January 2016 TBR!

Our books today have (mostly) not yet appeared in bookstores – they’re a selection of titles coming up in January of 2016 that, for one reason or another, I’m eagerly anticipating.

As some of you will guess, I’m a big fan of the sub-culture of YouTube known to its inhabitants as BookTube. It’s mostly filled with very young, very energetic folks sitting in front of cameras (usually with crammed bookshelves behind them) enthusing about books. There are irritating aspects to BookTube, of course, as there are to all things in life (except Stevereads); too many Booktubers assume an antic disposition when they start their cameras, for instance. They spasm around like they’ve got yellowjackets down their collars, they pitch their voices to odd, unnatural decibels (although at least they don’t flatten their inflections to sound like androids, the way tech reviewers do), and, most annoyingly, they tend to read the exact same ten “hot” books, as though they were the world’s most bookish clique, composed entirely of people who’ve never met each other (except for Vidcon, where they hump each other like bunnies in springtime). A place entirely devoted to books should be the last place where conformity can take hold. But I console myself by remembering that a) most Booktubers are very young, and b) most Booktubers – indeed, most readers in general – have no clear idea where to get book recommendations.

These aren’t exactly problems here at Stevereads! Yes, I am well-known to be a stone-cold super-hottie, but instead of wandering aimlessly in the shrubbery at Goodreads, I keep a constant watch on the lists of forthcoming books (and yet am regularly surprised, the which incongruity I wouldn’t change for all the mud in Egypt) and have been a voracious reader for a long time. So I usually have a pretty detailed picture of what I want to read.

And yet, despite any category differences or minor irritations, I sometimes wish to be a Booktuber! The appeals are obvious, if reductive: BookTube has such structure, such inviting regularity! BookTubers do “tags” to enhance the friendly, clubbish feel of things, and at the end of every month they do “wrap up” videos, and they talk regularly of a thing they call their “TBR pile” – the mass of books they’ve targeted as “to be read.” I don’t really have such a thing (unless you count all forthcoming books) – I read a bit too fast for it, I think – but a part of me watches the “January TBR” videos now cropping up on Booktube and wants to join in the fun.

Hence, my very own Stevereads January 2016 TBR post!

These are some of the books I’m looking forward to reading this month. There are a few restrictions most Booktubers don’t have, mainly that I’ve already read most of the month’s “big” new releases – books like My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout, or The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson or The Bands of Morning by Brandon Sanderson or Even Dogs in the Wild by Ian Rankin. So they can’t really feature in a proper TBR. But this isn’t meant to be a “Month’s Best” in any case – although you never know: some of these books could end up being just that!

Of course I look forward every month to my generous helping of historical romance – the super-predictable subset of the already-predictable sub-genre of historical fiction (of which I’ll get my fill as well, not least in self-published “Indie” form, everything from The Renegade Queen by Eva Flynn, about the remarkable 19^th century women’s rights champion Victoria Woodhull, to A Most Civil War by Greg Parkes, about the remarkable 18^th century survivor Margaret Schoolcraft). And two of January’s items under that heading look promising as always. The first has been a wellspring of enjoyable historical romance for decades: the Harlequin Historical lineup every month. January’s selections look delectable: In Debt to the Earl by Elizabeth Rolls, Rake Most Likely to Seduce by Bronwyn Scott, and The Captain and His Innocent by Lucy Ashford – two Regencies and one almost-Regency, all three by prolific veterans of the genre!

And in addition, this January presents My American Duchess, a new Regency (what can I say? I’ll get around to non-Regencies in due course, I promise!) by one of my all-time favorite historical romancers, Eloisa James. My American Duchess purports to tell the story of an arrogant Duke who finds himself captivated by a serial-jilting American heiress. But the real draw, as always with this author, will be her vivid heroines and the crackle of the dialogue she gives them.

Every bit as probably-enjoyable but a whole lot less refined will be The End, a bells-and-whistles post-apocalyptic thriller from super-prolific author and certified weirdo Matt Shaw, who epitomizes as well as any author I know both the promise and the perils of the new world of push-button publishing. Shaw basically never stops writing for a public audience, and thanks to the relatively hassle-free platform Amazon gives to its digital authors, he basically never stops publishing either – and because he has a vivid (and apparently inexhaustible) imagination and a very good sense of dramatics, the combination of constant-writing and constant-publishing (if there’s any editing involved, I’m unaware of it) isn’t the gruesome train-wreck it might otherwise have been. I’m no big fan of the horror genre (when you read as many self-published works of religious inspiration as I do, you realize there are far, far scarier things in the world than face-eating zombie clowns), but I find myself looking forward to the next thing Matt Shaw is going to churn out – most certainly including The End.

Two strongly visual items on my list for January: Timeline, a elaborate visual guide by Peter Goes to the entire history of the universe (he starts with the Big Bang, the cheeky fellow), and a big hardcover collection of the Green Arrow issues written by Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino. The thing I love about Peter Goes’ work is how, you’ll pardon the term, universal it is: you can hand one of his deceptively elaborate illustrations to anybody and watch the spark of understanding appear in their eyes, the spark of curiosity – so I think it’ll be thrilling to watch his talent play out on the broadest of all possible canvases. When it comes to the much-celebrated Jeff Lemire run on Green Arrow, I’m a bit less sanguine; Green Arrow has always been one of those one-note DC superheroes that have always left me cold. One such superhero shrinks to a tiny size; another runs fast; and Green Arrow is really good with a bow and arrows. In all such cases, I’ll grudgingly admit, the difference is in the writing, and I’ve heard a great deal of intelligent praise from some comics fans about this Jeff Lemire run on the character, so I’m half-way inclined to give this hardcover collection a try.

The work of capital-L literature I’m most eagerly anticipating in January (that I don’t already have, keep in mind – thus, not including the month’s array of Penguin Classics) is a new entry in the Murty Classical Library of India from Harvard University Press, Arjuna and the Hunter, an English-language translation (by the inimitably named Indira Visnawathan Peterson) of the sixth-century Sanskrit epic Kiratarjuniya by the poet Bharavi. This is one of the great works of world literature that I’ve never read (for those of you keeping score at home, I don’t read Sanskrit), a long poem elaborating an incident from the Mahabhrata, here presented in what I gather is its first unabridged translation into English. It’ll be a huge window opening onto a world that’s totally alien to me – which is, after all, one of the chief powers of reading in the first place.

An alien world of an entirely different kind will be on hand in Ken McLeod’s A Trackless Path, his translation-with-commentary of a long keystone poem of the dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. I’ll be reading the book mainly because, despite all odds, I’ve come over the years to respect McLeod’s abilities as a translator and especially as an exegete, which makes his work inherently interesting to me (and the good folks at Unfettered Mind put together an attractive book, which never hurts). The object of his talents is, in this case (unlike, for example, Arjuna and the Hunter) won’t carry me along for even four or five pages, since the whole world of Buddhist meditation is violently and permanently alien to me. That world, with its thought-dumping and embrace of waking sleep, has always been repulsive to me – I’m perfectly happy with mindlessly relaxing (I do it best, as you’ll no doubt have guessed, in the company of dogs), but only in counterpoint to great exertions, not as a goal in itself. I will, for instance, read McLeod’s book with a great deal of energy, whereas the truest possible adept of the text he translates wouldn’t read it at all.

And to wrap up this little list, there’s a book I don’t really have any intention of reading but smile just to think about, because of its enviable title: a “cozy” murder mystery called To Helvetica and Back. It’s nice to know that not all books out there require my help with titles!