January 2026 Superlatives

January was a terrific month in reading. Despite DNFing four books practically in a row, I read fourteen in total – and every single one of them was good. A few rose to greatness. At least one will be on my Best Books of 2026 list. I got in a few rereads, and covered a few backlist titles from authors whose work I knew I enjoyed. This is exactly the sort of start to the year that I’d been hoping for. I also got to spend one of my Christmas book vouchers. This month’s library reading is covered here; here’s what I made of the rest.

Images of book covers super-imposed against a blue-purple floral background

reread that interacted most interestingly with books I’d read earlier: Zami, by Audre Lorde (1982). First read in July 2020, when I enjoyed its warmth and humour, and was pleased to find that feminist poet and thinker Lorde wasn’t the deathly serious (and dull) theorist that I’d expected. It’s a memoir of her growing up, adolescence, and early adulthood. She feels like an outsider everywhere – as a bookish, visually impaired, fat Black girl, and then as a woman attracted to women – and that feeling becomes part of her identity too. Her early life reminded me of Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, emphasising the conventions of West Indian family life where she can’t fit in. As a young woman she moves away from New York, first to factory work in Stamford and then, on an impulse, to Mexico, where she blossoms. Early love affairs help, too, although none are particularly happy. The latter half of the book, taking place in the late 1950s, is fascinating about the lesbian subcultures of the time (Lorde doesn’t fit in here either: she’s neither a butch nor a femme and isn’t interested in those rigid categories). It was only a few years before the sexual fluidity and marital freedom Samuel R. Delany describes in The Motion of Light in Water, but it feels like a different world. Some of the melodramatic relationship material became repetitive and tiresome. The most interesting part of the book is Lorde’s teenage friendship with a girl who eventually killed herself, clearly because her father had been abusing her. Lorde’s love for Gennie – and, you get the impression, her guilt over Gennie’s death – was lifelong. I probably won’t reread this again, though.

longest awaited, and most worth waiting for: Menewood, by Nicola Griffith (2023). I’ve already mentioned the ten-year gap between this and its predecessor, the magnificent Hild. In Menewood, Griffith takes up the story of the Northumbrian princess who would become St. Hilda of Whitby almost immediately after that earlier book’s ending. The title is a place, a hidden valley in Elmet (West Yorkshire) which Hild’s uncle Edwin, the volatile High King of Britain, has given to her and her now-husband Cian. Holding Elmet for Edwin, Hild determines to build up Menewood as a sanctuary, where distinctions of slave and free are meaningless. Her role as Edwin’s seer appears to be lessening, for which she’s thankful, until the discovery that Penda and Cadwallon, the kings of Mercia and Gwynedd, have allied and are marching to threaten Edwin’s hold. History ensues, including the terrible battle of Hatfield Chase, which takes almost everything that Hild loves and that has given her purpose. The remainder of the novel deals with her recovery of self; her pursuit of vengeance on Cadwallon, who is now ravaging the North; and the choices she must make about what she will do with the power she accrues.

Like Hild, this installment is gorgeously written, with close attention paid to tactility and the senses, the cycles of nature, and the sheer hard work that it took to live, day to day, in this era. There are longueurs: after Hatfield, Hild takes a long time to recover, and the page space dedicated to her development of a viable fighting force is possibly a tad excessive. But Griffith’s effectiveness in these novels is partly due to the way she makes a reader understand time, and how differently it passed in earlier centuries. Taking her time is one way to do that, and we’re primed for it by the immersive, detailed nature of the writing. I’ve also always liked how Hild is permitted by the narrative to be both romantic/sexual/emotional (including in relationships that our era would label queer or sapphic) and practical/tactical/martial. That doesn’t change here, though she suffers in both aspects. We leave Hild at a moment that could, conceivably, serve as a capstone to a duology – but I hope Griffith writes a third volume.

most destabilising: Hangsaman, by Shirley Jackson (1951). In some ways it feels odd that I don’t have that much to say about this, because the way it operates – dreamy, suggestive, symbolic, blurring the lines between a fantasy life and occurrences in reality – would seem to indicate that there’s a lot to excavate. And there is, but I think the best way to excavate it might be to read the book yourself, not necessarily to read me talking about it. Most of it takes place during Natalie Waite’s first semester at college, during which it becomes apparent that she is far too strange for any of her classmates to make friends with. She is taken up, semi-ironically, by two slightly older girls who are trying to seduce their English professor, whose very young wife is a former student of the college, now suffering under the loneliness of social unmooring that comes with her marriage. Natalie herself is experiencing what it becomes progressively clearer are breaks with consensus reality. The book’s first section ends with a climactic scene at a cocktail party hosted by her parents, in which an ambiguous encounter with an older man in the backyard woods represents either an actual sexual assault or an emotional one that’s no less searing. For my money, it’s the former, and each section of Hangsaman contains a scene that repeats the contours of that one: a walk under dark trees with someone whose existence and behaviour threatens Natalie with the dissolution and fragmentation of her selfhood. (In section two, it’s Elizabeth, the professor’s wife; in section three, it’s Tony, Natalie’s apparent only friend.) It’s not a novel about the effects of assault in general, more a novel in which sexual threat is one of many menaces to the self; chief among the others is social conformity, which Jackson demonstrates often requires cruelty and disloyalty. I didn’t particularly enjoy the experience of Hangsaman, but it makes clear how much talent Jackson had, even at the start of her career.

slowest start: Augustus, by John Williams (1972). An epistolary, or rather documentary (not everything is in letter form; some are reports, journal entries, official proclamations, etc.) novel about the rise and life of Rome’s first emperor. Daniel Mendelsohn’s excellent introduction to the NYRB Classics edition identifies how this fits into Williams’s oeuvre: like Stoner and Butcher’s Crossing, it deals with the way a person can slowly but completely change over a lifetime, and the way that what they’re sure is good can change too. The first section deals with Octavius Caesar’s adolescence and early steps towards power in the wake of his uncle Julius’s murder. Unless you’re really into Roman military history, this is slightly drier and harder going than is ideal. I found my attention flagging at several points, but by the Battle of Actium, the stakes were obvious and the narration exciting again. Then we move into more interesting territory. Much of this centres around Augustus’s daughter Julia, whom he adores, and whom he is eventually forced to exile for adultery. (This saves her life: most of her lovers were involved in a conspiracy to kill both Augustus himself and her husband/stepbrother Tiberius, and the adultery charge pre-empts her indictment for treason.) Julia is a great character, and strong evidence for Williams’s facility at writing women. Her loneliness, her pride, her recklessness, and her rage all come through clearly in her first-person journal entries, written from exile on the tiny island of Pandateria. Other voices belong to Vergil, Ovid and Horace; Marcus Agrippa; Gaius Maecenas; Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony); even Cleopatra, which is rather brilliantly done – though all we get from her are official directives to staff followed by a letter to Antonius, they reveal perfectly both her mistrust of her lover’s capabilities and her determination to keep him sweet for as long as possible. We only hear Augustus’s own voice right at the very end, in a beautiful extended meditation on mortality, intentions, and the failures of even an apparently successful life that cements the thematic implications of all that has gone before. Williams is a remarkable ventriloquist, it should be added; each character has their own distinctive written style, without resorting to stylisation or caricature. Stoner is still his masterpiece, but this is enormously rewarding for those with patience enough to get past Actium.

most reassuring reread: The Madonna of the Mountains, by Elise Valmorbida (2018). Reassuring in the sense that my original response to this novel – loving it – was confirmed. On first reading it, I wrote, “It starts in 1923, with a girl called Maria Vittoria embroidering sheets for her dowry trunk. She’s twenty-five, alarmingly old to be unmarried… Valmorbida spins the story of Maria Vittoria’s life: her marriage, her children, the ascent of Mussolini’s government and the onset of WWII… The Madonna of the Mountains feels both universal (fears about infidelity, a child’s health, how to protect your family in uncertain times) and deeply, richly specific… It really feels as if you are peering into the head of, let’s say, your great-grandmother; someone whose world is not your world, whose socially conditioned responses are alien to your own… One of the most restrained, yet profoundly convincing, historical novels that I’ve read in years.”

That’s all still true. On this reread, I noticed some technical things. For example, how Valmorbida achieves the novel’s unique voice and tone: almost every chapter is narrated in free indirect style from Maria Vittoria’s perspective, so we’re both in third person (which gives us a sense of proportion) and locked in to her emotions and patterns of thought. There’s only one exception, when her daughter Amelia becomes the point of view character for a few crucial chapters. Time is also handled beautifully, through carefully chosen intervals: between sections, two or five years have passed, so that we get a sense of general continuity as well as an understanding that the events actually narrated to us are truly life-changing. The madwoman Delfina, who claims to be Maria Vittoria’s illegitimate cousin, serves as proof of hypocrisy and embodies the inadequacy of social norms: her outbursts ostracise her from the community and eventually lead to her death, but she is the quintessential frightening truth-teller, the inconvenient bastard on the margins of society who understands how things work better than any number of conventional, respectable people. She is Maria Vittoria’s dark double. Meanwhile, imagined monologues in italics from a Madonna statue inherited from her mother dramatise the demands that weigh on Maria Vittoria’s soul, the social and spiritual codes by which she lives and which define her. This superb novel was criminally underappreciated upon publication and should have been on the Walter Scott and Women’s Prize shortlists.

most bittersweet follow-up: A House for Alice, by Diana Evans (2023). This is a direct sequel to Ordinary People, Evans’s Women’s-Prize-shortlisted exploration of married (or at least committed) life in southeast London’s middle-class Black communities just after Obama’s election. It picks up eight years later, and focuses – at least initially – on the parents of Melissa, one of Ordinary People‘s protagonists. Her septuagenarian Nigerian mother, Alice, is beginning to make noises about “going home” to grow old and die; her white father, Cornelius, with whom Alice has not lived for decades, dies unexpectedly in a house fire as the novel opens, an event that takes place on the same day as the disastrous Grenfell Tower fire. Evans’s signature blend is to incorporate national/political happening with smaller-scale domestic event: Alice’s vacillation about her home reflects the “hostile environment”, Windrush Generation deportations, and the May administration’s naked contempt for immigrants and non-white Britons. Meanwhile, her daughter Melissa is beginning to regret having left her partner, Michael, the decision that ended Ordinary People; Michael is beginning to find that his second marriage, to jazz singer Nicole – vivacious, outgoing, and less a has-been than a never-quite-made-it – is perhaps shallower than he realised; Damian, whose marriage made up the other half of Ordinary People, has also left his wife, and we first encounter him searching for his runaway teenage daughter Avril in Paris. There is, in other words, an awful lot going on here (I haven’t even mentioned the flashbacks Melissa begins to have to what is clearly a childhood trauma related to her father’s alcohol abuse and violent tendencies, or the post-death scenes of Cornelius seeking a resting place in the afterlife). As a result, some characters are short-changed in uneasy-making ways. Avril is found, but does not get a happy ending, but little time is spent on the reality of her life or the effect on Damian of seeing his child suffer. Melissa’s flashbacks are not quite resolved. However, I’d rather read an overstuffed, ambitious novel – especially one that takes seriously the emotions and friendships between older women, such as Alice and her church friends, or Nicole and her circle of cool, artistic, powerful wine aunties – than a thin, timid one.

most poetic evocation of history’s emotional pull: May We Feed the King, by Rebecca Perry (2026). A curator of still life “scenes” for historic properties receives a new commission to dress half a dozen rooms in a former palace. Permitted to select any time period from the centuries in which the palace was inhabited, she (one assumes – we never find out) chooses the reign of a King who never expected to accede, and whose brief rule is still thought of as shameful and embarrassing. Struggling with a personal loss that’s never specified – though context clues suggest the death of a partner or a traumatic breakup – she finds herself drawn into the world of the long-vanished King, as well as increasingly attracted to the archivist (again, no gender specified) who provides the necessary documents for research. Meanwhile, a long central section in third person follows the King himself – his unexpected accession, reluctant response, and eventual mysterious disappearance – mostly focalised through him, with occasional forays into his personal attendant, a lady-in-waiting, or his power-hungry and frustrated chief advisor.

Perry’s writing is wonderful: assured, precise, evocative. I love fiction that delves deeply into the specifics of an unusual job, and the curator’s love for her work helps to make the level of detail she gives us feel, not excessive, but grounded in her characterisation. (There’s an especially great section about plastic-resin food props and the website you can order them from.) Her attempts to inhabit the King and his world offer a commentary on loss and time that are counterpointed by her own personal loss: in the end, we lose everything to history except for what is preserved, which is only ever incomplete. But art and beauty can emerge from our efforts to rediscover or recreate what is lost. Elegant, melancholy and with a faint extension of hope at its end, this is a début that I’d very much like to see on the Walter Scott, Women’s, and even Booker longlists this year. Published 29 January; thanks to Granta and NetGalley for the eARC.

best palate cleanser: Blurb Your Enthusiasm, by Louise Willder (2022). Willder estimates she’s written five thousand blurbs in her career as a publishing copywriter. In this book, the first thing published under her actual name, she pulls back the curtain on blurb efficacy: how do you convince people to open the covers of a book? Are spoilers ever okay? What kind of voice do you choose for each one? Do you have to read the whole book before blurbing it? (N.b.: in the UK “blurb” means the synopsising copy on the book jacket. In America, it means an advance quote of praise from another author. Willder uses it in the UK sense throughout.) Other chapters range further afield. Some of these worked better for me than others. Everything about cover design (including how text and image can be made to work around and with one another) fascinated me, as did theorising about the ideal title (Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog, apparently, combining the commercial allure of presidential gravitas, medical content, and an animal – though several books under this title have been published, and unaccountably, none of them has been a bestseller). I was less convinced by chapters that dealt with historical publishing, which made the sorts of leaps that my supervisors would be annoyed at me for. (I actually think it is perfectly fair to see the extraordinarily long titles of Daniel Defoe’s era as proto-blurbs if that is your angle, but it feels like a substantial claim to make without any hedging. At the very least, it would be good to acknowledge that literary marketing has not remained unchanged for 400 years.) Some of the material on different genres – romance, sci fi, etc. – felt both under-considered and unnecessary. These are churlish complaints, though, given Willder’s infectious enthusiasm and the fun with which she infuses her behind-the-scenes tour of this under-appreciated area of the book industry. Its witty, low-key tone strikes exactly the right note.

prolixest fantasy: Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay (1990). Tigana balances almost perfectly between being very compelling and very annoying. It’s a political fantasy in which an occupied peninsula is uneasily divided between two separate colonial powers, one of whom takes vengeance on the province in which his son was killed in battle by using sorcery to erase the place’s name from memory and speakability. Only people who were born there can say, hear or understand the word “Tigana”. Much of the novel’s page count follows the long and secret efforts of the province’s Crown Prince, Alessan, to build a human intelligence network across the peninsula, cause the mutual destruction of both occupying powers, and restore Tigana to the memory of the world. It’s compelling stuff, counter-pointed by characters such as Dianora, a Tiganese woman whose own vengeance quest has been derailed by falling in love with the man she’s sworn to kill, and Devin, a singer who doesn’t know his own heritage until he gets involved with Alessan’s plans. On the other hand, women are invariably defined through their attractiveness or sexuality (even if that sexuality is “oh gosh, no thanks”). More frustratingly, Kay has a terrible habit of overwriting. Here he is describing a character who sees someone she doesn’t expect:

And then, at the bottom of the staircase, as she stepped onto the mosaic-inlaid tiles of the floor, she realized who was waiting by the palace doors to escort her out and her heart almost stopped.

There was a cluster of men there. D’Eymon, for one, and Rhamanus as well, who had stayed in the Palm as she’d been sure he would, and had been named as Brandin’s Lord of the Fleet. Beside them was Doarde the poet, representing the people of Chiara. She had expected him: it had been d’Eymon’s clever idea that the participation of one Island poet could help counterbalance the crime and death of another. Next to Doarde was a burly, sharp-faced man in brown velvet hung about with a ransom’s worth of gold. A merchant from Corte, and a successful one clearly enough[…] Behind him was a lean grey-clad priest of Morian who was obviously from Asoli. She could tell from his colouring, the native Asolino all had that look about him.

She also knew he was from Asoli because the last of the men waiting for her there was from Lower Corte and she knew him.

None of the description in the second paragraph is necessary. They’re mostly characters we’ve already met, but we don’t need to know what they’re doing or even that they’re here in this scene. It’s obviously a technique designed to extend the moment, like slow-mo in a film, to emphasise the impact of seeing someone so unexpected. But it has the opposite effect here, not least because Kay has been doing it for the last 500 pages at this point. Even the individual sentences are weirdly redundant: “mosaic-inlaid tiles”? Just say “mosaic floor” or “tiled floor”. “Waiting by the palace doors to escort her out” – why not just “waiting by the doors” or “waiting to escort her out”? It’s clumsy. I’ll definitely try Kay again, since he’s still writing and well-regarded, and this example of his work is nearly four decades old, but I hope he got better at reining himself in…

Have you had a successful reading start to 2026?

Posted on by Elle 10

#LoveYourLibrary January 2026

Hosted, as always, by Rebecca at Bookish Beck, posting on the last Monday of every month. There’s no set formula to this; you can post anything about libraries, whether you’ve recently been to an event at one, heard about an initiative at one, whatever! I use it for rundowns of my monthly library reading. Join in on your social media space of choice using #LoveYourLibrary.

January was a month full of library reading. At time of writing, nearly half of the books I’d read this month came from my local branch, in both paper and e-form. Two of these were rereads, and, not for the first time, I realised how useful a library can be if you want to dig into a particular writer’s body of work. (My current holds list will bear this out further in February.) 2026’s four DNFs so far also came from the library, which is honestly the ideal scenario: I didn’t have to spend my own money on duds, and other patrons may enjoy them. Here’s what I made of my successful choices.

Five book covers arranged over a floral background with "Love Your Library January 2026" written underneath

Area 51: an Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base, by Annie Jacobsen (2012): One of my perhaps lesser-known personality traits is an occasional dad-like fixation on the history of the defense and intelligence communities. I wanted to read Jacobsen’s latest, Nuclear War: a Scenario, but it’s currently checked out, so I went for this in the meantime. Despite its title and premise, for the most part this is a very thoroughly researched and reasonably sober account of the officially-denied base in the Nevada desert. Area 51 has become associated with the Roswell incident, because the remains of that craft were taken there, and with UFOs generally. The majority of what occurred there, though, is twofold: generations of top-secret Cold War spy planes like the U-2 and the SR-71 Blackbird were designed and tested there, and absolutely loads of nuclear bomb tests also took place, many with a frankly alarming lack of oversight or cleanup plan, or even obvious scientific import. Mostly, the plane testing correlates with the alleged UFO sightings. A lot of what people claim to have seen that “was way beyond any flight technology we had at the time” was actually one of these aircraft (which were way beyond any flight technology that anyone else had at the time, because the US was trying hard to both beat the Soviets in this area and to keep it absolutely classified).

Jacobsen can’t entirely avoid journalistic sensationalism in her framing – at the end of one chapter, for example, she poses a series of leading hypothetical questions, instead of just stating her case – but the vast majority of the book is an interesting, plausible account of a genuine R&D program from which the CIA and military sought to distract public attention by spinning up rumour and conjecture. Unfortunately, in the last chapter, Jacobsen takes an absolutely wild punt on explaining the Roswell incident itself, using only a single anonymous source whose memory (let alone motives or veracity) is never questioned. Her answer is somehow even weirder than “aliens”; I’m not actually averse to a wild theory if there’s anything at all offered in evidence, but nothing is offered. The book as a whole is tainted by it, and it’s probably all best read with a grain of cynical salt. However, where Jacobsen sticks to the development of the spy planes and the nuclear tests, Area 51 is fascinating, valuable, and deeply concerning. (There is so much atmospheric plutonium running around loose, you guys. So. Much.)

Butcher’s Crossing, by John Williams (1960): This is nothing like Stoner (1965), the novel for which Williams is best known after it was “rediscovered” in the 2010s, except in the sense that they’re both really, really good. Butcher’s Crossing is both a historical novel and a Western: in 1873, Harvard dropout Will Andrews travels to frontier Kansas and, in search of some unclear-even-to-himself authenticity, underwrites an expedition led by the monomaniacal buffalo hunter Miller. The novel recounts the grueling trip to an isolated Rocky Mountains valley, the long weeks and brutal waste of the hunt, and some additional plot points that I won’t spoil, but probably should have expected: Williams, after all, seems dedicated to writing sad outcomes. His style is clear, elegant, and evocative all at the same time, perfectly declarative and yet able to capture tiny nuances of behaviour. Powerful, indelible scenes succeed one another. Animals nearly dead of thirst begin to run flat-out when they smell water; a life-threatening blizzard is survived in body-bags made of buffalo hides; a man who previously lost a hand to frostbite tips into madness at the sight of falling snow. There’s a devastating accident near the book’s end (I actually put my hands over my mouth when I read it). Miller is a kind of landbound Ahab, calmly insane, while Will starts out semi-consciously modeling himself on Emerson, but soon discovers how romanticised that pose truly is. The themes of white rapacity in the West and the futile desire to locate meaning in the wilderness are conveyed unmistakably but utterly without preaching, while an acknowledgement of the devastation wreaked on Indigenous lives is delicately sketched. I absolutely adored reading this.

26a, by Diana Evans (2006): WARNING: DISCUSSION OF MAJOR PLOT POINTS FOLLOWS. Evans’s third novel, Ordinary People (2018), was a surprise success for me: following two couples of colour in South London whose marriages faced big changes, it was well-observed and warm, marred only by a single confusing foray into magical realism. 26a was her debut and won her the Orange Prize for New Writing as was, and a Betty Trask Award. Set in Neasden from the late ’70s to the late ’90s, it follows mixed-race twins Bessi and Georgia as they grow up with two other sisters, navigating their parents’ baffling marriage, their white father’s reliance on alcohol and increasingly erratic behaviour, the joys and confusions of sisterhood, and the unevenly distributed incursions of sorrow. It too is remarkably well observed, and has a zesty comic spirit; the early chapters in particular, like the excellent opener featuring the death of the girls’ pet hamster, reminded me of a less gonzo Zadie Smith.

Although that wry tone never entirely disappears, two plot points plunge us into darker territory. First, partway through the novel, Georgia experiences a traumatic sexual assault that she never tells Bessi about (though her big sister, Bel, does know); then, near the end, Georgia’s mental health deteriorates drastically, and she hangs herself at the age of twenty-four. Evans is careful not to suggest that Georgia’s distress is entirely traceable to the assault: their Nigerian mother’s spiritual traditions hint at twin-dom as an inherently problematic state, and there are plenty of other possible factors to consider. Ultimately, it’s impossible to know why Georgia couldn’t live in this world. The novel’s coda – the year after her death, in which her spirit is represented as sharing Bessi’s body until it’s finally ready to move on – toggles fluently between absurdist comedy and horror (the scenes where the remaining sisters pick out a coffin and do the makeup on Georgia’s cadaver before her burial are particular standouts) and a more piercingly poignant tone (the final pages made me cry). I decided to reread Ordinary People in the light of this, since Evans obviously has an intentional approach to her inclusion of the supernatural in otherwise realist work. The mix may not be for every reader, but I thought 26a was insightful, bittersweet, and courageous.

Ordinary People, by Diana Evans (2018): Reread; first (and last) read in April 2018. Then, I wrote, “Evans’s protagonists [are] two couples, Michael and Melissa, Damian and Stephanie, trying to keep their relationships alive after marriage and/or children, moving to the suburbs, losing a parent, discovering that they will very soon no longer be young… [The] plotting is brave: not everyone gets a happy ending, and we’re forced to question what happiness can look like…Ordinary People is an extraordinary book for posing those possibilities while also telling an apparently familiar story about domestic strife; it’s very impressive.” I also, amusingly, compared her work to Zadie Smith’s, though again noted that it lacks Smith’s hyperactivity (not necessarily a bad thing). Obviously I’d completely forgotten that by the time I read 26a, but at least it’s consistent!

Further observations this time around include the delighted recognition that Ordinary People is funny, thanks to Evans’s precise observations and the dry tone of the narration. (At one point, Melissa’s internal monologue notes the apparent satisfaction that a pest control man takes at her fear of mice, and wonders wildly whether this means he’s a psychopath.) If you’re expecting an equal division between the two couples, you’ll be disappointed, as Stephanie definitely gets short-changed; this is mostly a novel about Michael and Melissa, with Damian a distant second in terms of page time and sympathy. The supernatural element did feel less intrusive this time. I chose to attribute it to a combination of Melissa’s worsening mental health and as symbolic of what’s gone so wrong in their domestic arrangements (as foreshadowed by their address: unlucky number 13 on the ironically named Paradise Row). This is a full, generous, thoughtful consideration of modern marriage; it may be told within the prism of the Black British twenty-first-century experience (and specifically that experience as it manifests in London), but anyone who’s ever been in a long-term relationship will recognise something here. I went off this a few months after first reading it, perhaps because its Women’s Prize shortlisting associated it with the inferior An American Marriage, but a reread has brought it up in my estimations again. (I then read the sequel, A House for Alice, which I couldn’t source from the library; keep an eye out for that in my forthcoming January Superlatives post.)

Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006): Reread; first (and last) read in November 2015, when I had only just moved to London, worked for Mumsnet, and was disoriented, exhausted, and subtly unhappy. Then, I was so impressed by this account of the shattering Biafran War in 1960s Nigeria as experienced by privileged twin sisters – lean, sarcastic Kainene; beautiful, slightly passive Olanna – and their partners (Kainene’s is a white British quasi-journalist named Richard, while Olanna’s is Odenigbo, a lecturer and true believer in Biafran nationalism). It did feel more “worthy” than Americanah, but still captured my imagination. Now, the paired infidelity and the sibling discord in the early sections feels soapy, as do occasional forays into the world of racist white expats. The focus on food, which foreshadows its terrible significance during the famine caused by the war, is nice, subtle: Harrison, Kainene’s steward, obsessed with cooking only English dishes and proud that he can do so, Odenigbo’s houseboy Ugwu hoarding chicken on his first night working in the house, Odenigbo’s mother’s attempts to dominate her son’s household via the kitchen. I also found that one of the most upsetting episodes – Ugwu’s participation in a gang rape as a conscripted soldier – doesn’t come out of nowhere, but is rather seeded in his characterisation: he tends to view women as objects, albeit sometimes objects of admiration, and his interest in tear gas, rooted in the idea that he could use it as a date rape drug, sounds an early ominous note. Meanwhile, Richard’s tone-deaf insistence that he is Biafran too, his utter refusal to identify himself with Britain, is fascinating and frustrating in equal measure, showing what the idea of Biafra could offer people but also revealing how deeply embedded British imperialism really was in this conflict. The final section, which takes place during the actual war, is a little too long and undifferentiated. I’d forgotten the uncertainty of the ending, though it felt appropriate. I’d still rank this second after Americanah, and am keen to see how Purple Hibiscus (2004) compares.

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Have you read any of these titles yourself, or visited a library yet this year?

Posted on by Elle 10

A Christmas Gift Card Book Haul

As mentioned in my 2025 wrap-up post, I received two book vouchers for Christmas this year – one for bookshop.org from my parents, and one for Waterstones from my fiancé. I’m hoping to spend the latter on a day trip to the big Waterstones on Piccadilly, but in the meantime, I ordered a lovely great stack from bookshop.org which arrived yesterday.

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Another Marvelous Thing, by Laurie Colwin (1986): I adored Colwin’s novel Happy All the Time last summer, and this – a novella about an adulterous couple who are, on the face of it, wildly ill-matched – appealed very much. Her dialogue and characters are a marvel of dry wit and forthrightness.

The Gilda Stories, by Jewelle Gomez (1991): Pretty sure this is a novel-in-stories about a queer Black vampire girl across two centuries of American history. Pretty sure that sounds absolutely incredible.

The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer (1991): Everyone seems to love this and I strongly suspect I will too; my impression is of a kind of quiet, crystalline apocalypse story set in a remote Alpine valley.

Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson (2011): Unbelievable to me that I’ve not read Johnson yet. This seems potentially on the same wavelength as Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams, which I read earlier this month, in that it’s a melancholy revisionist Western. Catnip to me.

Cold Earth, by Sarah Moss (2009): Moss’s first novel; I’ve read everything she’s published from 2015 onwards but want to get to grips with her earlier work. This story of plague and archaeology has always intrigued.

The Watermark, by Sam Mills (2025): This has “Calvino and Borges homage” written all over it, but I’m hoping for some of the playfulness and irreverence of Jasper Fforde, too. About a couple who get trapped inside a novelist’s work-in-progress and have to escape through other books. Sounds wild and exciting.

The Aud trilogy, by Nicola Griffith: The Blue Place (1998), Stay (2002), and Always (2007). You know I had to, after loving Hild and Menewood and knowing that these were being reprinted in smart new paperback editions after being virtually unfindable for years! Griffith’s protagonist, Aud Torvingen, is a tall, badass, lesbian Norwegian-American P.I. I’m anticipating the coolness of Francine Pascal’s Fearless books with, obviously, more sophisticated writing and ideas.

Penance, by Eliza Clark (2023): Chillingly smart and insightful thriller about teenage girls who murder a classmate on the eve of the Brexit vote. I’ve already read this, and adored it; it made my Best of Year list in 2024. But the copy I read was from the library, and I’ve long coveted my own.

Have you read any of these? I only have a very few outstanding books left on my TBR before getting round to these, so which should I read first??

Posted on by Elle 28

Pride Goeth Before a DNF

One of the things that got the most comments in both my best books of 2025 and 2025 wrap-up posts was how few DNFs I had last year. I attributed this to getting better at picking books. (It’s partly knowing what I’ll probably like, but just as much about developing a better sense for smoke and mirrors.) And yet, two weeks into 2026, I must come before you with the confession that I have DNFd four books already, which is 2/3 of last year’s entire total! They all came from the local public library (#loveyourlibrary); three of them are titles I actually requested the library to buy. I do not feel at all bad about the DNFing – what matters for libraries is checkout numbers – though I am a little sad that these were books I’d been genuinely keen on, at least theoretically. I suppose the silver lining is that it’s saved me spending my own money on disappointments, and maybe someone else in my local borough will love one or more of these.

Sky Full of Elephants, by Cebo Campbell (2025), @ chapter 9: Great premise (all white people in the US simultaneously drown themselves; a Black ex-con has to help his mixed-race daughter, whom he’s never met, traverse the country in the aftermath), but clunky execution.

The Women’s Courtyard, by Khadija Mastur (1962; trans. Daisy Rockwell 2025), @ chapter 5: Loved the idea of a Partition novel from a sheltered woman’s perspective, but the language felt stiff and distanced. Lost interest.

A Woman’s Place is in the Kitchen, by Sally Abé (2025), @ basically pg. 3: Abé’s an extremely talented chef who went far on Great British Menu. She’s dedicated her career to promoting women in the macho industry of professional cooking, which is utterly admirable. The writing’s mid, though.

Dream Count, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2025), @ 6%: I really wanted to like this, but opening with a tired rehash of the pandemic experiences of the laptop classes followed by flashbacks to a bad relationship with a self-regarding intellectual put me right off. Adichie’s writing here has nowhere near the snap and verve of Americanah‘s prose. What happened?!

This, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the one title in this list that I did not have to ask the library to buy for me, and there was someone on the waitlist for it within a day after I checked it out. Dream Count will have good borrowing figures regardless. Meanwhile, I’m trying to fill in my CNA gaps, so have placed reservations on Purple Hibiscus (which I’ve never read) and Half of a Yellow Sun (which I read once in 2015 and barely remember). Her collection of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck, is also on my radar to check out after I’ve at least tried all of her novels. So far, I suspect that Americanah (which I’ve read twice, in 2014 and 2023) is her masterpiece.

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Have you read, or tried to read, any of these? Have you DNFd anything yet this year?

Posted on by Elle 37

2025 Reading Wrap-Up, Stats, Holiday Book Haul, and 2026 Reading Hopes

General Wrap-Up

This year, I read 182 books. This is more than last year’s 170 – probably helped along by a binge of popcorn reading in May – and seems like a very decent showing; I was aiming, as usual, for about 150. Overall, 2025 was a great reading year. I was busy, but I tended to choose well, put books down when they didn’t suit me, and used the library (and its purchasing powers) liberally. My picks for books of the year totalled thirteen, which averages out to a little more than one truly exceptional read per month. Who could ask for better?

In terms of reading projects (a term I much prefer to “challenges”), I didn’t set myself any specific ones for 2025, unlike previous years. I did complete 20 Books of Summer, now run by Annabel and Emma, reading and reviewing twenty books that fit my own criteria: written by authors of colour and not bought brand-new. Unfortunately, although the letter of the law was met, the spirit was really not, in the sense that I barely enjoyed any 20 BoS reads; some were proper slogs. I wrote a wrap-up post here, in which I pondered the reasons for this. I intend to do the challenge again in 2026, and have come up with (hopefully) a clearer set of criteria which ought to improve the experience. More on that in the spring!

Other projects/events included the #1952Club, run by Kaggsy and Simon, which gave me the pleasure of first reading Ralph Ellison’s marvelous Invisible Man; RIP XX, in which I read work by Joe Hill, Alan Moore, Bora Chung, Horace Walpole, Carissa Orlando, and Mariana Enríquez; and Doorstoppers in December, run by Laura T., which led me to the diverse offerings of Nicola Barker, Robin Hobb, and George Eliot.

Stats

Who does not love a stat, eh? Of the 182 books I read this year:

  • 23 were nonfiction. As usual, that’s more than it felt like. My nonfiction choices are almost exclusively memoir, with some occasional lit crit and belles-lettres; even those are often memoir-adjacent.
  • 99 were by women (one was jointly authored by a woman and a man) and 4 were by non-binary writers, making 54% of my reading non-male-authored. This isn’t a huge change from last year, which was marginally closer to a 50:50 split, and I’m very pleased with it.
  • 44 were by authors of colour. That’s 24%, which is considerably better than last year, and 20 Books of Summer certainly had something to do with that. I’d like to get it up to 25% in 2026.
  • 28 were by (to my knowledge) LGBTQIA+ authors, or had major characters/themes that were LGBTQIA+. That’s 15%, a minuscule improvement on last year. There’s certainly room for more.
  • Some entertaining ones, according to StoryGraph: 87 of the books I read this year were “reflective”, 65 were “emotional”, and 51 apiece were “mysterious”, “dark” or “adventurous” (!) On the other end of the scale, only 4 were “hopeful” (I personally feel quite hopeful!) while only 3 were “inspiring” (The Eights by Joanna Miller, Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, and Marsha by Tourmaline, if you’re wondering).

Holiday Book Haul

We now appear to have entered the era in which people take me seriously when I ask for book tokens as gifts. My fiancé got me a Waterstones gift card, and my parents bought me a voucher for bookshop.org. Hooray! I’ll report back on how these are spent.

Meanwhile, there were also two actual books under the tree.

Shibboleth, by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert (2025): An Oxford novel that either will or won’t annoy me intensely. I’m vaguely alarmed by its apparent focus on identity politics (can we please lay to rest the absurd and insidious notion that university students are the greatest current threat to democratic ideals?) but I’m interested.

Menewood, by Nicola Griffith (2023): [screams forever] I’ve been waiting for this book for so long. A sequel to the extraordinary Hild, it took ten years to be published and another two years to find its way to me: the hardback was too expensive and then it seemed to drop out of UK circulation in paperback form. M. lied to my face about having bought me this when I guessed it. Concern about his deception skills aside, he chose perfectly.

2026 Reading Goals

As was true for the past year, I’ll have a lot to balance and a lot to deliver in 2026: paid work, PhD research, singing, wedding planning, travel, and maintaining relationships with friends and loved ones, as well as an active reading life. Setting specific reading projects for myself is not the way to ensure satisfaction. On the other hand, what I said last year was that I wanted quality, and that has turned out to be an excellent guiding star. So my main goal for 2026 remains the same.

Other than that, I intend to do 20 Books of Summer again and enjoy my selections more this time, with a better game plan (you’ll find out!) I’d like to keep using the public library and making stock-purchase requests there (honestly, what a life-changingly good service this is). Once again, I’d like to improve my read ratio for authors of colour. Also, because re-reading has served me so well this year, I’d like to give myself permission to do more of that. But really, what I want is to deeply enjoy absolutely everything I read. Seems thoroughly reasonable.

How does your reading year stack up? Did you receive any bookish delights over the holidays? Have you made any reading resolutions for 2026, or do you harbour any reading hopes?

Posted on by Elle 23

December 2025 Superlatives AND #LoveYourLibrary

I’m trying to clear the decks for the New Year, so I’m combining December’s Superlatives and #LoveYourLibrary roundup posts into one, as I did last year.

SUPERLATIVES

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fell hardest between commercial and academic publishing: Revolutionary Acts,by Jason Okundaye (2024). An oral history of the black gay scene in South London – Brixton and surrounds, really – in about the final quarter of the 20th century. I am a huge fan of what Okundaye describes as “archival joy”, the pleasure of discovering stories and lives that speak to you and yours where you had previously thought no such material existed, but I’d have liked this book to contain something closer to an argument about the significance of these lives, as opposed to just a retelling or revealing of them. I also felt he was sometimes rather too in awe of his sources. On the other hand, recording the stories of a community that was ravaged by HIV and now (what’s left of it) aging is intrinsically interesting and important work. I particularly liked that interviewees spoke not just about love and community, though there was plenty of that, but also about backstabbing and betrayal. Those things happen too, in every group and subculture, and it’s flattening to pretend they don’t.

most heartbreaking re-read: The Artificial Silk Girl, by Irmgard Keun (1932). I first read this back in 2019 and was enchanted by it. In Weimar Germany, sassy provincial gal Doris exhausts the possibilities of her hometown, steals a gorgeous fur coat, and runs off to Berlin to become a star. The first time around, I was so captivated by her voice, which I likened to Cassandra Mortmain’s, that although I didn’t exactly miss the book’s increasing darkness, it didn’t really register. This time around, the hunger and desperation of Doris’s situation became clearer, as did the clever, subtle way that Keun shows Nazi prejudice at work in the city. Doris isn’t a committed antisemite, and on the whole is much too preoccupied with staying fed and alive to think about Jews one way or another, but she encounters several men on “dates” who are virulently antisemitic. She finds them disgusting and hypocritical, but not dangerous, or not more than men usually are; to one, she pretends she is Jewish in order to annoy him. Had the novel been written in 1933 – just a year later – such a confession might have been a death sentence. There’s so much in this slim novel about sex and power, money and food, terror and hope; I must read more Keun.

most fractally fascinating nonfiction: A City on Mars, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (2023). Kelly Weinersmith is a scientist, her husband Zach the cartoonist responsible for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. This book is a collaboration – written by Kelly, diagrams/illustrations by Zach – in which they assess, very seriously, the arguments for and against space settlement. The evidence includes not just the physical limitations of humans and the truly gobsmacking level of uncertainty we currently possess about them (for example: any space settlement program would need functioning reproduction on a population level, and yet we know absolutely nothing about how human gestation is affected by the microgravity and radiation that are intrinsically part of the space environment). There are also, and fascinatingly, issues of space law: what territory can be claimed on other planets, and by what kind of entities? How does space sovereignty work? There are labour rights issues: if the first settlement is basically a company town, which seems fairly likely, how can workers – risking their lives to be off-world in the first place – be assured basic protections, and what kind of problems might arise?

All of this boils down to a consistent call from the Weinersmiths: go slow, and go big. If we want to settle space, we probably can, but not safely in the next thirty years with the current low levels of research investment (which is what Musk, Bezos et al are currently calling for). Instead, we should wait until we’ve got evidence-based, functioning systems solutions for all of the major environmental issues – radiation, regolith, gravity adjustments – and the philosophical ones – governance, sovereignty, the potential to weaponise gravity wells – and then send a lot of people at once. Every single page of this is interesting, whether it’s talking about the Outer Space Treaty, astronaut toilets, or orbital mechanics (helpfully diagrammed). The tone is occasionally a little chatty for my taste, but I suspect that’s the trade-off for a popular science book that covers so much ground in such detail without losing non-specialists.

best creepy Christmas re-read: Collected Ghost Stories, by M.R. James (1931; this edition, ed. Darryl Jones, 2013). I last opened this in 2019, but amazingly, huge numbers of the stories had stayed with me, in specific detail. James’s protagonists are usually scholars or clergymen, the ghosts and demons that they raise accidental byproducts of overeager (and perhaps naive) investigation. There’s also quite a lot of interest in the seventeenth century: witch trials, the convulsive English Civil War, and “bloody” Judge Jeffreys. This reread was made even more rewarding by finding several old BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas episodes on YouTube – not the new ones, beautifully shot and acted though they are, but the ones where Christopher Lee, cast perfectly as M.R. James, tells the story to a select group of students and colleagues, and you never see the ghost at all, just vague, suggestive shots of trees and shadows and buildings. Some of my favourites are included in this series: “Number 13”, about a diabolical disappearing room in a Swedish inn, and “A Warning to the Curious”, probably my single favourite James story, in which a young man removes an Anglo-Saxon crown from its burial site and is h(a)unted even after he puts it back. Of their kind, unbeatable.

best re-read, hands down: Middlemarch, by George Eliot (1871-2). Last fully read in 2009 (!) and I went back to the early few chapters about a decade ago but stalled out. It’s no good me saying anything about Middlemarch; it’s got to be one of the most commented-upon books in English. Let’s see, though, what struck me this time around? Well – the tenderness and understatement in some of its most intense emotional scenes, for instance. One tends not to think of George Eliot as an emotional writer, but in fact she is. There’s a scene, for example, where the vicar Mr. Farebrother fulfils a promise to his friend, the young scapegrace Fred Vincy, by asking Fred’s beloved Mary whether she’ll wait for him – despite being in love with Mary himself. It contains undercurrents of pain and friendship and belated realisation (it has never occurred to Mary that anyone but Fred could love her, and although she loves Fred back, she only realises that Farebrother himself cares for her in the sentence or two before he leaves) that run a reader through. Something else I noticed is how interconnected everyone is – everyone is someone’s uncle or aunt by marriage, or childhood friend, or old acquaintance – without it feeling as contrived as it can in Austen or Dickens. Middlemarch is a provincial manufacturing town, probably based on Coventry; its strata of society reminded me forcefully of my hometown, Charlottesville, also a place where inhabitants may come and go, but a core of People Who Know People Who Know People remains. Eliot’s obsession with web imagery reinforces the idea.

There are a million more things to say, of course, but finally for now: they say you should read Middlemarch every decade or so, and you’ll find a new focus of sympathy every time. In my early 30s and engaged, what I see in it far more strongly than at 17 is how it pulls back the curtain on married life after marriage, or rather, long-term relationships after commitment. People who choose the wrong marriage partner aren’t entirely condemned to miserable lives, but the requirement for happiness is that you be able to communicate with, and trust, your spouse, and that you both love each other enough to meet circumstantial setbacks like money trouble or professional disappointment with confidence. Neither of Eliot’s two main married couples – extravagant beauty Rosamond Vincy and aspiring doctor Tertius Lydgate; ardent Dorothea and pedantic Casaubon – can do this for one another. Dorothea and Casaubon come closer to it, though they too fail, and their marriage is hardly rescued by Casaubon’s early death, given the stipulation he puts in his will that reveals his paranoia and jealousy. But for Rosamond and Lydgate, the happiest ending they can hope for is mutual tolerance. It’s scary, and brilliant, and sobering.

#LOVEYOURLIBRARY

Hosted, as always, by Rebecca at Bookish Beck, posting on the last Monday of every month. There’s no set formula to this; you can post anything about libraries, whether you’ve recently been to an event at one, heard about an initiative at one, whatever! I use it for rundowns of my monthly library reading. Join in on your social media space of choice using #LoveYourLibrary.

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Childhood, Boyhood, Youth,by Leo Tolstoy (1852-1857): A trilogy of short early novels – Childhood was Tolstoy’s first published work – about an aristocratic boy’s upbringing and development. People call these autobiographical, but many of the details differ from those of Tolstoy’s actual life. Turgenev loved these, and it’s easy to see why; the detailed depictions of a way of life, the hunting scene and the university entrance exams and the children’s balls, are reminiscent of him. But protagonist Nikolenka Irtenyev’s mind and manners, as well as his experiences, are the focus here. The most noticeable thing about his character is his loneliness and sense of exclusion. As a noble, he’s meant to be comme il faut, a French phrase of complex connotations (he spends a whole chapter expounding on it) that include gracefulness, tact, unflappability, confidence, and gallantry. But he’s awkward and anxious, and can’t meet the standards that his class imposes on him, even while he himself has fully internalised their importance and despises himself for his inability.

Equally fascinating is the fairly open romantic attraction that Nikolenka experiences towards various young men in his circle, from childhood playmate Seryozha to his brother’s friend Dmitry Nekhlyudov, who becomes his own best friend. (This does seem to reflect Tolstoy’s own tendencies; he was attracted to both women and men, apparently.) I found the trilogy more engrossing as it went along, though your mileage may vary. It’s a shame that the intended fourth volume, Young Manhood, was never written, as one feels Nikolenka might just have started to figure out how to live with himself.

The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb (1995-1997): I wrote about this immense, absorbing fantasy trilogy for Doorstoppers in December. You can read what I thought here.

The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers (1983): Engrossing, rich time-travel novel about a twentieth-century expert in Romantic poetry who ends up stuck in the 1810s, fighting evil immortal wizards and their terrifying clown sidekicks. Features beggar guilds, gypsy kings, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, London’s sewers, body-snatching werewolves, and a badass cross-dressing woman as a romantic interest. (It’s from the ’80s, so some allowance is given for her excessive badassness and the apparent ease, not only practically but in her own mind, with which a respectable young lady poses as a beggar boy. Mercifully, Powers never talks about her body.)

This is absolutely not steampunk, despite what some reviewers bafflingly seem to believe; for one thing, the majority of the historical material occurs too early in the nineteenth century. If a comparison is necessary, it’s closer to Gaiman’s Neverwhere (the Spoonsize Boys, homunculi who can be deployed for espionage, tracking or murder, are the sort of thing he’d have made up) crossed with Stephenson’s Baroque trilogy, only without the Stephensonian ambition of explaining a major system (i.e. global financial markets and the stock exchange) through the medium of historical fiction. The Anubis Gates is content to just be an exciting, well-written book. There are some amazing set pieces – every scene in Rat’s Castle, a literal subterranean lair, is indelible – and some delightful twists. You’ll be way ahead of the protagonist, academic Brendan Doyle, in determining the true identity of his scholarly area of interest, poet William Ashbless, but you’ll enjoy watching Doyle figure it out. On the basis of this, I’d definitely try another by Powers.

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Have you read anything from a library this month?

Posted on by Elle 13

2025’s most memorable bookish experiences

This isn’t a compilation of the best books I read this year on a craft or emotional level. It’s not even the runners-up. (See here for both of those lists.) This is about something different from a book being good or great, even though many of these experiences involved good and great books. This is about the moments I had with books this year that filled me with instinctive, primal readerly joy. You don’t get a lot of that when you’re doing a literature PhD – it doesn’t not exist, but it takes some searching for. You also can’t force yourself to experience it. This isn’t, therefore, the most intellectually flattering portrait of my reading life. But it’s not definitive, either, only a snapshot taken from a certain angle.

  • The first of these actually does overlap with my best books of the year: the increasing delight I felt reading The Pickwick Papers, realising that it was genuinely great: funny, warm, engaging, everything that generations of readers have said it is
  • Revisiting Garth Nix’s wonderful Old Kingdom with a full re-read of his original Abhorsen trilogy, plus sequels and prequels (weaker than the originals, but I loved spending more time in that world!)
  • Abandoning all pretension and using the wildly overscheduled month of May to just read the purest popcorn and comfort stuff: more Cadfael mysteries, some previously unread Discworld novels, a re-read of I, Claudius. I read 23 books that month because I simply didn’t give a fuck
  • I’ve already mentioned this one, but taking myself for a solo date to read Nix’s Goldenhand in the café at Beckenham Place Park for a whole afternoon was an absolute dream Saturday
  • Being so entranced by Naomi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy during our trip to Glasgow that I read them all back to back, in ebook format, on my phone, on what felt like ten thousand trains
  • Lying out in the sun on our nine-day Yorkshire camping holiday, tearing through trashy spy fiction, a fantasy chunkster, a stone-cold realist chunkster, and finally figuring out why everyone loves Laurie Colwin
  • Two Thomas Hardy rereads, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Return of the Native, which felt both comfortably familiar and confrontingly strange, especially in the little details I noticed this time around
  • Going on an Ann Radcliffe rampage with three of her novels, The Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Italian. I so rarely read an author for more than one book in a row: it’s humbling, but delightful, to realise that the women in Regency novels that everyone makes fun of were right, Radcliffe is so damn readable
  • And, most recently – thank goodness I didn’t post this earlier – spending the entire afternoon of Boxing Day on the sofa in pyjamas with my feet resting on my long-suffering fiancé, rereading Middlemarch

Are there any patterns here? Yes, definitely: the reading experiences that tick that “primal joy” box are often cosy and non-time-bounded (on holiday, for example). Re-reads, classics, and fantasy seemed to offer the most of that this year, as well as what you might call serial reading: series, trilogies, or just multiple volumes by the same author in a row. This really confirms that one of the most appealing elements of reading for me is its power of immersion. I love being able to mentally be somewhere else.

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

Posted on by Elle 16

Best Books I Read in 2025, + Runners-Up and DNFs

Last year I wrote in my 2024 wrap-up and 2025 reading hopes post that I wanted to keep raising the bar for inclusion in the best reads of the year. I’d already said, in 2024’s best books post, how high that bar was: “I’ve gotten better and better at choosing things in the first place,” I wrote, so “I enjoy almost everything I read in some measure or another; it’s no longer adequate for a book to be pleasant, or even good, or even very good, in order for it to make the annual list.” That is still essentially true. This year, though, it felt a little bit easier to make the calls, to sort out the very good and the really fun from the likely-long-lasting. Perhaps it helped that I’ve included a list of titles that almost made it at the bottom of the post, and that I’ve tried to distinguish here between my favourite 2025 reading experiences and my favourite 2025 books (I intend to post about the former in short order). I’ll also do a full wrap-up of the year’s reading, including stats and reading hopes for 2026, right at the end of the month. For now, here’s my baker’s dozen: all books read this year but not necessarily published this year, of course.

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Old Soul, by Susan Barker (2025): An extremely grabby cosmic horror novel in which a man embarks on a globe-hopping quest to track down the mysterious photographer he’s convinced is somehow responsible for his best friend’s death. This is intercut with tense scenes in which that very photographer inveigles a young influencer into the desert. The finale truly shocked me, not so much for its violence as for the plot decisions it makes, the characters that the narrative eventually throws its weight behind. Almost by definition the novel feels very Lovecraftian, but there’s also a touch of Sarah Perry’s Melmoth here and some of the bleak Western horror-beauty of No Country for Old Men.

The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens (1836-7): I put off reading this for two years, partly because it’s very long even for Dickens and partly because I was under the impression it would be silly. How wrong I was! It’s very funny, and in some places farcical or satirical, but it isn’t silly. It’s about goodness, and how the fundamental dignity of goodness is unassailable by the minor common indignities of being alive. Pickwick is a wonderful character, but Sam Weller, his omni-capable cockney valet, is better still. All the actual writing is fresh, and the interpolated stories are just brilliant: moving and surprising and atmospheric, themselves Dickens plots in miniature. I was so pleasantly surprised by all of it; it was an absolute joy to read.

We Pretty Pieces of Flesh, by Colwill Brown (2025): The resonant story of three young women, Rach, Kel, and Shaz, who become friends at secondary school. It moves backwards and forwards in time to cover both earlier schooldays and their later lives. Rivalries, fault lines and secrets come clear, leading eventually to a moment of truth-telling and a genuine reckoning. Imagine the intensity and ferocity and precise capturing of the love girls have for their friends in Tana French’s The Secret Place, then cross it with the pop-cultural nous and the enraging revelation of personal vulnerability in Eliza Clark’s Penance. Effortlessly engaging and full of soul.

A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge (1992): Exactly the sort of thing you’d want on a long flight or a multi-step train journey. The first 80 or so pages require incredible focus and concentration: you’re adjusting not just to a new planet but to a new galaxy, where technology is decreasingly effective as you move closer to the center of the galaxy’s spin, and vice versa. Some characters are part of a race where consciousness is distributed between multiple bodies, a fact the reader has to figure out as they go along. All Vinge’s aliens are superb – differentiated from each other, with distinct cultures and subcultures and properly dynamic individuals – and you’re rewarded for the intense level of focus by constant fantastic character interactions, action set pieces, and moments of epiphany. This is a genuine modern classic of sf and one of the most brilliant pieces of writing I read in 2025.

Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison (1952): I read this for an event that Kaggsy and Simon co-run every six months, where they pick a year between about 1920 and 1980, then encourage us to read a book(s) from that year. It’s a novel of total disillusionment, of complete unraveling not just from the racist demands of white supremacy but from the pressure coming from one’s own people. You’d think, therefore, that it might be depressing or at least hard going, but it isn’t at all, largely because Ellison is a fantastic writer. He’s funny; he can do wry aphorism; he has a clarity of expression that cuts through to the heart. Invisible Man feels utterly fresh and contemporary to read because it works through these complicated philosophical and personal questions in that clear, incisive language.

Writers & Lovers, by Lily King (2021): There were a million ways this could have gone wrong, and it went right at every one of them. The title made me expect that this would be a love triangle novel, and it is, but there’s considerably more going on here, from an extraordinarily delicate dissection of grief over the loss of a parent to a clear-eyed look at financial precarity and the fucked job market for creative arts and academia. Everyone in this novel feels like an actual person; every event in this novel feels like something that really happened. Don’t sleep on this.

The Vaster Wilds, by Lauren Groff (2023): I absolutely love wilderness survival stories, and for much of its length, that’s exactly what this is. In the “starving winter” of 1610 in England’s Jamestown colony of Virginia, a servant girl leaves a stockade one night and enters a wilderness. She’s fleeing famine, plague, and the very real possibility of being caught and executed for murder. As she struggles to survive, moving north in search of French traders and deliberately avoiding the Indigenous people who live in the area, we get flashbacks to her infancy and adolescence, as well as the most extraordinary set pieces, in which physical pain and occasional delirium combine with deep religious faith to produce scenes that have the lucid beauty of a mystic’s dream. The final chapters are just exceptional, some of the finest and most moving writing I’ve encountered in years.

Essays, by George Orwell (1931-1949, pub. 2000): Genius! Genius!! Genius!!! Orwell is the antithesis to academic wind-baggery, which might be why I like his literary criticism the most out of everything in the collection. Because of this clarity, he is also memorable, which is why people tend to talk about, quote, and misquote him as though he were God. He was not; he was just an intelligent man with opinions and a readily admitted Leftist/Socialist bias. But he generally engaged in good faith with whatever he was thinking about. He doesn’t snipe or bitch or attempt to score cheaply. Nor he does let anyone or anything off the hook. Clear, authoritative, well written, wonderful.

Basilisk, by Matt Wixey (2025): SO glad I persevered past initial formatting problems. The main story here is the testimony of a “white hat” hacker named Alex, who, with her colleague Jay, discovers what seems to be a hidden online game, orchestrated by a figure calling himself the Helmsman. As Alex and Jay play through the puzzles and challenges they’re set, they receive as rewards single chapters of what seems to be the Helmsman’s memoir: an account of a brilliant but increasingly unhinged scientist in a shadowy government department, conducting research into the feasibility of developing a “cognitive weapon”. I read it in gulps and couldn’t stop thinking about it afterwards. Are there things we just aren’t meant to know? What if the cultural valorisation of endless discovery is ultimately a trap? A most superior philosophical techno-thriller.

Small Rain, by Garth Greenwell (2024): Greenwell has been very insistent that this is not to be seen as autofiction, despite the fact that what happens in it happened to him. The rich texture of Small Rain does feel more like what I still, very uncoolly, think of as “proper” fiction. The protagonist experiences a medical emergency for reasons no one can work out, even by the novel’s end, and spends a week in hospital during the autumn of 2020. It’s about care, trust, and vulnerability – when you’re sick and being looked after by strangers, but also when you love another person and choose to spend your life with them – and how those themes apply in contexts ranging from home ownership to sibling relationships to poem analysis. Greenwell’s prose is intentionally stylistic, but not clotted or heavy: fluid run-on sentences, lots of comma splices, totally engrossing, and never more precious or literary than it is human and emotive.

Arboreality, by Rebecca Campbell (2022): A novella in vignettes set on Vancouver Island in the late 21st and early 22nd century, after a series of plausible catastrophes including rising sea levels and waves of pandemics have rendered the internet patchy and vehicular travel all but impossible. The whole world hasn’t actually ended, but the islanders are so isolated to begin with that they, at least, have to start almost from scratch. It’s so realistic and yet so hopeful, with tightly woven themes of building, waiting, patience, and art. I tried to describe the central episode – in which a violin-maker cuts down the oldest Sitka spruce on the continent to build an instrument for a local prodigy – to my fiancé after finishing and suddenly found myself sobbing.

Stoner, by John Williams (1956): A beautifully subtle novel about an ordinary guy having a kind of sad-sack life. Williams reveals how two people can be fatally, horribly wrong for each other without anyone having to be evil, and how they can make each other’s worst tendencies worse over years. Stoner is not a saint, but he does try: just not enough, and not in the right way. The chapters detailing his love affair with a colleague and its results are gorgeous, spare but rich; the novel’s final scene, on Stoner’s deathbed, is absolutely masterful, especially given that the narration is in close-third throughout.

Beloved, by Toni Morrison (1987): I’d read this once before, ten years ago, and had forgotten virtually all of it. This might be the first time a reread has featured on a Best Books of the Year list for me. Much of the plot revolves around revealing not what happened, but why. Morrison is brilliant at seguing from one character’s thoughts to another, and from the present action to memories of the past. She also writes beautiful lines. One man says of his lover, “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.” Is there a better way to describe how it feels to love someone who loves you back? And is there a better book than Beloved for laying out one of the worst of chattel slavery’s violations, the way that it punished enslaved people for feeling love, even as it was unable to prevent them from doing so?

There were many almost-made-its this year, and as usual, the difference between them and the ones above the line is minimal. Here are three-word summaries on each of them, perhaps more suggestive than descriptive.

Oral History, by Lee Smith (1983): Appalachian family history. Wellness, by Nathan Hill (2023): chunky marriage portrait. Conquest, by Nina Allan (2023): formally innovative paranoia. Summer, by Edith Wharton (1917): subtle sexual horror. When We Were Orphans, by Kazuo Ishiguro (2000): loss, madness, Shanghai. Father Melancholy’s Daughter, by Gail Godwin (1991): deceptively quiet priestliness. The Lifecycle of Software Objects, by Ted Chiang (2010): astonishingly even-handed futurism. Orchid and the Wasp, by Caoilinn Hughes (2018): recent history, skewered. A Fine and Private Place, by Peter S. Beagle (1960): effortless ghostly love. The Dragon Waiting, by John M. Ford (1986): alt-history, Byzantium, vampires. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, by Samuel R. Delany (1999): eye-opening, intelligent, fierce.

I increasingly give myself permission to let things go if they’re not grabbing me for any reason, but I’m also getting better at matching book to mood or capacity. This year I only DNFd five books, which suggests a high level of general success! In brief, they were:

Red House Alley, by Else Jerusalem (1908; transl. Stephanie Ortega, 2024), @ 14%: Hated the writing style – stilted and expositional.

The Truce, by Mario Benedetti (1960), @ 17%: I kept getting distracted and bored, and the protagonist felt more wet-rag than sympathetic.

The Ladie Upstairs, by Jessie Elland (2025), @ 9%: Overwritten, overwrought. Obviously going somewhere but was going to take forever to do it, in clichéd language.

In the Shadow of Vesuvius: a Life of Pliny, by Daisy Dunn (2005), @ 38%: I really wanted to like this, but much of it offered no more than inelegant quotation from Pliny’s Letters. Also prone to digression without clear purpose, which looks suspiciously like padding.

The White Guard, by Mikhail Bulgakov (1924; transl. Michael Glenny and Roger Cockrell 2016), @ 25%: I didn’t have enough spare mental energy to figure out all the various factions trying to win control of Kyiv in the winter of 1918.

But let’s not dwell on the DNFs! Have you read any of my best books of the year, and if so, what did you think of them? If not, do any of them appeal? What are your picks for 2025’s top reads?

Posted on by Elle 39

Doorstoppers in December, II: The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb (1995-1997)

My attention was drawn to Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy by Dorian, who mentioned and recommended them in the comments here a few weeks ago. I’d heard of Hobb – she’s a prolific fantasy author – but never read her until now. The first installment is not a doorstopper, really, at 392 pages, but the second and third are 648 and 838 pp., respectively, and I read all three back to back in an omnibus e-edition, so I am absolutely counting them for Doorstoppers in December. There are SOME SPOILERS AHEAD but not many, I promise, and they’ll be clearly marked.

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Assassin’s Apprentice (1995): The protagonist of these books is FitzChivalry Farseer, who only acquires that name some chapters in to the first installment – until then he’s referred to as “boy”, or “fitz” as a common noun, which means “bastard”. He is the illegitimate child of the Six Duchies’ crown prince, Chivalry, who abdicates his place in the line of succession when he discovers that Fitz exists. Taken from a mother he doesn’t remember, he’s raised in Buckkeep, the capital, initially under the aegis of the gruff stablemaster Burrich but eventually moved into a room in the keep and given a gentlemanly education. Part of this education is his induction as the titular assassin’s apprentice: the secretive and pockmarked Chade, who kills with poisons, teaches Fitz all he knows. The book’s climax narrates Fitz’s first foreign mission, and how it goes sideways. He also possesses both the innate telepathic ability known as the Skill, and a capacity to bond telepathically with animals, known as the Wit. The Skill is rare, and desirable; the Wit is stigmatised, and those who practice it are usually executed if discovered.

A common complaint about Assassin’s Apprentice is that it’s too slow, but I think these readers may be putting too much of their expectations in the title. If you have no preconceptions about a book about an assassin, the pacing is fine. It helps you come to understand and care for the characters, it establishes atmosphere, and it accurately reflects one major thematic interest of these books, which is loyalty. This is particularly obvious in this first installment. Not Fitz’s: we know from the beginning where his loyalties lie. He is loyal to his grandfather, King Shrewd, a “King’s Man”, an alignment which will call for increasing levels of personal sacrifice as the books go on; he is loyal to Burrich, who raises him without sentiment but with unspeakable depth of feeling; he is loyal to his uncle Verity, now the King-in-Waiting, who is kind to him and has the sort of genteel gravitas that you’d want in a leader if you lived under a meaningfully monarchic system. But who is loyal to Fitz? That’s not always clear. Shrewd sometimes puts him in danger; Chade often refuses to explain things to him. His bastardy affects that: his other uncle, Regal, for example, dislikes him unreservedly from the start, simply because of his birth. Burrich, meanwhile, when he becomes aware that Fitz is Witted, makes it clear that the ability is an abomination, and that he won’t tolerate Fitz exercising it in his stable.

These books deal openly and well with emotional and physical abuse. Fitz and a handful of other Skilled noble youth are trained by a man named Galen, who first isolates them and then treats them with extraordinary cruelty. The effects are long-lasting: for the rest of the trilogy, Galen’s coterie will behave in ways that were conditioned into them during their training. This includes Fitz, who never even becomes a member of the coterie; Galen’s abuse of him is so intense that he actually destroys a significant amount of Fitz’s capacity. Later on in this series, it really matters that there are applications of the Skill that Fitz cannot use. Not only is the immediate experience of abuse – the swift reduction of a victim to abjectness and fear; the way many abused people develop a Stockholm-esque reliance on their tormentor’s positive regard – convincingly portrayed; Hobb doesn’t shy away from the serious long-term consequences of it.

There’s much more to talk about, and this is only book one, but before moving on, I should also mention the Fool. He fills the role of jester at Shrewd’s court, but much of what he says is obviously prophecy or perceptive advice in disguise as silliness. His appearance is deliberately marked as uncanny: he’s extremely pale, with nearly white skin and fine white hair, but also appears young, almost boyish. Fitz and the Fool’s relationship is crucial not only to this series but to the two trilogies dealing with the same characters that come afterwards. There is, indeed, much more to the Fool than meets the eye. In Assassin’s Apprentice, though, all we know is that he’s deeply loyal to Shrewd, fond of and an ally to Fitz, desperately lonely, and totally mysterious in origin.

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Royal Assassin (1996): From here, the trilogy becomes very plot-heavy, and it’s hard to discuss those points without spoilers. Instead, I’ll mainly talk about some of the interesting thematic material that Hobb handles through her characters’ experiences.

Events at the end of book one [POTENTIAL SPOILER INCOMING] mean Fitz experiences disability/chronic illness at the beginning of this book, as a result of poison. Hobb deals with the onset of disability really well: realising that what initially seemed a short-term illness may well be a permanent condition or array of symptoms comes with a lot of emotions, including shame, anger, and frustration. Fitz is never defined by what he can no longer do (in ways that are, perhaps, slightly more to do with plot convenience than I would really like), but it’s interesting to see this covered at all in an epic fantasy novel, where the protagonist is still traditionally expected to be a heroic achiever. Women also really come to the fore in this installment, in various ways. There’s Patience, Fitz’s father’s wife, who uses her status as a noble widely considered eccentric to shield the vulnerable in a political environment that’s becoming steadily more dangerous; there’s Kettricken, princess of a mountain kingdom married to Verity at the end of book one, whose understanding of her role as Queen-in-Waiting develops and deepens throughout this book; there’s also Molly Chandler, a poor woman with whom Fitz falls in love, and whom he treats remarkably badly throughout the trilogy. Molly is our lens on gender and money in this world: women can earn and even fight – we see female small business owners and multiple female soldiers and farmers and so on – but class status is still an issue, one that can’t be easily overcome by love.

Addiction is also a major theme. Various characters use stimulants like carris seed and Smoke; recreational drug use is generally treated disparagingly, as a character weakness or a potential one. The Skill itself is described as producing an addictive euphoria, which its practitioners should constantly guard against. In general, Hobb portrays reliance on substances as dangerous. The casual use of carris seed and Smoke on holidays is widely socially accepted, but the degeneration of the court at Buckkeep is explicitly and repeatedly linked to their overuse, and our main villain, Regal, is not only an addict but the child of one (his mother, the late Queen Desire, is characterised as a heavy user). It’s a judgmental approach, though also an effective one.

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Assassin’s Quest (1997): This is the longest book in the trilogy by far, and in fairness there is a lot to get through. Also in fairness, there doesn’t need to be this much to get through. Fitz’s narrow escapes start to get irritating: at least three instances of him being captured/seemingly doomed is one too many, and I can’t quite work out what Hobb gains (character-wise, plot-wise) from extending the portrayal of his arrogance and carelessness in these interludes. From what I could find online, this is also the installment to which other readers have had the most intense reactions. The climax and dénouement in particular seem to be frequent points of disappointment. Personally, I don’t think the plot resolution comes out of nowhere. Much has already been seeded to do with loss of the self (that addiction theme again) and the incredibly strong subsuming powers of the Skill. Kettle, a character who appears only in this volume, is a little bit convenient, but frankly I was quite pleased to have someone who was finally going to explain how some of these pieces fit together. I liked, too, that she’s an older female character who gets to behave heroically while also experiencing the realities of an aging body. PTSD, addiction and abuse are once again major themes; Hobb creates a particularly interesting dynamic when we finally realise what happened between Fitz’s father Chivalry and his uncle Regal, and Regal’s ultimate fate raises some significant, if probably unanswerable, questions about how to properly apportion blame in those circumstances. (This is necessarily coy to avoid spoilers, but if you’ve read these books, let’s talk about it!) Meanwhile [ROMANTIC-PLOT SPOILERS INCOMING], Burrich and Molly: yes. I approve. This is correct, and I refuse to accept what I understand is an alteration to this state of affairs in the sequel trilogies.

If you’ve made it this far, well done! The upshot of all this is that the Farseer trilogy is a set of wildly compelling epic fantasy novels, full of realpolitik and treachery as well as magic and questing. They also challenge tenets of the genre in a way that probably felt more surprising in the ’90s (around the same time that George R.R. Martin and China Miéville were, in very different ways, making similar challenges), but are still salutary: the focus on bodily vulnerability, whether through disability, illness, or injury, keeps the stakes real for every character, and Hobb does well on gender and class too. Her writing style isn’t complex or subtle – this isn’t John M. Ford – but it’s clear and engaging. There’s obviously much more to explore in this world, and luckily she’s written four more trilogies set there (well, three trilogies and a quartet, plus assorted other stuff). I’ll definitely be back, and probably soon.

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Borrowed from my local public library #LoveYourLibrary

Posted on by Elle 12

Doorstoppers in December, I: Darkmans, by Nicola Barker (2007)

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So here’s an odd thing. Darkmans is very bloody long – 838 pages in the paperback edition I read – which is, by any quantitative standard, a doorstopper. And yet by a particular qualitative standard, it didn’t entirely feel like one. This is not quite either a good or a bad thing. What I mean is that a book can be long and yet can avoid allowing you to settle, with a metaphorical ruffle of your feathers, into its world. The experience of reading Darkmans is not reminiscent of curling up in front of a fire and getting cosy, which is what we tend to associate with doorstoppers. Instead, it feels like riding a willful and cunning horse. You can run along for extended periods of time in reasonable comfort, but it’ll always buck and try to throw you before too long. The way you respond to the horse bucking, as it were, is going to be what determines the overall tenor of your experience.

Me, I decided to hang on tight through the bucks and keep applying the spurs (this metaphor is absolutely out of control), so what happened was I read 838 pages of exuberant formal and narrative chaos in two days. It was an experience, if not exactly the relaxing one that Doorstoppers In December is designed to promote.

First of all, we’re in Ashford, Kent, where the Channel Tunnel starts. History is a weird proposition in Ashford; it looks like one of those no-places composed entirely of new-build estates and ring roads, but all no-places are built on top of what used to be someplace. Barker’s concern throughout Darkmans is history as a concept, as constant revision and constant presence, something that pops out and hits you on the nose the more you try to keep it down. Her cast of characters is wide and interconnected, but we start with Beede and Kane, a father-son duo whose strained relationship is attributed by both of them to their differences in personality. Beede is a campaigner by calling, a man possessed by the idea of a better, slower, more authentic life, who does things like chair a committee to get a pedestrian light installed at a dangerous road crossing point or attempt to save a batch of antique tiles from a building knocked down for Channel Tunnel construction. Kane is a cynical drug dealer who couldn’t care less about most things and who resents his old man for existing. Both are romantically obsessed with Elen, a podiatrist whose husband Dory experiences periodic fugue states in which he behaves with erratic violence. Their small son Fleet is similarly troubled: he’s building a French cathedral he’s never actually seen, in lifelike detail, using matchsticks, and refers to his father as “John” when the fugues overtake him.

What’s going on with Dory? What’s going on with Fleet? Why do Beede and Kane seem to hate each other so much? What does Kane’s ex-girlfriend Kelly, a foul-mouthed chav stuck in hospital with a broken leg, have to contribute? What about Gaffar, a Kurdish delivery driver hired by Kane? All of these characters add their pieces to the mosaic, and all are demonstrations of the hazards and temptations of historical revisionism. As far as Dory and Fleet go, the strong implication is that both are being possessed by the ghost of John Scogin, a real historical figure who served as Edward IV’s court jester. Scogin’s violently psychopathic tendencies were enabled by the protected status of jesters, men who were permitted to speak truth to power – and thus to acquire their own power – in an era when that was a reserved privilege. Scogin’s ghost represents the Whackamole nature of history. He can’t be contained by theory, sentiment, or wishful thinking; he sows confusion, chaos, pain, distress. He’s the anarchy of what actually happened, the uncontainability of people and events. Beede and Kane’s relationship, it’s eventually revealed, is bad because of past actions: Beede allowed Kane’s mother to foster codependency with him, as she became ill with cancer and Kane was forced into caring responsibilities that a child should never have to shoulder. The narrative they’ve spun for each other since – Beede as a saintly do-gooder, Kane as a deadbeat – is uprooted by the Scogin-esque revelation of a very different story.

Kelly and Gaffar have similar trajectories. Kelly is the scion of an infamous local family, the Broads (her uncle, a dodgy building contractor, features in a subplot where he cons Elen and Dory over repairs to their roof). Nothing good comes from the Broads. Her brother has been in an overdose-induced coma for years, and dies in the course of the novel; her mother is portrayed as an overbearing, benefit-snatching harridan. Kelly’s story involves the discovery that she might be related to Dr. Andrew Boarde, an eighteenth-century bishop and biographer of Scogin. As it turns out, this is probably not true, but it matters deeply to Kelly; the idea that her family has experienced a tragic slide over generations is far more compelling than the reality that they have probably been petty criminals for centuries. At the same time, Barker doesn’t punish her for wanting more meaning in her life. She has a religious conversion experience in hospital, and while she retains her miniskirt-wearing, inventively-cursing personality, she also seems to find more purpose after being “saved”. Maybe historical revisionism has its place, Barker seems to be suggesting; maybe deluding ourselves isn’t an entirely bad idea. Gaffar, meanwhile, is one of the oddest characters in the book. He too has an understanding of his family’s history which appears not to be the whole truth, and he functions interestingly as a non-English counterpoint to the very English histories that otherwise populate Darkmans. The novel ends with him: he comes face to face with whatever the Scogin entity actually is, and sits down to gamble with it, in a closing image reminiscent of that famous chess scene from The Seventh Seal.

There’s so much going on that you might think it’d be easy to just surrender to the novel, but then there’s the style. One of Barker’s primary techniques is to show a character’s internal thoughts, often just a single-word reaction, on an intervening separate line between the more polished articulations of the narrating voice. Take this, for example:

He glanced down –

Damn

The tip of his spliff had dropped off into his lap. And there was still a small –

Fuck!

– ember…
He cuffed it from his jeans and down on to the floor. He checked the fabric – no hole, but a tiny, brown…

Bugger

He took a final, deep drag –

Nope…
Dead

– then tried to push the damp dog-end into the ashtray, but the ashtray, it seemed, was already full to capacity.

This, basically, is why the book is so long. The action is just “Kane finishes a cigarette”, but it takes up a lot of physical space on the page, and it yanks the reader’s attention back and forth between official narrating voice and irrupting character reactions. In that sense it’s a brilliantly effective way of formalising Darkmans‘s main preoccupation: embedded in the text itself is the experience of having an authoritative story disrupted and scattered, again and again, by something that represents the banal formlessness of reality. The constant use of parenthetical phrases achieves roughly the same end. Here, we’re with podiatrist Elen, musing on her work:

The foot was hardly the most glamorous of the appendages (‘yer dogs’, ‘yer plates’, ‘yer hoofs’). No one really gave a damn about it (although – fair’s fair – the acupuncturists had done a certain amount for the cause, and the reflexologists had sexed things up a little, but in Elen’s view, the short-fall still fell . . . well, pretty damn short). The foot had sloppy PR; it mouldered, uncomplainingly, down at the bottom (the fundus, the depths, the nadir) of the physiological hegemony. It had none of the pizzazz of the hand or the heart. The lips! The eyes (the eyes had it all their own way). Even the neck, the belly … the arse. Even the arse had a certain cachet. But not the foot. The foot had none (the foot had Fergie, with her lover, sprawled on a deckchair, in the Cote du Tawdry).

It’s distinctive, successful, and not particularly conducive to readerly relaxation. But then, Darkmans doesn’t want us to relax. I’m not entirely sure that its reiteration of its theme couldn’t have done with some variation, and I’m equally not sure that the past needed to be so relentlessly painted as aggressive; there are other mental frameworks for considering history, including as a means of positive emotional connection across otherwise unbridgeable gaps of time. What Barker does, though, she does with skill and guts. I’ve read three novels by her now, and this is far and away my favourite.

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Borrowed from my local public library – which actually bought this title at my request! #LoveYourLibrary

Posted on by Elle 18