Reading highlights 2023 / Thomas

Some books this year have been surprising; others unsurprising, sometimes in a good way. Here are a few that have stood out (ask me tomorrow and you will get a different list), numbered but not in any particular order (except maybe size):
1. Lori and Joe by Amy Arnold: The mind (so to call it) can maintain its claustrophobia even in the most wide-open spaces. Amy Arnold compellingly captures the way her protagonist’s thoughts swarm and cluster, accumulate in ruts and run thin over past traumas, stuttering in proximity to the unfaceable that yet shapes everything it underlies.
2. I, Object by Stella Chrysostomou: I read this book many times preparing it for publication and my enjoyment of it was undiminished: the objects who find voices in these texts reveal surprising perspectives in seemingly quotidian object-human relations (so to call them) and ask us to re-examine our interactions with our physical world and with each other, challenging our preconceptions of motivation and value.
3: Wall by Jen Craig: All accumulations — things crammed into houses, thoughts crammed into minds — are hoarded and dispersed in similar ways, are susceptible in similar ways to our sifting and sorting and also to our failure or refusal to sift and to sort. Jen Craig’s syntactically superb sentences are the best possible intimations of the ways in which thoughts remain stubbornly embedded in their aggregate when we attempt to bring them into the light. 
4: The Plague by Jacqueline Rose: What happens when even the great occlusions of culture can no longer hide the fact that our lives are contained in a matrix of death? Could a new recognition and accommodation with our mortality help us to address some of our personal and collective traumas and tensions?
5: The Planetarium by Nathalie Sarraute (translated from French by Maria Jolas): A new edition of Sarraute’s remarkable work comprised entirely of voices, in which the discourse itself is the protagonist; in which there are no static persons, just impulses caught in language. Readers (and writers) denied the usual novelistic props and crutches will find there are other, more interesting ways of moving along.
6: Little Doomsdays by Nic Low and Phil Dadson: What Walter Benjamin calls “the struggle against dispersion” that underlies collecting and archiving may be ultimately doomed to failure in a world that is undergoing loss at a faster and faster pace ('accelerated decumulation) but this is what makes that struggle more meaningful, not less. This beautifully presented book is a kōrero between Phil Dadson’s vigorously textured artwork and Nic Low’s incantatory texts evoking objects and containers akin to waka huia throughout history that contain and preserve the experience of being human (so to call it).