Less slumpy in November – I read some excellent books this month. The real issue has been the feeling that I’m teetering on the verge of running out: my print TBR is down to zero, my Kindle TBR is down to one (which I’m meant to read with a friend at some point in the near future). The library has certainly ridden to the rescue a few times, but if a reading material crisis occurs out of hours, their ebook holdings don’t always have what I want. (It’s a bit like shopping in a Nisa Local; you can probably find something, but you can’t really go in with specific ingredients in mind.) Recently, the solution has been rereading, the value of which is becoming ever clearer. Still, it’s a good thing Christmas is coming. This month I read thirteen books. Some were covered in November’s #LoveYourLibrary post; here’s what I made of the rest.

best time travel: The Motion of Light in Water, by Samuel R. Delany (1988). The subtitle of this memoir is “Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village”, and of Delany’s adult life it covers about five years (plus quite a lot of childhood and adolescent experiences and developments). What a five years, though. He married a woman (his best friend) straight out of high school because of a pregnancy scare, despite both of them knowing he was gay, and remained married to her for nearly twenty years. (She was Marilyn Hacker, who became a National Book Award-winning poet.) There must have been something in the water in this place and time; both of them have extraordinary creativity and talent from a very early age. They have lots of friends, and move in circles of people who are or become artistically famous, but there’s very little name-dropping, and what there is is truly delightful. (In one anecdote, a nineteen-year-old Delany impulsively invites W.H. Auden and Chester Kallmann to dinner at his and Marilyn’s walk-up; they bring wine and are thoroughly lovely to the two younger writers. In another, Delany – who initially planned to be a professional folk singer – is slated to play at a bar in the Village that had previously promised the slot to another guy. The other guy storms out in protest. His name? Bob Dylan.) I also loved the way Delany deals with his and Marilyn’s untraditional relationship structure: they’re open, he’s gay, she turns out to also be gay, but they both have a lot of sex with each other and end up in a throuple with a (married) drifter which lasts for months and culminates in the guy’s wife moving in down the hall, largely unaware of the relationship. It’s brilliant – not played for laughs, though the humour of the situation is acknowledged, but rather explored with a retrospective curiosity. Even if you’ve never read his novels, this is worth tracking down, although it’s hard to find in the UK: I ordered it new from its publisher, University of Minnesota Press.

best sadness: Stoner, by John Williams (1965). You were all right, okay. This is a beautifully subtle novel about an ordinary guy having a kind of sad-sack life, and it’s one of the best things I’ve read all year. I was put off this by reading a review that described Stoner’s wedding night as “marital rape”; this is not a strictly inaccurate description of what happens, but Williams’s approach and tone is so even and delicate that it doesn’t feel gratuitous or salacious. I also don’t agree with the charge that the novel exonerates Stoner for everything about the marriage’s failure while making his wife Edith a manipulative hysteric. What Williams does is reveal how two people can be fatally, horribly wrong for each other, and can make each other’s worst tendencies worse over years. Stoner is not a saint; he’s overly passive, and naively idealistic well into adulthood. But he does try – just not enough, and not in the right way – with his daughter Grace, whose trajectory is among the most painful in a very painful book. He also gets to experience love with a colleague, Katherine, whose portrayal proves that Williams is perfectly capable of writing interesting, complex, agentic women. The chapters detailing the affair 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. Isn’t it annoying when books that everyone raves about turn out to be great. This one absolutely did.

two long-overdue rereads: Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Northanger Abbey (1817, but written 1803), by Jane Austen. I wish I’d enjoyed both of these more. I mean, Austen is superb; I’ve read all her published novels at least twice as well as her collected juvenilia and Lady Susan, and her achievements are just undeniable. But Sense and Sensibility struck me as really quite melancholy, far more so than I’d remembered. Elinor really suffers, for a very long time, and no one pays much attention, and Marianne – even though she’s obviously wallowing – experiences real suffering too. Maybe the most interesting part was seeing how the Eliza Brandon subplot functions to move the disgrace of seduction off of Marianne. Both Elizas are narrative sacrificial lambs whose falls occur off-page but are nevertheless essential to ensure that Marianne is enlightened regarding Willoughby’s character while avoiding the same fate. (Is Eliza Sr. the closest Austen ever comes to actually depicting a prostitute? The word is never used and neither Eliza ever appears in the action, but it’s very clear.) Meanwhile, the final romantic pairings are acceptable – they don’t absolutely violate plausibility – but you have to read with a very sober eye to do so. Northanger Abbey, meanwhile, was pretty good (and especially fun to revisit now that I’ve got some Radcliffe under my belt), but I just can’t think of much to say about it a week after reading. Apart from to observe Isabella Thorpe’s impressive resemblance to Becky Sharp (an acknowledged influence on Thackeray, or not?), and the brilliant way that General Tilney is uneasy-making without having to be a literal Gothic murderer. It’s quite bad enough to be a chilling and repressive influence on your own children’s happiness, Austen suggests. A modern retread of this that majors on Tilney as an emotionally abusive dad would be interesting.

book I’m most glad to have read: Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, by Samuel R. Delany (1991). Made a great chaser to The Motion of Light in Water. It’s basically two long essays, the second rather more academically written than the first (but still totally readable), about the gentrification and redevelopment of the Times Square neighbourhood, and New York City more generally. Delany’s overriding thesis is that regular, casual contact between people of different social classes and statuses is what makes a neighbourhood, particularly an urban one, both safe and pleasant. This is very far from the prevailing idea of suburban or provincial communities, which rely instead on networking: more of a closed system, functioning to keep people’s interactions largely within their own social class. In the second essay (“Red”), he makes some really good arguments that the supposed benefits of networking actually tend to emerge far more readily from cross-class contact. In the first (“Blue”), he builds a fascinatingly detailed picture of how public contact spaces – specifically public sexual spaces, like porn cinemas and corners where street hustlers hung out – worked in the pre-Giuliani era. He deals especially well with the counter-arguments that he’s being naive or nostalgic (he absolutely isn’t), and that women were less safe in that earlier era. Again, without being naive, he demonstrates that these neighbourhoods and sexual spaces tended towards greater public safety, particularly for women, partly because they were governed by very clear codes (if someone didn’t want to do something, their no was a no, and you moved on; if someone seemed volatile or untrustworthy, a whisper network would let you know pretty quickly.) I underlined so much of this; he gets at a problem of authenticity that many global capitals, including London, are experiencing in a touristified, social-media-optimised century. Brilliant thinking, brilliant writing.

most underwhelming in comparison to the author’s other work: A Sicilian Romance, by Ann Radcliffe (1790). I read three Radcliffes in a row near the end of September and thought I’d polish off the major novels (I still haven’t read her first or last) with this, in which a virtuous young heroine flees an arranged marriage she doesn’t want and discovers the terrible secrets her father has been keeping from her along the way. Julia, our protagonist, has considerably less interiority than Emily St. Aubert of Udolpho, or Adeline La Motte of The Romance of the Forest. The narrative is also far less frequently focalised through her. In one way this is actually kind of cool, because it adds to the suspense: for example, at one point Julia disappears from her cell and the reader simply doesn’t know how she’s escaped for several chapters, putting us on a level with the other characters in the book and piquing our curiosity. On the other hand, it means that a lot of the book is spent not with Julia but with her brother Ferdinand or lover Hippolitus, so the sense of female subjectivity responding to terror and adversity that Radcliffe is so famous for doesn’t really get developed here. The most telling thing about A Sicilian Romance is that I’m already finding it quite hard to remember specifics of the plot without making an effort. It’s good to have read it, but it doesn’t do much that doesn’t happen better or more interestingly elsewhere.

most reliable read: The Hermit of Eyton Forest, by Ellis Peters (1988). I’m starting to wonder if I should just note when I’ve read a new Cadfael mystery and move on, as they are both marvelous and not that distinct from each other. What does stand out about this one is the relative prominence in the plot of details about the long English civil war: the fate of a vanished courier from the besieged Empress Matilda to her supporter Brian FitzCount is significant to the identities and motives of a number of characters. There’s also a more sustained treatment of a child character in this book than in many of the others. Through nine-year-old Richard Ludel, heir to the Eaton manor after his father’s death, Peters tackles the problem of dynastic marriage, and particularly of dynastic marriage arranged between young people by their greedy older relatives with little thought for their wellbeing. The relationship between Richard and his intended, Hiltrude, who’s a decade his senior, is very nicely done; she’s also being manipulated and abused by her family, Peters doesn’t let us forget, and they surprise each other with their humanity before helping each other out.

other book I’m most glad to have (re)read: Beloved, by Toni Morrison (1987). I read this once before, ten years ago, and had forgotten virtually all of it. It is superb. Much of the plot revolves around revealing not what happened, exactly (in many contexts, ranging from “what happened in the woodshed” to “what happened on the plantation” to “what happened on the journey to freedom”) but how and why it happened. Sethe, the primary protagonist, has spent eighteen years not knowing why her husband, Halle, never met her at the rendezvous point from which they had planned to escape North together. When another man from her old plantation, Paul D., turns up at the house on the outskirts of Cincinnati where she and her mother-in-law and single surviving daughter made a life, she starts to “rememory” – as does Paul. The ghost of the baby Sethe killed when she thought recapture was imminent is not happy about Paul’s appearance, first trying to make him uneasy through what we realise are “normal” levels of poltergeist activity (Sethe and Denver are accustomed to it), then by manifesting as an actual, physical woman, who calls herself Beloved: the single word that appears on the baby’s headstone. There’s so much more: Morrison is brilliant at seguing from one character’s thoughts to another, and from the present action to memories of the past, within a sentence or two. We hear what Paul D. experienced, including an incredible sequence in a forced labour camp where nearly fifty men, chained together in a line, save themselves from a mudslide; we hear about Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in-law, bought out of slavery by her still-enslaved son and called to preach an unconventional but much-needed gospel to free Black people, until the day slave-catchers violate the precincts of her home. Brilliant line succeeds brilliant line. Sixo, one of the plantation men, 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? Just magnificent.

How has your November reading gone?

My reading really slowed down in October. I’ve been in pain for much of it – the chest/rib injury from late September, plus what appears to be fasciitis in my left foot, which is being treated by a physio – and I got a foul combination of sinus infection, sore throat and dry cough, which sapped much of my remaining energy. The new term is in full swing, which always means more events and more deadlines, though I’m not teaching this year. (There’s light at the end of the thesis tunnel, though still only a pinprick.) Singing picks up in this season, too. Perhaps for some or all of these reasons, I’ve been teetering on the edge of a reading slump all month. Some early successes for RIP XX were followed by a #1925Club fail (though a #LoveYourLibrary win!), and much of what I have read seemed to take longer and grab me less than it usually does. I managed thirteen books this month. Here’s what I thought of the ones that still need discussing.

strangest: Chevengur, by Andrei Platonov (1928; transl. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler 2024). This is a bit of a slog, but also a masterwork, which couldn’t be published in the Soviet Union during Platonov’s lifetime. Born in 1899, he basically grew up with the Revolution, which is a pretty rare case for a major Russian writer of the era: most of them were either already adults when it started, or nearing the end of their lives, or they were born into the established Soviet regime. He started out as a true believer, but died of TB that he caught from his son after the latter was sent to a work camp on trumped-up charges at the age of fifteen, an experience which shook Platonov’s belief in the regime considerably. Chevengur reflects that deep ambivalence; although he was convinced it praised socialism, he was (correctly) informed by Maxim Gorky that it really doesn’t read that way. It’s often described as a Russian Don Quixote, which is sort of true and sort of flattening. It’s certainly about idealism; two men seek perfect communism and think they’ve found it in the titular village, but no idyll can last. It contains a very good horse whose name is Strength of the Proletariat, which might be a joke or might be totally serious—with Platonov it’s always extremely difficult to tell. That’s one of the things that makes Chevengur such a strange read: there are tonal disjunctions that apparently work in Russian to create a rich, disorienting fluctuation between states, but in the Chandlers’ English translation, which I must say is readable, it often loses that sense and instead feels whiplash-y. Not sorry I read it, though it probably wasn’t the place to start with him. The Foundation Pit is shorter and I might try that next.

best re-set book: A Spoonful of Murder, by Robin Stevens (2018). The sixth book in Stevens’s thoroughly charming Murder Most Unladylike middle-grade series, one of which I’ve written about before. These are among the best books on the market for younger readers at the moment, a little like golden-era Pixar in that adults can enjoy them on their own level. They’re totally unpatronising and always hit just the right tone. In this installment, 1930s schoolgirl detectives Daisy and Hazel travel to Hong Kong after Hazel’s grandfather dies and she is summoned home to be present for his funeral rites. On their arrival, Hazel’s father ambushes her with a new baby brother and a totally reshuffled household setup: her beloved nursemaid, Su Li, has been reassigned to look after baby Teddy, and her mother—Mr. Wong’s first/primary wife, but not the mother of Teddy—seems to be furious about everything, including Hazel’s personal appearance and behaviour. In the midst of all this, there’s a murder and a kidnapping, and the girls must find the killer even more urgently because Hazel comes under suspicion. Stevens does a characteristically excellent job of gently highlighting the effects of cultural differences: the usually in-charge Daisy is a fish out of water in Hong Kong as a white English girl, while Hazel, who often feels awkward or secondary in England, is confident and assured in this familiar environment, whether she’s explaining new foods, different domestic setups, or why it’s going to be difficult for the two girls to explore the city alone. Also, truly excellent servant characters: they’re all real people, not just labour-performing props. Ah Lan, the gardener’s boy; Ping, the new maid assigned to Hazel; and Su Li herself, have smarts, agency, and personality, and all are vital to how the plot unfolds. Stevens’s writing is just so perfectly trustworthy.

most heartrending, but (or because) least sentimental: A Fine and Private Place, by Peter S. Beagle (1960). This isn’t a scary book at all, but arguably could have counted for RIP XX, because it’s about a man who lives in a graveyard full-time and talks to ghosts. Beagle wrote it when he was nineteen, which is just incredible: not only does the writing have the confidence and competence of an artist already fully in charge of his craft, but the emotional beats—doomed love, irreparable loss, facing the possibility of being remembered as a failure, trying to find reasons to wake up in the morning—are portrayed with nuance and sensitivity that feels, for lack of a better word, really mature. It’s also a very Jewish book, in a low-key sort of way, not only because there’s a real refusal to capitulate to Christian paradigms of the afterlife but also because one of the main characters, Mrs Gertrude Klapper, is a lovingly portrayed mid-century New York Jewish matron who speaks Yiddish to her elderly neighbours. The ghost love story and the human love story intertwine so beautifully, and somehow Beagle keeps the tone floating effortlessly above maudlin sentiment while never letting it dissolve into cynicism, either. Oh, and he’s funny. An incredible feat, and one of the most genuinely moving and saddening and hopeful novels I can think of.

most caustic social realism: Colored Television, by Danzy Senna (2024). The opposite of the Beagle in the sense that this is a deeply cynical novel, or at least a novel about deeply cynical people. Jane, the protagonist, is a mixed-race (Black/white) woman whose tricky second novel has taken a decade to finish. When she finally sends it off to her agent, triumphant and proud of her “mulatto War and Peace”, the agent’s response – as the reader has suspected from the start – totally deflates her: the book isn’t good. Living in LA with her artist husband Lenny, whose art doesn’t sell, and their two children, in a series of house-sitting-for-friends situations interspersed with stints in horrible cheap apartments, Jane is desperate on a number of levels. So when the possibility of writing for TV appears on the horizon, she jumps at it. Colored Television is painful and thought-provoking about racial identity (I hadn’t fully registered that Black people can be racist about mixed people, for one thing), artistic integrity (is stability better than art? Are they mutually exclusive?), and marriage (goodness, the number of lies these people tell each other!) I enjoyed it while reading it, and have kept it on my shelf because I can’t think of another book that has pushed similar questions into the forefront of my brain while retaining such sharpness. I find that I don’t have much to say about it, but I’d recommend it.

most life-saving reread: The Long Price Quartet, by Daniel Abraham (2006-2009). I really love these books. They’re fantasy novels but feel like alt-history with a single magical element; if you enjoyed Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Became the Sun (2021), you’ll get on with these. They’re set fifteen years apart from one another, so the ramifications of the events of each book have a lot of time to percolate and come clear. I’ve never seen another fantasy series use a structure like it, and it works incredibly well. Book one, A Shadow in Summer (2006), is about laying the foundations for a world-altering change: friendship between two young men, their love for the same young woman, and the tenacity of a bookkeeper in her fifties with a bad hip reveal a conspiracy whose implications are only just being felt as the book ends. Book two, A Betrayal in Winter (2007), is about the unwilling ascendancy of one of those young men to the throne of his father’s city; it’s largely a tale of court intrigue and a murder mystery whose solution we know from the start, though that doesn’t diminish the pleasure of watching other characters figure it out. In An Autumn War (2008), the man on the city’s throne ends up reluctantly – and, refreshingly, badly – leading a war to save his world, which somehow ends in victory and defeat for both sides: only Daniel Abraham, you’ll realise if you get this far, could write that outcome. Finally, The Price of Spring (2009) moves fifteen years after the great battle to save the world and asks what resentment, patience, and monomania have wrought in the interim. Abraham’s women are uniformly excellent – dynamic, complex, convincing – and he understands that “morally grey” doesn’t have to mean “mass murder with brief self-indulgent guilt”. Rereading these made me feel like I was using my brain, without trying to force it into shapes it was too tired to take. I commend them to you.

book I immediately wanted to recommend to the most people: Arboreality, by Rebecca Campbell (2022). I could think of three friends, off the top of my head, who would love this, the second winner of the Ursula K. LeGuin Prize for Fiction. It takes the form of vignettes – you could call them interconnected short stories, as the same network of characters spreads through the book, some more visible at times than others – 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. And they do, whether that’s a dedicated group of academics and librarians saving the local university’s collections by storing boxes of books with sympathetic locals – and thereby ensuring that people have access to instructions on market gardening, electrical engineering, landscape management, etc., for the next two or three generations – or a group of youths organising into salvage gangs to strip abandoned suburban homes of useful materials like copper and glass. It’s so realistic and yet so hopeful. The central episode, originally an award-winning short story around which Campbell then built the rest of the book, features a violin-maker who cuts down the oldest Sitka spruce on the continent to build an instrument for a local prodigy. Campbell unobtrusively but tightly weaves themes of building, waiting, patience, art, and makes them resonate with the wider community’s actions as they try to survive an uncertain and rapidly changing world. I tried to describe the story out loud to my fiancé after finishing and suddenly found myself sobbing. Arboreality is absolutely superb, and also very short (117 pp. in paperback) – pick it up from the (independent!) publisher Stelliform Press for Novellas in November.

best perspective on an author’s preoccupations: Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories, by A.S. Byatt (collected 2021). Byatt’s most famous novel, Possession, holds a really special place in my heart, and I got that plus her whole Frederica Quartet signed by her when she came to speak at my college. She was an absolute delight in person, too: both tartly clever and generous, quite a rare combination. I decided to read this selection of her stories very slowly, only one or two per day, and so it took me the better part of a month. Though her novels are set in our world, there’s always more than a tinge of the fantastical about her approach to storytelling – from the cadences of her sentences to her fascination with texture, colour, and light to a recurring interest in transformations, both physical and emotional. These stories really bring that home: some are true fables, like “Cold” (about a coddled princess whose unusual physical needs mirror her emotional ones and whose marriage becomes a success in direct proportion to her husband figuring out how to meet those needs) or “Dragons’ Breath” (a weird little story in which a village is overtaken by dragons who are more geological than reptilian). Some just have a fable’s shape and flavour, like the title story, in which a “middle-aged woman with a hairdo” puts up with her hairdresser’s selfish thoughtlessness for years and finally snaps, or “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”, a novelette where the djinn is both absolutely real and representative of something else, some elusive freedom that the protagonist, Gillian Perholt, is able to achieve in middle age, despite the social narrative that suggests she should be considered irrelevant now. That’s another thing Byatt is deeply interested by: the ways in which women are freed and/or confined. She’s not simplistic: she knows mid-20th-century feminism has opened doors, but she also suggests that the barriers to equality aren’t less real for being subtler, or less visible, than they were to historical women. “Racine and the Tablecloth” is an amazing example of her working through this, a story about a schoolgirl being discouraged from university – and fighting that discouragement, but maybe losing some other, intangible battle along the way – that made me better understand several people that I actually know. A few late entries, “The Narrow Jet” and “Raw Material”, might have been my favourites. One is about two elderly gentlemen, possibly Victorian, building a fountain as a kind of final hurrah, and juxtaposes their project with the experiences of an enigmatic and possibly mythical creature who lives in the mud of the pond they’re building in; it’s lovely, funny, bittersweet. The other is a brilliant story about writing that ends with a horrendous, unexpected twist and forced me to think about the ethics of storytelling in a really concrete way, and how we all engage in it just by existing in the world, making up details and filling in blanks about most of the people we encounter daily.

How was your reading in October? Did you do RIP XX, or join in with the #1925Club?