Daniel Mason

2023 Reading Bracket

| Jessica Crawford

Here is my final 2023 reading bracket! (Hopefully I’m not jinxing it by posting it 3 days before the end of the year–I’m in the middle of reading a book that is fine but not a favorite, here’s to hoping I don’t finish it and then read something Earth shattering in the next 72 hours!)

I reconsidered and made a change since the last time I posted this bracket, but the final outcome would have been the same either way. I think this supports what I already knew: I love me some Gothic fantasy and science fiction, but not quite as much as I love some moving literary fiction!

Books included as some of my favorite reads of the year: “What Moves the Dead” by T. Kingfisher, “Trust” by Hernan Diaz, “Nettle & Bone” by T. Kingfisher, “The Mountain in the Sea” by Ray Nayler, “A House with Good Bones” by T. Kingfisher, “Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries” by Heather Fawcett (I actually read an ARC of the sequel and enjoyed it even more, but decided not to count it as a 2023 favorite since it won’t be published until after the new year), “A Face Like Glass” by Frances Hardinge, “Chlorine” by Jade Song, “Chain-Gang All-Stars” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, “If We Were Villains” by M. L. Rio, “North Woods” by Daniel Mason, and “The Seventh Bride” by T. Kingfisher.

Wow, that’s a lot of T. Kingfisher!

But the top honor goes to “North Woods” 🎉💯❤️

What was your favorite book you read this year?

Book Review: NORTH WOODS by Daniel Mason

| Jessica Crawford

Sometimes, overwhelmed, she retreats into the forests of the past. She has come to think of them as her private Archive, herself an Archivist, and she has found that the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.

The gorgeous, lyrical prose of North Woods by Daniel Mason transports readers to a parcel of land and shows them the changes it undergoes over the course of centuries. A love poem for nature, it teaches of the land’s native flora and fauna, as well as how various outside seeds, spores, insects, and microorganisms make their way there and work changes upon it. Each vignette tells of the succession of people who find their way onto this land, live out their messy lives there, and leave their own indelible marks.

Interspersed with fictional primary accounts such as letters, songs, and speeches, we get peeks into the lives of several generations of people. There are the lovers who flee their Puritan Massachusetts colony to make a life for themselves in the woods, the woman and her child taken captive by native peoples, the escaped slave making her way north to Canada. There is the ex-soldier apple orchardist and his twin daughters, and the landscape painter harboring an illicit love in his breast (“Nature doing her best to draw me into her cloak of melancholy, but I have the memory of my friend”). The robber baron with dreams of a hunting lodge, the vulnerable woman who accidentally invites danger to her home, and the schizophrenic whose hallucinations might be more than they seem (“Diabolical tools, a ruptured earth, words which froze in winter; were it a poem, not a disease, she might find it fascinating”). The amateur historian looking to dig up the past. And then there is the wildlife that makes the place its home in between the people. Sprinkled amongst the stories are love, lust, murder, art, and more.

This literary novel is not for readers looking for fast-paced plot driven stories. I had to take my time reading each line, allowing myself to fully absorb the beauty of it all. And I loved every minute of it!

Bookshop

Goodreads