As Autumn sets in, this is typically the time of year that I transition to simpler and less brainpower-intense books. We’ll see when this instinct fully kicks in. I’ve certainly spent more time on webnovels than I usually do, and I can already feel the quiet siren call of holiday romances calling my name.
This post is the opposite. I wanted to highlight some books where authors took big risks that – in my opinion – paid off wonderfully. These books all have aspects that I think are divisive and mean that readers tend to either love it or hate it.
- Walking Practice by Dolki Min: even without considering the translation techniques, this book is wild. It follows a shapeshifting alien serial killer who weaponizes hookup apps. It blends body horror with frighteningly deep insights about disability and gender. The text itself changes to reflect the narrator’s mental state as it drifts further from human-style thought. I highly recommend the translator’s note which talks about the Korean techniques that don’t work in an alphabet-based language, and how they tried to emulate the effect.
- Welcome to Forever by Nathan Tavares: this book singularly put Nathan Tavares on my ‘must buy’ author list. It’s kept him there even after I didn’t love his newest release. All of his titles do some experimenting, but this one focuses on a Memory Editor protagonist, and Tavares does a great job of using his chapter and scene structures to lure you into a maze where you get lost in overlapping versions of a reality that maybe never actually happened. The main characters are also bad people trying to become better and not knowing how. Mind bending in a way that I’ve never quite seen replicated.
- The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen: this is my favorite graphic novel of all time! It blends a child’s coming with his mother’s immigration story with three fairy tale retellings. The use of color as a storytelling tool is probably my single favorite choice an artist has ever made, and it allows Nguyen to interweave the stories visually. Probably shouldn’t give this to anyone under 10 (there’s some cannibalism), but it’s a book that resonates well across generational boundaries. Actually, it’s one of the few middle grade releases from the last decade that I’ll see adults rave about without couching it in ‘for a kids book’ type language. Meanwhile, my students can’t get enough of it.
- The Forever Desert Trilogy by Moses Ose Utomi: individually, these are notable for being Epic Fantasy in a novella length, which is a rarity. However, each book in the trilogy is set 500 years apart, and together they form a saga of how history gets warped and weaponized. By the end of book 3, I realized how Utomi had created a cycle where the third book leads directly back into the first, creating a really grim mirror for us to examine our life through.
- Several People are Typing by Calvin Kasulke: at first, this book is notable for being a workplace comedy told entirely via Company Slack chats. It follows an underperforming employee whose mind gets sucked into said chat, and everyone else thinks it’s an elaborate gag to cover him working from home. As the book progresses, more and more eldritch and unexplainable elements get introduced, and the Kasulke doesn’t feel the need to resolve or explain most of them. You’ll leave some sections wondering what the fuck is happening and have to take solace in the fact that you’ll never know.
- The Darkness Outside Us by Eliot Screfer: okay, so I can’t talk much about why this book is so ambitious. All I can say is that what starts as a YA romance on a spaceship turns into one of the best existential thrillers I’ve ever read. Don’t look up spoilers, and avoid reviews as much as you possibly can. It is so, so good.
- The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo: I could wax for a whole paragraph about how Vo uses items as storytelling tools. This child of museum workers geeked out at that. However, it also aggressively inverted Epic Fantasy tropes. What is normally deemed important, such as big battles and assassinations, are handled in a few sentences. Instead, Vo posits that the truly important story is the one between an Empress and her handmaiden Rabbit. Most of this series deals with truth or meaning in some way, but the first will likely always be my favorite.
- North Continent Ribbon by Ursula Witcher: this book is neither an anthology of short stories nor a novella nor a mosaic novel. It is something in between all three. The stories trace a planet’s shifting relationship with technology and how even well-meaning reforms get co-opted by the rich and powerful to continue oppressive systems. The disparate stories technically work on their own, but it’s the through-line between them that reveals a second layer of narrative that no individual story could replicate.
- Angels Before Man by Rafael Nicolás: this is a retelling of The Fall of Lucifer, from his perspective! To be clear, this is no Wicked where the villain was never actually a villain. Instead, it traces Lucifer’s slow slide from purity into depravity. God comes out looking pretty bad too, but it can be hard to root for a character committing unspeakable acts while you’re living in his head. Not a happy book, but a really intense one.
- The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw: it’s pretty often that authors who chuck a thesaurus at their books frustrate me. Khaw is not one of those authors. Their writing is filled with bespoke words that fit seamlessly into the tale of body horror they weave. There’s a marriage of word choice and tone that feels very specific and unique. I plan to read more Khaw in the future, and I’m hopeful that this trend continues!
Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together. Just like a few weeks ago, I went rogue because I didn’t really resonate with the prompt, and I’ve got a whole list of my own topics I’ve wanted to do for a while, and had been doing on a less regular basis before I ever knew Top Ten Tuesday existed.
Marked for Plot 