Well, what an excellent start to the reading year. I began with a five-star book, read a good mix of fiction, non-fiction, SFF and poetry and even the books I didn’t absolutely love I was glad to have read for one reason or another. I’m also happy that I managed to get through one book in Estonian and that most of what I read was more than 350-400 pages long. So here’s a quick overview for you*:

1. Deaf Republic, Ilya Kaminsky. If you follow poetry news, you have surely heard about this book already and it has probably been positive. Personally, I think all the praise is deserved. Kaminsky is Ukraine-born and hard-of-hearing and both are relevant for this collection. Deaf Republic is an epic poem about war, totalitarianism, resistance, courage (and lack of), family, power, loyalty. It is also about deafness as a metaphor, but it’s not clear what exactly it’s a metaphor for and that ambiguity adds another layer to the story. While the individual poems work on their own, cumulatively they add up to something so powerful and cathartic that I cannot recall when I last read poetry this good. Highly recommended.

2. The Tradition, Jericho Brown. The second poetry collection I read in January, this wasn’t bad by any means, but pales in comparison to Kaminsky. If you are a poetry reader and especially if you are interested in the exploration of race and racism, it’s well worth reading, though.

3. The Collected Schizophrenias, Esme Weijun Wang. Wang’s much-celebrated examination of mental health is indeed very good. She is clearly an intelligent observer and I emerged on the other side of this essay collection considerably more enlightened. There was something in her style, however, that rubbed me the wrong way, which meant I enjoyed it a bit less than I expected to. I also feel she is much better at analysing her illness and mental illness in general, than she is at conveying the immediate experience of being ill – in fairness, this view is not necessarily shared by most reviewers.

4. In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado. Machado’s book covers slightly similar territory. In The Dream House is also a mixture of memoir and intellectual analysis, where the topic of relationship abuse replaces mental illness. What makes the book unusual is that it looks at a lesbian relationship – a situation where abuse is assumed to be exceedingly rare. The theme of abuse is universal, of course, as is Machado’s epiphany that ‘most types of domestic abuse are completely legal’. She is an extraordinary writer and while you might find the form of the story gimmicky (it’s told in small fragments in different ‘genres’), I think she mostly pulls it off with aplomb.

5. The Bad Boy of Athens, David Mendelsohn. I read these essays while in Greece, which probably added to the experience – Mendelsohn is a classicist and the essays either look at classic Greec and Roman texts or, often, use that context to examine modern movies, TV series and books. I preferred the essays that were heavy on the old stuff, as this is where his main competence lies. Mendelsohn is erudite and insightful and I enjoyed most of the the essays a lot, but he has a weird cruel streak (for example calling Emilia Clarke an ‘untalented lightweight’ out of the blue, not adding anything to his take on Game of Thrones), which put me off every time it emerged.

6. Exhalation, Ted Chiang. I read a fair amount of genre books in January and Chiang’s short story collection was definitely the most weighty of the lot. He is an intellectual, literary science fiction writer and takes ideas very – time travel, AI, free will – seriously. Sometimes perhaps too seriously, examining them at length from every angle. I did like the stories, but didn’t love them – I tend to prefer my SF with a higher dose of epicness and glamour.

7. The Starless Sea, Erin Morgenstern. So here you have quite a bit of glamour, plus a fair bit of mystery, romance and magic. Morgernstern’s second book is a beautiful mess where the complex structure never fully adds up, but it is an enjoyable ride for those who like this sort of thing – a hidden world of books and stories next to our own that needs to be saved. I think The Night Circus was a better book, more structured and less sprawling. But if you liked it, there’s a good chance you’ll like The Starless Sea as well.

8. The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow. Another portal fantasy where books, stories and alternate world play an important role, this was a bit of a disappointment. I really liked Harrow’s A Witch’s Guide to Escape (a short story about books and libraries) and assumed I would love her first novel too. Alas, this never fully clicked with me, although it was an OK read. I cannot quite put my finger on it, it seemed somewhat by-the-numbers and underdeveloped and there is one plot hole that bugged me quite a bit. The cover is absolutely gorgeous, though.

9. Ninth House, Leigh Bardugo. This was also a mediocre read, although in this case I wasn’t very surprised. While I adore Bardugo’s Six of Crows duology, Ninth House is contemporary urban fantasy with horror elements about the secret societies at Yale, something that is much less my cup of tea. It is not badly written and many people love it, it just didn’t quite grab me – and I’m usually pretty easy to grab when it comes to fantasy. Still, I’m happy I read it, just to have an opinion on a much-discussed book; the same goes for The Ten Thousand Doors of January.

10. Mikita keeleaabits. Põliskeele omailm, Valdur Mikita. This was a fun enough read on topics (the use and essence of language and the Estonian language in particular) that I have been thinking about a lot lately. It was also nice to read something in my native language, these few hours were worth it for that reason alone. Mikita is too repetitive and too unconcerned with facts for my liking, but when I manage to put that aside, I enjoy his unconventional ramblings quite a bit.

11. Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo. The (joint) winner of 2019 Booker prize and a worthy one in my view. Girl, Woman, Other tells the stories of 12 mostly black British women and the telling is extraordinarily well done. Evaristo writes without conventional punctuation, often in fragments, which sounds pretentious but in fact works perfectly and seems entirely natural. The voices have such immediacy that it’s rather astonishing. It is also wonderful how we see the events from different perspectives (the characters are interconnected), making us understand and empathise even with our least favourite players. I felt the book lost some steam in the second half and the ending wasn’t quite the grand finale I expected – a critic said, succintly, that unfortunately, the book doesn’t become more than the sum of its parts. However, the parts are great on their own and well worth the investment.

How has your reading year started? Any early favourites?

*I had planned to stop with the monthly roundups, but January was so good that I couldn’t. I’m not sure if they are useful for you or you’d prefer proper reviews less often? Feel free to tell me in the comments.