The year finale
To quote Trump: "I know words, I know the best words."
A couple of things to add to my previous dispatch before I embark on the Best Of and the Meh Of.
Further books to look forward to: the young up-and-comer Helen Garner will have two titles out next year, her diaries (a selection, but a hefty one), and the book I mentioned in my HG Appreciation Post, about observing her grandson play football (Australian rules, no clue). J.D.M Stewart, who is also a good follow on Twitter, will publish The Prime Ministers with Sutherland House in fall.
Where do you get your book reviews, by the way, where do you go for your supplies? I’ve had the Times (London) subscription since 2018 and am enjoying it (they have four people employed full-time who cover books) but the Lit Section critiques sometimes, I was shocked to discover, miss big time. I’ve purchased two books this year after reading about them in the Times and they were both letdowns - Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time (one of the officers in Franklin’s NW Passage expedition is brought back, via a time machine, to contemporary London) and Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep, also shortlisted for Booker (a grumpy Dutch spinster dislikes her brother’s new girlfriend who nonetheless ends up living in her home and of course SPARKS FLY as lesbian desire heals historical rifts please no). I also read the Spectator book reviews (selection), the New Statesman (some people), UnHerd (occasionally they’d do book reviews, I see the excellent Ann Manov writes there), the Critic (some people) and wherever I can find Rachel Cooke (the Observer usually, though they’ve been sold to Tortoise Media so who knows what’ll become of them) and Martha Gill. On this side of the Atlantic, Kat Rosenfield and Leigh Stein always have interesting things to say about the world of publishing (Rosenfield’s piece on how the YA authors went crazy cancelling themselves is a classic) though unfortunately they don’t write book criticism.
For Canadian fiction criticism, I used to read Alex Good. He’s, however, mostly writing about American nonfiction and genre lit these days. Russell Smith on culture was always worth a read too but he doesn’t publish journalism any more after the Globe discontinued his culture column. I am keen to find good critics covering Canadian fiction, if there are any left - send leads.
I list all this so I can say: and yet, some of the most fearless lit crit lately I’ve been finding… on Substack. More specifically the Substack Notes, which I used to complain about. The Notes is still bad: the timeline is not chronological and doesn’t give you who you follow but some random people that the algo brings to you. (Someone you follow has liked them or follows them, or the thing already has a lot of engagement — the usual.) But the random content that makes it before my eyeballs when I click “Home” on Substack has improved dramatically. The most popular book Substacks are dedicated to the classics, which is expected, but there are a few that do contemporary stuff only and they are building their own readership gradually. Most of the critics on Substack also write for trad media, but Substack book writing is different in that there is much more space (which could be bad… it’s mostly for the good), it can be nerdy and inside-baseball the way general readership book reviews in the papers can’t afford to be, it doesn’t have to be timely or about recent books, and it can be more irreverent and inside-jokey.
It hasn’t, not in the trad media. (Orbital by Samantha Harvey won the Booker this year.)
She’s walking it back, but okay. She’s not far off on ‘fairy porn’ though: welcome to the world of romantasy and, er, cozy kink. Thank you, BookTok and Bookstagram; this is your world, we’re only living in it.
As I was saying
Now that Elon’s Twitter/X is taking away good features one by one in order to monetize them, people are dispersing all over. Analytics under tweets are now gone too, and you can’t really see how many people clicked on your link, unless you pay for the Premium account, but Notes gives you this service at no cost. [Edited to add: the tweet analytics is back, after what looks like a protracted multi-day glitch.] If only Substack would tidy up the timeline and offer more options (chronological timeline, of people you follow; Discover, where the algo suggests stuff for you), they’d have a winner.
OK the year finale - let’s go Brandon: