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It'll soon be time to nominate and select a fiction book to read in December (a month I always associate with time spent with family, and in reading and discussing good books).

One of the things I've enjoyed most about "Reading with Comrades" is that it's introduced me to, or motivated me to read, books or authors I probably wouldn't have read otherwise.

So lindsi and I thought we'd do something different for our December choice. We'd like you to tell us your favourite book you have read all year (and if you want to tell us why its your favourite, so much the better).

Post your favourites to this thread, and we'll set up a poll so that we can all vote. All genres are welcome - this is your chance to campaign for your favourite genre/author/book (and multiple nominations are acceptable).

We'd like to make our choice early this month - there are only 38 shopping days until Christmas. 🤣

My two favorites of the year, apart from what we read together, were Heavy by Kiese Laymon (he comes prepared to tell a lot of truths and it was the best memoir I’ve ever read) and Killers of the Flower Moon because it tells an incredible truth about the history of white America in the recent past against our native people.

My favorite fiction book from this year was ‘The Memory Police��! Super creepy and beautiful magical realism, kind of reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro. Highly highly recommend.

My favourite fiction book for the year was an old one, and a re-read - The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Oh whoops, I withdraw mine; both are non-fiction. Sorry I didn’t read closely enough.

Earlier this year I read Crime and Punishment. I enjoyed the internal dialogue of the main character, which continues throughout novel. There is also a good deal of tension and uncertainty that presents itself, making for twisting and compelling reading. I hope to read a number of Fyodor Dostoevsky's other novels over the course of this impending winter.



Having only this year come across All Quiet on the Western Front, I decided to dive right in. It is a quick and horrifying read, where its content certainly does vividly remind the audience of why we ought to be opposed to wars of aggression rooted in imperialist territorial expansion.

Alison wrote: "Oh whoops, I withdraw mine; both are non-fiction. Sorry I didn’t read closely enough."

To be fair to you Alison, my post only asked for your favourite book. So if you still want to nominate the two you mentioned, they can go forward to the poll. Or feel free to nominate your favourite fiction.

Ok thanks - I’ll leave them then; I didn’t have any favorite fiction this year��

I haven’t read much this year but I really enjoyed Blood Child and other short stories by Octavia E Butler.

My favorite book I've read this year is The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola which is a really interesting and surreal story based on Yoruba folktales. My second favorite book is Native Son by Richard Write.

The poll is set up on the Group Polls page -

/poll/list/1...

Voting has started, so cast your vote now!

Voting has ended - and the group's choice is The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa



Thanks to everyone who voted in the poll, and thanks to lindsi for suggesting this one.

It's had lots of good, and lots of mixed, reviews - so let's hear what you all think of it and why.

My copy should be here by Monday, so I'm hoping to make a start on it before the end of November.

The blurb from Amazon -

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020, an enthralling Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance from one of Japan's greatest writers.

'Beautiful... Haunting' Sunday Times
'A dreamlike story of dystopia' Jia Tolentino
__________

Hat, ribbon, bird rose.

To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed.

When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn't forget, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for him to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next?
__________

Finalist for the National Book Award 2019
Longlisted for the Translated Book Award 2020
New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year

'This timeless fable of control and loss feels more timely than ever' Guardian, Books of the Year

'Echoes the themes of George Orwell's 1984, but it has a voice and power all its own' Time

'A novel that makes us see differently... A masterpiece' Madeleine Thien

Yoko Ogawa -

has published more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction
has had nine of her books translated to English
has won every major Japanese literary award
has had two novels adapted into films
lives in Ashiya, Japan, with her husband and son

The Memory Police is her most famous book, and was written about 25 years ago, but only translated to English in 2019. In many ways its a homage to Anne Frank and was inspired by The Diary of Anne Frank. (Ogawa was interested in the Diary from childhood, and two of her own books are devoted to Frank’s life).

I'd picked up The Memory Police at the end of November, intending to read just a few pages, but its strange setting and calm, understated style, drew me in and I read it fairly quickly.

I'll avoid giving too many details, since I hope a number of you are reading our final book choice for 2021. And its an apt choice for this year - its been claimed as a political novel, reflecting dictatorial societies, but that's not how I experienced it. It felt more to me like a meditation on loss and death, which have touched so many of us in the last two years.

I wouldn't agree with Madeleine Thien's description of it as a masterpiece, but it has lingered on in my mind since I finished it. I hope any of you reading it will share your thoughts.

Has anyone else finished The Memory Police yet, and what did you think of it? Would you recommend it to others in the group?

I started it, and am about 50 pages in. I'm probably not the right audience, but if I'm going to read surreal / symbolic prose, I'm going to need more ....well, action, for lack of a better word, to make this work well for me. But, let's see how it plays out beyond this point!

If you guys want and are willing to nail down a time, I'm happy for DSA SF (Democratic Socialists of America, San Francisco Chapter) set up a zoom meeting to discuss in a few weeks or sometime in January. It's hard to get a good time, as we're so spread out across the world.

I tend to read very little long-form fiction prose, for a lot of good and a lot of bad reasons. For 2021, I only finished Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and John Langan's House of Windows. Now that I think about it, both are about the horror of war, though Mailer's is probably the existentialist Hemingway-esque novel par excellence about WWII and Langan's book has been marketed more as a genre horror novel.

I've been struggling to finish Edith Wharton's House of Mirth for roughly two years now, so there's that.......

Burritoboy wrote: "I started it, and am about 50 pages in. I'm probably not the right audience, but if I'm going to read surreal / symbolic prose, I'm going to need more ....well, action, for lack of a better word, t..."

I thinks its a great idea, and I appreciate the suggestion. I suspect your point about us being scattered around multiple time zones may be the biggest hurdle. Perhaps early-January we could canvas the group to find out who is interested in taking part, and what time zones they are in, and work out what would be possible for a call later in January?

Burritoboy wrote: "I tend to read very little long-form fiction prose, for a lot of good and a lot of bad reasons. For 2021, I only finished Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and John Langan's House of Windows. ..."

The thing I enjoy most about this group is hearing what others are reading, and frequently thinking "I need to read that" - and your post is no exception. Its years since I've read any Mailer, and I've always thought him a better reporter than an author, but I've got to re-read The Naked and the Dead. I think I was about 17 when I first read it, and I'm sure my responses to it now will be totally different.

I'd never heard of John Langan, but I'm intrigued by House of Windows - that has to go onto my TBR pile for 2022.

wrt the memory police, i will say it starts out very slow but ends up absolutely horrifying. also, i read it right after reading the shock doctrine so the use of the word “disappear�� definitely hit different

I’m about 2/3 the way through it. I like the dreamy prose but the dreams are turning into nightmares. I can understand the 1984 comparisons in the concept but the execution is completely different.

i truly despise when anything remotely dystopian is compared to 1984, as if that imperialist asshat (orwell) was even that good of a writer to begin with lmfao

I can't remember if this has come up in any of our forums before, but Orwell got at least some of his inspiration from a Russian sci-fi book written 100 years ago - We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Despite it's age, its well-worth a read.

lindsi wrote: "i truly despise when anything remotely dystopian is compared to 1984, as if that imperialist asshat (orwell) was even that good of a writer to begin with lmfao"

Orwell also worked for the British Government's main agency for anti-Communist propaganda - the Information Research Department. The involvement of him and others was kept secret at the time in a deliberate attempt to portray their anti-socialist smears as "objective".

Well, somebody's excited at the prospect of an online fight! :)

We all need to acknowledge just how messy the shared history of the Left broadly conceived is. There's just a lot of water under that bridge, and it doesn't move any of us forward not to look at the entirety of that history with open eyes. Not with all the goods and all the bads each of our little subgroupings have managed to do over time. Most of the bads have been directed at each other rather than the common enemies, and often neglecting the large areas of commonality that we could have built upon. None of our traditions or histories are perfect, and almost none have come through time unstained. Let's remember Fisher's Vampire Castle and all that.

wait are we still talking about george orwell? because that man was a straight up while supremacist. there’s no amount of ideological overlap in other areas that will make me sympathetic to white supremacists 🤷🏻‍♀��

and let’s not forget he was a cop in british occupied burma:

not only from a historical reality perspective, because there has never been a successful leftist revolution that didn’t center anti-white supremacy & anti-imperialism, but also as someone who immigrated to the US from a former british colony, anti-imperialism is the center of my politics and will ALWAYS come first. frankly, i do not consider anyone who doesn’t center anti-imperialism to be worth listening to, because the compulsion to defer to the status quo of settler colonialist violence will always infect their politics even if otherwise decent. orwell was an imperialist, a literal colonial cop, and a white supremacist. i can’t say he’s not a part of socialist history because of course he is - but this should tell us something very important about socialist history, ie that many of the western left’s heroes are actually vile and are today invoked to bolster the continuation of exploitation of the global south.

lindsi wrote: "wait are we still talking about george orwell? because that man was a straight up while supremacist. there’s no amount of ideological overlap in other areas that will make me sympathetic to white s..."

Well, I read Orwell's essay. It's not what Louis wants to portray it as.

i’ve also read the entirety of it, and i cannot possibly understand how anyone would NOT be appalled by its contents.

We've certainly moved away from the Memory Police :)

One question that might be interesting is: (and I'm still in the middle of Memory Police at 131 pages, so the book may end up going elsewhere.) Orwell's 1984 is, as others have correctly pointed out, hardly the beginning of dystopian works nor the endpoint. In what relation does the Memory Police stand to that now-quite long and storied history of dystopia? 1984 was part of a wave of dystopian books that seem to have been driven by the end of WWII, but Memory Police comes from a much different time, location, language and even seems to (possibly?) be set in a fantasy world or an alternative history. The technology level in Memory Police seems to be that of the early twentieth century, though the setting seems to be intentionally written to be unrealistic, whereas Orwell in 1984 takes on a stance of pretended realism to the point where that text includes purported non-fictional manuals and government documents from the future dystopian government.

There seem to be some elements of Memory Police that recall 1984, but they are so general at this point in 2021 that Ogawa may be in a conversation with 1984, or may not.

Since this group has a readership worldwide, I'm not certain what times would be best for a discussion on Zoom. A weekend morning here in California would be a weekend night for those of you in Europe, but that hardly solves the problem for the rest of the world. If we do go that route, I would suggest we avoid the weekend of February 12 and 13th, as that is the weekend of the American Lupercalia festival - that is, the weekend of the Superbowl.