Book Club 2023 — Sadie’s Selection

Compiling new list for a new year.

This year, the Counter Arts publication launched a Book Club.

If you hadn’t noticed that already, you can catch up here:

A few of us agreed to contribute (through earnings from book reviews and personal pledges) to a donation at the end of the year (2022) to the indigenousliteracyfoundation of Australia.

Thank you to everyone who wrote, read and offered to donate.

Carrying this good will and good reading on into 2023, I’ve started putting together a new list.

Below, you will find a list of twelve books which I’m nominating as my selection for the New Year Reading List.

However: this list is not yet ‘set in concrete’, so I’m open to comments about the books I’ve chosen (both positive and negative) — and to recommendations too. If you have any books you’re putting at the top of your pile for the new year, and you think they deserve to go on my list too, please do tell me about them.

I’m open to changing my mind if you come up with a strong contender.

Similarly, I’m also willing to consider suggestions for a charity you’d like to see benefit from proceeds of the 2023 Book Club. Tell me who you favour, give me a little information about them. Providing a link would be appreciated.

For 2023, I want to choose a selection of books from a variety of genres. They do need to be ones I’ve either already read or would like to read, but if there’s something you want to suggest, I’ve got pretty eclectic tastes and they are absolutely ‘inclusive’.

It also needs to be something I can get hold of in the UK — preferably in second-hand print. (However that’s not a deal breaker if there’s none available but I can end up with a cheap digital copy instead).

I’m building this list around myself because, while actively wanting other writers to read and review (PLEASE DO!), I definitely aim to cover each and every one myself.

So without any further ado, here we go, onto my suggestions for the Counter Arts Book Club (2023):

1. ‘Shuggie Bain’ (Douglas Stuart) — Novel (449 pages), 2020. Winner of the Booker Prize. Coming of age. LGBTQ+ self-discovery. Young son living in poverty with addict mother in Glasgow (Scotland) of 1981.
2. ‘The Song of Achilles’ (Madeline Miller) — Novel (369 pages), 2011. Greek mythology. Battle for Troy from a different perspective, the hardship of those besieging the city, camped on the beach. Treatment of women at that point in history. Close relationship between Achilles and friend Petroclus transformed into a love story.
3. ‘Time Is A Mother’ (Ocean Vuong) — Poetry collection (79 pages), 2022. Vietnamese-American poet, deals with grief and cultural assimilation. (I had to include this after reading the impressive novel by this author for the 2022 Book Club)
4. ‘Everybody: A Book About Freedom’ (Olivia Laing) — Nonfiction/essays (364 pages), 2021. Sexual politics, art/writers, psychoanalysis, illness, war, and the current struggle women are having for rights over our own bodies.
5. ‘At Night All Blood Is Black’ (David Diop) — Short novel (162 pages), 2020. Winner of International Booker Prize (in translation). Senegalese soldiers fighting in the trenches of WWI. Visceral. Death, grief and a need for revenge bordering on madness.
6. ‘Everything Under’ (Daisy Johnson) — Novel (274 pages), 2018. Shortlisted for the Man-Booker Prize. Mix of contemporary and mythology. Family dynamics. Oedipal echoes. Hidden truths.
7. ‘Heaven’ (Mieko Kawanami) — Short novel (192 pages), 2009. Japanese. Bullying of 14year-old protagonist. Nature of friendship bonds. Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
8. ‘This Is How You Lose The Time War’ (Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar) — Short novel (209 pages). Sci-fi. Time travel. Collaborative fiction. Correspondence between two rival agents in the titular time war. Messages left in incredibly inventive and imaginative places. (I found this one strangely beautiful.)
9. ‘Homeland Elegies’ (Ayad Akhtar) — Novel (369 pages), 2020. Blends memoir into fiction. Father/son relationship. Muslim-Americans facing prejudice in post-9/11, post-Trump, America. Part social essay, part family drama.
10. ‘The Vegetarian’ (Han Kang) — Short novel (188 pages), 2016. Korean culture (attitudes to food, disapproval towards vegetarianism). Art. Mental health declining. Eating disorder. Transformation
11. ‘Warrior Girl Unearthed’ (Angeline Boulley) — Novel (496 pages), to be published May 2023. Young Adult. A Native American teenager finds that the remains of ‘Warrior Girl’, and several other Anishinaabe ancestors are in storage at a local university and goes about planning how to return them to the tribe. A heist begins to seem the only way. Meanwhile, living women are disappearing from tribal land.
12. ‘The Daughters of Izdihar’ (Hadeer Elsbai) — Novel (384 pages), to be published January 2023.Egyptian-American author. ‘Feminist fantasy’. The group named in the title is a radical women’s rights organisation. Based upon Egyptian history. Elemental magic, politics and the lure of the forbidden. First of a duology.

Thanks for reading — do tell me what you think!

Stay warm. Stay well. Regards — Sadie