The books I’ve read so far this year:
DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD, Olga Tokarczuk
THE NIGHT PARADE OF ONE HUNDRED DEMONS, Matthew Meyer
DEATH WILL HAVE YOUR EYES, James Sallis
BATTLETECH: DECISION AT THUNDER RIFT, William H. Keith
THE BOOK OF YOKAI, Michael Dylan Foster
THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY, Thornton Wilder
THE ONLY HARMLESS GREAT THING, Brooke Bolander
CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN, Sayaka Murata
My brain has been on fire the last couple months so I had planned on reading a lot more light, escapist fare this year, but so far this has been mostly a lot of “capital-L” Literature. Probably some Maigret and more Battletech novels in the near-future. We’ll see.
The clear winner so far has been DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD (CA) (US).
I don’t want to say too much about the plot as a basic synopsis really doesn’t do it justice, but it concerns a hermit living in southern Poland, not far from the Czech border. One day, another of the hermits who lives near her dies under some mysterious circumstances and she begins to investigate what might have happened.
It’s an exceptional portrait of isolation, loneliness and mental illness. I can’t recall a protagonist I’ve related to more in a long time. I feel like I couldn’t be more like this person while having almost nothing in common with them. The extremes she believes in are pretty far from the ones in me, but the fervor of her dedication to them is eerily familiar.
“In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind – that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that’s constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences: in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality – its inexpressibility.”
Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk
“Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.”
“You know what, sometimes it seems to me we’re living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves . . . And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.”
Currently Playing: Bomani Armah – “Read a Book“
Currently Reading: THE ARMORED SAINT, Myke Cole (CA) (US)
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