Shelfie #44: Hadas Elber-Aviram

To retain authenticity, and by no means out of laziness, I have made no attempt to tidy this shelf or organise it by topic or author. Yes, I am woefully messy, but the eclecticism of this shelf also speaks to my work process - I try to draw connections between disparate genres and forge links across science fiction, fantasy, graphic novels, and academic monographs.

Three books on this shelf had a particular impact on my life and thought:

I read Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station for the third time this year. It is one of those rare books that becomes deeper, more moving, and more subtle with each re-read. It presents a beautifully realised future for Israel and Palestine and yet remains grounded in the sensitive, profound, and elusive half-truths about the messy chaos of life without once falling into cliché or offering easy answers. In these dark times for the Middle East, a book like this one is more needed than ever before.

China Miéville’s The City & The City is an exquisite meditation on the urban condition in the guise of a police thriller. Its premise of two spatially overlapping cities whose residents must learn to unsee, unhear, and even unsmell each other is a perfect metaphor for what it is to live in a metropolis. I think of this book every time my daily commute on the Tube is enlivened by the sight of a passenger picking his nose, the sounds of passengers having an intimate argument, or the odour of a passenger’s pungent dinner wafting from their tupperware. Ignoring each other is a strategy of survival in London and other big cities. No book articulates this insight as clearly as The City & The City.

Mervyn Peake’s The Gormenghast Trilogy, and especially the first book, Titus Groan, is a masterclass in prose writing. Peake describes a tedious morning as ‘both fleet and tardy, fructified and like a grape of air, in whose lucent body the earth was for that moment suspended’. This quote was the first time I came across the term ‘lucent’. Titus Groan spans roughly 600 pages, and relatively little happens by way of plot, but I read it in a day, luxuriating in its rococo style. This novel taught me that fantasy literature can be as much about mood and tone as it is about world-building and impossible premises.

Dr. Hadas Elber-Aviram is an Adjunct Associate Professor at The University of Notre Dame (USA) in England. She is the author of Fairy Tales of London: British Urban Fantasy, 1840 to the Present (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), which was a finalist for the 2022, 2023, and 2024 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies. She has also published articles and chapters on topics ranging from the affiliations between urban archaeology and urban fantasy, to Charles Dickens’s influence on Mervyn Peake and China Miéville, to H. G. Wells’s fantastical London, to post-Brexit science fiction, to the Jewish and Israeli themes in Lavie Tidhar's science fiction.

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