If the satire in 84K feels a bit obvious, chalk it up to our living in a painfully obvious time in history. The government has outsourced many (most?) of its functions to The Company, of which there is only one: Take a look at any business in the nation and you’ll find it’s owned by a company that’s owned by a company that’s… Theo Miller — that’s not his real name, it’s just what he calls himself — works at the Criminal Audit Office, assessing the amount people will have to pay for the crimes they’ve committed. If they can’t pay, they go to the patty line, hard labor to make up for the costs their crimes incurred.

When a woman from Theo’s past appears, begging him for information about her long-lost daughter, Lucy, he helps her a little and then wants to stop being involved. He has worked hard to be invisible (Theo Miller isn’t his real name; it was the name of someone who’s dead now), and he has no intention of letting his life fall apart for Dani Cumali, a long-ago friend and maybe more who lives her life on the patty line. But Dani tells him, “Lucy’s your daughter,” and then she’s murdered. The murderer is a hired hand for a subsidiary of the Company. Theo doesn’t think it’s likely that Lucy really is his daughter. But.

84K is far darker than any of Claire North’s other books to date (though as I say, I didn’t finish the one about death), so please take a substantial content warning for child harm, sexual violence, physical violence — you name it. Anyone who can afford to pay the indemnity for a crime can afford to commit the crime, and the wealthy of the world take grim advantage of that fact.

What’s more disturbing, in the present American political moment, is the feeling that none of what Theo does — or anyone does — matters. They can reveal that the Company has dug mass graves for workers on the patty line who died of starvation or illness or unsafe working conditions, but the fact is that everyone already, essentially, knows that to be true. Everyone knows, and nobody knows how to change it. The scope of what Theo wants to do — rescue a girl who may or may not be his daughter — is very small, because small change is the only change that seems possible in this world.

Though 84K is on the long side, its plot zips by, with the ever-present threat of Company violence looming over all of Theo’s detective work. I didn’t love the dude-is-motivated-by-lady’s-death plot here and wished I could read a book about Dani burning down the world instead of Theo; but I will say that all of Theo’s major allies in the fight are women. Dani sets him on the path, a woman called Neila finds him bleeding in the street and helps him recover, and there are several other spoilery women he teams up with later on and unexpectedly. Even so, and even knowing that Theo’s averageness is the point North is making, 84K did play into an existing frustration of mine about stories that insist on celebrating white male mediocrity.

What really shines about 84K is North’s prose. Theo lives in a world that requires its citizens to leave many things unsaid that are known by everyone, and the writing leaves space for things to go unsaid.

At the weekend he has money for drink, or can walk by the river without a card in the world, or take a bicycle out into the countryside and let the sunlight wash away the work, and when he returns to his soft bed

he is better

can work better, do what he needs to do, better, and one day

if he works hard enough, earning through his labours

one day maybe someone else will turn down the duvet in the corner of his bed and someone else will press the smell of cleanliness into his fresh-washed clothes and he need not scrub at dishes and argue with the water company and stand in line for the bus that never comes because these things are fundamentally

not the things he is best at
he can give
so much more to this world
so much more

if he’s just given the opportunity to do it.

This is not an unfair position.

The Company requires this kind of thinking, that jumps from one thought to another while ignoring, or trying to ignore, the human cost of the way one is choosing to live one’s life. As a comparison and to gauge whether this book is for you, North’s writing in 84K reminded me of White Is for Witching, my favorite of Helen Oyeyemi’s books.

Before we go, some stuff: The book knows that both men and women buy sex, but it tends to assume that only women and girls sell or are sold for sex. (Not true.) In a brief flashback section from a trans character’s point of view, North says “Once upon a time Neila was a man called Neil” and uses the wrong-body explanation of transness (here’s Janet Mock on why she doesn’t like this trope).

My biggest issue — surprise, surprise for a dystopian story — has to do with representations of disability. It’s fairly clear that Theo’s is a society that values normative bodies and minds, insofar as it values bodies and minds at all. We see some cases where indemnities for murder are higher if the murdered person belonged to a gym, and lower if the murdered person was disabled, but North doesn’t engage with the stories of any of those people, with the consequence that their tragedies feel like set dressing for the (non-disabled) characters’ efforts and epiphanies.

Towards the end of the book, our protagonist goes to see a badly injured ally in the hospital, and she’s just able to write the word END, instructing him to take her off life support. Though the character’s not exactly saying that a disabled life isn’t worth living — if she lives, she’ll be in the power of her extremely wicked son — the scene is all too resonant of the Bury Your Disabled, Type 3 trope. All in all, it paints a picture of a writer who engaged very very shallowly with disability when envisioning her fictional world.¹

Though her disability rep leaves a lot to be desired, Claire North has managed to write a satire that I didn’t hate — a satire of corporatism, no less! — and created a believably terrifying fictional world. Read it if you wish to be unsettled.

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My best thing of 2015 (brace yourself for a shock) was the musical Hamilton. Not a full week after I whined to my friends that I feared there would never be another musical that made me feel the way Wicked and Rent made me feel, and maybe my feelings about those musicals (and the others I love) were just a function of youthful emoness, lo there came Hamilton into my life. If you haven’t listened to the cast recording yet, find a way to do it. Then come back and tell me how much you loved it. Please and thank you.

In books, I’ve picked out a few faves for the year. Some of these I’ve talked about ad nauseam already, so bear with me.

Nimona, by Noelle Stevenson, was the first webcomic I read for my “Read More Webcomics” resolution of 2015 (which went brilliantly for me, if you are wondering). Also probably my most-recommended book of 2015.

How It Went Down, by Kekla Magoon, has been inexplicably overlooked, and I cannot understand why. In addition to being painfully topical, it’s also a beautifully written, thoughtful look at some of the issues that arise when a black child is suddenly dead and nobody can understand why. I can’t say enough about this book and this author. Check it out.

And now for a total change of pace, I loved Nick Hornby’s Funny Girl, when I didn’t remotely expect to. It’s witty and tender, and full of characters you just want to see succeed.

Congo, by David van Reybrouck, laid out the history of a huge, messy country in a way that was perpetually readable and relied as much as possible on the testimony and memories of the Congolese people themselves. If historians like David van Reybrouck could write histories of all the African nations, I’d be done with my Africa reading project in just a few years.

Touch, by Claire North, kept me up late trying to guess what was going to happen next. At least one book a year reminds me why I love reading so much, and Touch was that book for me this year.

Predictably, Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, has arrived on my best-of this year. I didn’t review it in this space because it was hard to feel that I had anything to add about this book, after so many glowing reviews have emerged of it. I’ve admired Coates’s writing for years for its measured insights and unwillingness to rely on easy answers. Between the World and Me is a tragic, beautiful, necessary book.

The Scorpion Rules, by Erin Bow, did absolutely none of the things I expected it to do. It was a perpetual surprise, and it’s made me excited to see what Erin Bow will do next with this world.

As with the Coates book, I don’t feel I have anything super valuable to add about Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which has basked in plenty of accolades already and doesn’t need my additional input. However, I will say that I had no expectation of liking this book and only read it so I could get to Bring Up the Bodies, which I also didn’t especially expect to like. But there you go. Life is full of surprises.

Finally, a shout-out to 1796 Broadway, a monster of an epistolary fanfic which, like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries in its time, kept me up late on several occasions where I kept saying “oh I’ll just do one more and then I’ll go to bed.” Ha, ha, Jenny. You know that’s not what’s really going to happen.

In statistics, female authors were far more heavily represented in my reading than male, and I continue to be fine with that.

I read 18% of my books because I was familiar with the authors from previous books I’d read of theirs, while another 45% of my book recommendations came from you lovely people! If that number seems low, please note that many of the books in the “author fondness” category became favorites of mine due to your unfailing advocacy. So actually I got closer to 53% of my books from bloggers. Another 15% I picked up based on professional reviews; 6% were books I spotted in publishers’ catalogs or that publishers pitched to me; and a small sliver, 3%, were books I picked up randomly at the library.

84% of everything I read came from the library. Lovely, lovely library, please never change. I cherish you so much. I borrowed two books from friends, owned eight, read seven online (from apps like Marvel Now and Comixology), and read fifteen in ARC format (either ebooks or physical). About a fourth (27%) of my reads were ebooks, and the rest were physical books. That is how I roll when subways and purse heavinesses are not a consideration.

I read less SFF this year than I think is typical for me, only 26%, whereas fiction-not-otherwise-classified accounted for 30% of my reading. Actually, that seems okay. Maybe I’d like to read slightly more SFF than ungenre fiction, but those percentages seem fine. 10% of my reading was comics, which I’d like to see go up a bit in the new year, and 14% was nonfiction, which rocks. I read more books in translation this year, seventeen, than I’ve probably ever read in a year before.

My goal for 2015 was to read no more than 65% white authors, and no more than 60% American authors. These stats are probably a little off, because I couldn’t always find interviews where the author self-identifies as one ethnicity or nationality over another, but anyway, employing US census categories, I ended up with 44% authors of color, and 50% authors hailing from countries other than America. I read books by authors from 38 different countries, and it was glorious.

How was your reading year? Did you meet your goals? Did you read anything of exceptional wonderfulness?

The post It’s the End of 2015 (as we know it) appeared first on Reading the End.

Onward to premise: There are creatures called ghosts who have the power to move from one body to another simply by touching skin. Ghosts can only die if they are cannot get out of their dying body quickly enough. Our nameless, genderless protagonist, known to their enemies as Kepler, watches their host, a woman named Josephine, get gunned down in a Metro station by a killer who was plainly briefed on Kepler’s body-jumping talents. Though Kepler escapes alive, they are determined to find out who arranged for Josephine’s death, and why.

The brilliance of Touch is in the mechanics — and y’all know, if you spend much time around here, that I love a story that gets its hands dirty mucking around in the mechanics of its premise. Kepler has been jumping bodies for over two hundred years, and they know a thing or two. You can get lost permanently in rush hour traffic. Anyone chasing you will be looking for people who have lost time; you can mitigate the obviousness of that by pumping your bodies full of drugs and alcohol before taking off for the next one; campsite rule applies when you’re at your leisure, and other times your host body might just have to take a hit. (Or a bullet.)

If there was anything disappointing about this fast-paced, brilliantly conceived book, it’s that all the brilliance of premise and running and detecting and THEMES was in service of such a disappointing goal. There’s this ghost called Galileo who does massacres and is a psychopath. It’s fine, as a macguffin, the way it’s fine in Sunshine to be hunting this one big master evil vampire, but in Touch I wished that the characters’ goals were as unexpected and fascinating as their means of achieving them.

Read it please! And report back to me!

Jeanne! This seems like quite a you sort of book! (My feelings won’t be hurt if you don’t care for it, though.)

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