The Guardian's list of best books is out for 2023
What a feast of joy it isn't. Among the recommendations are:
1. The story of a trio of gay Americans looking for their ancestral roots in Ghana
2. A propulsive thriller responding to the climate crisis
3. A harrowing testimony from a slave plantation.
4. An auto- fiction deeply engaged with the horrors of colonialism
5. A shadow history of queer desire and erasure
6. A hypnotic journey into the dub reggae scene
7. The tale of young Vietnamese refugees in Thatcher’s Britain
8. A chronicle of Soweto under and after apartheid,
9. A tale of gay "pioneers" in 1890s London
10. An excoriating account of Contemporary Britain, which sets one woman’s desire to return to the Nigeria of her youth against the backdrop of the Grenfell tragedy
It's all a very long way from Three Men in a Boat.
Do people in other countries also dedicate most of their publishing industry to self-hating fiction and books challenging heterosexuality? If it's just us, why do we do it? Are publishers responding to the market or trying to indoctrinate their customers?
Are they successful? Personally, I avoid anything published since this century began, buying books only secondhand. I pray there will be a reset to normal very soon and I can go back into bookshops with optimism and excitement about what enjoyable new novel I might find inside.
*Montmorency is the fox terrier in Three Men in a Boat.
One suggestion, not only published in this century, but with its action falling in the century: The Index of Self-Destructive Acts by Christopher Beha. It is very American, one might even say very New York, since all the action (not all the back story) occurs within either New York City or Long Island.
ReplyDeleteThank you, I will seek it out. ZMKC
Delete