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Is 2025 dead yet. no?
Last book blog of the year! I recently read the first big story Janet Malcolm did for the New Yorker and… you know what, it rocks, lmao. Really reassuring that she published Psychoanalysis at the age of 47… never kill yourself, etc. I'm in the middle of The Sadeian Woman by Angela Carter and The Purloined Clinic by Malcolm, both which I feel strongly positive on and will write up in more detail next time. Also in the middle of Laing's The Garden Against Time, which I feel generally positively on and lol one million novels I most likely am never going to finish.
Some quick notes on two recently read books, and then some reflection on the rest of the year:
The Bridegroom was a Dog, Tawada - As you all know, I've been on a real Tawada kick thanks to a bunch of her newer books coming out in translation. As you know, I've come to hate her latest trilogy about Japan vanishing and the journey of a bunch of loosely affiliated adults to first locate another native speaker of Japanese, then to locate Japan itself. I finished the trilogy not too long ago and didn't write up on it because I really resented it for reasons that I thought were reasonable (thanks for explicitly confirming she's trans and then using he/him pronouns for the rest of the book, absolutely infuriating) and maybe unreasonable ("and the journey will continue forever" okay, so what I'm hearing is that there's no ending…). It's not that I find the concept of a ghost ship carrying people forgotten or maligned by history sailing the Baltic Sea forever entirely unappealing, especially given the thematic connections to borders, language, and European history, but I feel like ultimately I was left unsatisfied and displeased with the pacing of events and the way the character arcs started flagging partway through the second part of the trilogy and never picked up again…
Despite how irritated this trilogy left me and my ambivalence towards The Emissary, I really did respect her stance on "real" language and nationality (bunk!) and the way she handles characters transforming and changing over the course of the story. Tawada's been writing and publishing since the early 90s; her writing career basically spans my entire conscious life. Having read a decent number of her most recent works and read a few overviews of her career, I did have a feeling that Tawada's the kind of writer whose thematic and stylistic concerns remain fairly consistent (I found this article by Tawada's frequent translator, Margaret Mitsutani, really useful in terms of explicating Tawada's appeal, themes, and style, and the works she discusses are ones I've touched on in the book blog before) and that I'd probably enjoy her earlier works more than her later ones, and I'm happy to say that I was right: this shit rocked.
The Bridegroom was a Dog packages three of Tawada's novellas/short stories into a single volume for a wider international release. I found this set of stories really fun and delightful to read. Funny and deeply perverse on multiple levels. I'm personally not too wild about the final story, but liked the first two a lot… but now I think I can set her works aside for a while and read other people.
Night's Master, Lee - Really nice set of interconnected short stories by Tanith Lee. I thought these were top notch examples of both fantasy short stories and the genre of interconnected short stories, a famously thorny and difficult type of novel-length work to pull off. One of my favorite parts of reading Tanith Lee is her clever, witty solutions to resolving plot problems. I think she finds genuinely surprising solutions to her stories, given that each story deals with Azhararn, the Prince of Demons, lord of the Underearth, master of mischief and wickedness. How do you both demonstrate his power and let him be outwitted? Azhararn is powerful and persistent, but not undefeatable. He can be swayed by beauty or caught by his own vanity or trapped by words. But it is not easy to outfox him, and the simply determined may .
It's almost a cliche to humanize a narrative embodiment of evil, but I think that Azararn is rare for lacking a revenge motive. He's weak to sunlight, but he's not locked in eternal combat with it and forms no eternally struggling dyad with the heavens. The heavens give not a shit about anything below them. Azararn's eternal dyad is with mankind. He is the coked up rock star who lets the runaway kids sneak into his afterparty. Azararn torments mankind, but he's also the only one who loves them; without humans, he has no sense of mastery, surprise, or joy.
The other fun element of Lee is her mastery over the conventions of fairy tales and their symbols and themes without being rote or dull. Her characters are efficiently created and motivated. She knows when to keep her characters' attributes (docility, determination, cynicism, pride) constant and when they need to swing to the other end of their dyad… reading through this collection, I started thinking about the weirdness of the last two books of the Birthgrave trilogy. My thinking then was that she's so well-acquainted with the conventions and tropes of fairy tales and myth that she's inevitably going to pick up on, say, the extended orientalist themes of the Birthgrave or the way beauty and virtue are tied up together in Silver Metal Lover in a way that I disliked—like, if the house you're working in has thirty long-haired cats, you're going to leave with cat fur all over your clothes, even if she's able to evade the aggressive misogyny of the material… it doesn't feel satisfying to type that out, but I find plenty to enjoy on a whole. When she's good, it's really great.
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I had a good time reading this year on a whole, in part because I dedicated myself to two or three authors (44 completed titles, 31 unique authors) and every time I hated a book, I fled back to Janet Malcolm or Tanith Lee until I stopped being mad… I was about to reflexively start writing a whole morose thing about how my attention span has been blighted by the problem of "I love dicking around the computer and playing video games" (how about Hades 2 and Silksong, eh?) but I guess I don't care that much. I'm still growing as a writer and reader, I like writing my little book blog, and that's enough to keep me pretty happy about how things are going in my chosen dumb, meaningful, and penniless occupation. Viva la 3:00am book blogging, and see you all in 2026.
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