I am so deeply glad Author Cynan wrote it. This is my 2021 Six-Stars-of-Five read.

Rating: 5* 6 stars of five

The Publisher Says: Out at sea, in a sudden storm, a man is struck by lightning. When he wakes, injured and adrift on a kayak, his memory of who he is and how he came to be there is all but shattered. Now he must pit himself against the pain and rely on his instincts to get back to shore, and to the woman he dimly senses waiting for his return.

THIS WAS A YULE GIFT FROM MY YOUNG GENTLEMAN CALLER. THANK YOU, MY LOVE.

My Review: Don't ever, ever think you're in a dark place again, is the primary message of this novella-cum-prose poem.

He is holding his hands in the water, rubbing the blood from them, when the hairs on his arms stand up. The sway briefly, like seaweed in the current. Then lie down again.

He looks up. A strange ruffle come across the surface.

The birds had lifted suddenly and gone away. As if there were some signal. They are flecks now, a hiatus disappearing against the light off the sea.

He is far enough out for the land to have paled in view.

Our nameless point-of-view man is busy preparing to take his kayak out of the cove near his home. With his experienced preparations, catching a fish for his supper and with the material goods he needs to make the short trip comfortable, there is a heaviness. The foreboding the above passage evokes in me is matched by the fact that he's there to scatter his father's ashes. But the world doesn't have time to mourn for anyone:

There was a piping of oystercatchers, a clap of water as a fish jumped. He saw it for a moment, a silver nail. A thing deliberately, for a brief astounding moment, broken from its element.

These passages make me think I live in Author Cynan's head. I see and hear them in realtime. I am deeply unsettled...what is coming must be difficult because these quotidian sensations are so powerful. The ashes, the small moments of daily reality going on despite the huge gaping hole of his father's death...going out of the shelter of this homely cove, noticing its real-world comforts...
...
...
...I've read your books before, Author Cynan, something terrible this way comes.

A moment truly as before-and-after as it is portrayed to be: A lightning strike.

While alone at sea. In a kayak. With a few hours' trip supplies.

Waking up alive, though after how long he doesn't know and with the arm that conducted the current dead (the fern-like pattern of Lichtenberg figures disfiguring his now-useless hand and arm), he inventories his few supplies and begins preparations to survive. It is grueling to read and almost reeks of experience, which I hope is second-hand:

He takes off the buoyancy aid & pulls on the thick sweater, useless arm first. The smell of the sweater triggers something, but it is like a piano key hitting strings that are gone.

That image is both terrifying to me, and gorgeous to read. What a superbly wrought way to describe the sensation of losing a piece of yourself, your experience. Where one expects resonant musical pleasure, there is the presence of silence and not just the absence of sound.

There is a miserable fight, with the good luck of an itchy sunfish rubbing against his kayak and beneficently steering it towards land; there is a moment of aesthetic joy as night luminescent seas trace the presence of his hand; there is so much work and so much pain:

If you disappear you will grow into a myth for them. You will exist only as an absence. If you get back, you will exist as a legend.

That's effective self-talk for a man who's been through some huge change. "They" are the woman pregnant with his child, and the unborn person itself. For, as the sea's many thefts (water, skin) bite ever deeper, he needs this goal to focus on, and needs also his dead father's ghost in his own head reminding him how to do this, how to survive.

An image of fatherhood that I am so unspeakably glad to see in fiction, littered as it is with cheating lying beating abusing men.

The ordeal continues. The night and the day and then there is land...land within sight...with lights...and he MacGyvers up a sail to speed his bonny boat...
...
...into a squall.

All of his life he's had a recurring dream: the car leaves the road. It is never the impact that terrifies him, wakes him. His fear comes the moment he feels the car go.

His life does not pass before his eyes. There is even a point he feels calm. But then he sees the faces of the people he loves. He sees their faces as they see him go.

Here is a man driven to Be There, never to leave, always support and defend, finally driven to his uttermost extreme in search of survival.

And that is where we end.

I close my remarks by noting that this is the book I wish The Old Man and the Sea had been, but was not.

GIFT CARDS! GIFT CARDS!! Now what shall I get myself....

The wrapping paper's all smoothed out and saved (right? RIGHT?! because it's hugely wasteful to just pile it into the landfill, and no one who reads my stuff is that selfish, RIGHT?!), the pile of returns is in something portable against the day the plague is beaten back, and now there are those lovely, lovely, lovely gift cards to spend!

Now, what to spend them on. Eternally recurring question, isn't it. I mean, mystery series: start or continue? Fantasy novels: Nonillionology or stand alone (rare things, those)? Science fiction: TV adaptation already out or being developed? Short stories: familiar author or start sampling some new work? Pize winners: this year, start from the inception of the prize, or just pick a date and read the winners from that year...you get my point, which book(s) to buy is a vexed and vexing question. (If you're the sort of person who buys clothes or tchotchkes, what are you doing here?)

There are over eight hundred review posts on this blog. Reading some of them, as I assume you have, you're bound to form an opinion of my taste and how it marches with yours. If this is your first visit, welcome! Click around. Nothing bad will happen to your browsing history. But the sheer number of options can feel overwhelming to some. (The more the merrier says I, but I bore easily so novelty and variety are my crack.) Use the search function! It's that little box at the top left of the Home page. Enter a term like "science fiction" or "mystery" or "economic royalists" and lots of options will magically present themselves in scrollable form! Don't care as much about genres, freeze when asked to think of spmething specific? The bottom of this post has all the star listings I've used...well, up to 200 characters it does...and there are the genre tabs to peruse, too.

I am always, um, taxed with the fact that some links go to a book's listing on Amazon. These are not affiliate links, which you can readily ascertain because they're all "Smile" links and those can not be affiliate links. Usually I've explained why it's to Amazon, but in general it's for books out of print or whose publisher sites make my nose hairs combust with frustration when trying to navigate. (Publishers: It's the 21st century. UPDATE YOUR STORES TO MODERN BEST PRACTICES.)

One final note: Only members of the blog, those who have Google accounts and click on the "Follow" button, can comment on here. People whose presence I find unpleasant have in the past exercised their free speech to say unkind, unpleasant, or unwelcome things. Don't do that. But please, if you find a broken link or a weird problem, please comment on that post! I can't keep track of everything that changes in the past eight years. I need and welcome the help. It's a kindness and a mitzvah.

Shop hearty!

A Book-A-Day #17: THE FUN WE'VE HAD, a novel that surprised me

THE FUN WE'VE HAD
MICHAEL J SEIDLINGER
Lazy Fascist Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 6* of five

The Publisher Says: Two lovers are adrift in a coffin on an endless sea. Who are they? They are him and her. They are you and me. They are rowing to salvage what remains of themselves. They are rowing to remember the fun we've had.

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt is to discuss a novel that surprised you.

Seidlinger is what a mating between Djuna Barnes and Samuel Beckett would've produced: Illusionless in his pessimism, joyful in his schadenfreude, and both human and humane enough to wrap his bitter pills in pretty words.

He wasn't at all sure this was excitement, but at least for now, the glimpsing of something else, something, anything, was enough to keep the momentum, the same momentum that seemed to outline his days. What might have been a lazy, relaxing Saturday became a cause for adventure, a curious matching between him and her, their search to be out, on the city, the town, so as to stave off being on the outs with each other.
That's what it is, was, and will always be.
Nothing would change. Nothing is wrong.
This is just another adventure. New thrill.
"Are we having fun?"
Of course they are. When every feeling is time-stamped and the life you lead becomes the life you led, there cannot be a whole lot more to do except admit right from wrong.

So, Michael Seidlinger. He's this guy, you know?

He wrote this book, which before we go any further down the rabbit hole let me assure you I purchased with my very own United States dollars as I am nowhere *near* hip/cool/hot/whatever enough to score an ARC, a book which by all rights he's too goddamned young to understand still less create. It's a very trenchant metaphor, He and She and the Deep Blue Sea separated, contained, bound, sustained, trapped, saved by a shared coffin. The consciousness of He and She is very much not shared, except the two are inextricable and still completely sealed off from yet bound to the experience of the other:

Touch being only touch, both of them imagining the warmth that would have been shared if their bodies had been bodies alive and still able to be repaired, they lay there like it had been a bed and not a coffin. The final end.
Not yet.
No.
Not yet, she fought the ghosts.
They reminded her. Tell him. Tell him.
She would tell him. Later.
"Later" arrived and left and returned once more. Still, she wouldn't tell him.

We mourn and grieve for Him and Her in their shared coffin, dead, living only in separate minds that are contained within a final resting place tossed on a restless expanse of endlessness.

Ghosts in the sea, all of us, whispering ghosts, the sea's physical voice a subsonic boom of waves crashing and moving the plates of the earth's crust a micron or two, and whispering "the end" to the living, "no end" to the dead, and "Hello Kitty" to the Japanese.