I read Child of God, by Cormac McCarthy, because the older I get, the shorter life seems and the less patience I have for the ordinary when I could have something sublime.

Let my start by saying I laughed at the necrophilia scenes. Perhaps I should finish by saying that too. That one sentence will tell you whether this book is right for you or not.

McCarthy is famous for the violence of his writing. Quite a few critics point to Blood Meridian as the most violent book. Not just the most violent McCarthy book, but the most violent book.

I disagree. Now it has been many years since I read Blood Meridian, but I do not recall that one featuring a serial killer rapist who attempts to make sweet love to a corpse but keeps getting thwarted in Loony-Tunes-esque ways—forbidden desecratory love, but make it slapstick.

Child of God does not resonate for me as much as No Country for Old Men (the finest crime novel I have ever read) or The Road (with the scariest horror scene I have ever read), but even a lesser McCarthy is a magnificent thing. He is a prose stylist nonpareil. At times his sentences are straightforward and terse, the noun did the verb to the object, marching the plot forward in staccato steps. Without warning his sentences turn wavy, different lengths, new cadences. He describes the mundane throwaway details like a monk illuminating the serifs in his scroll.  

I did not read a print version, but when I checked the Wikipedia page, I found the passage that made me stop in my tracks and rewind the audio as I walked the dog the other day:

“He came up flailing and sputtering and began to thrash his way toward the line of willows that marked the submerged creek bank. He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he's sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it. But they want this man's life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him?”

One final but crucial note: If you enjoy audiobooks, do not miss the Tom Stechschulte narration. He is one of my top five favorite narrators. Child of God is set in eastern Tennessee and he gets the accents right.

When I started as a public librarian, I checked out a few annual “Best of” anthologies to get a sense for different genres: sports writing, science writing, crime fiction, short stories in general. I recently found The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024 (Hugh Howey and John Joseph Adams, eds.) on sale, so I gave the ensemble-cast audiobook a listen.

Disappointingly, the stories were of varying quality. I expect better in an anthology with the word Best in the title. Or let me be more accurate: the stories were all good, speaking on a plot level, but the prose was not always up to snuff.

The phrase “achingly beautiful” should not appear in your short story, because that phrase is hackneyed. If I’m editing, I’ll let that slide in book-length manuscripts for some authors, because prose craft is not everyone’s forte. I will not let that slide in a short story, because you’ve only got three thousand words, give or take, and each one needs to count.

I absolutely, positively would not let “achingly beautiful” appear twice in the same fucking story. Which it did in one of the stories in the anthology.

My favorite fantasy short story was “John Hollowback and the Witch,” because I am a sucker for good witchy stories. Amal El-Mohtar has been on my TBR for years. I’m going to seek out her longer fiction on the strength of this story. My favorite science fiction short story was “Calypso’s Guest,” by Andrew Sean Greer. I love a familiar story thoughtfully retold.

And there was a short story I expected to dislike. I won’t name the writer, but I had bounced off his novels because his prose disappointed me, but he did a great job with the short story.

I read Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet, written by astrophysicist turned climate scientist Kate Marvel and with audiobook narration by Courtney Patterson.

This was a good overview of where we are and where we’re headed. Marvel makes the science of climate accessible to the lay reader, and may I just say, as someone who has edited writing by astrophysicists, I strongly appreciate that.

Marvel weaves her personal experience into the narrative, not enough to make the book a memoir, but enough to make her relatable. She writes about missing California, not just because she relocated to New York, but because she misses the California she knew as a child. Climate change has made it a hotter, dryer place. I’ve never been to California, but I recognize her grief. That’s how I feel about North Carolina.

Reading books about the climate is never emotionally easy, but Marvel does include reasons to hope, including the advances we have made in sustainable energy and the promise of future technologies that may one day scrub our atmosphere of the excess carbon and methane. Climate change is my biggest fear and my biggest grief, but Marvel personally has hope for the future, which makes me feel less pessimistic.

K. J. Parker has been one of my top-tier, can’t-miss writers since 2009, back before anyone knew he was the pseudonym of Tom Holt. To no one’s surprise, I enjoyed his newest novella, Making History.

As usual with Parker, the genre is low fantasy. It’s a make believe world with make believe characters, but the setting could pass for preindustrial Earth. The local monarch has conscripted a group of scholars to create a convincing set of archaeological ruins. Our main character, a linguist, is in charge of forging the ancient texts that will be uncovered at the miraculous discovery of the site, scheduled for nine months hence. The king will murder him if he gets it wrong.

Parker’s writing is always dark, in the sense that his characters make poor choices and people die, sometimes lots of them, but it’s always funny too. His writing is sharp and clever. “She looked at me as though I’d been spelt wrong.” What a terrific line.

Ian Bedford did a fine job with the audio narration, for those who want to go the audiobook route.

I fell in love with Russian literature as a teenager, which led me to majoring in Russian history in college, but somehow I missed out on reading Maxim Gorky (1868-1936). I very much enjoyed the first part of his autobiography, My Childhood.

The story begins with Maxim’s father dying of cholera and, from there, does not get happier. My biggest warning to readers is this: Steer clear if you do not want to read about a child being beaten, repeatedly. Other people too.

If you have the stomach for reading about violence and poverty, I recommend this one. Gorky is a hell of a storyteller. I came to care about the characters—young Alexei (Maxim’s name before his adopted nom de plume), his troubled mother, his saint of a grandmother. I found Gorky to be more accessible to the modern reader than most of the classic Russian writers.

I enjoyed the audiobook as narrated by Nicholas Boulton, who did a great job with the voices, even if their accents were English rather than Russian. That took some getting used to.

Besides the plot and the characters, I loved Gorky’s way with words.

“Much later, I realized that Russian people, because of the poverty and squalor of their lives, love to amuse themselves with sorrow, to play at it like children, and are seldom ashamed of being unhappy. Amidst their endless weekdays, grief makes a holiday.”

Though The Gospel of Loki is only my second time reading Joanne M. Harris, I feel comfortable extrapolating: She never disappoints.

I love her care with the language and her inventive storytelling. Here we get Norse mythology from the perspective of Loki, everyone’s favorite lying trickster liar. It is true that he is a philandering sociopath with dubious paternal instincts and a penchant for sowing discord, but he’s funny and charming and he can shift back and forth between his fire aspect and his human form.

If you’re familiar with Norse myths, you will recognize these stories, but Harris delivers them in a fresh way, so you won’t be bored. I enjoyed the audiobook narration Allan Corduner, who reads Loki with the charm and suaveness he deserves.

I read one of the most important nonfiction books of the modern era, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, still relevant fifteen years after its 2010 publication.

Though drug use and distribution is consistent across races, law enforcement polices Black communities at starkly disproportional rates. And ever since Reagan launched the War on Drugs, the penalties for drug use are draconian. Drug offensives that would result in a few months or a year turn become years and decades in the United States.

Even if the sentence is light, the punishment stays with the offender forever. Former felons may be denied the right to vote and the right to serve on juries…and more importantly in terms of basic survival, they may be denied housing, public benefits, and employment.

The American criminal justice system prosecutes Black people for drug crimes at far higher rates than other races, leading to a form of social control that is the descendent of Jim Crow laws, in turn descended from chattel slavery. And like Jim Crow, the mass incarceration of Black people, especially Black men, is on the surface race neutral. Under Jim Crow, anyone could vote if they could pass a literacy test, regardless of color; but since the tests were only administered to Black people, illiterate whites still maintained civil rights not afforded to illiterate people of other races.

“Few Americans today recognize mass incarceration for what it is: A new caste system thinly veiled by the cloak of colorblindness,” writes Alexander. In one of the more heartbreaking passages in a book filled with sorrow, she describes how this is true even among Black people, who are often ashamed to share with their neighbors that a loved one has been incarcerated. Slavery and Jim Crow were visible, while the mass incarceration of Black men is not.

Of books about Black people in the United States written in the twentieth century, I rank The New Jim Crows as essential reading. If you read in Black Studies at all, you will have heard of it, but if you have not personally read it, I encourage you to move it to the top of your TBR.

A friend encouraged/bullied me into reading The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, written by Natasha Pulley and audiobook narrated by Thomas Judd. I didn't know going into it that it was steampunk, a genre I usually avoid on stylistic grounds. Specifically, contemporary writers often overdo the Victorian dialogue, going well beyond atmospheric and into pastiche.

But Natasha Pulley does not make this mistake, and I found myself pulled into the world of Thaniel, a young clerk who one day comes home to discover someone has broken in to gift him with a valuable pocket watch.

There's a whole lot going on here, including live musicals, Japanese and English international relations, lady scientists, synesthesia, precognition, a queer love story, and trains. Read this if you like multi-layered plots, plot twists, and quirky main characters.

Terry Pratchett's character Death, to borrow the words of his new apprentice, is "tall, wears black, he's a bit ... skinny...."

The new apprentice is a young man named Mort. ("What a coincidence," Death says when they meet.) No one else at the hiring fair was interested, so with some trepidation, Mort agrees to apprentice himself to a skeleton who shepherds souls after they die.

The job comes with perks, like riding Death's noble steed Binky, but it also comes with difficult responsibilities, like standing aside while an assassin kills a princess. When Mort chooses to interfere with that assassination, he accidentally opens an alternate dimension.

The sprawling Discworld series has many good entry points, and this is one of my favorites, because it's the first book where Death is a main character. 

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is like any other English boarding school novel, only the students are preparing to spend their adult lives in two specific careers, first as carers, then as donors.

That much is revealed in the opening parts of the story, so I’m not spoiling anything. We know from the start that something unusual is going on at Hailsham, but our narrator, Kathy H., doles out the details slowly in this slow-burn science fiction novel.

Here Nobel Prize-winner Ishiguro visits some of his favorite themes: what makes us human; how we construct memory and how memory shapes us; how we justify our crimes against others. “I wasn't sobbing or out of control,” Kathy H. thinks on the last page, but I was.

This is my fourth Ishiguro novel. I rank him among my top ten living writers. Scratch that: I just jotted a list of my top fifteen living writers, and Ishiguro belongs in the top five. I feel myself becoming a better person in real time as I read his books, feel my humanity growing.

The audiobook is capably narrated by Rosalyn Landor, if that is your preferred medium.