November In Review
November came and went like a bus sailing past the stop when you're running late. Or, more acurately, like a strained simile at the start of a blog post that you'll hopefully have forgotten about in just a few minutes.
This year I've felt like I was spinning my wheels a lot. Because of some health issues in the first half of the year it really seems like 2024 never properly got going for me, yet somehow there are only 4 weks left in this bastard year. I don't know how that happened.
The spinning of my wheels wasn't quite as bad in November, which meant I was able to get a lot of writing work done, including kicking a project that's been hanging over me for literal years over the finish line. But being busy in my professional life has meant that I haven't had much time to read and even less time to blog about the things I read. I only actually finished three novels this month, along with two DNFs, one book of poetry, and one novel that I'm still in the middle of. The latter is Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking by Han Smith, which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. I'm enjoying it a lot, but it's a book that resists being read quickly. I find myself pausing after each chapter to take it in in the same way that I do when I read poetry.
Because I've read so little this month it seems pointless to pick favourites. I really loved Jack Spicer's After Lorca and enjoyed Hisham Matar's My Friends a lot, though I understand why it didn't make the Booker shortlist; not because it's not a good book, but because the majority of the other books that were longlisted were stronger. It definitely made me more interested to dig into the Orwell Prize, though.
Back in July I started reading George Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which is a book of notable Russian short stories accompanied by Saunder's analysis of and reflections on them. I've been dipping into it here and there over the year and finally finished it this month, and I'm really glad that I made time to get through it before the end of the year. I learned that I don't particularly love a lot of the Russian fiction he focuses on here (though I did enjoy Tolstoy's 'Master and Man' a lot), but Saunders' insights about the craft of writing that stem from them have really rewired my brain. I feel rejuvenated and like I want to get back to writing fiction - and not only that I want to get back to it but that I'm better equipped to do it now than I have been in the past, which is great.
Because I haven't really had time to sit down with a novel this month I've managed to dip back into reading short fiction, which has been nice. At some point I'll write a 'magazine of the month' post about Grimdark #40, which is the first issue of that magazine I've picked up. I've also been dipping into Granta and McSweeney's, two of my favourite literary journals that I've neglected for a very long time. In fact I've read enough short fiction this month that I can probably pick some favourites there instead of picking favourite novels. Some of the shorts I've liked this month have been:
- 'Woof-Woof-Woof-Woof-Woof' by Phoebe Hurst in The London Magazine (October/November '24)
- 'Heavy Snow' by Han Kang in The New Yorker (18 November '24)
- 'The Museum Guard' by J.M. Coetzee in Granta #168
'The Museum Guard' is a really interesting one, because I have the feeling that had I not read the Saunders book first I wouldn't have liked this anywhere near as much as I did. It's doing a lot of the same things that the Russians who Saunders looks at do, and I'm not sure I would have fully understood what was going on in it without Saunders' insights.
I also want to mention a piece called 'Essential Material' by Kimberley Capanello, published in issue #5 of TOLKA. TOLKA is very new to me, but I think it has the potential to become one of my favourite periodicals. They describe themselves as "a journal of formally promiscuous non-fiction". 'Essential Material' was the first pice I read and I immediattely picked up the issue that contains it for future reading. I don't know if this is memoir or fiction or a blend of the two or quite what it is, but I know that I loved it and want to read more of it. It reminded me a lot of the sorts of things that Rachel Cusk and Lara Pawson were doing in their Goldsmiths Prize-nominated books, and this is definitely a genre I want to explore more.
I don't actually know if anybody reads this blog because I never look at the analytics, but even though I'm trying to keep it separate from my actual work I feel obliged to mention that this morning I relased the first part of a serialised tabletop RPG adventure that I'll be putting out in parts daily througout December. You should check it out, probably.