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Toni Morrison, Clive Barker, Travis Baldree: Pajiba January 2023 Book Recommendations Superpost!
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Old School. Biblically Independent.

The Pajiba January 2023 Book Recommendations Superpost!

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | January 31, 2023

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Header Image Source: Bettmann via Getty Images

We’re one whole month into this shiny new year, because time means nothing and its endless passage makes fools of us all. Oh well, at least we’ll always have books. As always, I set myself the goal of reading 100 books a year, and I’m doing pretty solidly so far. In fairness, one of my other resolutions was to read more poetry, so short books make for quick additions to my Goodreads annual target. There’s a life hack for you, kids. Books are wonderful.

Galilee/Coldheart Canyon by Clive Barker

It’s taken me a while to get around to reading Clive Barker’s novels. I’m a big fan of his short stories and know way more about the Hellraiser franchise than is healthy. Yet his non-horror works, which are often hefty tomes of mighty ambition, always felt at a distance to me. Younger me was daft because Barker’s fantasies are amazing, so dense and layered and still fresh decades after their publication.

This month, I read Galilee, his generational saga of familial drama with a mythological twist, and over the Christmas period, I devoured Coldheart Canyon, his Hollywood ghost story-slash-orgiastic satire. Hot take: they’re both great. Barker reminds me a lot of another of my favourite authors, Anne Rice. Both love to delve into worldbuilding and historical detail, sometimes to the detriment of the wider plot, but the prose is so gorgeous that you don’t really care. Barker’s books are also stuffed to the brim with ideas, perhaps too many. Galilee follows two warring families over centuries of strife, with the twist being that one of them is peopled with millennia-old deities. It’s grand in tone but not portentous, with a soap opera edge. Coldheart Canyon, by contrast, is lascivious, even by Barker’s standards. An ageing movie-star moves into a curious mansion to hide from the press after his plastic surgery goes wrong, and soon he is immersed in the decadence of the ghosts of the silent age. Barker’s never been one to skimp on sexuality in his books, but Coldheart Canyon still manages to be the f*ckiest thing he’s ever written.

Both books are over 600 pages but I chewed my way through them in only a few days. I revel in spending time with Barker’s imagination, which has one foot firmly rooted in the literary past while he reinvents multiple genres at once in his own image. Next stop: Imajica!

Son of a Trickster by Eden Robinson

Jared is your typical burnout teen. He’s a disinterested student, a part-time pot cookie dealer, the son of a screw-up single mother, and a heavy drinker who never seems to be 100% sober. He’s a good kid but life has gotten in the way, forcing him to bail out his parents and look out for his neighbors. When a raven starts talking to him, he shrugs it off as the side-effect of a drug trip. But then life starts to get way scarier and sobriety ain’t fixing it.

Son of a Trickster, a Canadian novel by the Giller Prize-shortlisted author Eden Robinson, is mostly marketed as urban fantasy but that only makes up a sliver of the narrative. This is primarily a coming-of-age story of a working-class First Nations kid trying to navigate his troubled life without self-pity or meddling from the outside world. The injection of indigenous mythology and Jared’s status as a son of a trickster is subtle for the most part. One wonders if there’s a draft of this novel without the mythos. This is not to knock the book, which really is excellent. Robinson writes with humor, even in Jared’s darkest moments, utterly devoid of stereotypes or misery bait. Jared’s relationship with his mother, who adores him but seems utterly ill-equipped to raise him even without the intrusion of the supernatural, is deftly drawn and with total honesty. What Robinson sets up for the two sequels hints at something that could be grander but I hope she keeps the focus on Jared’s inner struggles.

Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree

The internet loves to chill. It loves lo-fi music and low-stakes tales to calm the blood. We’ve seen a noticeable rise in the past year or so of sci-fi and fantasy stories that discard frenetic drama in favour of something more domestic. Imagine the songs and food segments of The Hobbit as the driving force and you’re partway there. Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot novellas fit into this trend, but the current darling of the scene is Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree. Ever read a coffee shop AU fanfic? This is that.

Viv is an orc who has decided to give up her life of battles and bloodshed to fulfil her dream of opening a coffee shop. Sure, most people in her world don’t know what coffee is, but with the help of a hot succubus, a rat with culinary skills, and a singing bard in need of a new venue, perhaps her plans can come to fruition. That’s as dramatic as things get. The satisfaction comes in the minutiae of Viv’s work, from building her shop to planning the menu to talking to customers. Again, if you read fanfic, you’ll know these tropes a mile away. It is enjoyable to see this play out in a high fantasy world. Cozy fantasy makes a lot of sense so I’m not surprised this has earned a growing fanbase. If this genre is to grow, I’m eager to see where it goes next.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

There are many Classic Novels or pieces of pop culture that bear the hefty weight of greatness out there that I’ve yet to consume. As someone with a major skepticism towards all kinds of hype, I find that I really need to work up the energy to check out stuff that I’ve been told is one of the best of its kind. But the upside of that is that I get to have the joy of finally experiencing that book or film or album and being delighted to discover that, yes, it is just as brilliant as everyone said it was. My first real example of that in 2023 was reading my first Toni Morrison book, her Pulitzer Prize-winning magnum opus, Beloved.

Beloved just took my breath away. This gothic horror about the trauma of slavery and the smothering nature of generational pain somehow blew away all of my expectations. Sethe is a former enslaved woman who lives in near-total isolation with her daughter Denver in a house that is haunted by a malevolent spirit. When the ghost is forced out of their home, their brief respite comes to an end after a mysterious woman enters their lives. Could she offer solace for Sethe’s pain or drag her further into despair?

I’m not sure what I can say about Beloved that wouldn’t merely be repeating what decades of scholars and critics have already said. It is as good as you’ve heard it is, as dark and piercingly insightful as any book about America’s slave history could ever be. I didn’t expect it to be quite as visceral was it was, but Morrison certainly holds nothing back. There was no respite for the enslaved and even after Juneteenth, Sethe is not psychologically free from what this shameful institution did to her. She may never be. How could anyone be expected to get over that, no matter how much time passes? I can’t wait to read more Morrison books. What a gift her work is.