General Wrap-Up

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.

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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?

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.

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Did you have any favourite or memorable reading experiences this year, regardless of how “good” the book was?

As I mentioned last time, I’m not consciously participating in either of the two major reading projects that run this month, Nonfiction November and Novellas in November. But I do very much like a retrospective, and both of these offer the opportunity to look back on your nonfiction and novella consumption in the past year (“year” not defined, but I’m going to go with “past twelve months”, so from November 2024 to now). Previously, I covered my nonfiction reading; here are all the novellas I read in the last twelve months. This is a slightly trickier definition than “nonfiction”; I’m including everything under 200 pages, and although short nonfiction is absolutely a thing, everything in this list is fiction for the sake of not repeating myself.

Between last November and now, I’ve read 24 novellas by my definition, 22 of which were read in 2025. That’s a rate of 1.8 novellas (or “short books”, per my Goodreads shelf) per month in general, and 2.2 per month this calendar year.

The English Teacher, by R.K. Narayan (1945): Suffered slightly for being read directly after Haruki Murakami’s most recent novel. The protagonist’s wife dies halfway through and returns to him as a ghost, and although Narayan’s good enough to make me believe it, my external reading self felt wearied by more magical realism.

Ellen Foster, by Kaye Gibbons (1987): I made this an honorary Best Book of the Year. Eleven-year-old Ellen narrates, in alternating strands, the total breakdown of her biological family and the way in which, after many false starts, she comes to live with a new, kind and loving foster mother. Very funny and also, obviously, very sad.

The Wood at Midwinter, by Susanna Clarke (2024): More of a short story, but published as a standalone so I’m counting it. There’s some beautiful atmospheric writing and a moment of real shock and surprise about ¾ of the way through. But then… it’s like Clarke completely shirks her job and ends it just as things get interesting!

A Cure for Dreams, by Kaye Gibbons (1991): A portrait of at least three generations of rural Southern women, emphasising how they create their own world within a world that evades male institutions and substitutes its own forms of justice and care.

L’Amant, by Marguerite Duras (1984): Only superficially a novel about youthful sexuality. It’s much more about a girl and her mother, their relationship, and the terrible effect of white supremacy on everyone involved in the colonial system, even (especially) on children, how it warps a person to have the power to existentially humiliate another.

Beginning, by David Eldridge (2017): A play, the author of which teaches at my university. I read this when teaching a first-year undergraduate seminar called “Storytelling: Narrative Modes, Techniques and Archetypes”. It’s a one-act set over the course of about two hours in a Crouch End living room after a flatwarming party, and is meant to be played in real time. I’m not convinced that reading Beginning is the correct way to engage with it, at least not as a first go-round, but I felt I had a better handle on it after discussion.

The Magdalen, by William Dodd(? 1783): A chapter of my thesis is on this. It’s a yoinked-out plotline from an earlier anonymous novel about the Magdalen House, mapping the story of a woman’s fall from chastity into seduction, pregnancy, motherhood, abandonment, prostitution and “repentance”. I would not recommend it to the casual reader, there is a reason there’s no Penguin Classics edition of this, but like everything, the more you look at it, the more interesting it is.

In the House of the Seven Librarians, by Ellen Klages (2007): A novelette (between short story and novella on word count), published as a standalone: a lovely fairytale about a little girl who’s abandoned as a baby in the book return slot of a Carnegie Library. Cosy without being twee.

Poor Folk, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1846): An epistolary love story (sort of) between Makar and Varvara, neighbours and distant cousins. You can read the whole novella as a tragic romance but you can also read it as an even more tragic indictment of the way Varvara is forced to live. I bet it’d be a good text to teach.

No Touching, by Ketty Rouf (2020, transl. Tina Kover 2021): A short, very French novel about a high school philosophy teacher who, depressed and demoralised by her job teaching boisterous and disinterested teenagers in a working-class suburb, begins working nights at a stripclub. A little too brief and opaque and vaguely self-pitying for me to entirely like.

Walking Practice, by Dolki Min (2022, transl. Victoria Caudle 2024): A lost alien living in a crashed spaceship in a forest on the edge of a city can transform their body shape to almost any specifications. They stay alive by matching with people on hookup apps, having sex with them, and then killing, dismembering, and eating them. Parts of it are funny, parts are upsetting, and sometimes they’re the same parts.

Summer, by Edith Wharton (1917): Powerful and frightening, quite unlike the drawing-room Wharton we all think we know, and strikingly willing to be open about sexual threat.

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, by Nghi Vo (2020): Vo’s second novella in the Singing Hills Cycle actually came to my hands first. A nonbinary cleric in a fantasy Asian-inflected society travels their world listening to the stories of people they meet and recording them for the archives of their order. In this installment, Chih and a local guide, who rides a mammoth, get trapped by three hungry tiger sisters who can take human form. I liked it fine.

The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. LeGuin (1972): The allegory between the human (“yumen”) colonisation of the planet Athshe, and the American war in Vietnam is perhaps rather too plain, but it poses a question I’ve rarely seen addressed in fiction before: what a people might stand to lose by resistance to colonialism. This is not, in LeGuin’s hands, an argument for not resisting; it is an argument for not colonising.

Something Rich and Strange, by Patricia A. McKillip (1991): This is about a couple who live by the sea—Megan’s a dreamy artist who does seascapes and Jonah’s a grumpy shop owner who sells maritime trinkets—and the way they both end up entranced by what the jacket text calls “fairies” but which are perhaps more properly nereids, or sea nymphs. Proper committed fantasy, only the secondary world is within our own.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo (2020): The first Singing Hills novella, about secret history and an exiled empress using codes and espionage to eventually overthrow her husband. Still frustrating, though: Vo’s project here is at least as much about the way histories are told, misremembered, reclaimed, hidden, and protected as it is about actual resistance and war, but that’s the dramatic part, and I would happily have read a full novel about it. Failing that, I’d have settled for more of this novella being dedicated to it.

Passing, by Nella Larsen (1929): Two childhood friends, Irene and Clare, can both “pass” for white in Chicago high society, but only Clare chooses to do so. You’d think that this might make the novel overly schematic, with Irene representing positive racial solidarity and Clare representing selfishness and betrayal, but in fact it’s never that clear cut. The prose isn’t very interesting, but there’s lots to think about; this would also teach well.

The Creature in the Case, by Garth Nix (2005): Fun, reasonably scary long story/novelette in Nix’s Old Kingdom series that picks up with his non-magical sympathetic-rich-boy character Nicholas Sayre after the events of Abhorsen and just before those of Goldenhand. Glad I read it.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects, by Ted Chiang (2010): An astonishingly even-handed novella that follows the social consequences of the creation of digients, Tamagotchi-esque VR creatures. There isn’t a trace of moral didacticism about it. Chiang doesn’t start from a position that he then browbeats or cajoles the reader into. You really do feel the slippage of certainty that comes with an entirely new frontier of human experience.

Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih (1966): Famously beautifully written, and I found that reputation well-earned. Women’s bodies in both Britain and Sudan are the sites of colonial and post-colonial aggression here, eventually literally sacrificed to the emotional demands of men. Objectively very high-quality, but also very dark.

The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole (1764): Preposterous, but incredibly fun. Features false identities, benevolent friars, mysterious handsome youths, revealed bloodlines, and gigantic armoured body parts. Not particularly scary.

Mary: a Fiction, by Mary Wollstonecraft (1788): Wollstonecraft’s nonfiction was better than her fiction. This is a fragment, not a finished product, about a self-taught female genius, and boy oh boy are there a lot of repressed sapphic feelings!

Maria: or, the Wrongs of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft (1798): This is finished, but still not great fiction. It’s interesting to see how she developed from Mary, though. There are Gothic touches—it’s about a woman falsely imprisoned in a madhouse by her abusive husband—some extremely hard-hitting stuff about class and prostitution, and a great ending that promotes matriarchal community.

Arboreality, by Rebecca Campbell (2022): Adored this: interconnected short stories set on Vancouver Island in the near future, after a series of plausible catastrophes have rendered the internet patchy and vehicular travel all but impossible. So realistic and yet so hopeful, with unobtrusive but tightly woven themes of building, waiting, patience, art, and survival.

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So obviously none of these are nonfiction, but there are a few installments here that push the definition of “novella”: a play is really a different thing altogether, and there’s one short story and an arguable number of novelettes (between one and three). Still, if the challenge is about reading short books, they meet that criterion.

Some cold stats:

• 15 of these books were written by women, eight by men, and one by a nonbinary author (Dolki Min uses they/them pronouns).
• Four of these books are by authors who, to my knowledge, identify as LGBTQIA+.
• Seven of these books, as far as I know, are by authors of colour.
• Ten of these books were borrowed from a library in print or e-form. Of the rest, three were acquired secondhand (both of the Gibbons plus Wharton), two were gifts (Clarke and LeGuin), four were bought new, though some were deeply discounted (Rouf, McKillip, Larsen, Campbell), three I read online (via a class readings portal, the website of the magazine where it first appeared, and Internet Archive: Eldridge, Klages, and Dodd, respectively), one was an old personal copy that I reread (Chiang), and that leaves one more but I can’t figure it out.
• Ten of these books were first published in the twenty-first century. Of those, seven were published in the last decade. Of the rest, one is from between 2010 and 2015, two each are from the 2000s, 1990s and ’80s, one each is from the ’70s, ’60s, ’40s, ’20s, and ’10s, one is nineteenth-century and four are eighteenth-century.

Any favourites?: Ellen Foster, In the House of the Seven Librarians, Summer, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, Season of Migration to the North, and Arboreality were all standouts.

Any disappointments?: The English Teacher is a bit boring and aimless; No Touching offers less than I’d hoped; When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain was both a bad place to start with Vo and felt a bit anticlimactic.

Any surprises?: I’m most surprised at the spread of eras in this list. Who knew my novella reading was so temporally diverse?

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Are you doing Novellas in November this year? Shall we argue about what constitutes one in the first place?

I’m not consciously participating in either of the two major reading projects that run this month, Nonfiction November and Novellas in November. But I do very much like a retrospective, and both of these offer the opportunity to look back on your nonfiction and novella consumption in the past year (“year” not defined, but I’m going to go with “past twelve months”, so from November 2024 to now). This post will cover my nonfiction reading; I’ll do another on novellas later.

I don’t think of myself as a big nonfiction reader, but I’ll pick something up if I’ve read a great review or if it’s about a topic that appeals to me. Between last November and now, I’ve read 21 nonfiction books. 17 of those were read in 2025—so this year’s rate is about 1.5-1.7 nonfiction books per month.

Blankets, by Craig Thompson (2003): Graphic memoir about a young man’s coming-of-age in a deeply repressive and sometimes abusive Christian household, falling head over heels for a girl he meets at church camp, and the inevitable ebbing of that mind-blowing first love.

Mayhem, by Sigrid Rausing (2017): Memoir about the destructive power of drug addiction within a family.

Priestdaddy, by Patricia Lockwood (2017): Quirky memoir of an upbringing as the daughter of a deeply eccentric Catholic priest.

Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird by Henry Lien (2025): Subtitled “The Art of Eastern Storytelling”; an investigation of Western and Asian story structures, including four-act, nested, and circular stories.

Stay True, by Hua Hsu (2022): Marketed and received as a grief memoir about the murder of Hsu’s friend Ken in a completely random and senseless carjacking incident, but really a story of a young man’s decision process about the kind of person he’s going to be.

The Trip to Echo Spring, by Olivia Laing (2013): Re-read. Subtitled “On Writers and Drinking”; Laing chooses six big dogs of postwar American literature who were also alcoholics and explores the relationship between their lives, their works, and their boozing.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire (1968, trans. 1970): Educational theory. Very much of its time but also very influential, and I basically agree with it.

The Years, by Annie Ernaux (2008, trans. 2018): A portrait of a Frenchwoman’s life between 1940 and 2006 that’s both individual—through photos and highlighted elements of family life—and something deeper and broader, national, semi-mythological.

Hotel Splendide, by Ludwig Bemelmans (1941): A collection of vignettes about working in the banquet department of the Ritz-Carlton in New York during the 1920s. Very funny, and incredibly perceptive.

More Was Lost, by Eleanor Perényi (1946): Amazing memoir by an American woman who married a Hungarian baron just before WWII started. Endlessly fascinating, and sad.

Cries For a Lost Homeland, by Guli Francis-Dehqani (2021): Read for a Lent book group; short chapters consider each of what’s commonly known as Jesus’s seven last words from the cross (they’re more like sentences). I liked it a lot: smart but not abstruse, with strong, emotionally resonant connections.

Laboring Mothers: Reproducing Women and Work in the 18th Century, by Ellen Malenas Ledoux (2023): An examination of the compromises working women in this era had to make to balance their children with their jobs. Read for my first academic book review, which is open access: read it here!

Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson (2014): Re-read. A general memoir of Stevenson’s founding of, and work with, the Equal Justice Initiative, interwoven with a more detailed account of one particular case: that of a Black man condemned to death in 1988 for the murder of a white woman he was adamant he didn’t commit.

The History of Mary Prince, by Mary Prince (1830): The first book by a Black woman published in Britain. An account of her life, and her experiences of being enslaved in Barbados and Antigua, until she came to Britain, where she was legally free but could never return to her husband in the Caribbean.

How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2018): Subtitled “What History Reveals About Our Future”. I didn’t write about this at all. I think I couldn’t. Smart, harrowing, and so close to the bone that it was practically the marrow inside.

How to Say Babylon, by Safiya Sinclair (2023): A true story about a girl digging her way out from under her father’s religious oppression with a spoon (h/t to Jo Walton for that phrase), where the religion in question is Rastafari and the spoon is poetry.

Essays, by George Orwell (1931-1949): I loved these and became slightly obsessed with them. I think I read the one on Charles Dickens three times. What a model of clear expression and perceptive reading.

Marsha, by Tourmaline (2024): Subtitled “The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson”. The first full-length biography of Johnson, an icon of Black queer and trans life and a whirlwind street queen who has become most famous for throwing the first brick on the night of the Stonewall Riots. (Actually—and even better—it was probably a shot glass.)

The Wisdom of Whores, by Elizabeth Pisani (2008): Subtitled “Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS”, this offers a window into international development thinking at the time of the book’s publication (and perhaps now too): Pisani argues that treating HIV/AIDS as a development issue, caused by generic “poverty” and “disempowerment”, was well-meaning but fatally wrong.

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Written By Himself (1789): An autobiography written as a free man, living in London, but Equiano’s childhood and youth were spent in slavery. His life was amazing, encompassing combat during the Seven Years’ War, sailing, clerking, private trade, self-manumission, hairdressing, Arctic exploration, evangelical conversion, and abolition advocacy.

Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave, by Mariana Enríquez (2025): Subtitled “My Cemetery Journeys”; a combined memoir, travelogue, and whistlestop history lesson through twenty-six graveyards around the world over the course of two decades.

(I’m not counting these, but I’ve actually started this November with two more nonfiction choices: The Motion of Light in Water, by Samuel R. Delany (subtitled “Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village”; incredible, monumental, unforgettable) and I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara (true crime about the Golden State Killer; unflinching but never sensationalising). More on both of those later in the month.)

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The overwhelming majority of these books are memoirs: eleven of them fall into that category without question, while a further four contain memoir as a major element. Of the rest, one is a straight-up biography, one is wide-ranging essays on politics and literature (with—I realise now—some memoir too!), one is political history, one is a monograph incorporating history and literary criticism, one is educational theory, and two are literary criticism with, in one case, an element of group biography. That seems a fair representation of my tastes and interests.

Some cold stats:

• 11 of these books were written by women, nine by men, and one by a non-binary person (Olivia Laing now uses they/them pronouns, not exclusively but I think preferentially).
• Two of these books are by authors who, as far as I know, identify as LGBTQIA+.
• Nine of these books, as far as I know, are by authors of colour. This is quite a lot more than I expected given the generally dismal publication stats for nonfiction authors of colour!
• 11 of these books were borrowed from a library in print or e-form. Of the rest, two were provided by NetGalley (Enríquez, Lien), three were gifts (Hsu, Pisani, Tourmaline), one was provided by the publisher (the Ledoux monograph), two were bought new (Perényi, Francis-Dehqani), and two were old personal copies that I re-read (Stevenson, Laing).
• 15 of these books were first published in the twenty-first century. Of those, eleven were published in the last decade (well, ten, plus the English translation of The Years). Of the rest, two are from the 2010s before 2015, three were first published in the 2000s, one is from the late 1960s, three are more or less from the 1940s, one is nineteenth-century and one is eighteenth-century.

Any favourites?: Orwell’s Essays is among my best-of-year titles. More Was Lost and Hotel Splendide are fragments of a vanished world, wonderfully conveyed. Priestdaddy was a delight, hilarious but also fierce.

Any disappointments?: Somebody Is Walking On Your Grave was disjointed and tended towards dullness. Mayhem never quite convinced me. But other than that, not really!

Any surprises?: I was surprised by how much Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy felt like it was playing safe, read in the light of the changes that have occurred in the decade since its original publication. Equiano’s memoir is consistently fascinating, even if he’s not a natural storyteller. The Wisdom of Whores was both wildly entertaining and seriously informative.

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Do you read much, or any, nonfiction? Are you participating in this year’s Nonfiction November?

The Chilling Chunkster: King Sorrow, by Joe Hill (2025). An 800+-page novel with a propulsive readability that makes it feel like it’s a third that length? What a superb start to my experience of reading Joe Hill—famously one of Stephen King’s sons, all of whom also seem to write horror fiction. This one starts out as dark academia: a group of six college students (well, plus a townie) get in trouble with a local drug dealer and summon a demonic entity in the form of a dragon from a parallel reality called the Long Dark, who will protect and avenge his summoner(s) against all human foes…for a price. The novel is about what happens not just in the day or the year following their bargain with King Sorrow, but the next twenty years. The deal—which the group comes to understand too late—requires their complicity in regular, and usually mass, murders. Hill explores how people respond to guilt and shame over long stretches of time: whether they choose to pretend they’re not responsible, how they try to justify their own acts (or inaction), how a shared emotional burden can warp friendships. Characterisation is crucial for this to work, and while I thought it started out spotty and one-note (Gwen’s a salt-of-the-earth type, Allie drinks because she’s in the closet, Van is an affable stoner), it develops and deepens over the years, as I suppose real people’s characters do too between college and middle age.

It’s plenty scary, too. Hill makes the liminal world that the group enters when they summon the King a terrifying, entrancing landscape of symbol and dream, where a man’s heart can be found on a shelf inside his chest, the ghost of a made-up murderer can hurt you, and butterflies in a collection can be unpinned and set free. King Sorrow’s meals are not just the bodies of his victims, but the emotions they exude—their terror and despair—before he finally kills them. To that end, he stalks them for weeks before their deaths, shrinking and growing to fit into impossible places, extending a claw to grab their ankles from under their beds or appearing as a single gigantic eye in a mirror or a window. One tremendous sequence has two of the group descending into a hidden treasure cave in Cornwall, seeking an artifact that might kill the King. (As I wrote that, I thought, hang on… is something Oedipal going on here?!) The fear is found not just in the ever-less-human appearance of the man who’s led them there, or the atmospheric horror of realising that they’re in an ancient plague pit, where sick people were barricaded alive and left to die, but also in the sudden shock of what happens when they find the artifact: like his father, Hill recognises that supernatural horror reflects and amplifies the horror to be found in human behaviour. And also, the antagonist is an airplane-sized demon who burns people to death. It’s a terrifying and terrible way to die, and Hill makes sure that at least one scene offers the full weight of that.

Two further notes: one, Hill is mercifully better at writing women than his old man is. None of the gang are perfect, but the women aren’t defined by gendered weaknesses. The final showdown is, in fact, entirely female-led, including a trans woman and a single mom who both become part of the original circle over the years. This isn’t a closed system of relationships like the friend group in IT (which I loved, I’m not cancelling IT); it’s open and mutable, allegiances and intimacies shifting gradually and realistically. Two, I’m not sold on the throwaway attributions of events like the Beirut Port explosion and the California wildfires of the past decade to extraplanar demons. Real-life disasters like this happen for identifiable reasons. I feel it’s slightly irresponsible to write about events caused by climate crisis and inadequate safety precautions due to cost-cutting as though there’s some alternative supernatural explanation; yes, it’s fiction, but that soil nurtures conspiracy theorists and it would be just as easy not to.

Overall, though, this was absolutely superb: compelling, engaging, just scary enough, with some amazing set pieces. (The bit on the plane! The bit in the government complex!!) Highly recommended. NetGalley; publishing 21 October.

The Dark Portal Fantasy: The Great When, by Alan Moore (2024). On the one hand, I love an alternative-London novel. Hidden doorways into a psychogeographical liminal space? Personifications of famous landmarks or qualities? Mysterious and horrifying deaths that defy the laws of physics? Bring it on. On the other hand, there have already been lots of these: Moorcock, Gaiman, Miéville, Aaronovitch. When Garth Nix did his version back in 2021, it felt thin and pale in comparison. But on the third hand, Moore doesn’t have that problem. His prose is baroque, dense and chewy, an absolute delight (if also slightly exhausting). His formal technique for representing what it’s like to be in the Great When (lots of half-hidden puns here, too) is rather brilliant: he changes tenses and typography, as well as using ellipses where one would expect full stops, to give a sense of constant motion, flux and dreamlikeness. The inventively strange entities that people his other London feel right, as if Moore has seen into the heart of the place: one is called the Inferred Saracen, a mordant acknowledgment of the city’s millennia-deep roots in racial fantasies; another is the Beauty of Riots, a ten-foot-tall woman who wades, barebreasted and singing, through street fights; a third, Harry Lud, is the platonic ideal of crime in the metropolis.

This is the first novel in a projected quintet, and it’s pretty clear that Moore has a thesis about the way London has gone since the end of the Second World War—about violence and technology and loss of soul—that will be unraveled in full in subsequent volumes. This, therefore, feels rather like a prelude to an immensity, albeit a prelude that could stand on its own if it had to. But I just bloody adored it. How can you not love a novel with characters like Coffin Ada, a tubercular and possibly homicidal secondhand bookshop owner, or Iron Foot Jack, based on a real-life Soho eccentric with one leg several inches shorter than the other? Moore knows that in London, truth has often been stranger than fiction. Immersive; spooky; I’ll definitely continue with the series when possible (the next installment is out in 2026). Bought new with gift cards.

The Creepy Translation: The Midnight Timetable, by Bora Chung (2023), transl. Anton Hur (2025). This was so fun! I heard someone describe some other book recently as feeling folkloreish, as in “like a collection of urban legends”, and that’s exactly what Chung achieves here. The unnamed narrator is a nighttime security guard at the Institute, where haunted objects are catalogued and studied. Night after night, their boss (or sunbae, a word that Hur pleasingly doesn’t translate; it’s a respectful term for a professional mentor or senior) tells them stories that relate to objects in the Institute’s possession. There’s an embroidered handkerchief which has destroyed its former owner’s spoiled adult son; there’s a mysterious single tennis shoe with a sheep printed on the upper vamp. The objects’ stories are also, inescapably, stories of people. Two former security guards, a closeted and religiously abused gay man and an aspiring paranormal content creator, are the sources of their own tales, and the deputy director tells her own story, encompassing domestic abuse, gambling, homelessness, and help from a very unexpected quarter. Beautifully, the haunted objects become totems or manifestations of real-world violence and injustice—through war and various other kinds of human cruelty—but this happens slowly, and slowly we realise that they are to be respected and treated with caution, but not necessarily with terror. Chung’s story notes at the end of the volume reveal what a great time she had writing this, and even though it’s occasionally sad and often spooky, that sense of enjoyment really transferred itself through the pages to me. Hur’s a great translator, too. NetGalley; published 2 October.

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Have you read any of these authors before, or do any of these tempt you? How’s your spooky reading going, if you’re doing any?

So I did promise myself to take time off from project reading, but all three of these basically fell into my lap at the same time. They all fit nicely into Readers Imbibing Peril, an annual spooky-season challenge that champions Gothic, horror, thriller, suspense, mystery and dark fantasy fiction. Here are my thoughts, including how I would categorise each of these; I’ll cover a few more spooky reads in October.

The Classic: The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole (1764). Commonly called “the first Gothic novel”, and unlike similar claims about “the first novel” or “the first novel in English”, this one is verifiable. Walpole did something that no one else had done in this way before, and in so doing, set some of the major tropes of Gothic fiction for at least a century. Many of them are out of date now, but their influence is arguably still felt, in a more developed form, in the most contemporary horror fiction.

I’d read this once before, in 2009. My recollection is of finding it boring and preposterous. It is still preposterous, but I’m much more accustomed to early Gothic writing now and am aware that a certain level of absurdity is the price of admission. I’m pleased to discover that it’s no longer boring. It opens with a bang—literally—as the teenaged son of a Sicilian prince dies gruesomely on his wedding day, crushed by a gigantic helmet falling from the sky. (See: “price of admission”.) His father Manfred, who never liked the kid anyway but now urgently needs a male heir, proposes to divorce his wife, Hippolita, and marry his intended daughter-in-law, Isabella, whose father disappeared on Crusade many years ago and who has been raised in Otranto. Understandably appalled by this suggestion, Isabella flees towards the local convent. False identities, benevolent friars, mysterious handsome youths, revealed bloodlines, and more gigantic armoured body parts ensue. Is it scary? Not particularly to a modern sensibility: the idea of Heaven punishing ensuing generations for the transgressions of their forebears is frightening, but the whole-hearted medieval faith espoused by the characters is shared by relatively few readers, I imagine. The terrifying properties of the armoured giant’s massive scale—the eighteenth century was very interested in size as related to terror—strike most modern readers as simply silly (maybe because in the 21st century, everyone’s inherent sense of scale has been messed with by cartoons). The scariest parts, as so often in early Gothic, are the social ones: Manfred’s total power over the women in his household, his sexual threat to a girl positioned as his daughter and his cruel indifference to his biological daughter, his entitlement to have a stranger beheaded in his courtyard without charge or trial if it pleases him. The Castle of Otranto reads quickly (it’s only five chapters long!), and Walpole is surprisingly good at evoking our pity and concern, if not our terror, for vulnerable characters. There’s also a great creepy scene in some tunnels under the castle. Well worth checking out if your interests lie in this direction.

The Nonfiction: Somebody Is Walking On Your Grave, by Mariana Enríquez (2014; transl. Megan McDowell 2025). Enríquez is an Argentine author known for her horror and surrealist fiction, two story collections and a novel of which have been recently translated into English. (She’s written eight more novels.) This is nonfiction, though, a combined memoir, travelogue, and whistlestop history lesson through twenty-six graveyards around the world over the course of two decades. Twenty-six is frankly too many; cutting the number down would have helped focus the book, especially as there are several cemeteries, like the Jewish ones in Entre Ríos, Argentina, about which she has surprisingly little to say. Focus, in general, is lacking here. There’s no apparent thematic unity to the locations or the specific graves that Enríquez chooses to describe, and much of the writing about places that weren’t familiar to me ended up blurring together. This is a shame, because the material about places I did know—like Highgate Cemetery in north London—or could picture easily, like the Paris catacombs, was engaging, creepy, and sometimes infused with a spirit of gothy anarchy. (She steals a bone from Paris and names it François, getting it through airport security with no trouble at all.) I’ve always loved graveyards myself, but this made me realise that what I like is unraveling the extraordinary ordinary lives indicated by tombstones and memorials, not necessarily the backstory to the graveyard itself or the legends of its most famous residents. Maybe one day I’ll do the research and write myself the sort of thing I wanted this to be, something that focuses more tightly on a handful of vanished lives. NetGalley; publishes 25 Sept. 2025.

The Popcorn Pick: The September House, by Carissa Orlando (2023). “Popcorn” is no comment on the nutritional value here, just on the grabbiness. Margaret and her husband Hal have bought their dream home, a cobalt-blue Victorian with white trim and a wraparound porch, original hardwood floors, all that jazz. Unfortunately, it is extremely haunted. Most of the “pranksters”, as Margaret calls them, are unsettling but harmless: like Fredricka, a former housekeeper who was murdered by an axe to the head and who likes to make tea and tidy things, not always helpfully; or Angelica, a mutilated six-year-old who stands pointing at the basement door, silent except for when she intones, “He’s down there.” By “he” she means Theodore Vale, the illegitimate son of an illustrious local family who, it’s clear, tortured and murdered multiple children in the basement before starving to death himself at some point in the last century. There’s also the small matter of blood seeping out of the walls. But Margaret isn’t fazed. “Everything is survivable”, she tells us, if you just figure out the rules and then stick to them. There are always rules. She is flexible, accommodating. And she loves this house. She won’t leave; she will adapt.

All haunted house stories are stories about families and marriage, about the traps of domesticity, about failing our children and horrors behind closed doors. The September House is no exception. Margaret’s angry daughter Katherine offers an alternative perspective on her parents’ marriage: Hal’s alcoholism, coercive control, and violence, Margaret’s passivity and submission. As the novel progresses, two equally terrifying possibilities unfold for the reader: that Margaret really is living in a haunted house, in a dynamic of domestic abuse for which her entire adult life has prepared her, and that she isn’t. Where, after all, is Hal, who seems to have disappeared without trace? And where are all the flies coming from?

The way that Orlando handles the final quarter or so of this novel, which brings together the logical conclusion of each of these two possible interpretations in a spectacular fashion including a false-bottom ending that filled me with delight when I realised what was happening, is masterful. She may not, fundamentally, be doing that much different from the examinations of human darkness in vintage King, but she writes a damn scary scene, while also perfectly balancing the comedy inherent in the premise (the novel never gets too slapstick, but it’s often absurdly funny). This kind of tonal balance is much harder than it looks, and Orlando never puts a foot wrong. Highly recommended. Local public library copy #LoveYourLibrary

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Have you started off your autumn/clung to the last vestiges of summer with any creepy reads?

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.

This month, eight of my read books were from the library, including a fair few long-awaited holds and purchase requests coming in at once. Three were for 20 Books of Summer; two of those went in a roundup of books 8-10, and the remaining one will be in the next roundup. That leaves five others to discuss, and here they are.

Essays, by George Orwell, ed. Bernard Crick (written 1931-1949; this edition published 2000): Genius! Genius!! Genius!!! I started off looking for his long critical essay on Charles Dickens, found it online, and was so impressed with its incisiveness. (Orwell gets that Dickens is not really a reformer; Dickens believes that the solution to the societal problems that he delineates so devastatingly lies in the individual human soul, or as Orwell brutally puts it, “if men would behave decently, the world would be decent.” And yet Orwell also gets that, in its own way, Dickens’s is a sincerely held and quietly radical point of view: that humans therefore must behave decently, that they have an absolute moral obligation to it. He has this great capacity to convey both exasperation by and admiration for Dickens’s perspective.) Then I realised that the rest of his essays were probably worth reading too, and so they are. The most famous ones, “Shooting an Elephant” and so on, are almost short story-like, and indeed may not have actually happened as Orwell narrates them, which is a question of authorial ethics for another day. They are very well written, though. Especially when discussing political or artistic topics, his argumentation is clear and authoritative. He is the antithesis to academic wind-baggery, which might be why I like his literary criticism the most out of everything in the collection. Because of this clarity, he is also memorable, which is why people tend to talk about, quote, and misquote him as though he were God. He was not God—he was an intelligent man with opinions and a readily admitted Leftist/Socialist bias who nevertheless generally engaged in good faith with whatever he was thinking about. He doesn’t snipe or bitch or attempt to score cheaply. Nor he does let anyone or anything off the hook. My fiancé got such a torrent of Orwell-appreciation from me, the week I read this, that he bought me, for my birthday, the 1000-page Everyman hardback collection of the complete essays, more or less. I cannot wait to find out what I haven’t yet read.

An aside: on two separate occasions someone asked what I was reading, I showed the cover of this, and my interlocutor made a face that I could not confidently interpret, but which might have been mild distaste. It was not at all what I expected. Has Orwell’s reputation changed? Was it just that the Penguin cover image is of a Coronation street party and we’re automatically suspicious of British flag bunting in these cynical postmodern times? (In fairness, it isn’t the cover image I’d have chosen.) Am I overthinking this? (Yes.)

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell (2010): This highly engrossing and immersive historical novel is part of Mitchell’s overarching mythos, although it takes a while for a name we recognise (one irascible Doctor Marinus) to show up. Set in the dying days of the Dutch East India Company’s trading outpost in Japan—an island enclave called Dejima off Nagasaki which most of the European staff are not permitted to leave—it follows the titular Jacob as he falls in love, loses the woman he loves, attempts to keep both his career and his life, and eventually negotiates the future of Dejima with British would-be colonisers and the Japanese authorities. Meanwhile, the woman he loves, Aibagawa Orito, is legally abducted after her father’s death to live in the Sisters’ House of a shady monastery up a nearby mountain, where terrible things are happening and no one has ever survived to whistleblow. Devoted Mitchell readers will have strong suspicions about what exactly those terrible things are, and although he didn’t reveal the full extent of his metaphysics until The Bone Clocks in 2014, there are plenty of clues seeded here.

Unfortunately, the novel itself is a 300-page story stretched over more than 500. There is just a lot of extraneous length here. Partly this comes from an odd scene-setting habit of Mitchell’s: he adds descriptive colour by repeatedly inserting single sentences of it into scenes that otherwise contain dialogue or progressive action, like walnuts in a brownie (condemnatory). It’s probably meant to mimic the sweep of a camera lens, but it gets very annoying, especially because the details he lights on don’t generally seem to have any particular significance. I don’t know how well this would stand on its own, either; to me it reads more satisfyingly because I read The Bone Clocks and Slade House before it, but for anyone who hasn’t yet encountered those (including its first readers), it might prove quite annoying in its tendency to hint but not actually confirm. Worthwhile for a holiday read, but not a top-tier Mitchell, IMO.

The Safekeep, by Yael van der Wouden (2024): Spoilers of a sort follow. Quite a lot better and more interesting than I expected it to be, about the postwar treatment of surviving Jews in the Netherlands (awful; it was the only country that sent no official escort to collect its citizens from the death camps). Many couldn’t get their property back afterwards, even—especially—from neighbours who were supposed to just be looking after things for them. Our protagonist, Isabel, a bitter and miserable person whose head it can be very difficult to spend time in, lives in such a house, procured by her uncle during the war; she has never asked questions about it, and her mother never acknowledged that the house was basically stolen goods. When her brother Louis brings back a new girlfriend, Eva, whom Isabel loathes, to stay at the house with her, it doesn’t take the reader long to clock who Eva might be and what she might be doing there. The evolving sexual attraction between Eva and Isabel is both melodramatic and hot: the sex is well written even if their tormented conversational style gets a bit tiresome. My favourite bit of the whole book was Eva’s diary, which we get to read with Isabel near the end; her memories and experiences, her way of surviving both literally and emotionally, are instantly engaging. Not a bad Women’s Prize winner.

The Creature in the Case, by Garth Nix (2005): Fun, reasonably scary, inessential long story/novelette that picks up with Nicholas Sayre in Ancelstierre after the events of Abhorsen and just before those of Goldenhand (literally just before: the final few pages of this story are recapitulated in the early chapters of that novel). As aforementioned, I find Ancelstierre inherently less interesting than the Old Kingdom, and it turns out I find Free Magic inherently less interesting than the Dead, but I do like Nick as a character and Nix makes his wild dash across the country fun and believable. (Arriving by train, disheveled and with no ticket, at the capital, he’s mistaken by the platform guard for a hungover undergraduate whose friends have pranked him: an excellent little sequence.) Glad I read it, and my Old Kingdom series reading is now complete.

Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer (2024): I just finished this yesterday so I didn’t have a lot of time left to think/write about it, but: this year’s Clarke Award winner really goes to all the places that you’d both hope and fear a novel about sexbots might go to. Deeply disturbing, emotionally convincing, and one of the better imaginations of how a robot of this sort might think and order their thoughts (helped by Greer’s choice to keep the narrative voice in tight third person throughout, not first). Doug, Annie’s human boyfriend/owner, is terrible and pathetic and terribly, pathetically normal, committing acts of abuse in precisely the manner that most people do commit them: small, selfish, persistent. Annie is an extremely compelling protagonist, and her journey towards freedom is so well paced. The emotional dynamics of being helpless not to seek the approval of your abuser are ones Greer knows inside out and can convey with appalling efficiency; they are exacerbated by the extent to which Doug is capable of controlling Annie’s programming. (Those who have read the book will understand when I say: the closet scene.) I truly did not expect to be so shaken by Annie Bot, but it’ll stick in my mind for a long time to come.

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Have you read anything good from the library in July?

I think I first saw this on Laura’s blog, but her post apparently came from Eric Karl Anderson’s (Lonesome Reader’s) YouTube video. We’re precisely halfway through 2025, so… let’s see how the reading has been going.

1. How many books have you read so far this year? 91. This puts me, apparently, 60% of the way to my reading goal of 150 (Goodreads thinks I’m 24 books ahead of schedule, and StoryGraph makes it 23, which makes it obvious that one of them is programmed to round up and one to round down!) I’m pretty sure this has been boosted by my obsessive comfort reading fortnight in May.

2. What’s your favourite book so far this year? This is a very hard call and I refuse to make it. Thus far I’ve had about one book per month that feels like a worthy candidate for the year’s-end best-of list, which is good going, but I can’t pick a standout from those.

3. What’s the most disappointing book you’ve read this year? “Disappointing” to me implies initially high expectations; Susanna Clarke’s individually-published short story The Wood at Midwinter fell far short of the haunting, resonant work I know she’s capable of. I was also hoping for more from Garth Nix’s Clariel, despite having been warned.

4. What genre have you read most this year? According to StoryGraph, “literary” (although they include edge-of-genre writers like Karen Russell and Nina Allan in this category), followed by “fantasy” (boosted by all the Pratchett and Nix in April and May).

5. Name a new favourite author that you’ve discovered this year. If I can define “new favourite” as “new-to-me author from whom I would like to read more”, this is a toss-up between Vernor Vinge and Ralph Ellison.

6. What’s the most surprisingly good book you’ve read so far this year? I did not expect to genuinely adore and feel compelled by The Pickwick Papers. I thought it’d be one of the weaker Dickens novels; instead, it’s one of the most exciting and least annoying.

7. What are your favourite and most anticipated 2025 releases? I’m not reading a whole lot of 2025 releases (though more than I realised, mostly via NetGalley). The best ones I’ve read so far have been Susan Barker’s supernatural chiller Old Soul, Colwill Brown’s gorgeous evocation of Northern girlhood, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh, and Megan Hunter’s evocative Days of Light. I’m also currently reading Eliana Ramage’s To the Moon and Back, about a young Cherokee woman who wants to be an astronaut, and LOVING it—more on that soon (it’s one of my 20 Books of Summer).

8. What’s your next big priority for your reading? I’m partway through 20 BoS, so finishing that is my next major reading priority.

9. What’s been your bookish highlight of the year so far? Usually this is some combination of book and travel, or book and environment, or a literary event. I haven’t traveled much yet this year apart from on business, and haven’t been to many (any?) literary events. Maybe the answer is the cloudy spring Saturday when I took myself on a date to the largest park in south London and sat in the café in the basement of a restored manor house on the grounds. I had a cheese-and-ham toastie and a brownie and two coffees and spent about four hours reading Garth Nix’s Goldenhand. It felt like a pocket of time recaptured from the way I read in childhood, unselfconsciously and with abandon.

Tag yourself and join in if you’d like!

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.

This month, the vast majority of what I read came from the library: a solid fifteen books, often at the rate of one a day. Mostly this was popcorn reading to get through a month that demanded every ounce of mental, emotional and intellectual energy I could summon. Below, you’ll find my account of figuring out this reading strategy, or rather, being told it by a sympathetic and impartial observer, because sometimes I’m still not that good at stepping back and figuring out what I need.

Clariel, by Garth Nix (2014): Hm. Big hmmmm. This is a prequel to the Abhorsen trilogy (discussed in April’s #LoveYourLibrary post), set six hundred years in the Old Kingdom’s past. I don’t regret learning more about what this country and world were like in their heyday (nor do I regret getting to see Mogget in a new context, interacting with new characters!) But something about both Clariel the character and Clariel the book never quite cohered for me. She feels like a far more generic YA heroine than Sabriel or Lirael: one who wants things she’s told she can’t have, acts out in response, and ultimately achieves very little. I never felt I knew her. I knew her traits: uncontrollable rage (berserker blood is part of her heritage), what seems like agoraphobia, a monomaniacal obsession with returning to the Great Forest where she grew up. But I never felt that she was more than that list. The pacing, also, is very off: the chapters set in Belisaere take far too long, more time is spent in the Academy than the plot can possibly justify, and the climax occurs in the very final chapter and takes (I just counted) ten pages. Disappointing on the whole.

The History of Mary Prince, by Mary Prince (1831): The first book by a Black woman published in Britain. (She dictated it to a white amanuensis, so [insert necessary warning about the mediation of manuscripts by marginalised voices here].) It’s an account of her life, and her experiences of being enslaved in Barbados and Antigua, until she came to Britain with the Woods, the family that enslaved and abused her. There, she left them, because in Britain she was legally free—but she could never return to Antigua, and to her husband, unless the Woods chose to manumit her, which they would not. You don’t need me to tell you that this is harrowing. Prince’s rhetoric as she meticulously sets up all the pro-slavery arguments she’s ever heard, then knocks them down one by one, is very gratifying. So is the afterword from her contact at the Anti-Slavery Society, who describes John Wood’s vindictive attempts to regain her through the British court system, including slandering her character and provably lying about her treatment at his family’s hands. There were people who knew at the time that slavery was a moral stain; never let anyone tell you otherwise.

Then came a DNF, @ 38%. I ran out of books, you see, or I nearly did, and was reduced to prowling the library ebook app with the kind of frantic hunger with which one is generally discouraged from visiting supermarkets. Everything on my “of interest” list seemed to be already borrowed, and much that was available was rubbish (or in e-audiobook form, which has never worked well for me). I sampled the first chapter of In the Shadow of Vesuvius: a Life of Pliny, by Daisy Dunn (2019), then borrowed it. I really wanted to like it. Unfortunately, it offered little more than constant quotation from Pliny’s Letters, which I’ve already read. Dunn is also prone to digression without clear purpose, which looks suspiciously like padding in the absence of any compelling argument about her subject’s life. (Do I care about the efforts made by nineteenth-century twin brothers from Como to claim him as a native of their town, or require four paragraphs on Mary and Percy Shelley’s visit to his villa? Not really.) I was in low mood anyway, and none of this was helping at all. I mentioned it to M. He gazed at me in loving incredulity, and said (more or less), “Why on earth are you trying to read this right now? Go find some popcorn books at once.”

Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett (1987): This was the first thing I borrowed after M. set me right. Pratchett rarely fails me, and he didn’t fail me here. This, the third Discworld novel, is the first to feature the Witches of Lancre and I haven’t read very many of those, so this felt both comforting and new, which was the perfect combination. It’s about second-wave feminism as applied to magic. (A girl can’t be a wizard! And witches differ from wizards in fundamental and unchangeable ways! …Right?) It’s not as funny as some of the others—I don’t think he’d quite found his rhythm yet, though it’s already loads better than The Colour of Magic (1983) and The Light Fantastic (1986). There is something odd about the time scale here; Esk is eight or nine during the first part of the book, but seems a bit older by the time we get to the University, but there’s no indication that actual years have passed. And according to those who know, Granny Weatherwax is much better in the company of her coven; in Equal Rites she does seem quite harsh and not a little shifty, whereas (having read some later books where she crops up) I remember her being easier to warm to. But maybe that says something about gendered expectations, too. Did the trick, anyway. I felt loads better after reading this.

The Rose Rent, by Ellis Peters (1986): A Brother Cadfael mystery, set in twelfth-century Shrewsbury’s Benedictine monastery. They are the most perfect comfort reads. I went on a tear with them about three years ago and am picking up the series again now. This one is about a young heiress and widow, Judith Perle, who gives a large house to the monastery in exchange for an eccentric annual rent: a single white rose from its garden, in memory of her much-loved late husband. Murder and abduction throws suspicion not only on Judith’s household but on the many local men who have been attempting to convince her of their suitability as second husbands. As always, I absolutely love the way Peters writes medieval women: living within the bounds of their time, with social proprieties and religious conviction given due importance, but also people. Proud, brave, clever, shallow, whatever kind of person they are, they’re always people first. Partly because Cadfael became a monk as an adult with life experience, after going on Crusade and fathering his own son, he’s capable of seeing, and not fearing, women, in a way that those of the monks whose parents gave them to the monastery as children simply can’t manage. This emotional/psychological reality becomes an inciting incident in The Rose Rent. I really do love these books.

Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett (1988): Pratchett does Macbeth, and also Hamlet, and really Shakespearean tragedy in general, plus a bit of satirising the theatrical profession as a whole just for fun. Granny Weatherwax has a coven now (not by her own doing—it’s the keen young witch Magrat who’s gotten them all socialising). My favourite of the three witches, at least in this book, might be Nanny Ogg, who has fifteen children and innumerable grand- and great-grandchildren and is clearly Discworld’s version of a working-class English matriarch (she always has a family member, an “our Shawn” or “our Sandra”, working in the kitchens or the guardroom of wherever they might want to break, or sneak, into). She also has the terrifically awful one-eyed cat Greebo, described as “radiating a smell that would have knocked over a wall and caused sinus trouble in a dead fox”. Also, this is the book that introduced the world to the Discworld drinking song “The Hedgehog Can Never Be Buggered At All”. I understand some enterprising readers have written a full set of lyrics, but it’s much, much funnier to just hear snatched and horrifying excerpts of it from drunken characters.

Ink Blood Sister Scribe, by Emma Törzs (2023): I took a punt on this—it was the kind of book that I always find very appealing in the premise (library of magic books, family secrets, hidden rivalries), but everything hangs on the execution. Törzs does it perfectly. It does a lot of contemporary fantasy tropes, especially around complicated feelings within families and legacies of abuse and colonialism, without hitting you over the head; everything arises from the characters that Törzs creates and the fondness we’re encouraged to feel for them. Amongst many other things, I loved that Esther’s lesbianism isn’t presented as a problem for her or an obstacle to acceptance; if anything, that obstacle is about her identity within and relationship to magic, not to sex or love. I loved Nicholas, a sheltered wealthy magic-user who’s both alarmingly privileged and sweetly oblivious about how a lot of things in the world actually work. I loved his relationship with his bodyguard Collins, a sarcastic giant of a man, and the fact that his dog is a (female) Pomeranian named Sir Kiwi. I loved the magic system, which functions via reading and writing and therefore is bounded by time. I loved the way mothers are represented, how the book shows different kinds of mothering, not all cuddly, but none portrayed as “wrong” or evil. I loved that the villain is properly scary but a big part of how well that works is the way the villainy takes time to unfold and become obvious, to the reader as well as to the characters. There’s some romance, but it isn’t romantasy. The tonal balance is somehow always perfect. An ideal book to curl up with—I’ll be keeping an eye out to buy a copy of my own.

Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett (1989): Pratchett does ancient civilisations, specifically ancient Egypt and a bit of ancient Greece—although I’d argue this is really more about satirising people’s received ideas about ancient civilisations. Parts of it are still uncomfortable levels of culturally appropriative caricature, and the plot strands get overly frenetic as they come together. I’d happily have taken an entire novel about Teppic, the crown prince of not!Egypt, receiving a first-class foreign education in the Assassins’ Guild; those early bits were superb.

Writers and Lovers, by Lily King (2020): LOVED this. Like the Törzs, there were a million ways this could have gone wrong, and it went right at every one of them. The title made me expect that this would be a love triangle novel, and it is, but there’s considerably more going on here, from an extraordinarily delicate dissection of grief over the loss of a parent to a clear-eyed look at financial precarity and the fucked job market for creative arts and academia. (It’s set in the ’90s, and King manages to have these conversations in a way that feels resonant with the 2020s but still belongs clearly to that earlier time. Some of this is down to the way she writes about sexual harassment in the workplace. We really have made some progress in the last 25 years.) It’s also about writing a novel, in the most unromantic, unsexy way, which I appreciated enormously, and although I’ll avoid spoilers about the love plot resolution, it’s about how important it is for a prospective partner to take your creative work seriously. I mentioned in an earlier post that Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved sets a high bar for “books that feel real“; Writers and Lovers clears it. Everyone in this novel feels like an actual person; every event in this novel feels like something that really happened. Don’t sleep on this.

Terciel and Elinor, by Garth Nix (2021): I was not expecting this to be the better of the two Old Kingdom prequels (despite Laura’s assurance), but she was so right and it so was! Dual protagonists work even better here than in Lirael, perhaps because Nix does alternating chapters instead of a whole section with one and a whole section with the other. Both Terciel and Elinor are interesting, engaging, and rounded; Elinor is a good example of what Clariel could have been like, someone with a strong non-magical interest (theatre and acrobatics) who nevertheless isn’t a monomaniac and whose skills actually serve her well (she’s better at fighting and strategy because she has abilities like juggling and tumbling). Terciel’s uncertainty about his necromantic heritage, and his shift from raw apprentice to confident Abhorsen, is well managed, too. If the climax is less terrifying than in Sabriel, it’s partly because we’re already familiar with this villain and know he gets defeated elsewhere and elsewhen. I bought the romance, too, which is sweet and convincing and deals with sexuality very well. Overall, a relief to have such a delightful experience. Still waiting for the library system to deliver up the collected stories in Across the Wall.

The Heretic’s Apprentice, by Ellis Peters (1989): As you might be able to guess from the title, this brings in questions of heresy, of which it can be quite as dangerous to be accused as murder. You can always tell where Peters stands with her characters—if Cadfael gets good vibes from a guy, he’s never wrong—but that’s partly why these are such effective comfort reads, they’re not going to pull the rug out from under you. Instead you generally get a range of bad-vibe emanators, who are the gallery of suspects, to maintain suspense. This one ends with a tense hostage situation, and a resolution of the kind that Peters favours: death comes to the wrongdoer before they can be put on trial, usually via accident or suicide. It effectively prevents Hugh Beringar, the sheriff and representative of state power, and Cadfael’s dear friend, from being made unsympathetic as a character by having to carry out the sharp end of his office. She uses this device too often for these books to be properly literary; it’s a soft way out. Who cares, though, this is what they’re for.

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, by Nghi Vo (2020): Vo’s first novella, The Empress of Salt and Fortune, is on my 20 Books of Summer possibles list. Her second one came to my hands first, though, when I wanted something short for a day spent traveling to and from the ExCel Centre in London’s Docklands. Each book in the series is basically standalone; the premise is that Chih, a nonbinary cleric in a fantasy Asian-inflected society, travels around their world listening to the stories of people they meet and recording them for the archives of their order. In this installment, Chih and a local guide, who rides a mammoth, get trapped by three hungry tiger sisters who can take human form. To stave off being eaten, Chih tells them a story of a legendary tiger queen, Ho Thi Thao, and her wife, the human scholar Dieu. The tigers object to details of Chih’s narration at various points (“no no no! It was like this…”), and the novella deals explicitly with how we construct truth in history writing and storytelling. I liked it plenty, but I suspect the Singing Hills Cycle might be more than the sum of its parts; the more of them I read, the more they’ll probably build to a greater, more memorable reading experience than each individual element can provide. (I’m not going to lie, I also struggled with the violent and entitled behaviour of Ho Thi Thao. As love stories go, it’s not a perfect romance by any means.) Anyway, interesting, I would certainly try at least one more by Vo.

The Summer of the Danes, by Ellis Peters (1991): There is technically a murder in this, but Cadfael spends absolutely zero time on solving it and the murderer ends up confessing when mortally wounded right at the end. The whole book is about politics: the Welsh king Owain Gwynedd’s brother, Cadwaladr, has been sanctioned for being semi-rebellious, and in order to get his estates back, Cadwaladr hires Viking mercenaries from Dublin to back him up. Hostage-taking, negotiations, and losses of honour ensue. Cadfael has a front row seat to it all as one of the hostages, and as always, there’s an extremely interesting woman, in this case the daughter of an ambitious cleric who was born before his ordination but whose existence is still an embarrassment to an institution whose priests are supposed to be celibate. Heledd is about to be tidily disposed of via marriage, but she’s resentful of her father’s shame about her and not at all ready to give him and the Church what they want. Heledd is great. It can be a gamble when a series writer shakes up their formula, but it works very well here.

I, Claudius, by Robert Graves (1934): Reread, although I was 14 at my first (and last) reading of this. I’m amazed at how much has stuck in my memory, though; mostly the characters, Claudius’s awful murderous grandma Empress Livia and terrifying mad psychopath nephew Caligula. I also love Claudius’s prostitute mistress, Calpurnia, her practicality and kindness and professionalism, and I wish we’d seen more of her. As an adult, I suppose my biggest question is why does this book exist, given that we already have Suetonius (whom I haven’t actually read, but I understand this is mostly his material). Graves’s Claudius says he’s writing the secret history, the part that wouldn’t have made it past the propagandist guardians of Rome’s reputation for greatness. Until I read the actual history, I won’t know how much of this is in the real historical record, but I think quite a lot is, so what’s the impetus here? Maybe just that it’s a vivid, engaging introduction to the early years of imperial Rome. I don’t think people were writing much historical fiction like this in the ’30s: so intimate, so conversational! I loved it as a teen, and it’s lost none of its power to fascinate, horrify and entertain.

The Holy Thief, by Ellis Peters (1992): There are at least three separate crimes in this one: the theft, during a historic flood, of the bones of St. Winifred, whose presence at the abbey is responsible for both apparently genuine miracles and continued income; the robbery on the road of the wagon containing her reliquary; and eventually the murder of a young shepherd who might have been able to identify the mysterious figure, dressed as one of the brothers, who asked for help loading the parcel that contained the stolen saint. Continuing with the increased political edge of the later books, this contains a whole scene between Hugh, the sheriff, and Earl Robert of Leicester, in which the latter warns the former that the state of civil unrest in England between King Stephen and Empress Maud can’t last, and that every man of authority will have to think carefully about how to end the strife in his own area. This reflects the final years of the war, where active hostilities were winding down and individual nobles were beginning to make peace agreements with each other. There’s also a strong theme of the danger of a false vocation—two young men, at beginning and end, realise they don’t belong in the cloister—plus interesting stuff about the lives of troubadors (including their urgent need for patronage) and the practice of enslaving (mostly) Celtic and Welsh captives, which, although condemned by the church, continued in the twelfth century. Certainly one of the better, more complex entries in this series.

Goldenhand, by Garth Nix (2016): Not quite as good as Terciel and Elinor; loads better than Clariel. We get much more geography this time, going farther north than before, and I liked the implication that the barren wastelands beyond the Great Rift are a remnant of another world, destroyed by Orannis, the entity that Lirael re-bound in the last volume of the Abhorsen trilogy. Goldenhand is, casually, pretty good on disability—Lirael has a prosthetic hand now, and another major female character, Ferin, loses a foot above the ankle and treats it as a minor inconvenience but basically nothing to be too concerned about. The romance between Ferin and Prince Sameth happens quickly but feels right: he’s indecisive and shy and practical, she’s decisive and fierce and practical, they complement each other well. In fact, Ferin’s journey is one of the best things in the book, giving it a Sabriel-like quality as we meet another determined young woman whose only resource is herself and who must flee powerful, mysterious supernatural antagonists. I wanted a lot more to be made of Ferin’s psychological change of state, like in LeGuin’s The Tombs of Atuan—you live your whole life preparing to become a flesh vehicle for a centuries-old malevolent spirit and then that fate is taken away from you, it’s going to have more of an effect. On the other hand, Clariel/Chlorr is a much better character here even though she’s drawn with less detail. The scene in Death where the shard of her spirit that remained human finally embraces her larger, scarier, inhuman self, and they both pass through the final gate, had me crying. A good sequel, not an essential one.

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If you made it this far, thanks for persevering! I did read non-library books this month, but not many. I’ll talk about them at the end of the week. How did you do with library reading in May?