the 3rd annual alix e. harrow gift guide

this should have been a very easy newsletter to write. last year's took like, an hour! but i've never met a project i couldn't over-complicate, and what should have been a jokey little ode to some books i really liked this year evolved into a mild crisis about taste, identity-making, and the pleasing-but-not-effortless labor of reading well.

i've suspected for years now that i lack taste. it's not that i don't have powerful likes and dislikes (oh, beloveds, i do) but that i don't have consistent enough likes and dislikes to constitute a legible aesthetic. it bothered me, as a teenager. i never knew how to answer those which-character-are-you personality quizzes. i could never pick a favorite book, movie, color, season, style, or type. i had at least six crushes a semester and my two favorite articles of clothing were a sundress (powdery blue, fussy, three inches too short for me) and a pair of overalls (scummy green, at least two sizes too big for me, with a fading mickey mouse patch on the bib). i fell in love indiscriminately, almost promiscuously, over and over, with everything. when, in my junior or senior year of college, a young man told me i was the worst-dressed girl on campus, it came almost as a relief.¹ at least i was identifiably something.

when you become a published author, of course, your taste becomes a matter of public record. you blurb books. you post about books on instagram. you talk about books on panels and podcasts. you build a coherent brand (barf!) based on a consistent set of likes and dislikes, and then if nothing else the (overworked, underpaid) editors know which books to send you for blurbs.

poor editors. this year i've blurbed self-published romances and YA fantasies and historical epics and sci-fi novellas. i've made all my friends read sally rooney and bought every problematic mass market early-2000s regency i could find at used bookstores. i was flipping back through my reading journal to make this very list--yes, there's a list at the end of all this--and there i was again: falling in love over and over. and if there's anything more fundamentally cringe than falling in love, it's falling in love frequently.

so like--why was i making this list again???? what value is there, really, in cataloging my own fervent, erratic reading habits? who wants fashion tips from the worst-dressed girl on campus?? but then, okay: i was talking to a writing friend a couple of weeks ago, and he thanked me very sincerely for being--or making myself--"something like the ideal reader for pretty much anything you read." and--well. i like that.²

i like the way it frames reading as skilled labor rather than pure leisure. i like the implication that you, the Ideal Reader, are not a sleek ambush predator who waits for the Ideal Book to stroll into your mouth--but one of those sweaty, ignominious endurance hunters, who has to chase it down. that reading well is an exercise in sustained curiosity, and curiosity is work.

it's work to approach a book as a collusion of intentional aesthetic decisions, rather than a consumable product engineered solely to please you; to ask why, from what angle, to what end, for who, against what; to keep your disbelief generously suspended and your arms uncrossed; to indulge--knowingly, but not condescendingly--in the conceits of the genre; to resist the paranoid, destructive reading that reduces every work to a moral positive or negative; to let yourself be surprised by the twist; to worry less about what your reactions to a book say about you and more about what the book is saying to you; to listen, to feel, to think, to empathize, to find your way in--idk. it's work, to fall in love.

and of course that work--the good and honest work of reading--suffers under the weight of social media and corporate publishing (what doesn't!). of course it gets swallowed up in the endless churn of money-making and content-making and identity-making, and of course what gets spat back out often looks more like a review for a toaster on amazon than like, a human talking about a book.³ of course it encourages a consistent and legible brand (barf!) over everything else; algorithms always do.

so, you know, fuck it: please enjoy this non-exhaustive, tonally inconsistent list of books that are (mostly) nothing like mine, which form no coherent brand, which i fell deeply in love with this year. i may not have taste, but hey—i put the work in.

consider, for your shopping list:

a nostalgic fairy tale set in an alternate historical england, told with a bracing and necessary undercurrent of anger:

• emily wilde's encyclopedia of faeries by heather fawcett

• the magician's daughter by h.g. parry

• the witchwood knot by olivia atwater

recommended for: your mom, probably; anyone who knows the difference between regency, georgian, and victorian, but has never once wished they could have been born "back then"; anyone who still harbors a furtive love for the secret garden

a wrenching but transcendent historical epic invested in the search for power, pleasure, and fleeting, precious human connection in a relentlessly brutal world:

• he who drowned the world by shelley parker-chan

• menewood by nicola griffith

recommended for: fans of hyper-competent heroes who, on finding the world unsuited to them, bend the world; anyone who owns the emily wilson translation of the odyssey or the headley translation of beowulf; your dad who claims to love history but only ever reads ken follet, but only if you're feeling a tiny bit mean

a dark and lovely gothic interested in authorship, narrative power, desire, and--crucially--Big Freaky Houses:

• the last tale of the flower bride by roshani chokshi

• a study in drowning by ava reid

recommended for: people who actually listen to hozier lyrics; anybody who liked starling house tbh; and those intimidatingly chic gen z kids who wear long ribbons in their hair, like full-size american girl dolls

science fiction with a sociological investment in the humans who use and abuse new tech to recreate the same goddamn power structures that broke the world in the first place:

• feed them silence by lee mandelo

• some desperate glory by emily tesh

recommended for: that person who is always posting the bleakest AI shit in your groupchat; graduate students who have seen the depths to which otherwise decent people will sink in pursuit of glory, praise, or another semester of funding; your brothers if they have reddit accounts but aren’t assholes

a capital-R romance with strikingly sharp prose, a sense of humor, and a genuine love for messy bastards of all genders:

• a gentleman's guide to seducing a scoundrel by kj charles

• the halifax hellions series by alexandra vasti (these are a couple of years old, but are being re-released next year. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

• a power unbound by freya marske

• the roommate risk by talia hibbert (also a few years old ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

recommended for: people who are sweet enough to want a happy ending for everyone, but mean enough to want them to really go through it, first; your aunt who claims she skips "those parts" but absolutely does not 

gorgeous contemporary lit with a folkloric element that feels both whimsical and pleasingly, gorily dark:

• ink blood sister scribe by emma törzs

• white cat, black dog by kelly link

recommended for: english majors, your older cousin who reads a ton but not much [tinkling, infuriating laugh] genre

news

starling house came out in the US and UK and spent two (2!) weeks on the nyt bestseller list. it’s one of NPR’s best books of 2023, one of Amazon’s best books of the year, in Bookpage’s top ten, one of Book Riot’s best books of 2023, and a finalist in the goodreads choice awards.

other than that, the best american science fiction and fantasy 2023 collection is out now, including my story, "the six deaths of the saint," and the paperback omnibus of my two fairytale novellas (a spindle splintered and a mirror mended) will be out in february of 2024.

if you're interested in ordering signed and/or personalized copies of any of my books, they're available from my local indie store, new dominion bookshop! (they ship anywhere in the US). if you want to make sure it arrives before christmas, i'd order it soon!

further reading

• the recent issue of sweater weather, where brandon taylor talks about his mfa statement of purpose, has a line about the work of reading that is a helpful counterweight to everything i just said: "I was tired," he says, "of having to relate to art that had so little generosity of spirit in it, having to do all this work just to get down inside the subjectivity of someone for whom I might as well have been a dot on the far edge of the cosmos." some books, beloveds, are truly not worth the fucking work.

• a reminder to american readers to call your representatives and demand a ceasefire. if you find this offensive, i hope with the whole of my heart that you will keep it to yourself. there's no need to engage publicly in whatever grotesque moral contortions it takes to argue that fifteen thousand people should be dead--and more should die!--in addition to the twelve hundred who were murdered on october seventh; you will not convince me. nor will you convince me—me, who pays the taxes that pay for the bombs!—that it’s none of my business.

1. don't hold it against him. he was a very nice young homeschooled boy who had only recently been exposed to evolutionary theory; he had to catch up on at least two hundred years of social mores before he could figure out flirting.

2. you know when a compliment hits a little too hard? and you realize perhaps it's addressing one of your minor yet deeply-held insecurities?? ha! ha! me neither.

3. the vast majority of readers and reviewers are thoughtful, insightful, generous (or at least very funny), and sincere. but—well. i think, probably too often, of the person who gave gideon the ninth one star because it didn’t have a “HEA” (that’s happily ever after, for the less terminally online). imagine rating a fish one star, because it didn’t have feathers.