The Unseen Review: Monthly Reading

January 2026 Reads

Jessie Lethaby — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 18:22:38 GMT

Here are some books I read in January! It was a good month for reading, though there was one definite standout, marked with a star. I’ve split these into two categories today—coming-of-age retrospectives, and disappointing reads.

Coming-of-age retrospectives, or nostalgic summers

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, translated from Norwegian by Anne Born (2003)

Every year, Trond would spend the summer with his father in a cabin in the Norwegian countryside near the border with Sweden. They would leave Trond’s mother and sister behind in Oslo and enjoy time together in nature, with Trond’s father ostensibly using the land to make money via logging and other similar endeavours. These summers were something to look forward to for Trond, including his time spent with a local boy, Jon.

But one summer, everything changes. After a morning ‘stealing horses’ (or going for joyrides on horses, more like), Jon seems to suffer some sort of breakdown. The causes of this are slowly revealed, amongst other intrusions of the adult into Trond’s world. Loss of innocence has begun.

The novel is narrated retrospectively by a much older Trond; newly widowed, and having just moved himself to a cabin not wholly dissimilar to the one he spent his summers in—though this time, he has to deal with the harsh winters as well. It’s quickly clear that he is trying to escape something—some nebulous pain—but that it continues to haunt him anyway, its origins somewhere in that euphoric and confusing summer.

There was a lot to like in this book. Some of the scenes and set pieces were just wonderful—a couple of them I can bring to my mind’s eye now, weeks after finishing it. The beginning of the book particularly struck a good balance of narrative tension, exquisite scene-writing, and considered use of the retrospective voice. But sadly Petterson seems to lose his grip on the narrative; he abandons interesting storylines, flounders too long in reflection that begins to become rather heavy-handed, unbalances the interplay between the current timeline and the backstory, and adds rather too much in that isn’t necessarily needed to make his point. This kind of narrative structure—and coming-of-age in general—is something that I am very drawn to in my reading (as you are about to see), and I have high standards. I can see many reading and loving this book, but to me it ultimately felt like a lesser So Long, See You Tomorrow.

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore (1994)*

Lorrie Moore’s novel also features an older narrator looking back on a particular summer from her youth. She is Berie, an American woman from a small town in upstate New York, who when we meet her is vacationing with her husband in Paris. It’s clear that all is not well between them, and that Berie is reaching some kind of uncomfortable revelation about her relationship. Most of the novel, though, is focussed on a summer spent in the company of her best friend, Sils. The two of them work in a theme park called Storyland, and trade confidences and intimacies with the ease of girls on the cusp of adulthood.

Writing a novel which functions as a lament for lost youth, lost innocence, lost friendships, is nothing new, and often has the potential to slide into the saccharine or clichéd. But Moore captures this era with a peculiar power here, probably because some of the choices she makes are unusual on scales both large and small. Her prose is at once straightforward and yet layered with meaning, its imagery combining and recombining to create a strangely potent effect. Consider this passage from early on:

Certainly ‘safe’ is what I am now – or am supposed to be. Safety is in me, holds me straight, like a spine. My blood travels no new routes, simply knows its way, lingers, grows drowsy and fond. Though there are times, even recently, in the small city where we live, when I’ve left my husband for a late walk, the moon out hanging upside down like some garish, show-off bird, like some fantastical mistake – what life of offices and dull tasks could have a moon in it, flooding the sky and streets, without its seeming preposterous? – and in my walks, toward the silent corners, the cold mulch smells, the treetops suddenly waving in a wind, I’ve felt an old wildness again. Revenant and drunken. It isn’t sexual, not really. It has more to do with adventure and escape [...] though, finally, it has always stayed to one side, as if it were some other impossible life and knew it, like a good dog, good dog, good dog. It has always stayed.

I don’t want to say too much more so as not to ruin its effect, but I highly recommend this one. Exquisite, assured writing that deftly captures the complex emotions inherent in growing up—that feeling of being pulled in so many different directions—and yet the keen pain of the loss of that potentiality, those different directions, that sense of being in the waiting room of life.

No More Giants by Joaquina Ballard Howles (1966)

Until very recently, Joaquina Ballard Howles had written just this one book, inspired partly by her own upbringing. She grew up on a ranch in Nevada in the 1930s and 40s, and the novel keenly illustrates what it was like to grow up as a girl in this environment. Prevented from joining in with the men’s work around the farm with father and brother, and yet not entirely required in the house, either.

This is no thinly-veiled memoir, though. Protagonist Jenny—who narrates the book—faces major challenges in the novel; from the very first sentence we know her brother is going to die. She becomes embroiled in an illicit relationship with a Basque farmhand. Part of the reason that Jenny is at such a loose end around the ranch is because her mother is deeply unhappy and resents her husband for bringing them out here. In her bitterness, she hasn’t the patience to take Jenny under her wing. We follow Jenny through her adolescence and into her early adulthood, as she tries to reconcile her love for the ranch and her environment, and the fact of her family falling apart around her.

The prose unfolds with a kind of breathless immediacy that gives the book its perceptive portrayal of girlhood (do I dare say the word), and yet there is also a resonant reflectivity that demonstrates Jenny’s love for the isolated life of the ranch, and the Nevada country. There is no trickery, and little complexity at the line level—it is, in many ways, a straightforward accounting of Jenny’s fictional life. And it has a certain strength and clarity to it as a result. Jenny’s difficult relationship with her mother and a certain kind of tone made me think of The Copenhagen Trilogy, if it had been written in the American West instead. It’s a shame Howles didn’t go on to write more; it feels like there is latent potential for her writing to have gained that depth of voice in time. Still, this is a worthy read for those wishing for an account of women’s and girls’ lives in the West.

I should mention that both this and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? were recommended to me by the lovely Anh at morning through light.

The disappointing

Figuring by Maria Popova (2019)

This book was born from Popova’s blog Brain Pickings (now The Marginalian) in which she highlights interesting stories about historical and scientific figures past, many of them who had been marginalised in their own time, with an emphasis on women and particularly queer women. According to the blurb, Figuring is ostensibly about “explor[ing] the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries”. Some of the figures she looks at are the astronomer Maria Mitchell, the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the journalist Margaret Fuller, the sculptor Harriet Hosman, and the inimitable Emily Dickinson. The book looks at the ways that their various contributions were influenced by their often stormy private lives, as well as the ways the humanities and the sciences have talked to one another over the centuries.

I wonder if even reading this summary above you can guess what my problems were with this book. First of all: structurally, it’s a mess. It’s over five hundred pages long, and it is all over the place. I can only assume this was the intention, but for me it didn’t quite work. Yes, the text flows. But I also couldn’t really keep track of what was going on, who was connected to who, and so on. She moves back and forth in time, back and forth between ‘characters’, back and forth from paragraph to paragraph (there is a lot of ‘two centuries later x would go on to write . . .’, ‘four months before y was born . . .’). In many ways I feel like the book is really showing its origins as a blog. Many of the chapters (or extended anecdotes) might have worked nicely on their own, but not all put together in book form.

There is an enormous amount of quoted material in this book. Big block quotes, in my opinion, should be used sparingly (it’s funny to me that I used one above today even though I rarely do). Unless you read the surrounding text, they will almost never have the same effect on your reader as they will on you. It very much had the feeling that Popova, excited by the prospect of writing something longer and being able to include more research, put in almost everything she could gather.

Finally—and this is for me its biggest problem—I could not work out what the point of all this was. If the leading theory was that the private lives of these people affected their work . . . well, I probably knew that already. In some cases, it felt like Popova was revelling in rather intimate details of these people’s lives with a rather less noble aim that her blurb would imply. There is a place for this, but don’t try to pass it off as something more cerebral than it is. And as I’m a bit allergic to memoir and biography anyway, I’m not sure this did anything for me.

Finally, I didn’t see enough of her in the text. It is naturally a limited view—lots of Americans, a very specific time period—and I didn’t really understand why these figures and not others. Had Popova given shape to her project by showing us where its boundaries were, I think it would have worked better for me. As it was, it felt like she was presenting everything without qualification.

Nonetheless, I ended up listening to a large chunk of this, and it did flow well. I did learn some interesting things about figures I might not otherwise have known about, and I can see why many people do love this book. But stylistically it wasn’t for me at all. She has a new one coming out soon, and I’m intrigued to see whether it does something similar.

Theory of Bastards by Audrey Schulman (2018)

This book was probably our most hated book club read ever. It follows Frankie, a mating researcher who has recently developed an interest in bonobos (if you know anything about bonobos you’ll know why) and secured herself a position at an institute that houses a troop. Frankie is recently recovered from a surgery, which we soon find out is to do with her lifelong struggles with endometriosis. From there, the novel explores a little of Frankie’s history with her disease, as well as her observations of the bonobos and her efforts to ingratiate herself with them. In the second part, a dust storm blows in (the novel is set in a near future filled with intrusive tech and climate disasters), and Frankie is isolated with one of her fellow male researchers and trying to keep the bonobos alive in difficult circumstances. There is a substantial change in tone, and the novel heads off down a different path. I found this book in the reviews of my beloved Gathering Evidence, which is also about bonobos and science and research. Not only are the books nothing alike, but this one is much, much worse.

A little like with Figuring, you may already see my problem. There is simply too much going on here, and the topics were too big and required too much close attention and copious research in order not to come to some deeply concerning subtextual conclusions. You don’t mess around with mating and evolutionary science lightly or you quickly start down the road of eugenics, and both this and the endo storyline were poorly handled. The near-future setting was disappointing and not illuminating (as well as not really ‘ringing true’); there was no reason why it should have been set in the future and it felt half-baked. The romance subplot (and the apparent concept of the book—the titular ‘theory of bastards’!) bore some of the worst of the writing. The whole second half of the book left you wondering why we bothered with the first half. You could try and explain away some of its issues by saying that it was a restrictive point-of-view with caustic Frankie as its focus, but it shifts POV lightly and without thought at various moments so it becomes harder to argue that the ideological issues are just Frankie-wide and not book-wide.

Overall, it was somewhat readable and almost captivating in its utter strangeness and the blithe way it handled the enormity of its material. But you’d be better off reading Gathering Evidence instead.

In brief

Translation of the Route: Traducción de la ruta by Laura Wittner, translated from Spanish by Joana Adcock—My commitment to reading more poetry continues! I enjoyed these poems that mostly focussed on daily life; the sublime moments coming when you least expect them. Some were more impactful than others, and overall I don’t feel that Wittner is a new favourite, necessarily. I particularly liked the fact that this edition has the original Spanish on the facing page; I enjoyed thinking about the act of translating poetry and what kind of transformation it entails. Might return to it on that basis when I’m looking to improve my Spanish again.
Mervyn Peake’s Vast Alchemies: The Illustrated Biography by G . Peter Winnington—Read as research for the Gormenghast slow read. I don’t think this was a particularly engaging biography in and of itself (I don’t much go for biography in general, to be honest) but worth it if you want to get an overview of Peake’s life and career. Would have liked more about his craft and writing rather than lots of details about when he did what job, but that’s just me.
Under the Glacier by Halldór Laxness—reread this early this month after reading it in December, and reviewed it here.

Next month

Sometime very soon (!) I’ll be reviewing Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt, Wish Her Safe at Home by Stephen Benatar, and Infinite Ground by Martin MacInnes (amongst other things!), so make sure you’re subscribed to keep updated.

For now, dive in elsewhere:

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I'm still mentally in 2025 . . . October (yes, really) to December reads

Jessie Lethaby — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 14:33:33 GMT

Celebrating the books but subtly celebrating my new bedside lamps at the same time.

I’m characteristically behind on my reviews, but for myself as much as anyone I wanted to round out 2025 by writing these up. That way, I can get send out my top reads of the year in the coming days! (Can you guess if any of these made it on?)

I’m late partly because I did have a bit of a crisis where I wondered whether I should keep making these round-ups, and whether there was some alternative method of reviewing that I could be pouring my energy into. I’ve been making monthly round-ups of a sort for about a decade and I suppose they were probably due for a bit of a review themselves . . . But I’ve come full circle and decided to keep on writing them!

Over the years I’ve received some really encouraging messages about the value of the round-ups, but especially when I mentioned I was considering stopping them over in book club at the end of last year. So first of all thank you to anyone who sent a message about that. After a lot of reflection I do think they are still valuable to me and (hopefully) to you as well.

I do intend to vary the format of my reviewing a little bit on here and YouTube this year, so there may occasionally be books missing that will appear elsewhere. But I’m sure there will still be more than enough to talk about! In order not to overwhelm you today, though—there are three months of books to cover here after all—I will try and be a little more brief than usual.

We’ve got big classics like Wuthering Heights and Little Women in here; two Olga Ravns and two Halldór Laxnesses. Some Denis Johnson, some Sylvia Townsend Warner, some Tobias Wolff. Interesting nonfiction. Without further ado—let’s get into it!

The Standout

My Work by Olga Ravn, translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell in 2023 (2020)

To me, this is the book on early motherhood. It is an absolute tour de force, and I don’t use that phrase often. More specifically, it is the book on early motherhood as a writer—though I think most mothers would see themselves reflected somewhere in its pages, artist or no.

Using the Gothic tropes of found documents and the doppelgänger, the narrator puts together the ‘work’ of new mother Anna, arranging the fragments of memoir, medical reports, poems, and playtext into a Frankenstein’s monster of a novel.1 In order to describe the life-shattering experience of becoming a mother (and specifically one in the modern world, and even more specifically one who is also a writer) Ravn shatters the form of the novel itself. I’m usually very wary of fragmentary narratives because I’ve read a lot of bad ones—books where the implication seems to be that we should laud the author for experimenting with form just because it’s different and strange, but ultimately where it seems to impede rather than further their thematic aims. The form is always clearly chosen before the content. But here, form and content are completely aligned. There is no other way that Ravn could have written this book and still achieved the impact she has with it. Likely because there is another narrator floating just out of view—that of Ravn herself, whose experiences with postpartum depression seem to have inspired and informed this novel. There is true depth of feeling here.

The novel is unusual because it truly captures the ambivalence of motherhood. In this interview with Louisiana Channel, Ravn notes that many people talk to her about the book as if it depicts only the negative aspects of motherhood, and that they would hesitate to recommend it to new mothers. Indeed, I’m wary of reading ‘motherhood’ books a lot of the time, because I find they do tend to focus overwhelmingly on the negative (or, in other cases of course, the positive). That is partly why it took me so long to read this book. But readers unafraid to look complexity in the eye will see the deep love that is baked into this novel alongside its exploration of motherhood’s difficulties and tedium. Experiencing conflicting feelings at the same time is a maddening and yet at times transcendent part of the reality of motherhood, and My Work goes a long way to capturing that.

This would be a particularly interesting book to read alongside Ravn’s The Employees, as both explore the nature of work. In The Employees, Ravn exposes the absurdity of corporate culture by having it come into contact viscerally with art (but also . . . life). My Work looks at a different aspect of work altogether, expanding Ravn’s exploration by looking at the ‘work’ of mother, and the ‘work’ of an artist, and how they might not be so far from one another—or in fact might inform each other in fundamental ways.

I highly recommend this one and I know it’s a book I’ll be returning to myself in the future.

The Uncanny

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken in 2025 (2023)

Another Ravn! This is her latest work to be translated into English, and you can listen to an interview I recorded with her about it here. In this novel, Ravn does historical fiction her way. Inspired by her own personal interest in the history of witchcraft in Norway and Denmark, she finally came to write a book about it—though was wary of falling into the stereotypes of witches and witch trials as they are usually depicted in books or film. She focuses on the case of Christenze Kruckow, a noblewoman who was tried as a witch in the early 1620s, her highborn status meaning that there is a better record of her life and trial than many of the other voiceless women in the archive. Kruckow was also tried and executed alongside a number of woman friends, and the novel focuses almost as much on them as a group as it does on the supposed protagonist.

Ravn—suspicious of the artifice of historical fiction—chose to write the novel from the perspective of ‘the wax child’, a type of wax doll that the women created. This choice gives the narrative a more disembodied, strange, and uncanny effect, as it moves from fragment to fragment in the memory and life of the wax doll. How does one create the voice of an object? Alongside work, the life of objects is another recurring theme in Ravn’s novels.

I really appreciated the intricacy of Ravn’s language here, and her exploration of this strange period of history from an unusual perspective. The novel will undoubtedly confound some readers in its eerie lyricism and resistance to neat narrative, but it’s a more-than-worthy addition to literature on witches.

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)

Speaking of witches, I also read Lolly Willowes with book club in October. This is a fascinating little book that I find myself thinking about again and again. It follows Laura Willowes, who—like many of her age and sensibility in the interwar period—was passed around from family household to family household as a spinster and essentially an unpaid servant. Living in London with her brother and his wife, and reaching middle age, she finally has a kind of awakening and decides to move to the country to a village she has only read about in a guidebook. Her family thinks she’s mad, but she finds immediate relief in her new surroundings. There, things take a turn for the strange.

The first two thirds of the novel could easily be read as pure realism, and the tone shift as you come towards the end was a bit jarring for some readers in book club (including myself). I found myself drawn to the depiction of Laura’s life with her father in her early adulthood, and the novel also contains some of the best writing about autumn that I’ve ever read. It is so evocative and quite wonderful. There were also some brilliant turns of phrase throughout that had me feverishly marking up the book. But yes, in terms of reading experience, the plot development perhaps leaves a little to be desired . . . And yet, it is intriguing in different ways—especially considering the context of Warner’s life, the history of fantasy, and the period she was writing in—so that I feel inclined to forgive some of its awkwardness and defend it. I feel like this is a book I’ll probably return to when the season is right. Particularly interesting to have it talk to Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan. Though incredibly different in all sorts of ways, there is something analogous in how the two authors approach genre fiction in the first half of the twentieth century (when the genre as we know it today was beginning to make itself apparent).

The Laxness

Laxness was an Icelandic author who wrote over sixty books (only a portion of which have been translated into English) and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955. His career spanned the twentieth century—in all its change and stylistic fluctuation—in fascinating ways, which is partly shown in these two very different novels, both of which I really liked. The only question now is: what Laxness should I read next?

Independent People by Halldór Laxness, translated from Icelandic by J. A. Thompson in 1946 (1934)

Inspired by the old sagas and written in Laxness’s social realism era, this novel follows Bjartur of Summerhouses and his family over a number of decades. Bjartur, who has laboured in servitude for a local landowner for eighteen years, has finally purchased his own land, and he single-mindedly pursues independence in response—sometimes to the detriment of everyone and everything around him. This is not a character you will always (or ever) like, but the surrounding cast will almost definitely capture your heart. I had a tear in my eye a number of times.

When I paged back through my notes the other day, I found myself just wanting to pick it up again. It’s a novel I really lived in for a couple of weeks, as it felt verifiably real. So much happens here under the calm remove of the third-person narrator, that I can only imagine it improves considerably on a second read2 when you already know the general movement of the storyline. No doubt my reading of the Icelandic sagas and books like Smiley’s The Greenlanders helped me quickly get to grips with the style of this book. And the sentence structure is sometimes more challenging in ways you’d expect from a novel of this era, and it might take some getting used to. But this is just my kind of novel, and I know it’s another that I’ll come back to.

Under the Glacier by Halldór Laxness, translated from Icelandic by Magnus Magnusson in 1972, (1968)

This book, meanwhile, is an absurd and satirical little novel that comes in at just over 200 pages (compared to Independent People’s 500), and is introduced by none other than Susan Sontag in most modern English-language editions. The Bishop of Iceland sends an emissary to investigate the community at Snæfellsjökull, a glacier in western Iceland. There have been reports of strange doings there, particularly that the Pastor is not formally burying people (or burying them on the glacier), and not holding services or maintaining the church. Basically, what exactly is going on “at glacier”? And can the emissary report back about what he finds?

The emissary—always unnamed but who gives himself the moniker ‘Embi’ for ‘emissary of the Bishop’—travels to this place and there encounters a bunch of bizarre and frustrating characters who refuse to give him straight answers and often wax lyrical about their own philosophies or the local mythologies. Embi is not so normal himself; he sometimes refers to himself in the third person in an attempt to retain objectivity, and uses a combination of transcripts from a tape recorder he is apparently using, along with his own musings and retellings—which somehow slip in despite his directive to remain out of it.

To read this book one must definitely be comfortable with being uncomfortable, and with not understanding everything you read. It’s a commentary on this dynamic of reading and writing (particularly the reading and writing of a novel), as Embi variously stands in for both along its course. It’s also a snapshot of the sixties as Laxness saw it—a maybe-American turns up at one point hoping to communicate with alien lifeforms and re-animate a frozen fish with the soul of an immortal woman called Úa. This was a destabilising time period characterised by rapid change that fomented a melting pot of ideologies, all of which seem to take a turn in the spotlight in this book.

We had a lot of fun discussing this one in book club; for some it became an all-time favourite while for others it remained a bit of a confusing struggle—either way, we had lots to talk about; it’s that kind of book. Especially recommended if you like absurd or philosophical novels.

American Short Stories

Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson (1992)

Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams captured my heart a few years ago,3 and the ending of his debut Angels remains with me since my reading in 2022. Since these two, I’ve known that I wanted to read more of Johnson’s work. So I finally picked up one of his most well-known volumes, the story collection Jesus’ Son. Much like in Angels, we follow a down-and-out protagonist who suffers from addiction and lives an itinerant and often risky lifestyle. Whilst there were a couple of stories here that stood out to me, overall I couldn’t make this collection stick. Perhaps my expectations were too high. I will say that Johnson has a good mastery of the ‘transcendent moment’ that is so important to the rhythm of a good short story. But I think the relative brevity of the stories meant that I couldn’t quite stay in that moment for long enough. Overall, I’m glad I read them but I wasn’t bowled over. I did read them while very busy though, and I wonder if I would appreciate them more if I gave them more time.

In the Garden of the North American Martyrs by Tobias Wolff (1981)

I read Wolff’s story ‘Bullet in the Brain’ early in 2025 and knew I wanted to try a collection of his. His style is very much in the vein of writers like Raymond Carver, and the stories are all good examples of North American realism (where Johnson can veer more dramatically into the uncanny and strange). I wasn’t all that impressed with the first few stories; the dialogue felt clunky and I felt I could see their workings and craft on show. But when I dedicated a bit more extended time to the book and read a few of the stories back to back, they felt much more effective to me, so it is possible I was just being a bit grumpy with the first few as I was also pretty busy when I was reading them. Either way, I really liked many of the later stories (‘Smokers’, ‘Wingfield’, ‘Poaching’, ‘The Liar’, and the title story) and felt the effect to be cumulative. Again, Wolff had a good grip in these on the rhythm of a good short story—when to reveal what, where to leave off—and I hope to try more of his work soon.

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Nonfiction

Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane (2025)

I enjoyed this latest book by Macfarlane, though Underland remains my favourite. In it, Macfarlane earnestly explores the idea of a river being alive in a more literal sense—somehow conscious. The book is split into three sections, each with a river: first Macfarlane journeys to the cloud forests of Ecuador, then to Chennai in India, and finally to north-eastern Quebec. As usual, Macfarlane’s nature writing is gorgeous, and he makes a good case—as good of a case as a man steeped in Western culture can make. I’m quite familiar with some of the scholarship on this topic as it was pretty crucial to my MA dissertation, and I felt that Macfarlane probably didn’t go quite far enough into some of these ideas for me, but it was still an enjoyable read and I can see it having lots of devotees.

Structurally, I think the choice to cover three areas felt a bit unbalanced for me. These sections weren’t long enough to really dig into each individual culture but they were also a little too long to feel you were getting a comprehensive overview of the topic. Much of the narrative was focussed on Macfarlane’s own experiences with trying to make himself feel like a river was an alive thing—it is a reflective and personal narrative in this sense which may variously suit or irritate some readers. But overall, I’ll continue to read whatever he publishes next; I like his blend of disciplines (the sciences and the arts) and his prose is very beautiful.

Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia (2024)

This book peeks behind the curtain of artificial intelligence, and tries to uncover what it truly means to live in this new world alongside it. In it, Murgia talks to people that have to train AI to flag distressing content (mostly by watching hours of it themselves); she talks to women who have had intimate videos made of themselves from pictures they’ve shared online; she talks to doctors in rural India who are finding an AI diagnostics tool helpful for a second opinion in times of dire need; and to mothers who have found their children marked as criminals by an algorithm before they’ve even committed a crime. This was an unnerving and yet unsurprising read for me, and I continue to be skeptical of unregulated and unthinking AI usage—I’ve just read too much sci-fi.

If anything I wanted the book to dive more into the complexities and ins and outs of AI; whilst the narrative mode made it very easy to read, I found myself craving something more. I also felt on the basis of its relative simplicity, that Murgia probably ended up more optimistic about AI than I would be writing the same book. I think this serves as a good introduction to some of the pitfalls of AI, and I’d probably give it to a reader who I think needed it on that basis.

Classics

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)

I first read this as a teenager, which was probably the best time to read it and unreservedly love it, which I did. Coming back to it as an adult, I was shocked by how twisted and dark it really is. This book is full of violence and vitriol, hatred and anger. To describe the plot that’s actually there (rather than the Heathcliff and Cathy plot that has become the focus of our collective memory of this book), you have to describe it as the story of two places—Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange—and two intermingled families across two generations. When Hindley and Catherine Earnshaw are just children, their father brings home an orphan boy: Heathcliff. Over time, his presence in the household causes discontent: Hindley feels that Heathcliff is favoured and bullies him; Catherine is too wild in his presence, and she is eventually packed off to the more sophisticated home of Thrushcross Grange to learn to be a lady. There, she spends time with the two Linton children including Edgar, and thus a love triangle is born. Cue drama on the heath.

It is an odd—and therefore intriguing—novel (where on earth did it come from!?), and it’s so full of symbols and signs that you can interpret it a hundred ways and still spot something new. We had a lot of fun discussing it in book club. But I can’t say I always enjoyed my reading—high drama is not necessarily my preferred mode these days, and I longed for more warmth. Still a worthy read for being so iconic and capturing such a distinctive perspective as Emily Brontë’s.

I have very few expectations of Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation, not least because I wasn’t a big fan of empty gesture Saltburn. It’s clear that it won’t be a particularly accurate rendering, so I’ll watch and judge it for what it is rather than what it isn’t. The problem of the novel is once you cast Heathcliff as attractive, you’ve skewed the audience in favour of him in ways that you can’t necessarily in the world of words that is the novel. In this way, the novel is unfilmable in its true form.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868)

I read this as a child and thought it was twee nonsense, and whilst I wasn’t exactly wrong, I feel more generous in my old age. First of all, I’m more partial to twee nonsense these days, and I read this in just the right moment for Books on Film—tired after a long year and in a very busy season. It was nice to immerse myself in the lives of the March sisters for a time and the pages flew by.

I also was more interested in the book as a cultural artefact than I was aged ten—shocker! I was interested in the role its played in American literature and its contribution to what it meant to be a woman in the States at this very formative time; by the ways in which it espouses some pretty progressive views of womanhood alongside some very conservative ones; how it differs from British or European writing for young people contemporary to it. And whilst there were moments which were overly moralising—and we can wonder how much Alcott had to alter or include for her publishers rather than herself—there were others where I did wonder if this was the first time some womanly thing like this had been depicted in literature. And so its relationship to realism is interesting—on the one hand it is highly romanticised and on the other it feels like it does something unusual for its time. Its impact on the way we write about, say, sisterly relationships is probably difficult to quantify. In conclusion: a fun reread.

Reflective and Literary

Lila by Marilynne Robinson (2014)

In Gilead, we meet John Ames, an elderly pastor living in a small town. Feeling that he is nearing the end of his life, Ames pens letters to his young son, which form the structure of the book. In them, Ames tells his son something of his heritage and the life Ames has led up until now, though he gets distracted at points by the reappearance of his friend’s son Jack (whose family is the focus of the second novel, Home). Ames’s own son is the product of a late marriage to a woman probably half his age; naturally this was the cause of a fair amount of intrigue in Gilead.

And so, in this third book in the series, Robinson delves into the backstory of John Ames’s wife Lila, telling us how she came to be in this small town and marry a man twice her age. We already knew from the previous books that her prior life was somewhat troubled, and this book confirms that; the opening scene depicts Lila being essentially abducted from her home by a kindly lodger who sees her being mistreated. Lila’s new guardian, Doll, is fearful that her crime will be discovered, and keeps them on the road for much of Lila’s young life.

The previous instalment, Home, I found to be a little overlong, though still filled with Robinson’s deft characterisation and a deep humanity. I think this one had structural issues, too. Whilst I am not one to demand linearity from my books per se, this book seemed to fumble some of its more impactful moments by moving back and forth between various timelines too much. It felt like being in a strange dream, which was somewhat effective in itself, but also like it didn’t serve Lila’s story too well, nor Robinson’s purpose with it. It was often repetitive in un-rhythmic ways, and I felt like it slipped into too Biblical a parlance for me. And in many ways I feel like it detracts from rather than adds to the story of John Ames; I’m not sure what exactly the basis of their relationship is, and I felt more confused after this novel rather than less.

I always feel inclined to defend Robinson—she’s just one of those authors for me. I go on loving her even if I don’t love each individual work; I admire her somehow. Some good: the opening scene of this novel will stay with me. I think it was nigh on perfect, and I wish she had continued in this vein (and in a linear fashion) through Lila’s life. Indeed, I wonder if Robinson’s towering reputation sometimes prevents her from being more rigorously edited. Anyway, ultimately I think it’s an interesting example (for me) of a character who perhaps should have remained something of a mystery. I move forward to the final novel, Jack, with some trepidation. Perhaps it’s just time to reread Gilead.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)

This was my third read of this book—highly unusual for me. But I returned to it for Books on Film in October. The novel has a special place in my heart, for it was probably one of the first I read that showed me you could write both a ‘literary’ novel and one that borders on the speculative. The book is narrated by Cathy, a longtime ‘carer’ soon to become a patient herself. What does this mean? Well, you’d have to read it and see (and much of the fun—if you can call it that—is in the reveal).

The first (and often most memorable) part of the novel covers Cathy’s experiences at Hailsham, in many ways the epitome of the English boarding school—though its seemingly innocuous facade belies a more sinister underlying purpose. These golden days of childhood and the bonds formed there between Cathy and two of her fellow students, Ruth and Tommy, cast a kind of fading glow over the subsequent parts of the book.

Things I was particularly struck by this time: Ishiguro’s depiction of childhood games and the close relationship between Ruth and Cathy felt very visceral and accurate—unusual for a male author. The transitions and voice of Cathy at times felt a little clunkier than I would prefer, which I think probably speaks to my having read a lot more books since the first and second times I read this. Still, there is something about the atmosphere at Hailsham, Cathy’s voice, the dynamic of the three friends, and the underlying concept of the novel that I find so captivating, and so it retains its special status for me.

The Children of Men by P. D. James (1992)

This book is a hot mess. An interesting concept and a maddening execution, but one I couldn’t help enjoy so I could flag its myriad faults.

No children have been born worldwide for twenty-five years. Protagonist Theo is cousin to the ‘Warden of England’—essentially a despot. Theo spends the first few chapters telling us about his childhood, his marriage, his relationship to this all-important cousin . . . the usual stuff for a first-person narrator. But alarm bells started ringing when the novel switched to third-person after these first few chapters with no real justification. No ‘and now I end my diary entry’. No nothing. And then it continued to switch back and forth sporadically throughout with no real signposting or structure.

The book is neither a good character study nor a proper examination of what a childless world might look like. I think it’s making an attempt to be the former, but extremely poorly. The story gets sidetracked multiple times. It finally gets going about two-thirds of the way through.

As I say, quite entertaining for those of us who read to see how a novel works, because here is an excellent example of a novel which has so much potential . . . and then goes sideways. It’s also not a bad story, but it’s just a story where you’re likely to ask why on earth did she choose to write this and not that?

We read this for Books on Film, also, and the film is miles better at exploring the actual premise of the book. Apparently Cuarón didn’t read the book, and I don’t blame him!

In Brief

Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake – Of course I had to mention this. Ran a slow read of this here on Substack and what can I say about this book? It’s indescribably good, so much so that I’ve made literally hours of audio about it. Catch up and join us for the next book, Gormenghast?
The Saga of the People of Laxardal translated from Old Icelandic by Keneva Kunz – Continued my saga journey with this one! Stands out a little from some of the others for its strong female characters. High stakes family feuds and a lot of fun. I read it over too long a time period so kept getting lost with the profusion of characters (this is one of the sagas that concentrates on a whole community and boy, does it feel like it), but enjoyable nonetheless.
Street Cop by Robert Coover – Very cool little press Isolarii released this story of Robert Coover’s with art by Art Spiegelman. First of all, it’s just a nice object to hold (picture below). But the story was fun, too. About a street cop in a futuristic dystopian city who ends up . . . shall we say disgraced? Noir-ish setting, pulpy vibes (especially with the pictures). More intrigued by Robert Coover’s work now (anybody read any?) and will continue to read an Isolarii release now and again.
Spent by Alison Bechdel – Perfectly serviceable graphic novel from Bechdel who has realised essentially legendary status in the genre. Some good jokes about what it means to be an author working today (featuring a fictionalised version of Bechdel), but think you’d have to be familiar with her prior work (especially on Dykes to Watch Out For) to really enjoy this. Generally felt it to be a little surfacey.
The Zebra Stood in the Night by Kerry Hardie – Poetry from Irish writer Hardie. The poems about grief after the death of her brother at the end of the collection were particularly moving. Others were variously impactful, but I would definitely consider reading more from Hardie.
The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman – Listened to this in preparation for reading the latest (and final!) instalment of The Book of Dust. Narrated by Michael Sheen and I honestly had the best time; he does a fantastic job with this. So much so I could probably put it in my top reads of 2025 on that alone. Enjoyed this even more than the first time around, partly because I knew what to expect (the first time I read it I was hoping for more Lyra). I enjoyed the slow build-up to the flood, and the change in atmosphere that it foments.

Thanks so much for reading! I’ll be back in a day or so with my top reads of the year.

In the meantime . . .

Though I should note, beyond these references it is not overtly Gothic in feel or tone!

And I may be running a slow read for this one later this year—stay tuned for announcements!

I reread this for my How to Read and Analyse a Novel course last year.

August and September 2025 Reading Review

Jessie Lethaby — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 10:03:04 GMT

Welcome to one of my reading round-up posts, where I take stock and review everything I read over the course of the last month or two! I read widely across many genres, with a particular focus on literary and speculative fiction alongside some classics (and the occasional dose of nonfiction, too). With these I’m hoping to shed some light on backlist gems, perhaps push you to read outside your genre comfort zone, and also highlight which new releases are worth your time.

I’ve often barely put the finishing touches on one of these monthly round-ups before I feel I need to start writing the next, which is why I decided to combine August and September’s posts. We’ll see if this approach works or not moving forward, because now I feel daunted by the sheer amount of books we are covering today. I’ll try and keep it snappy (famous last words).

Both August and September were pretty good, reading-wise. A few that I particularly enjoyed, many that I thought had merit, and few duds. Still, I’ve found myself getting stuck in books again lately, which is a pattern I’d quite like to be free from, as it’s draining my reading enthusiasm.

Watershed by Percival Everett (1996)

Robert Hawks is a hydrologist sheltering from the storm of his ex-girlfriend in the mountains of Colorado, when he becomes unexpectedly embroiled in a conspiracy regarding the local Native American reservation’s water rights which has left two FBI men dead. Interwoven with this main narrative are two others: Robert’s recollections of his childhood during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and the strange family dynamics of the aforementioned girlfriend.

This is a quietly complex book. You could breeze through its two hundred pages in an afternoon, and you’d likely have a pretty good time. The narrative beats are all there, and Everett’s penchant for the big storyline (this novel has a particular resonance with Telephone which also goes to unusually dramatic places for a literary novel), plus his smooth narration style, will make you feel like you’re in the hands of someone that can write a solid novel. You might be somewhat put out by the depiction of the ‘crazy’ ex-girlfriend Karen, and wonder why she’s there at all. And then you’d set it aside and move on with your life.

But there’s more here than meets the eye, and that, for me, is the brilliance of Everett’s work. He can write something genuinely enjoyable and novel-y, but make no mistake—every decision here is made deliberately to serve the overarching narrative arc and themes. We had a good time with this one in book club, digging beneath that smooth exterior to see how and why Everett might have made some of the choices he did. To get the most out of it, I recommend this kind of approach. I also think Everett is one of those novelists whose work becomes richer the more of it you read. As you come to understand some of his signatures, you can also better appreciate how masterful he is at what he does. All I’m looking for in life is a novel I can both enjoy on a story level, and find layers of meaning in when I choose to take a second look. This novel certainly did that for me.

The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey

It’s a question I think about often. If we admit that there are powerful fictions working in the world, many of them harmful—religious, political, or otherwise—what does that mean for those of us who work with fiction professionally? Professional fiction-makers or consumers. What are our fictions saying about us, even if we recognise that they are not real? (Last year I had a panic that my love for fiction was fundamentally morally corrupt in some way. Thankfully I’m past that particular crisis.)

By exploring her childhood faith and her (manipulated) devotion to an abusive ex, Catherine Lacey explores this question in her own unique way. What role does fiction play in her own life—why does she write it? And is it somehow related to her desire for the transformative power of fiction (religious or relative) in her real life? What can her own fiction tell her about her life? The ongoing dilemma of how much one should read the author’s life into their works (especially when it comes to ‘controversial’ authors) makes this experiment of particular interest.

She does this by combining both fiction and nonfiction and placing them back to back in a single volume. You can start at either side of the book, ending up in the middle both ways—just like life, which has no real ending, at least while we’re living it. She explores the toxic relationship whose breakup is the catalyst to a year or so of self-discovery, leading Lacey through various friends’ apartments and a confrontation with her ability to write fiction (which she can’t or doesn’t want to do during this period). Her realisation that she had placed her faith in a man who didn’t deserve it leads her back to reminiscing about her childhood as an extremely devout Christian. She asks herself what drives her towards these worlds that she feels are essentially fictions, and how that might have influenced her career today.

I read the nonfiction first, and though I know the whole schtick of the book is that you can read it from either side . . . I have to say, based on anecdotal evidence I have gathered, that this is the more rewarding way to read it. That way, when I came to the fiction, I could see how it acts as a funhouse mirror to the memoir half of the narrative, and particularly interesting was the way the symbols and motifs from the nonfiction turned up unexpectedly in the fiction. It reminds you, all too clearly, that the ‘nonfiction’ side of the story is, too, a deliberate construction.

Overall this was an impressive and often moving book, and one that speaks to many of the topics that seem to be preoccupying inquiring minds at the moment. For those that look rather skeptically upon organised religion, what do we do with our yearning for unifying fictions, and for a place to put our—dare I say ‘innate’?—spirituality as human beings? And how do we counter harmful fictions on both large and small scales? Approached with characteristic grace by Lacey, I appreciated seeing an artist struggle with her craft in such a creative and public way (though it was undoubtedly a painful process for her). I imagine that the writing of this will deepen whatever she writes next, and I’m glad I got to witness a small slice of it.

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Carol by Patricia Highsmith

Highsmith had published Strangers on a Train to critical acclaim and a Hitchcock adaptation in 1950, the first of what would become her signature psychological thrillers. Her second novel, Carol (or sometimes, The Price of Salt), was quite different, at least upon first glance. It was a lesbian romance, and her publishers refused it, thinking it career suicide. So she went elsewhere and published it under a pseudonym, only allowing it to be re-released under her own name in the 90s. In the meantime, it had become an underground hit, with the paperback selling nearly one million copies in the United States alone when it came out in 1953. As Val McDermid writes in her Foreword to one recent edition, this was sort of a first at the time: “A novel that addressed a relationship between two women with seriousness, eroticism and classy prose”.

We meet Therese Belivet, an aspiring set designer who has taken a temporary job in the toy department of Frankenberg’s in New York. In walks Carol Aird, a glamorous older woman looking for a doll for her daughter. Some chemistry seems to spark between the two of them, so much so that Therese—using the address on the order form—decides to send Carol a letter. An invitation to lunch follows, which then sets them on a path of romantic entanglement. Carol is in the midst of a divorce from a husband who is willing to use their daughter as a bargaining chip, and faces some unthinkable choices for trying to live an authentic life as a lesbian woman, and retain her rights as a mother.

The hallmarks of a psychological thriller are here (moreso than in the film adaptation by Todd Haynes from 2015). We exist tightly in Therese’s point of view, to the point where any indication of who Carol truly is seems lost to us. Instead, we experience Therese’s insecurities over whether her love is truly reciprocated, and her naivety in the face of this more experienced (and richer) older woman. Refreshingly, especially for the time, neither character agonises over her sexuality, leaving room for Highsmith to pursue different narrative ends. Overall I was really impressed with it. We know I’m wary of romances, but Highsmith’s take was engaging and necessarily complex, and I found myself keen to read another of her books as soon as I closed it.

I mention the film because I read this for a new monthly event I’m holding called Books on Film here in London, where we explore books and their film adaptations. Luckily for me, this was an interesting one to begin with, where some very particular choices were made as to how to present their story onscreen versus in the book. Our next event is on Wednesday 15^th October at the Chiswick Cinema to discuss Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro with a screening of its film adaptation of the same name by Mark Romanek. We’ll be meeting from 6pm for introductions and to discuss the book (optional), followed by the screening at 7:30 and a short discussion afterwards of the film and how it compares. Tickets are here if you’d like to join.

Frog by Mo Yan, translated from Mandarin by Howard Greenblatt (2009)

Narrator Tadpole is growing up in a rural community in Shandong Province, China. If you read the blurb of this novel—and you believe Tadpole himself—he is writing about his aunt Gugu, who established herself as the foremost midwife in the area until she finds herself enforcing the One Child Policy to often brutal effect. And admittedly it is about Gugu, but the book is also about Tadpole and his inertia in the face of the conflict whipping through his community. It’s also about the community at large, and many of its—often eccentric—inhabitants.

This is a fascinating and sometimes uncomfortable book. To get around the censors, Mo Yan had to approach the topic of the One Child Policy in a roundabout way (though I don’t think it’s hard to see it as a critique, no matter how many qualifying elements are added), and the way he has to manipulate his narrator and storyline to do so shows a difficult and complex dance. One that he seems very familiar with—he is a controversial figure in not being more outspoken in his criticisms of the Communist Party in China, and yet he has penned a book like this one.

There is no doubt that Mo Yan is a man who knows his craft—one minute we think we’re reading a piece of realism, only for it to slip into something more insidious and slippery. As you move through the novel, it becomes increasingly ‘staged’—the theatre comes to play an important role—and the full weight of the choice of frogs and tadpoles as a metaphor becomes almost grotesque. It is strange and sometimes unwieldy, but always interesting, and I definitely recommend. I’d be keen to read more of his work.

Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth, translated from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund (2016)

Bergljot has cut herself off from her parents due to the trauma they inflicted on her as a child and their staunch refusal to take any ownership of it. However, a stint in hospital for her mother and an argument over the inheritance of two summer cabins draws her inexorably back into the fraught family dynamic, leading her deeper and deeper into a spiral of anxiety and fear.

Bergljot’s voice is claustrophobic and her thoughts become repetitive as she goes round and round in circles—no doubt a nod to verisimilitude, an attempt to portray the ways these experiences continue to interfere with her life. Of particular interest is Bergljot’s sister, a character who seems to be conciliatory, neutral, just trying to exist in the middle—but who nonetheless seems to re-traumatise Bergljot in her insistence the family stays in touch.

The novel is really strong in portraying these entangled family dynamics, and the use of the inheritance—the idea of monetary retribution for childhood trauma—was an interesting one. I enjoyed exploring some of these elements with book club. But I admit this is not my kind of book. I think I can just outright conclude that these internal monologue novels that attempt to show ‘accurately’ a character in an anxiety loop or having a breakdown of some kind generally just don’t quite work for me. I get that the point is to be one note, but I can’t help finding it a bit one note. If nothing else, I’d have liked to see Bergljot having to carry on life beyond and outside this storyline, just for a bit of balance. I think because of the way she is presented (in that daily life does carry on for her generally), it would have been good to see her in some of these other environments to add a different dynamic to the piece. Anyway, as I said in this newsletter, it might be a good one to compare to Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (an approach I can’t help but prefer).

Free Day by Inès Cagnati, translated from French by Liesl Schillinger (1973)

Galla is cycling home from her boarding school to surprise her mother, who longs for her to stay home and help with Galla’s many sisters and the endless housework. They live on a stony farm in Southwestern France, and her father is a cold and difficult man who is unable to provide much for his family. As Galla performs this round trip, she contemplates her short life so far, in all its difficulty and pain.

Her narration is direct and intense, providing us with a clear sense of Galla and who she is—a perpetual outsider at school, but with an innate resilience and pride in the face of hardship. Cagnati—who herself grew up in France in not dissimilar circumstances; the daughter of Italian immigrants, and a perpetual outsider—weaves into Galla’s narration some stark imagery that help add a dash of the unreal to the world, and bring it out of getting too bogged down in this internal monologue. Whilst in theory Cagnati’s pared back style should have appealed to me, for some reason I couldn’t love this book. Perhaps I wanted just a touch more of a thematic thread through the novel beyond some of the disparate images it touches upon. I didn’t feel like it was an entirely whole thing. Why portray Galla like this, and not some other way—what drives the urgency of her characterisation? Nonetheless, I would recommend it to the right reader.

Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis (1956)

In this, Lewis’s last novel (and the one he considered his most mature work), he retells the story of Cupid and Psyche as told in Apuleius’s The Golden Ass. Luckily (as you will see) I had very recently read the Cupid and Psyche story, so it was foremost in my mind as I read this novel. Unluckily, I didn’t like this book all that much.

In it Lewis tells the story of one of Psyche’s older sisters Orual, who in the original story is portrayed as a jealous harpy. Here she is a powerful, obsessive woman, whose love for Psyche overwhelms her in disastrous ways.

I often have this problem with novels where an author has taken some original much shorter myth and extrapolated it to a full-length book. There wasn’t enough here to provide a really solid foundation. The first parts where the girls were children were strong in atmosphere, and some of the moral dilemmas that Lewis explores were pretty interesting. But then it keeps going . . . and going. I read it in a staggered, halting way, which I don’t think helped. But Lewis adopts a formal, high style which sort of works but also sort of keeps us at arms length—I never really wanted to pick it up. And finally, it becomes so heavy-handed in its message in the latter part that I was left rolling my eyes. It completely undermined any of the interesting work done in the first part, to the point where I thought the novel was demonstrating some sort of schism in his own belief system.

This is a bit of a beloved book in certain corners of Substack at the moment but it wasn’t for me at all. It reminded me of Le Guin’s Lavinia, which had a similar problem (though thankfully hers was not so didactic).

The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, translated from French by Mattias Ripa and Black Ferriss (2000)

As you may know, I’m trying to read more graphic novels (and also find great examples of the kind of graphic novel that might appeal to the more ‘literary’ reader). I decided to start with some of the iconic texts just to see what was considered a ‘good’ work of this kind that had somehow snuck around the graphic novel blockade and become critically acclaimed more widely.

This was an interesting and engaging memoir about Marjane Satrapi’s experiences growing up before, during, and after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. I remember my dad taking me to see the film version of this when it came out in 2007, and the stark black-and-white illustrations have stayed with me since then. Marjane grows up in an upper-middle-class family who are no strangers to a demonstration, attacking the Shah of Iran’s regime as well as being resistant to the encroaching religious extremism after his overthrow that marked the Revolution. She is eventually sent away to Vienna to study, where she continues with her Western-style education and struggles to fit in.

Overall this was a good read, where Satrapi strikes a good balance of humour and the darker elements of her story. I don’t know that the book is doing anything particular radical with the form or message, but it’s an engaging read nonetheless. But if I’m trying to find graphic novels that are truly great, and especially perhaps do something that a novel can’t do—as in, makes the best use of the art and words together—I don’t think this is a total standout.

Couldn’t resist using this old cover, with which I am mildly obsessed

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich (1984)

I read this as part of my attempt to read Erdrich’s entire backlist (good luck to me). I love The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, which is a later novel in the Love Medicine series. This is the first, and it was also Erdrich’s debut. And boy, does it show.

Nowhere in evidence is Erdrich’s distinctive authorial voice, at least the one I’ve experienced so far—the voice that is lyrical yet straightforward, heartfelt and yet gently mocking of her eccentric cast. Instead it is overwrought and giddily ‘poetic’ to the point where it’s difficult to understand quite what she’s doing or what her aims are, and it then becomes very weighed down by its own self-importance. It was originally a book of short stories I think (?) that was then morphed into a novel. To be honest I couldn’t even see it as stories, the whole thing was that disorganised. Its saving grace was of course getting the backstory to some of the characters we later meet.

I’m willing to forgive all for it being a debut. I’m hoping The Beet Queen might be a step in the right direction. A very interesting example of an author that tried out this kind of purple prose who later abandoned it for something more straightforward. So on that front, I’m glad to have read it. Maybe there’s hope for Ocean Vuong yet! (I kid. Kinda.)

The Golden Ass by Apuleius, translated from Latin by E. J. Kenney (158)

This year I seem to have accidentally embarked on a project of reading more classical literature. And I’m also on a perennial journey of learning more about the history of the novel and the form itself. So this Roman ‘novel’ in Latin naturally made its way onto my list. I ended up listening to this over a fairly long period of time, which wasn’t too disruptive because there are lots of nested stories within the larger one (and the narration by David Timson in the Naxos version is truly excellent). The overarching tale is about Lucius, who has travelled to a different town on business. Whilst there, he gets romantically entangled with a serving girl, Photis, in his host’s household. Through her, he discovers that the wife of his host is a witch, and transforms herself regularly into a bird. Intrigued, Lucius asks Photis to help him transform into a bird, only the spell goes wrong and she accidentally turns him into an ass. What follows is a bunch of tomfoolery, as Lucius-as-ass is variously stolen, bought or traded through various different owners, coming across many stories along the way—one of which, of course, is the Cupid and Psyche story.

This was fun, it was silly, it was a real ride from start to finish. Like much ancient literature, it felt simultaneously familiar and also strangely alien at times. And it was interesting to see what a ‘novel’ from this time period might look like. Recommended to all with an interest in this kind of thing.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G. K. Chesterton (1904)

I’ve rarely liked some singular passages of a book so much and yet also found the book as a whole so deeply painful to haul myself through. This seems an especially startling achievement given it’s only 150 pages long. Published in 1904, it is about the 1980s London of the future (which doesn’t seem to have changed too much in material ways). In this timeline, London has become a boring, drab, bureaucratic place, almost mechanised in its daily automation. Enter Auberon Quinn. He experiences a strange awakening which causes him to become a satirist of sorts, cracking absurd jokes and pursuing absurd ends. He injects some whimsy and strangeness back into this grey London with his odd antics.

The new governing system in the future Britain is not unlike the one Riz Ahmed proffers in this recent Subway Take. Democracy, in this logic, often ends up at despotism, so why not choose a random despot by lottery rather than vote for someone who has specifically chosen the route of power? How can it be worse, the book asks? Well, it can be surprising, because Auberon Quinn is chosen to be the next King of England. He uses his new role to make each of the London boroughs take on a personality of their own again, and sets them against each other, hoping for war. Little does he know, with all his jesting, he has in fact inspired one person: Adam Wayne. Wayne is a true Romantic; he is going to defend his little part of Notting Hill until he dies. Suddenly, the character of Quinn’s whole sovereignty has changed.

This is required reading for all the Romantics of Substack, that’s for sure. But the mere fact that this novel, written over one hundred years ago, might also be about the same sorts of things we are talking about today—how to inject that Romantic sense of the sublime into our mechanised daily lives—shows perhaps that these worries are not new at all, at least in the Western world. The book naturally has a relationship with a form of nationalism (though this tied to London boroughs) which we might want to complicate, especially written by Chesterton and especially written in 1904. (This might make us think a bit more about the relationship of Romanticism and nationalism or conservatism, but that’s a discussion for another day.) But it’s its discussion of childish whimsy and ‘Faerie’ that feel surprising and interesting, even today. I read this because it forms an important epigraph in John Crowley’s Little, Big, which we finished a slow read for a few weeks ago, and so naturally I was going to be taken with this theme (which is also a key tenet of Crowley’s novel). And the final chapter has continued to linger in my mind long after closing the book. If I had a commonplace book, I’d be copying out a fair few quotes there.

But this was Chesterton’s debut, and it shows. The plot is convoluted, repetitive, and unclear. The prose trips over itself at times. Still, I’m glad to have read it.

Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson (1998)

This is a bit of a speculative cult classic, and I’ve been meaning to read it for a long time. In post-apocalyptic Toronto, Ti-Jeanne, a new mother to a baby boy, must find a way to reconcile her new role with the powers that begin to make themselves apparent in her daily life—powers that enable her to see people’s deaths, and access the world of spirits and gods. Hopkinson draws on Afro-Caribbean folklore to create her speculative world, in ways that I think were pretty fresh for 1998 when this audacious debut first came out. I also thought it was surprising and refreshing to see a breastfeeding mother take on a protagonist role in a fairly plotty novel here; I can’t think of many books in this genre that do that.

Whilst I’m glad to have finally read this, in reality it felt very much like a debut, and though Hopkinson had a good grasp of pacing and storytelling, there were things that fell by the wayside (namely character work). I don’t think it’ll be a particularly memorable read for me, and I admit I find it frustrating that her best-known work remains this debut—presumably because of the novelty of its subject matter at the time—rather than what are presumably her more mature works (at least that’s what I sense from a bit of research). I’ll definitely be trying something else of hers in the future, but I wouldn’t say this one is a must read unless you are interested in the wider context surrounding its publication.

The Map of the World by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (2023)

This collection was unlike any other poetry I’ve read this year. The poems capture the strange liminal unreality of what being a person can sometimes be by drawing on historical and mythical references. Some of the poems focus on the lives of those long dead, whose small traces might still be found—their humanity coming through in the smallest of moments. I didn’t understand what was happening in half of them, and yet I could still feel the way Ní Chuilleanáin had captured that part of our lives which feels both unknowable and deeply familiar. The thing that makes us feel we are more than just a bunch of chemical reactions, that there is something more, something mystical, about our existence. I loved them!

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June and July 2025 Reading Review

Jessie Lethaby — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 11:00:44 GMT

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Welcome to one of my reading round-up posts, where I take stock and review everything I read over the course of the last month! I read widely across many genres, with a particular focus on literary and speculative fiction alongside some classics (and the occasional dose of nonfiction, too). With these I’m hoping to shed some light on backlist gems, perhaps push you to read outside your genre comfort zone, and also highlight which new releases are worth your time.

The first thing I wrote for today’s post was: I’ve not had a successful summer of reading. I was stuck in a long book I felt ambivalent about for a while (hence why there was no post in June), and I read a number of short novels that did nothing for me. But then I listed out the books I’ve read, and I realised there were quite a few I’d recommend to the right reader. The duds have clearly loomed large in my memory, and I suppose most of the ones I still recommend haven’t really lit me on fire. Either way, I seem to be coming out the other side of this dispiriting run—but be prepared for some negative energy today.

Before we get into the books, I just wanted to alert you to a few things. I’m currently running a slow read of John Crowley’s remarkable Little, Big with daily podcast-style posts covering a few pages of the novel. It has been a saving grace through some of this less-inspiring reading, and I’ve been so thrilled at the response. You can take it at your own pace whenever you’d like. Introductory material is here, and the first three posts are available to listen to for free, starting here.

Second, I currently have some space for manuscript editing work (more on this soon). You can contact me here; I am offering various services including manuscript assessments, developmental editing, and copyediting.

Finally, we are reading Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth (translated by Charlotte Barslund) for Women in Translation month in book club. More details can be found here.

The one I highly recommend: this month’s featured book

Gathering Evidence by Martin MacInnes (2020)

You meet a book from time to time that seems to typify your taste (or one part of your taste, at least), and this is one of those for me. This novel is going to have a somewhat limited pool of fans, but if you like it, you’ll really like it.

One foggy morning, John drops his wife Shel at the airport. The roads are eerily quiet, but it’s chaos when they get to the airport; all the planes are grounded. Shel is determined to make it onto a flight—she’s been offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to observe one of the last populations of bonobo chimpanzees on earth. Two members of the precious troop have died in mysterious circumstances, and the authorities want experts to go and investigate. The park the animals live in is no longer open to the public (supposedly to preserve its fragile ecosystem), and is owned and administered by a mining conglomerate under the guise of ‘Westenra Ecology and Biodiversity Group’. Shel’s determination pays off, and after a quick hug and kiss, she makes it onto a flight. John is anxious in the ensuing days, and decides to visit the site of the house they’re building nearby.

When he gets there, he is attacked by something unknown, and wakes up in a strangely blank house with no memory of either the cause of his extensive injuries or his life up to this point. He is urged to stay there by a doctor that visits him once a day, and he has access to no means of communication. Shel, meanwhile, is making her way through the jungle to track and observe these bonobos. She is plagued by nausea, and the feeling that something is stalking (or hunting) both her research group and the animals themselves.

One of the best things about this novel is its uncanny, eerie atmosphere. I’ve rarely been so genuinely frightened by a book. But it is couched in the sort of cerebral idiom you’ll be familiar with if you’ve read MacInnes’s novel In Ascension. There is a submerged, distanced quality to the writing that will alienate some readers and delight others (me). MacInnes covers everything from the searing irony and yet unsurprising inevitability of a mining conglomerate running a nature reserve in our late capitalist hellscape, to the networks of fungi that underlie the forest, the interconnectedness of all things, and the ways we slide into deeper and deeper entanglement with the tech we rely on.

This last is explored directly in the opening chapter, which touches on neither John, nor Shel, nor any other specific character. Instead, it is akin to a short story about something called “Nest”: “The concept was simple: the user donated data and the app displayed the pattern. The data came from the users’ phones, tracking movement.” Over time, users begin to see a pattern that seems to sum up the very core of their being, their every thought and feeling encapsulated in micro-fluctuations in their “Nest”, prompted by every single one of their movements, some of which are minute and otherwise unconscious. It’s a brilliant chapter that demonstrates MacInnes’s inimitable intelligence, and discovering what links it to the main narrative is one of the pleasures of the novel.

Does the book very occasionally slip into overly self-serious territory, whereby some of its theorising becomes almost ridiculous? Probably. Though one could argue it’s part of the characterisation of our strange protagonists. Still, overall MacInnes is able to keep a grip on the reality of the novel just enough to prevent it from slipping out of the reader’s understanding entirely.

The book will frustrate readers who look for answers on a plot level (though I think at least a few are hidden in the text itself). Mysteries abound, and much is left to the reader to figure out (or ponder). Even for those who liked In Ascension, this book is another level of abstract, and is much more horror-inflected, though it still bears the marks of some of MacInnes’s enduring interests. It reminded me in parts of Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer; at others of Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker. The two books are entirely different in style (Beauman’s is satirical and humorous), but both encapsulate something of our modern world and our relationship to the nonhuman, in all of its contradictory madness.

For the right reader: the books I still recommend

The White Bear by Henrik Pontoppidan (1887; 2025), translated from Danish by Paul Larkin

This volume comprises two stories by Danish Nobel Laureate Henrik Pontoppidan, who is best known for his novel Lucky Per (recently re-released by NYRB as A Fortunate Man). The first is the title story, ‘The White Bear’. It describes the life of eccentric priest Thorkild Müller who—due to his unpopularity—is essentially banished to a remote post in Greenland to convert the locals. Whilst there, however, he becomes a member of the Inuit community he has been tasked to enlighten, converted in turn to their way of life. When he returns to Denmark, he cuts a controversial figure, and his fellow priests embark on a plan to disgrace him.

The second story, ‘The Rearguard’ follows a pair of newlyweds in a prolonged stay in Rome. One is the staunchly socialist painter Jørgen Hallager, the other upper-middle-class Ursula Branth. Each hopes to convert the other to their way of thinking: Jørgen hoping to turn Ursula into the kind of woman who will enjoy his social realist paintings of the backstreets of Rome, Ursula hoping to help Jørgen appreciate the high art of the Renaissance with which they are surrounded.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first story, for both its brilliant descriptions of the peculiar Müller, but also its beautiful rendering of Greenland’s dramatic landscape. It was a nice companion piece to my reading of the sagas this year, so I was predisposed to like it.

As for ‘The Rearguard’, whilst I appreciated Pontoppidan’s careful and nuanced portrayal of these two characters’ political opinions (neither one is entirely successful narratively), I found it a bit of a slog. This isn’t a story interested in truly establishing the intimate relationship between these two, and it is melodramatic throughout. This is clearly a deliberate stylistic choice, but I found myself weary of the dynamic between the two characters quite quickly. A worthy read that explores the political balance that Pontoppidan kept in his own life, perhaps, but not a particularly compelling one, at least for this reader.

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The Bell at Sealey Head by Patricia McKillip (2008)

At the end of every day in the coastal town of Sealey Head, as the sun slips into the sea, a bell can be heard ringing. The strange thing is, the sound corresponds to no real bell in the area. This novel is an untangling of this mystery via the small cast of characters that populate this sleepy town. To say too much more would ruin the gentle unravelling of this story.

McKillip is an author that I find tantalisingly mysterious. I never quite know what she’s up to in her books. They are certainly more thematically complex than your average fantasy novels, and yet they still elude easy interpretation. Unlike many other writers in the genre, she wrote a number of standalones (like this one), all of which clock in at the fairly modest three-hundred-page mark. What is she doing in these small, enclosed worlds? I hope to find out as I read more of her work.

On the surface, this book reads as a fairly charming small-town mystery with a fantastical element. The story seems neat, and yet it isn’t neat. It seems solvable, solved, and yet it isn’t. It is more overtly straightforward than the dreamlike Ombria in Shadow, but I think that’ll only serve to puzzle some readers all the more, especially when it occasionally subverts expectations. I love myself an enigmatic author, and I will continue to update you as I work my way through her novels.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy (2017)

I re-read this novel for book club in July; I first read it not long after it came out, and remembered finding it challenging but ultimately rewarding. I’m happy to report I felt similarly this time, too.

After she won the Booker Prize in 1997 for The God of Small Things, Roy took a lengthy break from fiction-writing, mostly turning her attention to nonfiction, and various activist causes. When she did turn her attention back to fiction with this novel in 2017, her years of activism were inextricable from its content. Here she explores the rise of right-wing populism and Hindu nationalism in India which eventually culminated in the victory of current prime minister Narendra Modi in the 2014 general election. Most prominently, she covers the Gujarat riots of 2002, and the occupation of Kashmir.

She does this by following a small cast of characters; firstly, Anjum, an intersex woman, or Hijra, living in Delhi, and then a selection of students who become embroiled in different sides of the conflict in Kashmir. Anjum’s sections were undoubtedly some of the most compelling; she is a fantastic and charismatic character, and is the glue of the novel. As we move away from her, it can take a moment to establish where exactly we are in the story; there are multiple different perspectives offered, alongside archival material, poetry, journalism. Throughout, it is dense with detail about the political scene in India, which may take those less familiar with it a moment to orientate themselves, also.

Something I was most taken with throughout was the voice; it is lively, often humorous, sometimes satirical—these things are vital in a book which sometimes goes to very dark places. It is also often beautifully lyrical in the way we might expect from the author of The God of Small Things. This voice kept me reading throughout, even in the stickier patches of the book, and provided a window into these characters’ lives and motivations. By the end, we see the seemingly distinct storylines come together into a moving and hopeful conclusion.

Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig (1939), translated from the German by Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt

Austrian author Stefan Zweig certainly seems to be having a moment. A Zweignaissance, if you will. This is the first of his works that I’ve read, and I know it is also somewhat unusual for him, at almost four hundred pages. Young officer Anton Hofmiller commits a gaffe at a glamorous party; he asks his host’s daughter to dance, only to discover she is disabled and unable to walk. His overwhelming anxiety at this impropriety of his, plus his pity for the young woman, leads him down a path which will ultimately besmirch his conscience, and ruin the lives of those around him forever. In modern parlance, he crashes out. Bad.

We are claustrophobically trapped in Hofmiller’s perspective, and the novel is a difficult read because of this, as he oscillates back and forth between various courses of action, only getting himself deeper and deeper into trouble. I can see why Zweig has been called an “anatomist of the heart”; his observational work on the follies of human nature is shrewd and exacting. The language describing the disabled young woman Edith is deeply uncomfortable, but Zweig’s focus here is most definitely on “pity”1 and our self-serving natures, and indeed no one seems to escape blame in their treatment of her.

I appreciated this book more than I enjoyed reading it—it is an intense and infuriating ride, even as it is excruciatingly accurate. I have a feeling I might prefer the reading of his shorter work, and perhaps I would suggest starting elsewhere with Zweig. Nonetheless, I can see why his writing has continued to enthral.

Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing (2020)

I am woefully ignorant when it comes to visual art, but I found Laing’s collection here to be extremely accessible. This volume holds a selection of their writing from the years before the book’s publication: a column they wrote for frieze about art and the modern world, short biographies of twentieth-century artists, essays, book reviews, love letters to their favourite musicians. They write in a lively manner that manages to transfer some of their enthusiasm for art of all kinds to the reader, something that is incredibly hard to do. I found myself inspired, wanting to go to a gallery, wanting to engage with some art—all of this is the indication of well-written criticism.

By far my favourite section was the artists’ biographies. I learnt things; I googled artists I hadn’t heard of before; I enjoyed my whistle-stop tours through their lives and artworks. Almost everything I read here was interesting, though, and it was nice to dip into something unlike what I usually pick up, and something comprised of short morsels I could quickly devour in a busy day. I’m wary of essay collections, as the resulting effect is often a bit vapid and shallow, but I was pleasantly surprised throughout.

Still, does the book warrant its subtitle, and does it meaningfully explore “art in an emergency”; art in a political climate which seems hostile to art? Whilst Laing does touch on it from time to time, it doesn’t really do this in any comprehensive way, but then I wasn’t really expecting it to, as it’s made up of rather disparate materials. Also, if you are already familiar with art criticism and visual art in general, you might not get much out of this. But for me, it was enjoyable and illuminating.

The long one I got stuck in

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell (2019)

Three families come together on the banks of the Zambezi in the early twentieth century; one Italian, one Zambian, one British. We follow three generations of these three families—and their entanglements—as Zambia gains its independence, and moves inexorably towards the future.

There were things to like about this novel, and yet I found myself stuck in it for weeks. I put this partly down to my own irritability; I have lately grown a bit tired of generational stories. It’s a difficult genre to do well—how do you make me care about new generations quickly, often without the narrative space to do so? Not to mention that there are three families here, so the characters just kept on proliferating. I even thought that there wasn’t enough foundational material at the very beginning of the novel to get me invested in the families at the outset; their entanglement is supposedly down to one key moment, but it isn’t entirely convincing, and is passed over quickly and swiftly forgotten. A similar thing happens with the magical realism of the book. It turns up now and then, particularly towards the beginning, but gets lost in the many hundreds of pages, so that you wonder why it was there at all.

The best thing about the novel was the page-long perspectival interpolations of a swarm of mosquitos living in the Zambezi. Here, Serpell shows us some linguistic prowess, and a real sense of voice. And in general there was some astute writing throughout. In the end I concluded that it felt like a very ambitious debut novel, and that it hadn’t all quite come together into a totally compelling book, but that Serpell was a writer I would read more of.

The disappointing sequel

Iron Council by China Miéville (2004)

Miéville’s Bas Lag books are some of my favourites in his oeuvre. Well, at least Perdido Street Station and The Scar are. This final novel in the loosely connected series was disappointing. I knew that it had that reputation amongst Miéville fans but you always hope everyone else is wrong. Sadly, I’m siding with the majority.

We follow a group of revolutionaries trying to overthrow the increasingly totalitarian government in New Crobuzon, set against the backdrop of an interminable war with another neighbouring nation. Some readers take issue with Miéville’s overt political themes in the novel and its commitment to socialism, but that didn’t bother me. What did bother me was the fact that it stubbornly refused to grip me. What is it about the book that made me bounce off it, time and time again? Was it the lack of focus across its various storylines, with no central character charismatic enough to grab my attention? Was the thin storyline just stretched over too many hundreds of pages? I got so frustrated with the book that I stopped even trying to figure out why I didn’t like it. I felt, overall, that Miéville himself did not feel that passionately about this story, or its characters.

There were flashes of Miéville brilliance in here. Namely seeing him take on a Western-adjacent world-build—complete with a fantastical train running through the plains—and putting into words the difficulties of coordinating a revolution against a monolithic force bent on your destruction. But they couldn’t sustain this 600-page tome all by themselves.

The overhyped

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers (2021)

As someone who reads a fair amount of speculative fiction, I’ve heard a lot about Becky Chambers over the years, who seems to be universally beloved. Unfortunately I found this book very disappointing, and in fact, it epitomises some of the trends I really hate in contemporary science fiction. I could probably write hundreds of words about how insidious (and boring) I find this particular brand of ‘cosy’ techno-optimism, but I will spare you for now.

In brief, the book follows a ‘tea-monk’ who is searching for enlightenment (I guess?) and journeys into the wilderness, where they encounter a robot, one of many who became sentient (all of a sudden?) and wandered off into the forests many moons ago. These two ‘characters’ talk about ‘life’ in a manner I can only imagine Chambers thinks is deep and meaningful, but is actually totally superficial and anodyne. The book doesn’t stand up to scrutiny on any level (the world-building, the science, the philosophy, the characterisation, the underlying ideology). I am so sorry to the Chambers fans out there but I actually had to speak my truth on this one. To everyone else, I recommend you skip.

When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà, translated from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem (2019)

On the other end of the spectrum, here is a literary novel I’ve heard many good things about over the years. I really didn’t get on with it. I do get why people would like it, and think that it’s partly a taste thing.

Clouds belly across the sky. They (the clouds) observe—in fact they initiate—the lightning strike that kills the poet-farmer Domènec in the Pyranees, leaving his wife behind to care for their two children and Domènec’s aging father. Each chapter of the novel is written from a different perspective—the clouds, to start. Then the ghosts of witches, the chanterelles Domènec was carrying, local characters, the mountain itself.

I had a number of issues with the book. The first is, once you untangle the plot from this polyphonic maze, it is unfocussed and confused. There are two major events in the book, and it’s unclear which one Solà actually wanted to write about (or maybe she wanted to write about the Spanish Civil War instead, which is also thrown in there). Experimenting with voice and form is one thing, but I’m wary when it feels like it’s covering up some major issue at the heart of the book. Second, the voices of each of these vastly different beings sounded much the same—flowery and lyrical, vague and abstract. Everything is afforded a depth of philosophical meaning which it hasn’t earned—when one of the characters says, “Emotions are more naked up here,” compared to down in Barcelona, I had to roll my eyes. Explore this theme, by all means, but it’ll need to be done in more than one passage. Finally, the translation was pretty grating to me. There was a strange mix of Americanisms and Britishisms that made the novel feel unmoored, and not very Catalan at all.

There were flickers of something more substantial here; as I neared the end of the novel, a more meaningful plot emerged (that had nothing to do with most of the first part). And I was mostly taken by the writing style at first; the clouds, the witches, Domènec’s wife. But from the chanterelles on, I was lost, and slogged through only because the book was so short. Still, the potential I could see lurking here means that I am likely to try her next novel which has just been released in translation, I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness.

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For non-German speakers, it’s worth looking up the differences between the versions of ‘pity’ in German. I wonder how I would have felt if the translators used other words of ours at times, like ‘empathy’.

May 2025 Reading Review

Jessie Lethaby — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 12:02:10 GMT

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Writing these reviews, I’m struck by how many great books I read in May. I started the month with a book I think should be considered a contemporary American classic, Sigrid Nunez’s The Last of Her Kind, and then continued to have fun in New York with Joanna Rakoff’s memoir My Salinger Year. In the second half of the month I read a spate of deeply moving novels, including Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North, and The Life of Rebecca Jones by Angharad Price, which confirmed for me that reading great books is a spiritual activity as much as anything else. Much to recommend—read on!

The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez (2006)

A week after Georgette George arrives at Barnard College in the late sixties, her roommate Ann Drayton blithely reveals that she’d asked to be “paired with a girl from a world as different as possible from her own.” Ann—a privileged young woman from a well-to-do Southern family—is a little disappointed because Georgette isn’t… well, Black. And thus begins Sigrid Nunez’ 2006 novel The Last of Her Kind, a novel which, amongst other things, explores the ideological extremes of the late sixties and early seventies.

In her own mind, Ann means well. She is a belligerent activist, for whom even the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) is fundamentally flawed, driven as it is by privileged young people like herself. Throughout the novel, she works consistently against her own interests, even when the effect seems only to maintain an ideological purity rather than to instigate any material change in the lives of the marginalised. It becomes clear that much of Ann’s fire comes from a place of deep shame and self-hatred, but in repudiating wholesale all she came from, she ends up fetishising the poor and oppressed classes in ways that are sometimes uncomfortable, at other times downright harmful. I don’t know how this read in 2006, but this kind of person is rather familiar to any of us who have followed certain strains of online activism from the past fifteen years or so.

Is Ann the last of her kind, then? Not really. Much of the novel seems to be Nunez trying to figure out Ann and people like her (she makes reference to similar historical figures, like Simone Weil and St Teresa de Ávila). Does it matter if your activism comes from a place of shame? Is it less effective, and why? Can anyone be radically honest with themselves in the way Ann seems to be, or is there always something hidden, lurking, in one’s motivations? Is ideological purity important, or can it be counterproductive? How can a privileged person meaningfully engage in this kind of politics? What happens when someone is—in a broad sense—right about something, and yet their ideas also seem to feed into a destructive mental health problem? Ann isn’t delusional, exactly, but neither does she seem entirely healthy. And if she does make some small difference in the world, where might we find it?

One can imagine this kind of novel being pretty ham-fisted in its attempt to carefully peel back all these layers. But Nunez avoids many of the pitfalls by picking the perfect narrator. Whilst Georgette doesn’t perfectly fulfil Ann’s roommate criteria, she’s still quite different from Ann in that she is from a working-class background and has had a difficult childhood. She’s never really interested in politics, and instead pursues a fairly comfortable life in New York. Still, Georgette is drawn back to Ann and thoughts of Ann, even as the two women grow estranged after college.

For some readers Georgette feels under-characterised and strangely blank. She’s our narrator, and yet we find things out about her almost incidentally, and many of the major events of her life are quickly glossed over. Yet I find her to be the perfect vehicle for this story. She is empathetic towards Ann (especially when she does something extremely drastic about midway through the novel), and her empathy allows us to maintain that careful, almost impossible, balance; we don’t have to agree with Ann, but Georgette can (and Nunez knows just when to introduce a dissenting voice). Too much characterisation of Georgette would get in the way; we might have to judge her more harshly for her continued identification with Ann, for example. This, to me, is the perfect use of a first-person narrator.

In many ways this feels like a very literary book, both in content (via Georgette’s succession of jobs in New York), and in style. Our narrator is more of a literary character than she is a supposedly psychologically real person (and is almost certainly a riff off Nick Carraway of The Great Gatsby); she embodies what it means to be the lens and voice of a novel, not of life.

This dynamic between Ann and Georgette is the driving force in the book, but Nunez covers so much here in ways that make for a wholly satisfying reading experience. She paints a picture not just of the protest generation, but also of the simultaneous advent of the hippie and free love movement through Georgette’s sister’s experiences (a perfect foil to Ann). Nunez is adept at bringing this particular period to life (just look at all the Goodreads reviews from those who were young during the 60s and 70s). As I mentioned, it’s also a nostalgic trip down memory lane to literary New York, complete with criticism of criticism. And if that weren’t enough, she also includes a variety of other materials, including newspaper articles, interviews, courtroom transcripts. Georgette herself even seamlessly moves between different registers throughout that kept the narrative style feeling fresh.

This book is eminently readable. Too meandering for some, perhaps, but I found it compelling throughout, with all this literary sleight of hand. Nunez does not try to impress at a sentence level; instead she layers styles, content and themes in ways that elevate the whole. It is a nuanced, never simple examination of Ann and “her kind”, yes, but it’s also just a great story, well told. Can we ask for much more than that?

The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen trans. by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman (1967; 1971)

In 1967 renowned Danish author Tove Ditlevsen published the first two volumes of what would become a trilogy of remarkable memoirs. The first two—Childhood and Youth—cover her early life growing up in a working-class neighbourhood in Copenhagen as an aspiring poet (it seems she was born this way), and entering the workplace in a string of jobs she likes more, or less. The final volume, Dependency, details her four marriages and a five-year period of life-threatening addiction to demerol and methadone. All this in less than a hundred and fifty pages! Though to be fair, it is the longest of the three.

These books are spare, then, in style, but with a latent energy and urgency. Ditlevsen speaks to us with a startling frankness, detailing all the scenes—from the most nightmarish to the most euphoric—in much the same tone. She cares little for our judgement and metes out none of her own upon the players of her life, including herself. Sometimes she does depart from the elegant but more workaday prose into some soaring poetic conceit, including the rightfully notorious and marvellous: “Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own.”

Many reviewers spend a lot of time on Dependency, for obvious reasons, but I find myself drawn to Childhood, where her writing truly sings. Was it the bigger temporal disjunct (and the fact that I believe the main stars of this volume—her parents—had passed away by the time of its writing) that allowed her more freedom, a more productive mix of healthy fictionalisation and memoir material? Even so, the trilogy as a whole is an impressive if sobering work, documenting the life of a woman who, even while ostensibly living her dream making good money as a writer, is plagued by the demands of wifehood, a string of unsuccessful marriages, and addiction. Sadly, the ending is not a happy one, though within the bounds of Dependency, at least, there is a reprieve of sorts by the end.

I recommend this to anyone who enjoys autofiction, or stories of writerly women. Autofiction is not a genre I automatically get on with and sometimes actively avoid, but Ditlevsen knows well that one must tell an effective story just as much as you must lay out the detail of your own life, and there are few stories more compelling than her own.

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The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid (1996)

I covered this in my How to Read and Analyse a Novel course in May, but as it’s been so long since I first reviewed it, I thought it deserved a brief mention here, too.

Xuela is born and raised on Dominica, a Caribbean island that was only granted full independence from the British after hundreds of years of colonial rule in 1978. Over the course of the novel, Xuela tells us about her life, and how she grew up in what she felt to be a loveless world. She has a mixed-race father who identifies with the British and repudiates his African ancestry, and a Carib mother who died when she was born, and so her life is shaped by the legacies of colonialism. This legacy seeps into everything, replacing love with mistrust and self-hatred in her social circle. As an act of rebellion, Xuela decides to pour love into herself, though this doesn’t come without sacrifices of her own.

Kincaid’s prose is elliptical, iterative, dense with meaning and lyrical in mode; through it, she brings the inimitable Xuela to life. As the novel goes on, it begins to abandon even those initial concessions to scene and specificity and moves into an even more reflective mode. Whilst distinct scenes and concrete detail are usually very important to me, Kincaid produces some of those rare exceptions. First of all, it all serves to further characterise Xuela, who I take to be a woman who is extremely clear-sighted on the deep and lasting effects of so many decades of colonial rule, but who is also a deeply traumatised and vulnerable character, having no warm parental figure on which to rely. Her story therefore feels both general and specific in ways that only a great novel can achieve.

It also all serves her themes and purpose with the book, in a manner that other reflective, dreamy narratives do not. This makes it a sometimes difficult read, but one whose effect continues to grow until the very last lines. It is a novel that has stayed with me since I first read it almost ten years ago, and it’s been a good reminder to return to some of Kincaid’s other work very soon.

You can click here to read a more in-depth analysis.

My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff (2014)

This memoir details Rakoff’s year-long experience at an esteemed literary agency in New York in the mid-90s. Her boss is staunchly against all those newfangled inventions like computers and emails, meaning that the office serves as one of the last enclaves of a pre-digital publishing world. It’s lit by low lamps and the floor is lushly carpeted; the assistants spend their days listening to their boss’s voices murmuring through dictaphones as they type up correspondence on a typewriter.

The supposed premise of the memoir is that Rakoff spends a rather large chunk of her time reading and replying to fan mail for J. D. Salinger, one of the agency’s clients. Whilst this certainly plays a role in the book, overall it’s more of a nostalgic look back at this vanished world. One in which troops of young people pour into the city from their outlying neighbourhoods, manuscripts in hand, hoping today’s the day they’ll attract their boss’s attention and rise in the ranks. One in which getting a foot in the door might not be entirely effortless, but feels just that bit more possible. One in which people could visualise a long and relatively remunerative career in the publishing world, if they kept working hard and if they liked books enough. One in which people would stay so long in a certain agency or publishing house that decades-long relationships between writers, agents and editors would be relatively normal. Ah, the good old days.

This is that old dream of literary New York, where the spruced-up secretary jobs (“editorial assistants”) involve mostly menial work and yet retain some of the glamour of the institution. And alongside her experiences at work, we see Rakoff deal with deteriorating college friendships and a rather unsavoury Marxist boyfriend.

All in all, this was a fun, light read. Rakoff arranges the narrative well to maintain tension and keep you reading, and I enjoyed immersing myself in this world for a brief time. I recommend it to anyone for whom the above sounds rather inviting.

A final note: I read this in the Slightly Foxed edition, which they sent me a few months ago. They are pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, and they’re lovely! I wanted to keep reading this book partly because holding it was just such a treat, and this is coming from someone who usually hates hardbacks (they are small and light but the quality still feels wonderful). They also produce a quarterly magazine. You can buy their books individually or you can subscribe and receive them throughout the year.

We Do Not Part by Han Kang (2021; 2025) trans. from Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris

I’ve read both The Vegetarian and The White Book, and while I liked both I wasn’t bowled over by them, nor do I remember much about either a number of years on. Whilst I was looking forward to reading it—we picked it as our quarterly new release choice over in book club—I can’t say I was especially excited about it.

Readers, I loved this book. I’m actually planning to reread it this month (here’s hoping—reading plans very quickly go out of the window around here). But how on earth to go about describing it?

Our narrator Kyungha is at a low ebb. She feels alone, lost. One morning she receives a message from her friend Inseon to come to the hospital; when she gets there, she finds that Inseon has had a woodworking accident and has to remain there for a few days whilst she recovers. She’d like Kyungha to go to her remote house on the island of Jeju to look after her bird, who will die if she is not given regular food and water.

How to describe the tone of this novel? It is muted, haunted; poetic and yet precise. Much of the novel takes place under the weight of an ever-falling snow. And though it’s a novel that requires some close attention from the reader to follow its various flashbacks a conversations, there are also many vivid, atmospheric scenes that stand out in the mind’s eye. This keeps the book grounded, preventing it from floating off entirely into indistinction. In fact, there is a delicate balance at work throughout, so that each mode—the concrete and the dreamlike—perfectly sets off the other.

As Kyungha explores her friend’s home, the story of Inseon’s family is slowly uncovered, particularly her parents’ experiences with the massacres that took place on Jeju in 1948–9, which left at least 30,000 civilians dead. This book is a testament to remembering in spite of everything, in spite of silencing. An apt message for our times.

We will be discussing this next month over in book club, and I think this novel will so reward extended discussion. There is so much to dig into, and that—to me—is the sign of a great book. Suffice to say I will be reading more of her work now—I’ve heard great things about Human Acts, so that’s where I’ll be turning my attention next (a novel which I actually think has some particular relationship with this one).

The Life of Rebecca Jones by Angharad Price, trans. from Welsh by Lloyd Jones (2002)

Rebecca Jones is born and raised in the Welsh valley of Maesglasau in the early twentieth century. We meet her at the end of her long life, as she narrates her own experiences, as well as those of her parents and her three brothers born blind (and one who was not). This is a quiet, slim novel that describes rural life in a place which retains the Welsh language and Welsh heritage against forever-encroaching forces of English assimilation.

It’s hard to believe that this is a work of fiction (it is technically based on the author’s family, though—there are even some photographs). Price truly embodies Jones’s voice, painting life here in vivid tones, so much so that though major events pass us by in a matter of passages, even sentences, we get the feel of something with great depth. It is tender, clear-sighted, smart. Interspersed among the chapters are interludes describing the geology of the valley, or its streams, or what happens atop the mountains that surround it. This lends the novel an epic, timeless quality, though one is ever aware that the peace and tranquility of this remote valley cannot be maintained forever.

I can only imagine that this book sings even more in the original Welsh. Still, Lloyd Jones’ effort is a valiant one, and to my inexpert eye it seems to retain some of the musical quality of the Welsh language. Highly recommended to all who like their quiet, reflective novels—I don’t think you’ll read another quite like this.

A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam (2021)

We meet Krishan as he comes home from work; he talks briefly to his grandmother, though he almost immediately wants to extricate himself from her inane conversation so that he can mull over an email he just received from an ex-girlfriend. Then he gets a call—his grandmother’s former carer, Rani, has died. Her funeral will be held in the northeast of Sri Lanka in a few days, and he’s asked to attend. Over the next few days, as Krishan journeys north, he reflects on many things: his grandmother’s struggles with old age; his experiences in love with someone fundamentally unreachable; and what he knows of Rani’s life, marked as it is by losing two sons to the Sri Lankan Civil War.

I reread this novel for book club this month (I first reviewed it here), and if anything I was even more impressed with it this time around. We shall see if I’m proved right, but I mark Arudpragasam out for greatness. He manages several almost impossible things here.

First, he writes in a stream-of-consciousness–adjacent style. Even by its best practitioners, I am usually pretty sceptical of stream-of-consciousness. Though perhaps the ‘adjacent’ bit is what makes it work here (third-person, slightly more sense of time and structure, flashback scenes that provide interest). His sentences are long and rhythmic, and they draw you deep into the book. You might find it hard to put down once you enter its flow.

The book manages to be profound without feeling like it’s trying too hard. One gets the sense Arudpragasam has actually thought all his Proust-style observational stuff through (perhaps this seems like a low bar, but it really isn’t—the thinking part seems to be a lost art). And so it is actually profound, actually thought-provoking. It’s unaccountably beautiful, in fact. There were countless passages I could’ve chosen, but here is one example that I’ll probably never stop thinking about:

He continued gazing at her, at the severity of her profile and the vulnerability of her gaze, and it was as though he could feel the sight of her penetrating his eyes in real time, burning itself delicately into the film of his retinas, forming an image that would remain imprinted in the back of his eyes like a shadow or like tracing paper over everything he saw subsequently. And maybe it was for this reason, it had occurred to him at that moment, that eyesight weakened with the passing of the years, not because of old age or disease, not because of the deterioration of the cornea or the lenses or the finely tuned muscles that controlled them but because, rather, of the accumulation of a few such images over the course of one’s brief sojourn on earth, images of great beauty that pierced the eyes and superimposed themselves over everything one saw afterward, making it harder over time to see and pay attention to the outside world, though perhaps, it occurred to him now, four years later in the country of his birth, walking at the back of the procession bearing Rani’s body for cremation, Rani who’d seen so much that she had never been able to forget, perhaps he’d been naïve back then, perhaps it was not just images of beauty that clouded one’s vision over time but images of violence too, those moments of violence that for some people were just as much a part of life as the moments of beauty, both kinds of image appearing when we least expected it and both continuing to haunt us thereafter, both of which marked and branded us, limiting how far we were subsequently able to see. (pp. 260–261)

You can see how the sentences just run on and on, you can’t stop reading them. It’s one of those books that, if it works for you, will likely stick with you, as it has for me. A novel I will continue to return to.

The Parisian by Isabella Hammad (2019)

Midhat Kamal, a young Palestinian man, is sent by his father to study medicine in Paris in 1914 to avoid conscription. So begins Isabella Hammad’s ambitious debut, which spans several decades, characters and settings. Midhat’s time in Paris is formative, and his abrupt departure—prompted by a miscommunication in love—haunts him for the rest of his life. He’s never quite able to get over the woman he falls for there, or the romance of Paris itself. Whilst he makes a life for himself of sorts in British-occupied Palestine, he is never again satisfied.

Enter Ghost is one of my favourite novels released in the last few years, so my expectations were high. Alas, this novel is just not quite there. Right from the start the plotting felt a little baggy and unfocussed, and in a sprawling novel like this one, that can be a major problem. There were certainly things I admired; I liked Hammad’s commitment to writing a proper twentieth-century novel here. Occasionally she really nailed the world-building, or narrative voice, or added depth with an extended conceit or metaphor. All the signs of a great novelist are here—it’s just a debut! And that’s okay.

Its biggest problem is Midhat. I’m not someone who typically complains of a character being flat or vague—I think these things can serve a purpose. But in a character-driven book of almost six hundred pages, having a bit of a blank for a protagonist was always going to be an issue. There were many of the parts of the novel that I felt Hammad really lived what she wrote (something very evident in Enter Ghost), but many of the Midhat sections felt unlived-in. Like a sketch of him had been made and then not filled in further.

One of the best things about it is its depiction of Palestinian life in the early twentieth century. A world now largely lost.

This is a novel for the Hammad completists among us—those of us who just loved Enter Ghost that much and want to follow her whole career. But for its own sake, I’m not sure I could confidently recommend it. Don’t just listen to me, though—there are many who loved this novel, and found its meandering ways captivating. But it was always going to pale in comparison to Enter Ghost, especially as I’d just reread it, so my expectations almost definitely interfered with my perspective.

Spear by Nicola Griffith (2022)

Griffith was in the middle of writing Menewood (which I reviewed back in February) when she was asked to contribute a queer-coded ‘Matter of Britain’ (Arthurian) tale to a new anthology. Though reluctant to take time off writing Menewood, she was struck with inspiration, and soon the short story had expanded to a short novel of around 180 pages in length.

She recasts the legend of Perceval (Peretur, here), gender-switching the character—who famously grows up in the wilds and becomes one of the Knights of the Round Table—and adding a few further twists of her own. Griffith takes a while to warm up; she’s an . . . abundant writer (remember that though this is comparatively short, it began as a short story . . .) and she probably took a touch too long for me to get to the action. She doesn’t have the hundreds of pages of the Hild series to work with here, and so the pacing felt a bit off. When we did get to that second part, though, it was a lot of fun. I’d always wished there was a little more magic in Hild, and I get that here. In general, it reads extremely similarly to Hild/Menewood (perhaps a little too similar?), so if you like those, you’ll like this. I’d still recommend starting with Hild though to read her masterpiece.

I must note that I read this in a really scatterbrained fashion, so I’d need to reread it to give a truer assessment, but those are my general thoughts. I am now keen to read more ‘Matter of Britain’/Arthurian stuff, though, so if you have recommendations, do let me know. I’m thinking T. H. White? He was always hovering around the edges of my childhood I feel, and yet I never quite got there.

Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller (2020)

Radiolab’s Lulu Miller is dogged by a persistent and dangerous depression. Unable to reckon with the world as the chaotic place it is—a world that says ‘you don’t matter’—she decides to try and seek answers in the life of David Starr Jordan, a man who seemed to resist that chaos in all his doings.

Jordan was a famous taxonomist and ichthyologist living in the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries. He achieved enormous success in his lifetime, not only identifying and naming thousands of fish, many for the first time, but also serving as the founding president of Stanford University. When an earthquake destroyed his life’s work in 1906, he just started again. It is this anecdote that sparks Miller’s imagination: how do you continue in the face of disaster?

The thing is, Jordan was also a pretty shady guy. He was a staunch eugenicist and may have committed a murder (maybe). Nonetheless Miller wrestles some sort of lesson from his life; she finds the commitment and wherewithal to go on (or at least to keep “the gun” at bay) and keep trying no matter what.

This is probably not my preferred style of book. You can certainly feel the influence of radio and podcasting on her writing, which is mostly quite interesting (where, exactly, does this feel come from?), but I admit that the light, comedic tone is not generally something I connect with. I enjoyed it in the moment, but probably won’t dwell on this book for a long time. It’s a little too loosey goosey with the facts in the name of a good story in ways I don’t particularly like in science-based nonfiction, and the link between Miller and Jordan is a probably too tenuous for my liking. I can see a lot of people enjoying this book, though. It’s fairly light and breezy despite the subject matter, and life-affirming, too. Still, I’m not surprised that it wasn’t shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, from whose 2025 longlist I picked the recommendation up from.

How to Read and Analyse a Novel Books

As you probably already know, I’ve been running a course on here called How to Read and Analyse a Novel. This is now finished (!), but the posts will stay live so you can take it in your own time (start here if you’re new). Of course I covered The Autobiography of My Mother above as it’s been a long time since I reviewed it, but the rest I have touched on in the not-so-distant past. So here are the other books we covered this month and their respective posts! (I love these books but can’t possibly write more on them to save my own sanity and your inbox. My original reviews follow each link.)

The City and the City by China Mieville original review

The Shipping News by Annie Proulx original review

And with that, I shall leave you! Make sure you subscribe if you want to read next month’s reviews, which will include The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell, and Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig.

April 2025 Reading Review

Jessie Lethaby — Thu, 08 May 2025 13:05:27 GMT

Today’s post is too long for email, so please do click through to your browser or the app to read in full.

Every few months I make a commitment to picking up a book instead of my phone as often as possible, and every few months I have to refresh this commitment when I find myself slipping back into my old scrolling ways. I’m not even that mad about this cycle; I feel like every time I start it again I have scrolled a little bit less to get there, so maybe eventually it will be more or less broken for good. Anyway, April was one of those months where I renewed my commitment to reading more and scrolling less, and it shows in the volume of reading material.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1980)

Like much of my reading at the moment, this was a re-read. This is the Year of the Re-Read for me so far and I’m loving it! (Though it would have been helpful if all my books weren’t packed away in boxes…) Anyway, it’s been so long since I first reviewed it I think it absolutely deserves an update.

I first read this at at university, and I remember loving it. When I read Gilead years later, I was surprised the same author had written both novels, as I felt it didn’t really match up to the Robinson I thought I knew. Now that I’ve re-read Housekeeping, I feel there are more similarities than I thought—biblical allusions still abound—but there is something intense about Housekeeping that does seem to be the marker of a younger and more passionate version of Robinson.

The book is narrated by Ruth, a young girl living with her sister in Idaho and haphazardly cared for by a stream of women. First, their mother abandons them on her own mother’s porch; then they are tended to by said grandmother who is caring but absent emotionally; upon her death some elderly aunts take over to disastrous effect; and finally they are left in the care of Sylvie, their strange and flighty aunt. Ruth takes to Sylvie instantly, clearly desperate for some sort of care and stability, even if it comes in the form of a woman who has for most of her adult life been a “transient” (cue gasp from respectable ladies… I believe this is supposed to be set during the 50s). Her sister, meanwhile, repudiates Sylvie’s lifestyle (and Ruth in turn), abandoning them both for a more conventional life.

I had remembered the novel as a mostly realistic coming-of-age tale that remarks on the relationship between femininity, motherhood and the home. Certainly parts of the novel do speak to this, and the first half is generally rooted in realism. But I was totally unprepared for how utterly strange this novel is, particularly in that second half, and also how desperately sad. Ruth as narrator will not appeal to everyone. She is oddly detached and sometimes feels under characterised, and yet I read this as indicative of her deep and lasting trauma. She does occasionally enter these extremely heightened states of emotion in the novel which were sometimes difficult to parse at a sentence level (we read this for book club and so read it especially closely—very rewarding!) but when you had untangle their meaning, felt deeply poignant and really quite upsetting. As a portrait of an abandoned child, it is entirely damning to all those who fail Ruth. These rapturous moments that come more and more often as we get deeper into the novel push well beyond the boundaries of normal literary realism, feeling surreal and blending folkloric and biblical imagery to great and piercing effect.

I don’t think this novel will appeal to all. This shift in tone feels odd and even uncomfortable. But for me I think it makes it a minor masterpiece. It is incredibly ambitious and filled with a real depth of feeling that is so hard to achieve (especially in this page count), and it did indeed signify the appearance of a future literary giant. One I will continue to return to, I think.

The Sword and the Lictor and The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe (1982, 1983)

I finally finished Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun! This is elevated speculative fiction from the 80s and the series (made up of four volumes) is regarded as a bit of a classic. Le Guin famously called Wolfe “our Melville”. Last year I read the first two books in which we are introduced to Severian, our narrator and protagonist. They’re set in the far distant future—mankind has already gone to space and back again, and lives out its last remaining years under the dying sun weighed down by the arcane customs of thousands of years of history, distorted by the passage of time. Much of the powerful technological and scientific knowledge we once possessed has been lost, meaning at times the narrative has the feel of fantasy rather than science fiction, as the characters use more analogue tools and accoutrements from the deep past, while sometimes encountering advanced technology they have no words to describe (i.e. magic).

Severian is raised in a guild of torturers, which is whatever passes in this world (nation?) for a justice system. It is as unnerving a childhood as you might imagine, but is unremarkable to him in many ways. However, when he shows a sign of mercy to one of the “clients” of the guild, he is sent away to live out his life on the periphery of power, in a faraway city named Thrax. When we get to the third volume, he has finally made it to this posting after a long, strange journey, and has taken up his role there as executioner. Of course, his journey is far from over, and his tendency to mercy—especially toward beautiful women—hasn’t left him yet.

These books are much loved and much lauded within the genre, and there are many things to like about them. Wolfe’s prose is often beautiful—his imagery is vivid and evocative, and there are striking passages throughout. Over the course of the book(s), his prowess at a sentence level bolsters and deepens his world-building (though occasionally his wont for an obscure archaic word or turn of phrase gets in the way unnecessarily). Peering through Severian into this world feels like peering into something with great depth and dimensionality. Wolfe is up there with the best in this regard. I could feel and see and imagine the accretions of thousands of years of human culture writ on the planet’s landscape. I felt the vastness of the space given over to this world in Wolfe’s mind.

For the most part I enjoyed following Severian on his meandering journey, never quite knowing where he would go next, and who he would encounter. The singularity of Wolfe’s vision meant there was much there to surprise and delight, and that felt fresh and original. Where speculative fiction can get trope-y quickly, this is always welcome.

But there was something missing for me. Even though I admired them quite a lot and even enjoyed much of my time with them, I could never quite fall in love. These novels are well known for presenting the reader with a bit of a puzzle. Severian is your classic unreliable narrator, and from my reading of various introductions and reviews, I understood that the reader is supposed to pick up on clues throughout the narrative to build a fuller picture of the subtext of the book, or determine the parts that are left unresolved on the surface. Loving puzzling novels as I do, I looked forward to this challenge. But by the time I reached the end, I was left a little cold.

I wonder how I would have felt if I hadn’t approached it in this way at all. Because whilst there is most definitely some joy to be found at piecing together parts of the novel(s) to give you a better understanding of what, exactly, is actually going on, it’s not like there is a grand reveal that changes the way you would characterise the book entirely. And I felt the more mysterious elements were there not to be resolved so much as to add to that evocative world-building—the books’ sense of mystery feels far more important than the mystery itself. So on the one hand I was disappointed that there was not some greater reward for my pains picking up on all these tiny details, whilst on the other I wish I had left them to be as mysterious as they were intended.

I think my other problem lies with Severian. First of all, he’s a misogynist, and Wolfe has no problem offering him up naked woman after naked woman who are ready to fall at his feet regardless. Yawn. I don’t think we’re offered quite enough moral distancing from Severian through whatever technique Wolfe might have made use of to allow us to better understand this facet of his character (no allusions to the fact that he grew up only around men, or wry dialogue from any of these women that might show us we aren’t seeing the full picture), so I can only conclude it’s to make him seem cool. Had I had no other issues, perhaps I could overlook it, but because I didn’t love other parts of the book, it became increasingly annoying as I went on.

My key problem, though, is the way he narrates. He tells us this story retrospectively, but he is unusual in that he can remember everything that ever happened to him with perfect clarity, so much so that when he recalls it, it is almost as if he relives it. At some points in the book, this also means that he is narrating recalling something in the moment as it was lived. Even more confusingly, he ends up absorbing others’ memories into his psyche, so sometimes they aren’t even his own memories. This could have been an interesting conceit, but it doesn’t quite work. It means whatever retrospective perspective we might have is collapsed, flattening the dynamic. Though he nominally changes for the better over the course of the book, it doesn’t feel very convincing because he delivers everything in much the same tone; he is recalling and living and narrating all at the same time for us, and all from the same pivotal moment at which the book ends. We are not afforded a sense of progression. For such a spiritual novel (more on that in a moment), we never get to a truly epiphanic or revelatory register, which is weird. It makes the book feel… stuck somehow.

On a more specific level, the final volume is a particular disappointment (in fact I think they get incrementally worse as you go along—the first remains my favourite). I really don’t feel like Wolfe had worked out entirely where he wanted Severian to go, and specifically how he was going to wrap up this story, when he sat down to write it. It felt half-hearted, the pacing slackened to an almost dead stop, and there was too much irrelevant material. Also, Wolfe was a devout Catholic, and it’s no secret that these novels are Christian in ethic and viewpoint. This is fascinating to me in a contextual sense—why on earth would Wolfe depict Severian in this rather morally ambiguous way when he is supposed to be a Christ-like figure (or at least just as a Christian figure)? But in terms of the novel as artwork, I think at the end it probably does get in the way of what could have been a more satisfying and successful conclusion to the series, in terms of its plot and outlook.

Overall, I didn’t hate this series by any means, but neither did I love it. It’s a shame because I felt it had real potential to become a personal favourite for the depth of the world itself, but ultimately I don’t think it is fully realised at a character or plot level. I wouldn’t rule out a possible re-read, though, to see if I can glean a bit more of its meaning, so clearly it didn’t entirely alienate me. I’ll also be exploring his other works set in this world, starting with the coda to this series, The Urth of the New Sun.

Peace by Gene Wolfe (1975)

Yep, I read a lot of Gene Wolfe this month! Last year when I was doing a bit of research into his career, this book repeatedly came up as one of his other ‘great’ works alongside the magnum opus above.

It’s hard to know how much to give away about the plot of this novel, and how much should be left to discover yourself. Elderly man Alden Dennis Weer is woken one night by a tree falling outside his house, prompting him to write down what essentially amounts to the story of his life, though told in a rather idiosyncratic manner. We see scenes from his childhood in great detail, but skip over (seemingly very important!) years or even decades. It’s all a bit muddled up—why? Well, you’d have to read it and see.

Again, sometimes Wolfe’s prose sentence-to-sentence requires a bit of careful parsing to figure out exactly what is happening, though the more impenetrable transitions are interpolated with all sorts of rather enjoyable (and very readable) stuff—we have folktales that Weer enjoyed as a boy, at least one horror story, and a whole chapter dedicated to his independent aunt and her many suitors (fun!) Wolfe has a real talent for this sort of folksy storytelling, and I enjoyed his depiction of Weer growing up in the Midwest in the early twentieth century.

There is, however, a certain unfinished quality to many of the stories here, which is no doubt purposeful and suits Wolfe’s intentions with the book, but naturally led to some dissatisfaction on my part. I closed the novel feeling rather disgruntled with it on this basis. Like BONS, it too is figured as a kind of puzzle, but I felt I had more or less got the gist of it and wasn’t altogether impressed with the whole.

But then I wrote up my notes and paged through it again, and realised that perhaps there was more here than meets the eye (even though I read it rather closely anyway!) and that I had also enjoyed quite a few of the sections even if it didn’t necessarily feel like it entirely cohered (I read it over a long-ish period of time, which didn’t help). So I have in fact made plans to re-read it this summer before I forget too much, and see what I make of it after round two.

I’m also keen to read it alongside Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, as I think they would complement one another very well. Dandelion Wine is also a coming-of-age tale of sorts set in the Midwest in the early twentieth century, and also has a fairly disjointed style (this one because it was originally conceived of as a selection of short stories). It, too, has at least one whole and complete horror story in its pages, and features a strange mix of realism and speculative. But Bradbury’s novel is most definitely the warmer of the two—there is a dark undercurrent to Peace (who is our narrator, really, and what has he done?) that I look forward to pinpointing a bit better next time around. So more on this one to follow, I suppose!

Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad (2024)

Isabella Hammad delivered the first half of this volume as a lecture at Columbia University nine days before October 7^th, and it is published here with the addition of a searing afterword written in January 2024 in the light of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza that is yet ongoing. (At the time of my writing this, no aid or food has entered Gaza since March due to an imposed blockade, resulting in widespread famine. It is absolutely unthinkable—some basic things we can all do today here.)

As soon as I first heard Hammad mention this book (in an interview from last year’s Hay Festival), I knew I had to read it as soon as I could. Narrative and narrativization—and how these things interact with the real world—are particular interests of mine, and I was already impressed with her approach to them in her latest novel, Enter Ghost. As expected, her ideas about narrative and the problem of narrative for Palestinians were astutely argued and illuminating in many ways; for the wider world, for Palestine, for literature, and for her own work. She’s undoubtedly an author whose output I’ll continue to follow closely.

The second half provides us with the harrowing details of the first three months of Israel’s action in Gaza. There will be nothing new here for anyone who has followed it closely, but the juxtaposition of the two parts made for particularly heartbreaking reading. A book I recommend to all.

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton (2024)

This is a very enjoyable nature memoir about a woman who ended up raising a hare during the early stages of COVID. Before the world shut down, Dalton lived a fast-paced lifestyle as a political adviser, and never settled anywhere for long, thriving on the adrenaline rush of her job. When she finds an abandoned leveret in the middle of a path near her house in the country, she feels unable to leave it there and let nature run its course despite her fears about interfering with a wild animal. The first part of the book is certainly the best part; there is some real tension in those shaky early days as she tries to maintain the hare’s wildness but also keep it alive.

Living in tandem with the hare, she explains, helped her see what her life was missing, and the joys of rootedness and time in nature. That’s the premise of the memoir, but it is lightly referred to within its pages. This book is not really about Dalton, it’s about the hare. And she writes the hare beautifully. Whilst very occasionally some of the hare facts—a must for a nature memoir like this one—felt shoehorned in, in general Dalton is a very accomplished, readable writer.

You shouldn’t expect reams of introspection or a more in-depth or nuanced take on the issues within. Suggestions for how we might live differently as a society are briefly offered. Very often this would irritate me in a book—I’d want more rigour—but it didn’t here. I could see that Dalton wanted to memorialise this time with the hare in some way, and she chose to do it in book form. It felt like an ode to that unique and beautiful experience, without her having to sacrifice too much of her privacy, and good for her (memoirs are tricky things for me on this front). It is a light read, but I still felt the tread of little hare paw prints on my heart by the end. I felt sad to say goodbye to the hare by the end of the book, enough to bring a tear to my eye during Dalton’s poignant final message. Whilst I wouldn’t say you need to rush out and read this, I can’t help but feel very fond of it. So perhaps you should at least amble out to read it, fairly soon.

Out of the Past: Tales of Haunting History ed. by Aaron Worth

I am currently subscribed to the British Library’s Tales of the Weird offering. I pay them a monthly fee, they send out a weird title of some kind—often a collection of stories, but occasionally a reprinted novel. Some of these are great, and inevitably some of them are pretty disappointing. This series has been going on for quite some time now, and I am beginning to wonder if the British Library is running out of good stuff to reprint from their archives. Especially in a genre like this one—encompassing supernatural stories, the gothic, and early science fiction—which can turn the bad kind of pulpy at the drop of a hat. Or perhaps I’m just a bit jaded because the most recent one I read was this one, and it was not their finest.

There was potential—it’s a collection of weird historical stories. I’m on a historical fiction kick at the moment so this should have been right up my street. Alas. They were mostly pretty dull which is perhaps the worst thing you can say about a collection of this kind? I won’t deny that I did skip one or two. It definitely warms up a bit as we get toward the end and the newer stories, particularly the editor’s own that he snuck in there. I don’t know whether to blame him for picking the other stories or thank him for saving it with his own. Honestly I should have given up with these but thought I should at least give each individual story a go, and it took me months. I will try another volume though soon, though, as they are beginning to pile up.

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Reading projects - sagas, poetry, graphic novels

I thought I would group the below as these are my current reading projects. In theory I’m supposed to be reading one saga, one poetry collection, and one graphic novel a month, though results are variable. Regardless of my ability to keep up, though, I am enjoying exploring literature outside my usual novels.

Egil’s Saga by Unknown (1240)

Following on from my success with contemporary novels written in the style of Icelandic sagas earlier this year—The Long Ships and The Greenlanders—I decided to go back and read the originals! There is something about this style that I’m drawn to. It’s been a welcome break from contemporary literature and prose styling, and can achieve a remarkable degree of nuance and subtlety using totally different methods to literary realism.

The Icelandic sagas are medieval literatures hailing from Scandinavia that—unusually for the time—are written in prose. They are also unusual in that they mostly describe the lives of fairly ordinary people—farmers, warriors and the like. There is something utterly compelling about them, especially compared to my experiences with other medieval literatures (though I don’t rule out returning to those at some point outside the bounds of an educational facility!) They are at once completely recognisable—these are characters that are motivated by the same spectrum of human inclinations as ourselves: jealousy, greed, love, dignity, pride. And the form itself does call to mind the modern novel, not only because they are in prose but also because of the nature of their content—relatively ordinary people living ordinary lives. Yet they are also utterly alien in other ways, denoting valuable information about this strange Viking world where it’s perfectly normal to spend the summers looting neighbouring countries for ‘booty’.

Anyway, I started with Egil’s Saga, thought to be one of the best of the collection of sagas that has survived with us until today. I’m reading from the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition which is a nice collection of quite a few of them, though of course you can read each volume individually, too.

I thoroughly enjoyed this! Egil and his family have a feud going on with the kings of Norway, and must flee to newly-settled Iceland to escape punishment. The saga follows Egil as he travels back and forth between the countries, variously escaping the wrath or courting the approval of different kings across Northern Europe, getting into scrapes and antagonising yet more folk, and on occasion peacefully farming his land. Egil is a skilled poet but a pretty brutal man, and there are some eye-poppingly violent scenes here, described with an almost cinematic effect. It was an engaging and rollicking read, elevated by the periodic shift into ambiguous moral territory when we have to ask ourselves if we admire this hot-headed man for living by his own code, even if it seems otherwise untenable? Double-edged dialogue seems to provide the literary complexity of these sagas, but also confounds understanding of their underlying truths at the same time.

I think I’ll be better able to evaluate these and my experience with them once I’ve read a few more, so stay tuned on that front. Next up is the The Saga of the People of Laxárdal.

The Many Deaths of Laila Starr by Ram V, illustrated by Filipe Andrade (2022)

I spent a couple very bunged-up fluey hours with this graphic novel, and enjoyed my time with it. I’m trying to read more graphic novels this year—apparently in the hopes that I can add yet more reading material into my life?

No, but really, I’m interested in the art form, the interactions between illustration and the text, and what this medium might be able to do that others can’t. I spend a lot of my time reading picture books to my daughter, and I’ve been impressed (and become slightly obsessed) with how powerful the marriage of the two things can be, and how much artistry it takes to nail it—whether that’s across one or two people. So it only makes sense to look at the more expanded, complex version of something like that. I daren’t say grown-up version because I’ll soon be making the case that picture books are for everyone (and are a singular art form, just as the graphic novel is).

Knowing as little as I do, I’ve been letting myself be led by the occasional recommendation (this one came from book club—thank you Pran!) I do think moving forward I’m going to go for the big hitters—Persepolis, Fun Home—and work outwards from there as my knowledge grows. As always, I’m looking for stuff that has literary merit, and naturally conforms to my taste in novels and literature in general. This is the stuff that I think is probably harder to find, hence my mission to find it and tell you about it.

Anyway, back to Laila Starr. Death has just been fired. Apparently, a child has been born who will invent an elixir for immortality, making her obsolete. As recompense, she is sent down to Earth for the first time in a human body (something she’s not altogether happy about at first). Over the course of several issues (collected in one volume as I read it), newly-named Laila comes into contact with the boy who changed the trajectory of her life, and discovers what it means to love and to lose. I admit, it did make me tear up by the end. You can tell that the collaboration between Ram V and Filipe Andrade was a productive one, and the story is well-supported by the latter’s illustrations with beautiful colouring from Inês Amaro—it is beautiful to look at, and the rhythm of the panels adds to the poignancy of the tale.

The story itself is nothing very groundbreaking, and I can’t say that I’ve thought about it a lot since I finished it. I think I’m probably more of a fan of Andrade’s vivid and lively illustrations than I am of the writing itself. That’s not to say it was bad, but not particularly memorable (especially as a novel-reader by nature). As I said, though, I had a nice time with it for a couple of hours.

Tender Spot by Naomi Shihab Nye

This volume encompasses some of Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s best work from a number of her poetry collections over the years. With such an expansive view of her career, I felt like I was dipping a toe into different periods of her life and perhaps missed the greater focus of Imtiaz Dharker’s singular Over the Moon—a helpful thing for me to know about my poetry preferences, especially with contemporary work. A collection conceived as a whole may work better for me than a compendium of sorts. (Over the Moon was the last collection I read; I am trying to read a collection of poetry a month—more or less!—and am dutifully documenting it here, but I do have far less expertise in poetry and am recommending mostly on vibes.)

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy many of these poems! I marked down lots of favourites, and have chosen a few of them to highlight for you. Nye has a beautiful way of using everyday language with a clarity that reveals the edges and seams of life, and that is able to surprise in imagery and tone. Her poems are easy to read, and yet still have the effect of making you stop for a moment to contemplate what she’s just said. Some of my favourites were a little long, so I’ve linked them rather than transcribed them. Many of her poems covering Palestine, and her father or grandmother’s relationship to Palestine, were particularly beautiful to read.

Travel Alarm

Wedding Cake

The Story, Around the Corner

‘The Only Democracy in the Middle East’

Gate A-4

Books from How to Read and Analyse a Novel:

I won’t expand too much more on these books, partly because I’ve already reviewed them, and partly because I wrote many, many words about them in April through the course itself. I’m tired!!! All you really need to know is—these are excellent books! And if you want more info, you’ll just have to join us on the course, won’t you ;)

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad - original review - course post

As wonderful as I remember it last year. This is fantastic literary fiction that I implore you to read.

Telephone by Percival Everett - original review - course post

Everett at his most elegiac, but without giving up the formal play that makes him such an interesting novelist.

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson - original review - course post

Small but perfectly formed novella about a lost way of life.

The Doloriad by Missouri Williams - original review - course post

A remarkable debut about human life after the apocalypse. Williams is one to watch!

That’s it! Congratulations if you made it this far.

In my next monthly round-up, I’ll be reviewing The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez, The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell and This is Happiness by Niall Williams (amongst other things!)

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March 2025 Reads

Jessie Lethaby — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 10:20:21 GMT

Today’s post is too long for email, so please do click through to your browser or the app to read in full.

Welcome to one of my monthly wrap-up posts, where I briefly review everything I read! I read widely across many genres, including classics, literary, and speculative fiction (with the occasional dose of nonfiction). With these I’m hoping to shed some light on backlist gems, perhaps push you to read outside your genre comfort zone, and also highlight which new releases are worth your time.

I’m late, I know. Was taken out by what I now believe was the flu, and to be honest I’m still not a hundred percent. Any energy I did have was poured into my How to Read and Analyse a Novel course, which I have been absolutely loving. Thanks so much to everyone who has been reading along with me!

I read some great books in March, though, and I’m excited to share them with you today. Let’s get into it.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996)

How does one start a review of Infinite Jest, or at least a review of one’s reading experience?1 You are either one of the people who will probably try reading Infinite Jest at some point in the name of reading books that are considered literary greats, or you happily excuse yourself from this special kind of torture (I salute this second kind, honestly). I don’t think much of what I’ll say below will move you from one camp to another, but I’ll try and put together some cohesive thoughts on this notorious novel nonetheless.

First I’ll say that this strikes me as an extremely sad book. Taking a quick glance at the blurbs on the back of my copy, it is variously described as a “comic brio”, “witty”, a “remarkable satire”. DFW himself is described by renowned critic James Wood as “a superb comedian of culture”. This is, of course, an accurate rendering of the tone in which the vast majority of the book is written—satirical and ironic. But for me, this compounds the absolute despair at the heart of this novel.2

DFW himself espoused the idea that the elevation of irony in contemporary (American) culture was detrimental; you can’t criticise that which has already criticised itself, nor is it solutions-oriented. It doesn’t offer a positive worldview, only a negative one. Of course, Infinite Jest is the perfect example of the kinds of problems he talked about, and I’m sure to some degree he is manipulating the irony ironically. Unfortunately, I don’t think this gets us away from irony, and the novel feels like it lacks for something as a result.

It’s almost impossible to capture this rambling book in a few sentences, but in short we’re in a near-future America, more specifically in Boston.3 The story revolves around two institutions; one is an elite tennis academy which was founded by James Incandenza, who, alongside having a brief tennis career of his own, also made avant-garde films. He has died in the recent past, leaving a hole in his already dysfunctional family. His son Hal is one of the protagonists of the novel; he’s enrolled in the tennis academy and is rising in the ranks, proving himself to be a tennis player worth watching. Unfortunately, he is also afflicted by a depressive “anhedonia”4, leading him inexorably into a secret marijuana addiction.

Other storylines come from the residents of Ennet House, a drug and alcohol recovery centre just a few short blocks from the tennis academy. This is all set against a background in which the countries of North America (Canada, Mexico, USA) have merged into one larger Organisation. Of course, the US is taking advantage of the Canadians, prompting the Quebec sovereignty movement to step up their efforts to gain independence from both. These three storylines refract into one another; we receive little fragments of each, alongside many (many) other stories, some of which are pretty much irrelevant to the main story thrust, and are never resolved. Oh, and there are loads of footnotes.

It’s a difficult novel to keep your head above water in, then. DFW is an extremely wordy writer. Critics say he delights in language… I guess? He certainly delights in drowning us in language.5 The novel is notoriously mundane and monotonous at times, to the point of absolute absurdity. I do think he had a talent for creating a great scene (if only he’d use it more often), and occasionally he’ll lay out an astounding sequence that builds to a climactic and memorable image or event. Some of the satire is genuinely funny. But much of this is lost in the noise. I don’t even think this is unintentional. At various points when characters criticise James Incandenza’s pretty pretentious films, we can see DFW poking fun at himself (there’s that irony again!):

Party-line entertainment critics always complained that [James Icandenza’s] entertainments’ public-area scenes were always incredibly dull and self-conscious and irritating, that they could never hear the really meaningful central narrative conversations for all the unfiltered babble of the peripheral crowd, which they assumed […] was some self-conscious viewer-hostile heavy-art directorial pose, instead of radical realism.

We can pretty much assume, considering the fact that the vast majority of these extra characters and scenes are not returned to in a meaningful way, that this is DFW’s intention with the book—a kind of “radical realism” through experimental form.

But this is not realism. And this is a supremely trapped novel to me, with a supremely trapped worldview. You can feel DFW stretching for that sincerity, that genuine connection, that heart. But it never quite gets there, both in ways I think DFW intended us to experience, and ways he didn’t. For sure his depiction of depression and addiction are on occasion moving. He astutely diagnoses that, in the absence of faith in something meaningful in the modern world, people tend to replace it with things like entertainment, or substance abuse, and that feels prescient in many ways. It’s almost worth reading the novel on the basis of its being the first ‘internet novel’ that pinpoints many of the problems we face today (he famously predicted streaming and filters, for instance). Indeed, I think it might be one the finest examples of this kind of novel, partly because it was published in the 90s.

This is where one of my major problems comes in, though. The novel almost can’t even conceive of real love or connection, and this becomes its downfall, exacerbated by that ever-present irony. The fact that the AA characters quite literally cannot stop talking about how the cheesy one-liners and emphasis on community in the organisation is genuinely helpful and somehow meaningful shows just how far the worldview of the novel is from this—it is that surprising to them. They can’t enjoy it, either, without mentioning just how nauseating it is.

At its foundation, there is a problem with the mother figure in the novel; Hal’s mother is shown to be “narcissistic” in her love for him. She is so loving, so overbearing, that he literally can’t bear it. I’m not saying this isn’t an accurate portrayal of a particular kind of dynamic, but there is a sense in which this is not just about Hal and Avril, but about all mother-child relationships.6 Not to mention I think it has strong misogynistic undertones, too. There is no true and meaningful communication between any parent or child in the book, actually, to the point that we begin to wonder… how do we get out of this cycle? What is the point? Where do we go next?7

I think this is also where the bigotry of the book comes in. The novel pretty much ticks all the problematic boxes you could think of; it’s racist, it’s misogynistic, it’s ableist, it’s homophobic, it’s transphobic. It’s so baked into the book I have an extremely hard time separating DFW from the ‘narrator’ —whatever the narrator means in this extremely fractured context—or writing it all off as satirical. The novel literally can’t imagine that anyone apart from Hal Incandenza (and Don Gately and James Incandenza if we are feeling generous) are worthy of being depicted as fully human. Everyone else gets the objectifying treatment. And perhaps this is the meaning that the book is missing, this is the part that is shouting from the sidelines, and can’t quite get in. If Hal, James, Don Gately, DFW himself, could admit more people into the ranks of full humanity, how much more connection might there be? How much more life? Would the novel sing better, and for more people? What if you saw your mother as a woman, a person, rather than the vast hole into which all your hopes and dreams fell? What if the woman nursing you wasn’t just someone to ogle?

In a way, then, I appreciate the book for what it tells me about a particular kind of mind, David Foster Wallace’s mind. A literary guy, clearly a clever guy, writing in a particular cultural environment in the 1990s. In so many ways I can feel he wants to exit this way of thinking. For example, I listened to his famous commencement speech ’This is Water’, which essentially advises people to give others the benefit of the doubt and is not dissimilar to today’s calls to ‘romanticise your life’, even the mundane shitty bits. On the surface, that’s what it says. But the language he uses to talk about other people, the way in which he couches these ideas, is very revealing to me that these prejudices are in fact not at all gone from his psyche. And I’m consistently surprised that people try to explain away the misogyny in his book as separate from his real life abusive behaviours toward at least one woman. This is the same kind of energy that I get from this novel. Like with the irony, on the one hand he is telling us to find meaning, to find connection, to find one another. On the other, he is shutting the door behind him on human subjectivity, admitting only the cerebral white guys, even as he is almost, maybe, just about to become self-aware. This, to me, is what makes this book truly sad. Perhaps it is what makes it a “profound study of the postmodern condition”, but only insofar as that statement has its own blind spots.8 Perhaps you’d want to sever the connection between DFW as man and his book, but in its sheer audacity and self-reflexive cleverness it seems to invite contemplation of its author more directly than other novels (especially as the narrative POV is not particularly well-defined).

Is it successful as a novel? I wouldn’t say it was an example of a particularly brilliant version of this form. It’s an interesting artwork, sure, but I don’t think it maximises the potential of what a novel like this could be like. I think his editor should have been more ballsy. I don’t think all the experimentation works, and I can imagine a more effective version of this book, even within DFW’s limits—one that is better structured and more intentional. I wouldn’t want to get rid of all those unconventional elements, but I certainly felt that it could have been strengthened in several areas, particularly the main story. It is layered with meaning in some places, in others crass and unnecessary. But the book is what it is: a product of a particular time, place, man. The literary hysteria surrounding it and the PR campaign that was launched upon its publication are interesting enough in themselves. Why do many critics trip over themselves to proclaim this kind of book a masterpiece? Why do we equate ‘infuriating to read’ with greatness? And why this man, with this book?

I read for many reasons, and one of the main ones is to garner a good understanding of literature as a whole (an impossible task, but a pleasurable one to pursue). This means reading highly influential or lauded books like this one, and seeing how they fit into my sense of the web of literature. So I’m glad to have read it. Like with Rachel Cusk’s Outline, it gave me a lot of food for thought on the author/book boundary, a boundary I continue to complicate after many years of diligently separating the two in my academic work. I think if you want to read a book that communicates the utter despair of modern culture through the lens of a man incapable of imagining life outside the bounds of his own experience, this is the book for you. Otherwise, I don’t know that its occasional brilliant passages are worth the slog.

Kingdom Cons by Yuri Herrera trans. by Lisa Dillman (2004)

This month I read two of Herrera’s slim novels, and loved them both. He is fast becoming a favourite author of mine. Everything I read of his helps me contextualise his work a little better, and makes me appreciate it all the more.

Also, let’s just get it out of the way, because we all know it’s coming. I am quite literally obsessed with the way Lisa Dillman translates his work, and I love reading her translator’s notes almost as much as I love reading the novels themselves. I hope one day to read the Spanish, but whatever magic she does when translating gives me what I think is probably an accurate sense of Herrera’s really unique style. Their collaboration is alchemical perfection.

In this novel, we follow Lobo, a musician whose talents land him in the “court of the King”, a heavyweight drug trafficker living on the Mexico-US border. He’s never referred to as that, though. Instead the novel is couched in this courtly terminology, creating a mysterious fable-like quality whose atmosphere will haunt you long after you close the book. There is real musicality to the language, as Lobo (now the Artist) composes corridos for his new master. But over time—and in the throes of a love affair—he must decide if it is worth giving his talent over to this man.

This novel was Herrera’s debut, and perhaps it occasionally suffers from being a little too heavy-handed in its depiction of this lifestyle. But overall, I was left very impressed. He’s one of those authors who you step back from and think… how is he doing that? What I love about his work is that although these novels are short, they feel like wholly fleshed out worlds. I really took my time with both of these and felt they rewarded that. He has a remarkable ability to write a compelling story and marry it with a poetic approach that elevates the text and often takes it somewhere totally surprising or strange. Having read so many wishy-washy short ‘lyrical’ novels, the weight Herrera’s words carry are always an absolute pleasure to encounter—every sentence here is doing some integral work.

The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera trans. by Lisa Dillman (2013)

This novel is in a slightly different mode. It is less vague and mythical, and more precise. Though there is always an element of mythologising at work in his books—I mean the main character here is called the Redeemer, after all. Anyway, look at the tension he builds in this killer opening:

A scurvy thirst awoke him and he got up to get a glass of water, but the tap was dry and all that trickled out was a thin stream of dank air. Eyeing the third of mezcal on the table with venom, he got the feeling it was going to be an awful day. He had now way of knowing it already was, had been for hours, truly awful, much more awful than the private little inferno he’d built himself on booze. He decided to go out.

The unusual but evocative vocabulary choices! The questions we are left with—why is there no water? What is going to be so awful about this day? Why has he been drinking himself into a stupor? So much is achieved here so quickly.

The Redeemer is a fixer living in a local town. He’s called upon by two families to find out what happened to their children, Romeo and Baby Girl. Both have gone missing, and each blames the other family. Yes, it draws on Romeo and Juliet, though perhaps the pair of star-cross’d lovers is not who you expect. The problem is, the “quiet of the streets” has not been disturbed by brawls between these families, but caused by a pandemic. The Redeemer heads out into the eerily quiet town making inquiries whilst always desperate to get back to his own love interest who lives across the hall, Three Times Blonde.

There is a noirish feel to this book, and with it comes some of the tropes you’d find within that genre. The Redeemer is your typical anti-hero, a hard drinker and a smooth talker. The first part of the book is almost entirely dedicated to his seduction of his neighbour. But I felt it served Herrera’s purposes nicely as the novel developed, and so did the Redeemer. I found the ending surprisingly moving as a result. It’s subtle, but it’s effective.

I have only his nonfiction book about the El Bordo mine fire and his latest novel Season of the Swamp to read before I become a Herrera completist, and you best believe I’ll be picking both up at the earliest opportunity.

In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente (2006)

The first hurdle to talking about this book is describing what happens in it in a way that won’t immediately make you want to run a mile. It has a One Thousand and One Nights–inspired structure, where the framing narrative involves a girl telling a young prince a selection of stories that read like folktales over successive nights. This girl has been banished to the gardens of a palace for an unknown reason, though she may be under some sort of enchantment. Her eyes are surrounded by black rings which upon closer inspection are formed of thousands and thousands of tiny words—the words that make her stories. The prince sneaks out of his palace home to hear them night after night.

From what I can tell from a brief bit of research, the novel differs from One Thousand and One Nights in that it exaggerates this framing idea. The novel is split into two books and each book contains one overarching story. But within each story are nested many others. At points, we are in a story within a story within a story. When you surface from one of them back up through the layers, you experience a small shock of recognition—oh yes, that’s where we got up to.

All in all, this should be a very annoying book. Just when you get momentum on one story, you dive into another. How do you even keep track of them all? Plus, as you may well know because I’ve mentioned it many times, I am suspect of contemporary authors using folktales or creating their own folktales. It is very often done extremely badly. But somehow it all works! Valente is confident in her control of the narratives, and they flow nicely. I never truly felt lost, and was always able to remember where we were when I went back up a layer (a condensed reading schedule would probably work best for this, though).

I believe one of the major hurdles to using folklore successfully in the contemporary novel form is length. These sorts of stories were never intended to work with the longer page count complexity requirements of the modern novel. But by using this form, Valente is able to capture some of their brilliance, whilst still working at a larger story scale, weaving them lightly together. And she writes them really well! Of course there are some stories that aren’t quite as compelling, but for the most part she clearly understands the form and what makes it so great. It requires mystery, tension and strangeness. It need not deal in psychological realism, but its characters should have distinctive voices and magnetism. The world she creates is fully formed and fascinating.

In many ways they are a feminist answer to the originals, and many of them poke fun of princes and their quests. Mostly, women save women here. Having been written in 2006, they are free of the kind of girlbossery we might find in more recent interpretations.9 There are possibly some stories in which it gets too heavy-handed and high on its own supply, but overall I was left very impressed. Very much for the literary reader looking to expand into other genres and challenge themselves to something new. It certainly gave me food for thought on the act of effective storytelling, and reminded me how much I actually really love folktales. I think that’s why I get so annoyed by contemporary authors using them badly.

Unfortunately for me I forgot that this was a duology, and I was left a bit bereft by the end. I hope to read the next later this year before I forget too much about the girl and her prince.

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich (2024)

In Erdrich’s nineteenth (!) novel, we follow two women, Crystal—a hard-working sugar beet hauler—and her daughter, Kismet. We know pretty much from the off that Kismet is going to get herself into an ill-advised marriage with Gary Geist, a local boy, heir to the sugar beet farm her mum works for. He seems desperate to marry her for rather cryptic reasons; he was mixed up in some tragic accident in the recent past, and finds Kismet’s presence a balm to his inner turmoil. Crystal, meanwhile, has her own set of problems with her husband, who seems to have stolen a bunch of money from the local church’s fundraiser.

I can’t help but enjoy Erdrich’s work. I just love her narrative voice; it speaks of many long years honing her craft, and a confidence that I often find missing from less experienced novelists. This novel is structured in lots of short chapters, which seems to be a form she is currently favouring, so we really only spend time with the characters in brief scenes. In one sense, I enjoy this almost disjointed approach to the narrative. It maintains pace and tension, and it kept me reading. I like that Erdrich puts her trust in us to fill in some of the gaps, and ranges far and wide into some unusual and interesting territory.

But on the other hand, I felt she could have been more generous with the story, with the characters, and with us. What it achieves in pace it probably lacks for in depth, especially compared to some of her earlier work. I didn’t feel she had the passion for these characters that would get me to really and truly invest. And it leaves some of their motivations a bit unclear; when there are a million red flags surrounding Gary, and literally nobody but him and his mum want Kismet to marry him… how exactly does this wedding come about? Whilst I’m fine filling in some gaps, I feel we needed just a touch more interiority here and there to bring the story together.

Still, I had a good time with this book. Is it Erdrich’s best, or most memorable work? Probably not. But I’ll read anything she writes. She brings a wonderful warmth and humour to her books that is reminiscent of the nineteenth century novelist—there’s something Austenite about this book—and I always feel safe in her hands.

The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality by Andy Clark (2023)

This book explores the predictive nature of the human mind. Clark is a longtime professor of cognitive philosophy, and someone whose work I briefly studied in a philosophy of mind module back during my undergrad, so I was looking forward to coming back to him and taking a trip down memory lane. The vast majority of literature about the predictive brain has been produced since I took that module, making me feel old.

I had a sort of vague awareness of the brain as a predictive machine; that it is not so much that we take in sensory information, process it and let that inform our thoughts and actions, but that we mostly predict what we perceive, allowing sensory information to nudge our perceptions into something more accurate and useful. There was lots here that I enjoyed reading about, particularly what this means for how we think about attention, qualia (the “what it is like” of the world), and how our brains perform complex tasks with relative ease.

Like many nonfiction books, though, the best work was in the first few chapters. After that, Clark spends some time in realms he is less meaningfully informed in—his attempts to tackle what the predictive brain might mean for racial prejudice or art felt simplistic and underdeveloped. That’s not to say this man doesn’t have some serious expertise, but he could have done with extra time in these other areas.

And unfortunately he is afflicted with a kind of techno-optimism that I just can’t get on board with. When he opines on a future where humans will develop “from the outset in the presence of a suite of supportive technologies” like personal AIs, “coming online when you are very young”, I tapped out. To be fair, he only presents this as speculation on a possible future, not necessarily the future he’d like to see. But the implication is very much there—he doesn’t critique these ideas at all, and focusses on them to the detriment of insights the predictive brain might provide us of the world as it is today. I’m sure some folks will appreciate Clark’s vision, but I certainly don’t.

I learnt some interesting things from this book, undoubtedly, and I recommend it on that basis, but with the caveats above. To be honest, though, I would like to read this same book but from someone with a much more holistic, multidisciplinary view, someone who is well-versed in sociopolitics.

(An aside: a free newsletter will be coming soon about literature and the predictive brain, inspired by this book—and how annoyed I was Clark didn’t go into it more lol—so make sure you are subscribed for that.)

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The Stronghold by Dino Buzzati trans. by Lawrence Venuti (1940)

I won’t go into too much detail with this one, as it was a re-read as part of the course in analysing a novel I am currently running! I also reviewed it here when I first read it under the older English title, The Tartar Steppe. Here is an excerpt from that review:

In it, soldier Giovanni Drogo is posted to half-forgotten Fort Bastiani a few days walk from his home city. Life at the fort seems essentially pointless; there is no enemy to guard from, nor has there ever been. The officers there seem in a state of stasis. And yet many of them feel this inexplicable pull to the place, and though he determines to leave after a few months service there, an enchantment drops over Drogo, too. He ends up spending decades in this nothing place, going through the same motions day after day. One of the best things about this book, and one of the reasons why I have so many pages of notes on it, is trying to work out what it all means. Is it about how/why people get themselves into monotonous, boring lives (as the introduction states, the inspiration for this book came from Buzzati's own boring job working the night shift at a newspaper)? How humans tend to live in the future, always feeling like there is more time ahead when something might happen, but never doing anything to actually bring that about? Are the soldiers protecting the world of meaning from the world of nothingness, and by being on that border find themselves in some sort of meaning hinterland? Is it about the concept of borders and national boundaries more generally? Is it about how we perceive time, what makes it speed up or slow down, how the promise of the future always creeps into what we are doing in the present? Is it more specifically about soldiers and the heroic fantasy they weave about themselves when the reality is very mundane? It is easy to make interpretations based on any of these ideas, which is what makes this novel so clever.

First of all, I think I probably do prefer this new translation by Lawrence Venuti now that I have read both. I cast some aspersions on his stated intentions with it in the course post, but as a translation I wonder if it captures the effect of the novel more accurately. I also had a sense this time around of how tightly structured the novel was. Although we are repeatedly told that nothing much is happening, each chapter advances the story and the themes in interesting ways, meaning that the tension is always maintained, even if it generally feels strange and fable-like. Overall I felt it to be a much more masterful novel even than when I first read it, and I highly recommend it.

And that’s it for March! If you have adjusted your email notifications, you may not have seen these posts (just so that you don’t miss anything that you do happen to be interested in).

Thanks for reading, everyone! In the next monthly round-up, I’ll be reviewing a lot of Gene Wolfe, my first Sigrid Nunez, and The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Divletsen.

I’m really going to piss people off with this one.

Before we get into it, I do know that this book is already considered “tragicomic”, but if you read on, the reasons I find it sad are slightly different from DFW’s (maybe).

A near-future from 1996, that is.

Inability to feel pleasure in normally pleasurable activities.

That’s not to say there aren’t some great sentences in here but there are also a lot of sentences. A great stylist, to me, is a great stylist almost everywhere.

If I explain why there will be… spoilers I guess? But you’d see what I mean if you read it.

After I wrote this review I read this piece, parts of which I largely agree with—there are no grown-up concerns here, treated with maturity.

A note to say that this criticism could obviously be levelled at many, many other books of a certain era. But there’s something particularly egregious about Infinite Jest. First, the intensity of the bigotry and the fact that it is so evident all throughout this very long book. Second, its reputation as a really great book that critics really love! Third, that many people seem to completely overlook these issues on that basis? As I say, I kinda think they are integral to the book’s central tenets, and not in a good way. Perhaps if we had a better sense of narrative voice in any of the third-person sections, we might have a bit more moral clarity.

This does also mean that there is an element of Orientalism about some of the tales. She obviously draws inspiration from folktales all around the world, and to some extent ‘exoticises’ them all. So at least it doesn’t have tunnel vision on what a folktale can be, and I would love to know more about her research process. But on occasion there are parts that probably wouldn’t fly today.

February 2025 Reads

Jessie Lethaby — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 15:02:29 GMT

This post is too long for email, so please do click through to the app or your browser to read the whole thing.

Welcome to one of my monthly wrap-up posts, where I briefly review everything I read! I read widely across many genres, from classics to literary to speculative fiction. With these I’m hoping to shed some light on backlist gems, perhaps push you to read outside your genre comfort zone, and also highlight which new releases are worth your time.

This month was dominated by long, dense reads that were nonetheless very enjoyable. Plus finally reading some Rachel Cusk, which I’ve been meaning to do for a long time.

Some links to books below are affiliate links.

Menewood by Nicola Griffith (2023)

There’s something about Hild. Saint Hilda, you may know her as, or Hilda of Whitby. She lived in 7^th Century Britain, and wielded a fair amount of power and influence (insert “for a woman at the time”), founding a monastery and dispensing advice to kings—enough for Bede to include a few paragraphs on her in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Griffith, intrigued by her story, has now written two novels speculating on what kind of early life she might have led to get her into this position of power; Hild covering her childhood, and Menewood her late teens and early adulthood.

And like I said, there’s something about her, or at least the way Griffith writes her. We spend so much time right up next to her, seeing the landscape the way she does, feeling her shift and breathe, and try to navigate a world fraught with dangers and difficulties. Reading these books—if you can find their rhythm—is an incredibly immersive experience. It is something few authors can achieve and speaks to Griffith’s eye for detail and absolute commitment to fully imagining and recreating the alien world that was this isle 1,400 years ago.

But like I say, this is only if you find their rhythm. I don’t think these books will appeal to everyone, and if they did they’d probably lose their magic. These are densely written novels, filled with minutiae, tons of difficult names (the Osfriths, Osrics, Oswines did rattle my brain this time round) and a lot of different kings and kingdoms to keep track of.1 Menewood is slightly more straightforward at a sentence level and has much more forward motion as a result, but I did mourn slightly the poetics of Hild. I think Hild is probably the towering achievement here.

Although I did have niggles about Menewood when I switched on my analytical brain—there’s some unnecessary repetition; I wasn’t sure about all the plotting choices; it feels like it could be tauter, tighter, cleaner—ultimately I forgive almost everything because reading this book has me genuinely gripped. I really care. It wielded a real power over me. And there’s a limit to how much I can criticise Griffith when some things feel like a divergence of taste between us—she wants Hild to become a warrior in Menewood, and I probably would have preferred a different arc—but that’s hardly a fault in the book itself.2 Ultimately I was willing to trust what she did with it and her interpretation.

I think you would be hard pushed to come away from these books without feeling a certain sense of awe at what Griffith does here. The way she holds the vast historical dynamics of the time and the small details of everyday survival together is nothing short of incredible. Add to that her depiction of Hild: I cried when Hild cried, my heart raced when hers raced. To enter this world you do have to give a little of yourself, a little of your time and effort and patience—but my, is it worth it. I’m just hoping we don’t have to wait another ten years for the next.

The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley (1988)

I’ve been singing this book’s praises for many years and thankfully for me, it is actually very good. I’ve wanted to re-read it since the moment I finished it the first time in 2019, and have dutifully carried it with me to a number of places where it always somehow slipped down the list. Unfortunately for me, I want to re-read it again already.

There are many technical things that I think make this book a minor masterpiece, but that still wouldn’t quite explain why I am so drawn to it. It certainly doesn’t have the same effect on everyone. But still, let me make an attempt.

Smiley writes in the style of an Icelandic saga here, telling the story of ‘the Greenlanders’, Norse peoples who had settled on the shores of Greenland from the tenth century. For a few hundred years they lived fairly prosperously there until around the fourteenth century, when the book picks up; soon after, the settlements were entirely abandoned. Though there are plenty of theories, we don’t know exactly why this happened—Smiley posits a selection of her own in the novel which feel entirely plausible.

Having just read Swedish author Frans G. Bengtsson’s take on an Icelandic saga in The Long Ships, I was keen to see how this novel differed, and what gave it its tone and feel. Bengtsson’s book is generally much wittier, lighter, fleeter of foot. Smiley’s novel is much darker, much denser. Whilst the first time around I was mostly just taken with the archaic writing style, this time I could see the influence of American literature in her work. It’s subtle, but it’s there. Her themes and the way she elucidates them through a series of symbolic images or refrains felt like the markers of an author who has read some Hemingway, some Steinbeck. So, too, is the mark of the 80s on this book. Whilst it starts out more formalised and saga-like, as we get deeper into these characters’ lives, we are caught in their entangled webs of human folly. We are afforded a closer attendance to a small subset of characters; we are privy to their thoughts and there are more extended dialogue scenes. I would assume these things mark the book as different from the original sagas, though I could be wrong. Either way, I’ll be able to tell you soon as I ordered myself a fat volume of them to work my way through. I’m very much in saga-mode at the moment.

This combination of the archaic, slightly removed style with the heft of emotion and careful human observation from contemporary writing is magic to me. She brings some of what is best about old modes of storytelling—assured manipulation of time, restraint and balance, lots of plot—with some of the best of what is new—sophisticated thematic choices that bring deeper meaning to the whole.

In short we follow a pair of siblings, Margret Asgeirdottir and Gunnar Asgeirsson, and their attempts to carve out a living for themselves in this unyielding place, and in the face of many tragedies. But the narrative is wide-ranging, and we encounter a lot of other characters and stories along the way. It’s another one of those books where you have a lot of names thrown at you. There’s a list (and some maps) to help you, but writing a few notes of your own might be helpful. As I say, though, the book’s focus does narrow down as you go on.

I must leave you with my usual Greenlanders warnings. The style of it will get in the way of some readers’ enjoyment. Compared to Bengtsson—which is much more accessible—Smiley’s prose feels more rigid and formalised, at least at first. I also spent the first seventy pages or so wondering whether the book was going to live up to my expectations. It is very much a slow burner in the way it works on you. It wasn’t until probably about halfway through that I remembered why I loved it quite so much. It takes time to get to know the characters (but the arcs! Oh the character arcs!) The first time round it took me a few weeks of reflecting on it to fully appreciate it, so this is an improvement. To me, it is entirely worth the trouble. A small miracle of a book.

The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez (2020)

I spent much of my time in the last few months of 2024 raving about Simon Jimenez’ The Spear Cuts Through Water, so I was very pleased to read this, his debut novel, with book club this month.

Whilst Spear is epic fantasy, here Jimenez tackles science fiction with a space opera style setting. We follow a small cast of characters that revolve around a mysterious silent boy who careens out of the sky one day. He forms an attachment with an aloof spaceship captain, and the two must cross worlds to keep him safe, as he has a power that is particularly sought after by the powers that be.

This little two-sentence summary doesn’t really do justice to how it feels to read this book. It was conceived of during Jimenez’ MFA programme, and so it starts off almost as a selection of lightly interconnected short stories before it begins to cohere together. In general it really has the feel of a debut novel; Jimenez tries all sorts of different techniques and voices out in it, in ways that are variously successful. I felt quite kindly toward it on this basis, you could see some of his talent beginning to come through, even if this wasn’t quite the right story or collection of characters. He is at his best when he writes a more focussed, concrete setting, where his imagery can really sing—the scope of the universe was just too big for him here.

But overall I actually really enjoyed my reading experience, even as I noted the parts of the book that just didn’t work. I am soppy and sentimental at heart, and this novel hit the right beats for me. I was able to fill in the gaps myself where needed. Nonetheless, I don’t know that I’d outright recommend it unless you loved Spear and want to see flashes of that same brilliance in his debut.

Outline by Rachel Cusk (2014)

There are a few things to check at the door when starting Rachel Cusk’s Outline, but the most important one is your sense of it as a work of realism. I am very aware of the artificialities of literary realism of all kinds, but this novel struck me as going far beyond them, into much stranger waters.

The thing is, is that realism—or at least the very internalised “new realism” of the likes of Ottessa Moshfegh or Jenny Offill—was what I was expecting, and so I was left pretty confused by this book. I then wrote close to two thousand words about it and now have to acknowledge that perhaps I need a little perspective shift. If a novel gets me thinking that much about how narrative is done, then it has achieved something. I certainly couldn’t write anywhere near that amount about, say, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which I found to be a rather empty endeavour.3

It is, famously, a novel in ten conversations (or at least ten chapters). Through these conversations, we are offered insight into the various characters depicted and their internal lives, as well as given an outline of sorts of our protagonist, the person whose perspective we actually inhabit. This character, Faye, is a writer, and she has agreed to teach writing to some students in Athens for a week or so. I was nervous that this would be wholly plotless, as it is often said to be, but actually there was enough concrete detail in each of the monologists stories that there is more than enough to go on, narrative-wise.

Analysing it as a piece of realism is a frustrating experience. I lost count of how many times I wrote in the margins ‘nobody talks like this’.4 The style is artfully poised, somewhat removed. All the characters across all the conversations sound much the same. It is, at times, verging on the ridiculous, in the way it describes absolutely everything that Faye observes through the lens of some grander philosophical narrative (a stranger’s hairy back “a foreign country I was lost in”, the opening or shutting of windows a lesson in “inversions of reality”). There is very little tonal shifting throughout, everything touches on the existential in a way that can feel forced. This is not a novel of light and shade, but an increasingly urgent monotone. Toward the end we meet a playwright who describes an affliction she calls “summing up”, whereby she keeps whittling all her ideas down to one word until she can no longer work on them. It culminates in this sentence: “And not just books either, it was starting to happen with people — she was having a drink with a friend the other night and she looked across the table and thought, friend, with the result that she strongly suspected their friendship was over.” Needless to say, if you thought Cusk was aiming for realism here, you might think rather poorly of the whole endeavour.

You might be forgiven for assuming it was so, though, because of the minute physical details and acts of ‘noticing’ that Faye feeds us, stuff that feels incongruous to the nigh-on Socratic dialogue that is the rest of the book. I say noticing because when she teaches her writing students about writing, a lot of it seems to be about noticing. Of course, I am very much of the mindset that noticing and writing down what you notice does not amount to good storytelling. But the contrast between these highly personal stories shared at the drop of a hat (complete with full philosophical and moral implications rendered in abstracted and impersonal language) and what we can assume passes for realism for Cusk—the small physical details of the way someone’s lips move when they talk, or the tracking of their eyes—this discordance is where my fascination truly lies with this book. To me it becomes almost uncanny in its unhumanness, and this in turn creates an interesting effect. And as a novel, for me, it’s all very odd. And yet I can’t deny that what Cusk produces is actually a pretty interesting version of a novel, even if it’s not my preferred type. What is she trying to achieve here, and why?5

Hannah Tennant-Moore talked in her review about an undercurrent of rage in this novel that she wishes Cusk had tapped into. It is obvious that the main theme across all the stories is the fraught nature of the relationships between men and women.6 One of the few details we know about Faye is that her marriage and family life as she knew it is falling apart. Cusk herself has written repeatedly of her own divorce, and so some sort of collapsing of Faye and Cusk is inevitable.7 On the one hand, I am tempted to say this novel is a failure in terms of how it depicts Faye. We get very little sense of her at all, despite the concept of the novel as a whole. And yet on the other I realise that perhaps the overall tone, the absurdity of the novel—perhaps that does feed into how I think of Faye (and, due to inevitable collapsing, Cusk). Perhaps I am shown a way of seeing the world that is, in many ways, alien to my own, and that is, in fact, quite revealing.8

It’s hard to tell where Cusk and I meet. Am I affording her too much grace for a novel which is—to my mind—at points ridiculous, strained?9 Devoid of actual life? Or is it in fact entirely her intention for it to feel this way? Does she intend to reveal herself, or is it Faye? How similar are they—where does the writing style of Cusk slip into the characterisation of Faye? What does it say about our narrator’s relationship to the concept of story as a whole? Is it as simple as that she is obscure to us because she is so obscure to herself? Is what I’m interested in in the book how far it reveals Rachel Cusk herself, writing fiction even though she doesn’t read fiction anymore? Or the modern subject? Or what it reveals about how we conceive of fiction in our current climate, what we (not me) value, why we value it?

Whatever the case may be, it has got me thinking, so it has in some ways been a success. I don’t particularly like it—I like my novels to have more humanity in them—but why should I like it? Certainly it deserves to exist. Many novelists have attempted to play with and resist the novel form and have ended up with something that is actually just very dull. This I think is doing… something. I think I’ll be continuing with the trilogy to see what that something might be.

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The Dead Wander in the Desert by Rollan Seisenbayev, translated by John Farndon and Olga Nakston (original 1991, translation 2019)

This book documents the death of the Aral Sea at the hands of the Soviet Union and their grand agricultural plans. For those that don’t know, the Aral Sea was one of the largest lakes in the world, spanning multiple Central Asian countries. Today only 10% of it remains, leaving behind what is now mostly desert. Ironically, it is because the Soviet Union wanted to ‘irrigate the desert’ to grow crops like cotton and rice that the two main rivers that fed into the Aral Sea were diverted, inefficiently and without thought to the unthinkable damage to the ecosystem. Seisenbayev—a prominent figure in Kazakhstan’s movement to independence—writes here a suitably apocalyptic novel, for a truly apocalyptic event.

Although the cast of characters might seem large, the narrative really focuses on Nasyr—a fisherman and mullah in a small village on the receding coastline of the Sea—and his son, Kakharman. Whilst Nasyr refuses to leave Sinemorye, as so many of his neighbours and friends do, Kakharman tries to fight the overwhelming deafness of Soviet bureaucracy from within, teaming up with scientists—Russian and Kazakh—to try and make them see sense. I don’t need to tell you that he fails in this, and the despair they all feel at witnessing this ecological disaster is palpable throughout. A note to say at times this book gets very dark—the people were pushed to the absolute brink.

As I often do when I encounter a book from an entirely new culture, I feel pretty out of my depth reviewing or evaluating this book. I think I’d have to read a few more books from Kazakh authors to understand which parts of the book comprise artistic choices, and which are inevitable as a result of Seisenbayev’s own literary and cultural experience. In general it has quite a grand, sweeping style to it that I would suspect has an even greater lyricism in the Russian in which it was originally written (I don’t tend to find this style works as well in English). We spend time on the small things, like following Kakharman into Party meetings, or sitting with Nasyr and his wife in the increasingly empty village, but there are also scenes of enormous impact and drama. I’m thinking of one in particular in which a helicopter is caught in a deadly tornado, and a fiery stallion flying through the air is the last thing the scientists inside it see. Not to mention the true magical realism elements (if that’s even the right term for the specific narrative style Seisenbayev employs here), where an enormous catfish might choose to talk to you, or the dead speak from beyond the grave.

I can’t say that Seisenbayev’s is a style I am particularly drawn to in general—I love precision in all things narrative, and folk epic is not generally my preferred genre—but that’s certainly more of a preference than a criticism of the book or Seisenbayev’s project with it. It certainly gave me a starting point and a glimpse into the culture and the history of the Kazakh people, and I will be seeking out more (I have my eye on Amanai and Zamanai by Saken Zhunuzov next, but do let me know if you know of others—there are not many translated works out there to get hold of). And I do recommend it to anyone looking for a book from this part of the world.

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford (2023)

Around a thousand years ago, Cahokia was a large and prosperous pre-American city with a population similar to that of London’s at the time. It was eventually abandoned in somewhat mysterious circumstances. In this alternate history novel, British author Francis Spufford imagines that this city continued to grow and develop under the guiding hand of its Native American inhabitants until at least 1920, when this book is set. In his version of our world, smallpox didn’t have such a devastating effect on the Native American population, such that more significant pockets of America were able to remain under their control, including the state (and city) of Cahokia.10 Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t sit right with the white settlers and states that surround it, leading to some of the major tensions of the book.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this novel. On the one hand, it was a very solid take on 1920s noir fiction, making it a rollicking read with bags of plot and atmosphere, and the alternate history element added some extra speculative interest. Some of it was a bit laughable (particularly the love story), but I think that’s part and parcel of the genre Spufford is working in. We follow Joe Barrow and his partner Phin Drummond who are called to investigate a strange murder one night: a body has been found pinned to the top of a skyscraper with its heart ripped out. As the two try to track down the murderer, tensions in the city begin to rise. Not only that, but Joe Barrow himself is experiencing a sort of awakening, leading him to re-examine the life he has built.

In many ways it is clear that Spufford is a talented novelist. It does what it needs to do, which is: entertain! And I’m keen to allow scope for authors to explore life outside the boundaries of their own experience; it just makes for better art. Ultimately I tentatively conclude that he does the best he can with transposing Native American city culture into the 1920s noir setting, coming up with some interesting ways that it might have had to adapt to fit this particular story. Whilst it isn’t glaring when you read the book, as I reflected more and went back over my notes, I do think he has several blind spots that would be better addressed by someone more familiar with the material, and he probably made some choices I would have avoided. I would love to read a Native American author’s response to this book in novel form, I would love to read more alternate history of this kind!11 I think a book like this poses a question to the world, and the reading experience would be made richer by having that response. If you already know of a book doing just that, please do let me know.

The physical copy of this book is wonderful, complete with illustrations.

Over the Moon by Imtiaz Dharker (2014)

It’s my aim to read a book of poetry each month this year, although I admit this was left over from January. I picked this collection up because I read and loved a poem called ‘This Room’ in the Being Alive anthology, and then saw that Tasnim had highlighted this particular volume of hers in her 31 days of poetry last year, so when it came time to look for something, I thought I would start here. Excuse my sharing quite a few of her poems with you today, but I think one of the best ways to review poetry is actually just to share some examples for you. Here is the original poem that I loved:

This Room

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This room is breaking out
of itself, cracking through
its own walls
in search of space, light,
empty air.

The bed is lifting out of
its nightmares.
From dark corners, chairs
are rising up to crash through clouds.

This is the time and place
to be alive:
when the daily furniture of our lives
stirs, when the improbable arrives.
Pots and pans bang together
in celebration, clang
past the crowd of garlic, onions, spices,
fly by the ceiling fan.
No one is looking for the door.

In all this excitement
I'm wondering where
I've left my feet, and why

my hands are outside, clapping.

One thing I love about what I’ve read about Dharker’s work so far, including the poem that Tasnim shared in her post, is her ability to highlight beauty in the ordinary moments. The sense of joy that rises off This Room is almost tangible. There is also a playfulness to some of her work that provides balance to some of the darker themes, and gives them a really distinct voice.

Over the Moon starts largely by documenting Dharker’s life in London (though there are still interludes from other places she calls home), and I so enjoyed seeing my city through her eyes.

The City

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Hauls itself out of riversilt and swamp,
trailing marshdamp and the warmth
of creatures it has slept with all these years.

Makes itself up in layers, from clay and chalk,
brick by brick of London stock, standing
not on solid rock, but breathing water.

Rises up at Ludgate Hill to feel
the people flowing through it veins,
and still, the secrets in its underdank,

its lates, Ropemaker Street, Saddler's Hill,
Goldsmith Street, Ironmonger Lane,
a geography of daily needs.

The City maps its appetites, its hunger, 
so that even now a woman lifts her mouth
in Bread Street, Corn Hill, Milk Street,

Honey Lane, to taste the names, 
and taste the names again.
On Wood Street, a thrush begins to sing.

Then her eyes remember
The colours flood back in.

Part way through writing the collection, though, her husband Simon Powell died after a long illness. Whilst the poems are devastating—and some more despairing than others—they are also filled with her love, and so are absolutely beautiful to read:

Vigil

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Your eyes open, silver
for one second, close.
Your hand stops, falls still.
You send me no more messages.

The machine by your bed
is saying prayers for you.
It keeps watch, tenderly interpreting
your body's needs.
It listens and records your every breath,
the turning of your blood, your heartbeat.

All night, all night, it pays close attention
to you. At dawn it stops.

I try to read its face. 
The machine is blinking back 
its tears.

Vroom

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This month is the arsonist. It strikes
its match and trees catch fire down every street,
out across the country lanes, all the way to Wales.

No mists here, but the leaves cut out of glass
stained crimson, carmine, orange, gold.
Your colours fly from every mast.

You never belonged down in the tube-lit room,
trapped in a web of wires and tubes, and will not stay
a minute longer than you must.

The machines open their hands, lose
their grip on you, and you are gone, flown
ahead of us, along the clanging corridor

up the stairs and out. Out at last 
to where the day fires up and speaks to you
in tongues of blackbirds, London buses, ars

taxis, human voices, trumpets, cymbals, 
joyful brass. You head off on Brompton Road
and the leaves are flames

that light you up, your face aglow,
not looking back, knowing this is the way
to go.

Overall, I highly recommend them. I had to stop myself buying another collection of hers to read for February, thinking I should give another poet a chance…

Here’s what you may have missed since the last monthly wrap-up! If you have adjusted your email notifications, you may not have seen these posts (just so that you don’t miss anything that you do happen to be interested in).

Book Club

In book club this month, we are reading Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, and Peace by Gene Wolfe. Click here to find out more about what we have going on over there, or here for more details on this month’s picks.

Thanks for reading, everyone! In the next monthly round-up, I’ll be reviewing Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (yes, really), The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich and The Garden by Nick Newman. Make sure you are subscribed to stay updated, and share with bookish friends if you enjoyed!

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The front matter of Menewood contains three maps, a full-spread family tree, and a cast of characters that takes up eight pages. In the back we have Griffith’s note on the historicity of the work, as well as the names and pronunciation notes of various words in the four languages that are used throughout (Old Irish, Ancient British, Latin and Old English). Oh and then there’s a three page glossary (which I wish had been longer).

This would explain why I think I ultimately favour Hild, though. I also have a history of preferring the childhood sections of novels and series, too.

Moshfegh and Cusk are very different authors in many ways, and yet they are often grouped when it comes to people’s literary tastes (if you like one you’ll probably like the other). I think I know why, but I’ll leave that for another time.

A personal favourite: ‘In other words,” Georgeou said, “I could deduce your story from the facts alone, and from my own experience of life, which is all that I know for a certainty, most importantly in this case my experience of failure, such as my failure to memorise the constellations of the southern hemisphere, which never ceases to upset me.” He folded his hands and looked at them with a downcast expression.’ No mention of constellations before this.

I’ve gone down a rabbit hole here but I find it so interesting how she repudiates fiction in general and doesn’t read much of it. Why, then, choose this form? It’s truly fascinating to me, and shows in the writing. What is she trying to push away from herself, and yet is nonetheless still drawn to?

It’s funny because I ‘agree’ with probably about fifty percent of the philosophical takes in the book. They should be ripe for analysing but they’re not, to me, at all. There are too many of them, they’re too scattered and they don’t seem to add up to any cohesive whole beyond ‘men and women will always create an unequal partnership’. In a good book, a book I like, the abstract mode generally really seems to touch something of actual life. Here I think it sometimes does but equally often doesn’t. Like Cusk is sort of stabbing in the dark for meaning.

She has also said she is “certain autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts.” I… do not agree lol.

Cusk is sometimes pulled up for not liking people or humanity that much. I would tend to agree.

The fact that she equally described “the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous” means that Cusk and I are at a ridiculosity impasse, which I enjoy.

Taking land from Illinois, Tennessee, Missouri, Mississippi, Arkansas and Kentucky.

Under no illusions that this might already have happened but that Native American authors may have a much harder time getting published than someone like Spufford for many different reasons.

January 2025 Reads

Jessie Lethaby — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 13:30:58 GMT

This post is too long for email, so please do click through to the app or your browser to read the whole thing.

I had a truly excellent start to my year reading-wise, and it is that rare occasion when I have no extra notes for you—let’s get straight to it.

Links to the books below are affiliate links.

No I do not have this lovely NYRB edition myself (though I don’t know that I want it with the major motion picture sticker…)

Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams (1960)

By this point it seems like almost everyone has read John Williams’ Stoner after its ‘rediscovery’ sometime in the last twenty years or so (the rediscovery that just keeps going!) And as it trickled down into bookfluencer spaces, you might see that some of the delirious hype around it has led to an inevitable backlash here and there. I admit, I do love Stoner. It is that quiet kind of novel that appeals to me, with its carefully weighed account of a man’s life. Not a perfect man, or even an exceptionally good man. Just a man. One who loves literature and books, and therefore already has an in with Williams’ target audience.

It’s been a few years since I read Williams’ most famous novel, so it’s possible that a reread might change my mind again, but right now I think I like the novel that preceded it, Butcher’s Crossing, even more. Will Andrews, a Harvard boy, has abandoned his life in Massachusetts to explore the American West. Inspired by Emerson, Andrews hopes that he will find true wilderness there, and, we presume, a sense of self. His notion of what wilderness is, and what he’s looking for, are somewhat vague. Upon his arrival in Butcher’s Crossing, he realises the only way to get ‘out there’ (out where?) is to agree to finance a buffalo hunt with the enigmatic hunter, Miller. Miller claims to have been to an untouched valley where there are still buffalo as in the old days and has always wanted to return to hunt them. You see, it’s sometime in the 1870s, and if Andrews were interested in hunting buffalo (which he’s not, really), he’s far too late. Almost the entire population of North American buffalo has already been killed. With a wretched single-mindedness, this small group of men set out for this hidden valley to harvest these last remaining hides.

Something I think people like about Stoner is its restraint—the way grand emotional notes are played quietly, not to reduce their impact but in fact to show just how far the resonance carries. Here, Williams’ restraint increases both the tension of the book—we are always waiting for the bad thing to happen—but also the horror, which we experience as a groundswell as the novel goes on. Why do none of these men stop? Can’t they see what they are doing? The horror comes from the sheer emptiness of their endeavour; it is brutal, yes, but it is also pointless, even by their own morally dubious standards. Whilst not in first person, Williams describes Andrews’ thoughts, his physical reactions to the events around him—we are in his point of view. And yet when we close the book we feel this emptiness pouring off him still, this unfillable void within him. We are not close to him at all, and neither he nor we know what he is looking for, or if he’ll ever find it. But we know that whatever it is, it certainly does not engage with ‘Nature’ or nature in any meaningful way.

It is hard to describe Williams’ prose. For large swathes of his novels, it is self-effacing, advancing the plot, the themes, the rhythm of the book. It works quietly on you. But then he will suddenly hit you with a sublime passage or two. It is never complex, but it is always beautiful. All in all, this is a masterful book that caught me in its spell, and didn’t let me go until the end.

The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson trans. by Michael Meyer (1941-1945)

This book was an awful lot of fun. It is a Swedish novel from the early 1940s, written in the style of an Icelandic saga—though of course updated here and there with a few twentieth century techniques. It’s set in the late 10^th century, and centres around Orm Tostesson, nicknamed Red Orm for his hair colour and fiery temper in battle. As a Viking warrior, Orm travels all around the world, from his native Scandinavia through Northern Europe, the Mediterranean and down to Muslim Spain and back. Admittedly, there is a lot of fighting and ‘booty’. But it is a well-balanced book—especially with the inclusion of more intimate and domestic moments—and Bengtsson has a gift for storytelling. Perhaps toward the very end of this five-hundred-page tome (originally split into two volumes with two books each) I felt it becoming repetitive, but in general the stories within are engaging and entertaining. And this coming from a person who hates watching pretty much any action scene in any film ever made (with a few notable exceptions).

Before I say anything more I must speak about the wonderful translation by Meyer. Obviously I can’t read the Swedish, but whatever Meyer did here makes this novel so readable and enjoyable for English speakers. Crucially, he managed to keep Bengtsson’s humour (so hard in translation!) It’s the humour that really makes this book, the wry asides and comments. Whilst the characters are fairly flat in the way you would expect from a saga, the humour draws them out into three-dimensionality. And once they’ve been drawn out, you find you care for them, and moments of poignancy begin to come through.

Naturally the novel is pretty interesting from a historical perspective, too. I learnt more about Vikings, and about the 10^th century, and about the encroachment of Christianity on Scandinavian shores. Orm’s encounters with Islam and Judaism were sensitively and unexpectedly rendered. One thing I appreciated about Bengtsson’s interpretation of Viking life is his resistance to the kinds of macho mythologising that you might otherwise get. No doubt there was violence and an adherence to a certain kind of masculinity, but life—as always—was much stranger, less conformist, than one imagines.

I’m going to be re-reading The Greenlanders this month, which is American novelist Jane Smiley’s take on an Icelandic saga, and I very much look forward to comparing the two. In the meantime, I highly recommend The Long Ships. In the NYRB intro, Michael Chabon says that it has “the potential to please every literate human being in the entire world”. That might be overstating it, but I do think that most of you would be hard pressed not to enjoy it.

The Odyssey by Homer trans. by Emily Wilson (-800)

I’ve always been a little reluctant to delve into the Classics. Mostly I think because of the cultural discourse that surrounds them, both in and out of academia. They seemed to lend themselves too well to a type of literary snobbery that I don’t really approve of. Or outside of that, to a sense of heroic masculinity that makes me want to roll my eyes.

But of course, as with most things like this, I’ve done myself a disservice there. I thought The Odyssey would be something I would kind of slog through in preparation for my reading of Ulysses later this year. Turns out, it’s really great, actually! Who knew!? Only, perhaps, the many thousands of people who have read it and proclaimed it worth reading for hundreds of years.

I was expecting an action-packed saga which would move abruptly from incident to incident, each of which I assumed would involve rather obscure mythical creatures, and a lot of high-register praise of things like violence and honour and adventuring. What I got instead was a much more intimate and deeply felt poem about one man’s homecoming. What does it mean to come home, and can you ever really come home after a long time away? As in The Long Ships, domestic scenes, even nature writing, provide balance to the whole. In fact, that which I thought of as The Odyssey—the bit where Odysseus encounters Circe and the cyclops and gets tempted by nymphs, that kind of thing—takes up only a four of the twenty-four books, and is narrated after the fact in first person by Odysseus himself. In general there were so many techniques here that still felt fresh and modern, even. Cinematic scene changes, a narrative that starts halfway through the action, and where we don’t even meet Odysseus himself until a few books in. It was eminently readable, and more than that—enjoyable!

I suppose we must talk translation! I read the Wilson because I read this Substack article of hers and liked what I gathered of her translation approach. This was confirmed for me by her translator’s note and introduction when I got my hands on a copy. She knows, we all know, that translation cannot truly be ‘faithful’ to the original, certainly not with a text as ancient as this. She tries to capture some of the feel of the original, which is apparently not written in a particularly high style, and does have a rhythm and beat to it. I suspect she’s right that a translation wrought in more contemporary language does reveal some of the strange and uncanny parts of this poem more than if you archaise or elevate it, and I appreciated that about her version. I think the tension between the alien and the familiar is one of the things that makes this text so fascinating, and so enduring. I think I probably will try another translation (or two!) in my lifetime. But for now I was very happy with my introduction through Wilson. I have no misogyny-inflected hangups about that.

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The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares trans. by Ruth L. C. Simms (1940)

Alone on a tropical island, a nameless protagonist pens a diary for an unknown reader. He is a fugitive from his native Venezuela and he came to the island as a kind of refuge; on it are a museum, a chapel and a swimming pool. One morning he finds himself suddenly surrounded by people who seem to have appeared from nowhere, and, fearing they will report him to the authorities, he races down to the nearby marshland where he waits in hiding. Thus begins Bioy Casares’ strange volume which his friend Jorge Luis Borges called “perfect”.

This is a beguiling little novel that I would put in the same category as My Death and Pedro Páramo. Short, thought-provoking, weird, and sitting on the boundary where genre encounters literary. And like these novels, I don’t want to reveal too much lest I ruin the magic of this book for you. It is atmospheric, mystifying and provocative, and sometimes all too prescient for a novel written in 1940.

This wasn’t a resounding success in book club, mostly because of one or two plot points that loomed too large and made for sometimes uncomfortable reading, especially for our modern eyes. I think I ultimately appreciated it for what it was. Whilst I can’t speak to the accuracy of the translation, the writing was quite beautiful, some of the imagery very arresting, and the ideas were both satisfyingly layered throughout the text and resistant to clear answers, allowing us to keep thinking through some of the implications. I recommend giving it a try, especially if you like twentieth century Latin American fiction, or the novels mentioned above. Or, indeed, if you like the next novel…

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (2020)

Any time I read Piranesi will be a good time. This re-read solidified the novel once and for all as an all time favourite for me. I link here a previous review and I don’t want to endlessly repeat myself every time I read it (which will be many more times). But it embodies so much of what I love in literature. Firstly, it’s straight up enjoyable—the plotting is great, it’s compelling, and it’s satisfying to have a mystery to put together. Protagonist Piranesi is uniquely lovable, but in a way that doesn’t feel like Clarke is deliberately manipulating us—he’s still just a person, but he is one we can deeply empathise with. All this satisfies the reader inside me who actually just wants to enjoy what I read and get lost in it. For the analytical adult reader, there is much to love, too. The structure of the House, the ideas it embodies and the clash of different knowledges and sciences throughout is extremely well established across form, content and at a sentence level. It is a novel that I think will endure long past our current moment.

I re-read this because it has been compared to Morel, and I can see why! There are so many interesting moments in which the two overlap it’s hard to believe that Clarke hadn’t read Bioy Casares’ work. Of course Piranesi is often considered to reference Borgesian labyrinths, so it wouldn’t be too big of a jump. In many ways Piranesi does feel like the more updated and whole version of Morel. Morel feels more troublesome in various ways, but that almost makes me like it more rather than less in the comparison. Piranesi is the good child, Morel the more difficult, grinding up against some of those things that become easier for a writer like Clarke. It is an earlier piece and feels that way, but it also shows how remarkable Bioy Casares’ vision was, and why Borges was so taken with it. I really recommend reading them together, and I think I’d read Morel first if you haven’t read Piranesi yet, though either way round would be rewarding.

Blackwater II: The Levee by Michael McDowell (1983)

Partway through this series and I did say I was going to stop trying to review books like this one which really feel like parts of a whole when I hadn’t yet finished the whole cycle. So all I will say is that I liked the way this book expanded the world McDowell began in the first part, and I was impressed by his ability to write nuanced human dynamics, especially for a horror novel. A couple of truly chilling scenes, but really the main event here is the town of Perdido. Let’s see how it progresses!

I would love to hear from you—if you’ve read any of the books above, your favourite books from January or perhaps what you’re currently reading and enjoying.

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Here’s what you may have missed in January! I’m planning on doing these little round-ups at the end of my monthly posts, especially for those who have adjusted their email notifications, so that you won’t miss anything that you do happen to be interested in.

Book Club

In book club this month, we are reading The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez, and In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente. Click here to find out more about what we have going on over there, or here for more details on this month’s picks.

Thanks for reading, everyone! In the next monthly round-up, I’ll be reviewing Menewood by Nicola Griffith, The Dead Wander in the Desert by Rollan Seisenbayev, and Over the Moon by Imtiaz Dharker amongst others. Make sure you are subscribed to stay updated, and share with bookish friends if you enjoyed!

Favourite Books of 2024

Jessie Lethaby — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 14:07:01 GMT

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I usually begin these posts with a preamble, looking back over my year of reading. Usually this tends into the hundreds (thousands) of words. This year, though, I am perfectly contented as I look back on 2024 as a whole. I read some great books that have become easy favourites, I read lots of books I would generally recommend to the right reader and overall there were very few duds. Almost everything I read taught me something; what I do and don’t like, what makes for a good or bad reading experience.

I read a very neat and tidy 100 books. Technically I wrote reviews for 101—I finished Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning in the first days of January, but it occupied most of my December so I counted it as such in my monthly books.

I read 9 nonfiction books—pretty good for me!—and 17 translated books. I’d probably like to read more of both this coming year, though I’m not entirely unhappy with that ratio. It was also the year of big books, and I surpassed the previous year’s page count in about September or October. I read 13 books over 500 pages, 6 of which were over 800.

I listened to far fewer books, I think through lack of routine in large swathes of the year. This is pretty surprising as 100 is the most books I’ve read in a year since the birth of my daughter, and I think I read a lot in 2023 by listening to a fair few. But equally, it was also the year I pivoted hard to books in my online output, which freed up a lot more ‘work time’ for reading.

Speaking of, I read at least 60 books with others this year (and it could be higher, I’m not sure). Reading with others through the book club continues to be such an enriching and rewarding experience. It’s probably why I feel so great about the year; I got value from many of the books I didn’t outright love through our countless discussions.

As for plans or changes in 2025, I definitely need to find a good balance of new releases and backlist titles, as well as reading for larger projects or courses. A couple of my reading projects took up practically all of my precious reading time in the latter half of the year (partly because I was playing catch up after a very busy summer) and I missed reading more to my mood. This is obviously tricky when you’ve only got so many hours in a day. But I’ll keep working at it, and in the meantime the Airtable base I use to organise my reading becomes more and more elaborate.

Let’s get into the books, shall we! I haven’t counted rereads this time, even though I still love Jeff VanderMeer’s original Southern Reach trilogy and Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance, obviously. Usually I do quite haphazard categories, but we’re going to stick to a fairly standard First, Second and Third Place categorisation today. As always, I had to be true to my more nebulous sense of connection to a book. We can’t always explain what it is that makes us really love one well-crafted book compared to another. There are so many great books I won’t be writing about today that might give you that feeling, and I encourage you to scroll through my monthly reads if you’re interested. There are over twenty additional books I’d still highly recommend (I’ll include a few as honourable mentions at the end of this post), and almost forty more books after that that I consider pretty good and would recommend to the right reader.

I’m going to try and be brief below (lol—nice try), but do go and click through to my original reviews if you want to learn more about each.

Links to Blackwells below are affiliate links!

First Place

These are the books that have stuck with me since I read them, and that I consider on their way to becoming all time favourites (this designation I think only truly comes after rereading and a year or two of reflection). All but one of these authors was new to me this year!

The Employees by Olga Ravn trans. by Martin Aitken (2018) - original review

I loved this book, and I loved discussing this book. It’s an unusual novel and one that might usually get my hackles up. It’s told through a series of employee statements given to an HR-like body. They work aboard a spaceship and have recently ventured to explore a nearby planet, where they have found mysterious ‘objects’ which are provoking strange reactions amongst them. We quickly discover, though, that some of these employees are human and some are humanoid, and we’re not explicitly told which is which.

Puzzling this out, interpreting the role of the objects, and discovering the underlying storyline (it’s there and it’s good!) was so rewarding, and unlike other short novels set in space (Orbital), it really feels like it has depth, nuance and meaning. Wonderful! I’d love to read her book My Work this year.

Little, Big by John Crowley (1981) - original review

I read this book over several busy weeks, which interrupted its flow and rhythm. But I haven’t stopped thinking about it, to the point that I’ll be rereading it this year as part of a slow read I’m running—I hope some of you will join me! I really think it’s a masterpiece. It opens with the journey of Smoky Barnable, who is walking from the City to Edgewood, where he will be getting married to a woman he only fleetingly knows, Daily Alice Drinkwater. Indeed, he has been given special instructions as to his journey; he must walk and not ride, he must eat only food he himself has made, and he must find or ask for a place to sleep. See, the Drinkwaters are a little strange, as is their house and the grounds on which they live. Do fairies live in Edgewood? And what is the Drinkwaters’ relationship to them? This is that rare book that really captures the magic of the fairytale, amongst other things. It is utterly beautiful.

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich (2001) - original review

I’ve read Erdrich books before and had minor niggles with them whilst broadly enjoying them, but something about her writing is very moreish to me. And this one just really got me. I don’t know why I was so taken with the story of Agnes DeWitt/Father Damien—a woman who finds herself rather unexpectedly performing the role of a Catholic priest on an Ojibwe reservation—but I was. It is meandering and tragic and funny and ultimately very moving. I think about it a lot and will now be working my way through the series it comes from from the top.

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad (2023) - original review

This book works on many levels; it is smart and incisive; it’s a good story that works through multiple layers of interpretation; the prose is captivating; and it is somewhat ambitious and inventive. It follows Sonia, an actor living in London who decides to visit her sister in Haifa after a disastrous love affair. As a Palestinian who has avoided the pain of living in and around Israel for many years, this brings up a lot of emotions for Sonia, especially when she finds herself in a production of Hamlet taking place in the West Bank. It is great literary fiction of an older tradition, and I so look forward to watching the rest of Hammad’s career.

Hild by Nicola Griffith (2013) - original review

I had to put this one here, even though I struggled with it at times, because it just keeps coming back to me. This is extremely dense historical fiction based on the early life of Saint Hilda. It is granular in detail at times, and keeping on top of the political machinations at this pivotal moment when Christianity arrived on our shores (shores not yet British or English) was difficult at times. And it is written in this thickly lyrical dreamlike prose which I think highlights just how alien this world is. But Hild, and her connection to the natural world around her, wormed her way into my heart. I missed her when she was gone, and I look forward to accompanying her on the next stage of her life in Menewood.

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury (1957) - original review

I found this book to be moving in many ways, partly in Bradbury’s absolute earnestness with it. Who could describe many contemporary novels with that label? But I’m also putting it here because it is totally weird and it shouldn’t work at all, but it does! And that surprise element just really delighted me. It’s a mishmash of stories, some focussing on 12-year-old Douglas Spaulding—earning it the designation of ‘coming of age’ novel—but it also features several other stories, including one out-and-out horror story which shouldn’t fit the genre at all, and it pretty much abandons Doug entirely through the second half. And whilst it starts in gentle realism, strange machines begin to proliferate in Green Town, Illinois. This instability in the narrative structure in turn lends it a real magic in the effect of the actual story. Will be rereading in a future summer!

My Friends by Hisham Matar (2024) - original review

Matar writes here of Khaled, a fictional protagonist who—in this version of events—attends the very real demonstration outside the Libyan embassy in London in April 1984. Convinced to go by his friend, he is one of those injured by the gunmen shooting from the windows of the embassy, and his whole life is unutterably changed, the future he thought he’d have gone in an instant. He lives, then, in exile, and relies on his close but delicate friendships with the people around him. Matar’s long, contemplative sentences drew me deep into this book, and spin beautiful portraits of Khaled and his friends. There is true humanity in this book. His and Isabella Hammad’s work is really a balm for the soul for those of us who are tiring of the current trends in literary fiction. It is alive and well if you look in the right places.

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez (2022) - original review

I spend my days searching for an author like Jimenez, who is writing challenging and ambitious speculative fiction wrought in accomplished, assured prose of a distinctive style and is doing it all today. These are rare authors, and they must be cherished. It is difficult to describe this book in just a few sentences, but suffice it to say it is a vivid, evocative story of a journey taken by two men in a strange, otherworldly place. There are elements of this book which feel familiar and give it its epic proportions, but Jimenez also includes so many surprising and imaginative details that make this novel both fascinating craft-wise and also entertaining (a long lost combination of things!) All wrapped up in some really distinctive and thoughtful prose. We are reading The Vanished Birds for book club next month, and I can’t wait.

Second Place

There are only two books in this category! I don’t know why I couldn’t push them up into the first—it’s a mystery to me too. Is it because they are missing the ‘human warmth’ factor that pretty much always needs to be present in a book I consider an all time favourite? It’s certainly not entirely absent here, but it’s not as overt in either as in many of the books above. There is surprising human warmth in The Employees, even. But I find both to be exceedingly good books.

Embassytown by China Miéville (2011) - original review

To borrow my own words from my original review: Have you ever wondered what a language might look like where there is no (or less) slippage between a word and its referent? Where language somehow grasps the physical world? And then, have you ever wondered what might happen when that kind of language met our kind of language? China Miéville has, and he wrote this book about it. This is a fascinating and complex book, that explores the entanglements between personhood, power, language and colonialism in a unique and powerfully thought-provoking way. And despite some dips in pacing here and there, the story itself is also engaging and satisfying.

2666 by Roberto Bolaño trans. by Natasha Wimmer (2004) - original review

This is a perfect maze of a book, Bolaño challenging us to find the connections and resonance across its five volumes. The book ultimately revolves around the northern Mexican town of Santa Teresa—which is experiencing a spate of femicides—but it also delineates the story of four academics in search of the author they’ve dedicated their lives to, the story of a man fighting on the eastern front of WWII, the story of a Black American journalist covering a boxing match in the wake of his mother’s death. It is strange and surreal at times, blunt and straightforward at others. Overall I was left very impressed by it.

Third Place

These books are in here for a number of reasons: the book was just too good at a craft level to exclude; I couldn’t stop thinking about it or it felt significant to my reading, flaws or no; it surprised me in some way (the element of surprise plays a large role in my feelings about a book… hence why rereadings are ultimately important); it was unique or noteworthy enough that I want to tell you about it again.

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong (2022) - original review

This was one of the first books I read in 2024, and I thought about this a lot in the months after I read it. It just seemed to have relevance everywhere I looked. When we discussed The Employees I was thinking about it, and again when I listened to The Mountain in the Sea. Looking to different animals’ sensory systems—some similar and some vastly different to our own—defamiliarises the world. There are millions of different worlds experienced just on our own planet. It was a fascinating read, expertly told with just the right balance of science and personable voice.

Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera trans. by Lisa Dillman (2009) - original review

I think I need to return to this one once I’ve read some Homer. Because somehow Herrera embodies the feel of an epic in just 119 pages. I find Herrera to be a fascinating author with a really unique approach; Ten Planets which I read in 2023 was mind-bending in the best possible way. I also love reading Dillman’s translator’s notes, I haven’t read the Spanish of course but the way she translates his work, to my eye at least, is ingenious. Here we follow the journey of Makina, a young Mexican woman searching for her wayward brother in the States. In order to do so she must traverse a kind of underworld. Truly excellent writing.

The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe (1980) - original review

I didn’t quite finish The Book of the New Sun in 2024, but I was enthralled by this first instalment (I was less enamoured with the second but I still liked it). I loved the slightly obscured style, the mysterious asides, and the depth of the world created. We follow Severian, a young man brought up in the guild of torturers in a dying world. He is on his way to becoming one himself only to find his commitment to the guild called into question by one of its prisoners.

Gogmagog by Jeff Noon and Steve Beard (2024) - original review

This comes into the surprise category. I expected very little from this book, and found a richly imagined world which skirts many of the hackneyed tropes and types from other speculative fiction that results in something that feels fresh and unusual. We follow irascible boat pilot Cady Meade who reluctantly agrees to aid a young girl and her thrall down the river Nysis, which is inhabited by the ghost of a dragon. I want more people to read it!

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo trans. by Douglas J. Weatherford (1955) - original review

The precursor to such books as Signs Preceding the End of the World, this was a strange and surreal little book, and I very much enjoyed following the threads of its narrative. I particularly loved the ghostly atmosphere it conjured up; I remember moments from the opening pages well nine months after reading it.

The incredible full cover (front and back) by Kinuko Y. Craft

Ombria in Shadow by Patricia McKillip (2002) - original review

This book is also dreamlike and strange, but instead of the unnerving, threatening atmosphere of Comala, it is the true strangeness of fairytales that seeps into its pages. Because fairytales are not cosy, warmhearted tales, they are uncanny and alien in many ways. Here we are immersed in shadowy, dangerous Ombria; glittering above the surface, dark in its depths. The Prince of Ombria has just died leaving a vacuum of power, with only his mistress and five year old son left behind to ward off the encroaching threat of sorceress Domina Pearl.

That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx (2002) - original review

I struggled with this book at times. I read it too slowly and too distractedly for its meanderings. But I didn’t stop thinking about it once I’d finished it! Proulx’s project—documenting the end of a certain way of life in the Texas panhandle—seemed to have burned itself into my brain. I’d love to return to it at some point. It details the experiences of young Bob Dollar—a man without much direction or wherewithal—who accepts a job with Global Pork Rind, sniffing out good spots for a new hog farm. The locals would be pretty hostile to this, of course, being that these farms are smelly, unethical and toxic. So Dollar goes undercover, and finds himself more absorbed with the community than he expected.

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli trans. by Elizabeth Jaquette (2017) - original review

This is an exquisitely crafted book (oh, to read it in the Arabic!) that had me sat staring at the wall for minutes afterwards. It is a book of two halves, the first covering a few days in the life of an Israeli soldier in 1949; he finds, assaults and murders a Bedouin girl out in the desert. Half a century later, a Palestinian woman finds out about this through a ‘minor detail’ in the archive, and sets out to discover the girl’s side of the story with great difficulty, both because of the restrictions placed on her ability to research by the occupation, and the fact of the girl leaving behind no written record. All this inspired by a true story that Shibli came across. I highly encourage you to read it.

A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar (2012) - original review

Again, a book I struggled with at times and yet one that lingers in my mind after the reading. Young Jevick—born on the Tea Islands which are considered somewhat marginal and backward—travels to Olondria, a place he has dreamed about, read voraciously about, and which he has been taught about by his mysterious and charismatic Olondrian teacher. Samatar disrupts the traditional trajectory of the epic fantasy narrative, and in doing so deftly explores the relationship between colonialism and writing and reading. It is rendered in dense, poetic prose that at times seems to occlude the storyline, but also led to some incredibly vivid scenes that I can bring to my mind’s eye even now. I’m very interested in reading more of Samatar’s work.

Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer (2024) - original review

Of course I had to put Absolution in here, the newest Southern Reach novel. A special book to me not only because I enjoyed the reading of it but I also got to chat to Jeff about it as well! I enjoyed this one a lot, and appreciated its expansion of Area X and the project of Central and the Southern reach. I was particularly struck, here, by the seeming ease with which VanderMeer moves between different registers. The first section moves from a journalistic reporting tone to enraptured hysteria; then there was the beautiful, forceful lyricism of some of the nature passages; and finally the chaotic expletive-ridden madness of the last.

Honourable Mentions

Jonathan Abernathy, You are Kind by Molly McGhee - original review

A very promising debut about the crushing nature of debt.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck - original review

Whilst this novel is far from perfect, I absolutely loved dissecting with book club both its contents, but also its place in ‘Literature’, now and when it was published.

Witness by Jamel Brinkley - original review

One to return to—overall a subtle but powerful collection of stories with hints of the strange.

Home by Marilynne Robinson - original review

Not as expertly crafted as Gilead, but something of its rawness and pain really touched me.

My Death by Lisa Tuttle - original review

Very much enjoyed this novel and discussing it, also, particularly that provocative ending. Would be a great read with Byatt’s Possession.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith - original review

A warm, big-hearted book that depicts a slice of working-class life in early-twentieth-century Brooklyn. Really great scene-setting and storytelling, easy to gulp down.

A Flat Place by Noreen Masud - original review

Perfectly balanced nature memoir lauding a type of landscape we often forget about: the flat place.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar - original review

Wears its heart on its sleeve; ambitious, messy, and somehow just about works.

The Extinction of Irena Ray by Jennifer Croft - original review

Absolute chaos that suitably takes to task the world of translated fiction. Very clever and utterly weird.

Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb - original review

I wish I’d had more time to finish out the Liveship Traders series in 2024 or this might have made its way further up the list; as it was it just felt like I was too much in the middle of the story, but Hobb remains a favourite.

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein - original review

I think Klein hits the nail on the head with this one—so much great analysis of the way the online world interacts with the real. Highly recommended for all.

With that, I shall conclude this, and say goodbye to 2024 for the final time. It’s been real. Of course you can find all my other reviews either here on Substack or my website for the older archive.

December 2024 Reads

Jessie Lethaby — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 12:14:02 GMT

Not pictured: A Flat Place by Noreen Masud, Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha, The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

Let’s peer, for a moment, into the distant past that was December 2024, and review the last few books I read in that strange and disconcerting year. Every January I consider not doing this because I am usually later posting it than I would like, partly because I am diametrically opposed to starting one of these before the month is out. It seems I absolutely need to see the reading month in full before I can reflect on it. This is obviously a flawed way to proceed but it’s what I’ve got. Anyway, every year I decide I obviously have to review the books I read in December, seeing as I’ve done it for every other book I read throughout the year. And so here we are. Looking at the words ‘December 2024’ when our minds have all turned towards the fresh page of a new year.

This month held two pretty major disappointments for me, so against all usual protocol I’m going to write about those first and then move into the books I did like. I was very ready to love both Pale Fire and Too Like the Lightning but alas, it was not meant to be. Let’s get into it.

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962)

Oh no, I have a very unpopular opinion here.1 This book should have been an easy favourite for me. I love a pretentious literary puzzle, and I also think Nabokov is a genius. But I found the book to be… lacking.

The book is largely penned by a character called Charles Kinbote. Purportedly, the book is an analysis of a poem (‘Pale Fire’) by a writer named John Shade, who has (duh duh duh) recently died. We have Kinbote’s preface, the poem itself, and then the extensive notes. Only we come to find we are being offered something rather different.

It’s hard to talk about why I didn’t like this book without in some sense ruining it. So if you haven’t read it and do want to go into it fairly blind—which I think is probably the right approach—I give you permission to skim read the rest of this (I’ll avoid major spoilers, though). Partly because although I didn’t enjoy this book that much, I still think it’s worth reading. I wondered whether some of my issues with the book came down to the fact of it being an older version of books I love; without it, perhaps they wouldn’t exist or would look very different. I appreciate Nabokov’s experimentation here, his writing a novel in the form of a poem and analysis to said poem. On a prose level it is light and adept, shifting subtly into different registers and voices (not to mention, the actual poem itself, by turns lyrical and ridiculous). And I think my disappointment registers differently because I had such high expectations. If I read this book from a contemporary author, I might have been pretty impressed; such is the curse of being Nabokov. I’m glad to have read it and would recommend it on all these bases.

But hey, it was a bit of a slog, in ways I didn’t expect. Not because it was dense or because it was annoying flipping back and forth between different parts of the book to follow references. That’s the kind of stuff that really gets me going. I couldn’t help comparing it, in fact, to Possession by A. S. Byatt, which I read in December the previous year, so my seasonal senses were tingling. That, too, features a lot of poetry penned by no less than two different (fictional) Victorian authors, and a number of layered narratives. It is pretentious and English literature-y in all the ways I love. That book seems born out of a real love for this kind of endeavour.

Pale Fire, however, seemed to me to be born out of a desire to mock those academics lining up to analyse it (stung by his experience with readings of Lolita, perhaps?) In my opinion the poem and the notes were just too far apart narratively to make for an interesting reading experience, and actually the storyline itself seems almost straightforward if you follow the clues.2 It doesn’t help that the story we are told in the notes is incredibly tedious,3 or that Kinbote as a character is generally rather unpleasant.4 Don’t get me wrong, many many people have tied the poem and the notes closer together and I read a lot of different theories, but I find myself unable to buy into any of them. I end up feeling like a crazed Kinbote, clawing for meaning where there isn’t any. Or perhaps there are meanings, but they are too many and various—too many possibilities abound due to multiple red herrings that feel like Nabokov is just messing with us, rather than trying to show fundamental instability or hint at some hidden truth. And because this feels to me to be the heart of the novel—analysis is futile—I can’t get invested. There is no truly great story here, no truly great characters. It is an experiment before it is an enjoyable novel. That is fine, but I can’t call it a favourite.

I hate to be that person that puts up their hand in class and says ‘well what’s the point of it analysing this?’ That goes against my very nature. But with this it felt like such an empty endeavour. When I got to the bottom, what would I find? What themes, what heart? It reminded me of reading House of Leaves. Yes, this is all very nice, but you have to be doing it for a reason beyond ‘I’m being experimental’.5 What story do you actually want to tell, and why? Thankfully, because it is Nabokov, there are elements to the book that I think are interesting beyond the puzzle aspect, and if I ever returned to it I’d be focussing on these. In fact, the whole rabbit-hole-of-references aspect I consider a distraction I spent too much time on. I’d follow the theme of mortality, death and haunting. I think this works through the book in an interesting way and possibly has echoes in Nabokov’s other work, too.6

I now prepare for comments telling me I’m wrong.

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer (2016)

I enjoyed Ada Palmer’s introduction to Gene Wolfe’s seminal Book of the New Sun (which I am still halfway through…more on that soon, I hope), and it put her Terra Ignota series firmly on my radar. Not least because it seems to have been heavily influenced by him; a novel which relies on in-depth world-building, mystery, and the accretions of centuries of life.

Well, I was sorely disappointed. In fact, this novel annoyed me more than any novel has done in a while, exacerbated perhaps by a very promising first chapter or two. First of all, we can chuck the Gene Wolfe comparison out the window. Wolfe’s prose is far more sophisticated and subtle than Palmer’s. Maybe I even made the comparison up, I don’t know. Either way, they are not the same.

Honestly, where to start. I don’t know how to go about describing this book because it is almost entirely exposition, with very little plot to speak of. It is styled as a memoir of sorts by Mycroft Canner, living in the year 2454. He is a ‘servicer’, meaning that he has committed a crime of some sort, but in this future world people are not shut away in prisons but made to engage in a sort of permanent (?) worldwide community service. Mycroft—for very tenuous narrative reasons—seems to be ‘in’ with this world’s elite, so we spend most of our time in their quarters, discussing politics and sometimes philosophy. The book starts with the much more interesting potential storyline of a boy called Bridger, who seemingly has magical powers to make things (drawings/toys) come to life. This is quickly abandoned.

Mycroft writes in a faux Eighteenth Century voice apparently because his own time in some ways reflects this period (maybe???) It is a near-utopia, where people don’t live in geographic nation states but rather enormous ‘Hives’, of which there are about seven (all of which you’ll have to become quickly familiar with as the book progresses).7 This is partly made possible by extremely fast flying-car-based transport, which can take you across the world in a matter of minutes. One thing that I disliked about the book was that in spite of all this meticulous world-building of which we must read so much—all the different political statuses of countless individuals and Hives—the idea of what it might mean for humans to no longer have a true geographical home is not explored. In short, I didn’t like the concept as a whole. One need not believe in the concept of nation states to know that humans are tied to and a product of their environment and local geography. Maybe this wasn’t as fashionable of an idea when Palmer penned her first draft, but if you make a world a certain way I need you to think down to the bottom of the idea. Maybe she does it in subsequent books, but I won’t be rushing to read them.

Mostly I didn’t care a jot about these world elites. They were tiresome to read about. The novel needed focus and a smaller, more intimate story. Sure we can have the other stuff, too, I suppose, but we need that to be the core. I thought we would get that with Mycroft, but instead he seems to be flying about attending to the concerns of others. I really had to push myself through large swathes of this novel.

I think the first draft of this was written by 2008, but only published in 2016. This may explain some of the bizarre approach to gender and race. Despite the wholesale abandonment of geography, everyone is described by their continental facial features (yikes!) And in this version of the future, being gendered in language or in person is taboo, everyone is referred to by ‘they/them’. But then Mycroft chooses to reintroduce he/she pronouns back into his own narrative (and then tells us why he’s doing it countless times). It was actually just hard to parse some of it, but it felt gender essentialist at times in an uncomfortable way. Still, I suppose I admire Palmer for trying something rather different at the time of writing, even if it doesn’t exactly match up with current thinking.

Finally, finally at the end of the novel we get a bit of plot. But then we are left with a giant cliffhanger! Over 400 (very large) pages and I have to read the second novel to get even a little satisfaction from the experience!?

And yet, and yet. Some qualifications. I’m not entirely ruling out reading the next book, though as I say I won’t be rushing to do so (perhaps the audiobook could be the way forward). I’m willing to believe that Palmer has matured as a writer since the writing of this first book. There is a lot of potential here, some good ideas, and some real ambition and risk-taking, which I appreciate in any author. More audacity, please. Also, the story is clearly half-finished. Perhaps some of my issues would be less glaring in the context of the entire story. So we shall see. To be continued (perhaps).

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A Flat Place by Noreen Masud (2024)

Along with the poetry below, this was probably my favourite read of December. This is a nature memoir that documents Masud’s relationship with flat places, which— despite the general public’s imperviousness to their beauty—she finds particularly arresting and magnetic. This particularly in light of her difficult upbringing; first growing up in Pakistan under the control of her authoritative and abusive father, then finding herself curiously numbed to the world upon her arrival in the UK.

I think Masud here manages a wonderful balance that results in something truly resonant and in many ways quite unique. She does not go into huge amounts of detail about her life in Pakistan, using just a few important incidents to give us an impression that still preserves the her privacy and that of her family. And it is not rigorously academic or historical or scientific or literary, even though she touches on all these things in her exploration of flat places and trauma. It seems she knew she couldn’t cover everything in great depth, but she has a knack for pulling out just the thing that will work paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter. This is a great and underrated skill, that requires a good ear for narrative voice and rhythm, and I think she has a very distinct one. Although it doesn’t make us, the reader, a voyeur into her trauma, it still feels radically vulnerable, and I was really able to feel her relationship to flat places; the writing is as incisive as it is poetic. Again, no mean feat for a writer describing a landscape, particularly such a featureless one. Overall, it is a very accomplished, confident work, and one that I will continue to think about. I hope she writes more, but if not, I won’t look at a flat place the same again.

Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha (2024)

An utterly devastating poetry collection. Toha is a Palestinian poet who fled Gaza with his family in November 2023. The poems in this collection give a sense of what it is like to live as a Gazan, both before and during the current Israeli onslaught. He slips easily between different tones and registers across the poems, sometimes slow, reflective and beautiful, sometimes filled with rage, sometimes with the cold, empty void of despair. And some of these poems are incredibly raw. This one I can’t stop thinking about. An unthinkable thing that is yet a daily reality in Gaza.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

For a Moment

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Her small body rides in my arms
as I run to the hospital.
There is no electricity
and the inner hallways are
a forest lined with cots.
The girl I carry
is dead,
I know that.
The pressure of the explosion
tore apart her thin veins.
I know she is dead,
but everyone who sees us
runs after us.
You are alive
for a moment,
when living people
run after you.

At times Toha reinterprets poems and forms of poems by famous American poets: Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman. We become aware, suddenly, that he is writing all this in English, his second language. He was friends with Refaat Alareer, who also taught and championed English literature in Gaza. Toha escaped with his life where Alareer did not. Toha daily posts on his Instagram terrifying updates, all in English so that we may see and know. At the very least, as lovers of English literature and poetry and art, we can lend our eyes and our ears to Toha and writers like him.

The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke (2024)

This story is so brief it is difficult to review but as it came packaged in book form, I will attempt it. I think I read this at just the right moment (though I wish it had been before Christmas rather than after). It was late at night and I was maybe half asleep already and I read it quietly, peacefully, for about twenty minutes (it really is that short). Quiet and peaceful reading was not something I got a lot of over the holiday period so it was quite lovely, and I was able to capture just that little bit of fairytale magic from it. I probably won’t think about it for a long time, but I’d consider reading this aloud to my daughter at Christmas next year. If I’d paid almost ten British pounds for it, though, I might have been more disappointed.

I actually really liked Clarke’s little note afterwards, particularly regarding a Borges story that I read last year and its relationship to Piranesi. Just some trivia for me to store away in my brain. It was almost worth a read just for that, from the rather reclusive Clarke.

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

I was left a little cold by this one, the book of the summer.8 I listened to it and I think that probably exacerbated my problems with it, but overall I wanted more. I read and liked Long Bright River, one of her previous books. It felt like an elevated mystery/thriller; a fairly nuanced approach to the themes—and there being themes—and smooth, reliable prose. Whilst this is approaching what we might think of as a literary thriller, it’s not quite in the literary box for me (the essay where I define what I think of as literary is long overdue). I’d forgotten the full extent of my last experience, and considering this one was billed as a ‘literary thriller’, I think my expectations for this were probably a touch too high. As it was, it felt a bit lacking.

We switch between various different perspectives across two timelines. The Van Laar family run a summer camp on their sprawling Adirondacks estate. In 1975, they finally permit their own daughter Barbara Van Laar to attend, where she quickly falls in with the resident outcast and gets into mischief. But she then goes missing. The tragedy is compounded by the fact that Barbara’s brother, Bear, also went missing on the grounds fourteen years ago. What secrets are the Van Laar family keeping?

Two issues with this one. First, whilst we get a lot of character work here across the different perspectives, quite a lot of it feels extraneous to the actual story. I could enjoy the characterisation in and of itself, of course, and some of it I did, but for a book to be truly great everything needs to be there for a reason. In this one it felt like Moore had said to herself that we should know more about these characters to achieve a more elevated style… but why? How does it serve the themes or plot? Barbara’s camp friend, Tracy, for example. Why do we need to learn about her home life, her insecurities? Sure, it makes her feel more ‘real’, but does it really serve the story being told? Perhaps the mini stories inside the larger story just needed to be more engaging. But it begins to feel like padding, no matter how nicely it’s written, and leaves loose threads. Switching back and forth between perspectives also added to the sense of narrative superficiality. The tension was in danger of being lost, and very little was advanced with each chapter beyond some character exposition.

The central problem is that the story itself feels half baked (hence all the dallying with the characters, perhaps). By the time we got to the reveals I was disappointed. The final one even seems a little silly. This is always a risk with mysteries, and it’s extremely hard to please everyone, so that’s where the other elements come in to support. But the combination of difficulties in both the story and its telling meant it just didn’t quite cohere for me. I didn’t really connect.

That doesn’t mean I had a horrible time with it. I can see why lots of people really enjoyed it. I think I just went in with my expectations too high. I suppose I wanted more time in nature, too. Less character, more atmosphere. More outside stuff happening, not just flashbacks and interiority. Anyway, I’d recommend it as a good holiday read (hence its summer popularity I’m sure!) and maybe as a good one for people moving from reading genre fiction to a more literary mode. It’s partway there.

Thanks for reading today! My favourite books of 2024 will follow tomorrow.

Dare I ask for your Pale Fire opinions?

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Well, at least in the grand scheme. But we read this for book club and actually pretty much all of us were more or less on the same page about this one. This also meant I got to have some fantastic (occasionally ranty) conversations about it.

SPOILER: Who cares if Charles Kinbote is in fact Botkin??? We don’t know Botkin? What difference does it make!?

I’ll be happy never to see the word Zembla again. If this story had been better, I think I’d have enjoyed the novel a lot more. Its reveal could have been ‘the point’.

The problem of Lolita is that Humbert Humbert’s narrative voice is somehow attractive or charismatic to the reader, even though he is loathsome paedophile. Would I have felt differently about this novel if Kinbote had been allowed to embody a more engaging voice?

I give Nabokov more leeway on this than Danielewski. He earned it.

SPOILER: More interesting than taking this theme and claiming that it’s evidence John Shade’s ghost wrote the poem through Kinbote after his death…

SPOILER: The reveal of this book seems to be that this is not a utopia, which… yeah. We can see that from page one.

Don’t mind me, just reading it six or so months late in the depths of winter.

November 2024 Reads

Jessie Lethaby — Sat, 07 Dec 2024 11:30:40 GMT

Earlier this week I covered my reading of the Ursula K. Le Guin Fiction Prize shortlist, many of which I did read in November. But I managed to squeeze in a few other books as well.

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2666 by Roberto Bolaño (2004)

I admit I read this over the course of several months, otherwise that would have been quite a lot of pages for November.

Where does one begin with this vast, complex book? It’s split into five volumes, which Bolaño originally requested to be published separately. He was nearing the end of his life whilst writing this and it’s said he hoped the sales of each volume might help support his family after his passing. However, it was decided after his death that it should be published as a singular whole novel, and I’m glad his estate made that decision. I think it makes much more sense of the parts even if they are still rather distinct from one another.

The first part concerns four critics who have dedicated their academic careers to the mysterious figure of Benno von Archimboldi, a German author who is notoriously secretive. They chase his legend to the northern Mexican town of Santa Teresa, and there they wait for sign of him. The second volume is the shortest, following Chilean academic Óscar Amalfitano who lives with his daughter in Santa Teresa and feels like he is losing his grip on reality. For you see, Santa Teresa is experiencing a spate of femicides; body after body is turning up on the edges of town (inspired by real events in Ciudad Juárez). This looming threat begins to gnaw away at the edges of Amalfitano’s consciousness.

The third section concerns a Black journalist named Oscar Fate from New York. He is sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match there, even though he is generally a features writer. Once there, he becomes embroiled in the strange nightlife of the city. The fourth section is the most notorious, finally giving us a seemingly endless account of the murders of Santa Teresa’s women, and it makes for brutal reading. The police appear to be helpless in the face of the onslaught, though they do finally arrest one German man, Klaus Haas. Finally, finally, in the last section we meet Benno von Archimboldi and get an overview of his life; growing up in Prussia, fighting on the Eastern Front in World War II, and ultimately transitioning into a much-admired author with a cult following.

This is not a book to read if you want answers. How the volumes fit together is not always that obvious; in fact, I think my synopsis gives a sense of cohesion that isn’t entirely reflected in the text. Santa Teresa is a focal point (and the novel needs it), but it is also sometimes just a backdrop to the other dramas unfolding.

One of the major themes of the novel is the difficulty, perhaps impossibility, of conveying the horror that is mass murder in literature, whether it be of the women of Santa Teresa or Jewish people in World War II. These murders are on the one hand the responsibility of some individual somewhere (an intimate partner, a serial killer, a German bureaucrat), but also of society collectively (misogyny, fascism, the ease with which we look away). Bolaño seems to be asking, can I depict this? And how can I? Whether mimesis reenacts the violence of the assault, and whether you get a sense of the humanity of the women of part four, I don’t know. I’m not sure Bolaño doesn’t also want us to ask ourselves this question.

Overall I was impressed by this. I liked its almost flat, direct style, especially when married with the more Borges-inspired surrealities of the text and other tonal shifts. I appreciated its scope and ambition, and I felt engaged with the book throughout pretty much all the parts, which is a difficult thing to sustain through such a weighty and otherwise disjointed tome. I appreciated the academic satire of part one, the strange shifting ground of parts two and three, the reveals of parts four and five. It reminded me of other big postmodern texts from the second half of the twentieth century, and I wonder if this wasn’t one of the last books of this kind published in 2004. I recommend it (though be warned about those harrowing sections), and look forward to reading more Bolaño. Please do let me know your favourites in the comments; I didn’t realise he’d published so much until recently, only ever really hearing about this and The Savage Detectives.1

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A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (1859)

I re-read this one for November’s book club, and had a great time with it, as I almost always do with Dickens. In it, we move back and forth between Paris and London during the time of the French Revolution. Doctor Manette has been retrieved from a long stint in a French prison for an unknown crime, reunited with his daughter and safely ensconced in a leafy London suburb. Only his past will continue to haunt him, especially in the form of the husband his daughter chooses.

It is noticeably different from some of his other novels. Obviously, it’s a historical novel, of which he wrote one other, Barnaby Rudge (one I haven’t read yet). It zooms in and out from some of the most famous scenes of the Revolution—like the storming of the Bastille—to quieter, more intimate moments. The balance between the two is really smoothly done, and one can see how and why the personal informs the political throughout.

Perhaps because of the influence of books like Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, at times the sentence structure felt more impenetrable than usual, particularly toward the beginning of the novel. Usually I find Dickens to be a very smooth read. But maybe most strikingly, it is by far the tautest novel that I’ve read of his. Unlike some of his other plots (looking at you, Little Dorrit), not only does it draw together in a whole and complete fashion at the end, but practically every scene and chapter advances it. However, this comes at the expense I think of some of the lighter elements of Dickens’ work, and perhaps as a historical novel, this makes a lot of sense. There are fewer comedic characters and scenes, and in general our protagonists are even more like symbols instead of people than usual; the couple at the centre of the story are nothing special. I did appreciate the inclusion of figures like Mr Lorry, Miss Pross and Jerry Cruncher of course, but in another Dickens we’d probably have had a lot more of them.

But oh, the ending. I remembered the ending from last time (which must be about ten years ago now) and I’m sure I’ll think about it again until my next read. Because of the excellent plotting, by the time you reach the end there is a real emotional climax. In conclusion, this book is wholeheartedly on my recommended Dickens list. I don’t think I would start here, but I think it’s both a great read and an interesting one to compare to his other books.

Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer (and Annihilation/Authority/Acceptance) (2024/2014)

One of my most anticipated novels of the year was, of course, this newest Southern Reach novel. And I am so grateful that I got to interview Jeff about this last week.2 He is one of my favourite authors; I find his work to be consistently fascinating and surprising, and Southern Reach is some of his best. Naturally, as I loved the original trilogy so much, I was apprehensive about this newest surprise volume, but I’m glad to say I think it’s a worthy addition.3

It is nominally a prequel (with little sequel hints) but I would definitely still read the series in publishing order. It follows a fairly tangential character from the third book, Old Jim, who, it turns out, was a Central operative and plant on the Forgotten Coast before the formation of Area X there. The book is split into three parts; in the first Old Jim goes through the files reporting an expedition of biologists who visited the area twenty years before the border came down. Of course, strange things were happening even then. In the second we follow Old Jim in the weeks leading up to the formation of Area X proper, as he tries to find out both what happened to the previous expedition and what on earth is going on down there in general. Finally, we follow another character from the first books, Lowry, on the first ever expedition into Area X, of which he was the only survivor. This is the most controversial section, as it features an inordinate amount of swearing.

I just really enjoyed this book. I liked the matter-of-fact opening section which read a little like a detective novel, moving finally into a moment of ecstatic surrealism. I liked the tenderness and pain at the heart of Old Jim’s section in the middle. And I liked the absolute chaos and deep weirdness of Lowry’s part. I’ll never miss an opportunity to step into Area X. I’ve read a lot of VanderMeer now (I have in fact completed all of his published novels) so I feel like I have a good idea of what to expect from him, and it’s true that I don’t think his writing is for everyone. It is deliberately frustrating at times, obscure, strange. At other times, though, it is poetic and beautiful just when you least expect it; something I was struck by time and time again as I read this.

One of the wonderful things about reading a lot of work by one author is that you get such a good feel for their authorial voice and the way their mind works as they write. I really appreciate having that with VanderMeer, and I think it deepens my interactions with his books as a whole. I think he has a really unique talent at grasping true strangeness and imbuing a text with horror. I’ve talked a lot recently about not being that scared by horror fiction, but perhaps it’s just because I’ve read so much VanderMeer; he is a master at that existential uncanny.

As you can see, I did go back and read the first three books after my reading of Absolution in possibly my most speediest reading mode ever. I think I started Annihilation on Sunday night and finished Acceptance around midday on Tuesday (in amongst, you know, being a mother, and eating/peeing/sleeping). I really enjoyed thoroughly immersing myself in this whole world again, and I had a new appreciation for both Authority and Acceptance, both of which I had less recollection of than the infamous Annihilation. I think it was a rewarding way to think through Absolution, also, and I look forward to rereading the fourth novel at some point now that I’ve renewed my knowledge of what came before.

Morning and Evening by Jon Fosse trans. by Damion Searls (2000)

This brief novella opens on the birthday of protagonist Johannes. We are in the perspective of his father, who hovers outside the room his wife is labouring in. Once he has come safely into the world, the narrative shifts to the day of Johannes’ death. His wife and best friend have gone before him, and he wakes and starts his daily routine only to find everything is slightly off, particularly when he finds said best friend waiting for him on the dock. In this small Norwegian fishing village, we encounter our main character at these two key junctures, and feel deeply the brevity and miracle of any life.

This book has very few full stops and an iterative, gentle style. By staying focussed on the simplicity of Johannes’ final moments—and utilising a careful hand with scene-setting—Fosse manages to keep the book just grounded enough to feel like it isn’t just a stream of words on the page. I found the ending to be particularly moving, and I think it will be the thing I take with me from this book moving forward. It’s worth reading the book for that alone, I think, as long as you can find the rhythm of what comes before.4 I definitely felt Fosse had a gift for writing transportive atmosphere here, and I look forward to reading more of his work.

Saga, Vol 1. by Brian Vaughan and Fiona Staples (2012)

I hope moving forward that I’ll be incorporating more graphic novels into my monthly reading. I started with this and got it out at the library as I know the series as a whole is much loved. Whilst I liked it—many of the illustrations are great and it had its funny and/or tender moments—it didn’t blow me away. It’s an epic space opera style series about two people from otherwise warring races. They’ve fallen in love and had a baby, and pissed off a lot of people in the process. Does exactly the job that it should but perhaps not my kind of thing, or at least I’m not intrigued enough to continue at this point. I look forward to finding out what I do and don’t like in graphic novels though, as it’s an intriguing art from all of its own.

With that, I shall leave you! I’m so looking forward to my December reading, I have a great line up of books I haven’t been able to get to whilst I’ve been doing my big reading projects. I look forward to sinking into them as we settle into the final parts of the year.

I also have very exciting ideas for this space for the new year… stay tuned as I now have time to start putting it all together! Newsletters to follow again, too.

This month in book club we’ll be reading Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, and will be meeting on Sunday 29^th December to discuss. Here are some more details if you are interested.

Leave a comment

If you are interested, I did write posts for each section of the book over in book club with some more detailed thoughts and themes as I read it, available on tiers 2 and 3 and also as a standalone.

If you’d like to watch this back, the link is in the chat for paid subscribers of this here Substack (as well as over on book club), or you can use this link to access it as a standalone.

Here is a link to my review of Annihilation when I reread it last year, if you want to familiarise yourself with the premise of the trilogy.

I have been loving listening to a book as I read at the moment, I think it helps with prose styles like this one to find the rhythm and keep me focussed, which is key to the success of any reading.

October 2024 Reads

Jessie Lethaby — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 12:01:45 GMT

I read quite a lot digitally this month so fewer books for the stack!

Hello, everyone! This wrap-up is looking shorter than usual as I’ve been reading primarily for my speculative fiction round up (on its way to you tomorrow) and working my way through the Ursula K. Le Guin prize shortlist which I’ll be writing about next week, all being well. Anyway, it was a very solid reading month; even if I didn’t enjoy everything I read I gained something from each.

Living Things by Munir Hachemi trans. by Julia Sanches (2024)

I had it in my head I’d be reviewing this for my speculative fiction round-up but about halfway through I realised that SF wasn’t the genre this book was playing with at all, it being more of a literary psychological thriller (and heavy on the literary at that). Perhaps it is horror inflected—at least by the protagonist’s own admission—but not in a particularly supernatural way.

The novel is set in that perennially useful could-be-the-near-future-but-also-could-be-now kind of time, as weird weather events begin to plague its characters. It follows four young Spanish men who travel to the south of France to earn some summer cash picking grapes. Only once they get there they realise there are no jobs among the grapevines at all because they’ve been washed out by the unseasonal torrential rains. But they can go and wring the necks of chickens if they like? Or vaccinate them? Or would they like to fatten up ducks?

As the summer wears on and the men restlessly move from job to job, they become increasingly disturbed by what they see. Through the strange otherworldly monotony of the early hours stamping their feet outside warehouses filled with petrified birds, Hachemi tries to “narrate the horror of real events”1; tries to show us that “true horror does not know vitriol, only monotony and routine.” The narrator (also called Munir) admits he and his friends are not really there because they have to earn the money, but rather to garner that elusive caché of ‘life experience’ that can only be attained by a bit of manual labour. For these middle-class boys, it is this that attracts them the most. Munir hopes he might get a novel out of it. But of course, it is the gap between their expectations (somewhat romantic vision of picking grapes) and the reality (using something that looks like a petrol pump to ram food down bird’s gullets) that produces this psychic disconnect and the horror of the piece. The novel progresses, and we wonder why they don’t just leave, especially as they don’t have to be there. But something of their machismo, the strange dynamic between them roots them there until the end of this disastrous summer.

As you might be able to tell from some of my quotes so far, fictional Munir does not shy away from giving us his direct opinions about late stage capitalism and his own experience of fictionalising this summer, writing it, processing it for a reader. This usually throws me completely out of the book, but here it generally really works, and the opening sections where our protagonist writes candidly about what we should expect from the narrative made for a deliciously fun unreliable narrator reading. It’s clear he is desperately anxious about what it means to exist in this world and then tell stories about it, in ways I know at least I can relate to. Hachemi’s ability to construct this believably through a strong narrative voice is a big contributing factor to the book’s overall success. I only wish he had maintained this energy throughout. Whilst this fundamental instability continues, I think I wanted Hachemi to have a clearer picture of what the disjunct between reality and our narrator’s experience is. That way, some of that mystery and tension that he builds so well in the opening section could be maintained, and as the reader I could have the satisfaction of puzzling some of it out.

Because it does lose steam about two thirds of the way through. I get it, we need a sense of monotony. But this is such a difficult line to toe. It’s a problem I see consistently in books of about this length. Could this have been a very successful fifty to seventy-page long short story and not lost any of its power? I think so. Could it have also been expanded with a bit of extra storyline support (it ends rather abruptly, for instance) to the tune of about two hundred pages? Also yes. It’s this sticky 100-120 page range that I think tends to be very difficult. Some stories are perfectly suited to this length, but many are not.

Overall, though, I was really impressed by this, especially as Hachemi’s first novel. I had an e-ARC from Fitzcarraldo (thank you!) and it’s surely a good sign that I plan to purchase my own physical copy. I absolutely think it would benefit from a re-read at some point to get into those early sections even more, as Munir tries to decide how to tell this story, the story of the disturbance of a mind, the story of late stage capitalism.

The Last Warner Woman by Kei Miller (2010)

‘Mr Writer Man’ just wants to tell us the story of Adamine Bustamante, a ‘warner woman’ (i.e. a diviner/forecaster) who grew up in Jamaica in the first half of the twentieth century before immigrating to England, where she finds that her warnings are received with suspicion and land her in a mental institution. But his story keeps getting interrupted by the protagonist herself, who is quite adamant that he is telling it all wrong.

Well, that’s my spin on the blurb anyway which has it the other way around, and which I found to be fairly misleading. I was expecting this to be a real clash between the two narratives. But instead this is more a story of healing and reconciliation. I don’t want to spoil too much, but I hope if you go on to read this now you’ll have a better sense of what it’s doing. I think the imaginary other novel that the original blurb conjured up for me did interfere with my reading experience.

This is one of Miller’s early novels, and there was a lot to like about it. I thought at a smaller scale the storytelling was strong, the voices were well-realised, the prose style was effective; poetic without losing narrative steam or getting caught up in meaningless turns of phrase. But I think the overarching plot line could have done with a bit more work; one of the main bits of feedback from our book club sessions was that we just wanted more. More of Ada’s childhood, more of her time amongst the Jamaican Revivalists, more of her time in England. So lots of potential, but not quite there in terms of the kinds of things that would make it really stick in your mind after your reading. I definitely want to read Miller’s Augustown, as I’ve heard very good things and I’m sure he will have matured as a writer since the publication of this.

The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft

Veteran translator Jennifer Croft writes fiction solely under her own name here, to mostly good effect. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s about the act of translation itself.

You know how I’m often saying I want authors to get weirder? Well, Croft needs no such haranguing. This novel is pretty wacky, and her willingness to push the reader gives it a real energy and scope that can’t be said of some of her contemporaries. It’s another that I originally intended for my speculative round up (coming in a day or two) but that ultimately didn’t quite fit the bill. However, the feeling and atmosphere of a weird novel is certainly here.

A group of eight translators gather in the Białowieża forest on the Polish-Belarusian border to receive details about highly-regarded Polish author Irena Rey’s latest work. There—where no outside opinion can reach them—they will translate this tome of a novel as they have done many times before. Only not long after they arrive, Irena goes missing. This novel is partly a pretty fun send up of the literary world; the moment when they discover Irena might *the horror* organise her bookshelves by colour absolutely elicited a chuckle from me. It is biting in tone and sometimes farcical as the translators—now like headless chickens without their all-powerful leader—try to find out what happened, and slowly become deprogrammed from the cult of Irena Rey.

But it is also intelligent and insightful, as only good satire can be. This borderland has both historical and ecological significance, and Croft deftly balances her different themes by choosing this setting. Mostly—and it seems she’s not alone if we look at her fellow authors Elif Batuman and Brandon Taylor just on this website—she seems concerned about the role of art (particularly this very insular, erudite literary art) in a world that is facing such huge political, social and ecological crises. What does it mean to create it, to dedicate so much time to it, and what kind of morality is at work in the figure of the author and the weighty literary tome? In this, Croft can marry themes of translation (partly the struggle for power across languages) with that of climate change—why write when the world burns, how to write about the world burning—and the particular strange politics at work in Białowieża.

The novel is chaos, which may or may not work for you. I can’t say I totally enjoyed reading it because just when you think you have a handle on it, it slips out of your grasp. However, I do think it is actually doing and saying interesting things, and Croft makes a set of choices with it that are consistent with what she is trying to communicate. This can’t be said of other less enjoyable/chaotic litfic. And so I certainly admire it. When it comes to literary fiction that really captures the current mode, I think this is a fantastic example.

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert

American journalist Elizabeth Kolbert writes here about the current mass extinction we are living through—the human-engineered one—in comparison with the extinctions of the past. Each chapter covers a species that is under threat or already extinct and Kolbert travels the world to meet with scientists and those on the frontlines of climate change.

I learnt a few interesting facts from this book, and I found Kolbert’s style to be very readable. But I wasn’t sure exactly what she was trying to say here. It’s okay actually because so far in the Earth’s history there have been multiple mass extinctions and animal populations always recover, even if they’re different species from the last time? Or actually ours is bad because we’re the ones doing it and we shouldn’t be? Or ours is worse than others? The latter two options are hinted at but not entirely persuasively argued, leaving me a bit lost as to what the point of this book is. Maybe I’m just supposed to infer it without having it pointed out to me? But I would say there really is a kind of ambivalence to how Kolbert writes about it. Like why compare the mass extinctions if you don’t just a little bit think there’s something in the first theory. Perhaps I’m too familiar with the founding idea—that we are living through a mass extinction—in ways which 2014 readers wouldn’t have been, and that is really the driving force of the book. But still, it feels like just enough ‘oh no’ for those who’d like to pat themselves on the back for reading it, but not enough ‘oh no’ that they’ll be moved to action afterward.

The structure, too, feels quite meandering, and overall I’m not sure it’s a book I will be reflecting on for a long time. There are better books about these topics out there. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised it won the Pulitzer in 2014 (which I do realise is like ancient history for this specific topic), but I still kinda am.

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

This is generally very entertaining commercial historical fiction. I think because of its size (it’s over a thousand pages long) it often gets lumped in with more challenging novels, but as Follett writes in his introduction, this is a good ‘popular’ novel. It’s there for your amusement, not because it has integrated themes or a unique prose style or whatever else you might look for in something more literary. And as we’ve noted recently, good storytelling is hard to do, so this is a skill all of its own. That’s why the novel has been so well-received and why so many people have read it.

I listened to it and I just straight up enjoyed it, especially in the first half. It’s about the construction of fictional Kingsbridge Cathedral in 12^th Century Britain. We follow a small cast of characters as they fight to get this cathedral built against all odds. I say in the first half because I liked the first set of characters best. I find with generational stories like this one, I tend to be much less interested in the progeny of the primary characters. They’re like the nepo babies of characters. I need authors to give me very good reasons to care about them beyond ‘they are this character’s child’… but I digress. This wasn’t the only issue for me in the second half. Having been written in the 80s by an author that mostly wrote thrillers, you might not find it surprising that there are a lot of gratuitous and graphic rape scenes. They are absolutely there in the first half (does anyone else find this ten times worse in audiobook form?) so be sufficiently warned, but the torture of our main female character really amps up in the second. Much of the drama seems to be from wrecking her life which I… did not love.

I didn’t even have to check with Google to know that this novel is not historically accurate whatsoever. Follett is not here to put us in the alien world of 12^th Century Britain, not really. Not like Hild, or The Greenlanders or Wolf Hall. It’s like reading a nice BBC Drama. A little light on scene setting, high on soapy drama. And for that reason, I can see why many readers love it! But it won’t be making it into the annals of my favourites. Will I continue the series on audio if I’m stuck for an audiobook? Probably. I don’t know what it’d be like to read this rather than listen to it, but I imagine I’d have been quite a lot more frustrated. Because whilst I say there’s not a lot of scene setting, I suppose that’s not strictly what I mean. It isn’t atmospheric; we don’t get a sense of daily life or small moments, but we do get a lot of description. At one point I was listening to about two hours of a boy setting a fire and I was thinking… I could do with a little less detail here. So yes, if I had been reading this I might have lost my patience with it rather more quickly. But that is why it works so well on audio; when my attention wavered, it didn’t matter all that much. I could still more or less follow the story.

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

You may remember I read Dandelion Wine over summer, and this much more famous novel is nominally set in the same place, the fictional Green Town, Illinois. I assume that such a thing as a ‘Halloween novel’ exists and if it does, this is the progenitor of such a novel. It follows two boys who attend a mysterious carnival that turns up on the edges of town a few days before Halloween. They quickly cause enough trouble so as to be pursued by the petrifying figure of Mr. Dark, who wants to trap them inside the carnival forever.

One thing I love about Bradbury’s prose is that the man just goes for it. This is such pulpy, purply prose that at times it becomes quite glorious. I don’t think I’ve written down so many quotes from a single book in months, maybe years. Sometimes the sentence just absolutely works, especially in a horror context ("Waiting, his flesh took paleness from his bones”), and sometimes it’s completely batshit (while a character walks off into the distance; "Somewhere a vast animal made water. Ammonia made the wind turn ancient as it passed”). But at least he is taking risks, he hazards something, he really truly cares about what he’s writing and you can tell. It is a soothing antidote to the abject dullness of much contemporary prose styling, at least that which receives the kind of readership that Something Wicked has received over the years. Because it is also not particularly beautiful or poetic in the way you might think of ‘poetic writing’. It doesn’t seek to create soft reflective images, but rather vivid splashy ones. I like it, I admire the gumption. I want to read more.

But this was nowhere near as successful as Dandelion Wine for me. There are countless reasons to be honest, but I think a major one is that it is very one note. The wonder of DW was that Bradbury was combining different modes and genres into one piece; it was the quiet coming-of-age parts that really heightened the strangeness of the horror or speculative elements. Here we don’t get that quiet, and so we don’t get the contrast or the light and shade. Instead the hysteria of it goes up and up and up, with little release and not enough characterisation or plot line to carry it.

I wouldn’t read it again, but I am glad to have read it, so make of that what you will. I think it’s worth a try because some folks just get on with the style and atmosphere and it carries them through (though obviously it really should be a seasonal read). But within our book club it was not overly popular. It just doesn’t have enough story to sustain you over its 250 pages.

Being Alive ed. by Neil Ashley

I read this poetry anthology slowly over the space of about eighteen months, and it did exactly what I wanted it to do which was give me a long list of poets whose collections I will now seek out. It’s part of a larger series edited by Ashley that highlights contemporary poets writing on all sorts of subjects for an intended audience that is largely unfamiliar with poetry. Ashley clearly wants us to see how poetry should be read and consumed as part of daily life, and need not be restricted only to those who know ‘how poems work’ or ‘how to read poems’. Not just to the snobby English lit student, then. In that respect, I think this volume and I assume the others do a fantastic job, making it a potentially great gift for someone who you think could benefit from a little more poetry in their lives. Unsurprisingly it has a rather Western bent to it, so be wary of that. But overall I very much enjoyed!

I can’t mention poetry without briefly mentioning Tasnim, who posted thirty-one days of poems on her Substack over the summer, if you’re looking for yet more collections to dip into. From now on I’d like to make it a habit of reading a collection a month. Currently I’m reading Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha’s latest, Forest of Noise.

With that, I shall leave you! I hope you enjoyed, and stay tuned for the big speculative fiction round up coming to your inboxes very soon. And we shall be back to normal programming now that I’ve finally completed some of these big reading projects.

As the narrator himself says, quoting writer Ricardo Piglia.

August and September 2024 Reads

Jessie Lethaby — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 11:00:57 GMT

a few july books snuck in here (long story) so if you don’t see a review for one of these below, check my last round-up post

I’ve left this for far too long and now have a teetering stack of books to review for you from August and September. As usual, I debated how to group them. This time, rather than great/good/meh I’ve gone for the method I use myself when I’m tagging up books. There are my favourites, then the books I mostly recommend, followed by the books that I recommend only for specific readers, and then the ones I don’t recommend at all (luckily we’ve none of them this time round). You can’t always explain what it is that differentiates between a favourite and a book you just highly recommend, it’s usually one of those finicky personal things. But I do always feel the need to differentiate between the two for you anyway. (There is further differentiation between a monthly favourite and a yearly favourite and an all-time favourite, but that’s not relevant today.)

my favourites

My Friends by Hisham Matar (2023)

I’m of the party that believes the fact that this wasn’t shortlisted for the Booker this year is a literary crime. I’d like to bet it’s a darn sight better than a significant amount of the long list, though as I’m not going to put myself through the pain of reading said list, I’ve used my research and trusted reviewers to confirm this.

I was deeply moved by this novel, and I unreservedly love it. It follows Khaled, a Libyan exile, walking from King’s Cross to his home in West London. He has just dropped off one of his closest friends there at the train station, a friend who will now begin a long journey to America, a journey that may mean Khaled never sees him again. So, as he walks, he thinks about his friendships and how he came to be here, in London, far away from his family and point of origin.

He’s stranded there primarily because he attended the fateful demonstration outside the Libyan embassy in London on the 17^th April 1984, when shots were fired into the crowd from its windows. Khaled is one of a number of injured demonstrators, and as he recuperates in hospital afterwards, the seriousness of the situation begins to sink in. He is now a target for Qaddafi’s regime in Libya, which had no qualms about murdering people wherever they were, and certainly would not allow them to return home unharmed. Fearful of being tracked down, he decides not to return to the University of Edinburgh where he was studying and hunkers down in London instead, clinging to faithful friends, including the one that convinced him to go to the demonstration in the first place.

This is a beautiful and painful meditation on exile, friendship, a life that goes sideways. Matar writes in long, meditative sentences that have a beautiful cumulative rhythm to them. I’ve thought about these images from the opening chapter of the book many times since reading it:

It is, of course, impossible to be certain of what is contained in anyone’s chest, least of all one’s own or those we know well, perhaps especially those we know best, but, as I stand here on the upper level of King’s Cross Station, from where I can monitor my old friend Hosam Zowa walking across the concourse, I feel I am seeing right into him, perceiving him more accurately than ever before, as though all along, during the two decades that we have known one another, our friendship has been a study and now, ironically, just after we have bid one another farewell, his portrait is finally coming into view. And perhaps this is the natural way of things, that when a friendship comes to an inexplicable end or wanes or simply dissolves into nothing, the change we experience at that moment seems inevitable, a destiny that was all along approaching, like someone walking towards us from a great distance, recognizable only when it is too late to turn away. No one has ever been a nearer neighbour to my heart. I am convinced, as I watch him go to his train for Paris, that city where the two of us first met so long ago and in the most unlikely way, that he is carrying, right where the ribcages meet, an invisible burden, one, I believe, I can discern from this distance.
When he still lived here in London, hardly a week would pass without us taking a walk, either through the park or along the river. We sometimes got into a debate, usually concerning an obscure literary question, arguments that, perhaps like all arguments, concealed deeper disagreements. I would sometimes, to my regret, for the gesture has always displeased me, tap my forefinger on his chest and let my palm rest there for a fleeting moment, as though to keep whatever it was that I believed I had placed there stable, and I would once again take note of the distinct pattern of his ribs, the strange way his bones protruded, as if in constant expectation of an attack.

I had to quote a big chunk like this because that is how this book works; you can’t take one of its sentences in isolation if you want to get the full effect. And this careful layering by Matar, each sheaf of quiet observation, builds to press, slowly, on your readerly heart. It brought me to tears multiple times. Most of the books that stay with me have this deep sense of humanity to them, and Matar’s style stands out to me at one of the most effective I’ve come across recently at really communicating that humanity to the reader.

He also balances the novel really well by making the chapters fairly short, meaning at no point does it feel entirely overwhelming. Considering we’ve talked about story recently, I think this is where the book’s great storytelling comes in. Like the style itself, each chapter, too, builds the picture outwards from that introductory image of Khaled watching Hosam walk away. I found it compelling throughout, and whilst it doesn’t necessarily feel like it, there are plenty of high stakes events here. Since finishing it, I’ve wanted to compare it to Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North, a similarly introspective novel in which the protagonist thinks about his life as he takes a journey; both touch on big political events but also art and literature and smaller, more personal moments.

I don’t think this book will work for absolutely everyone, and I think you’ll pretty much be able to tell whether it will or not by reading the quote above. This meditative style just won’t suit every kind of reader, and it will feel long and meandering to some. There were occasional moments where I felt Matar lost control over the narrative voice so that it ranged just a bit too far, and in another world perhaps you would have tightened up some of the chapters in the latter half, bringing a bit more focus. But this would make it into a different novel, and I don’t think I want a different novel. I want this one, in its sometimes overflowing humanity. I look forward to reading more of his work.

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury (1957)

This book is completely and utterly strange, and I think that’s why I like it so much. Bradbury, best known for his science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451 (and other contributions to the genre like The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man), writes here a coming-of-age tale somewhat based on his own experiences. But there’s more to it than meets the eye.

We follow Douglas Spalding in the summer of 1928 in fictional Green Town, Illinois. The book opens with Douglas experiencing the kind of revelation that many on the cusp of adolescence have felt; “I’m really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember!” This breathless tone that I associate with the 50s is apparent throughout much of these early sections, to great effect (but perhaps to the frustration of readers looking for a style more in keeping with our modern day cynicism). We really feel Douglas’ awakening to the world, as he begins his summer rituals; obtaining a new pair of sneakers, preparing dandelion wine with his grandparents. He anticipates a summer full of fun and freedom, but of course he cannot extricate himself from the looming loss of innocence. And so we attend the death of a beloved family member, the realisation of his own mortality, the feeling that everything around him is changing irrevocably. And the change isn’t just happening inside Douglas, real change is here, starting to invade Green Town. Bradbury writes movingly of this lost world, already almost unrecognisable I imagine by 1957.

But this is where the real fun of this novel begins. The novel slips into a strange surrealism that is almost undetectable at first; you mean to tell me this character Doug meets in front of the United Cigar Store is actually going to attempt to make a Happiness Machine? Indeed, the machines begin to proliferate. Two elderly ladies run someone down with what they call the ‘Green Machine’, a kind of open electric car. On the other hand, a local colonel with stories of the Civil War is referred to as a time machine. He is so depicted that it’s almost impossible to tell whether he really is mechanical or the local boys just like to call him that because of his depictions of times long past. We begin to wonder; are we just inside an imaginative boy’s mind? Whether we are or not, it captures something of the uncomfortable magic of this completely unsettling time of life.

Again and again, the era of the machine begins to trickle into this small town, largely to ill effect. But the scenes that come from these changes are wonderfully evocative, such as the one where the local trolley—soon to be replaced by a bus—rolls impossibly off the tracks and into the countryside with all the local children aboard, and they have a wonderful picnic by a lake. After they walk back into town, trolley-less, we end with this quiet image:

Douglas, standing on the law, was seeing how it would be tomorrow, when the men would pour hot tar over the silver tracks so you would never know a trolley had ever run his way. He knew it would take as many years as he could think of now to forget the tracks, no matter how deeply buried. Some morning in autumn, spring, or winter he knew he’d wake and, if he didn’t go near the window, if he just lay deep and snug and warm in his bed, he would hear it, faint and far away.

I can find almost no reference on the Wikipedia page for this book, for example, that Dandelion Wine features such strange, otherworldly occurrences, and yet they are what makes this book so uniquely interesting. At times, it veers off into stories about other inhabitants of the town entirely—in fact we lose Doug for long stretches of the second half—including a whole and complete horror story towards the end of the novel (the dark is closing in on Green Town). Some of these are realistic, others not so much. And Bradbury wrote it like this (along with other volumes of his), bringing together stories written at separate times into a whole narrative. Whilst some may find this odd and choppy, I just found it really interesting, and a rather unusual way to write (and read) a novel.

I read this on a long day’s driving through the late summer sun in the final days in August, which was a perfect way to read it. It spoke to me that day, at the end of a busy summer and in the midst of a very strange year. Whilst I think the somewhat dated style will alienate some readers from connecting enough with young Doug, if this review piqued your interest at all, I recommend you find an equally suitable time and place for your own reading, as its pages are best read soaked in sunshine.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (1943)

Here’s a lovely book! I’m glad it’s sitting beside Dandelion Wine because in my head the two complement one another nicely even though they are quite different in style and feel. Using this book, I feel better able to describe Bradbury’s style, which seems born of a marriage between the realism of the nostalgic boyhood drama and the more genre-inflected style Bradbury employed for his other work, which is somehow… boxy. Then it feels 50s-ish and then there’s the dreamlike strangeness of it all. In other words, it’s an unusual prose style that either will or won’t work for you, and it’s not always easy to parse out exactly what’s going on line to line.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, however, is a much more straightforward outing, a coming-of-age tale wrought in a distinctly American-style realism. Like Dandelion Wine, it looks back nostalgically at the early twentieth century, and is partly based on the author’s own childhood. I suppose that’s where the similarities end, but there is a certain warm feeling that I get from both books that also makes me want to sit them together.

We follow Francie Nolan, an Austrian-Irish-American girl growing up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1912. Life is full of hardship as her mother works ceaselessly to put food on their table while her affectionate but generally aimless father spends much of his meagre wage on drink. Although the hunger and poverty of the Nolans’ life is made very palpable in the novel, it is mostly an account of Francie’s day to day existence and her and her mother’s resilience in the face of terrible odds. The whole first section of the novel follows Francie on one singular Saturday, including taking her neighbourhood junk to the local ‘junkie’ in exchange for a few pennies, running errands for her mother (“Children were the marketers of the neighbourhood”) and ironing a shirt for her father. But most gloriously of all, it involves a trip to the library, and an afternoon reading on the fire escape protected by the canopy of a tree, sure to appeal to anyone who loved to read as a child.

As Francie grows up, the narrative begins to move faster. She attends school, and enters the workplace. She experiences loss, heartache, and the terror of growing up as a girl. Smith is a wonderful storyteller; she brings scenes to life with the smallest of details, and many of the chapters could be read entirely by themselves and still be very enjoyable. Anyone that writes a story like this one, made up of so many little pieces of a life, must be a good storyteller in order to keep it compelling. And although this book is close to five hundred pages, I flew through it and never felt it to be a slog.

This has been an immensely popular novel and is considered an American classic. But interestingly, both this and Dandelion Wine have sometimes been dismissed by critics for being too sentimental and nostalgic. This was our September book club pick, and I was initially worried that there wouldn’t, actually, be enough to get our teeth into. As I began to prepare for our meetings, though, I realised I needn’t have worried, and we ended up talking for three and a half hours about it across two meetings. If nothing else, to attend to some of its internal inconsistencies (does it uphold the American Dream? or refute it?) are what make it so interesting. Is it not taken seriously enough because it’s the work of a working-class woman writing semi-autobiographically? Or because it could be read and understood and wept over by a teenage girl? And why can’t we engage critically with books that dare to be warm, nostalgic, human? Anyway, I think this book will have the most widespread popular appeal of my favourites this month, so if you’re looking to spend a few hours with a girl from Williamsburg in the early twentieth century, I highly recommend it.

Please be aware that this book is very much of its time. Do check content warnings if you need.

A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar (2012)

This book follows Jevick, a young man who has grown up on the Tea Islands off the coast of a mysterious land called Olondria. He finds himself suffocated by his homeland, desperate to leave it and his disciplinarian father and discover the places in Olondria he has read about only in books. When he does finally travel there, his journey is derailed by the fact of his being haunted by a young girl he had met only briefly in life.

This book is much weirder than you might expect once you’ve read the blurb. It is a deeply haunted novel, introspective in a way you wouldn’t anticipate from what Samatar considers her version of epic fantasy. Her prose is dense and poetic, which means at times it serves up the most gorgeous, otherworldly, atmospheric scenes whilst at others it makes it difficult to fully grasp what’s happening, or get a clear picture of our protagonist. I found it was a book I needed real quiet and concentration for, and the more I put into it the more I got out of it. In many ways it reminded me of reading Hild, though the worlds couldn’t be more different. Sometimes frustrating, sometimes pure genius, always beguiling.

I liked how Samatar played with and thwarted the conventions of epic fantasy; she refuses us the more typical journey narrative, and instead heads off course, in ways that feel uncomfortable for the reader. Whilst I struggled at times with the middle third (concentration was shot), I found myself moved by the ending. Jevick is not just changed by Olondria, but he and his ghost change it in turn. It is a novel about oral versus written storytelling, the (sometimes dark) magic of literacy and books, and the beauty of telling one’s story. I recommend if you’re looking for challenging literary fantasy, and I look forward to trying the next Olondria book, The Winged Histories. I feel like Samatar could be an author I continue to follow closely.

I can’t help but feel like this novel is up to something, but I don’t entirely know what it is! It feels tricksy and slippery to me, which makes it all the more fascinating. Everett’s take on The Tales of Huckleberry Finn (a book I read at university and am very happy not to return to) has rightly received a lot of critical attention this year, but feel all the reviews I’ve read are quite inadequate, including my own.

Everett brings all of his satirical bite to this book, but in such a way that if you didn’t know Everett wrote a lot of satire, it could fly under the radar entirely, it reads so drily. This is most obvious in the language conceit at the heart of the book; James speaks through a “slave filter” when there are white people around, and in a distinctly elevated diction around his friends and family. This leads to a number of amusing episodes, but also to the heart of the book, with James’ strong desire to write his own story, to express it in his own way, to give himself his own name. One thing Everett is great at is bringing heart and poignancy to an otherwise satirical novel, which is actually very difficult to do (I’m thinking of the list of names in The Trees, too). And indeed, I think this is a book of two halves. First, we have those parts that more closely follow Huck Finn, and they feel fully rooted in the adventure story tradition. And then, when Huck and James separate, the novel takes a darker, more emotional turn.

Why do I think it’s slippery? Well, I think you’d have to read it to see. Everett makes some plot choices that seem un-literary (if we’re thinking of literary fiction as something which has its own genre conventions), and in particular the ending is cinematic in feel. But knowing Everett’s work as I do, I feel he is using these things to ask a question to the reader. What will we tolerate in this story, how far will we follow this new incarnation of the literary Jim? Everett is not trying to draw a realistic portrayal of life under slavery, so what exactly is he doing? What purpose does the novel serve, and if it is not a wholly historical production, what is it saying about life for Black Americans today, and about language? For now, I’ll have to keep thinking on it.

Adulthood Rites by Octavia Butler (1988)

This is the second instalment in Butler’s Xenogenesis/Lilith’s Brood trilogy. We read Dawn last year for book club, and I’ve been meaning to read the remaining books since then. I liked this, but I’m not entirely sure I was in the right mood for it. Butler has a distinctive style that, from my experience, you do need to be in the right headspace for. She is very much rooted in the ideas of her story, dialogue and action, and if you are in the mood for something more reflective, descriptive, atmospheric or character-based, you may be disappointed. She is very direct. I am almost always taken with her work (I’ve almost finished it in its entirety!), but I do understand what people mean when they say they can’t quite connect.

You just can’t fault her ideas though. Her straightforward prose belies the book’s inner complexities. To pack this much nuance into this kind of style basically using action and dialogue alone is a real skill. In Dawn, we follow Lilith in the aftermath of some grand apocalyptic war (nuclear, we assume). A bunch of aliens called the Oankali came and rescued her and a number of other humans; they want to use humans’ genetic material and create new half-human, half-Oankali beings as is their nature (the Oankali scavenge for genes across the universe). So, on the one hand, they’ve saved her from a sure death and given her a comfortable life, but on the other, they essentially seduce and cajole her into mating with them. This deeply uncomfortable relationship between power and futurity and desire and free will continues in Adulthood Rites, where we follow one of these new people, Lilith’s son Akin, as he navigates a world in which he doesn’t wholly belong to either of his ancestral groups.

I recommend Butler to everyone. So far my favourite series of hers was the Patternist series (which I read in chronological order rather than publication order), but it has been a long time since I read it so that is subject to revision. I keep finding this with authors whose work I’m close to completing; I just want to go back to the top and start again as it’s taken me so long!

Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro, trans. by Frances Riddle (2007)

I’ve been meaning to read this book for a long time, and it was an extra treat to read it with book club for Women in Translation Month in August. I feel like it really enhanced my experience of it overall. In it, we follow Elena, an elderly woman with advanced Parkinson’s, who is sure that her recently deceased daughter was murdered despite being told otherwise by the authorities. She sets off on a journey across Buenos Aires to find answers, made absolutely excruciating by her disease and her reliance on the medication that allows her to move at all.

The part I’ll take away from this novel is Piñeiro’s depiction of living with Parkinson’s. It is relentless and at times very upsetting to read. Whilst of course I can’t know what it’s like, the little glimpse here was heartbreaking, and I applaud Piñeiro’s efforts. I think she really gets into the difficulties of prolonged degenerative illness, and its impact beyond even the person affected.

It is a compulsive read, too, as we follow Elena on her journey towards an unknown end and unknown answers, getting flashbacks to her life with her daughter and their relationship. All the tension of the literary crime novel is there. I won’t spoil too much more, but I think this will really suit a large range of readers, though do be aware of the claustrophobia of the narrative voice.

The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges (1949)

It seemed like high time I read some (more) Borges. I read ‘The Aleph’ as a standalone story in the Weird anthology edited by the VanderMeers and to be honest I just didn’t really get it. With a few more years of Weird reading under my belt, I now feel better equipped to handle these kinds of stories, but it does take a bit of practice. Mostly it’s a practice of how to sit in discomfort and unknowing.

Overall I really liked these; I love the deep sense of dread and unease of Borges’ strange structures and labyrinths. The strange, uncanny parallels both within and across the stories. Most of all it’s great to see how some of my favourite authors have taken inspiration from Borges and his work, and built on it. I’ll definitely be returning to them myself because I think Borges is such a master of this particular form, and there is a true unnatural otherworldliness to his writing that still feels fresh, almost seventy-five years later.

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (1846)

What a wild ride this book is! This classic revenge tale is completely silly but also a lot of fun. It took the place of Big Book in my day-to-day reading that had just been vacated by War and Peace, so at first I was pretty confused. This is certainly not as serious and thinky (yes, we’ve reached a point where I’m making ‘thinky’ a word, eight reviews and over 4000 words in) as Tolstoy, so I think I experienced a bit of novelistic whiplash. Struggling to get into it and fully buy into its idiosyncrasies, I basically abandoned it for a couple of months, and by the time I returned to it, I was much more able to accept it for what it was, which was a fun revenge story.

The book opens by introducing us to Edmond Dantès, a young sailor and soon-to-be captain who is about to marry the love of his life. Then, through the evil doings of two (and a half) jealous men, he ends up being thrown in jail for fourteen years. Whilst there, he meets a priest, who tells him of some secret treasure he has on the island of Monte Cristo. When he finally escapes, Dantès finds this horde of wealth and sets out on an elaborate scheme of revenge.

Don’t get me wrong, there were lots of interesting elements to this book that are worthy of discussion. Its popular appeal means that it has filtered through our collective consciousness and inspired many works of art since. It is vividly drawn, and carefully plotted. As translator Robin Buss attests in the introduction to my Penguin Classics version, it has undoubtedly had a big impact on detective fiction, thrillers, and even literary vampires! He summarises by saying that it “stands at a crucial point in the development of modern popular fiction, drawing into the genre elements from Romantic literature, popular theatre, history and actuality, and wrapping them up in a narrative carefully enough constructed and dramatic enough to hold the attention of a growing reading public with a great appetite for fiction.” This is a great popular novel, people! I recommend if you want to read a classic but you’re looking for something lighter than some of the other enormous tomes. It does still occasionally drag (you can always tell these authors were paid by the line), but overall it’s a rollicking read.

Blackwater I: The Flood by Michael McDowell (1983)

This is the start of a series of horror novels set in a sleepy town in Perdido, Alabama. The town is almost swept away entirely by an apocalyptic flood, and after four days a woman named Elinor Dammert is found on the fourth floor of a hotel, with no earthly reason how she could have survived there for so long. The man who finds her falls in love with her, much to his mother’s chagrin, and so much of the novel is actually driven by a protracted battle between these two women. It is a domestic kind of horror, with the occasional unnerving scene. There are six volumes in total, and I feel like I’m very much in the middle of the story, so will report back on my overall thoughts at a later date. I’m enjoying it so far, though!

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey

This was a lovely way to spend a couple of hours. It is a nature memoir about Bailey’s experience with a chronic illness that followed a viral infection, and her observations of a simple snail plucked from the forest by a friend during her long recuperation (and/or confinement). The snail provides her with a new way of looking at life, as it lives slowly and nocturnally, helping her reframe her own slower pace. We learn a few snail facts and we feel deeply for Bailey and her experience, though at no point does she slip into utter despair, at least not within the pages of the book. It is likely to be a comforting read for those experiencing chronic illness themselves, too.

July 2024 Reads

Jessie Lethaby — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 14:22:23 GMT

Welcome to one of my monthly wrap-up posts, where I briefly review everything I read this month! I read widely across many genres, from classics to literary to speculative fiction. With these I’m hoping to shed some light on backlist gems, perhaps push you to read outside your genre comfort zone, and also highlight which new releases are worth your time.

First of all, I know what you’re thinking. Yes, this is almost a month late! There are various reasons for the delay, but one of the major ones is that it took me absolutely ages to read Hild. I planned to write and upload these whilst I was away, and then Hild took over basically my entire trip. I’m not that mad about it to be honest, but I’d prematurely included her in these stack pictures I took before I left, so although she truly belongs in the August wrap-up, she is making an early appearance here. (Take the pictures again, you say? Impossible.)

You’ll also see from the stack that I read the second volume of Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun in July. I’ve decided I won’t be attempting to review this now until I finish the whole cycle. It just feels too much like I’m in the middle of the story, and seeing as this book particularly seems to rely on everything coming together at the end, it feels pointless trying to evaluate it at this stage. So, stay tuned! I hope to finish it before the end of the year.

the great

Hild by Nicola Griffith

Let’s talk about Hild then, shall we? It’s books like this that make me especially glad I gave up on the star rating system. Does the magic of this book emerge from its pretension and density, or is it hampered by it? I think the reason I’m finding it difficult to answer that is because it’s a little of both.

Inspired by the life of St Hilda—an unusually influential woman for her time—Griffith uses the bare bones narrative that we’ve inherited from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People and expands it to the tune of five hundred closely typed pages. She plunges us straight into seventh century Britain, complete with vocabulary from its various languages and almost entirely alien ways. Not being a scholar of seventh century Britain myself I can’t speak to its veracity, but my common sense tells me that hundreds—perhaps thousands—of hours of research went into this. It is incredibly immersive, but only with a high level of focus, and a willingness to flip back and forth to the (fairly minimal) glossary. I can see why it was nominated for a bunch of fantasy awards because the world-building is entire and whole, but I would say it’s pretty light on the fantastical elements, reading more like historical fiction to me. It’s fantastical in the sense that the Middle Ages is pretty fantastical to us modern day readers, and sure, Hild was supposed to have been able to prophesy, but the focus here is on a more realistic recreation of her life and times. It just so happens to be very strange.

We follow Hild as she sits uncomfortably, precariously, between a number of powerful figures. Her uncle King Edwin—possibly responsible for her father’s death—relies on her acuity while she is still just a child. Able to follow the patterns of things—the “warp and weft”—of nature and of humans, she is gifted at being able to predict what will happen next (though perhaps rather less magically than her observers would imagine). Her mother, meanwhile, works behind the scenes on her own schemes, trying to keep hers and her daughters’ heads, and maintain hold on the reins of power. Thus follows a long, meandering novel that requires us to keep track of tens of characters with fairly similar names, and the political machinations of this as-yet-disunited isle. I can only assume it’s the politics element (and medieval setting) that had some reviewers comparing it to Game of Thrones. Other than that, they are entirely different in pretty much every single way.

Something else this book has been compared to, and something I thought almost immediately upon starting it, was Mantel’s Cromwell series. Both are incredibly immersive, meticulously researched, and focussed on a particular historical figure. Does Mantel better strike the balance between immersive historical setting and story, providing us with an ultimately more readable set of novels that nonetheless maintain a high level of artistry? Perhaps. But Griffith is working with a much older, more alien culture, and a figure we know even less about. Still, the balance is slightly off, I think. I think there is a version of this novel which is ever so slightly tighter, following the whorls of its plot with a bit more confidence. I also wanted to compare it to Jane Smiley’s The Greenlanders, another ambitious novel that I was at times confused by when reading it, only to come out loving it.

Because in the end, she got me. I was captured by Hild and her world. I felt I knew her, I missed her when she was gone (after complaining it was taking me so long to read). I’ll definitely be reading Menewood, which I didn’t realise came out only recently after a ten year gap! I’m regretting, now, not picking up a copy when I was in the States earlier this year, but I thought yet another book—and a seven-hundred-page one at that—was probably not a priority for luggage space when I didn’t even know if I’d like Hild. Anyway, I’m glad I spent so much time with her, that I really tried to follow exactly what was happening, because I think in the end it made the whole experience more rewarding. I couldn’t recommend this to many people, but it’s worth a try if you like your dense historical fiction.

Embassytown by China Miéville

Have you ever wondered what a language might look like where there is no (or less) slippage between a word and its referent? Where language somehow grasps the physical world? And then, have you ever wondered what might happen when that kind of language met our kind of language? China Miéville has, and he wrote this book about it.

Our narrator Avice lives in the titular Embassytown, an enclave of humans belonging to the nation of Bremen on an alien planet. There are two unique things about this place; one, that it is on the edge of Bremen influence, the edge of empire and also the known world. The other is that the indigenous alien people of this planet, the Ariekei, speak a very unique form of language. It is Capital L Language, and it somehow closes that gap between word and referent, meaning these people can only speak true things. This, though, is a real simplification of the world Miéville creates here, because in reality it is much more complex, each detail adding depth to his themes. The planet is on the edge of the ‘immer’, a “foundational alt-reality”; Avice becomes a living simile so that the ‘Hosts’ (the Ariekei) might be able to express themselves in more ways; the Host Language must be spoken with two mouths and a living soul (whatever you think that means).

Miéville offers us very little foothold at the beginning, dropping us straight into this strange world. It takes a good fifty to a hundred pages just to work out the basics and orient yourself. But it does become more straightforward over time, and there is a good plot waiting for you when you’ve worked out what’s going on. The more I think about this book, write about it, talk about it (we did it for our Moon book club pick), the more intricacy I find. At earlier points in the book it reminded me of some of Le Guin’s science fiction stylistically, but I think Miéville also continues her legacy here in the nuanced and fascinating portrayal of the entanglements between colonialism, power, language and personhood.

My only minor quibble is the pacing, which dragged here and there (there’s an awful lot of formal parties in the first half, though I suppose it is set in an embassy). But really I think if I were to read it again perhaps I would discard even this. It’s a powerful book that is both penetrating in its analysis, but also compelling on a story level. Highly recommended, and if you are a linguist you actually have to read it. It’s the rules.

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli trans. by Elisabeth Maquette

This was a devastating read, and a powerful work of literature. I think I’ve mentioned that I saw Adania Shibli in conversation with Hisham Matar earlier this year at Hay Festival, before I read this book, and it’s a conversation I’ll probably think about forever. (If you sign up for Anytime, you can listen to it here.) It was, in many ways, a good thing for me to come to this book after that conversation as I felt I could much better understand what Shibli is doing in this book, and what her intentions were in writing it. It is short and in many ways deceptively simple, but it is—at least to my mind—exquisitely crafted.

The first part is based on a true story and is about the rape and murder of a young Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers in 1949. The second part follows a woman who becomes obsessed with this ‘minor detail’ from the archive (as the real story was when it was rediscovered both within and without the book), and sets out to try and find out more about the girl and her perspective. A futile gesture, of course, in the face of catastrophic erasure.

There is a big stylistic shift across the two parts. In the first part the reader tracks the minute details of the leading soldier’s life in the Negev desert. His meticulous ablutions (undermined by the fact of his allowing a scorpion bite to fester), his pointless excursions out into the seemingly empty desert. The big action seems to exist just outside the words themselves, more devastating when the girl enters the narrative. The circularity of his activity, the ceaseless mechanics of his routine, are disrupted only minimally during the emotional height of the novel.

Then the second part. This is a first person narration by the woman herself. Now, the words spill out. There is indeterminacy, chaos in her story. Shibli talked a little about this in the interview. How she felt that as a Palestinian she was always stuttering against the grand narrative of Israel. The second half of Minor Detail does indeed have this sense of profusion and confusion compared to the straightforward first half. And it describes, too, the pain and slow degradation of life under occupation. Of course, the big things; the loss of life, the mutilation, the ceaseless thunder of bombs. But also the small things, the minor details. The dust that covers a work desk after a bomb, because of course the windows had to be open so they wouldn’t shatter. The constant mental load it takes to work out which area you can get to with which pass when you live under an apartheid regime. As the narrator seeks to find out more about the lost girl, she begins to cross some of these uncrossable boundaries.

On one hand we have a whole life of a murdered girl which becomes just another minor detail, another number. And yet on the other we have the actual minor details that have a cumulative grating effect, on one’s sense of self, on one’s narrative, on one’s sense of place. I think this book will stay with me for a long time.

My Death by Lisa Tuttle

Like many reviewers before me, I reiterate that it’s best to go into this short novel without too much information. Briefly, it’s about an author who decides to write a biography of a forgotten female artist, only to find their lives uncannily intertwine. We discussed this for book club, so if you’ve read this and want to know more of our thoughts about it, you can always join and watch back the recording. We had a lot of fun with it!

Overall I really enjoyed comparing this one with Possession by A. S. Byatt, which we read for book club at the end of last year. They are very different stylistically, but both examine “the romance of the archive” (as Amy Gentry calls it in the NYRB introduction) and some similar themes, though in entirely different ways. I’d go so far as to recommend you read them together for a really fruitful reading experience. Also I need more books about researchers falling down literary and artistic rabbit holes, please.

Without giving too much away, I recommend this one. I don’t think it will appeal to absolutely everyone, as Tuttle is insistent on not providing clear answers, but I think that is half of the fun of this unusual piece of work.

the good

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein had (has?) a doppelgänger problem, in that she kept getting confused for conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf online. Wolf describes herself as a liberal, and did write the feminist book The Beauty Myth in the nineties, but since COVID has adopted some rather ridiculous and dangerous beliefs, starting with being anti-mask and anti-vax, and finding herself now in decidedly right-wing spaces. Klein uses this confusion—the fact of having a doppelgänger—to explore the contemporary world more widely, namely the polarisation of politics, the seemingly strange alliances that have formed in some of these spaces, and what those on the left can do about it. It is an incisive look at now, and helped me make sense of a lot of what we see online. She covers a huge range of topics from wellness culture, to personal branding, to the project of Red Vienna, to our cultural understanding of autism through history, to Palestine and Israel. And it all comes together well under her central theme of the doppelgänger. I’ve thought about this a lot since I finished it, and I recommend it!

the solid

The Book of Love by Kelly Link

I said it in my recent video and I’ll say it again, I have no idea who I’d recommend this to. It is six hundred pages of the minutiae of teenage angst, with a little magic thrown in. Whilst there is a Linkian playfulness to this book which does remind me of her other work, in other ways it is not what I would have expected from her at all for a first novel. We follow four teenagers who have been brought back from the dead and must compete against one another (at what? we don’t know) so that two of them may stay in the land of the living and avoid being sent back. I listened to this which is a good thing as I don’t know if I could have justified the time investment if I’d been properly reading it. And yet, and yet, by the end I was kind of invested? I don’t know if it was the sheer number of minutes I listened to, but I came to care for these characters. There’s no doubting that they are wholly and completely realised, but also… they’re kind of annoying. And the plot is definitely secondary to the inner workings and interpersonal relationships of these teens. One for the Kelly Link completists, perhaps. I don’t think it’s a bad book I suppose it was just, not for me? And I didn’t exactly know what the point of it was, which both frustrates and intrigues me.

Disoriental by Négar Djavadi trans. by Tina Kover

This novel is told to us by Kimia Sadr, an Iranian woman who has lived in France since she was a child. She is sitting in the waiting room of a fertility clinic, and whilst she does so she tells us, the reader, about her family and life up to this point. She had activist parents who ultimately had to flee the Iranian Revolution (though they were critical of both what came before and after), and she finds herself in the in-between identity of immigrant; now neither fully Iranian nor fully French, hence ‘disoriental’. The writing style is lively; Kimi explicitly directs the readers attention and signposts her storytelling techniques, and it is by turns humorous and morose.

I couldn’t help but be a little disappointed by this one. I think at times the style got in the way of the emotional core of the novel. And by the time we got to some plot revelations that had been heavily foreshadowed, the narrative surprise was worn out. With Djavadi being a screenwriter, I was intrigued by the overlap with Martyr!’s cinematic elements which I read last month. Both writers employ this multimedia-esque style. For whatever reason Akbar’s just spoke to me that little bit more (perhaps a translation issue and it overall works better in French, as this review suggests).

There were some parts I couldn’t really parse due to my own ignorance. I don’t know how an Iranian reader would find this book, and whether they would consider it too much written for a Western audience (it was certainly very explicatory). Of course this may not be the case, but it’s something I’m aware I don’t know the answer to. I also thought some of the central theming of gender and motherhood and fertility was a bit of a distracting choice, and wasn’t entirely fleshed out.

However Disoriental is a solid book, and there are things to like about it (in fact, many people really love it!) At no point was I keen to abandon it, and I wanted to see what happened in the end. I certainly think some of the storytelling, particularly the descriptions of Kimi’s forebears, was especially engaging. But I don’t know that it’s one that I’ll think a lot about moving forward.

Thanks for reading and if you got this far, congratulations! If you enjoyed this, you can read last month’s round-up here.

You can also join our book club here. I’m biased but it’s one of my favourite corners of the internet, and I’ve read countless fantastic books I’d have never known about through recommendations from our members. Not to mention our monthly book club discussions, which always leave me with a much greater understanding of whatever it is we’re discussing. At the end of August we will be meeting to discuss Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro.

I look forward to seeing you next month!

June 2024 Reads

Jessie Lethaby — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 12:54:51 GMT

I think it could be the first time ever that every book I read this month sits more or less on the same longitudinal line of quality (well, at least by my own reckoning). These were all great books that I really enjoyed, all of them with something noteworthy, unique or special. But none without their flaws.

I’ve been talking about it a lot recently so forgive me for saying it yet again, but I’m beginning to like thinking about a book’s flaws more and more, and even liking the flaws themselves. I gave up on star ratings years ago because I found it more and more difficult to parse a whole novel’s complexity down into numbers. But recently it feels like I’m dropping even more of that internal hierarchy. Perhaps it’s taken me a while to shake off the ghost of the star rating. I feel like I’m engaging a lot more with each text as its own thing, and also like I have a much deeper sense of books as the product of a wholly human person. In turn that means I’m not so much searching for a ‘perfect’ book all the time anymore (though it’s nice when you do find a work which you think is nigh on flawless, of course), but more just interested in the ways books overlap, differ, converse. And rather than anything I know intellectually, I’m experiencing this as a feeling. I can feel more the uniqueness of each experience; the total individuality of my mind meeting the author’s and then meeting (more often than not) the members of the book club community’s minds. Isn’t art fascinating and also super weird? And am I getting old and sentimental? Very probably.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are still books I read which I don’t think are great works of literature, and I’m sure I won’t be abandoning my Great/Good/Fine rankings just yet. You need the crappy books to balance out the good, to show you what is good. But these books in particular and how they all came together in June prompted me to think outside these boundaries more than I usually would. I’m sure it’s also partly to do with the fact that I’ve written so much recently about what I think constitutes a good novel. It’s like as soon as I put something like that out in writing, my mind discards it completely, pushes past its boundaries into somewhere new. Thanks a lot, brain! Recalibration of what makes a good novel, of why I read novels, continues.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Considering this, I think we’d better start with East of Eden. This book is a convergence for me of a few things; an enjoyable and engrossing reading experience, an acknowledgement that it’s not without some rather major flaws, the sense that these flaws are what make it such a fascinating and discussion-worthy novel and the fact of its legacy and context standing so tall in the literary imagination.

We follow two farming families living in the Salinas Valley in California. One of them is based on Steinbeck’s own maternal line, and the other is a fictional creation that reenacts the two seminal stories of the book of Genesis; Adam and Eve, of course, but more importantly that of Cain and Abel.

Over the course of two meetings book club talked for three and a half hours about this book, so I’m going to have trouble synthesising my thoughts into these few paragraphs, I’m sure. First of all, Steinbeck writes a great sentence. There are some real showstoppers in here. And his nature writing is beautiful, he really captures something of the essence of the Salinas Valley. There is something deeply warm and humane in his writing which is what, I think, makes this book enduringly popular.

He wrote a lot about writing this book (also interesting!), and at one time acknowledged that it was a kind of primer for his sons, to tell them about their family but also to teach them how to be good people (no coincidence that two pairs of brothers form the main axis of the novel). He also commented that he put everything into this. Naturally there are semi-autobiographical details (little John actually appears in the book!), there is philosophy, commentary on America and its history, its culture. And although it is six hundred pages long, it flew by for me.

This book has always been popular with readers, but often less so with critics. A book this weighed down with so many simultaneous objectives (history of the Hamilton family, myth-making for America, trying to work out what makes a person good or bad, biblical allegory to support this) is bound to be chaotic. At the time of its publication, many criticised his broad strokes attitude to the themes of good and evil, the somewhat one-dimensional and monstrous depiction of the main female character Cathy, and the weird use of the first person narration. All of which I think are probably fair. But oh, how interesting these things make the book.

We talked about Cathy for a long time, rescuing her from inhumanity, contextualising her, wondering if there were more nuances (intended or otherwise) within the text. Wondering how a text changes over time, going above and beyond how and why it was originally written. And I found the narration fascinating. I didn’t even know it was based on Steinbeck’s family and so thought he was making really conscious choices with his narrator at first (how does the narrator know such intimate details of both families when they are only descended from one? What will the narrator’s role be in the story, considering we open with a strong sense of their voice?) and then realised partway through that it was a more historical effort. How revealing, of the project Steinbeck is carrying out here. It adds a vulnerability to this text that undermines and yet also highlights its myth-making endeavour. It’s an unusual thing to do, and pushes it away from the social realism Steinbeck is known for.

Good and evil, well, yes, those are big topics. For the most part I think there’s more complexity here than you might otherwise suspect. Not only do we get one set of Cain and Abel brothers but we actually get two, both with their own slight differences from the original story. The main reason for the use of this ancient narrative seems to be asking questions about fatherhood, about nature versus nurture and free will, rather than making a religious point. Additionally, some characters seem to represent multiple biblical figures. And the conclusion of the novel seems to suggest there are no wholly good or bad people (does Cathy complicate this, or is she redeemed, too? What of the seemingly morally flawless Lee, or Sam?)

So yes, it’s a melting pot of so many things. And that makes it pretty fun. By the end, you’ll almost definitely feel something. Needless to say, The Grapes of Wrath is high on my list now. It’s generally considered (by critics, too), to be Steinbeck’s best novel, and I’m so keen to see how it differs from this one. If that same vulnerability exists in it, or whether it is a tauter, slicker novel. We shall see!

That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx

Another novel that exists as a chaotic mishmash of ideas and stories, perhaps with even less of a through-line, That Old Ace in the Hole was an interesting and up and down reading experience for me. At first I was engrossed, then I lost momentum with it, then it picked up enough that I could steam to the ending which I found pretty moving, actually. But I finished it a bit disappointed considering how much I love Proulx’s other work. Then I went back through my notes and realised I liked more elements of it than I thought I did, and that perhaps there was something I had missed in my rather fragmented reading of it (one of those you should read quickly, if you can). I’d like to return to it at some point to get a better feel for it.

We follow Bob Dollar, a man who’s not really sure what he wants to do with his life. Abandoned by his parents as a child and brought up by his loving but slightly odd uncle, he finds himself accepting a position with Global Pork Rind, scouting for spots in the Texas panhandle to set up hog farms. Naturally these hog farms are very unpopular with the residents, being toxic to local water reserves and air, unethical to the pigs and also immensely smelly. So Bob has to invent some sort of cover story for himself, ingratiate himself with the local community of a town called Woolybucket, and see who might be willing to sell up. This is obviously a job that requires some moral dampening, and yet Bob is depicted sympathetically, naive perhaps to the full implications of his job, sometimes internally conflicted by his deception.

There are some wonderful sections in here, particularly the opening pages delineating Bob’s childhood:

A few months after his parents’ fateful departure Bob had started thinking of his slippery self as a reindeer, and he carried his head carefully to avoid hitting his antlers against cupboards or wall projections. It became an intensely vivid fantasy. He had no idea who he was, as his parents had taken his identity with them to Alaska. The world was on casters, rolling away as he was about to step into it. He knew he had a solitary heart for he had no sense of belonging anywhere. Uncle Tam’s house and shop were way stations where he waited for the meaningful connection, the event or person who would show him who he was. At some point he would metamorphose from a secret reindeer to human being, somehow reconnected with his family.

Who hasn’t sometimes felt so sensitive and at a loss that they’re like a secret reindeer?

Proulx writes with her slight wry humour, she loves her characters but also lightly ribs them throughout. The folks of the panhandle are drawn with warmth and careful writerly attention. There are some vivid scenes, like the one featuring the quilting club he ends up sitting in on, with all the elderly local women sharing stories as they vividly depict the visage of James Dean as Abel in their Cain and Abel themed quilt (East of Eden reference alert! Funnier because James Dean plays the Cain character in the film version).

The novel drifts into various little stories of some of the residents, going back and forth as Bob drives around, hoping to catch a break. You’ll have to keep your eye on the names in this one, because it’s easy to lose track. I got lost a few times. Slowly, slowly, we build to Bob’s redemptive arc. If I had been able to read it in a more condensed way, I think I would have felt the iterative rhythm of its movement a little better. It’s quite beautiful, but something niggled in the back of my mind. There’s no doubt that Proulx romanticises settler and panhandle life in this novel (though she also acknowledges some of its history before the arrival of European immigrants, as well as settler colonialism). There is nuance here, but the overall arc of the story takes us down a particular road. Of course East of Eden does this to some extent too, but being an older novel I’m more lenient with it. I don’t say this to dismiss the whole project of this novel out of hand, but it’s worth being aware of what books are doing to us subconsciously as we read them. At the same time it does exist as a record of sorts of this way of life, and the people that lived there, and it is interesting. I think she spent a lot of time with folks from there, and you can tell.

I’m definitely going to continue to read Proulx’s work, she’s on my ‘to complete’ list. There is a reason she is so beloved in the literary world.

North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud

Here’s an interesting little collection of stories! I read The Strange by Ballingrud last year, a nostalgic love letter to the sci-fis and Westerns of his childhood. This was a very different project. Each is an eerie tale featuring… you guessed it, a monster. But this is a more subtle book than that. There’s a darkness here beyond that of the supernatural, the darkness of the human heart, the monster within.

These are desolate stories about people pushed into difficult circumstances, either by structural neglect, abusive personal relationships, abandonments or harsh environments, all set in the American South. There’s a fatherless boy who becomes dangerously close to the vampire that lives under his house, the man just released from prison struggling to relinquish his tight control over his teenage daughter who takes it out on a lake monster, the couple who adopt a strange alien/angel in place of their missing son. Despite the difficult subject matter, Ballingrud exercises restraint throughout, perhaps too much. For the horror lover, you may be underwhelmed by this book. This is more horror adjacent, just tipping into that uncanny, disquieting zone of the not-real. This amount just about works for me. But for the psychological realism lover, I think this collection leaves just a touch to be desired. The tonality of the narration is much the same across the book, even over a wide range of different characters, which gave me a feeling of sameness. I also (thankfully) don’t think Ballingrud is quite depraved enough to give me a real hefty sense of the dark thought spirals some of these characters exist in. Or enough contrast perhaps, between their normal selves, versus the creeping darkness from their inner monsters.

Nonetheless I think this is a clever collection. I think the relationship between the monster and each of the protagonists of the story could be carefully teased out to good effect in each story. There is a subtlety, an elegance to Ballingrud’s work here which I like, but it just needs that extra something to push it into the truly great. I’ll definitely be reading whatever he writes next.

Home by Marilynne Robinson

You may already know that Gilead was another of my favourite books from last year, and I’ve been meaning to read Home for quite some time. The first novel is in epistolary form, letters written from the point of view of John Ames, a Congregationalist pastor living in the town of Gilead. He is writing to his son and trying to teach him his family history and also something of his sense of faith and how to live (East of Eden bells ringing, again). But he is also wrestling with the return to the town of Jack, his best friend the Reverend Boughton’s wayward son. Named after Ames and a thorn in his side, Ames struggles to find the forgiveness he knows he should afford Jack before he dies.

This novel, Home, takes us over to the Boughton’s place. It’s a third person narration but it’s mostly free indirect narrated through the eyes of the youngest daughter Glory, returned home after a painfully long engagement that went nowhere. When Jack comes home, the conversations between these two siblings reveal more about their lives, their souls. At the same time old Boughton is dying, and Jack tries to make peace with his father before he is gone.

This novel has all the hallmarks of Robinson’s mastery of her medium. She has great empathy for her characters, and a gift at bringing quiet, seemingly insignificant moments to life. Giving them the gravitas that they actually do have in the great sweeping narrative of our lives. It is beautiful in all the ways that Gilead was beautiful. People do bad things, they feel shame, they do good things, they feel better. That is the sway of this novel. How can we bear the movement between the two?

I think Gilead is the better novel, though. I felt the press of religion to be stronger in this one, interestingly. Whilst Jack has undoubtedly done some morally questionable things, he suffers an excess of shame in this novel for things which are perhaps not entirely his responsibility. Whilst there are hints, I don’t think Robinson quite unpicks the apparent necessity of Jack’s shame. I’m also not sure I know more of what’s going on here, or that this book advances the overall story, going over much of the same ground. I assume I’ll get more insight into Jack in Jack, but there was a lot of agonising here without enough forward motion, even psychologically if not plot-wise. The conversations between Glory and Jack, with all this high-minded discussion of faith and souls and how to live sometimes tipped into the unreal. They stopped feeling like fleshed out characters and became mouthpieces for ideas. Not always, but sometimes. I value the former in Robinson’s work so I was disappointed by it and at times grew a bit weary with the two of them. Gilead is a tauter novel.

My occasional qualms with it didn’t stop this novel’s ending from breaking my heart entirely. This was a painful one.

It feels like Robinson is working something out in these books. She is covering and re-covering the same ground, trying to squeeze out something important. I’m very intrigued as to how I’ll feel when I do get to the end of the series, and if I can make more sense of her intention here. Either way I still really enjoyed reading this, and look forward to the next.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

As we come to the end of these reviews the theme for this month seems to be male protagonists asking how the hell they are supposed to live their life and do some good, when life is filled with so much pain? Addiction and faith link this one surprisingly to Home, in two otherwise very different novels. Many of the above have also been baggy and disordered novels, and this one is no exception.

We finish here with Cyrus Shams, an Iranian-American recently sober and trying to come to terms with life and the traumatic fact of losing his mother as a child in the Iran Air Flight 655 incident, where a commercial passenger plane was shot down by the US in 1988 (this really happened).

At one point Cyrus writes “We all have the snorting-spilled-coke-off-bathroom-tile-stories. That stuff is only interesting to those blessed with a rare cosmic remove from knowing actual addicts. Active addiction is an algorithm, a crushing sameness. The story is what comes after.” Indeed, here we have what comes after the long years of Cyrus’ addiction. Sure, we get some accounts of his life before, but mostly we get the sense of Cyrus’ raw newness in his sobriety, his wrestling with the fact that life, now, must go on. And his uncertainty of how to make that work. In the void made by the lack of drink and drugs, he latches onto the idea of martyrdom. He feels he’s been offered all this ‘extra’ life when he should have died, and so paradoxically he becomes obsessed with death. His mother’s death, the psychic death of his PTSD-ridden uncle, and the idea of the martyr, his desire to become a martyr and make his own death matter somehow.

The rawness of this novel is what makes it deeply lovable. It means that there are some odd and awkward moments, some cheesiness, but far more often there are some real transcendent sections because of its sheer vulnerability. Akbar himself is in recovery, and he writes from a place of deep empathy with Cyrus. That doesn’t make Cyrus always very likeable (and I think your enjoyment of the novel will lie in how much you like him and can tolerate what some would consider whininess). There is a juvenile, teenagery feel to this book which I think probably reflects some of what it means to be newly sober, fresh to the adult world once again. Especially for Cyrus, who has lost both of his parents by the time the story starts, and has had an unusual upbringing. Just being an Iranian-American brings its own baggage.

Akbar is a poet and you can see it here but not in the way you might expect. It is not lyrically and poetically written but instead you see it in his bringing together two seemingly opposite things and juxtaposing them in such a way as to make a striking image, and an important point. This book veers into all sorts of unusual territory. We have Cyrus’ poems about a range of martyrs (Bobby Sands, Bhagat Singh, his parents), interludes of his dreams where two wildly different figures might meet and talk (at one point we read a conversation between Lisa Simpson and his mother Roya), excerpts from the States’ report on the shooting down of Flight 655, first-person chapters from the point of view of Roya and her brother, the story of the Persian poet Ferdowsi. Of course all brought together by the central narrative of Cyrus trying to work it all out, it being life. I enjoyed the Cyrus part of the story, too, which was propulsive. It had its melodramatic elements, some corny dialogue which usually would make me wince. But honestly, I just really enjoyed it. I enjoyed reading it, I enjoyed thinking about it. I think it totally works because of the nature of what Akbar is doing here. It’s a wonderful, moving debut novel that will probably have you in tears by the end. I hope he writes more fiction!

And that’s everything for this month! I would love to know if you’ve read any of the above and what you thought of them.

For a full breakdown of everything we’re reading in book club this month, you can check out this post. Our main pick is My Death by Lisa Tuttle, which promises to be a fascinating, uncanny read.

May 2024 Reads

Jessie Lethaby — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 12:07:32 GMT

I had an unexpectedly fantasy-heavy month in May, though my favourite book of the month was easily Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost, a book I could have started from the beginning again as soon as I finished it.

Before we get into the rest of the post, a quick note to say I’m sorry I dropped off the face of this Substack for a couple of weeks there! It’s been a bit busy round these parts and I’m yet to figure out a whole new research, reading and writing routine for my upcoming posts. Thank you for bearing with me. This month I’m going to finish my first speculative fiction round-up of the year, so keep your eyes peeled for that towards the end of June. I’ve got my list of books, I’ve got my ARCs downloaded, I’m ready to go. I’ve decided to do a few parts to this series so I can cover as much as possible.

This round-up marks the first instance where I write a post like this one without an accompanying YouTube video. If you are a fan of the video round-ups, I will make a big May and June video in a few weeks time.

Onto the books…

the great

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad

This is an excellent novel. And because it’s an excellent novel, I’m going to struggle to summarise exactly what makes it so excellent.

In it, we follow Sonia, an actor approaching middle age and recovering from a messy affair with her most recent director. She decides to leave her home in London and head to Haifa to stay with her sister, recalibrate and lick her wounds. Whilst there she finds herself drawn into a performance of Hamlet in the West Bank.

The book is narrated by Sonia and I was quickly sucked into her voice. I have been referring to this kind of prose as still water prose recently. It is fairly straightforward to read at a sentence level, sometimes conversational and perhaps even a little reserved emotionally. But this belies the hidden depths of this narrative, and in fact the great emotional force within. A little like the quiet surface of a deep freshwater lake versus the complex ecosystem beneath (simile now complete). Now and then you’ll find a sparkling sentence in this novel which brings to life a tiny detail of a fellow character’s body language, or perhaps the atmosphere of summer in Palestine. For some reason this small section keeps returning to my mind’s eye from just the opening pages of the book:

Where the wall curved on my right, a group of boys stood in a line. All elbows, hands on hips, shifting their weight from leg to leg, watching each other, waiting. Two were small and skinny, barefoot, with brown sunlit shoulder blades. Most of the older ones wore sneakers that left dark marks on the stone, and necklaces of drops fell from the seams of their shorts. The first in line took a running start and leapt, knees up. He seemed to fall for a long time, his body unfolding. Then he cracked the water and disappeared. When his head bobbed up again, the other boys didn’t react. I guess I was expecting them to applaud, or something. The diver flicked his hair and swam for the rocks.

We’ve almost all seen this group of boys by the sea, running and jumping into it, almost aimlessly it seems. Something about this passage captures that ennui of a long summer day. You can see the conversational tone Sonia takes with us: “I guess I was expecting them to applaud, or something”, and also the minute and beautiful detail which really brings it to life, the flicking of the hair, the shifting from foot to foot.

Whether she’d like it to be or not, Sonia’s life is highly politicised purely by virtue of being Palestinian, and this novel naturally explores the relationship between the personal and the political (“Must every Palestinian story be a family story?”) Her family is also from Haifa, now inside the boundaries of Israel, which brings its own particular selection of fraught identities. Sonia has a tricky relationship with Palestine and the trip detailed in the book is her first in twelve years. Partly, we gather, from heartbreak; not wanting to emotionally engage with a place that is constantly being lost, a place of humiliation and pain and decades of trauma. For Sonia, it has been easier to just disengage.

This book is testament as to why fiction in particular can be such a powerful way of learning about another place. I learned a lot here about relationships between Palestinians in all their different statuses; inside and outside the boundaries of Israel, in the West Bank, whether they were made refugees during the Nakba or are in the process of being expelled from their homes now, or are living uneasily alongside Israelis. Gaza and Gazans are mostly left out because, as Hammad has said in interviews, they have become almost completely isolated in the strip because of the occupation. The nuances here, the way Hammad has her characters interact over these differences—either in words or in silences—probably gave me far better insight than had I read the facts of it.

Hammad is able to bring a lot of these disparate parts together in her use of the play form, and the performance of Hamlet which the whole book is working towards. It naturally gives the book focus and a good teleological thrust. At times it slips into playtext, which as a former drama kid, I loved. In general returning to the world of theatre—another artform I am keenly interested in and kind of minimally informed about, at least compared to visual arts—was a wonderful addition for me also.

Alongside all this Sonia reflects on her childhood trips to Haifa, her life in London, a previous marriage. It is an inward-looking book in many ways (and a great character study), and yet Sonia’s actorly attention to others brings a precision to her observations that prevents it from becoming too insular. It is also a book about family dynamics, about friendship, sisterhood, community. It is a book about finding these things again after a time of feeling lost and aimless and hopeless.

You can see that Hammad covers a lot of ground with this book, and it could so easily have slipped out of her control. But her talent allows her to maintain a tight grip on her subject matter and themes. For me this is perfect example of a particular kind of literary fiction; it is not so challenging as to be unenjoyable or a slog or pretentious, but it is deeply layered and meaningful. She’s an author I will undoubtedly follow now through her career, and I’m keen to pick up The Parisian as soon as I can. This is a book I will no doubt return to (possibly very soon for some essays I have in mind), and I highly recommend you read it.

the very good

Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb

As many of you know, I read and loved Hobb’s Farseer trilogy last year, and I knew I wanted to continue my Realm of the Elderlings journey in 2024. Ship of Magic is the first novel in the Liveship Traders trilogy, which takes us away from the first person narrative of Fitz of the previous trilogy and into a whole different part of Hobb’s world.

At first I very much missed Fitz. In case you haven’t heard me ramble on about Hobb in the last year or so, this is rich, warmly written fantasy. It is not overly magical, but opts for a more psychologically real and sometimes political bent. The magic system(s), though, are intelligent and well-articulated. Reading Hobb is like reading an elevated, adult (and often quite dark) version of the very best of what I read as a kid. It is measured and doesn’t gallop along—to some readers’ frustration—allowing Hobb time to really build your relationship with her characters and flesh out the world. It’s immersive and highly enjoyable, and there are also themes here to satisfy those of us who want more intellectual stimulation and a consistent, principled worldview (something that can’t be said of some of Hobb’s contemporaries…)

Slowly as I got deeper into the book, I became enamoured with the new set of characters we follow here. The main story revolves around the liveship Vivacia. She is about to ‘quicken’ upon the death of her current ailing captain, which means that she is about to become properly sentient and alive. Due to an unfortunate series of events and interventions, her natural new captain Althea is robbed of the ship by members of her own family. Her nephew, Wintrow, is forced to give up his happy life in the priesthood to help his controlling abusive father aboard the ship. At the same time we follow a somewhat psychopathic pirate, Kennit, who is attempting to gain control in the Pirate Isles. Woven into this story is an examination of slavery, power, patriarchy and class.

Whilst I had previously thought it was more or less fine to start The Realm of the Elderlings with either Farseer or Liveship Traders, after a few discussions in Book Club recently I think to get the full experience it is better to start with the former. With most authors in other genres I always say to start with their best work, but when it comes to speculative fiction series—especially a long one like this—I almost never regret going in publishing order. Not to mention it can be so interesting to see how an author’s writing develops over the course of the series. Although at first I missed the focus we get with Fitz in Farseer, I could begin to see some of the ways she has already matured as an author here. She manages lots of different threads of storyline really well, moving between the different perspectives with ease. No easy feat. I look forward to seeing this development continue and also finding out some of the answers to the questions I was left with by the end.

Ombria in Shadow by Patricia A. McKillip

Patricia McKillip is one of those authors who is much loved within particular speculative fiction circles, but rather unknown without. This was my first foray into her work, but it won’t be the last.

The city of Ombria is teetering on the verge of chaos. The Prince has just died, leaving the vulnerable figures of his mistress and five year old son in the hands of the irascible and terrifying regent Domina Pearl, a woman who has been around for far too long for it not to be by supernatural means. After kicking the mistress Lydea out of the castle, Domina attempts to seize control, but might she be stopped by another sorceress working in the underground levels of Ombria, Faey? A sorceress whose mysterious waxling, Mag, seems to have her own agenda. And what role does Ducon, the Prince’s bastard nephew, have to play in all this?

The prose is dreamlike and atmospheric. I felt a bit like I was looking at each scene through the bottom of a glass jar. In the centre of the scene would be one detailed focal image; elaborate puppets lying on the bed of a child, the charcoal-covered fingers of Ducon, sketching his surroundings. And then you get a kind of blurriness around it, a less sharply drawn atmosphere that allows for the magic to creep in when you aren’t looking. With the materiality and grounding of the central images, McKillip keeps you in the story where an even more dreamlike style would not, but she still creates that sense of fairytale strangeness overall.

These are not psychologically real, fleshed out characters, and yet it is in these little moments that they are made human somehow, despite their oddities. The pacing is a little up and down. McKillip was quite committed to writing standalone fantasy novels, and so at times this speeds through the important elements and might slow down too much in other areas. I would definitely recommend you read it in a few longer sittings rather than dipping in and out, as its easy to lose the thread of it.

Overall I really enjoyed this novel. It’s a fantastic example of a certain kind of fantasy which is more romantic and owes less to realism (compared to an author like Robin Hobb, for example) than it does to older kinds of stories. Stories which are more allegorical, more unknowable, more strange. A big thank you to Emily for bringing this to one of our Reviews in Book Club otherwise I never would have discovered this book. McKillip is definitely an author I will be reading more of in the future (I promise it has little to do with how beautiful the covers are…)

the good

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

In this book, Wilkerson adeptly explains how race and racism functions, how it is a completely socially constructed concept with no basis in biology (though this doesn’t mean it doesn’t hold real and damaging power, of course), and how we might think of its manifestation in the US as more of a system of caste, rather than race. She does this by comparing it to two other systems of caste, the Indian caste system and the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany.

I felt the opening section of this was great, and I think it would make a fantastic introduction for anyone having difficulty conceptualising how race can be a social construction and yet also wield real power and also sometimes have little to do with actual skin colour at all. As a journalist, she has real skill in breaking down academic discussions for a wider audience, and I do think this would make a great starting point for many readers. She is a narrative journalist, too, and I think she has a talent for picking out interesting stories and anecdotes to back up her arguments.

She lost me a little in the second half. She has a tendency to write too much and repeat herself (which I also found with Warmth of Other Suns). And yet at the same time sometimes some of the analysis was not quite as rigorous as a subject like this needs, especially when you pull in the caste system in India and Nazi Germany. I think the focus on the Great Migration worked well in Warmth, and perhaps she was just trying to cover too much in this particular book.

The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

This was our June Book Club pick, and you can see it wasn’t quite as successful for me as the previous few (that’s alright, you can’t win them all). In it, Hargrave fictionalises an account of the witch trials of Vardø in 1621. A few years before, a huge storm wiped out most of the men in the settlement, and this is what set off a chain of events that led to the trials and executions of a number of women and Sámi men.

We follow two protagonists; Maren, who has lived on this island her whole life, and Ursa, a young woman from Bergen brought here by her controlling and dominating husband, a Scot with a keen eye for ‘witches’. This is ultimately a love story between these two women, who find solace and comfort in one another in a harsh and difficult place.

Let’s start with the good. I think Hargrave handles the love story sensitively, and the tension builds solidly throughout. I think this will disappoint dedicated romance readers but for those of us who err on the side of the literary I think it works. The story was compelling and well-told. Hargrave has a background in children’s literature and I think you can tell in the fact that the story progresses well (though some of my fellow readers felt she left too much to the end).

Much beyond the story level though, I think it falters. I think most of us wanted to see more of the women of the island and how they collectively grieve and look after one another in the aftermath of this catastrophic event (and presumably how this ultimately turns to spite and denouncements). There’s another, much tauter and more rigorous novel somewhere here. Instead we are sped along to the arrival of Ursa and her husband and the impending trials. It would have been nice to see the romance be between two of the women of Vardø, for example. She toes a fine line with her Sámi character, Diinna, and mostly gets it right, but it would have been nice for her not to be relegated to the side of the narrative. By the end, there are a few things left unaddressed in favour of speeding through the trials themselves. One of my all time favourite novels is Jane Smiley’s The Greenlanders, which I couldn’t help comparing this one to, so I think it probably suffered for me in that respect. I’d maybe read more Hargrave, but perhaps a few more books down the line.

the fine

The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett

Here Pratchett and I are again. There are some authors and some worlds that my literary knowledge feels incomplete without. You may be surprised to know that I include Terry Pratchett on that list, but as a devotee of speculative fiction I feel it’s my duty to familiarise myself with Discworld and see if I like his work. And as I explained above, I’m a publishing order kind of woman, so I listened to The Colour of Magic recently and now have listened to this, the second Discworld novel (in a series of like forty plus). But I have been assured that these two are not representative of his overall body of work and that he improves vastly in subsequent novels. There was at least an overarching plotline to this, though the two protagonists do still skip from dilemma to dilemma throughout. Initially I was quite swept up in it but this quickly dissipated. I’ll keep you updated.

And that’s all, folks! Have you read any of these? Did you enjoy them?

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If you’d like to join us over in Book Club, you can have a little look at what it involves here. It is easily the best thing I’ve done on the internet.

Thanks for reading!

March and April 2024 Reads

Jessie Lethaby — Wed, 15 May 2024 14:01:43 GMT

Alright the subtitle is probably a bit of an overstatement but as I’m looking at the stack on my desk, I feel like I covered a lot of ground in the last couple of months. We have literary powerhouses Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich, eye-opening nonfiction from Edward Said and Robin Wall Kimmerer, cult classic speculative fiction from Gene Wolfe, not to mention the classic from Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace. Somehow Keanu Reaves has slipped in there, too.

First, a quick commemorative statement for the first ever round-up I’m doing on Substack. I’ve been writing these for years (and you can read all my old ones on my blog) but it’s nice to think that alongside those of you who have been following along for a long time, they might find a new audience here, too. I hope to switch back to monthly rather than bi-monthly from now on, so you can expect one a month (I’m often a little late, though, I realise we are two weeks into May now…)

Before we get into the reviews, I wanted to note that I’m currently highlighting a fundraiser for a family and their community in Gaza and running a giveaway that would mean you could win a personalised package of books from me and free paid subscriptions to this Substack and my Patreon community for a full year when you donate. All details will be at the end of this post, but any donation would be much appreciated.

Also the links to the books below are affiliate links.

I always split them into random tiers that make sense only in my head (I gave up on star ratings a long time ago), so here we go. They are not individually ranked within the tiers, just grouped. But I think I may ruffle some feathers with their groupings…

the great

The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

For the uninitiated, this book is the first in a quartet of novels entitled The Book of the New Sun, and whilst it’s not received much acclaim outside the genre bubble of speculative fiction, it is considered a classic within it. Le Guin called Wolfe “our Melville” and Gaiman claims The Book of the New Sun is SF’s À la recherche du temps perdu (to which all I can say is, thank god it’s not, but more on Proust at a later date). It’s also generally regarded to be a challenging read. I have two editions of The Book of the New Sun and I found it amusing that in both introductions, Ada Palmer and Neil Gaiman are quick to offer qualifications for its difficulty, and tips and tricks for reading it. I found it amusing because I recognise so much of myself in those introductions, trying desperately to communicate on the one hand that a difficult novel is no picnic, but also please read it because the effort is rewarding. I’ll be doing my own version of this below, I’m sure.

If you know me at all, you’ll know just how tempting that challenge sounds. I want to play, I want to put the puzzle pieces together. Now whilst I won’t really know how the whole comes together until I’ve read all four novels (and I did consider waiting to write the review until I had), this book really delivered for me. This is Deep Future science fiction, to the point where it almost reads like fantasy because technology that far beyond us would look a whole lot like magic. There are also elements you’d expect from fantasy; there are swords and cloaks and the like. There is a certain baroque element to the worldbuilding which I really appreciated and you don’t see all that often in science fiction; Ada Palmer notes this accumulation of cultural “clutter” in her introduction. It gives a very deep sense of time to the novel. Because why wouldn’t the accoutrements of swords and cloaks come back in fashion over the aeons?

And (did you guess from the title?), the planet, the sun is dying. Whilst Urth heaves under the weight of all of humanity’s clutter, the sun too has begun its long death, so that the very colour of the sky would be unfamiliar to us. We are ushered into this world by Severian, an apprentice torturer living in an arcane guild, the only home he has ever known. In this instalment, we follow him through his childhood and adolescence, and eventually his travels beyond the walls of the Citadel. He is your typical unreliable narrator, and the story weaves in and out of episodes that appear more or less relevant (though we are assured by Palmer and Gaiman that everything is relevant). Frustrating for some readers; for me, I was hooked. If by nothing else than the description of the world itself; botanic gardens which seem to preserve whole ecosystems from the past and seek to trap you within its hothouses, the accumulation of towering labyrinthine buildings in the Citadel.

Purportedly translated from some Deep Future language into English by Wolfe, he uses a lot of arcane terminology here which will have you reaching for your dictionary more than once. In fact, someone has written a whole Lexicon Urthus with all the different terms but unfortunately apparently it’s riddled with spoilers. I think on this you need to strike a balance. It can take away from the experience to try and define each and every word, but some do bring new meaning to what you’re reading. Ultimately most people agree this book would bear a few readings, so I would err on the side of not getting lost in your online dictionary if you can avoid it, at least for the first read. Or I imagine an e-reader would be very helpful here.

The book is not without its issues. It was written in the 80s by a white guy. The treatment of the female characters is bad, and Severian is endlessly annoying about them (it is the first person narration of an adolescent boy growing up in an all-male guild so perhaps we can throw some grace Wolfe’s way). Luckily a few of my fellow buddy readers had got ahead of me and pointed this out before I got stuck in, and I think that actually helped me dismiss it when I saw it.

As I say, this book won’t be for everyone. It’s weird, it’s vague, nobody is very likeable, you’ve probably got to read it multiple times to truly catch everything that’s happening (and just the once through a four book series is a big commitment). But for me, I’m very much looking forward to The Claw of the Conciliator.

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich

It’s probably no surprise that this and Pedro Páramo were my other favourite books I read in the months of March and April, because we did both of them for book club. I read so much more carefully with the meetings in mind, and our discussions always bring so much to my experience. So, join a book club folks! Doesn’t have to be mine, but it can bring so much richness to your reading.

Anyway. I really liked this. I’ve had a funny Erdrich journey so far. The Night Watch I liked but I thought it was perhaps too meandering. It stuck with me, though, after reading it. The Round House I enjoyed reading a lot but I found the overarching plot line a bit questionable. But as I’ve been saying a lot recently, sometimes it’s in the flaws of a novel that it feels its most human, which can be a beautiful thing. I’ve read a few novels that feel like perfection, and that’s great. Not a word out of place. But I’m also coming to appreciate more and more those novels that in fact feel like the work of a soul, just another human person. Erdrich gives me that feeling, I find myself drawn to her work; it’s like she’s not trying to be ‘right’ somehow. Or perfect. She just is, she just writes. And often it’s very good. I remember reading in the end matters (😉) of The Round House how she has a car notebook and when ideas for stories occur to her while she’s driving she pulls over to scribble them down quickly. This woman lives to write, and I think you can tell.

We open the book with an ancient Father Damien, who has been living and working as a missionary in a town called Little No Horse on an Ojibwe reservation. He is coming to the end of his life and reflecting back on all that has happened to him. But it’s quickly revealed that Father Damien was in fact born as a woman called Agnes DeWitt, and fell into this role as a kind of traumatic accident. I’m not going to lie, I was a little nervous about this plot line, especially in a novel published in 2001. I was concerned how transgender identity would be handled here, but I was pleasantly surprised by its sensitivity. To Agnes, her gender identity seems by the by. Her transformation into Father Damien and everything she experiences as him is much more wrapped up in her sense of her faith and the role of the missionary than anything else. In practise, she considers herself like two people, both of whom are performances of a kind (not just Father Damien but also Agnes, too), embodying the same body. I primarily refer to her as Agnes here because that is what she calls herself in the privacy of her house, but it doesn’t seem to matter much to her. This lack of angst felt really refreshing to read, and I know that Erdrich took some inspiration from Ojibwe ways of being to formulate Agnes’ particular mode of transness.

Of course, Agnes does worry about being a woman in the context of the fact that women can’t be Catholic priests. She worries about whether all the things she’s done in Little No Horse will be cosmically undone by this discovery upon her death. Faith is at the heart of this book, and Agnes’ wrestling with her sense of Father Damien as a symbolic and literal emissary of colonialism and cultural genocide whilst also just another person providing real, tangible help to his community is where this book becomes quite spectacular. I was moved emotionally at multiple points, and had tears running down my face at the end. Through Father Damien’s conversations with local character Nanapush, the reader begins to ask, who is converting who, here?

As with the other Erdrich novels I’ve read, there is real richness and warmth to the dynamics between her characters and a gruff tenderness to their depiction. There is comedy and lightness here, in both tone and content, that keep it from feeling too dense and heavy. The more I write about it the more I think how much I loved it. It’s part of a series that follows a wider cast of characters, and although impossible now, I wonder what it would have been like reading this for the first time with the context of the five books that came before. Of course it can be read as a standalone, but perhaps the revelation about Father Damien (who appears in other novels I believe) would have felt more dramatic. I am now very keen to go back and read the others.

But! It wasn’t a total success with the group. It is very meandering and at times slow. Erdrich is a wordy writer, and her sentences have a framework of lyricism that means if you’re not used to them, it might not immediately flow. I like it because it really reminds me of the kind of novels I’d read on my contemporary American lit courses at uni, but it’s not a style that universally works for all readers. Of the three I’ve read, I would say this one is probably the most difficult to keep the thread of in its circular route to the conclusion—the other two being much more straightforward—but it’s by far my favourite.

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo trans. by Douglas Weatherford

This novel is widely considered a classic of Mexican literature and Latin American literature more generally, but for whatever reason has never quite managed to make it into the mainstream in its English translation like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ or Mario Vargas Llosa’s work has, both of whom cited it as a major inspiration. A few have pointed out that this is a translation issue. In this book, apparently Rulfo renders the oral cadences and diction of people living in rural Jalisco in such a way as to create real poetry out of it. None of that can really be translated into English. I quite like Weatherford’s minimalist dreamy translation of this that brings to mind the likes of Cormac McCarthy, but it probably doesn’t and can’t capture the original Spanish (but if you’re going to read in English, do read this version, it is thought of as the best translation yet).

And this is a strange, genre-bending little book, with a story and timeline that must be carefully pieced together from scraps to get the full effect. We follow Juan Preciado, a young man who goes to the town of Comala to look for his estranged father, Pedro Páramo, in the wake of his mother’s death. When he gets there, the town is abandoned, Páramo is dead, and he begins to wonder if the few people he does meet are even alive either. The atmosphere is dripping off this book, especially in the first half. It is everything I love in a novel; uncanny, unsettling, puzzling. The best way to enter this book is to visualise yourself in Comala listening to the scraps of conversation from ghostly passersby, from which you are to try and put together a whole narrative. Because unlike other fragmentary books, there is actually a distinct plot here, it just needs a bit of rooting out. You’ll move from fragment to fragment between timelines and points of view with little signposting, so just be on your guard.

I don’t think I’m spoiling much when I say Juan sort of disappears halfway through the book, and the story then focuses much more on Pedro Páramo, and the ways his despotism suffocated the town of Comala and everyone in it. I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed by this. I liked seeing how Juan was interacting with the townspeople and the contrast between him and them, it added dynamism to the exchanges. A story about a generally shitty tyrannical cacique appealed to me less. I suppose I wanted it to go somewhere else.

But overall, I really liked it, and I’ll be thinking about this one for a while. I can see its influence in so much that I’ve read, and I’m putting his short stories in my list, too.

the very good

Gogmagog by Steve Beard and Jeff Noon

This was absolutely batshit, and also quite wonderful. Former boat captain Cady Meade is approached by a young girl (/alien?) and her robotic butler to take them down a dangerous river so the girl can perform some sort of strange coming-of-age ritual. Why dangerous, you ask? Well the river is overlaid by the ghost of a dragon and said ghost is sick. As no one uses the river anymore, Cady has fallen into a kind of perennial torpor exacerbated by drunkenness and the hostile attitude of a grumpy old woman. Though initially reluctant to help them, she finally agrees. In some measure because she’s part plant witch, part human, is hundreds of years old and actually has a whole role of her own to play in the larger enfolding drama. Yes, really.

This world is totally bizarre and feels completely alien to read (rare when you read so much great speculative fiction). You’re dropped right in the middle and it takes a moment to get used to it. It is fantasy but in a mid-twentieth century setting, so it has a touch of steampunky goodness thrown in. It reminds me of China Miéville’s work in some ways. Cady is a great character for those of you who appreciate your older women protagonists who give absolutely no f*cks whatsoever. There are about five or six different types of peoples, all of whom felt really original to me. Plus I’m sure it helped that the dynamic between the girl and her Thrawl (or mechanised butler) reminded me of a book I loved from last year, The Strange. This book is infinitely weirder, but the character dynamics have a similar feel.

It has an episodic feel as the whole thrust of the book is the journey through different parts of the dragon’s ghost (like the fire, brain, liver…), and I liked being able to see more parts of the world in their progress. There’s also a second novel coming out later this year which I’m really looking forward to. This is definitely one of those books where we stop right in the middle of the story, so you may want to wait until they’re both out if you feel like that might be frustrating.

I really didn’t expect much from this novel and I think the surprise element endeared it to me even more. I would definitely recommend to those of you who like your weirder fiction.

Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Braiding Sweetgrass is one of those books which I’ll be thinking about intermittently for the rest of my life, so I knew I wanted to jump on the Gathering Moss buddy read this year. I listened to it because I so much enjoyed listening to Braiding Sweetgrass, but you do miss the opportunity to write down some of Kimmerer’s best insights. It is read by the author herself, though, and she does a fantastic job, I just love listening to her voice.

This was brilliant. You can tell its an earlier work than Braiding Sweetgrass, which reads like a (gentle and loving) call to arms. She is beginning to work through some of the ideas that become foundational in that later book. Kimmerer’s academic specialty was in mosses and she brings all her knowledge to bear here—both scientific and indigenous—to illuminate the lives of this plant that we might otherwise completely overlook. I’m always impressed by her ability to blend these things with anecdotes from her life and sections that read more like memoir. For me, this is the perfect nonfiction. One which holistically embraces the whole of being, and refuses the terms of objectivity apparently required to disseminate knowledge, particularly when it comes to science. I’d say read Braiding Sweetgrass first and then come to this when you need more Kimmerer (which you will).

Orientalism by Edward Said

I think anyone who has touched a humanities degree with a barge pole has probably come across Edward Said’s Orientalism. It’s a foundational work and is said to be one that touched off the huge body of postcolonial analysis that came after (though is not really a piece of postcolonial academic literature in and of itself).

Said was a prominent Palestinian-American who spoke often in defence of his people, but his academic career was rooted in Western literature and criticism, so this book is not the one to read to learn more about Palestine specifically (which he covers in The Question of Palestine and his memoir, Out of Place). It does, however, carry much relevance and weight in its wider themes, and I noted down many ways in which Orientalism still seeds our cultures and bolsters (neo)colonialism.

In Orientalism, Said posits that the West and East are completely socially constructed formulations, and that any Western writing on ‘the Orient’ is part of the creation of said Orient (would never use these terms myself but they are the ones used in the book and more to the point I think Said uses them intentionally to ruffle feathers, as by the 70s they were going out of fashion). This Western writing that is purportedly about ‘the Orient’ accesses no ‘true’ information about these regions, fundamentally because the creation of ‘the Orient’ doesn’t exist. This creation, in turn, forms the dichotomy, the foil, that also generates the idea of the West, or the Occident. The West being the place that is supposedly objective, rational, superior, that knows stuff about the East, that takes it and categorises it and codifies it. The East is not a place that knows stuff about the West, it is often gendered as feminine, as passive, as exotic, as irrational. Naturally this discursive creation of ‘the Orient’ fed into and fuelled colonialism. His focus is on the ‘near East’ in the book (Egypt, the Levant) rather than on the whole region that ‘the Orient’ would have covered just to prevent him from having to cover too much ground. We would perhaps use Global South these days instead (fraught with its own issues, I’m sure).

He makes his argument by analysing a number of Western texts and their depictions of ‘the Orient’, starting at Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt through to the 1970s. He focuses on French and British writing for the first two chapters, through to the takeover by American imperialism in the last.

The book is a vital puzzle piece in academic work at the time, and to understand so much of what came after I think you at least need to read the introduction to this book. I’d recommend the whole thing to those of you who want to see the argument unfold, and how he builds it. This is dense though, Said is an academic and his style is pretty dry. Over the years the book has been criticised for not being radical enough and unwittingly reinforcing the binary that it seeks to erode. But this work was a starting point, and it took Said to academic superstardom for a reason. Some of it may strike us as fairly obvious now, but that’s only because we are the beneficiaries of decades of work that came after and sometimes, because of Said.

I don’t recommend this to everyone because as I said, it’s dry. And so many of its ideas have now been made accessible by others who have read it. But I do recommend it if you plan to read any other theory or academic work, because it’s such a vital piece of the puzzle. It’s also just interesting to see how different academics tackle the laying out of arguments and how their styles differ from each other. People think academics write all one way, but there’s a lot of variation and artistry that goes into any kind of writing. I haven’t read Culture and Imperialism, but as a literature lover I wonder if I would prefer the reading experience to this one. This book doesn’t cover much fiction, where Culture and Imperialism does. So I think I may read that one next.

the good

River Spirit by Leila Aboulela

I want to put this somewhere between the above category and this one. There was a lot to like about this book, and very little to dislike.

I found this while looking for Sudanese literature, in the wake of learning about the war happening in Sudan right now. If you don’t yet know what’s happening, for up to the minute information Sara aka bsonblast on instagram/tiktok is a great person to follow (she also has a whole introductory series on TikTok which you can start from the top), as is the author of this post, Yassmin. I quickly came across some great reviews for River Spirit which had only recently been published, and I then saw that Tasnim had also read it and liked it which cemented it for me as high priority tbr (side note, Tasnim has been tirelessly posting about Palestine and Sudan for the last few months and has been a real inspiration, so please do go and follow her—she also likes good books).

Back to River Spirit, which is a historical novel set in 1880s Sudan, during a period when a man named Muhammad Ahmad proclaimed himself the Mahdi—a figure from Islamic eschatology (end times)—and began to gain power and popular support as a result. A quote from the epigraph, the Mahdi “will be sent at a time of conflict […] then he will fill the earth with equity and justice as it had been filled with tyranny and oppression.”

There are so many things about this book that I shouldn’t have liked. It’s told from multiple points of view and we don’t get extended time with many of the characters; it’s a sweeping panorama of a huge and complicated period of Sudanese history and Aboulela has to do quite a lot of explaining and historical exposition to catch us up, and it is at its heart a love story, which can be tricky to accommodate alongside everything else. But it just flows, and I found it to be really quite compelling. This is a testament to Aboulela’s skill because that is a tough ask. I think this skill lies in having a light hand with the prose, never allowing it to become overwritten but still bringing elegance and beauty into it. And she manages to do a lot with her characters in a short space of time that gives you something to fasten onto emotionally.

The central love story follows Akuany and Yaseen, who come from different worlds entirely and are thrown together somewhat by chance, only to then be variously separated and reunited over the years. I liked these two but I was particularly drawn to Akuany, who is the heart of this book. Overall I was also really impressed by Aboulela’s ability to get a lot of nuance into the text; she is no fan of the proclaimed Mahdi, and derides his religious fundamentalism that ignores the necessity for grace, practicality and flexibility in the lives of ordinary people. At the same time she acknowledges that there was only a space opened up for the Mahdi to seize so much power and appeal to the spirit of many Sudanese people because of the exploitation and violence of colonialism, first in the form of the Ottoman Empire who were taxing the Sudanese people out of all proportion, and then the British, too. She writes of the places were nationalism, colonialism and religion meet, and I felt I gained real insight into the way these entanglements might work in Sudan.

The only reason it is perhaps in this section rather than the one above is because it is so sweeping and has to move so quick, I don’t know that it’ll stick around at the forefront of my mind for a long time. However I do really want to look into Aboulela’s backlist as I felt myself in very confident hands here. I’d definitely recommend you read it, because unless you know a lot about this period of Sudanese history, it is sure to expand your world.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy trans. by Anthony Briggs

Preparing myself for some outrage at the fact that I didn’t absolutely love this novel.

Look, I liked reading lots of parts of it! But I thought it was flawed! That’s okay! And if you’d asked me in the hours after I’d just read endless pages of (rather vacuous) analysis about ‘History’ and ‘historians’ and ‘great men’ and how un-great Napoleon was, I’d have put it in The Meh, so you’re honestly in luck that a little bit of distance has reminded me that I did like large swathes of this novel. (Just to be clear, no fan of Napoleon myself, just didn’t need to hear about it over and over.)

I probably don’t need to explain War and Peace to you, but in brief we are following three families—the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs and the Bezukhovs—during the Napoleonic Wars. There’s a huge cast and it’s a sprawling story where the camera lens of Tolstoy’s narrative weaves from scene to scene, character to character, as Russia moves in and out of… you guessed it, war and peace. I thought the first half of this book was strong. I wasn’t bowled over by the prose style; of course it’s difficult to tell if this is a translation problem (and I read the Anthony Briggs because I hold no purist notions about the older translations when this one is described as the smoothest for English readers), though I suspect some of it might lie in the original text. I think this is because I’m a Dickens girl, and not only do I get to read him in his original language but his prose is also very lively and light-footed where this is more sombre and stolid. Call me uncultured. Anyway whilst I wasn’t bowled over by that, I did appreciate how Tolstoy was unfolding the narrative and the immense difficulty of holding all that story means you have to be really good at plotting and directing the reader’s attention, which is a mighty skill in itself. I was immersed, shall we say. I cared.

But then somewhere around eight or nine hundred pages, it began to lose me. Here’s something to know about War and Peace which I—perhaps naively—did not. It is interspersed with some long essays by Tolstoy about ‘History’, and readers, it is mostly utter tripe, at least from my own contemporary standpoint. The best of it is Tolstoy talking about how war is mostly just chaos and also pointless, but the rest of his insights are lacking. I can see that much of it might have been more revelatory at the time of publishing, but don’t have quite the same effect now. It very much feels like your grandad going on a rant at the dinner table right when he’s in the midst of a story you would quite like to hear the end of. It really destroyed the narrative tension for me, and worse, it gets pretty nationalistic and starts reading like propaganda. Going into reading a Russian novel at this particular moment in time when the invasion of Ukraine is ongoing, I knew I wanted to pay attention to the way this novel functions in the mythmaking of the Russian national consciousness (just like I’m acutely alert to hints of Empire in the British classics). And whilst I expected it to be there, I didn’t expect it to be quite so overt, and it ended up feeling pretty uncomfortable. Great men don’t exist but Russian commander Kutuzov was a great man… yeah, I’m not sure I buy it (thank you to this man and his review for making me feel sane). I know some editions collect all of this essay stuff and put it at the back of the novel and whilst it is fairly separate from the rest of the text so I can see how it might be done, I can’t help but feel that the novel does in some ways need it as filler for odd junctures where Tolstoy is not quite sure where to go next.

And let me issue another warning, the book ends with about fifty pages of it. So I didn’t even realise I had said goodbye to the characters for good when I did. You’re telling me I followed them for over a thousand pages and just kinda missed the farewell entirely? I feel like it might be the case that forewarned is forearmed on this one, and you can pay a bit more attention to those final moments than I did (though even if I had, I’m not sure I would’ve been overwhelmed by their poignancy).

Finally, the character work. Tolstoy is much loved for his characters. And to a large extent I get it. They do pop off the page, they do feel real, I did feel for them, a tear or two did escape my eyes from time to time. But I can’t help but feel that some of their overall arcs were pretty odd, even dismissive. The epilogue generally felt like an afterthought, even aside from the endless essay. Don’t get me started on how Natasha ends up, we’ll be here forever!

It sounds like I hate this book, and for a few hours, I did. But every now and then he’ll write a transcendent passage and you just think wow, what a talent. I think back through the first half and think there was a lot of potential there, enough even to keep it in The Good rather than The Meh, despite my disappointment on a number of points. I’m still keen to try Anna Karenina, I’m not giving up just yet.

They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell

Many of you will know I read and loved So Long, See You Tomorrow last year. That, to me, is one of those perfect novels, about which I had not a single complaint (rare, as I’m sure you can tell). That was Maxwell’s last book, and They Came Like Swallows was one of his first in a career spanning fifty years. It’s funny because when I read So Long I was sure that that book would at least be a contemporary of Stoner, if not older. It really has that modern classic feel. But it was actually published in 1979 in a totally different literary ecosystem. It looks like he really maintained that ‘classic’ tonality throughout his career, and They Came Like Swallows, published in 1937, feels similar despite the forty year gap.

Maxwell lost his mother to the 1918 flu epidemic, and this haunts both these novels. If I think too hard about that—that one of his first novels and his last novel explore that foundational trauma—I’ll cry right here writing this. It makes them really interesting to read together; I’d still go in with the better novel, So Long, first, and then explore this one if it interests you. This book is much more straightforward and probably is more directly autobiographical, where So Long takes a more circuitous route in its examination of the protagonist’s grief. Here, we follow Bunny in the months surrounding his mother’s death whilst he tries to find his place in the complex household dynamic. He is the younger, more introverted and less masculine son to his more typical older brother (a dynamic that appears also in So Long). This makes the loss of his mother that much more difficult, as she was his major ally.

The prose in So Long is distilled right down to a crystalline perfection. The inclusion of other elements in the story actually serves to highlight the passages on grief more, making them that much more impactful. This book is the first version of this. And it’s still quiet and beautiful and reflective and of course desperately sad, but it is not yet Maxwell at his full power. Still, as I say, one to look into if you loved So Long. With just that one novel, he has cemented himself on my list of authors whose body of work I’d like to complete some day.

The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose by Alice Munro

I’ve been meaning to read more Munro for absolutely ages and have had this sitting on my shelf staring at me for quite a while. Although Munro has only ever written short stories, this book came quite close to the novel form for me because we follow recurring character Rose as she grows up and moves from her small Canadian town to climb the rungs of class as an actress. It’s marketed as a book about the relationship between Rose and her stepmother, Flo, but whilst that was the focus of the first few stories, it’s absent through much of the middle. In general I found the opening stories to be the strongest; Munro writes the dynamic between Flo and Rose with precision and ease. She also examines Rose’s experience of childhood poverty and her subsequent movement into the middle class with pinpoint accuracy, in all its awkwardness and discomfort.

The middle section, though—which focuses on Rose’s marriage and dalliances—was less convincing. I wondered as I was reading whether this was an earlier work of Munro’s because it felt like she was emulating the voice of her contemporary male authors rather than fully writing in her own. I think if I could add to my list of dislikes in books, it’s the ‘I hate my marriage’ stories. I don’t know why, it’s just not a subgenre that I enjoy, and it’s quite prevalent in literary fiction from this around this time. Anyway, when I looked it up I realised that it was one of the first things she wrote, so I sense that she was still finding her voice as a writer through many of these stories. I’d read this if you’re interested in the dynamic between Flo and Rose that defines the opening stories, but not an essential Munro otherwise.

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

I listened to this and for the most part enjoyed it. Dr. Ha Nguyen travels to a remote island to investigate reports of an intelligent octopus species. Essentially it’s a first contact novel, but set here on Earth. It’s billed as a thriller and I suppose it is, but in that literary science fiction mashup kind of way.

I think the reason I liked this is because it is absolutely packed full of science, and so listening to it felt a bit like listening to a podcast with a bit of narrative. There were some interesting insights throughout and lots of great quotes to note. But as a novel I’m not sure it would be successful for everyone. First of all it takes itself suuuuuper seriously. I’d have liked to see some human lightness here, I think it would have added more dimension to the characters, who can read a bit flat. I suppose if I think back to the blurb I’m surprised about the direction Nayler took with it, but overall I feel that’s probably the blurb’s fault rather than Nayler’s. There is not as much progression or action in the plot as you might expect, and I wasn’t very interested in some of the secondary storylines. But if you’re looking for a good audiobook that’s easy listening but you might learn a thing or two, I’d recommend it.

Home by Toni Morrison

I read this one in just a couple of hours as it’s so slim. I’ve been on a Morrison kick for the last year or so, and have been working my way through her whole ouevre. And unfortunately this book did pale in comparison to some of her others, but it’s Morrison so I’m reluctant to throw any criticism her way.

Despite the impression from the blurb, I’d say we follow two protagonists here, Frank and his sister Cee. Frank is a veteran of the Korean War and is at somewhat of a loose end, experiencing acute PTSD and once more enduring the racism of his home country. Cee, meanwhile, has run from their small town and got herself mixed up in her own kind of trouble. This is definitely one of the easiest Morrison novels I’ve read, it is much more straightforward than some of her others. But I think that means it doesn’t quite pack the punch of her very best writing.

One of the problems with this book is that Morrison is trying to do too much in a small page count, not giving her time to fully explore the themes. She covers PTSD, alcoholism, racism, small town life vs. city life, gender roles, black womens’ role in the history of gynaecology, the Korean War. And by covering so much some of it becomes reductive; I wasn’t convinced by the treatment of PTSD; the glorification of small town life and people felt a touch patronising towards the end, and the gender roles veered into fairly traditional archetypes. As with many Morrison novels there are some deeply disturbing scenes in here, too, so please tread carefully.

Nonetheless her writing is always about a hundred times better than the next author’s, and I have so thoroughly enjoyed reading through her work. It has been really rewarding to see how she shapeshifts across her novels whilst still maintaining such a distinctive voice, but I’ll save all that for another day. I’ve only two left; A Mercy and God Help the Child.

The Book of Elsewhere by China Miéville and Keanu Reaves (ARC, release 23rd July)

I feel like everywhere I’ve talked about this book I’ve been like this! book! is! perfectly! good! It didn’t light my world on fire, but nor was it bad by any means. If you’re wondering what the hell Keanu Reaves’ name is doing there, let me explain. Reaves collaborates with another writer and an illustrator on a series of comics called BRZRKR (Berzerker) and now he’s teamed up with Miéville to do a proper novel following the same protagonist. It centres on an 80,000 year old man B/Unute who occasionally enters a fugue state where he loses executive control and commits unspeakable atrocities to whoever is nearby. We hear a little of his backstory here, and discover that he is now working for some elite military unit to do their dirty work for them. Only strange things start to happen which hint at other supernatural forces at work, and cause B/Unute to reexamine his own relationship to life.

This book is eminently readable. Miéville is a clever guy, and he’s almost definitely incapable of writing something crap. It’s more the storyline itself that probably didn’t appeal so much. If you’ve got an 80,000 year old man as your protagonist, I want some real in-depth thought going into what that might be like. And don’t get me wrong, there is some examination of it, it’s just not as sustained as I personally would’ve liked. But this book is just doing something else, it’s for a different kind of audience. It’s more action, it’s more thriller, it’s more military. These are not my topics of choice. I’m also wary of anything where the violence seemingly serves an aesthetic role, rather than an examination of violence’s relationship to power. Like why does this guy get violent in his fugue state rather than I don’t know, travelling to a particular time or place? I know it’s because they’re utilising the Berzerker concept, and because it looks cool in the comics presumably and it would look cool in the movie adaptation that feels inevitable, but it doesn’t make for a particularly enlightening examination or justification of violence. I imagine I liked the bits best that readers of these genres would find frustrating and distracting, which is the glimpses into B/Unute’s past that we get from time to time.

Also, there’s an 78,000 year old pig, so make of that what you will. This is part Miéville after all, and you can’t escape the weirdness. Overall, a well written version of this kind of novel, just not necessarily my thing to begin with. As an aspiring Miéville completist, I’m glad I read it.

the meh

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

This book is not an outright disaster but nor does it have any of the things that, for me, make a good novel. It doesn’t have the plot or character footholds to make it compelling, but perhaps if it was intended to be more experimental or poetic, it doesn’t have that challenging, puzzling aspect that will engage me in the absence of a more traditional story. BUT, that doesn’t mean others won’t like it. Indeed, I can see why many people would like this one, it’s just not my cup of tea at all. This book has flow to it, and is more of a softly lyrical song than a rigorous examination of its themes. I like the latter, but you may very well like the former.

So what is it about? This is literary science fiction, so as that’s one of my things, I was really looking forward to it. It follows a group of astronauts who are orbiting the Earth at some ridiculous speed so that they see sixteen sunrises and sunsets in one day. An interesting concept that might help you examine how tied we are to our planet through Earth’s unique twenty-four hour timescale. Alas, that idea does not quite come to fruition here.

This, for me, was the epitome of the ‘typing novel’. One of my red flags for this is lists. When authors start writing long paragraphs consisting of lists, I start to sweat. To me it speaks of a lack of confidence in what you’re saying thematically, so you just shove everything in and hope that something sticks. Whilst it has a nice, lyrical style, there were some generalisations and contradictions that just seem silly. In a matter of seconds on page two, “the earth is an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake”, then “the earth is a mother waiting for her children to return”… well, which is it? What are the differences in the moments when it feels like a lover, and the moments when it feels like a mother? Why later on does it feel like “in this moment [the space station], not earth, feels like home”? Where is the evidence for this beyond the words themselves? What does home feel like, viscerally, not just intellectually? What I think is intended is a poetic effect, and again this will appeal to many, but it’s not what I tend to look for in my literary sci fi.

There was little differentiation between the astronauts, who come from wildly different backgrounds; America, Japan, Britain, Italy, Russia. This absence of specificity means the potential depth of this novel instantly collapses into a kind of surfacey prose that doesn’t quite tap into… well, anything. It lacks a sense of materiality, as we float between the various (indistinguishable) thought patterns of the astronauts. I’m still going to try Harvey’s other work because I have been assured by Varsha that it’s really good. Perhaps a step into the speculative just doesn’t quite fit her style.

Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer

Ah, Jeff. I think we’re on first name terms at this point. I wouldn’t be surprised if many people associate my reviews with his work, and I have championed him many a time. Unfortunately I couldn’t love Hummingbird Salamander. I really wanted to, but I couldn’t. Honestly, I’m still not entirely sure what to make of this one; it feels messy somehow, like it has a bit of an identity crisis going on, but I’ll do my best.

It started off quite well, I think. We are following ‘Jane’ (an alias, we’re told) who is given a mysterious note one day by her barista which leads her to a storage unit inhabited only by a chair and a rare taxidermy hummingbird. This intriguing clue leads her down a rabbit hole to discover more about Silvina, a dead climate activist, and Silvina’s mission.

He had me in the first half. With VanderMeer, I’m acutely aware that he is going to thwart absolutely every expectation you have of him. This is a detective story of a kind, sure, but it’s not going to be a satisfying unravelling mystery. Instead it is sort of a character study of Jane, who is distinctly unlikeable. But it’s not even going to be a character study in the way some detective novels are, like Tana French’s In the Woods, because you’re not even going to get the payoff of the unreliable narrator concept. I initially enjoyed following Jane and wondering to myself if this was all a private delusion, as well as the nigh on laughable logical jumps she makes.

But it devolves into a kind of silliness that VanderMeer is a bit prey too, sometimes at the expense of what he wants to say. He seems to want to co-opt the thriller genre here to get more eyes and ears on his environmental message, but it all gets a bit muddied along the way with odd set pieces and endless meanderings. There’d be a great passage in there sometimes, but then a lot of boring Jane time. I read a review on Storygraph/Goodreads that I now can’t find for the life for me that mentioned how VanderMeer has a tendency to fall into misanthropy in his novels when it comes to his eco message. The books I like best that deal with environmentalism tend to be those that explore and acknowledge humans’ ability to live well with the land, our ability to act as stewards to it rather than destroy it, much of which comes to us from indigenous modes of thought. VanderMeer sometimes seems to want us to just disappear entirely, and this lack of hope and lightness in his vision sometimes leaves me feeling downcast. The problem is the extractive nature of capitalism, not the fact of us existing at all. I think he knows this, but he doesn’t acknowledge other ways of being enough for me sometimes.

I’m close to finishing all of VanderMeer’s novels, and I still love him. But this is not my favourite of his, and I was left feeling a bit confused and empty.

the painful

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Another potentially controversial ranking, but I hated this book, sorry. I really liked Slaughterhouse-Five, so I had especially high hopes which may have contributed to the crushing disappointment but yeah, not for me.

This is a classic satirical science fiction novel that follows narrator John/Jonah, a journalist wanting to know more about the enigmatic figure of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, co-creator of the atomic bomb. He ends up on the Caribbean island of San Lorenzo with Hoenikker’s offspring, where the world may just end up being changed irreversibly once again.

Oh, it’s so racist, so sexist, so ableist. It’s so uncomfortable to read. I get it, this is satire, I don’t think Vonnegut was a super bigoted guy, he’s trying to make a point about American imperialism and he’s doing it through the lens of the very gullible and generally morally bankrupt protagonist. It’s the 60s, so the satire is naturally going to be dicier than it would be today. But it’s just so unpleasant, really. I give a lot of grace to authors writing in a different sociocultural context, but I was grimacing the whole way through the second act. It’s the whole schtick, here, and I don’t think the payoff is good enough.

He’s trying to make a point about science and religion and the similarities between the two, which is great. He does have a way with words and the opening sections are quite promising. As a historical artefact about the Cold War, it’s an interesting contribution that should be studied. And in our Patreon discussions about this one, Melissa brought up the great point that probably a lot of this would have felt fresh and exciting upon first publication, but we've come a long way since then and the themes (which are really the whole basis of this book) just don’t feel as intellectually stimulating as they might once have been. Personally, I think it’s safe to skip.

conclusions and giveaway!

So that’s it, everyone. Sorry for the mammoth post, I hope you enjoyed my musings.

As I mentioned, I’m currently highlighting this fundraiser for Shady, his family and community in Gaza. I’ve been in touch with Shady and he’s told me how he’ll be using the money to provide food and aid for local children and his community as a whole, not only his family. He teaches dabke and has been sending me videos of the activities he has been organising for the kids, bringing them some small joy in the most unimaginably difficult times. I so want to support them to help them meet their goal of €20,000, and I think we can do it.

If you would like to be in with a chance to win a personalised book package, and free paid subscriptions to both this Substack and the Patreon community for a year, first of all please donate whatever you can to the fundraiser, with the suggested amount being €5. For donations less than this amount, I have set up a Buy Me a Coffee page as Gofundme doesn’t accept them, and I will transfer the balance to the fundraiser regularly. This will also work if you can’t donate to the GFM from your country! Screenshot your receipt or confirmation, and then add it to the end of this form (where I’ll also ask for some of your preferences so I know where to start with your book recommendations!) This will be running until the 21st May, when I’ll use a random generator number to pick a winner. Of course this is open to existing paid subscribers of either platform, too.

Thank you all, and speak soon!

The Unseen Review: Monthly Reading

January 2026 Reads

Coming-of-age retrospectives, or nostalgic summers

The disappointing

Top Reads of 2025

Third Place

Second Place

First Place

Re-reads

Keep updated?

I'm still mentally in 2025 . . . October (yes, really) to December reads

The Standout

The Uncanny

The Laxness

American Short Stories

Nonfiction

Classics

Reflective and Literary

In Brief

August and September 2025 Reading Review

Watershed by Percival Everett (1996)

The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey

Carol by Patricia Highsmith

Frog by Mo Yan, translated from Mandarin by Howard Greenblatt (2009)

Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth, translated from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund (2016)

Free Day by Inès Cagnati, translated from French by Liesl Schillinger (1973)

Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis (1956)

The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, translated from French by Mattias Ripa and Black Ferriss (2000)

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich (1984)

The Golden Ass by Apuleius, translated from Latin by E. J. Kenney (158)

The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G. K. Chesterton (1904)

Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson (1998)

The Map of the World by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (2023)

Did you see my latest newsletter?

Or read the last round-up

June and July 2025 Reading Review

This post is too long for email, so do switch over to your browser or the app to read the whole thing.

The one I highly recommend: this month’s featured book

Gathering Evidence by Martin MacInnes (2020)

For the right reader: the books I still recommend

The White Bear by Henrik Pontoppidan (1887; 2025), translated from Danish by Paul Larkin

The Bell at Sealey Head by Patricia McKillip (2008)

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy (2017)

Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig (1939), translated from the German by Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt

Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing (2020)

The long one I got stuck in

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell (2019)

The disappointing sequel

Iron Council by China Miéville (2004)

The overhyped

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers (2021)

When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà, translated from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem (2019)

Did you see my latest newsletter?

Or read last month’s reviews (it was a much more successful reading month):

May 2025 Reading Review

This post is too long for email, so do switch over to your browser or the app to read the whole thing.

The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez (2006)

The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen trans. by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman (1967; 1971)

The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid (1996)

My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff (2014)

We Do Not Part by Han Kang (2021; 2025) trans. from Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris

The Life of Rebecca Jones by Angharad Price, trans. from Welsh by Lloyd Jones (2002)

A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam (2021)

The Parisian by Isabella Hammad (2019)

Spear by Nicola Griffith (2022)

Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller (2020)

How to Read and Analyse a Novel Books

April 2025 Reading Review

Today’s post is too long for email, so please do click through to your browser or the app to read in full.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1980)

The Sword and the Lictor and The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe (1982, 1983)

Peace by Gene Wolfe (1975)

Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad (2024)

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton (2024)

Out of the Past: Tales of Haunting History ed. by Aaron Worth

Reading projects - sagas, poetry, graphic novels

The Many Deaths of Laila Starr by Ram V, illustrated by Filipe Andrade (2022)

Tender Spot by Naomi Shihab Nye

Books from How to Read and Analyse a Novel:

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad - original review - course post