Month: February 2025

February 2025 Superlatives

At the end of 2024 I said I only had a few reading goals for 2025. One was reading The Pickwick Papers, which happened this month (the link to my review in February’s #LoveYourLibrary post is below). Another was reading more authors of colour; only two in February, okay but not outstanding. The last was to keep raising the bar with the quality of my choices, and this has been a very good month for sheer quality, as well as for quantity. I read fifteen books in February—not bad for the shortest month! Five were from libraries, which I wrote about here. I managed two rereads, which is especially pleasing; I’m increasingly keen to incorporate more of those into my bookish life. I also wrote a rundown of the book haul that I managed this month with my Christmas gift cards and loyalty points. Here’s the rest (including a few from the book haul)!

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best voice(s): We Pretty Pieces of Flesh, by Colwill Brown (2025). I can’t improve on Blair’s review of this, but I can add my voice to the praise. Told throughout in South Yorkshire dialect, which is rendered so sensitively that it poses no particular problems for a non-speaker to read it, this is the resonant story of three young women—Rach, Kel, and Shaz— who become friends at secondary school. Moving backwards and forwards in time to cover both some primary school days and their later lives, their 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.

This is a great book—well-written, very funny, entirely engrossing, and moving—but it’s also an important one, one dealing with moments in time that have either been memory-holed or not narrated in mainstream publishing from this perspective before: those ’90s-’00s years when everyone thought they didn’t need feminism anymore; the post-crash implosion of the high street that ruined already-decimated communities; the post-Brexit crumbling of what trust in the social fabric remained. (There are surprises here meant to rebuke London-centric readerly assumptions: Shaz, the most working-class and stereotypically “chavvy” of the three girls—promiscuous, hard-drinking, prone to scrapping on nights out—votes Remain, because she understands perfectly well that her communities are kept on life support by EU funds; Rach, the one who gets out and goes to university, is suspected to have voted Leave, to have turned credulous when faced with slogans.) Effortlessly engaging and full of soul; I absolutely loved it. Source: NetGalley; published 20 February

grew on me most: Beginning, by David Eldridge (2017). I read this because my undergrads had to. It’s a one-act play that takes place over the course of about two hours in a Crouch End living room after a flatwarming party, in which two people—Laura, whose flat has just been warmed, and Danny, who turned up with a business client of Laura’s to whom she extended an invitation on a whim—move through the tentative steps of opening themselves up to each other. It’s meant to be played in real time; there are stage directions like [Silence. Five minutes?] As a result, I’m not convinced that reading Beginning is the correct way to engage with it, at least not as a first go-round. Obviously, the actors’ decisions about what to do during those silences are crucial to the way the play goes over, and the way we’re meant to understand the development of their relationship with each other.

That said, though, it’s possible to exercise your own imagination while you read. The reason the undergrads had to read it was because we were talking about time that week, and I’ve always thought that time—both quantity and quality—is something writers use to get us to understand character dynamics. If we’d had the time (heh), Nathan Hill’s Wellness would have been a good counter-example, a novel that is 600+ pages long because it needs to simulate what 20+ years feels like for its protagonists, whereas Beginning immerses us in a floating present (of about two hours’ duration) in order to achieve the same kind of audience empathy. The long view vs. the deep view, I guess. Anyway, I felt I had a better handle on Beginning after discussing it, as usually happens. Source: free access via DramaOnline.

most satisfying reread: Things in Jars, by Jess Kidd (2019). I first read this in April 2019 and absolutely adored it. Victorian PI Bridie Devine’s value to the police comes from a childhood spent, first, trying to survive in London as an Irish street child, and secondly under the tutelage of Dr. John Eames, an eminent surgeon, who bought her for a guinea from her elderly guardian and essentially apprenticed her to himself. When she takes a case involving the theft of a baronet’s daughter, Christabel, who has some extremely unusual traits, Bridie’s drawn back into a world she thought she’d left behind: one of body-snatchers and collectors of gruesome natural phenomena, corrupt physicians and traveling shows. Kidd is A1 at atmosphere, whether it’s the tense silence of servants’ quarters in a house where something is badly wrong, or the squalour of a Seven Dials rookery, or the arrogant maleness of a surgical theatre at Bart’s. Things in Jars is a deeply effective pastiche of Victorian sensation fiction mixed with just a splash of penny-dreadful supernaturalism. I did notice this time, however, that sometimes Kidd’s tone and her content are at odds; there’s an ironic distance to some of her descriptions of terrible violence and cruelty that, while they may reflect Bridie’s attempts to protect her mind, soured on me slightly as the story progressed. I’m glad I read this again, and I’m also glad to have confirmed that it’s no longer essential to have in my home library. Source: old personal copy

most alarming academics: The Sleeping Land, by Ella Alexander (2025). It’s not dark academia if they’re not actually in the academy for the entirety of the novel, but The Sleeping Land‘s archaeological dig group sure shares some characteristics of the genre. Charismatic and independently wealthy leader, check; simmering sexual resentment, check; a contained setting, check; things going badly wrong, check. I’d argue, though, that this novel’s forebears are more VanderMeer and Strugatsky than Tartt and Bardugo. Arriving in Siberia right after the fall of the USSR, the group discovers that their access to the dig site—a sacred prehistoric cave—is mediated by a local contact named Vasiliy who seems to have a variety of shady connections, and perhaps an agenda of his own. A coke-dealing American businessman on the Trans-Siberian Express accuses them all of working for the KGB, or the CIA. Isolated at the site for weeks at a time, minor incidents make each group member begin to doubt elements of their own reality. There’s a real sense in this novel of a metaphorical other world, a system of behaviour and conduct and money that underlies the seemingly straightforward imperatives and preoccupations of the explorers. VanderMeer gets at this when he writes of Central; Strugatsky, in his descriptions of the Institute founded to study the Zone. Alexander writes so well, too, with an unshowy clarity and competence (but an eye for the telling detail) that makes it easy to surrender to the reading experience. My sole complaint is that the ending feels very abrupt, but otherwise, I’d highly recommend this. Source: NetGalley; publishing 4 March

best space adventure: The Deep Sky, by Yume Kitasei (2023). I bought this because Laura T. recommended it as a science fiction novel completely devoid of cisgender men. It’s basically a murder mystery set on a generation ship, although the pre-plot premise—that the generation ship, funded by a trillionaire, is crewed entirely by people who can get pregnant as part of the mission—brings us back repeatedly to the years spent in training by an ever-dwindling number of candidates, including our protagonist, Asuka. Laura makes the point, in her review, that by eliminating cis men from the cast list, a clichéd source of tension is instantly eliminated too, allowing Kitasei to bring out richer and less familiar sources of conflict among the crew: ethno-national or political or straight-up interpersonal dynamics left over from training academy. It’s very gripping, as a mystery novel should be; I read it in a single day.

Yet I didn’t quite love it as much as I’d expected to. Perhaps that’s because of Kitasei’s authorial tone, which often felt a little unpolished, or—relatedly, I think—the way that Asuka has something of the YA heroine about her in her constant inclination to mope, her ready submission to self-loathing and self-blame. (She’s pulled up for this by her best friend, late on, but that doesn’t undo it.) Perhaps this is all part of the point: training leaves the crew in a state of suspended emotional adolescence, especially because they’ve spent the last ten years—the better part of their twenties—in cryosleep. But that makes me want to nitpick, too: if the secondary mission protocol is to get pregnant at least once and ideally multiple times, isn’t that a biologically contrarian itinerary? Why not get the crew pregnant first (easier to conceive at 18 than at 28), have them do the necessary ten years of heavy-lifting child-rearing, then put them all in cryosleep? It’s not the point of the novel at all, but it’s one of those things where, once you start pulling a thread, you may see more of them dangling. Regardless: if you’re hankering after something like the Rocinante-set chapters of an early installment of The Expanse, this’ll help fill the niche. Source: bought new (but free) with loyalty points

saddest: Flesh, by David Szalay (2025). I read the third chapter of this as a standalone story in the New Yorker, and liked it, though the very flat, choppy dialogue and descriptions aren’t my usual go-to. The ending of the story version is quietly melancholy, and in the book, those effects are compounded, so by the end of the novel Flesh (a very weird title, there’s nothing either lushly decadent or body-horror-esque here) I found myself quietly sad. In an interview, Szalay said he wanted to write a story about being on the receiving end of events without controlling them—about passivity—and also about emotional numbness, which strikes me as a very masculine way of talking about or engaging with passivity. On a technical level, he’s quite right, it’s easier to do that sort of thing via what he calls “cumulative suggestion”, so we get vignettes of István’s life between the ages of about fifteen and sixty, in all of which things happen to him but he never seems to be making the decisions, he never seems to be an agent in his own life, even when they’re really serious things happening: an accident that causes a neighbour’s death, a move to Britain, an affair with his employer’s wife. I don’t dislike what Szalay is trying to do here; there are very few literary authors who take seriously the inner lives of inarticulate men, and Flesh has probably given me a better framework for understanding things about the world that I don’t naturally get (like inarticulacy and passivity as character traits) than many a literary novel of recent years. It is, however, just inescapably sad, because living passively means having to cope with a lot of things, and there’s a sense of low-level despair attached to that coping. It’s a very skillful novel. I’m still not sure that it has a particularly strong reason for existing, apart from as an experiment in achieving those effects Szalay discusses in the interview, but it hasn’t put me off reading more of him. Source: NetGalley; publishing 6 March

best-crafted reread: Reservoir 13, by Jon McGregor (2017). I think I was hoping this would prove less marvelous than I remembered, so I could give it away and make space on the shelf. No such luck; it’s still fantastic. My old review, from 2017, says everything about the plot and characters and emotional beats, so go read that; I can’t improve on it. What I can say here is what I noticed this time around: a sense of the village’s collective memory and the way the missing girl becomes part of it. She isn’t forgotten. The story moves away from her most of the time, but it does that with everyone else, too. Becky Shaw has a permanent place in the memories of the villagers, even if McGregor threads a suggestion that this remembering, too, will pass. I also saw more clearly how he builds this community through repetition of natural events (mating badgers, feeding goldfinches, the river at various points in its course) as well as the human traditions which ebb and flow, occurring the same time every year but not always well-organised or well-attended or reliably samey (fireworks, carols, Mischief Night, well-dressing). It’s not quite true that the novel has no narrating voice, as I thought earlier—technically what McGregor does is a mobile combination of close third person, free indirect style, and a pull back to third person omniscient in the sentences that take us into nature. But it’s as close as makes no difference, and closer than I’ve seen any writer manage before or since. It truly isn’t the “story of” any character, except of course that of the missing girl, whom we never see. It’s staying on my shelf. Source: old personal copy

most annoying thesis read: The Magdalen, by William Dodd (1777). I had assumed this was a reread, but actually I don’t think it is. Still, it felt familiar because the whole novel is a yoinked-out plotline from The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House (1760). I’ll probably come to appreciate it more after I’ve written a thesis chapter on it. It’s hard not to be irritated by a novel written by a Cambridge-educated cleric in which a woman’s unchastity—even if the decks of plot and characterisation are stacked as high as possible to make readers feel sympathy for her—is unequivocally described as sinful behaviour for which repentance is the only redress. My argument, which I wrote about six weeks ago and haven’t looked at since, appears to be that Dodd gives his penitent prostitute a greater subjectivity and individuality than the rest of the texts associated with the Magdalen House charity, thus posing a powerful challenge to anti-prostitution writing’s narrative conventions from within their own ranks. I can support that from the text itself, but not without effort. Might need to iterate on it. Source: Internet Archive

warmest bath of a book: In the House of the Seven Librarians, by Ellen Klages (2006). Technically a novelette at just over 10,000 words, but this has been published as a paperback by Aqueduct Press and has its own listing on Goodreads and StoryGraph, so I’m counting it as an individual work. This is just a lovely, fairytale-like story about a little girl who’s abandoned as a baby in the book return slot of a Carnegie Library. The library itself has long since been abandoned, but the seven librarians who chose to remain there have kept it running, and the library itself takes care of them, with resources and food. There’s so much in this about the love of books and the love of the buildings that contain them, with enough library in-jokes about book-binding and the Dewey system and card pockets to satisfy any devoted user. The story itself is quite simple and doesn’t dig too deep—of course Dinsy can’t stay there forever; of course she wants to see the world, not just read about it—but the way Klages builds the world of the library as a gorgeous, nestlike place as well as a repository of excitement and adventure, and the way the story acknowledges the need for balance between seclusion and engagement with the outside world, makes it cosy without being twee. Entering rotation as my newest comfort read, I think. Source: Uncanny Magazine

best multiverse: Bridge, by Lauren Beukes (2023). Bridge, daughter of a neuroscientist who became obsessed with the idea of the “dreamworm”—an object that could facilitate travel to other worlds—hunts across realities for her mother after the latter dies. There’s been a fair bit of discourse about how the multiverse story is this generation’s sf subgenre of choice, and this is a great example of a multiverse story that handwaves its science but takes its own moral and ethical implications seriously. Bridge’s increasingly single-minded quest is not presented as an unalloyed good. Her best friend Dom, a nonbinary Latinx person whose characterisation walks a line between hiply contemporary and timelessly staunch, understands far more clearly than Bridge does what the risks and consequences might be. There’s a case to be made that Dom is the hero of the story, even though Bridge is the protagonist, in the same way that Sam Gamgee is the hero of The Lord of the Rings: the bestie sine qua non, without whom the day is not saved. What we eventually discover about the way the dreamworm functions, its second- and third-order effects, pushes us to question the motives and desires of both Bridge and her mother, Jo. And then there’s Amber, a fellow dreamworm user/sufferer who’s managed to unite most of her otherselves across universes into what she calls an “Ourmind”. Chapters from her perspective have a Stephen King-like atmosphere and intensity; compelling in her monomania, Amber is terrifying, dangerous, and perfectly camouflaged across most of her timelines as a postmenopausal woman with a small, fluffy pet. Bridge has the detail and lived-in feel of a mainstream novel and the philosophical heft of all good science fiction, and the mystery structure—Where’s Jo? How does the dreamworm work?—ensures the reader is as engrossed as the characters. It’s worth checking out if you want something entertaining but smart and skillfully composed. Source: bought new (but free) with loyalty points

best use of religion: Ordinary Saints, by Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin (2025). It’s very rare to get a contemporary literary fiction novel that genuinely understands the sincerity and power of religious faith. Ní Mhaoileoin’s début—in which a lesbian thirty-something in flight from her emotionally cold Irish Catholic family has to reckon with the past when a process is set in motion to canonise her brother Ferdia, a deeply charismatic young priest dead in a sports accident at twenty-four—really does. Jacinta, or Jay, has lost her faith, and the pain and cruelty associated with the Church—not just to her, but the legacy of the Magdalene Laundries and the widespread rot of child abuse—comes through as clearly as you could hope. But you also understand what faith meant to Jacinta as a child, what it meant to Ferdia; what it means to her mother, drawn to the abstractest details of theology and determined to support the canonisation case, and her father, quieter but dedicated to his annual pilgrimage trips. Possibly Ordinary Saints’s greatest achievement is in its refusal to assign total blame or villainy to any of its characters. Yes, Jay’s parents seem unsupportive of her sexuality, neglectful and absent in her childhood, but there are reasons for their behaviour—not excuses, but reasons that make sense and make those characters real, not just cardboard cutouts labeled “Evil Zealots”. The text demonstrates, too, other ways of merging the conviction of faith with the truth of someone’s identity. Jay’s friend Clem, another queer character with religious parents, puts up with their discomfort about his sexuality more easily; when she asks him why, he replies simply that he loves them, and they love him, and they all just try to live with each other. It’s not signposted as a better way of coping than Jay’s, but it’s there for the reader to see as another option. (Minor characters are another of the book’s strengths. I loved the cheeky wit and the acknowledged pain of Brian Fallon, Ferdia’s best friend from seminary, whom Jay finds in London years later, or Lindsay, Jay’s philosophy-lecturer girlfriend, whose initial reaction to learning about Ferdia is hearteningly terrible and who, over years, does better.) Snap this one up. Source: NetGalley, publishing 13 March.

How has your February reading gone? What’s the best thing you read this month?

Posted on by Elle 30

#LoveYourLibrary, February 2025

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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February was a good library month for being so short! I used both my local libraries and Senate House, though I ought to use the latter more. I also got the local library system to buy in four new books, which are now on reservation for me; I should get a notification when the copies arrive and I’ll write about them in due course. (They were: My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones; Walking Practice by Dolki Min; The Truce by Mario Benedetti; and Hotel Splendide by Ludwig Bemelmans.) Meanwhile, in February I read five library books, with some pretty good genre and era range.

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The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens (1836-7): For years, I’ve been reading a Dickens novel more or less annually, usually in the winter months. I’ve worked through all of his novels this way; The Pickwick Papers was my last one. I put it off for two years (see “more or less annually”, above), partly because it’s very long even for Dickens and partly because I was under the impression it would be vignettes instead of a fully plotted novel, and silly to boot. How wrong I was! It starts out vignette-ish, to be sure, but a plot kicks in after too long; you can actually see it begin to happen around chapter four, which is rather exciting, as young Dickens (twenty-four when he wrote this) starts to rev his engine and commit to his characters. 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. (Wodehouse’s Jeeves, although his accent is more couth, and he would shudder at the comparison, surely derives a strand or two of DNA from Weller.) Dialogue and exposition are clear and uncluttered; Dickens hasn’t yet worked himself up into a clotted descriptive style, so all the actual writing is fresh. And the interpolated stories are just brilliant, moving and surprising and atmospheric, themselves Dickens plots in miniature: the Tale of the Queer Client, for instance, who pursues vengeance on his cruel father-in-law through the courts unto the old man’s death, or the proto-Christmas Carol tale of the goblins who steal a curmudgeonly sexton on Christmas Eve and return him to Earth a better man. I was so pleasantly surprised by all of it; it was an absolute joy to read. Now I have to decide what to do next: the nonfiction and journalism, starting with Sketches By Boz, or begin a reread of the novels? Source: Bromley libraries

Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire (1968 [transl. Myra Bergman Ramos, 1970]): Only by empowering the peasants to recognise their objective reality and become historical Subjects can the revolutionary leaders claim legitimacy and further the Becoming of the People! Or, to put it differently, the ability to act in your own life and upon an oppressive reality in order to transform it is every human being’s birthright, and education should be designed and pursued so as to promote this, to exercise which birthright is to become more fully human. There is quite a lot more to it, but that’s the gist. You can’t forget that Freire was writing at a time when talking about revolution wasn’t embarrassing, when the world hadn’t yet lost its faith in the regenerative capacity of these things. (Mao Zedong wasn’t dead yet. He’s quoted more than once. The Great Leap Forward and subsequent famine had happened at this point, as had most of the Cultural Revolution’s devastating violence. They are not directly addresed at all, though Freire does discuss the many “errors and miscalculations” into which revolutionary leaders can fall, including the reproduction of oppressive systems in the name of the revolution.) I do like his metaphor of the “banking method” of education, though, where students are seen as totally empty ignoramuses to be filled, paternalistically, with the teacher’s knowledge. He says it doesn’t result in anything really being learned in the deepest sense, and he’s right. So for that alone, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was useful. Chapters 2 and 4 were particularly engaging to me because they’re the most linked to actual real-world examples. Worth reading. Source: Senate House Library

Small Worlds, by Caleb Azumah Nelson (2023): Over the course of three consecutive summers, Peckham boy Stephen makes decisions about his future, falls in love and then out and then in again, and begins to understand the reality of his Ghanaian-born parents as fallible humans with histories of their own. Nelson really excels at wide-shot scene-setting, like a walk Stephen takes from the station to his house that establishes the atmosphere of a hot, lazy South London summer’s day, or several scenes at backyard barbeques and house parties that capture the ebb and flow of energy in those spaces. I think he may be a little too in love with the repetition of his best phrases, like “two Black crowns touching” and “because all our problems can be solved by dancing” and “something spiritual, something I didn’t know I needed”. There’s a rationale for this technique, which echoes the call-and-response of the gospel music that Stephen’s mother listens to with such joy, but it gets a touch precious. I also found the on-again, off-again relationship with childhood best friend Adeline frustrating, but loved the emphasis on trying to know your parents as a newly-minted adult. There’s a particular focus on the way that migration affects family history, and the snapshots of Stephen’s mother’s early years in London are superbly rendered: she becomes lifelong friends with a fellow Ghanaian she meets at a bus stop, and the two women initially bond over their mutual exhaustion and hatred of the cold. Nelson’s a talented writer, even if his protagonist here seems like he’ll shortly age out of much of his angst. Source: Bromley libraries

The Years, by Annie Ernaux (2008; transl. Allison L. Strayer, 2018): My first Ernaux, and I’ll definitely read more. I read this only after watching the extraordinary stage adaptation (on at the Harold Pinter Theatre until April, with a five-woman cast including Romola Garai, Deborah Findlay, and Gina McKee). Some of the play’s detail actually comes from Happening and A Girl’s Story, although the outlines of those traumatic events are in The Years, the book, too. The approach Ernaux takes to autobiography here is basically collective, so the pronoun is “we” for most of the book. Occasionally, “she” is used for descriptions of photographs and slightly more personal interludes, but that’s as intimate as it gets. As a result, its portrait of a Frenchwoman’s life between 1940 and 2006 is both individual—through those photos and the elements of family life that are highlighted—and something deeper and broader, national, semi-mythological. The book, even more than the stage play, helps you understand the phenomenon of living through events as a human being. Often, Ernaux describes not having thought about major historical moments on the day they happen, unless they’re happening in France, and sometimes not even then. (The only global event that truly breaks the skin of the personal is September 11th.) Yet, still, we feel the currents of politics, the impact of technological advances, the philosophical alterations in worldview from decade to decade. It’s so clever, so Woolfian; parts of it also reminded me of Lively’s Moon Tiger, with its insistence on the complete uniqueness of the world inside every person’s head and the way a whole history of the world dies when an individual does. Source: Bromley libraries

Double Star, by Robert A. Heinlein (1956): A washed-up (though very confident) actor is shanghaied into impersonating a kidnapped politician for—at least initially—the completion of a ceremony of extreme importance on Mars. Of course, that’s not the end of it; circumstances arise, he has to keep doing the job. I’d only previously read one Heinlein, Starship Troopers (link to my old review), which I liked a good deal and think is more politically complicated than the pro-fascism charges often leveled at it would suggest. Double Star, however, is really brilliant, and I think the reason why is the protagonist, Laurence Smith, who “becomes” Supreme Minister John Joseph Bonforte. Smith starts out narrow-minded, prejudiced, and slightly self-important. His initial disgusted contempt for Martians is removed by mild hypnotherapy, but it starts a chain reaction; by acting the part of a truly decent man who wants humanity to be its best self by embracing alien cultures, he acquires that goodness and open-mindedness. This book has been considered a satire on the shallowness of politics, an argument that second-rate actors could replace every statesman and no one would know the difference, but I don’t think that’s Heinlein’s point at all. He has one of his best characters, Bonforte’s friend and spaceship pilot Dak Broadbent, describe politics as “the only sport for grownups”; it’s considered a noble calling, a profession not just to be pursued with integrity but actually capable of instilling it. It’s an unromantic view but a very hopeful one, and the ending is quite beautiful. (Old-timey sexism alert: the secretary is in love with her boss, cries and faints a lot, and the pilot threatens to “spank [her] round fanny”, which—I hasten to add—in American means “butt”, not “vagina”. On the other hand, she’s a good driver and often contributes major policy initiatives to Bonforte’s speeches. YMMV.) Source: Bromley libraries

Have you read any of these? Have you picked up anything from a library this month?

Posted on by Elle 35

Post-Christmas Gift Card Book Haul

At Christmas I got two bookshop gift cards, as well as a bunch of physical books, so I really did pretty well; my complaint that “no one buys me books” does not apply in this instance. I was saving up those gift cards for an in-person spree, especially since I realised I also had £20 worth of points on a loyalty card; my greedy little brain calculated I could get eight books if I was careful about their prices. In the end I managed seven, because the Perényi, Vinge, Griffith and Rouf were all above £9.99 in varying degrees, and I only bought the top two—on loyalty points—in person, at our local Waterstone’s. It’s a decent-sized branch but at this point my tastes are at a peculiar point of depth and width where really only the gigantic five-story one on Piccadilly is likely to have physical copies of the specific titles on my wishlist. I got lucky on a local browsing trip, spotting a wishlist title and one I’d been recommended, and threw caution to the wind (it felt great). The others I bought online using the gift cards. Not as fabulous a feeling as spending several hours shelf-lurking with a large basket, but it’s still great to get a big fat parcel full of books in the post. Here they are!

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The Deep Sky, by Yume Kitasei (2023). I’ve already read this, and will be talking more about it in this month’s Superlatives post. Laura T. recommended it as an example of a gynocratic novel (all the crew on the spaceship where it’s set can get pregnant, and the vast majority of the characters in flashback sequences can too). A bomb goes off on a generation ship and the protagonist, half-Japanese half-American Asuka, has to find out whether it was done by, or with the assistance of, a fellow crew member, and if so, who. You’ll find out what I thought!

Bridge, by Lauren Beukes (2023). Bridge, daughter of a famous neuroscientist who became obsessed with the idea of the “dreamworm”—an object that could facilitate travel to other worlds—hunts across realities for her mother after the latter dies. Possibly a bit of In Universes or The Moonday Letters, possibly entirely its own thing. I’ve read one previous Beukes, the Clarke Award-winning Zoo City; there, the style is so omnipresent that it gets exhausting, but it’s also exhilarating. I like the idea of this.

Tales From the Perilous Realm, by J.R.R. Tolkien (1997). That pub date is for the compilation; these are five of Tolkien’s “non-legendarium” stories, i.e. ones not set in or about Middle-earth. They’re still what he called “fairy stories”, which is to say fantastical. There’s one called “Roverandom”, about the adventures of a transformed dog, and “Farmer Giles of Ham”, where a staid countryman has to slay a dragon, and “Leaf By Niggle”, which is apparently about art and futility and the importance of trying anyway. It is definitely time that I read them.

A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge (1992). Not sure I can do better than the Wikipedia summary here: “a space opera involving superhuman intelligences, aliens, variable physics, space battles, love, betrayal, genocide, and a communication medium resembling Usenet.” It’s a chunky modern classic of sf and I’m fascinated by the idea of intellectual potential being limited by where you physically are in space; how do you make that into something you can build a novel around? Vinge does it, apparently.

More Was Lost, by Eleanor Perényi (1946). Perényi, an American, married an impoverished Hungarian aristocrat (not an oxymoron) just before WWII. This is her memoir of their early life together, the struggle to manage and keep the estate, and then their return to America after the outbreak of war. I’m really hoping for beautiful writing and an elegiac tone. It’s published by NYRB so you know it isn’t silly. Can’t remember why I’m aware of this, but probably because a fellow book blogger loved it.

No Touching, by Ketty Rouf, transl. Tina Kover (2021). A novel about a Parisian secondary school teacher who takes a second job stripping in a nightclub and finds it fulfilling in ways she didn’t expect. I’m so excited for this—I love fresh takes on sexuality in fiction. I wonder how it’ll resonate with the Annie Ernaux I’ve just read (The Years; more on that in #LoveYourLibrary on Monday).

Hild, by Nicola Griffith (2013). I’ve read this before; it’s a reimagining of the early life of the woman who became Abbess Hilda of Whitby, but who started out as a Northumbrian princess in an unfriendly court. When I read Mary Stewart’s Merlin novels, they reminded me of Hild. I’ve never owned a copy, and the sequel, Menewood, is out after a decade-long wait. (It’s still not in paperback and I can’t afford it in hb, but I want my own copy of that too.) Can’t wait to revisit Hild’s world.

Have you read or heard of any of these? What appeals to you most from my haul? Apart from The Deep Sky, what should I read first?

Posted on by Elle 26

Short stories from the New Yorker, IV: Egan, Bolaño, Kapur, Ong, Heti

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“Safari”, by Jennifer Egan (first published 2010; chosen by Greg Jackson). This is a chapter of what would become Egan’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010), which I read, back in October 2013, and enjoyed immensely. I haven’t reread it since, but I recognised the outline of the story/chapter, even after over a decade. It moves between members of a group of rich Americans on a safari holiday: a record producer, Lou; his much younger girlfriend, grad student Mindy; and his children from an earlier marriage, Charlie (fourteen, a girl) and Rolf (ten). Egan’s really good at free indirect style and her transitions between character perspectives are so smooth, you barely notice them. This is also a tremendous story for the use of flash-forward, which I happened to be discussing with my undergrads immediately after reading it. If there’s a more brutal use of the device in literature than at the end of this story, when we find out exactly what’s going to happen to Mindy, Charlie, and—most heartbreakingly—Rolf, then are returned to a moment of unfiltered sibling love and connection as Charlie and Rolf dance with each other in the bar where the adults are all drinking, I don’t know about it. I also love the use Egan makes of two elderly birdwatchers, fellow tourists, who are constantly overlooked by the others (because they’re older women) and who therefore have a slightly God-like or even authorial function: always perceiving, rarely if ever perceived in their turn, except in the story’s final sentence. Just brilliantly put together.

“Labyrinth”, by Roberto Bolaño (first published 2012, transl. Chris Andrews; chosen by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain). This whole story is based on a real photograph of the staff of Tel Quel magazine, a group of French literary theorists including Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers. I found it intensely boring. Bolaño clearly has intentions: the story has a style, with its occasional run-on sentences, and there’s a sense of a door opening out of the photograph and into the (imagined) lives of its subjects. It’s not unartful. It’s just really dull. There’s no dialogue, though people talk to each other; we’re just told the gist of what they say. The interactions in every scene are reported and distant. I couldn’t hook onto any of it. The discussion was interesting; HolyWhiteMountain says he likes the story because he thinks it’s written in a spirit of revenge, that the “Central American writer” figure who visits the magazine offices and is rejected could be a Bolaño stand-in, and also that Bolaño is “mean” here, which he (HolyWhiteMountain) finds “more interesting” than authors who are “nice to their characters all the time”, whatever that means. I found that illuminating, because I disagree. There’s nothing inherently interesting about an author being mean. Yes, a story needs friction of some sort, but that’s not at all the same as deliberately degrading or nastifying or stultifying your characters. What I was looking for was some sense of dynamism, some attempt at understanding something. It’s an effectively dark story but not one that really goes anywhere. It was published after Bolaño’s death, too—it, and others, were found on his computer—so who knows whether he’d have approved.

In the 13 January magazine: “Prophecy”, by Kanak Kapur (first published 2025). The wealthy scion of an Indian real estate family chooses love over money when the family soothsayer forbids his marriage on the grounds of mysterious astrological incompatibility. That’s sort of all there is to it, apart from a little tremor of uncertainty over whether the soothsayer was right when the couple’s daughter is born premature. Yet despite its simplicity, I found this incredibly moving. The ending is really what makes it, but even without that, it’s an affecting example of how it takes bravery to reject privilege, and also of how trying to control and know the future is a fool’s game. As far as I can tell this is Kapur’s first New Yorker publication, and she’s apparently working on a novel. It’ll be interesting to see what she produces.

In the 20 January magazine: “Ming”, by Han Ong (first published 2025). I’m not entirely sure I understood this. The premise is very good: Thaddeus, an alcoholic struggling poet, is bequeathed an enormously valuable antique jade cup by an Egyptian academic and collector whom he befriended while writer-in-residence at a cancer ward. What will he do? Will he keep it as a memento of a strange and poignant relationship? Sell it for anywhere between twelve and sixty million? Just as importantly, will this unexpected windfall cause him to fall off the wagon? I enjoyed most of it. The ending, however, had me stumped. Thaddeus agrees to sell the cup to a broker, but only after a period of two years, during which he’s not to be contacted about it. The last we see of him, he’s staging bizarre scenes with tiny figurines in and around the cup, then photographing them. Has he gone mad? Is this an evolution of his art? What’s the symbolism? (There’s got to be symbolism; it’s too weird to be read straight.) I confess myself confused.

In the 27 January magazine: “The St. Allwynn Girls at Sea”, by Sheila Heti (first published 2025). This is the first thing I’m aware of by Heti that isn’t autofiction (How Should a Person Be?; Motherhood), creative autobiography (Alphabetical Diaries) or completely surreal (Pure Colour). It is, however, at least a little bit surreal, because the premise is that during a time of what appears to be European war, a girls’ school and a boys’ school move onto two ships, on the basis that it’s safer to be at sea, and traverse the oceans while schooling goes on. The technology seems to be about 1940s-level—children on the two ships exchange letters with one another, no one has a smartphone, but photography and warplanes exist—except, of course, during WWII the sea was by no means the safest place to put children. So we’re already a little disoriented. The story is about first disillusionment, I think, a theme that runs through details like the girls’ usage of a photograph as an “Oracle” that can answer all their questions, and the key central problem is the uncertainty of Dani over whether Sébastien, writing to her from the boys’ ship (and allegedly in possession of a girlfriend elsewhere), likes her. Odd story, slightly untethered, but I liked the way Heti presented her girl characters, including perpetually tragic Flora with the philandering father and irritable, reasonable Lorraine, whom no one likes because she won’t participate in the social fantasies that make school (and shipboard life) bearable. It’d be nice if this were part of a longer fiction, a chapter in a novel maybe.

My favourite: “Safari”. Golden Raspberry: “Labyrinth”.

Further dispatches from the realm of short story reading: I’ve noticed that the stories I read in the magazine with my eyes alone are often the stories that I don’t relate to well, or lose patience with, or find boring. (“Labyrinth” is the exception that proves the rule; it’s the first story I’ve listened to where I found my mind properly wandering.) This is odd, and can’t be solely down to editorial decision-making “now” vs. “then”, because The New Yorker has had the same fiction editor for twenty-two years. I wondered, then, if hearing the stories materially altered my experience of their quality. I conducted an experiment: my undergraduates were recently assigned ZZ Packer’s “The Ant of the Self”. Obviously, I read it too. It was provided in PDF form. I decided, on the spur of the moment, to read it aloud to myself (yes, alone in my flat). And do you know what? I think I got more out of it. I’d probably have liked it anyway, on the basis that Packer is genuinely a brilliant story writer, but I felt more reading out loud, and saw more about structure and craft. This has to be the trick. I’m going to try it again and see what happens.

Have you read work by any of these authors? Or any other good short stories recently?

Posted on by Elle 19