phantomtomato

Just one post from me to close out the final two months of 2025. Offline (which is most of where I’ve been), I spent these months on a paper deadline, moving out of Boston after my temporary residency, managing a home remodel, and doing a bit of winter break travel. Not much time for reading, so I only read three short books across two months. Expect a similarly lean next couple of months—I will be traveling internationally for a month between January and February and might compile those months into one reading post as well. Maybe I will finish at least one book!

Hope you’ve all been having a nice winter season and enjoying a break, or time with friends or family. :)

The Loser, by Thomas Bernhard
Translated by Jack Dawson

The Loser is a stream-of-consciousness style short novel about three men: the unnamed narrator, Wertheimer, and Glenn Gould (IRL pianist Glenn Gould, 1932 - 1982). All three pen were piano students together in their youth in the world of this novel, and their lives diverged from that point—Glenn Gould off to prodigal fame and an early death by stroke; Wertheimer giving up on the piano and eventually killing himself; the narrator rejecting his musical training, becoming a writer, and attempting to document the lives of his friends.

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I think that the summary of this, much like Mrs Dalloway or Shyness and Dignity, is that such a book is a journey best undertaken when one can read for prose. Ultimately the story does not matter, and the characters are necessary for voice but often peculiarly flat in that theiir relationships exist in retrospect. There’s a weird combination of amazing focus and shallow depth of field, so that perhaps one or two characters approach real, but their sharpness compared to surrounding fuzziness makes htem unreal again. I’m prepared to say that every reader should try something like it—if only to know how else a commentary can look, outside the Austen-shaped bounds of society novels. I appreciate that I’m missing a great deal of this one. Reading it made me think, though. I’ll hold some of its ideas for a while.

Old School, by Tobias Wolff

Old School is an American boarding school novel—from 2003. Written in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye or A Separate Peace, Wolff gives us a semi-autobiographical look at the life of a New England preparatory student in 1960. I find these books quite different from their British counterparts—more cynical, for one, but also more distinctly alien, in that the narrative is positioned as remote and not an invitation into that world. The boys usually leave it, violently, through war and expulsion and running away. They don’t belong there, and neither do you. I don’t quite know why; perhaps it’s something to do with the fact that boarding schools aren’t/weren’t as central in civic and social life here. The quintessential American school setting is a public high school. And this book is not that, it takes place in the near-mythical wilds of a private boys’ school in the Northeast.

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So, I think, this book is for fans of those other more well-known classic American boarding school novels, who want to keep seeing this world. It fits that genre to a tee, and it’s a fair entry for its look at Jewishness, or for asking how an author develops. I don’t quite think it matches them, though. There are probably better modern books on the subject. (And there’s definitely a better modern movie: The Holdovers [2023].)

Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann
Translated by Kenneth Burke

Gustav Aschenbach is a middle-aged widower and author who, inspired by an encounter with a stranger one day, decides to set off on a vacation. He ends up in Venice, where he becomes enthralled by a teenage Polish boy named Tadzio. This obsession grows from observing the boy at their shared hotek, to following his family through the streets of Venice, to making the decision to withhold information about a cholera outbreak in the hopes of being trapped in quarantine with the family. Through all of this, Tadzio and his true opinion of Aschenbach remain enigmatic. Aschenbach is ultimately unsuccessful, and the novel ends with death by cholera—the titular death in Venice.

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I'm cheating on this one—half of the last book was read during October, but, well, I've been too busy to type these up until now, so they're all going in together. :)

The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst

This novel tells the story of Nick Guest, a recently-graduated Oxford student who becomes a lodger in the London house of the Fedden family. Toby Fedden, his uni friend and crush, makes the connection—Toby’s parents, Gerald and Rachel, take Nick on as a guest to watch the empty home while they are on holiday. Nick’s new friendship with the troubled daughter, Catherine, paves the way to a longer-term living arrangement, and the result is a three-part story about 1980s British politics, touching on class, wealth, race, queerness, and scandal.

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So I would firmly call this a good book, if a slightly long one for how much I got out of it. Any unevenness of feeling that I have about it is in wishing that it had fit in more, not to have done less of what was there. Nick is not the most likeable protagonist, but these hangers-on to wealth rarely are, and his qualities enable him to have more proximity for longer, which gives us access to so many different stages of excess. What’s interesting is how little the university friend Toby is around for any of this, and how much is done with Nick’s awkward role as part-guest, part-staff, and part-family. What’s there for those is all great, and the setting is vibrant. I think this really solidly falls into the literary category of my reading—the sort of book which needs attention and doesn’t strain itself to amuse you, but which has the writing quality to honor that attention.

Bunny, Mona Awad

This novel follows Samantha Heather Mackey, a 25 year old woman in her second and final year of a creative writing MFA program at a fictional elite American university. Her cohort is all women, but the other four students (the Bunnies) form a clique which Samantha both envies and reviles. Their instructors include the woman leading their writing workshop (who Samantha nicknamed Fosco after The Woman in White) and Samantha’s thesis advisor, nicknamed The Lion, a man who seemed to withdraw from her after mysterious incidents in her first year. Outside of her program, Samantha spends most of her time with a wild goth chick named Ava, and the novel creates tension through Samantha’s divided loyalties between her existing friendship with Ava and the new opportunity offered by invitations from the Bunnies.

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The overall impression I would convey is that this book is messy. The main character is messy, the story is messy, and the prose is messy, so the message and intentions cannot help but also be messy. I did not find it the fun kind of mess.

The Guest Lecture, Martin Riker

Our protagonist, Abby, is a female Economics professor who has recently been denied tenure. Despite this career upset, she must complete a pre-existing commitment to deliver a guest lecture. This book takes place in the span of just one evening, the sleepless night before that guest lecture as she plans her talk with the help of her imaginary friend, John Maynard Keynes.

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What I can’t settle on is whether this makes the book “bad.” I mean, in my subjective opinion. I don’t recommend it, based on how I felt the story moved away from its most interesting elements over its progression. I didn’t like the protagonist, though of course that alone doesn’t make a book bad. But mostly it’s that I don’t come away with a sense of what Riker was trying to achieve, and all of the key elements (experimental prose, flaws of the protagonist, growing away from the academic thesis) can come across quite differently depending on the light that you read them in. Perhaps the most accurate thing for me to say is that Riker did not sell me on a vision which would allow me to read this combination in its best light, and if it were a better book, I could have been sold.

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

Clarissa Dalloway is the Late Victorian Ideal, grown middle-aged. It’s 1923, she’s in her early fifties, and she must prepare to host a high society party at her London home this evening alongside her husband, Richard Dalloway, who is some sort of minor conservative politician. Over the course of a single day (I’m sensing a theme: this, The Guest Lecture, and the Solstaad book from August), we follow her preparations which take her around London, where her life brushes up against so many others. The book flits between perspectives, picking up old friends of Clarissa’s but also strangers, including our deuteragonist, the young war veteran Septimus Warren Smith. We see the parallels and contrasts between different genders and classes in Interwar England.

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My thoughts on this book are a bit more scattered than I would like, or than this book deserves. It was a good introduction to Woolf, and reading it has made me interested in reading more of her work, which has evaded me despite owning Orlando for years. I suggest a deliberate read-through, one with time for rereading sections over again, and though I cannot prescribe a “best” way of reading it, I can say that one gets a lot of mileage out of a beater paperback and a pencil, here.

I reread some of The Longest Journey in anticipation of RMSE, and ended up writing a fic about it. ❤️

Extraordinarily Civilized
Fandom: The Longest Journey - E. M. Forster
Relationship: Stewart Ansell/Rickie Elliot
Rating: Teen
Warnings: None
Tags: Edwardian Period, Broken Engagement, Pining, Getting Together

Stewart Ansell receives an objective lesson in the cow’s existence, even when working very hard not to look at her.

Love, Leda - Mark Hyatt

This novel has a fascinating backstory to its publication. Hyatt was an outsider poet in the 1960s and early 1970s, before he died by suicide. His poetry remained a niche enthusiast interest for much of the past fifty years, and luckily two of those enthusiasts decided to compile his poems into an anthology and reached out to his family and friends as part of that process. One of his friends had kept thousands of pages of his writing, including a complete novel manuscript, safe for nearly five decades. The result is this, rescued from oblivion. Hyatt’s novel is a wild, first-person stream of consciousness narrative about the titular Leda, and his experience as a poor, queer man in 1960s London.

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I do recommend this. To me it’s incredible to recover lost art and give it public due, sort of a time capsule, and something that could not be created now. It is rougher than other novels—the author was not here to work with an editor, and the compiler wisely opted not to impose much editing. It has the quality of a manuscript, but a quick, pacey one, if the style agrees with you.

The Incandescent - Emily Tesh

Dr. Sapphire Walden teaches invocation magic (demon summoning) at Chetwood school, a private boarding school in England. We follow the course of one school year with her, in which her staid schoolmistress life is shaken by a dangerous demon incursion, the hauntings of her own past, student dramas, possession, and two separate romances. This is an eventful, teacher-focused magical boarding school novel for anyone who has ever thought, “but how did those Hogwarts instructors manage?”

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In sum I’d put this down as a solid modern fantasy novel that’s most interested in the question of what it means to be a teacher—as a matter of logistics, career, and identity. It has a cool approach to integrating magic into our world, it has a high-stakes plot, and it has romance elements, but those are mostly secondary to the examination of life at Chetwood and concerns of identity within that system.

Shibboleth - Thomas Peermohamed Lambert

This book came recommended by a friend who knows the author; it seems to have had a fairly small promotional cycle on its release this year, so I wouldn’t have heard about it otherwise. Shibboleth is a satirical campus novel set at modern-day Oxford, taking aim at the patterns of identity politics in student activism. The protagonist is Edward Zahir, whose grandfather was from Zanzibar but who was raised essentially white and middle-class English. The students around him are invariably wealthy, but from different backgrounds: white, English Angelica; Black, Egyptian, Muslim Youssef; white, English, gay Conrad; Black, American Liberty; white, German, Jewish Rachel. The identities of this group, plus a loose collection of secondaries, form the network of conflicts which take place in the novel.

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As it stands, I cannot recommend this book. It was also quite long, over 350 pages, so the reader needs to be very tolerant or very determined. I might just not get the context fully, not being English or knowing that educational system. Definitely the humor was not for me. I recognize parts of my experience in there, of course I do, but without the tempering elements which make them real. And I learned, in reading this, that I need more empathy for characters in the stories that I read—even, especially, the ghoulish ones. I only resented the protagonist more for having been given the privilege of depth and nuance, and having been forgiven his shortcomings, when the others so often were not.

Small World - David Lodge

Small World is the second book in the Campus Trilogy by David Lodge, a famous set of connected satirical campus novels. I’ve read and reviewed the first one previously. I wouldn’t have read this except that I found a copy in a little free library just around when I was reading Shibboleth, and I can never resist a narrative set. Despite that, let me be plain that I strongly do not recommend this book or any others in the trilogy, as the two that I’ve read have been horrifically sexist, hardly free of other bigotries, and simply not that compelling outside of academic navel-gazing interest.

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So it’s overall a major distraction, and the satire is weakened to the point where I begin to question its value. And Lodge is careful and observant, and describes a culture and an era that I see value in having documented—but it’s not worth reading at this cost, and frankly, it’s not worth recommending, even for the historical value, without heavy caveats. Which I have never seen done.

I read other things after the dark academia! Though honestly the second book took me two weeks and I finished it up just yesterday; let us forgive this slight accounting error and treat it as June. In July I’m planning to try Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent and one of my bookstore backlog items, but as always, we’ll see what turns up. Hope you’re staying cool and enjoying some fresh produce. My red currant bush was so productive in its first fruiting year and I’m delighted.

Cakes and Ale, W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham’s Wikipedia page contains an involved discussion of his literary mediocrity, detailing criticisms of his output both contemporary and retrospective. Particular attention goes towards his supposed lack of brilliance and beauty, despite the clever correctness of his prose and storytelling. I would have understood that, perhaps agreed with it, until I reached the final chapter of Cakes and Ale.

This is a classic sort of navel-gazing novel in which an author writes a fictionalized sketch of things known from life. Willie Ashenden (not the spy novel protagonist; Maugham reuses his name here) narrates in the first person as he navigates a present-day friend’s attempt to write a post-mortem biography of a dead Great Author. The friend, Alroy Kear, knew the Great Author, Edward Driffield, later in Driffield’s life. He wants Ashenden’s youthful recollections of the author before he was great, when they were acquaintances in the same small village. Ashenden reminisces about his life and knowledge of Driffield.

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Lord Dismiss Us, Michael Campbell

Terence P. Carleton is a senior prefect at the Weatherhill School starting his final summer term. He’s already sat his exams and will be headed to Oxford in autumn. A new Head of school, Crabtree, and his wife and teen daughter are beginning at Weatherhill following the prior Head’s death. Existing masters, like the old Dr. Rowland and young Cambridge scholar Eric Ashley, must adjust to the new Head’s regime; a wide cast of secondary characters includes the school reverend Cyril Starr and a pretty, new boy named Nicky Allen.

This 1960s portrait of British public schools was written to be contemporary and critical, for the discerning adult reader. It’s blurbed by Christopher Isherwood. Campbell set out to write a fictional treatise on homosexuality in schools, and he covers his subject to an amazing extent. Crabtree wants to root out this “muck” and will extract blood by the end of term. Dr. Rowland is the repressed older teacher; he initially turns a blind eye towards sex and romance among the boys, but is swayed towards Crabtree. Ashley is the wild young instructor still reeling from his own boyhood romance, driven to ever-more instability by the eradication crusade. Reverend Cyril Starr might not desire fleshly things, but he does collect a stable of his favorite type of boy. And the boys, well—Carleton falls for Allen and is absurd in his ascetic attempt to keep that love pure, i.e. nonsexual. Most other named boys in the book are fucking someone. The ones who aren’t become arms of Crabtree’s crusade. It’s a messy, homosocial, homosexual world in which women and girls are foreigners or enemies, but the greatest enemy of all remains the patriarchal definition of acceptable masculinity.

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And for regshoe, this exchange:

Ashley: ‘Do you know E. M. Forster’s “The Longest Journey”?’
Carleton: ‘Yes, it’s very difficult.’
Ashley: ‘It’s the most interesting of them all.”

I’m calling this month a bit early so that I enjoy the rest of my holiday reading without rushing to finish in the next week. :) I really enjoyed this month, especially the first two—and that’s another reason for this going up now! After two great books in a row, it’s a bit difficult to want to follow them with something which simply won’t be as good (to me), as much to my tastes. Do you ever feel that way after reading something? I need a sort of come-down to adjust back to books that aren’t nearly perfectly aligned with my interests.

The Temple, by Stephen Spender

This was the first great book that I’d finished in what felt like a long time. I loved it. It also felt like I was completing part of my literary collection in reading it, as I’ve read Auden and Isherwood before, and now I have Spender as well.

The Temple is a thinly-fictionalized account of Stephen Spender’s youth spent living abroad in Hamburg, Germany. It opens on him as Paul (all real figures have been given aliases), badly managing an early infatuation with a fellow university student. His poems about this crush lead to friendships with Auden and Isherwood expies as well as a man named Ernst Stockmann, who is a friend of one of the college deans and soon becomes an admirer (romantic, artistic) of Paul. Ernst invites Paul to spend the summer of 1929 with his family in Hamburg. Germany was then an escape from censorship and the anti-homosexuality laws of Britain, and both Auden and Isherwood were already making use of this. Paul, their disciple, seizes on the invitation to launch himself there.

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I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys Auden or Isherwood, who is interested in queer or Jewish experiences during the Interwar period, or who enjoys autofiction. It’s one of those rare books in which a queer author, late in life, has outlived the profanity laws which stifled their younger writing and can finally see it published. That alone makes it a story worth reading.

The Secret History, by Donna Tartt

Where does one begin when a novel occupies so much space in the modern imagination? It is nigh-impossible to escape some peripheral awareness of The Secret History as a reader of campus novels. The book’s fame and accolades have only been augmented by the past decade’s creation of Dark Academia—literary trend, clothing style, digital aesthetic. In such a context, a book cannot only be a book.

Despite all of the forces against it, The Secret History is a very good book. It tells the tale of a group of college students studying Classics at a small liberal arts college in Vermont, modeled very much on Tartt’s own undergraduate experience at Bennington College. (This is, by the by, how I first encountered the novel: the Esquire piece from 2019 got shared around to me as a liberal arts grad. I read and enjoyed it at the time, but wasn’t moved to read any of the novels mentioned.)

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The Bacchae, by Euripedes

When embarking on a new genre, I never know how to write about the first work I encounter. That’s a bit of a lie—I think that I read Oedipus Rex and Lysistrata in high school. I certainly don’t remember particulars. The sum total is that, in reading The Bacchae, I am both unsurprised by and unfamiliar with its conventions. I’ve seen the form, but I have no meaningful context for it. I’ve spent years circling around the classics by reading those old Victorians and Edwardians, and so I’ve grown a sense of their consequence, a certain era of their cultural cachet and meaning, and read my share of one-off poems. But to sit with a long piece, one of the great tragedies, is a different task.

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Two books up this month.

Changing Places by David Lodge

I got this recommendation from an article in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, and in true Baader-Meinhof fashion, have since seen it mentioned another handful of times. This is a campus novel about two academics, one British and one American, completing an exchange semester at the other’s university during the sunset of the 1960s. It’s a highly referential novel—both of these characters, and the author, were English professors—and would reward a reader who is deeply situated in classic British literary references and tropes of novelistic structure/form.

It was a good novel but not an enjoyable one. I struggled particularly with the sexism in the story. Both of the professors were at midlife crisis points in their careers and marriages: one’s wife is demanding a divorce which prompts him to accept the exchange, and the other’s lack of career (and thus financial) success is straining his ability to be present for his wife and three children. This is a premise which I expect to deal with gender, especially roles within a marriage/household, and I’m not sensitive to the mere fact of sexism. But in this book I struggled to determine where the characters’ sexism ended—not all of it felt like commentary, and I think that the combination of intentional commentary and unintentional (?) bias made all of it feel intolerable. I guess that the short explanation is that this felt like a book written by a man who thinks that sleeping with students is caddish at worst.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

This was my book club book for Spring 2025. It’s my first piece of sensation fiction—and now I understand the name! The book is a thrilling tale of a young woman who, through a bad marriage, loses both money and identity. It follows the subsequent quest to try and regain them for her. It contains classic tropes like mysterious parentage, an inheritance plot, women wrongfully committed to asylums, identity switch-ups, dastardly foreigners, and more. In 250k words, there is certainly room for all of that! And all the excitement makes the book a snappy read, despite the length.

Unfortunately, this also somewhat decided me on my future with sensation fiction. I would read another novel with a discussion group, but not on my own. I found it challenging to feel a meaningful connection to the characters (positive or negative) as the plot around them was all-consuming. Now that I’ve got those answers, I’ve no interest in continuing to dwell on the characters’ lives or experiences. My favorite two were definitely Marian Holcombe, half-sister of the female romantic lead, and Count Fosco, a villainous Italian with a mysterious background.

Of all it covers, the book has the most interesting things to say about the role of women in English society at that time. Not all great things to say, mind, but the author’s training as a lawyer leads to more care and attention towards the legal complications of the central female character’s situation than one might get from a less-informed writer. There will be a sequence of high melodrama, and then grounding conversations which remind us of what would actually be required to reverse some new horrible circumstance. I do recommend it in that vein—there’s much to consider about why it would be possible for our villains to engineer the disadvantages that they do, above and beyond the usual questions around motives.

But this is paired with the unskippable narration of Marian, a female character forced to embody the “contradictory” (to Collins) roles of proactive agent and, uh, womanhood. At every daring action, she bemoans some womanly quality of weakness in herself—whether or not she’s actually demonstrating it!—and other characters are constantly praising or demeaning her for how well she does or does not fit feminine ideals. Her treatment is complex and the plot could not exist in this form without her; I don’t mean to suggest that her writing is flat or that her creation deserves scorn. Rather, Marian is an example of some of the characteristic difficulties in the handling of proto-feminist characters in books of this period, and the unique decisions in this portrayal make her essentially unpalatable to me. Which is a shame, as she’s one of the two main narrators of the piece, and the other is the dreary male romantic lead who is best when playing investigator and not character.

Overall, I am always glad for having taken part in these discussion groups, but of the Victorian bricks that I’ve now read, my preference remains in Middlemarch.

booknook created a great template for reviewing your 2024 year in reading, and I’ve edited it to fit me. I think the big takeaway from last year’s reading is that I’m happy with where I’m at in terms of number of books, variety, etc. Posting about my reading here on Dreamwidth has been one of my favorite online experiences this year—it’s very satisfying to look back on those posts, rather than needing to flip through my notes scattered among other thoughts in my physical journal. That’s also been a large portion of my personal writing in 2024! As I go through a period of lower interest in transformative fandom, but not a lower interest in reading new things, reflecting on the things that I’ve read (and occasionally getting to chat with other readers) has filled the role for me that sharing fic did in years past.

In 2024:

I Read: 27 books to completion

My Reading Goal: was to post at least 12 updates to my Dreamwidth journal about my reading, which I did exactly! I skipped December and condensed April and May into one post, but I also made two standalone book review posts. I’m happy with this; the point of this goal was to make reflecting on my reading a regular part of my DW life and to keep my journal active, and I did that.

An Author New-to-me in 2024 I Really Enjoyed: was Allen Bratton, whose debut novel Henry Henry absolutely tore through me. I loved it, and I’m looking forward to seeing what Bratton’s career contains in the future!

My Favorite Book of the Year/Books I Read in 2024 That I Recommend:
Favorites are difficult! I loved Where Angels Fear to Tread and Howards End by Forster, and Henry Henry as mentioned above. This was also a great year in emotionally devastating queer manga, with The Poe Clan, Claudine, and Run Away With Me, Girl. I’m not big on choosing single favorites, and any of those really could be it, so instead I’d call them a group of titles that are easy to recommend. They’re so obviously great that if the premise and format of any sounds interesting to you, it’s probably worth reading.

I would also recommend A Separate Peace to fans of the homoerotic boarding school novel genre, which stands out among the boarding school novels that I read this year. I also enjoyed two fantasy books that I read this year, very different in tone: The Idylls of the Queen (Arthurian mystery) and The Great When (sardonic riff on the British portal fantasy).

In 2025:

My Reading Goal: is to again post at least 12 Dreamwidth entries about my reading

My TBR List: includes a bunch of books that I purchased in the second half of 2024:
The Farewell Symphony, Edmund White
Nocturnes for the King of Naples, Edmund White
Love, Leda, Mark Hyatt
The Temple, Stephen Spender
Lost Property, Ben Sonnenberg
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins (spring 25 reading group book)
Star Clock Liddell, Yoshimi Uchida (on preorder)

I’d like to also read these unreads sitting on my bookshelf:
Orlando, Virginia Woolf
The Secret History, Donna Tartt

I am currently reading The Book of Life by C. H. B. Kitchin, which will be my first novel of the year.


I’ve dropped a lot of the potential questions in this template, but if it looks interesting to you, go check out the full set on booknook!

This is likely going to be my last reading roundup of the year. November was a slow month, meaning that I only just finished the second of my November books today-in December! Between the US election, the US Thanksgiving holiday, and the end of the academic term, I’ve been a bit too occupied with other things to keep reading at the top of my to-do list. I look forward to a bit of extra time over the winter break, and I hope to return with a reading roundup in January. :)

There is one item of good news in all of that busyness: I have officially received tenure from my university! I’ve known that I would for a few months now, but it’s great to have that all public and announced—it confirms that I’ll get to take next year off as a sabbatical, and it’s a culminating experience for all of the work I’ve done over the past six years. This is the goal for any academic, and now I’m past it… I’m excited for the new experiences and challenges that come next! (But after my well-earned year off of teaching!)

The Great When by Alan Moore

I purchased this the day after the US election. It felt the right moment for escaping into a bit of fantasy. Alan Moore is an author that I know for his comics work—Watchmen, From Hell, and so on. I was surprised to hear that he’d written a novel (not his first, apparently!), and I was curious to know what a graphic novelist did with a prose novel.

The Great When is a portal fantasy set in London in 1949. Dennis Knuckleyard, 18, works at a used bookshop in the East End and is nobody special. However, an encounter with a used book that should not exist draws him into another world, and the quest to dispose of it, avoid the nasty types who want to steal it from him, and prevent the uninitiated from finding the magical world leads him to a host of new connections and demands that he muster a bit of bravery and competence.

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I enjoyed this book. It’s the first in a series but reads well as a standalone, and I might recommend it on that merit. I also like it as another entry into the British Boys Portal Fantasy club, especially one which meaningfully examines class through its choice of protagonist. The prose is strange for sure, and I don’t love it, but I got used to it. It reads like Moore indulging himself—he has so many outlandish descriptions, and even the non-magical sections are studded with references to literature and music and art and film and occult history. This is a man who truly loves Edwardian ghost stories and historical occultists stringing together a plot and some new characters to get to play around with their ideas, their contexts, their lives. In some ways, it has the addictive quality of reading an old pulp novel—which, all told, I think that Moore may have been pleased with.


Bertram Cope’s Year by Henry Blake Fuller

I was browsing Standard EBooks and found in the summary for this novel that it was about a gay character—and Wikipedia backed this up by calling it the first American homosexual novel! Well, that bit of notability meant I had to read it.

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Overall, this lives as a great read if one is feeling patient enough to take on character study, historical detail, and subtly-drawn relationships (at least, between Phillips, Randolph, Cope, and Lemoyne). It is not a page-turner, and it is no mystery why this book has lived on primarily in academic circles as a landmark work in the development of the queer novel.

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

I started this three times before it took. No one told me that Brideshead was a frame story! The first chapter, introducing us to a narrator broken down by the second world war and resurfacing long-buried memories upon revisiting Brideshead Manor, is truly very dull. I wanted a story about English social class, not a war story. It isn’t actually a war story, but you must hold out for a little while to get there.

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Decent Fellows - John Heygate

Denis Bailey attends Eton College. He’s about sixteen, short for his age, and just behind his longtime friend in moving through the school—a new term separates them as the friend joins an elite society of senior boys, leaving Denis to find new friends to share tea with. He settles on a motley bunch of slackers, all of whom are united by their families’ wealth and status. Within Eton, the impact of this is limited to what they can bring to tea or how many new suits they have made in a year; during the holidays, Denis finds out just how much their home lives diverge.

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