Counter Arts Book Club 2023

To be updated throughout the year, with links to any essays and reviews about the books on our list. ***Last added to December 31st 2023***

To recap, I’ve drawn up our new Book Club list for 2023 . There are twelve books in said list (below), one for every month. You can decide for yourselves if you read each one, when you read them, or if you would like to submit an essay or short review.

This list will be pinned at the top of the Counter Arts’ publication page. I will update it as and when we have any new essays/reviews to add.

If you do write about any of these titles, please clearly mark that the piece is Counter Arts Book Club related; use ‘Book Club’ as one of your tags; and do be sure to submit it to us here at Counter Arts!

Please do join in as and when you can, there are some amazing books on this list!!

January (in keeping with this month’s prompts on Counter Arts and Rainbow Salad)

‘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.)

Marc Barham has been quick off the mark (pun intended) with this one!

Plus my own offering:

February

‘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)

To get us off to a quick start this month, Reece Beckett has done us proud with a review piece which draws comparisons between this poetry collection, which alludes to Vuong’s own emotions and experiences, and the similarly expressive tracks on Kendrick Lamar’s recent album:

Then there’s my own review:

March

‘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.

*Note* Please be careful with this one if you have a history with sexual violence, it certainly has plenty material which could potentially be triggering.

Slightly late, but here we are, my review and gushing recommendations of this month’s book:

April

‘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.

*Content Warning* Having just finished reading this short novel, I feel compelled to add a warning: Obviously, given it’s setting, you’ll be expecting at least some allusion to violence and death. However, this soldier’s mental deterioration involves acts of revenge which go beyond ‘bloody’ and into ‘torture and gore’. There’s some nasty detailing of killing — and to top it all off, a rape at the end. It is an intriguing book, I kept reading wanting to know just where it was going — but I did feel by the end that, while well written and interesting, it was mercifully short.

May

‘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.

June

‘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 Patroclus transformed into a love story.

Watch this space, reviews still on there way for this title from both myself and Counter Arts Editor, Marc Barham:

July

‘Heaven’ (Mieko Kawanami) — Short novel (192 pages), 2009. Japanese. Bullying of 14year-old protagonist. Nature of friendship bonds. Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.

• Content Warning* This one can be really rough reading. The story includes some harrowing scenes of physical bullying and mental abuse and emotional conversations between the two teenage victims who come to be each other’s support. Just be sure to put your own mental health first when deciding whether or not to pick this one up.

Thanks to Roberta Patellaro for her review. Great to see a writer getting involved with Book Club:

August

‘Between The World And Me’ (Ta-Nehisi Coates) — Nonfiction, in the form of a letter to Coates’ at the time fourteen year old son (256 pages), 2015. Exploration of America’s racial history since the Civil War, how it still affects everyday lives — and the author’s idea of the way forward.

With thanks to Heather O'Donohue for an excellent suggestion!

Counter Arts editor Marc Barham read and reviewed this book too (thank you again Marc). I’m struggling to get new essays out myself, but they will come!

September

‘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.

October

‘The Vegetarian’ (Han Kang) — Short novel (188 pages), 2016. Korean culture (attitudes to food, disapproval towards vegetarianism). Art. Mental health declining. Eating disorder. Transformation

November

‘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.

December

‘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 duology.

Thank you for reading — and thanks in advance for all the great writing I hope you’re going to produce!

If you enjoy my writing, you might consider leaving a ‘Tip’, or signing up for Medium membership through my referral link here. Many thanks and much love — Sadie