wandering_star - reading my bookshelves in 2024

Let me see if I remember how to do this! Last year feels like it went on for ever - I was surprised to look back on some of the books I read in January because I would have sworn that they were from much longer ago.

In 2023 I read fewer books than usual, mostly managed to keep up with my own Club Read thread but did quite badly at following others' reading - in 2024 I am aiming to do more of that, as well as to read more of the physical books I already own.

I would like to think I read quite a variety of things but looking at my top reads of the year they are all fiction, by women, and all but one from the twenty-first century.

Top reads from 2023:
Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata (unsettling short stories with a theme of the absurdity of human existence)
The Women of Troy by Pat Barker (retelling of the end of the Trojan War)
The Employees by Olga Ravn (unsettling novella about strange objects on a spaceship)
The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai (multi-timeline story about a house where generations of artists have lived)
The Maiden Dinosaur by Janet McNeill (life of a 1960s spinster)
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan (interlinked short stories about a future where we have access to each other’s consciousnesses)

Welcome back, Margaret! I keep seeing Maiden Dinosaur mentioned on the threads, I should see if my library has a copy. I also have one of Pat Barker's retellings on my read-next bookcase, Silence of the Girls. Looking forward to that too, as I've only read Barker's Regeneration trilogy so far, but really liked it.

>2 labfs39: I was hooked Pat Barker after the Regeneration trilogy but haven’t tried any of her recent works. I can never get into modern versions of the classics so haven’t tried Silence of the Girls. Maybe I should try it, though I recently gave up on Song of Achilles.

>1 wandering_star: The Silence Of The Girls will more than likely be in my (yet to be compiled) top 10 for 2023. I have The Women Of Troy on my TBR shelves and I expect I'll read it this year as part of one of the LT Challenges.

Happy new year! So glad you loved The Maiden Dinosaur too.

Happy New Year. January 2023 does seem like a really long time ago to me too. I’m interested in The Candy House.

Happy New Year! Looking forward to seeing where your reading takes you this year.

Waving! Happy New Year!

I keep thinking The Maiden Dinosaur is something I should recommend to my book club, then forget. Maybe this year I'll remember...

Happy New Year to you!

I'm looking forward to following along with your reading this year. Cheers!

Happy new year. I will follow your thread as usual, probably silently as usual.
Last december, I read After midnight, that I had bought following your review in March. It was an interesting read, so thanks for that§
Your top reads from 2023 in >1 wandering_star: shows interesting titles. You labelled two of those books as "unsettling", I like that!

Happy New Year. Great list of favorites from 2023. I loved The Candy House. I will look for the Makkai. I loved The Great Believers though I was disappointed by I Have Some Questions for You.

Slowly making the rounds of everyone's new threads. Will be following along here, as I always pick up some ideas for titles.

Oh dear I am so behind already! Both on my reviews and on all the 100+ message threads that always seem to happen at the start of the year. Still, a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step so let's start off with the first review of the year: Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov.

The time is coming when more and more people will want to hide in the cave of the past, to turn back. And not for happy reasons, by the way. We need to be ready with the bomb shelter of the past. Call it the time shelter, if you will.

This is not so much a novel as a collection of thoughts about memory loosely hung on a story structure. The two (or are they?) main characters are the narrator and a mysterious friend of his named Gaustine, who is obsessed with the past and has the idea to set up homes for the elderly where the things around them will be familiar from their youth.

There are a lot of ideas here about individual memory, in particular (as Gospodinov is Bulgarian) what it means to lose your memory when your early life was lived in a Communist society so different from the one you live in today. There is a character whose memories of his obsession with the USA is stronger than any memories of his real life; another who tracks down the agent who used to spy on him, to remind him of the details of his youth.

There are also ideas about the quirks of memory (a dentist's drill makes the narrator think of the Bulgarian politburo because their photos were hung in his dentist's office when he was a child), and later on about the impact on the sense of self of the loss of memory.

Later on in the book, this examination of memory broadens out into political nostalgia, and the comment "The past is not just that which happened to you. Sometimes it is that which you just imagined" takes on a more sinister edge as one after another, countries across Europe vote in referenda to return to earlier times - times perceived as better/simpler by those who voted for them. I was reading this book when the news leaked out about the AfD's deportation plans, which made it feel horribly prescient.

2. Statues in a Garden by Isabel Colegate

Set over the months of summer before the outbreak of WWI, Statues in a Garden is about a wealthy family in their country house, preparing for the wedding of their older daughter.

They are observed by a few outsiders - handsome governess Alice, who is half in love with their world but amazed by their obliviousness, and nephew Philip, adopted by the family as a child after his parents died, but full of bitterness at what he perceives as second class status within the family. His anger and frustrated striving are perceived but ignored by the family, in the same way they ignore the talk of possible war in Europe and in Ireland, but may be as dangerous for the family's future as historical events will be for their entire class.

This is the second book I have read by Isabel Colegate who seems to be an unjustly unknown writer. Her writing style is a bit like Penelope Fitzgerald in that you need to concentrate on what she says, to see the shapes of what is not said but lies between the lines - but her view of human nature is more complex even than Fitzgerald's, and in this book there is a lot of anger about the smugness of the British ruling class.

Statues in a Garden was originally published in 1964 and reprinted a couple of years ago in an edition which must have been machine-read from a hard copy source and not checked through, because it is full of typos and missing punctuation :-(

When you have had a quarrel with your husband, a quarrel known to both of you to have been caused by nothing more than tiredness - a mutual lapse - you try to make it up before you go to sleep that night. That is a rule. Of course. But if your husband looks at you from such a distance through his new reading glasses and smiles politely as to a stranger or perhaps a constituent - what do you do then?

>15 wandering_star: Wow, that last passage you quoted is really something. I'll have to look for that book. Thanks.

>14 wandering_star: I like your review of Time Shelter. I read it last year and was similarly interested in the memory aspects, but also the political implications.

>14 wandering_star: Thank you for your comprehensive review. I’ve half-read Time Shelter and have the second half of it waiting for me to read. I haven’t dumped the book and really liked the first half. I’ve forgotten the structure; am I correct in thinking there are two distinct parts?

>16 rocketjk:, >17 labfs39:, >18 kjuliff: hello! Thank you for dropping by!
>18 kjuliff: the structure does change quite a bit, but it's not quite as clear as having two distinct parts, I think

3. Water Shall Refuse Them by Lucie McKnight Hardy

A coming-of-age story x folk horror, set during the famously hot summer of 1976. Nif (short for Jennifer) and her younger brother are taken to a cottage in Wales by her parents - well, by her father really, as he hopes it will help her mother break out of the shell of grief she has been in since the accidental death of the younger daughter. The villagers though are not welcoming. The younger ones bully Nif and her brother, and the older ones conduct what seem to be strange purification ceremonies, particularly targeting the people who live next door to the cottage Nif and her family have borrowed - a single mother (who sunbathes in skimpy outfits and gets very close to both Nif's father and mother) and her troubled son, who exhibits every teenage psycho red flag in the book....

This story was good at creating a sense of threat, less good at knowing what to do with it.

When I walked past the door of the bedroom I could see a sliver of her through the crack, lying on the white sheets, mouth open, eyes blank. She wasn't my mother anymore. She was an impostor, a depiction of what she had been, with the inside, the important bit, missing. It was as though someone had taken her away and replaced her with a statue.

>20 wandering_star: Sounds interesting. A little similar to my last read, but I’m tempted. Thanks for the review.

Enjoyed these three excellent reviews. Isabel Colgate sounds worth checking out. Of course, I was not aware of her before.

>22 dchaikin: she is definitely worth trying!

4. Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

An almost microscopic look at family dynamics and how long a shadow certain events can cast, which reminded me of Commonwealth by Ann Patchett. It starts with a romance between two college students, William and Julia. William, whose parents have spent most of their lives frozen in grief after the death of his younger sister, is bowled over by the feeling of becoming part of Julia's expressive, loving family - meanwhile, Julia sees in his quietness a seriousness and dedication very different from her own father, and believes this will get her to the grown-up life to which she aspires.

Sylvie understood her sister’s laser focus. She knew that Julia had gone all in on William Waters; he would be her husband, the structural beam of her future. Julia was willful, and her formidable engine was powering her and William forward. “I know why you like him so much,” Cecelia had teased her older sister. “Because he does whatever you tell him to.” Sylvie didn’t know William as well as she knew her sister, of course, but she did sense some kind of fear in him, though he presented as steady and calm. He was holding on to Julia like a life raft, and Sylvie wondered why.

The story then follows William and the Padovano family over the next decades. It is particularly good on the meaningfulness of small details in the context of a family or a relationship, as well as the long-running impact of historical pain or injury. I don't think it's for everyone - it stays very close to each character's emotional state, in a way that some readers might find tiresomely detailed - but I loved it.

>24 wandering_star: the second positive thoughtful review this week! I really enjoyed Commonwealth.

>24 wandering_star: Interesting. I will add it to my list. I’ve just finished a book with a key event being a death of a child to am having a break, but I enjoyed your review.

>24 wandering_star: I've had Anne Napolitano on my vague list of authors to ignore since reading and disliking Dear Edward. But maybe I should reconsider, as I've now read several glowing reviews of this book, aand I do usually like these types of family stories.

You've read some great books so far!

Time Shelter and Statues in the Garden both sound wonderful. I will look for books by Colegate; she sounds like an author I would like.

I already had Hello Beautiful on my WL.

Yes, it has been an interesting start to the year! Glad I am bringing Isabel Colegate to more people's attention :-)

5. Insignificance by James Clammer

Insignificance tells the story of a day in the life of a plumber - his first day back at work after an unspecified health-related absence. He arrives at the house of his wife's friend, who has offered him a job as a gentle way to restart working. He flirts with her a bit (amusingly we see these scenes from both people's point of view, and he is not making the impression he thinks he is). Then she goes off to start her day and he works on the plumbing; and starts to ruminate on the events which created the crisis in his life.

The writing has a slightly arch, removed-from-emotion tone, whether talking about Joe's inner thoughts or what he is doing. I don't think plumbing work has ever been described like this before!

Lying full length on his side he undertook a quest beyond the wooden support blocks upon which the cylinder was mounted in order to gain access to the drain-off cock and determine its operationality. A little valve with a square key head was what he was looking for, through well-established cobwebs his gloved hand sought, always they were in the most impossible places.

This tone also creates a numbing effect around the very shocking events that happened to Joe and his family which we gradually learn about through his ruminations. Perhaps this is deliberate - they are so painful that Joe can't look directly at them - but it gives the book quite a flat feeling. That said, it is a short novel and I think the ending does pay off, so I ended the book feeling more satisfied than I thought I would be.

6. Darling by Rachel Edwards

A domestic noir, which deals with a struggle for the emotions of Thomas, a widowed architect, between his teenage daughter Lola (bratty but fragile) and his new girlfriend Darling, a black nurse with a terminally ill son. Lola is not impressed when she meets Darling, and what starts with accidentally-on-purpose locking Darling in the cellar, or leaving cigarettes in obvious places when she knows Darling is trying to give up - but Darling has plans of her own. We know from the beginning that one of them will not make it out alive - but which one?

And yet, despite knowing the PR Lola would be giving me, and despite knowing there was more to being Alpha than cultivating long straight hair and not eating a sandwich, I was supposed to smile and to not mind and to offer teas and healthy snacks and iced fruit-infused waters. (Lola made it quite clear: we were never to look like starch-addicted proles in front of these lovingly reared Lilies, these trained orchids.) I was tempted – just for bant – to slap a bowl of fried chicken on to their laps, along with some pineapple punch, in all their greasy, sugary, blackfood glory, but it would not have been worth the fallout. One girl, product of the perfume-spritziest mother and a platinum-card father I would never meet, blushed whenever she looked upon me – every goddamn time – and never even said hello, not once. I didn’t know whether that was a you’re-a-parent thing, a you’re-black thing, or a you’re-such-a-bitch-to-Lola-and-you’re-shagging-her-dad thing. To loathe me for all three might be overkill, but you just never knew with kids.

7. Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada

A novella or possibly three short stories about the same people, loosely connected by themes of parenthood and relationships, with slightly surreal overtones. I enjoyed this fine when I was reading it but I do feel I was missing something, in the symbolism or undertones. What do the weasels in the attic signify? Or the expensive tropical fish?

“We meet at school, or work, or maybe a store. Wherever it is, there’s just a random group of individuals, right? Within that group, you find your mate. If you were in a different group, you’d end up with a different mate, right? But we never dwell on that. We live our lives in the groups we have—in our cities, our countries, even though we didn’t choose them. Know what I mean? We like to tell ourselves it’s love, that we’re choosing our own partners. But in reality, we’re just playing the cards we’ve been dealt.”

8. Sheep's Clothing by Celia Dale

Another domestic noir, this time from the 1980s (although it could be a decade or two earlier - it's the last novel that Dale published, and most of her noirs are from the 60s and 70s).

Grace is a con artist - with her sidekick Janice, she poses as someone from the social services, talks her way into the house of elderly women, then drugs and robs them. It's almost the perfect crime as the women are generally so embarrassed to have been taken advantage of that they don't even both to report it. (The sympathy shown for these women was one of the best aspects of the book for me).

It was a livelihood which comprised skill, nerve, an understanding and manipulation of human nature, and risk. The risk made Grace Bradby’s cold blood run warmer and faster; deep out of sight behind her calm façade, the stalking, the hunt, the kill thrilled her. It was absolute power dependent on absolute skill. Besides, if all went well, it was roughly five thousand a year tax free.

But Janice has a new boyfriend and is getting moony, and Grace needs to find a new con that she can manage on her own. She identifies a man to target - but both he, and Janice's fellow, have some mystery in their past that the women cannot find out.

This book came with a lot of high recommendations, including from Ruth Rendell. I thought it was fine, but no more.

>27 arubabookwoman: Loved that vague list of authors to ignore. I suspect we all have those, but haven't seen it put so well before.

>29 wandering_star: Sounds interesting. When I think of stories featuring a skilled trade, I always think of 'The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher" from Mantel's book of the same name. This doesn't sound like that, however, but still noting.

>32 wandering_star: Ruth Rendelll wrote some great books. I think I read all of her early to mid books, but the quality drifted of a bit toward the end. Maybe that’s when she recommended Sheep’s Clothing .

After reading your top 10 books of 2023 I became interested in Murata and I decided to try her. Am now listening to Convenience Store Woman . Looks very promising.

>34 kjuliff: How did you find the rest of Convenience Store Woman?

9. Alison by Lizzy Stewart

I enjoyed this graphic novel about a young woman who is taken under the wing of an older artist - their relationship leads her to leave her husband and their quiet town and move to London, initially as the artist's muse and lover (of course) but later as she gains in confidence and ability to challenge the way that the art world work, as a artist in her own right. It reads like a memoir or a real life story, and there is a mix of text and images which I haven't come across before, and which has the effect of feeling like a flashback in a film - the reminiscences and the images that go with them. I loved the story of how Alison starts to challenge Patrick, and to start to navigate the prejudices of the art world. The novel also makes sure that it is not telling a simple story of an older man preying on a young, naive woman - later in life Alison often grapples with the question of how she sees Patrick, who ultimately enabled her to become the fulfilled artist that she ends up as, but whose outsize shadow means that she will be always thought of as "once Patrick Kerr's lover".

10. Weather by Jenny Offill

This woman is a shrink. Also a Buddhist. She likes to practice one or the other on me, I’ve noticed. “You seem to identify down, not up. Why do you think that is?”

Like Offill's Dept. of Speculation, which I enjoyed, this is a story told in fragments - each short paragraph is not necessarily related to the ones next to it, but they build up in a mosaic over time.

It’s church. I remember now how it went. “I thought you wanted community,” Ben says afterward. But not so much. Not like that. All that eye contact. “Not my tribe,” I tell him.

The theme of the book, I suppose, is how people deal with impending doom - climate change of course, given the title, but also during the course of the book, Trump is elected president (which made reading this in 2024 even more depressing than reading it at any other time).

Personal doom is present too - Lizzie, our main character, is struggling to look after her addict brother, as well as to cope with everything which is happening in the world (and creating the weather) around her, in a way which looks like it may undermine her marriage.

And then it is another day and another and another, but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.

I did enjoy Weather - there is such intelligence and wit in the writing. But perhaps I wouldn't recommend picking it up if you are already feeling a bit doomy about the world.

When we worked together years ago, she always told me I had no game. She said this because allegedly you are not supposed to cut to the chase and ask your fellow dater to tell you about the time he was most soul-crushingly lonely. Allegedly this is not a best practice. But it makes a date so much less boring. Do you, did you, will you? I just want to know.

11. The Obelisk Gate by NK Jemisin

The second in the Broken Earth trilogy, after The Fifth Season which I read in December. I am glad I did not leave a longer gap between the books, because I already struggled a little bit to pick up the story.

In The Fifth Season, although the narrative was complex, there was a relatively simple overarching theme - many of the sympathetic characters were "orogenes" (people born with special powers linked to the earth) and we saw them battling both prejudice from humans, and the mysterious system of "Guardians" who harness and control, often brutally, the powers of the orogenes. There is also a mysterious group of "stone-eaters" who seem to be the enemies of both Guardians and orogenes.

In The Obelisk Gate these assumptions are pulled from under our feet - we are given glimpses of a wider context of how the world has come to be the way it is, and maybe the moral dynamics between the orogenes, Guardians and stone-eaters are not as simple as we thought. Previously sympathetic characters are shown in a different light, which gives them an additional complexity. Quite mind-blowing! I can't think of another science fiction/fantasy series I have read which achieves an effect like this.

All this is going on in the background of the story, which is essential a fight for survival in a post-apocalyptic world, following two separate narrative strands - Essun and her daughter Nessun, both orogenes, who were separated at the beginning of The Fifth Season.

I am not sure if I would have persisted with this book if I had not enjoyed The Fifth Season so much - like the penultimate Harry Potter film, it has the feeling of a story which is filling in the gaps and getting everyone into the right position for the final act. I am planning to read the final book of the trilogy this month, so that I don't lose track of the story again.

Yes. His thoughts are clearer now. Easier to think around the whispers. He needs this boy, and others like him. He must go forth and find them, and with their help, he can make it to — to — well. Not everything is clearer. Some things will never come back. He’ll make do. The boy is searching his face. While Schaffa has been trying to put together the fragments of his identity, the boy has been wrestling with his future. They are made for each other. “I’ll go with you,” the boy says, having apparently spent the past minute thinking he has a choice. “Anywhere. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I don’t want to die.”

>38 wandering_star: You've done some interesting reading since your last check-in. I think I'll hold off on Weather for now, I feel enough impending doom as it is.

I’m intrigued by Weather. Enjoyed your latest.

12. Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong by Louisa Lim

Probably another book to avoid >39 labfs39: if you don't want more impending doom!

Indelible City is a book about Hong Kong - although it starts with the earliest period of Hong Kong's history, it's really about the mid-1980s negotiations between the UK and China over the future of Hong Kong, and the last few years of China's increasing crackdown on expressions of Hong Kong identity. Along the way, Lim (who is half-Cantonese and grew up in Hong Kong) redefines her own identity from journalist to activist - symbolised in the first few pages of the book when she goes to cover a protest which involves writing enormous banners, and ends up picking up a calligraphy brush herself. Sobering, about both the casual dismissal by the British that Hong Kongers should have any right to decide their own future, and about the likely future of Hong Kong as a place with any independent spirit.

With their feet, Hong Kongers were stamping pilgrimage routes across the soil of their city to defend that identity and their values. Two slogans that I saw that day stood out: "You Can't Silence Us," on a banner hanging from a pedestrian walkway, and "We Stand For What We Stand On", emblazoned on T-shirts worn by members of Demosisto, a political party started by Joshua Wong. The foreknowledge of defeat added a painful poignancy to this extraordinary show of political imagination. The moral high ground would offer no refuge from police batons and tear gas.

13. Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge

Libertie is a young African-American woman growing up in 1860s Brooklyn. Her mother, a doctor, is a staging point on the underground railroad, and the novel starts with the arrival of an escapee, who had taken a sleeping draught and been smuggled away in a coffin. But Ben is unable to make the most of his freedom because he is obsessed with his lost love, who ran away a few weeks before he did (in the company of another man) and was caught and killed. He talks about her so much that the town's children nickname him "Ben Daisy", and he is trapped in his memories of her.

This symbolises the way the novel deals with its theme of freedom - not just legal freedom, or freedom of the body, but freedom from other's expectations, and from assumptions which keep a person from seeing things how they are. Libertie's mother is ostracised by the community when she starts to treat white women as well as Black ones, but she is doing it so that she can afford to send Libertie to a good college where she too can become a doctor - although it turns out that this too is an expectation that Libertie wants to escape from. To get away from her mother’s judgement, Libertie marries a fiery young man - believing him to be as committed to freedom as she is - but when she returns to Haiti with him she discovers that he has some blind spots when it comes to the freedom of others.

I thought this was an excellent book (with a setting that I don't think I have read about before) - with the exception of the sections set in Haiti, where the author's sure tone deserts her - she is good at writing about the Black Americans in Haiti but falters when it comes to the Haitians themselves. Still very worth reading.

I have never in my life felt anything as powerful as whatever force was in that room while those women talked, and I began to believe that it was the talking itself that did it, that perhaps women’s voices in harmony were like some sort of flintstone sparking, or like the hot burst of air that comes through a window, billowing the curtains, before rain, I imagined the whole room lifting up from their talk — lifting up and spinning out, into the future times to come, when everyone would be truly free.

14. Fear for Miss Betony by Dorothy Bowers

A 1941 crime novel, which came particularly recommended by the Shedunnit podcast (which focuses on Golden Age crime fiction by women).

Miss Betony is a retired governess, who responds to a request by a former pupil to come and help her out in the school that she has recently established. When she gets there, she discovers that she has not been invited for her teaching skills, but because Grace wants some moral support in dealing with some strange happenings at the school, including the apparent attempts to poison one of the residents. Miss Betony is surprised at first, but gradually takes on the task with gusto. Things get complicated when a different member of the school is poisoned for real.

This was a mixed bag for me. The detection part is paced oddly and wraps up very suddenly - but I did enjoy the story as a whole, including Miss Betony's pluck and sharpness, and some points where it was genuinely thrilling.

Perhaps Emma Betony's greatest virtue was not after all kindness, nor tolerance, nor a practical sense of the brotherhood of man, but the grimmer one of being resolute to complete a job that has become imperative.

>41 wandering_star: Sigh, true. Doom is all around. Sounds like a good book for me to read at some point, although at the moment I'm still in China's past.

>42 wandering_star: Although imperfect, this still sounds interesting. Noting.

>43 wandering_star: Just catching up on your thread after some time away from LT. You've done some very interesting reading. Taking particular note of the Louisa Lim book. Thanks for the great reviews.

I love your reviews, so forgive if i admit your Indelible City review left me feeling sad. I spent a single confused say in Hong Kong in 1995.

Good reading here—I'm catching up after being behind too. A few things I have on my pile Weather or am interested in Alison.

>15 wandering_star: late to the party here …. I read something else by Isobel Colegate that I remember liking. All her other books were out of print at the time. I’ll keep my eyes open for this one— love a country house novel

15. Glass Town by Isabel Greenberg

A graphic novel which imagines Charlotte Bronte later in her life, looking back on the worlds and characters that she has created over her life, including the very first, Glass Town, which was invented by all four siblings, before Emily and Anne broke away to imagine Gondal, and Charlotte created her own Angria.

I liked the drawing style and it was kind of interesting to learn about the Bronte juvenilia, but there isn't a lot to the story.

16. The Stone Sky by NK Jemisin

I don't know how to review this book, or the trilogy that it is the last volume of. I think that if I had been on a beach holiday, and read the three books back-to-back without having a lot of distractions, I would have liked it a lot more than I did. But reading them even slightly separated, in short bursts on my commute and with lots of other things on my mind, did not show them at their best - I couldn’t put all the pieces together as well as they are intended to fit.

That said, I think even then, I would have found this volume did too much tying up of loose ends that I had not been wondering about. For example, it reveals the origin stories of the different types of humanoids which exist in this world, and how the world became the way it is (prone to periodic calamities, "fifth seasons", which create mass extinctions). I had assumed that this was a nod to future environmental catastrophe because of the way that humans live now, so I didn’t need a separate explanation of how it happened.

Generally a bit unsatisfying, but at least I have completed the trilogy now!

My memories are like insects fossilized in amber. They are rarely intact, these frozen, long-lost lives. Usually there’s just a leg, some wing-scales, a bit of lower thorax – a whole that can only be inferred from fragments, and everything blurred together through jagged, dirty cracks.

17. White Houses by Amy Bloom

A historical novel, reimagining the relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickock (which is sexual/romantic, in this telling - there is some dispute over whether it was actually more than a close friendship, although in my view it's hard to read the letters between them as purely platonic).

My editor liked the pieces and every once in a while he’d say, Your lady’s got some good lines. I liked her height and her energy. I liked her long, loose stride and her progressive principles. She insulted conservatives and cowards every time she opened her mouth and I wrote it all down. She smiled when she saw me coming and I did the same.

Themes of the story include secrets and imbalances - the two women come from very different backgrounds, but also Hicks knows that whatever she does, she cannot compete with Roosevelt's public life - not just the part about being married to the President, but also Roosevelt's commitment to her work.

I enjoyed reading this, but the whole story is told in a slightly sassy/humorous way which masks the very real emotions which are going on, and therefore made it all feel a bit too distanced.

18. Cosmic Detective by Jeff Lemire

Hardboiled detective comic crossed with urban fantasy (a god has been murdered). Great visual style, not much of a story.

19. Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi

Fed up with being given all the crappy tasks at work, Shibata one day tells her boss that she can't clear up the dirty cups and cigarette butts from the meeting room because of her morning sickness. It works - someone else does the cleaning - and in fact things get even better at work, as she is not expected to do overtime or go out drinking with her colleagues. But since Shibata is not actually pregnant, things eventually get complicated. Shibata downloads a pregnancy app so she knows how she ought to be feeling, and starts hanging out with other expectant mothers. But surely this situation can't go on for ever...

I did not love the way that this story resolved itself, but I enjoyed the journey to get there, and all the pointed comments about the roles and expectations of women in Japan.

As a result of my new badge, people started getting up and giving me their seats on the train. No, please, I don’t need it, I’d say. But they’d insist, so I’d end up playing along. Part of me wanted to lift my blouse and show them my belly so they could see I really didn’t need it. But I decided against it. That would just make things awkward.

20. The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey

A queue for the final performance of a popular theatre show. A man faints - but it turns out that he has actually been stabbed to death, and had been held in a standing position by the jostling of the people around him. There is an obvious suspect - but Inspector Grant is not confident that he has the right man.

This Golden Age murder mystery subverts itself cleverly at the end, making the reader question the assumptions that they have brought to the rest of the story (or perhaps making the reader of the period question the assumptions - the modern-day reader will I hope be more resistant to the idea of Latin backgrounds leading to the sort of passionate temperament that causes one to kill...)

When one came to think of it, even if one’s grandmother was an Italian, one doesn’t carry daggers about on the offchance of their being useful.

21. Khirbet Khizeh by S Yizhar

Khirbet Khizeh is a Palestinian village, and this novella is the story of how the village was cleared during the 1948 war - described in enough detail that you can't close your eyes to everything that the antiseptic word "clearing" means. S Yizhar was an intelligence officer during the war: his narrator is uneasily aware that what he is doing is wrong, but tries all sorts of things to distract himself from the feeling, keeping on moving instead of stopping with his own thoughts, sometimes throwing himself into the clearance operation even more strongly as a way to convince himself that what he is doing is right. A tough read, especially right now.

“What’s the matter with you!” grumbled Yehuda, scratching at the layers of solidified mud with his fingernails. “What are we doing to them? Are we killing them? We’re taking them to their side. Let them sit there and wait. It’s very decent of us. There’s no other place in the world where they’d have been treated as well as this. Anyway, no one asked them to start with us.”

22. Family History by Vita Sackville-West

This book is divided into four parts, the first two of which are "Portrait of the Jarrolds" and "Portrait of Miles Vane-Merrick". The Jarrolds are a wealthy family; old Mr Jarrold made his fortune from mining, and gave his children every advantage money could buy. At the start of the book we see him talking to his widowed daughter-in-law, Evelyn, who patiently lets him tell his old stories - she understands the role she needs to play in the family, and is happy to - at least until she meets the younger, fiery Miles Vane-Merrick, who shows her how things could be different. But this would mean flouting the social conventions that she is happy with and he frustrated by - something which ultimately threatens their relationship.

Interesting mostly as a portrait of social changes at the time, and for what we know of Sackville-West's own tendencies to ignore conventions.

She was dreadfully bored at Newlands; not only bored but irritated. The irritation was new, and had come upon her since she had known Miles. The total absence of ideas among the younger Jarrolds, their perpetual heavy banter which passed for wit, the limitation of their interests, their intolerance, their narrow-mindedness, all appeared insufferable to her now in contrast with Miles' alertness and gaiety. She almost preferred the drunken Evan, whose weakness made him into something more nearly resembling a human being, to the wooden and self-righteous Geoffrey or Geoffrey's virtuously British wife. Mrs. Geoffrey could talk of nothing but her servants.

23. Theft by Rachel Ingalls

The other book I have read by Rachel Ingalls is Mrs Caliban, a satirically funny feminist piece about a woman who falls in love with a sea creature, so I was not very prepared for Theft, a dystopian novella narrated by a man in prison for stealing a loaf of bread, as riots and political oppression go on outside.

If Jake had been along he'd have known how to handle the situation. He says just never give your right name and you'll be all right. With the political atmosphere like it is they'll never bother to pick you up on the street again unless they recognize you. And that's unlikely, because they think we all look alike. Or if it's one of ours working for them, chances are he'll let it go unless it's for something so big that he'd get a recommendation out of it.

Wow, that was a massive dump of reviews - happy to say that I am now caught up to the end of April (and that May started with some excellent reads - I realised as I was writing these reviews that April had not been the best reading month).

Congratulations on catching up!
>56 wandering_star: I always enjoy reading Vita Sackville West and this is a new title to me. Happy to see it.

Wow, an eclectic month of reading. I am interested in Khirbet Khizeh, but don't think I can read it right now. Diary of a Void looks interesting too.

Khirbet Khizeh seems like a timely and important read, given the unspeakable atrocities being committed by the IDF and militant settlers on innocent Palestinian civilians. I'll be on the lookout for it.

>58 wandering_star: So many great reviews here. I agree with your assessment of Jemisin. She begins well, but she usually can't stick the landing.

24. My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley

This novella is essentially a depiction of the relationship between the narrator and her mother - a relationship without any real connection or communication on either side. At first, we see the mother through the narrator's eyes, but gradually we come to realise the narrator's own complicity in the state of things, and start to wonder where the real fault lies. It is very well written but some parts hit pretty close to home for me.

‘Next week fine,’ she wrote. ‘I am OK thanks although I’ve had a few setbacks.’ ‘Oh dear. What happened?’ I didn’t think she’d answer that, but her reply came by return. ‘Setbacks were horrendous panic attacks with me in the corridor shouting I can’t breathe and trying to rip my clothes off and my leg swelled up so I was in A&E for 6 hours last Saturday until they decided it wasn’t DVT. The physio is hard but quite fun in the pool with others.’ ‘Oh dear!’ I wrote, again. ‘Great that you are back in the water, though.’

25. The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue

This book is narrated by an older Rachel, looking back 12 or 15 years to her university days - in particular her intense friendship with her gay flatmate James, and her interest in the life of her university tutor Dr Byrne - this is partly a huge crush, but also a curiosity about the life that he leads with his wife (also his publisher), two adults in an intellectual milieu whose lifestyle appears stable and comfortable - the polar opposite of Rachel's relationship with her mercurial boyfriend. ‘The thing about Carey,’ James said once, when we were up late and commiserating over our hopeless men, ‘is that he would walk over hot coals for you, but he won’t commit to lunch plans.’

There are so many layers to this book - Rachel’s emotions were complicated enough at the time, and occasionally narrator-Rachel pulls back from the action and adds her own thoughts, seeing the story both through her own memories and her understanding of what Dr Byrne and his wife's lives were really like. I'm usually pretty impatient with twentysomethings agonising over the details of their lives (this is why I can’t finish a Sally Rooney novel), but I really enjoyed this - and Rachel kept my sympathy despite her sometimes reckless or stupid behaviour. I think this might be my favourite book that I have read so far this year.

Nice reviews of books by authors unknown to me. I admire your ability to succinctly convey the gist of a book and your opinion.

>64 wandering_star: This is one of my favorite books from last year's reading. She pulls off something impressive in how Rachel remains sympathetic throughout.

26. Your Wish is My Command by Deena Mohamed



In the world of this charming graphic novel, third-class wishes have been banned in most countries in the world, because of their unpredictable consequences. First-class wishes are expensive and hard to come by, but three sit on sale in a small shack selling drinks and snacks, in the middle of Cairo. Shokry, the stallholder, hasn't tried hard to sell them, because as a devout Muslim he personally would not use them, and who would believe that real first-class wishes are available from such a shabby stall anyway? But eventually, the three wishes are sold, and we follow the stories of what happens to the three people who buy them. They are very different individuals - a poor woman seeking justice, a troubled rich kid, and the final story is about Shokry himself and how he wants to help his friend, an elderly woman coming to the end of a very rich life. Mohamed also uses a variety of drawing styles to tell the stories. At first I thought that this book was going to be fun but forgettable, but the stories become richer as they go along and I ended up really enjoying it.

Incidentally even using a first-class wish is not straightforward:



I do wish though that the English-language version of the book had been published right to left, as is done with manga translations - with this, the publishers have reversed the page order but not flipped the images, so some of the double-page images make no sense (eg an image which should be someone on one page looking at something on the other page comes out with the person having their back to the thing they should be looking at).

27. Red Smoking Mirror by Nick Hunt

I found the premise of this book irresistible - what if the first Europeans who reached Central America had come not from a Christian Spain, but from a Moorish one? Our narrator, Eli Ben Abram, is an Andalusian Jew, now a merchant in the "New Maghreb". He is a senior member of the colony, and occasional advisor to the Emperor Moctezuma, but attracts some suspicion from the younger and fierier colonists, mainly because of his wife, a local woman and former slave (who we learn in an afterword was based on a real-life woman who was Cortés' interpreter and mistress). And the colony is troubled - it is prosperous and provides a lot of goods which sell well in Europe, but there is a new movement growing up back home which believes that things like "xocolatl" and "tubaq" are abominations and the realm of the Caliph needs to reject them.

Unfortunately I think that all the author's imaginative effort went into imagining and describing this context - the story is extremely weak. There are a couple of story arcs - what happens to the colony, and to Ben Abram himself - but neither is very compelling. For example, Ben Abram is guarding a terrible secret, but it doesn’t seem plausible to me that it would be a damaging secret in the world of the book. So this was a bit of a disappointing end to a book which I had been enjoying. That said, I think the world that the author has created will stay with me.

I remember when the emperor’s men first came to see what we had built, the tiled dome we had raised above what had been four walls, on the land he had granted us when we made our trade agreement. Moctezuma did not come, but he sent his viziers. They wore quetzal-feather cloaks, gold torcs and tall plumed headpieces. They left their footwear at the door as the imam asked of them. They stood here for the longest time, staring politely at the walls and the infinitely repeating tiles and the coloured light falling through the dome. None of them said anything. They were humble and embarrassed. Where is the god? one asked at last. There is no one here.

28. On A Pale Horse by Piers Anthony (audiobook)

A fun read about a loser who accidentally becomes Death. In contrast to Red Smoking Mirror, I thought that the author spent too much time worrying about the story in this one. The world, and Zane/Death's voice, were great fun, and I would have been happy for them to keep having adventures without having to create a convoluted plot to hold them up. Yes, I know, I am never satisfied!

Once again so many great reviews. I feel like a broken record, repeating this, but it's true each time. I especially liked your review of Your Wish is My Command by Deena Mohamed which is going on my list.

>70 rv1988: Thank you! It's always nice to hear :-)
I hope you enjoy Your Wish is My Command!

29. Loot by Tania James

One of the most popular items in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London is a large wooden sculpture of a tiger mauling a British soldier - who (if you turn the crank in the tiger's side) struggles and moans as he is being eaten. "Tipu's Tiger" was made for the ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, sometime after he had won a battle against East India Company forces - and ended up in London after he was finally defeated.



Loot takes this as its starting point and imagines that the tiger was produced by a French clockmaker and a young Indian carver - Lucien and Abbas. The book tells Abbas' story, from the time that he is picked out by the palace to work with Lucien (because of the beautiful toy animals he has carved), to his attempts to be reunited with his artwork after Tipu's fall. I really enjoyed this - great characters, good writing and a fun story.

Abbas returns his attention to the block of wood. It's still something of a stranger to him, this piece of tree, something he is coming to know through continued conversation. And as with any conversation between strangers, their talk begins tentatively. Tap of mallet against wood, loosening forefinger and thumb, gaining speed as he goes. Wood chips shooting this way and that as he dissolves into the work until he is no longer a toy maker serving Tipu Sultan. He is wood and mallet and chisel. A nutty aroma rises from the flesh of the wood, its surface as dappled as windblown water.

30. The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez

This is, in theory, a novel - about a writer living in New York during the Covid pandemic. She is over 60, and therefore "vulnerable" - the first link to the title - and she spends the months covered by this book living in a friend’s flat in order to take care of their parrot. (Pandemic lockdown began while those friends were away from NYC - and the narrator's own flat is lent to a medical worker who needs to isolate from their family). The original parrot-sitter, a young man, initially went home to his parents but at some point is kicked out and returns to the flat, to live in an uneasy coexistence with the narrator. I suppose the parrot and the young man are also vulnerable - the parrot because it was originally a rescue, and the man because the young are vulnerable to depression in the isolation caused by the pandemic. But perhaps the title actually refers to all of us?

There is very little plot - most of the book consists of musings, mainly about writing, memory and human connections, as well as the narrator’s reactions to the strange new world she is living in. I don’t know if I would have liked the book better if I had known this going in, and wasn’t always wondering when the story was going to get started. I think it also suffered because I read it not very long after Jenny Offill's Weather, which I think does a better job of turning a collection of loosely connected thoughts into a coherent whole.

That said, to write this review I looked at all the quotes I had saved from the book, and there were lots of interesting thoughts in there. And it’s very short!

Things a person with a cell phone might have been tempted to snap and share: Young lovers huddled on a stoop, passionately making out through their face masks. A standard black poodle wearing matching leopard-skin-print raincoat, booties, and mask. (Is there nothing dogs won’t put up with from us?) In the window of a shuttered florist’s, left over from Before: Help wanted. Must have a clue. Movie house marquee: SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE.

>67 wandering_star: I've got another book by Deena Mohamed already on my list but I didn't know about this one. I love wishes stories so I'll try and get hold of a copy at some point. It's very odd for them to reverse the page order but not the image order on the page, seems like that's the most confusing way they could have done it!

edit: Having looked into it further it looks like the book already on my list is the same one. It's under the title Shubeik Lubeik but it seems to be the exact same translation with the same number of pages, but the pages are in right to left order.

>72 wandering_star: Oh man, I'm definitely bumping that one up the pile. I loved the cover but didn't know what it referred to.

>74 valkyrdeath: Great that your copy is in the correct order! Mine was an ebook (but also different title) - possibly different decisions by UK and US publishers?

31. Butter by Asako Yuzuki

In Butter, Rika, a young journalist, becomes intrigued by the story of a suspected serial killer - Manako Kajii is in jail awaiting trial, accused of extorting money from, then murdering, several men she met through dating sites. A lot of the online conversation about the case focuses on Kajii's supposed unattractiveness - she is older and frumpy. She herself is very proud of the way that she cared for the men she dated, including the wonderful meals she cooked for them - her blog is all about food and cooking. Initially she rejects Rika's attempts to reach out to her, but Rika's close friend Reiko suggests that Rika could win Kajii over by asking for a recipe, and the two develop a relationship. Kajii talks about her life, but also teaches Rika to enjoy food - from a simple bowl of white rice with soy sauce and fine French butter, to multi-course meals at Michelin-starred Tokyo restaurants.

To be treated well, to be adored, to be showered with presents and affection, and to eschew that which she disliked, including work and group socialising – she went on demanding these things as though they were perfectly within her rights, and as a result, she had carved out for herself an environment she found comfortable, in which she could live apart from the world. It was this accomplishment, more than the close to 100 million yen she had managed to extract from various men, that seemed to Rika deserving of admiration. In principle, all women should give themselves permission to demand good treatment, but the world made doing so profoundly difficult.

I often find Japanese feminist literature a bit heavy-handed in its messages, but Butter was more complex than a lot of the ostensibly similar books I have read. One reason for this turns out to be that the character of Kajii sticks very closely to the real-life case that the novel is inspired by. This adds complexity because Kajii is both someone who merrily ignores social norms when they don't suit her, and also very committed to old-fashioned visions of femininity (as she says in a line from the book which I've seen quoted in a lot of reviews: "There are two things that I simply cannot tolerate: feminists and margarine." Another reason I think is that the book shows that the social norms in Japan don't work for men either. Kajii's victims are men who are very similar to Rika's own father, unable to look after himself after the end of his marriage. So although at first the book seems to be focused on body image, this is just one facet of societal expectations, and people's internalisation of them. As I read on, I came to realise that the book is actually saying that everyone should try and live for themselves, not according to other people’s expectations.

32. The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard

It was the year I would turn thirty-six, and fifty-six, and sixteen.

The world of this novel is made up of a chain of valleys, identical except for the fact that they are 20 years apart from their neighbours. You can't visit the neighbouring valley, but there is a permit system if you want to apply, for example to see a loved one who has already died in your world, or to meet a descendant that you won't live to see in your own timeline.

I don't mind if fantasy worlds like this don't quite make sense if the overall story works, but here it doesn't. The writing is good on a sentence level, but the world is incoherent and the main character does self-defeating things out of an exaggerated personal morality, which always annoys me.

33. The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel

At least there was Eve. At least Eve knew how to be angry out loud. As the firstborn, it was her job to be the icebreaker ship, plowing through her mother's good intentions. Fifteen was old enough to brew stronger, higher-value anger. Vera's version, at thirteen, was only a mixer.
"I do not love you," Eve said to their mother.
"You do love me and I know it. This is exactly, exactly, what love feels like."

Jane is a scientist in her late 30s, struggling to be recognised for her work in a working environment that is still pretty misogynist, and also trying to hold her family together after the death of her husband in a car crash. She ends up taking her two teenage daughters with her to Siberia, looking for mammoth remains - and somehow, after the trip, they end up in cahoots with a wealthy Italian woman, trying to breed a mammoth from genetically modified embryos - part of the story which becomes a bit madcap, even though the overarching themes are about grief and loss, not just within the family, but also past and probable future extinctions. All this makes for a book which doesn't quite hang together satisfactorily - the tone is a bit hard to pin down, with the angry teenage daughter saying things which are presented as funny, but which are pretty sad when you think about them. An interesting read though, even if it could be better.

34. Mr Burns by Anne Washburn

A play in three acts - one set in a near-future dystopia, then 7 years later, then 75 years after that. Our characters have between them managed to remember the stories and many of the lines and jokes from several episodes of the Simpsons - at first just for their own distraction, but by the second act they have become a theatre troupe, performing the episodes for others - although there is competition:

COLLEEN: Let’s not kid ourselves. If Richard’s has a strong enough security detail, they keep buying lines. They keep buying lines they assemble superior shows. Our shows look shitty in comparison. We lose audience. We lose more audience. Until we’re selling our repertoire to Richard’s show by show by show. Thursday Night held out as long as they could. I think a lot of those guys went into the Shakespeares and some of them just straight out sold themselves. There’s a kind of a pause.

In the final act, we see a musical performance of the same Simpsons episode, although over time the story has evolved, drawing in other cultural memories and becoming more epic and serious.

I think I liked the idea more than I liked the play itself. It got me thinking though - in the 12 years since the play was first performed, there is so much more content around, I wonder if there is anything now that is being watched now by enough of the population to be a cultural touchstone in the way that Simpsons episodes are in this play? (Personally I know the Simpsons episode in question (Cape Feare) pretty well so all the references made sense to me, but would a younger person be able to say that?)

(Incidentally this was premiered 2 years before Station Eleven was published).

35. A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

Mahit is the new Ambassador from Lsel, a mining station in a remote part of the universe which has just about managed to avoid being absorbed into the Teixcalaan Empire. Mahit is proud of Lsel but has spent most of her life studying Teixcalaanli culture, and loves it. She is excited about the posting, but also daunted - in Lsel it is traditional that your predecessor's knowledge is transmitted on to you through an "imago" implant in your brain, but the previous Ambassador has not been back to Lsel for 15 years, so the imago is out of date - and no-one knows why the Empire has requested a new Ambassador - did the last one die or could he be in disgrace?

I know that anyone who does not read science fiction will probably look at that paragraph and think, this just sounds ridiculous and not for me. That would be a real shame - this is more of a political drama disguised as a space opera, as Lsel teases out the story of what happened and - just as importantly - how she navigates the world she finds herself in to make sure that she protects her home. I loved this - in addition to the story, there are great asides about, for example, how the way that the Teixcalaanli language works explains aspects of the culture - and I miss Mahit as a character to spend time with.

"You're really enjoying that, aren't you," said Three Seagrass. "When you can make a point of being uncivilized."
Mahit was, in fact. It was the only enjoyable part about being alone and alternately entranced and terrified by being surrounded by Teixcalaanlitzlim, who up until today had been both much less upsetting and much more approachable by virtue of primarily appearing in literature. She shrugged at Three Seagrass. "How could I be anything but distressed at the great distance which separates me from a Teixcalaanli citizen?"
"Exactly like that," Three Seagrass said.

36. Nives by Sacha Naspini

An elderly widow befriends a chicken who becomes the most important creature in her life. When the chicken starts to behave strangely, she calls the vet, even though everyone knows he's far gone in drunkeness by this time of the night. About four-fifths of the novella is made up of their phone call - as they talk they gradually move on from talking about the chicken - and reminiscences lead to shocking revelations of past scandal. Fun and occasionally poignant.

"The trick was not to get all mushy."
"What?"
"With Pagliuchi, I mean."
"Ah, him again."
"You got on top of him and had your twenty minutes of fun, as God intended. If you started writing love letters, he would drop you on the spot."

>79 wandering_star: I reviewed Ramona Ausubel's debut novel, No One is Here Except All of Us for Belletrista. I found it creative, with some eloquent passages, but I've never followed up with any of her other works. Like you I felt it was "An interesting read though, even if it could be better." I like the passage you quote here.

>81 wandering_star: >82 wandering_star: You have a talent for picking very enticing quotes.

>81 wandering_star: We read this and the sequel for our bookclub and the overall consensus was positive. Do you plan to read A Desolation Called Peace?

>78 wandering_star: Too bad, because the premise sounds wonderful!

>77 wandering_star: This is a great review. I think that makes three of us on CR who have read Butter so far, and it's been fun to read the different takes on it. I especially liked your closing sentence, as it is not just a book about body image as some reviews have been saying, but a more complex account.

>81 wandering_star: This sounds intriguing!

>80 wandering_star: I'd heard about this play, and was very intrigued by the idea, but the chances of me getting to see it in the theater were always pretty close to zero. I might have to pick it up in book form.

>83 labfs39: Thank you for the comment about the quotes I pick! I enjoy doing it - I generally try and choose one which covers some of the themes of the book, as well as giving an idea of the style. Sometimes the right quote pops right out at me as I am reading, sometimes it is a bit more of an effort.

>84 rhian_of_oz: I would like to read A Desolation Called Peace but from the plot description, it seemed like you wouldn’t have to read it straight afterwards, because it is the same character but a different story. Do you think that’s right? I was burnt by the Broken Earth trilogy because each story went straight into the next and you really had to remember the previous book(s) to be able to make sense of what was happening.

I realise that I have missed out a review, which should have been 29. The Photograph by Penelope Lively

Looking through a pile of old papers, Glyn finds a photograph of his late wife Kath which has caught her furtively holding hands with another man - who turns out to be Kath's sister's husband. In shock, and rage, he contacts both Elaine (the sister) and Nick (the other man) to tell them what he knows, as well as tracking down Kath's friends from that time, in an effort to discover what the hand-holding meant - was it a fling, a long affair, or one of many infidelities?

This is a story about how the news sends shockwaves through long-established relationships; it's also about memories, and how inconsistent and self-serving they are; and (one of my favourite subjects) how easy it is to think that you know someone, without knowing them at all.

It still seems incredible to Oliver that Kath will not suddenly walk into the room. Never again. That is what she did, back then. No one was expecting her, Elaine didn't know where she was, what she was doing, and then there she would be smiling, laughing: 'Are you all terribly busy? Can I come to lunch?'

He sees her arriving thus with a great tray of peaches in her arms. She has bought up the entire stock of some greengrocer. 'Here...' she says. 'I couldn't resist. Let's gorge.'

38. Rachel to the Rescue by Elinor Lipman

Rachel Klein has just been fired from her job as a minor factotum in Trump's White House (for accidentally sending an "all-staff" email critical of the President) when she is hit by a car. It seems like that is the worst possible day, but then she learns that the car was being driven by someone who is having an affair with the President, and friends and family urge her to go public with the information, either to bring down the President or to get some financial benefit. She ends up working with a muckracking journalist, and the whole story descends into a screwball comedy, with characters including Rachel's roommate, her girlfriend, and a guy that Rachel meets.

Silly but fun - in fact in the end it was not the silliness that I minded so much as the fact that there was no jeopardy whatsoever - even the most rom-com of rom-coms usually has a bit where something comes between the couple!

I asked if he remembered my room-mates.
"Of course. Very subtle, those two."
"I know. Like the Mack trucks of matchmaking. When I was leaving tonight, one of them yelled 'If you don't come home, we won't worry."
He asked, "Where's your phone?"
I retrieved it from my coat, on his tightly made double bed and returned to the couch.
He dictated. I texted, Having a wonderful time. Don't wait up.

39. So Late In The Day by Claire Keegan

This is essentially a short story, although published as a standalone novella - about a man who has had a brief romance and then driven his girlfriend away by his grumpy behaviour. I liked Foster and Small Things Like These by the same author but this felt plotless and a bit mean-spirited.

That was the problem with women falling out of love; the veil of romance fell away from their eyes, and they looked in and could read you.

40. Black Drop by Leonora Nattrass

A historical spy drama, set in London shortly after the French Revolution. Laurence Jago is a junior Foreign Office clerk, supporting staff during the talks with the newly independent US which aim to keep them from joining forces with France.

‘More bad news from Flanders, I’m afraid.’ He put the paper into my hand and, remembering just in time that as a clerk I was supposed to understand no French, I resisted the urge to read it at once.

This was fine. The setting is pretty interesting, although the story is perhaps too complicated and Laurence is an irritatingly clueless narrator. I finished the book but have no plans to pick up the sequel.

41. How to Own the Room: women and the art of brilliant speaking by Viv Groskop

This book is deliberately not about how to write a good speech, but about giving yourself the confidence to stand up and talk in front of people. Each chapter channels a woman - from Oprah to Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche to Hilary Clinton to Virginia Woolf - in order to give advice on one aspect of public speaking, generally around mindset. I am sure this is helpful for many people, but I actually speak in public a lot for work, so it is not really what I needed. That said, it did contain some useful tips about things like pace.

Groskop's big idea is the concept of "happy high status" - which makes intuitive sense, I guess, although she never really explains it anywhere. The comedian and podcaster Deborah Frances-White has a similar concept (which I learnt during a training course that she ran) around "include yourself" - don’t hang back waiting to be invited, but also don’t make a big deal of fighting to get into the circle - just join the circle as if you belong there.

The important thing to remember is that in real life the majority of speeches are not ‘I Have a Dream’ moments, designed to shift the fabric of the universe. They are off-the-cuff, unprepared remarks given by someone in a position of authority to impart information, say thank you or provide some kind of low-level inspiration to get us through another day at work. One of the tricks of great speaking is to accept it for what it is: not that different from an everyday conversation or interaction. You’re just doing it in front of a larger group of people.

You've read a variety of interesting books! Enjoy your summer (I'm assuming you're in the northern hemisphere but not sure WHERE you are these days)

42. Tomb Sweeping by Alexandra Chang

There is one fantastic short story in this collection, and you can read it here. It's short, so I won't say anything about it: please read it.

Otherwise - most of the stories in this collection are about family or romantic relationships, and these just did not resonate with me. All the stories I enjoyed are the ones not about relationships - my second favourite story in the book is “Unknown by Unknown,” in which a young student takes a summer job house-sitting, falls half in love with the absent homeowners, until a slightly creepy incident causes her to look beyond the surface.

I quickly realized that none of Katherine's art was on the home's walls. That she, in fact, did very little painting. Her sketchbooks were mostly empty, with only a page or two of notes or paint splotches on them. Her boxes contained personal files, bank statements (printed with such large and long numbers I had to look away), menus, family photos, old receipts and checks. I wondered if this was why Katherine had wanted me out of the studio - in seeing its contents, the mask of who she was and what she represented fell away. She, like the house, no longer held the same power over me.

>95 Nickelini: Thank you! My summer holiday is starting this weekend so I am trying to catch up on reviews before I head off (/as a displacement activity for packing and clearing out the fridge).

>96 wandering_star: Wow, "Li Fan" is so interestingly well-constructed. Much like how our memories move back in time as we get older, the story flows back in time in such an associative way. I had to read it twice. Thanks for sharing the link!

>98 labfs39: Glad you liked it!

43. Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon

All spy stories are about betrayal (well, except the ones which are about whizzy tech and fast women), and Kanon really maxes out that theme in Leaving Berlin.

Alex Meier is a celebrated writer - originally German, he fled to the US in the 1930s, but then fell foul of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Would it have mattered, giving them names they already had? What if he’d done the practical thing, cooperated with the committee? But no bargain had been offered, not then. And he’d seen the faces before, the jowls and smirks, when they’d been Nazis, the same bullying voices, and he couldn’t do it.

Now he is back in Germany - being celebrated along with other returning exiles, Brecht and Anna Seghers and Arnold Zweig. But he is not planning to be there for good - he has been given some tasks to prove his loyalty to the US, so that he can return and be with his son. Soon after he arrives he discovers that one of these tasks is to get close to his childhood love - someone who he has carried a torch for all these years, even though he knew at the time that she was cheating on him.

How many betrayals do you count in the synopsis so far? It's only the start of things, anyway. As Alex returns to a blasted, empty Berlin, he realises that everyone is working against everyone else, and they all expect things of him.

This book had a very interesting setting but I found it a slightly odd mix of the context setting (slow-paced, literary) and the thrilling spy adventures.

>99 wandering_star: Kanon does like to take his time putting the reading into the time and place, but that is the thing I like most about his books.

44. Games and Rituals by Katherine Heiny

Like >96 wandering_star: Tomb Sweeping, most of the short stories in this collection are about families and romantic relationships. But unlike Tomb Sweeping, they really clicked with me - I loved the whole collection.

The first story, "Chicken-Flavored and Lemon-Scented", is set in the unlikely location of a branch of the DMV, where hearing how the driving test examiners allocate candidates between themselves tells you a lot about human life. There are also stories about parent-child relationships - like "Damascus", about a mother wondering if her son is acting as crazily as she did at his age, and "Twist and Shout" where spending time with her father makes a woman revert to her teenage rebelliousness - as well as marriages and friendships.

Lindy said nothing. She turned Rob’s sentences over in her mind, examining them one by one for truthfulness like a woman picking up grapefruit at the supermarket and checking each one for signs of softness and rot. She rejected all of them but the last. She guessed that was true. Rob probably hadn’t actually meant to go so far.

>100 RidgewayGirl: I was interested in the reviews for this and his other books - they all seem to come out with an average review score of around 3.5 on LT, but with plenty of real devotees! I definitely found the setting interesting.

45. You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here by Frances Macken

It often feels as though myself and Evelyn were born friends. We’re always on the edge of things and looking on. It’s as though we’re the only people who’re truly alive, and the people around us aren’t real at all, existing merely for our own amusement.

Katie and Evelyn are best friends. It's weird how none of the other kids in their little Irish village seem to want to hang out with them, but it must be because Evelyn is so cool - right? And anyway, it's fine with Katie because she really just wants Evelyn to herself - it's just a shame that means that Evelyn’s gormless cousin Maeve is always there too.

As they get older, they had imagine living in Dublin together - ("6. Work internships during the day 7. Get a job in a cool bar at night 8. Get to know the right people 9. Everyone falls in luv with our art and ideas 10. Take the world by storm") but when Katie goes up with Evelyn for her art school interview, she sees the terrible art in her friend's portfolio, and starts to worry for the first time that their dreams might not pan out.

This is essentially the story of someone who has fallen under the spell of a close friend, so much so that she can't live her life on her own. The difficulty I had with it is that Evelyn is really quite a horrible character, and it seems that Katie can see through this, but not enough to break free from her influence - so Evelyn can, for example, put Katie off a new beau with a few barbed words. I think a good writer could make this story work, but with this book I was not along for the ride.

46. Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum

A few days in a swish hotel in Weimar-era Berlin. Surely, anyone staying here is simply glorying in their life in the lap of luxury? But it turns out that there are many secrets hidden behind the wooden doors of the hotel rooms. An ageing prima ballerina - an aristocrat fallen on hard times and forced to turn conman - a powerful businessman who reached his position by marrying the boss’s daughter and who is desperately trying to cover up the fact that he is out of his depth - and a poor clerk in the businessman’s company, who is determined to spend his life savings in the few weeks he has left to live.

Kringelein had a little notebook bound in shiny black oilcloth, which he had brought with him from Fredersdorf, and he sat at it for hours at a time. He entered his expenses in it, the reckless expenses of a man who was learning to enjoy life and spending a month's salary in two days.

The meaning of life in all its ridiculousness!

>89 wandering_star: I don't think you have to read A desolation called peace right after A memory called empire. The setting is so different, and you have new characters in addition to Mehit Dzmare and Three Seagrass, as well as an alien ship whose actions are threatening the Teixcalaan empire. But politics still abound!

I love reading your reviews. I have added some new-to-me authors to my WL. I've had Grand Hotel on my shelf for a long time. Maybe this year?

I really liked No One Is Here Except All of Us but haven't followed with other work by Ausubel. I will check this one out. It sounds interesting.

47. The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel

The glass hotel of the title is an expensive folly, a beautiful peace of luxury looking out onto wilderness. One night, a hooded figure emerges from the trees in the dark and scrawls an abusive message onto the window. Then the story spirals back and forward in time, to resolve this and other mysteries.

I always find Mandel's books enjoyable but a little unsatisfying. She is an excellent writer on a sentence level, and I really liked the themes in this book. There are a lot of different worlds layered on top of each other - the worlds of the rich and the struggling, the well and the sick, the secret and the public life - and also the alternate worlds that people dream into existence when they regret that one thing they did when their life turned in a different direction. So that is the enjoyableness. The unsatisfying part comes because when you reassemble the narrative from all its deconstructed parts, it turns out not to be that great a story. Maybe that doesn't matter too much, though, if you enjoyed the getting there.

Diving into the pool at night: in summer Vincent dove through the lights of the house, reflected on the surface; in cold weather the pool was heated, so she dove into steam. She stayed underwater for as long as possible, testing her endurance. When she finally surfaced, she liked to pretend that the ring on her finger was real and that everything she saw was hers: the house, the garden, the lawn, the pool in which she treaded water.

48. Enlightenment by Sarah Perry

A binary star is a system of two stars that are gravitationally bound to and in orbit around each other, which makes their orbit pattern much harder to understand or predict. If they are close enough, they can gravitationally distort each other's outer stellar atmospheres and in some cases, exchange mass.

Or as Sarah Perry puts it: One star might waylay another in space, but find in due course it suffers from this new proximity: it is possible for one star to draw matter from another in what they call mass transfer, growing larger and more bright at a dreadful cost to its companion. In this way the bodies of the stars are formed by the forces of attraction between them, and the closer the relation, the higher the risk. If there cannot be equity, I wonder if it’s better to receive the greater proportion of love, or give it? I wish I knew.

This also describes the relationship between Thomas Hart and Grace Macauley, the two main characters of this book. Thomas is a writer - not elderly, but old-acting. "He had a courtly manner considered an affectation by those who didn’t like him, and irresistible by those who did; and if it couldn’t be fairly said that he was strange, there was certainly the impression of his being the lone representative of his species." He has known Grace since she was a baby, and loves her dearly and protectively.

The idea of being in orbit around more than one thing, though, is also something reflected in both of them. For Thomas, it is his quiet life in the small town, a pillar of the non-conformist Chapel that both he and Grace belong to, and the life he lives as a gay man on his visits to London. Meanwhile, Grace's orbit around Thomas starts to wobble when she meets Nathan, a boy from outside the Chapel, who first makes her realise how unusual her life and religion are.

Thomas has worked out how to live between his two centres. "He survived, as he put it to himself, by dividing his nature from his soul; so he left his nature in London on the station platform, and picked up his soul in Aldleigh as if it were left luggage." But in trying to protect Grace from being hurt, he does something which throws her out of her path - both that of her religion and her friendship with him - and it is a very long journey for her to try and find her comfortable spot again.

There is a lot more I could say about this story - a whole sub-plot about the rediscovery of a pioneering female astronomer, for example, and much further use of astronomical metaphors (Grace and Thomas come back into each other’s lives at intervals, like comets returning). But that's probably enough for the moment. I don't know that Sarah Perry's writing suits everyone - like Thomas, she has a courtly and old-fashioned style which meant it was a surprise to discover that the story starts in 1997 - and the story is baggy and capacious. But it is very definitely in my wheelhouse.

I'm going to have to go quicker than this if I'm to catch up on my backlog of reviews, aren't it? I'll try and do some shorter ones.

49. Learning to Swim by Clare Chambers

My least favourite thing about Enlightenment was the idea that one small thing can cause your life to get out of control and you never get it back. Of course, there are some single events large enough to be life-changing. But I can't get behind the idea that if a teenager is once let down by or falls out with a friend, they may never, ever recover any meaning to their life.

Anyway the same thing happens in Learning to Swim - a chance encounter with someone she used to know sends Abigail spiralling down memory lane, with lots of portentous foreshadowing. Some people can look back at their past and can identify certain pivotal moments where a meeting, an action, a decision, or even a failure to act or decide, has proved critical and altered the course of their life. I can think of three such moments in my life.

Unlike Enlightenment, this is the only story in the book, and Learning to Swim also lacks anything else that would make up for my annoyance with the story.

50. The Book Tour by Andi Watson

A graphic novel about a book tour in which everything that could go wrong does. To make it worse, the author seems to be following around another, much more popular author - when no-one turns up to his signings, the bookshop staff comment how busy it was the previous day, strangers tell him about this great book which turns out to be by his rival, and so on. But worse is to come when the author starts to attract the attention of the police.



Moderately amusing but I don't think it will stick with me.

51. The Nakano Thrift Shop by Hiromi Kawakami

Hiromi works in the thrift shop of the title. She hangs out with her co-workers, gossips about the shop's owner and their regular customers, and nurtures a crush on Takeo, another member of the shop staff, which turns into a brief relationship. That's kind of everything that happens in the book...

Takeo arrived, again smelling of soap. For a moment, I wondered if I ought to have taken a shower, but I quickly pushed that thought aside, since had I done so, he might have thought I was expecting something. This was what made love so difficult. Or rather, the difficult thing was first determining whether or not love was what I wanted.

52. The Last Dance by Mark Billingham

Noir-ish crime. Story quite good, but the detective is too obnoxious.

‘A lot of men sleep around,’ Xiu said. ‘A lot of men who aren’t married to Michelle Cutler. She’s almost certainly got “hitman” in her phone book somewhere. Right between “hairdresser” and “homeopath”.’ ‘I’m not convinced.’ ‘You’re probably right,’ Miller said. ‘I doubt she has a homeopath.’

53. The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

A story about a housekeeper, her ten-year-old son, and their friendship with the amnesiac mathematician who she works for. He is an amnesiac, and she has not had a lot of formal education, but they manage to build a connection as the professor talks passionately about numbers. Any summary of the book would make it sound cloyingly sweet, but somehow it manages to be charming.

At the end of my first day, I noticed a new note on the cuff of his jacket. "The new housekeeper," it said. The words were written in tiny, delicate characters, and above them was a sketch of a woman's face. It looked like the work of a small child-short hair, round cheeks, and a mole next to the mouth-but I knew instantly that it was a portrait of me. I imagined the Professor hurrying to draw this likeness before the memory had vanished. The note was proof of something, that he had interrupted his thinking for my sake.

54. Perilous Times by Thomas D Lee

Remember how King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table were said to be not dead but sleeping, waiting for the time they need to wake and save the kingdom from peril? In this story they've been woken up from time to time through history, so that they have an established routine.

He gulps down air, trying to fill his lungs, but the air feels heavier than it ought to feel. It doesn’t look like there’s anyone here to wake him up this time. In the old days there were bands of horsemen, sometimes even a king, in person, when the need was dire. Then it became army lorries, or circles of druids in white shifts, slightly surprised that their dancing had actually achieved something. More recently, a man in a raincoat, checking his wristwatch, with a flying machine roaring on the grass behind him. Nothing today.

The man in the raincoat, by the way, is Christopher Marlowe, who sold his soul for immortality - and perhaps for other things? Because this time Kay and Lancelot have been woken up to deal with a rebellion in the realm - a group of ecoterrorists trying to attack fracking sites. But who is the real peril coming from??

This was such a fun read, and a lot better than I expected it to be.

55. A Spy Alone by Charles Beaumont

The cover of this book proclaims that the author is a "former MI6 operative", and perhaps like his main character, Simon, he quit the agency after getting frustrated by the UK's inability or unwillingness to deal with the incoming tide of Russian money buying influence at the highest levels of the UK government. Whether or not that was his reason, this is a pretty solid spy thriller which pulls no punches about how the UK got itself into this mess (including a thinly veiled portrait of a previous PM - "everybody knows the PM doesn’t do difficult decisions and is short of money.")

In the permanent social hierarchy that governs British intelligence, surveillance is a working-class activity, desk-based targeting largely for grammar-school types and running agents reserved for the public schoolboys. The occasional exceptions to this rule only try to reinforce it, strenuously acquiring the habits and language of their adopted class.

56. That Night by Alice McDermott

That night, a group of teenagers came to a quiet street and tried to force their way into a house. One of them believed that his girlfriend was at home and that her parents were keeping her from seeing him. The family men from the houses round about came together to defend the neighbourhood. Even though what happened was only a scuffle, followed by arrests when the police came, it subtly changed how people felt about themselves and others. This novella tells the stories of the events which led up to and the ripples across the community afterwards.

It's a good idea for a book - and one thing I particularly liked was the way that people of different ages reacted to the teenagers and their scandalous romance: adults thought about future loss, when their own daughters grew big enough to be rebellious, while younger children thought about future adventures. But overall I felt that the book needed more variation of pace and tone. Every bit of the story is told in exactly the same style - which meant that although this is a short book, it didn't *feel* short.

They made a group of kids playing baseball in the street step out of their way. The kids moved only as far as they had to. They looked into the cars like curious, defiant natives, knowing that they would soon be teenagers too, that they would replace them.

57. The Awkward Age by Francesca Segal

Julia and James have been living together for almost three months. Julia's daughter Gwen and James' younger child Nathan have not really adjusted well to this development - especially Gwen who passionately hates everything about the new arrangement, and wants her own time with her mother back. But perhaps life for this blended family is actually better when the kids are fighting than after they start to get on...

This book starts with an ill-fated weekend trip to the US where the family has decided to spend Thanksgiving with James' ex-wife. It's very funny, and from the start I felt that I was in good hands with the author. But sometime later in the book, Gwen starts to behave in a way that is so catastrophically stupid that I could not find it amusing, and I lost a lot of patience with both self-centred Gwen and her hopeless mother. I listened to this on audiobook, and I couldn't find the right section to quote the words correctly, but at one point there's a comment along the lines that Julia would say, "I just want Gwen to be happy", as if that automatically ruled out any hard work or sensible behaviour.

I suspect your sympathies are meant to shift around between the different characters, but mine definitely did not! Perhaps it would be a good test of personality to find out which of the flawed characters in this book each reader finds most annoying.

58. The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

This has been quite a buzzy book this summer so you may already know the outline of the story. A troubled teenage girl goes missing from a summer camp on the grounds of her family's estate. It turns out that before she was born, her brother had disappeared at the same time of year.

I heard an interview with Liz Moore where she said she first had the idea for the premise, and worked out what happened in the writing. This shows a bit in the story. There is a strong theme running through all the different storylines about the way that the rich and powerful protect themselves, and see reputation as more important than reality. Nothing against that as a theme, of course, but it dominates some of the decisions that Moore makes - in particular, the way that one character reacts when confronted with evidence fits thematically but is psychologically implausible, in a way which badly misdirects the reader. Similarly, the way that we discover what actually happened to the young boy comes from a subplot which works for the theme but is a very unlikely coincidence.

Last in the line came Tracy, whose size, she believed, was already drawing stares from the others. Upon being asked to introduce herself, she found that her voice had been completely taken from her. A slow resignation settled in: this was what her summer would be like. She’d keep to herself. She’d speak to no one. She’d go unnoticed, hiding behind books whenever possible. Staying out of it. Blending in.

Wow, a plethora of interesting reviews. I think I liked Nakano Thrift Shop more than you. Although not much happens, I liked the quirky characters and the crisp writing with deadpan humor. I read another book by her, Ten Loves of Nishino, which didn't work for me though.

>107 wandering_star: That was the perfect description of Mandel's books! Thy are fine when I'm reading them but put all together not satisfying enough. I never remember what they were about after the fact, lol.

>119 labfs39: Thank you! I did enjoy it when I was reading it, but wondered a little bit afterwards, what was that all about.

When I have a really long gap between posting reviews, it's often because the next review up is one where I am not sure what to say. That's definitely the case here with 59. All Fours by Miranda July. My ambivalence is partly that the book was a very buzzy read earlier this year - and of course that creates a backlash so people tend to either love it or hate it. It's also because the book is quite uneven and I am not sure whether or not you are meant to find the main character sympathetic.

Anyway, enough preamble (which is just me putting off the moment when I actually have to come up with the review)! All Fours is a book narrated by a woman whose life has a lot in common with the real-life Miranda July - someone who has produced creative work in a lot of different fields, and who is super-famous within a relatively narrow audience. She decides to drive across the country for a meeting, but after stopping in a rundown motel on her first night, she ends up just staying there - spending a huge amount of money on redecorating her motel room, and fantasising about someone she saw at the petrol station (who she later befriends, and more). This part of the book has a lot of very explicit sex and wild behaviour; the next part is about how she tries, and ultimately fails, to go back to her normal married life. "I was a throbbing, amorphous ball of light trying to get my head around a motherly, wifely human form."

This second part, weirdly, made much less sense than the first. The motel-life part of the book had some kind of crazy logic, whereas the second part was just one thing happening and then another thing happening.

Looking at the quotes that I've highlighted from the book, there is quite a lot there about expectations of women, and how much you can be true to your (throbbing, amorphous) self while also being part of a stable family unit. But the main experience of reading the book is being inside the head of someone who is striving, self-conscious, anxious, constantly questioning herself and being interrupted by new thoughts.

I’m forever wanting to know what it feels like to be other people. What were we all doing? What the hell was going on here on Earth? Of course none of these artifacts really amounted to anything; it was like trying to grab smoke by its handle. What handle?

When that inner voice is recognisable, it's great, but overall I think the book is a bit exhausting.

As Mark Twain said, "I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one." I can't explain how I feel about this book without this long and rambly review!

60. Politics on the Edge by Rory Stewart

Rory Stewart is a former Conservative politician and now co-host of a very popular politics podcast. I enjoyed his previous memoirs, The Places in Between and Occupational Hazards, both about times before he entered Parliament. This book is mainly a memoir of his time as an MP and later Minister, and an account of all of Stewart’s frustrations, from the turbulence and tribalism of British politics (particularly around Brexit and Boris Johnson), the difficulty of getting things done even when he was a Minister, and his failure to get his messages across well enough to be elected leader of the Conservative party.

Her genius lay in exaggerated simplicity. Governing might be about critical thinking; but the new style of politics, of which she was a leading exponent, was not. If critical thinking required humility, this politics demanded absolute confidence: in place of reality, it offered untethered hope; instead of accuracy, vagueness. While critical thinking required scepticism, open-mindedness and an instinct for complexity, the new politics demanded loyalty, partisanship and slogans: not truth and reason but power and manipulation. If Liz Truss worried about the consequences of any of this for the way that government would work, she didn’t reveal it.

I don't really believe in Stewart's current cuddly, national-treasure image, and of course all political memoirs are self-serving. But it's hard to argue with his call for more seriousness in public life.

61. Dark Entries by Robert Aickman

Six eerie short stories - a bit MR James-y in the way that you feel normality slipping towards something very strange. I read this at the end of August so have had to look at some summaries to remind myself of the detail of the stories, but can still only remember three of them, which I guess are the ones that made the most impression on me. I am a wimp when it comes to horror, but I enjoyed how it was evoked in these stories - I guess because they are pretty short so you didn't spend pages knowing that something bad was going to happen and just waiting for it to arrive.

“We’ll just go straight on,” said Phrynne. “Until we find it.” Left to himself, Gerald would have been less keen. The stones were very large and very slippery, and his eyes did not seem to be becoming accustomed to the dark.

>122 wandering_star: Thanks for reviewing this! I've been thinking about reading it, but I am leaning towards giving it a pass. I really don't like "exhausting" books and I don't think I'll identify with the main character, though I'm her age and stage of life.

>123 wandering_star: This quote speaks to the political climate on this side of the pond too. the new politics demanded loyalty, partisanship and slogans: not truth and reason but power and manipulation

>126 labfs39: I think there are a number of UK politicians who learnt from Trump 1 that there are lots of things that you are told you "can't" do, but in practice if you do them no-one can stop you.

62. The Writing School by Miranda France

This book is an account of a residential writing course which Miranda France taught on - written as if non-fiction, although I suspect it's a mix of stories from several such experiences with a bit of creative exaggeration. The chapters alternate between ones about what's happening on the course, with essays about other parts of the author's life. These are framed as "writing exercises" and are just about linked to what is going on at the school - for example, what it means to write about a real person, how much of your personal pain to share - but it means that the book ends up a really weird mix of tones, because you are jumping from lightly humorous pieces about the strange behaviour of the writing students, to stories which are much more meaningful and painful in France's life (the suicide of her brother, and the family's attempts to understand it, are a key theme).

Tom and I swapped our encouraging smiles for ones of supportive concern. These are the two most useful expressions on a writing course, and quick changes between them are sometimes required.

+++

‘You mean fictionalizing your experience? Or writing something different inspired by it? Or just totally different?’ ‘What do you think?’ ‘I think making stuff up is harder.’ It was like being a doctor sometimes, sitting there at my desk, hearing about symptoms and trying to locate their source, dispensing advice while discreetly keeping an eye on the clock. In some cases the diagnosis people wanted was simple: ‘Have I got it, doctor? Have I got a story?’

63. The Morning Gift by Eva Ibbotson

When I read this book I assumed that it had been written in the 1950s - it's very much got the feel of women's fiction before the era of explicit sex in fiction. I was surprised just now to learn that it was actually published in 1993, although it does draw on the author's real experiences as a Jewish refugee in England in the 30s.

Anyway, it follows a fairly standard romance plot, beautiful girl, handsome man, things which get in the way of their relationship. The setting does add interest - many of Ruth's friends are people who were musicians in Vienna, now often working as servants or cooks in the UK, and that world is interesting and feels real.

One of the things in the way of Ruth and Quin's relationship is also the snobbery of those around them.

Lady Plackett took the binoculars. Her sight was less keen than her daughter’s but she too agreed that the girl was Ruth. She turned to Miss Somerville. ‘This is unfortunate,’ she said. ‘And quite irregular. The girl is a Jewish refugee who seems to think that she is entitled to every sort of privilege.’

The main thing getting in the way of the relationship though is Ruth's extreme self-sacrificingness. She's also a complete Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and Quin is the most classic romantic hero. I think this is why the author had to keep them apart through Ruth's virtuous qualities - she couldn’t make either of her characters have anything negative about them, even for the purposes of manufacturing stakes in the story.

Ultimately I found all this too irritating to enjoy the book, despite the interesting context and minor characters.

64. HMS Surprise by Patrick O'Brian

The third in the Aubrey-Maturin series, this is a long and rambly-structured instalment which takes us from a bold rescue of Stephen Maturin from an interrogation chamber, to adventures in India, romances both happy and unhappy, and a couple of rousing sea battles.

I particularly like this series for the description of male friendship, which is rare-ish in fiction. There is a bit less of that in this volume, but an enjoyable read nevertheless.

He was growing fat again, but in any case he had no intention of getting out of the way of running up and down the rigging, as some heavy captains did: the feel of the shrouds under his hands, the give and spring of live rigging, the heave and swing on the roll as he came over into the top made him deeply happy.

>130 wandering_star:

Funny I should chance on a remark about male friendship when I was just wondering whether to mention having read (and MUCH enjoyed) Monsieur Lambert : suivi de l'ascension sociale de monsieur Lambert, but didn't know how to segue onto the topic. You saying it's rare in fiction, helps. :) Anyway, it's all about male friendship, told very humorously, gently but shrewdly.

I presume you're reading O'Brian in series order? I never finished it so don't know what happens to Aubrey and Maturin by the end.

I am - and also extremely slowly (2016, 2022 and 2024 for the first three instalments)!

65. Everything is Teeth by Evie Wyld and Joe Sumner



A short graphic novel about a young girl and her obsession with sharks (which seem to be a metaphor for the fear of death). A bit of an odd story, but some fantastic imagery.

66. Flung out of Space by Grace Ellis

Another graphic novel - this one about Patricia Highsmith. In these pages, Highsmith alternates between seducing women and seeking therapy to help her get rid of her urges (there is one great full-page image where she is dancing with a man, but becoming increasingly fascinated by the female piano player; in the next spread, the two women are in bed together) - she also writes for comics while hating the medium she is working in.

She writes Carol (which "flung out of space" is a quote from), and eventually finds a publisher that is willing to take it on. The book ends rather abruptly at this point - I guess we are to assume that she has overcome her internal contradictions?

I thought this was very good despite/up till the abrupt ending.

67. Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh

An enjoyable fantasy novella with tinges of folk horror, inspired by the Green Man legend. Tobias is a wild man of the woods - a gentle creature, but with an aspect fearsome to most humans. In 400 years, only one human - Henry Silver, an amateur of myth and magic - has seen him and not been terrified. Silver and Tobias become friends, but will the ancient magic let them be?

At once slow deep green rolled over him. He took a breath, and another, smelling old rotting leaves and healthy growth and autumn light. He felt almost as though he could have planted his feet and become a tree himself, a strong oak reaching up to the sky, brother of the old oak who ruled the wood. Ah, he thought, and nothing else.

Hi. Just quickly catching up here. Enjoying your posts.

>129 wandering_star: Sorry The Morning Gift didn't work for you. I haven't read it, but I loved the Ibbotson novel that I did read, Madensky Square.

Just catching up on your thread and what a lovely lot of reviews. I did not know that a graphic novel about Patricia Highsmith existed! Thanks for posting about it, it's on my list.

>135 wandering_star: I loved that book ! The sequel, Drowned Country, is great too.

>137 rocketjk: Thanks - I liked the style, but got annoyed by the plot, so I might try that one!

68. Neighbors and other stories by Diane Oliver

When Diane Oliver died in 1966, aged only 22, she'd published four stories. Two more were published over the following year, but it was only in 2022 that her sister (in response to an enquiry from an agent) went through her boxes and found another eight unpublished stories, all collected here, with a foreword by Tayari Jones.

The stories, set in the Jim Crow South, are generally about small moments and emotions which illuminate a bigger picture - for example, the first story shows us parents discussing whether they really want their young son to be the first to integrate his school. I prefer short stories to have more of a plot than these tended to have - but I thought they provided a valuable and interesting perspective on the personal impact of having to live under these awful circumstances.

She had a difficult time trying to think of something in which to major. Her mother had suggested drama but Winifred didn't see how she could play the maid's part for four years. She was fairly adept in biology, but the department scheduled field trips throughout the year. And even if the motels were supposedly integrated, she hated to be involved in testing them.

69. Windmill Hill by Lucy Atkins

Two elderly women live by a windmill - they used to live inside it, but then came what they know as the Awful Incident, and they haven’t been back inside since. One of them discovers that her ex-husband, a famous actor, is writing his memoirs. She is convinced that this will bring back to public attention a decades-old scandal which she was involved in, and so she decides that she has to put a stop to this.

I have been worried recently that I can't finish a book, so even though I wasn't especially enjoying this one, I decided to keep pushing through rather than put it aside, as I have with so many books lately. I shouldn't have bothered - I found the story a bit silly and the pacing very off (we get tiny dribs and drabs of both the Awful Incident and the 1960s scandal, and then a big info dump at the end).

The notion that the windmill might collapse was not, in fact, outlandish. Pieces of it were definitely coming loose. The next big storm could rip off the sweeps, perhaps even take off the fantail. She pictured the iron star wheel spinning through the sky and slicing through the cottage roof. The villagers would be up in arms. They’d roar up the hill, raging about irresponsibility and nuttiness and public safety. Or perhaps they wouldn’t. They didn’t get agitated about the windmill the way they used to; it was almost as if they’d given up caring.

70. The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall

The title of this book comes from a Finnish word which means "the boundary between the capital region and the rest of the country. The name suggests everything outside the border is wilderness."

Rachel, a zoologist and wolf specialist, has been working with a wolf pack in the Western US. A landowner in her native Cumbria invites her to work on a project he is funding, to reintroduce wolves to the UK - but she has no interest in being near her mother, and so she declines. After her mother dies and she falls pregnant after a one-night stand with a friend, she decides to run in the other direction and returns to the UK (without telling the friend about the pregnancy).

She would like to believe there will be a place, again, where the streetlights end and wilderness begins. The wolf border. And if this is where it has to begin in England, she thinks, this rich, disqualifying plot, with its private sponsorship and antiquated hierarchy, so be it. The ends justify the means.

This is a book with themes of family, motherhood, wildness, independence. I liked it fine. (My problem with Sarah Hall I think is that I absolutely loved the first book of hers that I read, The Electric Michelangelo, and so I keep buying and reading her other books even though I haven't loved any of them).

71. Fleshmarket Close by Ian Rankin

A re-read of this Inspector Rebus novel, although I first read it so long ago it’s not logged on LT. The intertwined mysteries here are the murder of an asylum-seeker on a run-down housing estate, and the discovery in a cellar of what look like murdered human remains but are in fact medical specimens. I always enjoy Ian Rankin, although it’s funny to skip so far back in the series and see how the character has evolved and softened over time.


'I'm older than you . . . I need my sleep.'
'I thought you need less sleep as you get older?'
Rebus shook his head. 'You don't need less sleep; you just take it.'
'Why?'
He shrugged. 'Mortality closing in, I suppose."

72. Undue Influence by Anita Brookner

Claire is a woman who spent most of her life looking after her mother and working in a bookshop (a classic Brookner heroine, then).

I was free, certainly, but that freedom was ironic, not quite the real thing. I was free because nothing was required of me. I was therefore superfluous. This I knew to be true, but the truth was so unwelcome that I seized my purse and my keys and went out to the all-night supermarket. In the late evening this always seems to be populated by solitaries, people who look drained by the strip lighting.

She likes to make up stories about strangers that she encounters, imagining whole lives for them. When she befriends Martin, one of the bookshop customers - she imagines his relationship with his invalid wife - and later, after Cynthia dies, her own life with Martin. The 'undue influence' of the title is that exerted by one person over another. But does Claire really have the influence she thinks over Martin, or is it the other way about?

Like the last Brookner I read, Providence, the protagonist learns in the final chapter that the man she had her eye on is in fact going to settle down with someone else.

I think this was my least favourite of the Brookners I have read so far, because I got a bit irritated with Claire’s endless speculation about the lives of others.

73. Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

People are right to be afraid of ghosts. If you get people who are bad in life - I mean, cruel people, dangerous people - why do you think they're going to be any better after they're dead?

But she would never speak it. Never. Never utter the word 'death', if she could help it. And even though they needed frightening, even though they deserved frightening, she would never, when she was with her clients, slip a hint or tip a wink about the true nature of the place beyond black.

Alison is a spiritualist, earning her living travelling around the UK to do shows and psychic fairs. She's accompanied by her assistant Colette, and her spirit guide, the ghostly Morris - a vile and irrepressible presence even though only Alison can see or hear (and sometimes feel) him. Colette doesn’t believe in him - or, really, in Alison's supposed gifts, although sometimes she wonders. But Alison is definitely haunted - both by ghosts, which she sees everywhere, and by some terrible things which happened to her in her childhood.

This is a strange book. It absolutely kept me absorbed, even though there are plenty of things to dislike in it. Morris may be a metaphor for suppressed trauma, but he is a pretty horrible individual to be spending a lot of time with, and there is very little plot - I suppose you could say that the story develops towards the reveal of what actually happened in Alison's childhood, but by the time we get there the reveal is unnecessary, as the reader will have worked it out. I did enjoy reading this but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it.

74. Death of a Nationalist by Rebecca Pawel

A historical crime novel set in Spain, after the victory of the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War. When two police officers find a young woman near the body of one of their colleagues, they shoot her, although she had nothing to do with the killing. This sets in train a chain of events in which Inspector Tejada is asked to investigate the killing of the police officer (there are rumours of corruption), while the young woman's lover tries to avenge her murder. I really enjoyed this - it is an excellent portrayal of life in the city where so many of the ordinary citizens were on the losing side, now living in fear and resentment - as well as a good mystery. I do feel odd though that we are asked to sympathise with Tejada, a Falangist!

Tejada gestured toward the hallway with one hand. “Should I get my coat?” she asked in a low voice designed to pass over the heads of the children. The sergeant felt a moment of unwilling admiration for Señorita Fernández. She was cooler than many of the men he had arrested. She was either very courageous, or else she had a very clear conscience—and if she had stuck it out in Madrid as a Nationalist then she should probably get an award for courage in any case. “There’s no need,” he answered in the same undertone. She let out an almost imperceptible sigh and stepped into the hallway.

Lots of interesting reading, lots of overlaps with my shelves. Happy holidays to you, Margaret! Wolf Border and Beyond Black are both books I'd like to get to sooner than later.

75. Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene

A group read through APS Together and Yiyun Li.

Inspired by Don Quixote, this is an unlikely-buddy story in which a priest and a Communist drive across Spain together, bickering amicably about their different belief systems. It's really a book about the value of doubt as part of faith - the baddies all have great clarity about what they believe, and no flexibility. (And the worst baddie, the Bishop, also always reads the end of a book first!)

‘All the same you do believe all that nonsense. God, the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception …’ ‘I want to believe. And I want others to believe.’ ‘Why?’ ‘I want them to be happy.’ ‘Let them drink a little vodka then. That’s better than a make-believe.’ ‘The vodka wears off. It’s wearing off even now.’ ‘So does belief.’

Nice to see some new reviews by you. A Brookner i haven’t heard of and a fantastic graham greene quote. I should read hi. I liked Beyond Black more than you, although glad you liked it. I found it a haunting look at the lost people in soulless contemporary suburbia.

Some interesting books to wrap up the year. There seem to be a lot of books set in Spain in the LT air, or maybe I'm just noticing them more since I read a few myself this year.