Hosted, as always, by Rebecca at Bookish Beck, posting on the last Monday of every month. There’s no set formula to this; you can post anything about libraries, whether you’ve recently been to an event at one, heard about an initiative at one, whatever! I use it for rundowns of my monthly library reading. Join in on your social media space of choice using #LoveYourLibrary.
We Do Not Part, by Han Kang (2021; transl. e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, 2025): I wrote about this astoundingly atmospheric excavation of historical horrors and inherited trauma for #ReadIndies, here.
Purple Hibiscus, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2003): Adichie’s début novel is also the only novel of hers that’s written in first person, which probably partly accounts for its sense of limited scope in comparison to her later work. Kambili is the fifteen-year-old Catholic daughter of Eugene, a successful factory owner – a Big Man – and devout worshipper himself. Eugene is also abusive to his wife and children. When Kambili and her older brother Jaja go to stay with their aunty Ifeoma, a university lecturer in a different town, and get to see that it’s possible to live with joy and pleasure even if you’re poor and less doctrinally dogmatic, their lives change forever. I appreciate the way national politics appears on Kambili’s horizon via protests at Ifeoma’s university and the constant shortage of fuel and food – something she’s never previously faced in her affluent, if oppressive, home. Intelligently, too, Adichie provides a priest who isn’t a total bastard: Father Amadi sings Igbo praise songs during Mass and brings Kambili out of her shell with attentive care. I liked less that Kambili develops a crush on Amadi which he appears to reciprocate; we’re never told how old he is, but she’s fifteen and he’s obviously an adult. Although his vows of celibacy render their mutual attraction “safe”, and allowing for cultural differences regarding age gaps, it still feels a little dicey. The scenes of Eugene’s escalating abuse are terrifying, but the ending disposes of his menace in a way that feels unearned. Adichie’s voice is confident – I can see why this attracted attention as a début – but Purple Hibiscus doesn’t trouble Americanah from its spot at the top of her oeuvre.
Returned unread:
Nuclear War: a Scenario, by Annie Jacobsen (2025): I read the opening prologue, which describes in great detail what would happen in a ten-mile radius during the first ten minutes or so after a thermonuclear attack on the Pentagon. Obviously this is entirely what the book is about, so I can’t say the content surprised me, but (especially with parents living two hours south of D.C.) it was sufficiently distressing to make me realise this is actually not what I need to read right now.
The Thing Around Your Neck, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006): I read the first two stories, “Cell One” and “Imitation”. Neither seemed to have much to say, and both ended abruptly. Operating on the dread principle (if your primary emotion when you think about picking up a book is apprehension, stop reading it), I called it a day. I’ve read or given the old college try to all of Adichie’s fiction now, so it’s safe to say that her work is hit and miss for me.
Nothing wrong with deciding a book isn’t right for you at the moment! I’m not really thinking of these as DNFs; I didn’t get that far into either of them. Have you read any of these, or visited your library this February?
I’m a huge fan of Griffith’s novelsabout the seventh-century Northumbrian woman who became St. Hilda of Whitby. An earlier trilogy of novels, of which I first became aware when Laura T. wroteaboutthem, has been out of print for years. Canongate has recently brought them back with stunning, classy new covers, and I took the first available opportunity to spend part of a Christmas book voucher on all three. It seems sensible to write about them together, and as Canongate is an independent publisher based in Edinburgh, this post qualifies for Kaggsy’s month-long #ReadIndies event, too. [Be aware, SOME PLOT DETAILS FOLLOW.]
The Blue Place (1998) introduces us to Aud Torvingen (rhymes with crowd, or shroud), a Norwegian-British-American P.I. living in Atlanta, Georgia. She’s a lesbian, martial artist, skilled carpenter, and ex-cop who – in the best tradition of noir fiction – gets dragged into a dangerous case by a charismatic and compelling woman. Drugs, fake art, and arson are all involved, but unravelling the mystery alongside Aud is only part of the satisfaction of the novel. The other part is her relationship with Julia, the woman she literally runs into one rainy night; the feelings they both develop for one another threaten to bring Aud out of what’s obviously a carefully constructed shell of competence and cool. The novel divides roughly into two: the first half is set in Atlanta and follows noir plot conventions more closely, while the second half sees Aud and Julia travel to Norway, deepening their characterisation and readerly investment. Wonderful secondary characters, from Aud’s sensible aunt Hjordis to her coffee-shop-owner friend Dornan to a briefly glimpsed piercing specialist who goes by the name of Cutter, hint at the many selves and faces that Aud possesses, none of which are insincere but none of which are the full story of who she is, either. She’s a character comfortable with violence, which makes it all the more disturbing when it appears in her life unexpectedly and she can’t control it, or its consequences. The Blue Place all but demands an immediate sequel; luckily, I could pick it up the same day, but original readers had to wait four years for…
Stay (2002). MAJOR PLOT POINTS FOLLOW: This opens with Aud, traumatised by Julia’s murder, holed up in a cabin in the Appalachians which she inherited from her father. She’s trying to renovate and winterise the entire thing by herself, which she’s more than capable of doing, when Dornan shows up. His fiancée Tammy, who appears briefly in The Blue Place, has gone missing – she’s done so before, but she always comes back and he always knows who she’s with. Aud dislikes Tammy, seeing her as manipulative and self-serving (a dislike clearly rooted in Tammy’s heavy investment in patriarchal notions of women: she’s physically small, she wears heels and dresses, she pretends to be dumber than she is). But Julia made her promise to stay in the world, and so, in an effort to retain her friendship with Dornan, she tracks Tammy to Manhattan and heads north to retrieve her. The mystery is actually wrapped up by the halfway point, which makes way for Aud to pursue the righting of wrongs at a deeper level: the second half of the book concerns child trafficking and takes place in rural Arkansas. Once again, though, without shortchanging the plot, Griffith focuses on developing characters’ relationships with each other and ours with them. Tammy has been deeply scarred by her experiences in New York, but as she recuperates in Aud’s cabin, the two women get to understand each other better. Eventually Aud recognises and respects Tammy’s strengths, while also being forced to stretch the boundaries of her own comfort. There’s a lot of social engineering in the second half, which I always love reading about, and by the end, Aud is firmly rooted in the world.
Always (2007). MAJOR PLOT POINTS FOLLOW: Though published much later, this picks up only a few months after the events of Stay. It’s considerably longer than the first two in the series because Griffith’s tendency to write books of two halves is formalised and integrated: chapters following Aud’s investigation of a real estate fraud on waterfront property that she owns in Seattle are interleaved with flashback chapters that detail a ten-week women’s self-defence class she recently taught in the Atlanta suburbs. Something happened at the end of that course for which she feels responsible, but we have to keep reading to find out what. Meanwhile, the situation in Seattle starts to get out of hand, and Aud has to grapple with her own physical and emotional vulnerability. Thematically, this reinforces something she tells her class: “No matter how big or fast or strong you are, how heavily armed or well trained, there’s always going to be someone out there who is bigger, faster or stronger. Always.” It’s one thing to say it, but another thing to come to terms with it herself. But, as she also tells them, the statistics on gender-based violence are strongly in favour of women who fight back. It just doesn’t get reported nearly as often. (The Women Against Rape study from 1985, which still holds up, and Justice Dept. figures from the time of the book’s writing, show that it’s possible to prevail against an unarmed rapist 72% of the time; if he has a knife, your chances are 58%, and 51% if he has a gun – which is still better than half.) Always reintroduces a love interest in the form of Kick, a former stuntwoman turned film caterer who’s diagnosed with MS partway through the book; Griffith, who has MS herself (though, as she points out in the Author’s Note, her illness is not Kick’s illness), writes incisively about disability, and the way that having an unreliable body challenges prevailing ideas about “fighting” and “courage”.
I’m so glad Canongate reissued these. They offer a rejoinder to predominantly male-focused thrillers and noir. They put a gay woman at the heart of a story that isn’t about her sexual orientation or identity but in which her romantic/sexual experiences are given due weight. Above all, they provide a model of competence without fetishizing that quality, or shying away from the less savoury aspects of a personality built to hide pain. Welcome back to the world, Aud.
I don’t always manage to contribute to ReadIndies, the February event instated by Kaggsy and Lizzy Siddal – and now, after Lizzy’s very sad passing last year, run solo by Kaggsy – to celebrate independent publishers. This year, however, my first two reads of the month were from independent publishers and there are a fair few more lined up for the rest of February! Here’s what I made of these two:
We Do Not Part, by Han Kang (2021; transl. e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, 2025): Kyungha, in the grip of a serious depression, hasn’t left her apartment in months. She spends her days lying on the floor, and her nights alternately writing and tearing up versions of her will. An unexpected text from her friend Inseon takes her out to the emergency department of a local hospital, where she discovers that Inseon – an artist with whom Kyungha had once hoped to collaborate on an installment inspired by a dream that itself clearly stemmed from her research into a historic massacre – has sliced off the tips of her fingers with the band saw in her workshop. She needs Kyungha to travel to Jeju Island (whence she has been medivac’d) to care for her pet bird, who has now been almost three days without water. Blindsided, Kyungha agrees, but Jeju is caught in the worst snowstorm anyone can remember, and even getting to the house is an ordeal. When she arrives, the bird is dead, and she buries it. Or is it? And has she really arrived? Weirder and weirder things start to happen, including the impossible reappearance of Inseon. The book leans ever deeper into an exploration of Inseon’s mother’s patiently gathered archive, which documents another massacre, one that occurred on Jeju in the 1940s.
We Do Not Part is astoundingly atmospheric – I have never read something that captures persistent snowfall so well – and integrates its themes of historical horrors and inherited trauma beautifully: it never feels showy, forced, worthy, or precious. Oddly, though, it did feel bitty; perhaps because I read it in short bursts, it constantly seemed to be evading my attempts to mentally grasp and settle into it. It was approaching possible inclusion in my Books of the Year list, but that bittiness meant I couldn’t quite love it as I’d hoped to. Still, this worked far better for me than my previous two forays into Kang’s work (one of which, Human Acts, is about the Gwangju massacre and is clearly the referent of Kyungha’s early dreams). Two of her books in translation remain unread for me, The White Book and Greek Lessons; I might try another.
Shibboleth, by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert (2025). I have simultaneously a very great deal and not much to say about this Oxford-set satire of academia and 2020s campus liberalism. The language is fizzing and vivid, and some of the dialogue is extremely funny; everything that the best friend, Youssef, says is absolutely delicious. The final third of the novel deals thoughtfully with a genuinely complex situation and includes some fantastic lines (“History didn’t just happen in Berlin. It happened here too […] If this were the Garden of Eden, we wouldn’t be standing on people’s bones.”) But some of the targets are low-hanging fruit. Satirising diversity workshops and the earnest self-regard of undergraduates is not groundbreaking. Also, though I accept that things have no doubt changed since my time (2010-2013 plus two more years living in the city), the Oxford that Lambert describes is unrecognisable to me except as the broadest parody. My college had, at the time, the highest proportion of privately educated undergraduates in the university, and even so, this shower of double-barrelled maniacs does not match my memories. (And there’s some weird geography. You wouldn’t go to a diner on Cowley Road and then walk down the High Street towards the train station. Lambert is a current postgraduate at Oxford, which makes this even more baffling. The route you would take would have been considered an unfeasibly long walk in my undergraduate years, anyway. You’d either have found a closer party, or eaten nearer the venue.) Perhaps best considered as reflective of our reality but not entirely tethered to it, like American Psycho or Right Ho Jeeves.
Have you read either of these? Are you an independent-publisher aficionado?
January was a terrific month in reading. Despite DNFing four books practically in a row, I read fourteen in total – and every single one of them was good. A few rose to greatness. At least one will be on my Best Books of 2026 list. I got in a few rereads, and covered a few backlist titles from authors whose work I knew I enjoyed. This is exactly the sort of start to the year that I’d been hoping for. I also got to spend one of my Christmas book vouchers. This month’s library reading is covered here; here’s what I made of the rest.
reread that interacted most interestingly with books I’d read earlier: Zami, by Audre Lorde (1982). First read in July 2020, when I enjoyed its warmth and humour, and was pleased to find that feminist poet and thinker Lorde wasn’t the deathly serious (and dull) theorist that I’d expected. It’s a memoir of her growing up, adolescence, and early adulthood. She feels like an outsider everywhere – as a bookish, visually impaired, fat Black girl, and then as a woman attracted to women – and that feeling becomes part of her identity too. Her early life reminded me of Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, emphasising the conventions of West Indian family life where she can’t fit in. As a young woman she moves away from New York, first to factory work in Stamford and then, on an impulse, to Mexico, where she blossoms. Early love affairs help, too, although none are particularly happy. The latter half of the book, taking place in the late 1950s, is fascinating about the lesbian subcultures of the time (Lorde doesn’t fit in here either: she’s neither a butch nor a femme and isn’t interested in those rigid categories). It was only a few years before the sexual fluidity and marital freedom Samuel R. Delany describes in The Motion of Light in Water, but it feels like a different world. Some of the melodramatic relationship material became repetitive and tiresome. The most interesting part of the book is Lorde’s teenage friendship with a girl who eventually killed herself, clearly because her father had been abusing her. Lorde’s love for Gennie – and, you get the impression, her guilt over Gennie’s death – was lifelong. I probably won’t reread this again, though.
longest awaited, and most worth waiting for: Menewood, by Nicola Griffith (2023). I’ve already mentioned the ten-year gap between this and its predecessor, the magnificent Hild. In Menewood, Griffith takes up the story of the Northumbrian princess who would become St. Hilda of Whitby almost immediately after that earlier book’s ending. The title is a place, a hidden valley in Elmet (West Yorkshire) which Hild’s uncle Edwin, the volatile High King of Britain, has given to her and her now-husband Cian. Holding Elmet for Edwin, Hild determines to build up Menewood as a sanctuary, where distinctions of slave and free are meaningless. Her role as Edwin’s seer appears to be lessening, for which she’s thankful, until the discovery that Penda and Cadwallon, the kings of Mercia and Gwynedd, have allied and are marching to threaten Edwin’s hold. History ensues, including the terrible battle of Hatfield Chase, which takes almost everything that Hild loves and that has given her purpose. The remainder of the novel deals with her recovery of self; her pursuit of vengeance on Cadwallon, who is now ravaging the North; and the choices she must make about what she will do with the power she accrues.
Like Hild, this installment is gorgeously written, with close attention paid to tactility and the senses, the cycles of nature, and the sheer hard work that it took to live, day to day, in this era. There are longueurs: after Hatfield, Hild takes a long time to recover, and the page space dedicated to her development of a viable fighting force is possibly a tad excessive. But Griffith’s effectiveness in these novels is partly due to the way she makes a reader understand time, and how differently it passed in earlier centuries. Taking her time is one way to do that, and we’re primed for it by the immersive, detailed nature of the writing. I’ve also always liked how Hild is permitted by the narrative to be both romantic/sexual/emotional (including in relationships that our era would label queer or sapphic) and practical/tactical/martial. That doesn’t change here, though she suffers in both aspects. We leave Hild at a moment that could, conceivably, serve as a capstone to a duology – but I hope Griffith writes a third volume.
most destabilising: Hangsaman, by Shirley Jackson (1951). In some ways it feels odd that I don’t have that much to say about this, because the way it operates – dreamy, suggestive, symbolic, blurring the lines between a fantasy life and occurrences in reality – would seem to indicate that there’s a lot to excavate. And there is, but I think the best way to excavate it might be to read the book yourself, not necessarily to read me talking about it. Most of it takes place during Natalie Waite’s first semester at college, during which it becomes apparent that she is far too strange for any of her classmates to make friends with. She is taken up, semi-ironically, by two slightly older girls who are trying to seduce their English professor, whose very young wife is a former student of the college, now suffering under the loneliness of social unmooring that comes with her marriage. Natalie herself is experiencing what it becomes progressively clearer are breaks with consensus reality. The book’s first section ends with a climactic scene at a cocktail party hosted by her parents, in which an ambiguous encounter with an older man in the backyard woods represents either an actual sexual assault or an emotional one that’s no less searing. For my money, it’s the former, and each section of Hangsaman contains a scene that repeats the contours of that one: a walk under dark trees with someone whose existence and behaviour threatens Natalie with the dissolution and fragmentation of her selfhood. (In section two, it’s Elizabeth, the professor’s wife; in section three, it’s Tony, Natalie’s apparent only friend.) It’s not a novel about the effects of assault in general, more a novel in which sexual threat is one of many menaces to the self; chief among the others is social conformity, which Jackson demonstrates often requires cruelty and disloyalty. I didn’t particularly enjoy the experience of Hangsaman, but it makes clear how much talent Jackson had, even at the start of her career.
slowest start: Augustus, by John Williams (1972). An epistolary, or rather documentary (not everything is in letter form; some are reports, journal entries, official proclamations, etc.) novel about the rise and life of Rome’s first emperor. Daniel Mendelsohn’s excellent introduction to the NYRB Classics edition identifies how this fits into Williams’s oeuvre: like Stoner and Butcher’s Crossing, it deals with the way a person can slowly but completely change over a lifetime, and the way that what they’re sure is good can change too. The first section deals with Octavius Caesar’s adolescence and early steps towards power in the wake of his uncle Julius’s murder. Unless you’re really into Roman military history, this is slightly drier and harder going than is ideal. I found my attention flagging at several points, but by the Battle of Actium, the stakes were obvious and the narration exciting again. Then we move into more interesting territory. Much of this centres around Augustus’s daughter Julia, whom he adores, and whom he is eventually forced to exile for adultery. (This saves her life: most of her lovers were involved in a conspiracy to kill both Augustus himself and her husband/stepbrother Tiberius, and the adultery charge pre-empts her indictment for treason.) Julia is a great character, and strong evidence for Williams’s facility at writing women. Her loneliness, her pride, her recklessness, and her rage all come through clearly in her first-person journal entries, written from exile on the tiny island of Pandateria. Other voices belong to Vergil, Ovid and Horace; Marcus Agrippa; Gaius Maecenas; Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony); even Cleopatra, which is rather brilliantly done – though all we get from her are official directives to staff followed by a letter to Antonius, they reveal perfectly both her mistrust of her lover’s capabilities and her determination to keep him sweet for as long as possible. We only hear Augustus’s own voice right at the very end, in a beautiful extended meditation on mortality, intentions, and the failures of even an apparently successful life that cements the thematic implications of all that has gone before. Williams is a remarkable ventriloquist, it should be added; each character has their own distinctive written style, without resorting to stylisation or caricature. Stoner is still his masterpiece, but this is enormously rewarding for those with patience enough to get past Actium.
most reassuring reread: The Madonna of the Mountains, by Elise Valmorbida (2018). Reassuring in the sense that my original response to this novel – loving it – was confirmed. On first reading it, I wrote, “It starts in 1923, with a girl called Maria Vittoria embroidering sheets for her dowry trunk. She’s twenty-five, alarmingly old to be unmarried… Valmorbida spins the story of Maria Vittoria’s life: her marriage, her children, the ascent of Mussolini’s government and the onset of WWII… The Madonna of the Mountains feels both universal (fears about infidelity, a child’s health, how to protect your family in uncertain times) and deeply, richly specific… It really feels as if you are peering into the head of, let’s say, your great-grandmother; someone whose world is not your world, whose socially conditioned responses are alien to your own… One of the most restrained, yet profoundly convincing, historical novels that I’ve read in years.”
That’s all still true. On this reread, I noticed some technical things. For example, how Valmorbida achieves the novel’s unique voice and tone: almost every chapter is narrated in free indirect style from Maria Vittoria’s perspective, so we’re both in third person (which gives us a sense of proportion) and locked in to her emotions and patterns of thought. There’s only one exception, when her daughter Amelia becomes the point of view character for a few crucial chapters. Time is also handled beautifully, through carefully chosen intervals: between sections, two or five years have passed, so that we get a sense of general continuity as well as an understanding that the events actually narrated to us are truly life-changing. The madwoman Delfina, who claims to be Maria Vittoria’s illegitimate cousin, serves as proof of hypocrisy and embodies the inadequacy of social norms: her outbursts ostracise her from the community and eventually lead to her death, but she is the quintessential frightening truth-teller, the inconvenient bastard on the margins of society who understands how things work better than any number of conventional, respectable people. She is Maria Vittoria’s dark double. Meanwhile, imagined monologues in italics from a Madonna statue inherited from her mother dramatise the demands that weigh on Maria Vittoria’s soul, the social and spiritual codes by which she lives and which define her. This superb novel was criminally underappreciated upon publication and should have been on the Walter Scott and Women’s Prize shortlists.
most bittersweet follow-up: A House for Alice, by Diana Evans (2023). This is a direct sequel to Ordinary People, Evans’s Women’s-Prize-shortlisted exploration of married (or at least committed) life in southeast London’s middle-class Black communities just after Obama’s election. It picks up eight years later, and focuses – at least initially – on the parents of Melissa, one of Ordinary People‘s protagonists. Her septuagenarian Nigerian mother, Alice, is beginning to make noises about “going home” to grow old and die; her white father, Cornelius, with whom Alice has not lived for decades, dies unexpectedly in a house fire as the novel opens, an event that takes place on the same day as the disastrous Grenfell Tower fire. Evans’s signature blend is to incorporate national/political happening with smaller-scale domestic event: Alice’s vacillation about her home reflects the “hostile environment”, Windrush Generation deportations, and the May administration’s naked contempt for immigrants and non-white Britons. Meanwhile, her daughter Melissa is beginning to regret having left her partner, Michael, the decision that ended Ordinary People; Michael is beginning to find that his second marriage, to jazz singer Nicole – vivacious, outgoing, and less a has-been than a never-quite-made-it – is perhaps shallower than he realised; Damian, whose marriage made up the other half of Ordinary People, has also left his wife, and we first encounter him searching for his runaway teenage daughter Avril in Paris. There is, in other words, an awful lot going on here (I haven’t even mentioned the flashbacks Melissa begins to have to what is clearly a childhood trauma related to her father’s alcohol abuse and violent tendencies, or the post-death scenes of Cornelius seeking a resting place in the afterlife). As a result, some characters are short-changed in uneasy-making ways. Avril is found, but does not get a happy ending, but little time is spent on the reality of her life or the effect on Damian of seeing his child suffer. Melissa’s flashbacks are not quite resolved. However, I’d rather read an overstuffed, ambitious novel – especially one that takes seriously the emotions and friendships between older women, such as Alice and her church friends, or Nicole and her circle of cool, artistic, powerful wine aunties – than a thin, timid one.
most poetic evocation of history’s emotional pull: May We Feed the King, by Rebecca Perry (2026). A curator of still life “scenes” for historic properties receives a new commission to dress half a dozen rooms in a former palace. Permitted to select any time period from the centuries in which the palace was inhabited, she (one assumes – we never find out) chooses the reign of a King who never expected to accede, and whose brief rule is still thought of as shameful and embarrassing. Struggling with a personal loss that’s never specified – though context clues suggest the death of a partner or a traumatic breakup – she finds herself drawn into the world of the long-vanished King, as well as increasingly attracted to the archivist (again, no gender specified) who provides the necessary documents for research. Meanwhile, a long central section in third person follows the King himself – his unexpected accession, reluctant response, and eventual mysterious disappearance – mostly focalised through him, with occasional forays into his personal attendant, a lady-in-waiting, or his power-hungry and frustrated chief advisor.
Perry’s writing is wonderful: assured, precise, evocative. I love fiction that delves deeply into the specifics of an unusual job, and the curator’s love for her work helps to make the level of detail she gives us feel, not excessive, but grounded in her characterisation. (There’s an especially great section about plastic-resin food props and the website you can order them from.) Her attempts to inhabit the King and his world offer a commentary on loss and time that are counterpointed by her own personal loss: in the end, we lose everything to history except for what is preserved, which is only ever incomplete. But art and beauty can emerge from our efforts to rediscover or recreate what is lost. Elegant, melancholy and with a faint extension of hope at its end, this is a début that I’d very much like to see on the Walter Scott, Women’s, and even Booker longlists this year. Published 29 January; thanks to Granta and NetGalley for the eARC.
best palate cleanser: Blurb Your Enthusiasm, by Louise Willder (2022). Willder estimates she’s written five thousand blurbs in her career as a publishing copywriter. In this book, the first thing published under her actual name, she pulls back the curtain on blurb efficacy: how do you convince people to open the covers of a book? Are spoilers ever okay? What kind of voice do you choose for each one? Do you have to read the whole book before blurbing it? (N.b.: in the UK “blurb” means the synopsising copy on the book jacket. In America, it means an advance quote of praise from another author. Willder uses it in the UK sense throughout.) Other chapters range further afield. Some of these worked better for me than others. Everything about cover design (including how text and image can be made to work around and with one another) fascinated me, as did theorising about the ideal title (Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog, apparently, combining the commercial allure of presidential gravitas, medical content, and an animal – though several books under this title have been published, and unaccountably, none of them has been a bestseller). I was less convinced by chapters that dealt with historical publishing, which made the sorts of leaps that my supervisors would be annoyed at me for. (I actually think it is perfectly fair to see the extraordinarily long titles of Daniel Defoe’s era as proto-blurbs if that is your angle, but it feels like a substantial claim to make without any hedging. At the very least, it would be good to acknowledge that literary marketing has not remained unchanged for 400 years.) Some of the material on different genres – romance, sci fi, etc. – felt both under-considered and unnecessary. These are churlish complaints, though, given Willder’s infectious enthusiasm and the fun with which she infuses her behind-the-scenes tour of this under-appreciated area of the book industry. Its witty, low-key tone strikes exactly the right note.
prolixest fantasy: Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay (1990).Tigana balances almost perfectly between being very compelling and very annoying. It’s a political fantasy in which an occupied peninsula is uneasily divided between two separate colonial powers, one of whom takes vengeance on the province in which his son was killed in battle by using sorcery to erase the place’s name from memory and speakability. Only people who were born there can say, hear or understand the word “Tigana”. Much of the novel’s page count follows the long and secret efforts of the province’s Crown Prince, Alessan, to build a human intelligence network across the peninsula, cause the mutual destruction of both occupying powers, and restore Tigana to the memory of the world. It’s compelling stuff, counter-pointed by characters such as Dianora, a Tiganese woman whose own vengeance quest has been derailed by falling in love with the man she’s sworn to kill, and Devin, a singer who doesn’t know his own heritage until he gets involved with Alessan’s plans. On the other hand, women are invariably defined through their attractiveness or sexuality (even if that sexuality is “oh gosh, no thanks”). More frustratingly, Kay has a terrible habit of overwriting. Here he is describing a character who sees someone she doesn’t expect:
And then, at the bottom of the staircase, as she stepped onto the mosaic-inlaid tiles of the floor, she realized who was waiting by the palace doors to escort her out and her heart almost stopped.
There was a cluster of men there. D’Eymon, for one, and Rhamanus as well, who had stayed in the Palm as she’d been sure he would, and had been named as Brandin’s Lord of the Fleet. Beside them was Doarde the poet, representing the people of Chiara. She had expected him: it had been d’Eymon’s clever idea that the participation of one Island poet could help counterbalance the crime and death of another. Next to Doarde was a burly, sharp-faced man in brown velvet hung about with a ransom’s worth of gold. A merchant from Corte, and a successful one clearly enough[…] Behind him was a lean grey-clad priest of Morian who was obviously from Asoli. She could tell from his colouring, the native Asolino all had that look about him.
She also knew he was from Asoli because the last of the men waiting for her there was from Lower Corte and she knew him.
None of the description in the second paragraph is necessary. They’re mostly characters we’ve already met, but we don’t need to know what they’re doing or even that they’re here in this scene. It’s obviously a technique designed to extend the moment, like slow-mo in a film, to emphasise the impact of seeing someone so unexpected. But it has the opposite effect here, not least because Kay has been doing it for the last 500 pages at this point. Even the individual sentences are weirdly redundant: “mosaic-inlaid tiles”? Just say “mosaic floor” or “tiled floor”. “Waiting by the palace doors to escort her out” – why not just “waiting by the doors” or “waiting to escort her out”? It’s clumsy. I’ll definitely try Kay again, since he’s still writing and well-regarded, and this example of his work is nearly four decades old, but I hope he got better at reining himself in…
Hosted, as always, by Rebecca at Bookish Beck, posting on the last Monday of every month. There’s no set formula to this; you can post anything about libraries, whether you’ve recently been to an event at one, heard about an initiative at one, whatever! I use it for rundowns of my monthly library reading. Join in on your social media space of choice using #LoveYourLibrary.
January was a month full of library reading. At time of writing, nearly half of the books I’d read this month came from my local branch, in both paper and e-form. Two of these were rereads, and, not for the first time, I realised how useful a library can be if you want to dig into a particular writer’s body of work. (My current holds list will bear this out further in February.) 2026’s four DNFs so far also came from the library, which is honestly the ideal scenario: I didn’t have to spend my own money on duds, and other patrons may enjoy them. Here’s what I made of my successful choices.
Area 51: an Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base, by Annie Jacobsen (2012): One of my perhaps lesser-known personality traits is an occasional dad-like fixation on the history of the defense and intelligence communities. I wanted to read Jacobsen’s latest, Nuclear War: a Scenario, but it’s currently checked out, so I went for this in the meantime. Despite its title and premise, for the most part this is a very thoroughly researched and reasonably sober account of the officially-denied base in the Nevada desert. Area 51 has become associated with the Roswell incident, because the remains of that craft were taken there, and with UFOs generally. The majority of what occurred there, though, is twofold: generations of top-secret Cold War spy planes like the U-2 and the SR-71 Blackbird were designed and tested there, and absolutely loads of nuclear bomb tests also took place, many with a frankly alarming lack of oversight or cleanup plan, or even obvious scientific import. Mostly, the plane testing correlates with the alleged UFO sightings. A lot of what people claim to have seen that “was way beyond any flight technology we had at the time” was actually one of these aircraft (which were way beyond any flight technology that anyone else had at the time, because the US was trying hard to both beat the Soviets in this area and to keep it absolutely classified).
Jacobsen can’t entirely avoid journalistic sensationalism in her framing – at the end of one chapter, for example, she poses a series of leading hypothetical questions, instead of just stating her case – but the vast majority of the book is an interesting, plausible account of a genuine R&D program from which the CIA and military sought to distract public attention by spinning up rumour and conjecture. Unfortunately, in the last chapter, Jacobsen takes an absolutely wild punt on explaining the Roswell incident itself, using only a single anonymous source whose memory (let alone motives or veracity) is never questioned. Her answer is somehow even weirder than “aliens”; I’m not actually averse to a wild theory if there’s anything at all offered in evidence, but nothing is offered. The book as a whole is tainted by it, and it’s probably all best read with a grain of cynical salt. However, where Jacobsen sticks to the development of the spy planes and the nuclear tests, Area 51 is fascinating, valuable, and deeply concerning. (There is so much atmospheric plutonium running around loose, you guys. So. Much.)
Butcher’s Crossing, by John Williams (1960): This is nothing like Stoner(1965), the novel for which Williams is best known after it was “rediscovered” in the 2010s, except in the sense that they’re both really, really good. Butcher’s Crossing is both a historical novel and a Western: in 1873, Harvard dropout Will Andrews travels to frontier Kansas and, in search of some unclear-even-to-himself authenticity, underwrites an expedition led by the monomaniacal buffalo hunter Miller. The novel recounts the grueling trip to an isolated Rocky Mountains valley, the long weeks and brutal waste of the hunt, and some additional plot points that I won’t spoil, but probably should have expected: Williams, after all, seems dedicated to writing sad outcomes. His style is clear, elegant, and evocative all at the same time, perfectly declarative and yet able to capture tiny nuances of behaviour. Powerful, indelible scenes succeed one another. Animals nearly dead of thirst begin to run flat-out when they smell water; a life-threatening blizzard is survived in body-bags made of buffalo hides; a man who previously lost a hand to frostbite tips into madness at the sight of falling snow. There’s a devastating accident near the book’s end (I actually put my hands over my mouth when I read it). Miller is a kind of landbound Ahab, calmly insane, while Will starts out semi-consciously modeling himself on Emerson, but soon discovers how romanticised that pose truly is. The themes of white rapacity in the West and the futile desire to locate meaning in the wilderness are conveyed unmistakably but utterly without preaching, while an acknowledgement of the devastation wreaked on Indigenous lives is delicately sketched. I absolutely adored reading this.
26a, by Diana Evans (2006): WARNING: DISCUSSION OF MAJOR PLOT POINTS FOLLOWS. Evans’s third novel, Ordinary People (2018), was a surprise success for me: following two couples of colour in South London whose marriages faced big changes, it was well-observed and warm, marred only by a single confusing foray into magical realism. 26a was her debut and won her the Orange Prize for New Writing as was, and a Betty Trask Award. Set in Neasden from the late ’70s to the late ’90s, it follows mixed-race twins Bessi and Georgia as they grow up with two other sisters, navigating their parents’ baffling marriage, their white father’s reliance on alcohol and increasingly erratic behaviour, the joys and confusions of sisterhood, and the unevenly distributed incursions of sorrow. It too is remarkably well observed, and has a zesty comic spirit; the early chapters in particular, like the excellent opener featuring the death of the girls’ pet hamster, reminded me of a less gonzo Zadie Smith.
Although that wry tone never entirely disappears, two plot points plunge us into darker territory. First, partway through the novel, Georgia experiences a traumatic sexual assault that she never tells Bessi about (though her big sister, Bel, does know); then, near the end, Georgia’s mental health deteriorates drastically, and she hangs herself at the age of twenty-four. Evans is careful not to suggest that Georgia’s distress is entirely traceable to the assault: their Nigerian mother’s spiritual traditions hint at twin-dom as an inherently problematic state, and there are plenty of other possible factors to consider. Ultimately, it’s impossible to know why Georgia couldn’t live in this world. The novel’s coda – the year after her death, in which her spirit is represented as sharing Bessi’s body until it’s finally ready to move on – toggles fluently between absurdist comedy and horror (the scenes where the remaining sisters pick out a coffin and do the makeup on Georgia’s cadaver before her burial are particular standouts) and a more piercingly poignant tone (the final pages made me cry). I decided to reread Ordinary People in the light of this, since Evans obviously has an intentional approach to her inclusion of the supernatural in otherwise realist work. The mix may not be for every reader, but I thought 26a was insightful, bittersweet, and courageous.
Ordinary People, by Diana Evans (2018): Reread; first (and last) read in April 2018. Then, I wrote, “Evans’s protagonists [are] two couples, Michael and Melissa, Damian and Stephanie, trying to keep their relationships alive after marriage and/or children, moving to the suburbs, losing a parent, discovering that they will very soon no longer be young… [The] plotting is brave: not everyone gets a happy ending, and we’re forced to question what happiness can look like…Ordinary People is an extraordinary book for posing those possibilities while also telling an apparently familiar story about domestic strife; it’s very impressive.” I also, amusingly, compared her work to Zadie Smith’s, though again noted that it lacks Smith’s hyperactivity (not necessarily a bad thing). Obviously I’d completely forgotten that by the time I read 26a, but at least it’s consistent!
Further observations this time around include the delighted recognition that Ordinary People is funny, thanks to Evans’s precise observations and the dry tone of the narration. (At one point, Melissa’s internal monologue notes the apparent satisfaction that a pest control man takes at her fear of mice, and wonders wildly whether this means he’s a psychopath.) If you’re expecting an equal division between the two couples, you’ll be disappointed, as Stephanie definitely gets short-changed; this is mostly a novel about Michael and Melissa, with Damian a distant second in terms of page time and sympathy. The supernatural element did feel less intrusive this time. I chose to attribute it to a combination of Melissa’s worsening mental health and as symbolic of what’s gone so wrong in their domestic arrangements (as foreshadowed by their address: unlucky number 13 on the ironically named Paradise Row). This is a full, generous, thoughtful consideration of modern marriage; it may be told within the prism of the Black British twenty-first-century experience (and specifically that experience as it manifests in London), but anyone who’s ever been in a long-term relationship will recognise something here. I went off this a few months after first reading it, perhaps because its Women’s Prize shortlisting associated it with the inferior An American Marriage, but a reread has brought it up in my estimations again. (I then read the sequel, A House for Alice, which I couldn’t source from the library; keep an eye out for that in my forthcoming January Superlatives post.)
Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006): Reread; first (and last) read in November 2015, when I had only just moved to London, worked for Mumsnet, and was disoriented, exhausted, and subtly unhappy. Then, I was so impressed by this account of the shattering Biafran War in 1960s Nigeria as experienced by privileged twin sisters – lean, sarcastic Kainene; beautiful, slightly passive Olanna – and their partners (Kainene’s is a white British quasi-journalist named Richard, while Olanna’s is Odenigbo, a lecturer and true believer in Biafran nationalism). It did feel more “worthy” than Americanah, but still captured my imagination. Now, the paired infidelity and the sibling discord in the early sections feels soapy, as do occasional forays into the world of racist white expats. The focus on food, which foreshadows its terrible significance during the famine caused by the war, is nice, subtle: Harrison, Kainene’s steward, obsessed with cooking only English dishes and proud that he can do so, Odenigbo’s houseboy Ugwu hoarding chicken on his first night working in the house, Odenigbo’s mother’s attempts to dominate her son’s household via the kitchen. I also found that one of the most upsetting episodes – Ugwu’s participation in a gang rape as a conscripted soldier – doesn’t come out of nowhere, but is rather seeded in his characterisation: he tends to view women as objects, albeit sometimes objects of admiration, and his interest in tear gas, rooted in the idea that he could use it as a date rape drug, sounds an early ominous note. Meanwhile, Richard’s tone-deaf insistence that he is Biafran too, his utter refusal to identify himself with Britain, is fascinating and frustrating in equal measure, showing what the idea of Biafra could offer people but also revealing how deeply embedded British imperialism really was in this conflict. The final section, which takes place during the actual war, is a little too long and undifferentiated. I’d forgotten the uncertainty of the ending, though it felt appropriate. I’d still rank this second after Americanah, and am keen to see how Purple Hibiscus (2004) compares.
Have you read any of these titles yourself, or visited a library yet this year?
As mentioned in my 2025 wrap-up post, I received two book vouchers for Christmas this year – one for bookshop.org from my parents, and one for Waterstones from my fiancé. I’m hoping to spend the latter on a day trip to the big Waterstones on Piccadilly, but in the meantime, I ordered a lovely great stack from bookshop.org which arrived yesterday.
Another Marvelous Thing, by Laurie Colwin (1986): I adored Colwin’s novel Happy All the Time last summer, and this – a novella about an adulterous couple who are, on the face of it, wildly ill-matched – appealed very much. Her dialogue and characters are a marvel of dry wit and forthrightness.
The Gilda Stories, by Jewelle Gomez (1991): Pretty sure this is a novel-in-stories about a queer Black vampire girl across two centuries of American history. Pretty sure that sounds absolutely incredible.
The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer (1991): Everyone seems to love this and I strongly suspect I will too; my impression is of a kind of quiet, crystalline apocalypse story set in a remote Alpine valley.
Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson (2011): Unbelievable to me that I’ve not read Johnson yet. This seems potentially on the same wavelength as Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams, which I read earlier this month, in that it’s a melancholy revisionist Western. Catnip to me.
Cold Earth, by Sarah Moss (2009): Moss’s first novel; I’ve read everything she’s published from 2015 onwards but want to get to grips with her earlier work. This story of plague and archaeology has always intrigued.
The Watermark, by Sam Mills (2025): This has “Calvino and Borges homage” written all over it, but I’m hoping for some of the playfulness and irreverence of Jasper Fforde, too. About a couple who get trapped inside a novelist’s work-in-progress and have to escape through other books. Sounds wild and exciting.
The Aud trilogy, by Nicola Griffith: The Blue Place (1998), Stay (2002), and Always (2007). You know I had to, after loving Hild and Menewood and knowing that these were being reprinted in smart new paperback editions after being virtually unfindable for years! Griffith’s protagonist, Aud Torvingen, is a tall, badass, lesbian Norwegian-American P.I. I’m anticipating the coolness of Francine Pascal’s Fearless books with, obviously, more sophisticated writing and ideas.
Penance, by Eliza Clark (2023): Chillingly smart and insightful thriller about teenage girls who murder a classmate on the eve of the Brexit vote. I’ve already read this, and adored it; it made my Best of Year list in 2024. But the copy I read was from the library, and I’ve long coveted my own.
Have you read any of these? I only have a very few outstanding books left on my TBR before getting round to these, so which should I read first??
One of the things that got the most comments in both my best books of 2025 and 2025 wrap-up posts was how few DNFs I had last year. I attributed this to getting better at picking books. (It’s partly knowing what I’ll probably like, but just as much about developing a better sense for smoke and mirrors.) And yet, two weeks into 2026, I must come before you with the confession that I have DNFd four books already, which is 2/3 of last year’s entire total! They all came from the local public library (#loveyourlibrary); three of them are titles I actually requested the library to buy. I do not feel at all bad about the DNFing – what matters for libraries is checkout numbers – though I am a little sad that these were books I’d been genuinely keen on, at least theoretically. I suppose the silver lining is that it’s saved me spending my own money on disappointments, and maybe someone else in my local borough will love one or more of these.
Sky Full of Elephants, by Cebo Campbell (2025), @ chapter 9: Great premise (all white people in the US simultaneously drown themselves; a Black ex-con has to help his mixed-race daughter, whom he’s never met, traverse the country in the aftermath), but clunky execution.
The Women’s Courtyard, by Khadija Mastur (1962; trans. Daisy Rockwell 2025), @ chapter 5: Loved the idea of a Partition novel from a sheltered woman’s perspective, but the language felt stiff and distanced. Lost interest.
A Woman’s Place is in the Kitchen, by Sally Abé (2025), @ basically pg. 3: Abé’s an extremely talented chef who went far on Great British Menu. She’s dedicated her career to promoting women in the macho industry of professional cooking, which is utterly admirable. The writing’s mid, though.
Dream Count, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2025), @ 6%: I really wanted to like this, but opening with a tired rehash of the pandemic experiences of the laptop classes followed by flashbacks to a bad relationship with a self-regarding intellectual put me right off. Adichie’s writing here has nowhere near the snap and verve of Americanah‘s prose. What happened?!
This, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the one title in this list that I did not have to ask the library to buy for me, and there was someone on the waitlist for it within a day after I checked it out. Dream Count will have good borrowing figures regardless. Meanwhile, I’m trying to fill in my CNA gaps, so have placed reservations on Purple Hibiscus (which I’ve never read) and Half of a Yellow Sun (which I read once in 2015 and barely remember). Her collection of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck, is also on my radar to check out after I’ve at least tried all of her novels. So far, I suspect that Americanah (which I’ve read twice, in 2014 and 2023) is her masterpiece.
Have you read, or tried to read, any of these? Have you DNFd anything yet this year?
This year, I read 182 books. This is more than last year’s 170 – probably helped along by a binge of popcorn reading in May – and seems like a very decent showing; I was aiming, as usual, for about 150. Overall, 2025 was a great reading year. I was busy, but I tended to choose well, put books down when they didn’t suit me, and used the library (and its purchasing powers) liberally. My picks for books of the year totalled thirteen, which averages out to a little more than one truly exceptional read per month. Who could ask for better?
In terms of reading projects (a term I much prefer to “challenges”), I didn’t set myself any specific ones for 2025, unlike previous years. I did complete 20 Books of Summer, now run by Annabel and Emma, reading and reviewing twenty books that fit my own criteria: written by authors of colour and not bought brand-new. Unfortunately, although the letter of the law was met, the spirit was really not, in the sense that I barely enjoyed any 20 BoS reads; some were proper slogs. I wrote a wrap-up post here, in which I pondered the reasons for this. I intend to do the challenge again in 2026, and have come up with (hopefully) a clearer set of criteria which ought to improve the experience. More on that in the spring!
Other projects/events included the #1952Club, run by Kaggsy and Simon, which gave me the pleasure of first reading Ralph Ellison’s marvelous Invisible Man; RIP XX, in which I read work by Joe Hill, Alan Moore, Bora Chung, Horace Walpole, Carissa Orlando, and Mariana Enríquez; and Doorstoppers in December, run by Laura T., which led me to the diverse offerings of Nicola Barker, Robin Hobb, and George Eliot.
Stats
Who does not love a stat, eh? Of the 182 books I read this year:
23 were nonfiction. As usual, that’s more than it felt like. My nonfiction choices are almost exclusively memoir, with some occasional lit crit and belles-lettres; even those are often memoir-adjacent.
99 were by women (one was jointly authored by a woman and a man) and 4 were by non-binary writers, making 54% of my reading non-male-authored. This isn’t a huge change from last year, which was marginally closer to a 50:50 split, and I’m very pleased with it.
44 were by authors of colour. That’s 24%, which is considerably better than last year, and 20 Books of Summer certainly had something to do with that. I’d like to get it up to 25% in 2026.
28 were by (to my knowledge) LGBTQIA+ authors, or had major characters/themes that were LGBTQIA+. That’s 15%, a minuscule improvement on last year. There’s certainly room for more.
Some entertaining ones, according to StoryGraph: 87 of the books I read this year were “reflective”, 65 were “emotional”, and 51 apiece were “mysterious”, “dark” or “adventurous” (!) On the other end of the scale, only 4 were “hopeful” (I personally feel quite hopeful!) while only 3 were “inspiring” (The Eights by Joanna Miller, Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, and Marsha by Tourmaline, if you’re wondering).
Holiday Book Haul
We now appear to have entered the era in which people take me seriously when I ask for book tokens as gifts. My fiancé got me a Waterstones gift card, and my parents bought me a voucher for bookshop.org. Hooray! I’ll report back on how these are spent.
Meanwhile, there were also two actual books under the tree.
Shibboleth, by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert (2025): An Oxford novel that either will or won’t annoy me intensely. I’m vaguely alarmed by its apparent focus on identity politics (can we please lay to rest the absurd and insidious notion that university students are the greatest current threat to democratic ideals?) but I’m interested.
Menewood, by Nicola Griffith (2023): [screams forever] I’ve been waiting for this book for so long. A sequel to the extraordinary Hild, it took ten years to be published and another two years to find its way to me: the hardback was too expensive and then it seemed to drop out of UK circulation in paperback form. M. lied to my face about having bought me this when I guessed it. Concern about his deception skills aside, he chose perfectly.
2026 Reading Goals
As was true for the past year, I’ll have a lot to balance and a lot to deliver in 2026: paid work, PhD research, singing, wedding planning, travel, and maintaining relationships with friends and loved ones, as well as an active reading life. Setting specific reading projects for myself is not the way to ensure satisfaction. On the other hand, what I said last year was that I wanted quality, and that has turned out to be an excellent guiding star. So my main goal for 2026 remains the same.
Other than that, I intend to do 20 Books of Summer again and enjoy my selections more this time, with a better game plan (you’ll find out!) I’d like to keep using the public library and making stock-purchase requests there (honestly, what a life-changingly good service this is). Once again, I’d like to improve my read ratio for authors of colour. Also, because re-reading has served me so well this year, I’d like to give myself permission to do more of that. But really, what I want is to deeply enjoy absolutely everything I read. Seems thoroughly reasonable.
How does your reading year stack up? Did you receive any bookish delights over the holidays? Have you made any reading resolutions for 2026, or do you harbour any reading hopes?
I’m trying to clear the decks for the New Year, so I’m combining December’s Superlatives and #LoveYourLibrary roundup posts into one, as I did last year.
SUPERLATIVES
fell hardest between commercial and academic publishing: Revolutionary Acts,by Jason Okundaye(2024). An oral history of the black gay scene in South London – Brixton and surrounds, really – in about the final quarter of the 20th century. I am a huge fan of what Okundaye describes as “archival joy”, the pleasure of discovering stories and lives that speak to you and yours where you had previously thought no such material existed, but I’d have liked this book to contain something closer to an argument about the significance of these lives, as opposed to just a retelling or revealing of them. I also felt he was sometimes rather too in awe of his sources. On the other hand, recording the stories of a community that was ravaged by HIV and now (what’s left of it) aging is intrinsically interesting and important work. I particularly liked that interviewees spoke not just about love and community, though there was plenty of that, but also about backstabbing and betrayal. Those things happen too, in every group and subculture, and it’s flattening to pretend they don’t.
most heartbreaking re-read: The Artificial Silk Girl, by Irmgard Keun (1932). I first read this back in 2019 and was enchanted by it. In Weimar Germany, sassy provincial gal Doris exhausts the possibilities of her hometown, steals a gorgeous fur coat, and runs off to Berlin to become a star. The first time around, I was so captivated by her voice, which I likened to Cassandra Mortmain’s, that although I didn’t exactly miss the book’s increasing darkness, it didn’t really register. This time around, the hunger and desperation of Doris’s situation became clearer, as did the clever, subtle way that Keun shows Nazi prejudice at work in the city. Doris isn’t a committed antisemite, and on the whole is much too preoccupied with staying fed and alive to think about Jews one way or another, but she encounters several men on “dates” who are virulently antisemitic. She finds them disgusting and hypocritical, but not dangerous, or not more than men usually are; to one, she pretends she is Jewish in order to annoy him. Had the novel been written in 1933 – just a year later – such a confession might have been a death sentence. There’s so much in this slim novel about sex and power, money and food, terror and hope; I must read more Keun.
most fractally fascinating nonfiction: A City on Mars, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (2023). Kelly Weinersmith is a scientist, her husband Zach the cartoonist responsible for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. This book is a collaboration – written by Kelly, diagrams/illustrations by Zach – in which they assess, very seriously, the arguments for and against space settlement. The evidence includes not just the physical limitations of humans and the truly gobsmacking level of uncertainty we currently possess about them (for example: any space settlement program would need functioning reproduction on a population level, and yet we know absolutely nothing about how human gestation is affected by the microgravity and radiation that are intrinsically part of the space environment). There are also, and fascinatingly, issues of space law: what territory can be claimed on other planets, and by what kind of entities? How does space sovereignty work? There are labour rights issues: if the first settlement is basically a company town, which seems fairly likely, how can workers – risking their lives to be off-world in the first place – be assured basic protections, and what kind of problems might arise?
All of this boils down to a consistent call from the Weinersmiths: go slow, and go big. If we want to settle space, we probably can, but not safely in the next thirty years with the current low levels of research investment (which is what Musk, Bezos et al are currently calling for). Instead, we should wait until we’ve got evidence-based, functioning systems solutions for all of the major environmental issues – radiation, regolith, gravity adjustments – and the philosophical ones – governance, sovereignty, the potential to weaponise gravity wells – and then send a lot of people at once. Every single page of this is interesting, whether it’s talking about the Outer Space Treaty, astronaut toilets, or orbital mechanics (helpfully diagrammed). The tone is occasionally a little chatty for my taste, but I suspect that’s the trade-off for a popular science book that covers so much ground in such detail without losing non-specialists.
best creepy Christmas re-read: Collected Ghost Stories, by M.R. James (1931; this edition, ed. Darryl Jones, 2013). I last opened this in 2019, but amazingly, huge numbers of the stories had stayed with me, in specific detail. James’s protagonists are usually scholars or clergymen, the ghosts and demons that they raise accidental byproducts of overeager (and perhaps naive) investigation. There’s also quite a lot of interest in the seventeenth century: witch trials, the convulsive English Civil War, and “bloody” Judge Jeffreys. This reread was made even more rewarding by finding several old BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas episodes on YouTube – not the new ones, beautifully shot and acted though they are, but the ones where Christopher Lee, cast perfectly as M.R. James, tells the story to a select group of students and colleagues, and you never see the ghost at all, just vague, suggestive shots of trees and shadows and buildings. Some of my favourites are included in this series: “Number 13”, about a diabolical disappearing room in a Swedish inn, and “A Warning to the Curious”, probably my single favourite James story, in which a young man removes an Anglo-Saxon crown from its burial site and is h(a)unted even after he puts it back. Of their kind, unbeatable.
best re-read, hands down: Middlemarch, by George Eliot (1871-2). Last fully read in 2009 (!) and I went back to the early few chapters about a decade ago but stalled out. It’s no good me saying anything about Middlemarch; it’s got to be one of the most commented-upon books in English. Let’s see, though, what struck me this time around? Well – the tenderness and understatement in some of its most intense emotional scenes, for instance. One tends not to think of George Eliot as an emotional writer, but in fact she is. There’s a scene, for example, where the vicar Mr. Farebrother fulfils a promise to his friend, the young scapegrace Fred Vincy, by asking Fred’s beloved Mary whether she’ll wait for him – despite being in love with Mary himself. It contains undercurrents of pain and friendship and belated realisation (it has never occurred to Mary that anyone but Fred could love her, and although she loves Fred back, she only realises that Farebrother himself cares for her in the sentence or two before he leaves) that run a reader through. Something else I noticed is how interconnected everyone is – everyone is someone’s uncle or aunt by marriage, or childhood friend, or old acquaintance – without it feeling as contrived as it can in Austen or Dickens. Middlemarch is a provincial manufacturing town, probably based on Coventry; its strata of society reminded me forcefully of my hometown, Charlottesville, also a place where inhabitants may come and go, but a core of People Who Know People Who Know People remains. Eliot’s obsession with web imagery reinforces the idea.
There are a million more things to say, of course, but finally for now: they say you should read Middlemarch every decade or so, and you’ll find a new focus of sympathy every time. In my early 30s and engaged, what I see in it far more strongly than at 17 is how it pulls back the curtain on married life after marriage, or rather, long-term relationships after commitment. People who choose the wrong marriage partner aren’t entirely condemned to miserable lives, but the requirement for happiness is that you be able to communicate with, and trust, your spouse, and that you both love each other enough to meet circumstantial setbacks like money trouble or professional disappointment with confidence. Neither of Eliot’s two main married couples – extravagant beauty Rosamond Vincy and aspiring doctor Tertius Lydgate; ardent Dorothea and pedantic Casaubon – can do this for one another. Dorothea and Casaubon come closer to it, though they too fail, and their marriage is hardly rescued by Casaubon’s early death, given the stipulation he puts in his will that reveals his paranoia and jealousy. But for Rosamond and Lydgate, the happiest ending they can hope for is mutual tolerance. It’s scary, and brilliant, and sobering.
#LOVEYOURLIBRARY
Hosted, as always, by Rebecca at Bookish Beck, posting on the last Monday of every month. There’s no set formula to this; you can post anything about libraries, whether you’ve recently been to an event at one, heard about an initiative at one, whatever! I use it for rundowns of my monthly library reading. Join in on your social media space of choice using #LoveYourLibrary.
Childhood, Boyhood, Youth,by Leo Tolstoy (1852-1857): A trilogy of short early novels – Childhood was Tolstoy’s first published work – about an aristocratic boy’s upbringing and development. People call these autobiographical, but many of the details differ from those of Tolstoy’s actual life. Turgenev loved these, and it’s easy to see why; the detailed depictions of a way of life, the hunting scene and the university entrance exams and the children’s balls, are reminiscent of him. But protagonist Nikolenka Irtenyev’s mind and manners, as well as his experiences, are the focus here. The most noticeable thing about his character is his loneliness and sense of exclusion. As a noble, he’s meant to be comme il faut, a French phrase of complex connotations (he spends a whole chapter expounding on it) that include gracefulness, tact, unflappability, confidence, and gallantry. But he’s awkward and anxious, and can’t meet the standards that his class imposes on him, even while he himself has fully internalised their importance and despises himself for his inability.
Equally fascinating is the fairly open romantic attraction that Nikolenka experiences towards various young men in his circle, from childhood playmate Seryozha to his brother’s friend Dmitry Nekhlyudov, who becomes his own best friend. (This does seem to reflect Tolstoy’s own tendencies; he was attracted to both women and men, apparently.) I found the trilogy more engrossing as it went along, though your mileage may vary. It’s a shame that the intended fourth volume, Young Manhood, was never written, as one feels Nikolenka might just have started to figure out how to live with himself.
The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb (1995-1997): I wrote about this immense, absorbing fantasy trilogy for Doorstoppers in December. You can read what I thought here.
The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers (1983): Engrossing, rich time-travel novel about a twentieth-century expert in Romantic poetry who ends up stuck in the 1810s, fighting evil immortal wizards and their terrifying clown sidekicks. Features beggar guilds, gypsy kings, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, London’s sewers, body-snatching werewolves, and a badass cross-dressing woman as a romantic interest. (It’s from the ’80s, so some allowance is given for her excessive badassness and the apparent ease, not only practically but in her own mind, with which a respectable young lady poses as a beggar boy. Mercifully, Powers never talks about her body.)
This is absolutely not steampunk, despite what some reviewers bafflingly seem to believe; for one thing, the majority of the historical material occurs too early in the nineteenth century. If a comparison is necessary, it’s closer to Gaiman’s Neverwhere (the Spoonsize Boys, homunculi who can be deployed for espionage, tracking or murder, are the sort of thing he’d have made up) crossed with Stephenson’s Baroque trilogy, only without the Stephensonian ambition of explaining a major system (i.e. global financial markets and the stock exchange) through the medium of historical fiction. The Anubis Gates is content to just be an exciting, well-written book. There are some amazing set pieces – every scene in Rat’s Castle, a literal subterranean lair, is indelible – and some delightful twists. You’ll be way ahead of the protagonist, academic Brendan Doyle, in determining the true identity of his scholarly area of interest, poet William Ashbless, but you’ll enjoy watching Doyle figure it out. On the basis of this, I’d definitely try another by Powers.
This isn’t a compilation of the best books I read this year on a craft or emotional level. It’s not even the runners-up. (See here for both of those lists.) This is about something different from a book being good or great, even though many of these experiences involved good and great books. This is about the moments I had with books this year that filled me with instinctive, primal readerly joy. You don’t get a lot of that when you’re doing a literature PhD – it doesn’t not exist, but it takes some searching for. You also can’t force yourself to experience it. This isn’t, therefore, the most intellectually flattering portrait of my reading life. But it’s not definitive, either, only a snapshot taken from a certain angle.
The first of these actually does overlap with my best books of the year: the increasing delight I felt reading The Pickwick Papers, realising that it was genuinely great: funny, warm, engaging, everything that generations of readers have said it is
Revisiting Garth Nix’s wonderful Old Kingdom with a full re-read of his original Abhorsen trilogy, plus sequels and prequels (weaker than the originals, but I loved spending more time in that world!)
Abandoning all pretension and using the wildly overscheduled month of May to just read the purest popcorn and comfort stuff: more Cadfael mysteries, some previously unread Discworld novels, a re-read of I, Claudius. I read 23 books that month because I simply didn’t give a fuck
I’ve already mentioned this one, but taking myself for a solo date to read Nix’s Goldenhand in the café at Beckenham Place Park for a whole afternoon was an absolute dream Saturday
Being so entranced by Naomi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy during our trip to Glasgow that I read them all back to back, in ebook format, on my phone, on what felt like ten thousand trains
Lying out in the sun on our nine-day Yorkshire camping holiday, tearing through trashy spy fiction, a fantasy chunkster, a stone-cold realist chunkster, and finally figuring out why everyone loves Laurie Colwin
Two Thomas Hardy rereads, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Return of the Native, which felt both comfortably familiar and confrontingly strange, especially in the little details I noticed this time around
Going on an Ann Radcliffe rampage with three of her novels, The Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Italian. I so rarely read an author for more than one book in a row: it’s humbling, but delightful, to realise that the women in Regency novels that everyone makes fun of were right, Radcliffe is so damn readable
And, most recently – thank goodness I didn’t post this earlier – spending the entire afternoon of Boxing Day on the sofa in pyjamas with my feet resting on my long-suffering fiancé, rereading Middlemarch
Are there any patterns here? Yes, definitely: the reading experiences that tick that “primal joy” box are often cosy and non-time-bounded (on holiday, for example). Re-reads, classics, and fantasy seemed to offer the most of that this year, as well as what you might call serial reading: series, trilogies, or just multiple volumes by the same author in a row. This really confirms that one of the most appealing elements of reading for me is its power of immersion. I love being able to mentally be somewhere else.
Did you have any favourite or memorable reading experiences this year, regardless of how “good” the book was?
Elle Thinks 