2015 finally dies!

Despite this being a horrible life year, it was a very wonderful reading year. Not included in my tally are the many books I started or collections I picked through over 2015, many of which were also good but not for me, not right now.

This has been the first full year I've lived without my father after two years of his frightening and terrible decline. I was deeply involved with my father's end of life and death, the details of which I am still reckoning with and will be for quite some time. Being faced with admin tasks that are not only relentless and boring, but suffused with such powerful hurt has been exhausting and lonely. Luckily for me, cartoonist Roz Chast went through some similar things and decided to write a funny, informative and just SO TRUE book about it called Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? This book was loaned to me by a great friend. When I read it I cried, but with relief.

Too fucking real: pic.twitter.com/Fa70oYefnU

— Carrie (@carrietryharder) March 21, 2015

There are books that take you away and books that make you stay and the three novels in The Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer accomplish both. The first, Annihilation, is a missive from an inhospitable land, filled with beautiful natural details and almost unbearably tantalizing mystery. The second, Authority, is about juggling identities and becoming oneself, and while the main character wasn't all that interesting to me there were enough other things going on in the story to carry me though. The final volume, Acceptance, follows a character present in the previous two and brings many of the mysteries of the Southern Reach to a satisfying close, without solving a single thing. Vandermeer created a world with endless frightening possibilities and endless frightening beauty that I still think about; this trilogy is an excellent reminder that life is complex and not simply a trial, no matter how much horror gets served up.

I finished THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE on the plane ride back and, though I've read it a few times before, wow. Just wow.

— Carrie (@carrietryharder) September 23, 2015

Speaking of horror, I returned to an old favorite this year The Haunting of Hill House, after recommending it to a friend. Turns out that Jackson's sure voice and teasing plotting were exactly what I craved at the moment, and it is always worth taking another look at what the desire for acceptance will do to a person. Plus, Theo, always Theo.

To balance the many terrible surprises of the year, the mail at least was peppered with some lovely ones care of my subscriptions to four comics presses: Ley Lines from Grindstone Comics/Czap Books, Kus, Retrofit/Big Planet and Frontier from Youth In Decline. I wrote about some here on try harder, some I just sucked in. Two stand outs I didn't write about, both from Retrofit/Big Planet were Ikebana by Yumi Sakugawa and Sea Urchin by Laura Knetzger. I loved Sakugawa's quiet story about stopping giving any fucks and creating oneself. Sakugawa's work always speaks to me, but this one came at exactly the right time. I've been following Knetzger for awhile, and just got her all ages tome Bug Boys from Czap Books. Sea Urchin is decidedly adult autobio about depression and what we think about when no one is watching.

I listened to many fewer SFFH podcasts the second half of the year than I usually do, mostly because I fell victim to Fallout 4's immersive charms. However the casts from The District of Wonders, Escape Artists, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Uncanny and Apex, continue to expose me to exciting short story writers and take me places I never could have imagined.

And no 2015 survey would be complete without talking about twitter. Besides the usual dog jokes, book news, essay recommendations and author process notes that twitter always provides, this year the service was one of the only and best ways I could connect with my own grief. That meant posting photos and thoughts, as well as meeting (or further developing relationships) with others that have been through similar stuff or are just empathetic souls. Invaluable stuff.

I know I'll be thinking about the stuff I read in 2015 for many years to come. What about you?

2015 Reads

Ikebana by Yumi Sakugawa

Frontier 9: Becca Tobin

Fountain of Age by Nancy Kress

Among Others by Jo Walton

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

xoOrpheus edited by Kate Berheimer

Dragon's Breath by MariNaomi

The Only Ones by Carola Dibbell

Hagelbarger and That Nightmare Goat by Renee French

It Never Happened Again by Sam Alden

Worst Behavior by Simon Hanselmann

The Oven by Sophie Goldstein

Malcriada #1-3 by Suzy X.

Revenger 1, 2 by Charles Forsman

Ley Lines: Thank God, I Am in Love by Cathy G. Johnson

Lover Only #1 by various

Frontier 8: Faith in Strangers by Anna Delforian

Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

Super Mutant Magic Academy by Jillian Tamaki

Ink for Beginners by Kate Leth

Sea Urchin by Laura Knetzger

Mutual Paradise 1-3 by Lizzee Solomon

Ice Heist and Vampires Vampires Vampires by Madeline McGrane

Authority by Jeff Vandermeer

Forgive Me #2 by Summer Pierre

Frontier 7: Sexcoven by Jilliam Tamaki

Paper, Pencil, Life #1-3 by Summer Pierre

Authority by Jeff Vandermeer

Eat Pray Spit in My Mouth by Mike Funk

Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast

Horizontal Press Tijijuana Bibles by various

Never Forgets by Yumi Sakugawa

Bird Girl and Fox Girl by Yumi Sakugawa

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

Get in Trouble by Kelly Link

Earthling by Aisha Franz

The Wilds by Julia Elliott

Smut Peddler 2014 Edition, edited by C. Spike Trotman

Grace, Jerry, Jessica & Me by Derek Marks

Backyard by Sam Alden

Frontier #9: Becca Tobin

The story of a musician is a story that I'm inclined to dislike. However, the excellent thing about reading about creative frustration is that you don't have to hear the products of the struggle. Though, in the case of Frontier 9's spaced out music scene, where synthesizers are created by shaping globs of goo into instruments, I might not object to a listen.

Becca Tobin's gloppy fantasy follows Butter, the synth lead of the wildly popular band Eurobe as she struggles to create an instrument that will bring her one-album wonder band to the next level. What follows is both a meditation on the perils of fame, the fraught consequences of wish fulfillment and a creepy vampire golem story. It is funny, too.

This short story seemed luxuriously long, in part because Tobin conveys the band's back story and current circumstances with super sharp description and, later, dialog, that distills both the characters and quickly builds the world they live in.

I loved Tobin's use of color. Generally I'm overwhelmed by too broad of a color pallet, but the full-crayon-box colors and watercolor-y tones of her art drew me in instead of making me want to take to my bed. The pages seem to pulse with the energy of her lines. The details, like the cat shirt Butter wakes up in the morning after the creation of her synth, make re-reading rewarding--a rare treat.

Simply, I can't wait to read more by Becca Tobin.

The Oven by Sophie Goldstein

I must admit that I am a sucker for a scrappy utopia. I love hope expressed through investing in the land, having children and forming community around shared humanity. In Sophie Goldstein's The Oven, "the city" has become entirely removed from the land and in order to have children one must be deemed perfect and issued a permit.

Young 20-something main characters Syd and Eric run away from the city to have a child and, perhaps, to become adults. The Oven seems to offer a few options for that future. They begin with the exhilaration of the young and despite Syd's initial fear that they made a mistake, they are taken under the wing of a farmer couple with several children and settle into a physically strenuous life of growing their own food, sewing their own clothes and living without the UV-ray protection of a dome.

But the saying, uttered often around the camp, "It's a free country," has a dark side of course. Goldstein is sparing in showing us the full extent of life  in The Oven, but the glimpses of the less savory side of being outside the law are interesting. Especially effective are the panels showing the effects of a local drug made from bugs.

While I enjoyed The Oven, I felt as though the decline of Syd and Eric's relationship happened too quickly. I would have appreciated more scenes of them growing apart, their shared dream unraveling, so that when Eric leaves we feel more profoundly what Syd has lost and gain more insight into her final decision to stay in the colony. I also think this would have provided more opportunities to explore the world that Goldstein built.

Update: The Oven is a 2015 Ignatz nominee for Outstanding Graphic Novel.

Ley Lines: Thank God, I Am in Love by Cathy G. Johnson

Grindstone Comics and Czap Books' Ley Lines series collects work from exciting cartoonists about art. Sometimes the comics are about influences, sometimes about the art world, but Thank God, I Am in Love gets at the primal, wrenching feeling of finding work that speaks to your soul.

The brown pallette of the pages seems an odd choice for a book about love, but the plainness of the images lets Cathy G. Johnson's words take center stage.  "I don't need portraits or actors pretending to be him. I don't need the mythology. I have the swirls of ecstasy, the impasto, I have his presence his presence his presence" Johnson recreates those swirls of ecstasy for each panel of the comic. I could recognize some of them from my very limited knowledge of Van Gogh's work; I wonder if a more versed reader would gain extra insight.

Though descriptions of the physical sensations that art love cause dominate the text the (not unrelated) line that most stuck with me was: "His work alleviates my loneliness." That is the most precious gift of falling in love, that melding, that recognition, and Johnson truly captures it in this book.

I was deeply into Golden Smoke by Warren Craghead and Unholy Shapes by Annie Mok, and I can't wait for the next issue of Ley Lines. If you did not subscribe, well, now's your chance.