For book eighteen, I was given the choice between:

‘The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet’ by Becky Chambers

‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

‘The Bone Clocks’ by David Mitchell

With a classic sitting in the middle of two more modern choices, I finally decided to take the dive and check out the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Goodreads summary: The brilliant, bestselling, landmark novel that tells the story of the Buendia family, and chronicles the irreconcilable conflict between the desire for solitude and the need for love—in rich, imaginative prose that has come to define an entire genre known as “magical realism.”

Have you ever wanted to enjoy a book so much that you almost manage to fool yourself into believing it is better than it actually is? Gabriel Garcia Marquez is an author who has been lauded for many years and ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ is one of his supposed classics. As always with a book like this, my lack of enjoyment is not due to Marquez’s writing ability – he wouldn’t have needed me to tell him that he can write. It is instead that the plot itself, what should be driving me forward in an engaged reverie, which felt all too much like a confusing slog for the majority of the novel’s length.

To what extent Marquez meant for it to be confusing is up for debate. With the narrative telling the story of the Buendia family over the course of several generations, and with a central thematic idea of history repeating itself, the decision to name many of the characters the same name is clearly designed to disorient the reader. One character bleeds into that of his uncle or her mother; characters share similar infatuations and foibles as those that came before. However, just because something is designed to be in a particular way, it doesn’t make it good.

The confusion surrounding the names often meant that the events that occurred to each character rang hollow for me. Someone got married, someone else had a lot of sex, another character flew off into the sky and never came back. Nearly all of the set pieces that were designed to highlight the eccentricities of the family (alongside what I’m fairly sure was multiple incestual relationships, unless I completely misread it) just washed over me and nothing felt like it stuck. Even now, a week or so removed from finishing the book, I struggle to genuinely remember what happened to who.

Where ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ is at its best is during some of the darkly comic moments that exist across the narrative. Unfortunately, Marquez often overdoes these humorous scenarios to the point where they become too farcical to be enjoyable. I know that the style is ‘magic realism’ and there is always going to be an element of the weird and wonderful, but all too often it felt like something strange happened for the sake of it.

There was a time when I think ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ might have appealed to me more, the more experimental nature perhaps fitting in better with a younger me when I desired to challenge my reading ability as much as enjoying a good book. Also, I can see why people like this book. If you can get past the confusion and buy in to the Buendia family’s story, the writing itself is beautiful in its evocative nature. However, it just wasn’t for me, no matter how much I might have wished it was.

For book seventeen, I had the choice between:

‘Hyperion’ by Dan Simmons

‘Ring’ by Koji Suzuki

‘The Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison

Sticking with narratives of a slightly more fantastical nature, I decided to check out ‘Ring’, the original source for the film that I remember enjoying many years ago.

Goodreads summary: A mysterious videotape warns that the viewer will die in one week unless a certain, unspecified act is performed. Exactly one week after watching the tape, four teenagers die one after another of heart failure.

Asakawa, a hardworking journalist, is intrigued by his niece’s inexplicable death. His investigation leads him from a metropolitan Tokyo teeming with modern society’s fears to a rural Japan–a mountain resort, a volcanic island, and a countryside clinic–haunted by the past. His attempt to solve the tape’s mystery before it’s too late–for everyone–assumes an increasingly deadly urgency. Ring is a chillingly told horror story, a masterfully suspenseful mystery, and post-modern trip.

When reading a book that served as the basis for what became a successful film adaptation, one that you particularly enjoyed (the original Japanese version), there is always concern as to what ‘damage’ might have been caused by watching rather than reading first. Especially given the thriller-esque nature of ‘Ring’, there was a danger that knowing the ending beforehand could kill any joy that was to be gained from the novel itself. Thankfully, this is not the case as Koji Suzuki’s best seller retains a taut sense of uncomfortable engagement from start to finish.

Many will already be aware of the overall narrative of ‘Ring’ due to the many remakes and outright impostors that followed in its wake. It is worth lauding the central concept – anyone who watches a certain videotape will die in seven day – even if the oversaturation of the idea has maybe lessened its impact. It takes the somewhat jocular and ridiculous world of chain letters, an idea that will often spark a notional feeling of ‘what if?’ when we choose to ignore them, and takes that kernel of fear and blows it wide open with the additional twists and turns afforded by the use of the fantastical and the macabre.

In the blurb, there are references made to Haruki Murakami: whilst this may be a stretch, Suzuki’s Asakawa and his best friend, Ryuji, are both presented as slightly odd, even excusing Asakawa’s marriage and child and Ryuji’s popularity. It is this weirdness that the characters seem to share that helps to create a believable relationship that is required as Ryuji goes out of his way to help Asakawa, even exposing himself to the videotape. His somewhat nihilistic character, not presented in the film version, is at odds with his helpfulness towards Asakawa, although a scene later on in the narrative does seek to address the disparity between these dual natures.

As was to be expected, there are elements of the book that don’t find their way into the film – or at least from what my memory recalls – but the very focused structure and tightly paced narrative means the adaptation is pretty faithful. It is the strength of the novel itself that unsurprisingly gives the film an excellent starting point to build upon.

The ending also leaves things in an engaging fashion. It would have been easy to have the main protagonist defeat the curse and things return to normal. However, Suzuki leaves a significant ethical dilemma at Asakawa’s doorstep – how far is he willing to go in order to save his own family? The cynical reader will probably see this as an easy way into a sequel, but it does raise interesting questions about how Asakawa might go about resolving the issue. Does he try and save everyone, or just those that he loves?

‘Ring’ is well-written, legitimately scary in places, and doesn’t overstay its welcome. Can’t ask for much more than that.

The options I had for book sixteen were:

‘Ancillary Justice’ by Ann Leckie

‘The Fifth Season’ by N.K. Jemisin

‘The Sisters Brothers’ by Patrick deWitt

Although Ancillary Justice showing up once more did make me think I should chose it, I ended up going with ‘The Fifth Season’. Having first got into fantasy with the Game of Thrones series of books, my desire to branch out has seen Jemisin’s work recommended to me. Thus, I was excited to give it a try.

Goodreads summary: This is the way the world ends. Again.

Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, a woman living an ordinary life in a small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Meanwhile, mighty Sanze — the world-spanning empire whose innovations have been civilization’s bedrock for a thousand years — collapses as most of its citizens are murdered to serve a madman’s vengeance. And worst of all, across the heart of the vast continent known as the Stillness, a great red rift has been been torn into the heart of the earth, spewing ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries.

Now Essun must pursue the wreckage of her family through a deadly, dying land. Without sunlight, clean water, or arable land, and with limited stockpiles of supplies, there will be war all across the Stillness: a battle royale of nations not for power or territory, but simply for the basic resources necessary to get through the long dark night. Essun does not care if the world falls apart around her. She’ll break it herself, if she must, to save her daughter.

The three things that help to make a fantasy novel work are the author’s ability to create an interesting world, peopled with interesting characters, and build it upon systems that are engaging in and of themselves. In ‘The Fifth Season’, N. K. Jemisin absolutely delivers on all three counts in a novel that had me almost immediately reaching for the second book to find out what happens next to Essun. I mean, when you start your story with the world ending, you have really set your stall out to provide your reader with an excellent experience.

It is difficult to talk about structure and the narrative voice without giving too much away, but the story is initially split into three separate arcs. By utilising the second person for Essun’s chunk of the story, the one that starts the reader off and carries the bulk of the later part of the narrative, it feels immersive from the opening page. It helps to place us in a world that is falling apart and very different from our own, whilst we also experience Essun’s very real confusion and awe as some of the more fantastical elements of the world around her come to life and the reality of a ‘Fifth Season’ taking hold.

Though the three different narratives that we follow, we get a chance to explore a richly realised world that Jemisin has created. The Fifth Season itself is a process of dramatic climactic change, one that threatens the lives of all who inhabit the Stillness. They include Orogenes, powerful creatures who can control the earth around them, the central ‘system’ that is explored within the novel. Rather than being magicians who can produce lightning bolts out of thin air, this manipulation of the planet’s power is at once fantastical, yet believable – of singular importance to the reader ‘buying in’ to Jemisin’s world.

With great power comes great responsibility and we are shown several difficulties of life as an orogene, including the difficulty in controlling that which burns within in such a volatile fashion. This also helps to somewhat humanise the experiences of Damaya and Syenite, the two other narrative strings that run alongside Essun’s story. Through their trials and tribulations as powerful outcasts in this society, we are left in a position to legitimately sympathise with them as things go wrong…and boy do they go wrong from time to time.

Perhaps it is the fact that this is a trilogy, but ‘The Fifth Season’ is more often than not bleak in its outlook. There are moments to savour, yet Jemisin doesn’t shy away from presenting the darker side of humanity as it exists in the Stillness. Around every corner, there is the possibility that things won’t work out for our main protagonists the way they might hope for. At times, it reminds me of Joe Abercrombie’s work: Jemisin takes tropes and ideas from the fantasy world, gives them a modern twist, whilst maintaining a consistently black tone, whether for comic purposes or to highlight a more difficult reality about this world.

Naturally, it would be churlish to give away details about the ending, but suffice to say that it had me immediately seeking out the second book in the trilogy. The plot is masterfully paced and intricately crafted; there is no doubt that I will be enjoying more of Jemisin’s work in the months to come.

For book number 15 (1/5^th of the way through the project), I was given the choice of:

‘Flights’ by Olga Tokarczuk

‘A Prayer for Owen Meany’ by John Irving

‘Red Mars’ by Kim Stanley Robinson

I decided to go for the most recent book that was to offer, as well as being an International Man Booker Prize winner – ‘Flights’ by Olga Tokarczuk.

Goodreads summary: A seventeenth-century Dutch anatomist discovers the Achilles tendon by dissecting his own amputated leg. Chopin’s heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveller, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveller. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller’s answer.

There are certain books that, whilst you can admire the quality of the writing and the scope of the ideas presented, just don’t resonate with you. Tokarczuk is clearly a very gifted writer and I could understand why someone might absolutely love what she served up in ‘Flights’, but it never fully gripped me like some books do. It had its moments, but all too often it felt like a fragmented slog.

‘Flights’ is interesting in terms of its structure because it reads like a series of small extracts that occasionally give way to longer set pieces. Ostensibly, we follow the main protagonist in her journeys – hence the name ‘Flights’ – which then spark off into longer narratives away from the narrator that tend to explore ideas around movement or travel. There also is a consistent focus on the body, mainly explored through stories about the plastination or dissection of bodies. Outside of being interesting narratives that allow for some long form pieces to hold the book together as a whole, I’ll freely admit to not entirely getting the link.

When the book is good, it is very good. Some of the brief asides about travel and the world of airports in particular are humorous, shared moments of understanding between the author and the reader. Alongside this, some of the longer chapters present interesting slices of life. Particular favourites for me included a woman travelling to see a dying ex-partner, as well as an aging man who gives lectures on cruises as seen through the eyes of his wife, looking beyond to a future when he no longer is apart of it.

Indeed, there is a fascination with life, aging and death that does occasionally engage, but the lack of cohesion hurts the narrative, if there indeed is one. It just seems to meander from place to place, artfully and stylishly I’m sure to some, but losing any sense of power in whatever message Tokarczuk was trying to convey – again, if there is one. Therein lies the problem: if I’m leaving a book and I’m left with a lot of ‘why?’ or ‘what?’ questions, most notably ‘why was this written?’ and ‘what was the point?’, it doesn’t bode well.

What carries this novel to an average rating rather than outright panning is that Tokarczuk is clearly a very skilled writer. I could only wish to have her ease and control of language, which feels adeptly translated into English by her translator. However, being a good writer and writing a good book are two very separate things, and this is ultimately where the disconnect comes for me.