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

General Wrap-Up

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

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

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

Stats

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

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

Holiday Book Haul

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

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

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

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

2026 Reading Goals

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

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

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

Posted on by Elle 23

December 2025 Superlatives AND #LoveYourLibrary

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

SUPERLATIVES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#LOVEYOURLIBRARY

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have you read anything from a library this month?

Posted on by Elle 13

2025’s most memorable bookish experiences

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Elle 16

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Elle 39

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Borrowed from my local public library #LoveYourLibrary

Posted on by Elle 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He glanced down –

Damn

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

Fuck!

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

Bugger

He took a final, deep drag –

Nope…
Dead

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Elle 18

November 2025 Superlatives

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?

Posted on by Elle 33

#LoveYourLibrary November 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.

After a quiescent October, my library reading picked up again this month. Four of the books below were ordered in at my request; my library is particularly responsive in this regard, very rarely declining a title I’ve asked for. (When they have done so, it’s usually either because they can’t source it through their wholesaler or because they’re waiting for it to come out in paperback.) Here’s what I thought:

Our Ladies, by Alan Warner (1998; original title The Sopranos): [some spoilers ahead, I guess] I’d thought of this when I picked it up as a cross between Colwill Brown’s We Pretty Pieces of Flesh and Tana French’s The Secret Place, but the French comparison is inapt; the better second half of that comp might be the TV show Derry Girls. This follows six girls from the choir of a Catholic convent school in Oban as they spend the day in Edinburgh for a big singing competition, which will be televised. The singing barely matters, and as it turns out, they do incredibly badly in the contest anyway. Most of what we see is the day leading up to the performance, when they’re (perhaps inadvisably) allowed out into the streets of the city, seeking alcohol, men (and it’s pretty much always men, I don’t think they speak to any boys their own age), new clothes, and finding that they each end up with much more than bargained for on several levels: the alcohol-and-men bit, the getting-in-actual-trouble bit, and the finding-out-truths-about-themselves-and-each-other bit. I loved how queen bee Fionnuala ends up becoming close to Kay, who’s initially painted as straitlaced and middle-class but turns out to be the boldest of them all. I also loved the way gay identity is slowly revealed and developed; I don’t know if this is how girls actually came out to themselves in provincial Scotland in the ’90s, but it felt plausible. Most of it is written in Scots, and the first 30 pages or so required perseverance, but once the girls are on the school bus and events begin unfolding, I raced through it. Warner could have afforded to drop a few characters: only three out of the six are really memorable, and the story’s heart is in [SPOILERS INCOMING] a) the discovery of attraction between two of those three, and b) the returned childhood cancer of the third. The negative reviews this has received tend to be from people who read it as rompy and/or trying to be edgy by writing about Catholic schoolgirls who swear and fuck. I don’t think that’s what Warner is aiming for at all, and certainly as the novel comes to a close there’s a much more tender focus on friendship, mortality, and choosing to live fully (which includes swearing and fucking) while there’s still time.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, by Michelle McNamara (2018): Famously well-written true crime investigation by a citizen reporter about the Golden State Killer; McNamara equally famously died before he was arrested and convicted, but her work seems to have helped investigators to connect several different sprees during the ’70s and ’80s as the work of the same man. The book is obviously full of disturbing descriptions of crimes (the man was a burglar, rapist, and murderer), and McNamara is very good at avoiding either sensationalising or trivialising what he did. I tore through this in a day, but it didn’t quite blow my socks off. I felt a certain level of timeline confusion that’s probably inevitable when discussing criminal behaviour by one individual on this scale; the map in the front of the book was really helpful in this regard, but the text itself could do with more chronological signposting. And although it’s true that McNamara interrogates her own obsession with the case, it didn’t feel very… I don’t know, literary? Like, the writing is good to fine, I don’t have any complaints per se, but I think some of the best true crime is more formally interesting than this on the sentence and structural levels. (In Cold Blood, for example, ethically murky though its composition was.) Maybe it’s a fair tradeoff for McNamara’s self-awareness. I don’t know.

The Dragon Waiting, by John M. Ford (1983): Now, this blew my socks off. It’s fantasy alt-history in which the branching point is that the emperor Constantine did not succeed in establishing Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire. By what we know as the fifteenth century AD, Byzantium remains the major global power, and official religious neutrality has resulted in a Europe where Mithras and Cybele are worshipped by considerably more people than Jesus. (He has his followers, but they’re few among many.) Oh, and there are vampires, although it’s not a vampire novel per se; they’re not the point, they’re just another thing that’s different. The novel follows four separate characters – a one-eyed Welsh wizard, a female Florentine physician, a vampire gunsmith, and a Byzantine noble living in exile as a mercenary – as they try to undermine imperial power through espionage and investigation. Ultimately, they end up supporting Richard III’s claim to the English throne, and all of the Wars of the Roses/Princes in the Tower stuff is played with fascinating differences to our own history and Shakespeare’s version thereof. (For one thing, the presence of vampires has quite an effect on the reader’s natural sympathies and reasoning.) Ford, who died far too young, was smart as hell and there’s a lot that’s left unsaid in every scene; I didn’t find myself thoroughly lost at any point, but this is an invaluable resource (it’s basically footnotes) for any first-time reader. Someone (Scott Lynch?) has said of this that if Ford had made it a series and written five more, he’d have been George R.R. Martin. But he didn’t, and something about that choice feels very ethical to me. It just is what it is. It would make an amazing setting for a TTRPG. It’s an amazing novel: extraordinarily well-written and engaging, and even though it’s not technically a chunkster at 300-odd pages, it gives you all the satisfaction of one.

The Raven in the Foregate, by Ellis Peters (1986): I read this to reset myself, partly (though not entirely) to help deal with the book hangover from The Dragon Waiting. I’ve read and written about lots of Brother Cadfael mysteries here before. This one is a good example of their usual style and preoccupations. Moral failure is demonstrated by people not being kind or extending understanding to one another, and is punished. There’s no question at the end of a criminal being ignominiously hanged as a result of their unmasking; Peters always figures out a way to satisfy our need for justice without pandering to a thirst for blood. The politics of England’s twelfth-century civil war are present here (there’s a subplot about a spy for a supporter of the Empress Matilda) but not overwhelming. Women are interesting and complex and there’s more than one of them. Young love overcomes all. Unbeatable comfort reading.

The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Arthur Conan Doyle (1902): I’d somehow never read this before! It’s like The Odyssey or Dracula, I guess; most people, if pressed, could come up with the basics of plot and premise because it’s in the wider cultural awareness. Having read it, I’m even more incensed that the BBC’s Sherlock show did such a rubbish job with the episode based on it. There’s loads going on here that would have been interesting to explore: Holmes actually thinks he’s failed at one point, not just to solve the mystery but to prevent his client’s death. The testimonies and experiences of two separate women (who never meet each other) provide crucial evidence. There’s an underlying question about government justice vs. natural justice with the juxtaposition of the escaped convict Selden (whose sister is the housekeeper at Baskerville Hall) and the ultimate fate of the Baskerville killer. Generations of readers weren’t wrong about its superb atmosphere either: the misty moor! The mysterious noises that echo over it! The lethal bog that sucks down the unwary! Watson gets to do a lot on his own here, and his increased agency makes his first-person narration all the more engaging. (There’s a very cute bit where he thinks Holmes hasn’t been reading his letters, in which he has conscientiously been reporting events, and when Holmes reassures him he cheers up – bless.) Definitely the best of the three full-length Conan Doyle novels I’ve now read.

Darkmans, by Nicola Barker (2007): A wild and largely inexplicable ride, about which I shall write more for Doorstoppers in December. (It was due back at the library on the 2nd of December so I thought I might as well finish it sooner and have something to write about straight away!)

Have you read anything from the library in November?

Posted on by Elle 18

A Year in Novellas

As I mentioned last time, I’m not consciously participating in either of the two major reading projects that run this month, Nonfiction November and Novellas in November. But I do very much like a retrospective, and both of these offer the opportunity to look back on your nonfiction and novella consumption in the past year (“year” not defined, but I’m going to go with “past twelve months”, so from November 2024 to now). Previously, I covered my nonfiction reading; here are all the novellas I read in the last twelve months. This is a slightly trickier definition than “nonfiction”; I’m including everything under 200 pages, and although short nonfiction is absolutely a thing, everything in this list is fiction for the sake of not repeating myself.

Between last November and now, I’ve read 24 novellas by my definition, 22 of which were read in 2025. That’s a rate of 1.8 novellas (or “short books”, per my Goodreads shelf) per month in general, and 2.2 per month this calendar year.

The English Teacher, by R.K. Narayan (1945): Suffered slightly for being read directly after Haruki Murakami’s most recent novel. The protagonist’s wife dies halfway through and returns to him as a ghost, and although Narayan’s good enough to make me believe it, my external reading self felt wearied by more magical realism.

Ellen Foster, by Kaye Gibbons (1987): I made this an honorary Best Book of the Year. Eleven-year-old Ellen narrates, in alternating strands, the total breakdown of her biological family and the way in which, after many false starts, she comes to live with a new, kind and loving foster mother. Very funny and also, obviously, very sad.

The Wood at Midwinter, by Susanna Clarke (2024): More of a short story, but published as a standalone so I’m counting it. There’s some beautiful atmospheric writing and a moment of real shock and surprise about ¾ of the way through. But then… it’s like Clarke completely shirks her job and ends it just as things get interesting!

A Cure for Dreams, by Kaye Gibbons (1991): A portrait of at least three generations of rural Southern women, emphasising how they create their own world within a world that evades male institutions and substitutes its own forms of justice and care.

L’Amant, by Marguerite Duras (1984): Only superficially a novel about youthful sexuality. It’s much more about a girl and her mother, their relationship, and the terrible effect of white supremacy on everyone involved in the colonial system, even (especially) on children, how it warps a person to have the power to existentially humiliate another.

Beginning, by David Eldridge (2017): A play, the author of which teaches at my university. I read this when teaching a first-year undergraduate seminar called “Storytelling: Narrative Modes, Techniques and Archetypes”. It’s a one-act set over the course of about two hours in a Crouch End living room after a flatwarming party, and is meant to be played in real time. I’m not convinced that reading Beginning is the correct way to engage with it, at least not as a first go-round, but I felt I had a better handle on it after discussion.

The Magdalen, by William Dodd(? 1783): A chapter of my thesis is on this. It’s a yoinked-out plotline from an earlier anonymous novel about the Magdalen House, mapping the story of a woman’s fall from chastity into seduction, pregnancy, motherhood, abandonment, prostitution and “repentance”. I would not recommend it to the casual reader, there is a reason there’s no Penguin Classics edition of this, but like everything, the more you look at it, the more interesting it is.

In the House of the Seven Librarians, by Ellen Klages (2007): A novelette (between short story and novella on word count), published as a standalone: a lovely fairytale about a little girl who’s abandoned as a baby in the book return slot of a Carnegie Library. Cosy without being twee.

Poor Folk, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1846): An epistolary love story (sort of) between Makar and Varvara, neighbours and distant cousins. You can read the whole novella as a tragic romance but you can also read it as an even more tragic indictment of the way Varvara is forced to live. I bet it’d be a good text to teach.

No Touching, by Ketty Rouf (2020, transl. Tina Kover 2021): A short, very French novel about a high school philosophy teacher who, depressed and demoralised by her job teaching boisterous and disinterested teenagers in a working-class suburb, begins working nights at a stripclub. A little too brief and opaque and vaguely self-pitying for me to entirely like.

Walking Practice, by Dolki Min (2022, transl. Victoria Caudle 2024): A lost alien living in a crashed spaceship in a forest on the edge of a city can transform their body shape to almost any specifications. They stay alive by matching with people on hookup apps, having sex with them, and then killing, dismembering, and eating them. Parts of it are funny, parts are upsetting, and sometimes they’re the same parts.

Summer, by Edith Wharton (1917): Powerful and frightening, quite unlike the drawing-room Wharton we all think we know, and strikingly willing to be open about sexual threat.

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, by Nghi Vo (2020): Vo’s second novella in the Singing Hills Cycle actually came to my hands first. A nonbinary cleric in a fantasy Asian-inflected society travels their world listening to the stories of people they meet and recording them for the archives of their order. In this installment, Chih and a local guide, who rides a mammoth, get trapped by three hungry tiger sisters who can take human form. I liked it fine.

The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. LeGuin (1972): The allegory between the human (“yumen”) colonisation of the planet Athshe, and the American war in Vietnam is perhaps rather too plain, but it poses a question I’ve rarely seen addressed in fiction before: what a people might stand to lose by resistance to colonialism. This is not, in LeGuin’s hands, an argument for not resisting; it is an argument for not colonising.

Something Rich and Strange, by Patricia A. McKillip (1991): This is about a couple who live by the sea—Megan’s a dreamy artist who does seascapes and Jonah’s a grumpy shop owner who sells maritime trinkets—and the way they both end up entranced by what the jacket text calls “fairies” but which are perhaps more properly nereids, or sea nymphs. Proper committed fantasy, only the secondary world is within our own.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo (2020): The first Singing Hills novella, about secret history and an exiled empress using codes and espionage to eventually overthrow her husband. Still frustrating, though: Vo’s project here is at least as much about the way histories are told, misremembered, reclaimed, hidden, and protected as it is about actual resistance and war, but that’s the dramatic part, and I would happily have read a full novel about it. Failing that, I’d have settled for more of this novella being dedicated to it.

Passing, by Nella Larsen (1929): Two childhood friends, Irene and Clare, can both “pass” for white in Chicago high society, but only Clare chooses to do so. You’d think that this might make the novel overly schematic, with Irene representing positive racial solidarity and Clare representing selfishness and betrayal, but in fact it’s never that clear cut. The prose isn’t very interesting, but there’s lots to think about; this would also teach well.

The Creature in the Case, by Garth Nix (2005): Fun, reasonably scary long story/novelette in Nix’s Old Kingdom series that picks up with his non-magical sympathetic-rich-boy character Nicholas Sayre after the events of Abhorsen and just before those of Goldenhand. Glad I read it.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects, by Ted Chiang (2010): An astonishingly even-handed novella that follows the social consequences of the creation of digients, Tamagotchi-esque VR creatures. There isn’t a trace of moral didacticism about it. Chiang doesn’t start from a position that he then browbeats or cajoles the reader into. You really do feel the slippage of certainty that comes with an entirely new frontier of human experience.

Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih (1966): Famously beautifully written, and I found that reputation well-earned. Women’s bodies in both Britain and Sudan are the sites of colonial and post-colonial aggression here, eventually literally sacrificed to the emotional demands of men. Objectively very high-quality, but also very dark.

The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole (1764): Preposterous, but incredibly fun. Features false identities, benevolent friars, mysterious handsome youths, revealed bloodlines, and gigantic armoured body parts. Not particularly scary.

Mary: a Fiction, by Mary Wollstonecraft (1788): Wollstonecraft’s nonfiction was better than her fiction. This is a fragment, not a finished product, about a self-taught female genius, and boy oh boy are there a lot of repressed sapphic feelings!

Maria: or, the Wrongs of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft (1798): This is finished, but still not great fiction. It’s interesting to see how she developed from Mary, though. There are Gothic touches—it’s about a woman falsely imprisoned in a madhouse by her abusive husband—some extremely hard-hitting stuff about class and prostitution, and a great ending that promotes matriarchal community.

Arboreality, by Rebecca Campbell (2022): Adored this: interconnected short stories set on Vancouver Island in the near future, after a series of plausible catastrophes have rendered the internet patchy and vehicular travel all but impossible. So realistic and yet so hopeful, with unobtrusive but tightly woven themes of building, waiting, patience, art, and survival.

So obviously none of these are nonfiction, but there are a few installments here that push the definition of “novella”: a play is really a different thing altogether, and there’s one short story and an arguable number of novelettes (between one and three). Still, if the challenge is about reading short books, they meet that criterion.

Some cold stats:

  • 15 of these books were written by women, eight by men, and one by a nonbinary author (Dolki Min uses they/them pronouns).
  • Four of these books are by authors who, to my knowledge, identify as LGBTQIA+.
  • Seven of these books, as far as I know, are by authors of colour.
  • Ten of these books were borrowed from a library in print or e-form. Of the rest, three were acquired secondhand (both of the Gibbons plus Wharton), two were gifts (Clarke and LeGuin), four were bought new, though some were deeply discounted (Rouf, McKillip, Larsen, Campbell), three I read online (via a class readings portal, the website of the magazine where it first appeared, and Internet Archive: Eldridge, Klages, and Dodd, respectively), one was an old personal copy that I reread (Chiang), and that leaves one more but I can’t figure it out.
  • Ten of these books were first published in the twenty-first century. Of those, seven were published in the last decade. Of the rest, one is from between 2010 and 2015, two each are from the 2000s, 1990s and ’80s, one each is from the ’70s, ’60s, ’40s, ’20s, and ’10s, one is nineteenth-century and four are eighteenth-century.

Any favourites?: Ellen Foster, In the House of the Seven Librarians, Summer, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, Season of Migration to the North, and Arboreality were all standouts.

Any disappointments?: The English Teacher is a bit boring and aimless; No Touching offers less than I’d hoped; When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain was both a bad place to start with Vo and felt a bit anticlimactic.

Any surprises?: I’m most surprised at the spread of eras in this list. Who knew my novella reading was so temporally diverse?

Are you doing Novellas in November this year? Shall we argue about what constitutes one in the first place?

Posted on by Elle 27

A Year in Nonfiction

I’m not consciously participating in either of the two major reading projects that run this month, Nonfiction November and Novellas in November. But I do very much like a retrospective, and both of these offer the opportunity to look back on your nonfiction and novella consumption in the past year (“year” not defined, but I’m going to go with “past twelve months”, so from November 2024 to now). This post will cover my nonfiction reading; I’ll do another on novellas later.

I don’t think of myself as a big nonfiction reader, but I’ll pick something up if I’ve read a great review or if it’s about a topic that appeals to me. Between last November and now, I’ve read 21 nonfiction books. 17 of those were read in 2025—so this year’s rate is about 1.5-1.7 nonfiction books per month.

Blankets, by Craig Thompson (2003): Graphic memoir about a young man’s coming-of-age in a deeply repressive and sometimes abusive Christian household, falling head over heels for a girl he meets at church camp, and the inevitable ebbing of that mind-blowing first love.

Mayhem, by Sigrid Rausing (2017): Memoir about the destructive power of drug addiction within a family.

Priestdaddy, by Patricia Lockwood (2017): Quirky memoir of an upbringing as the daughter of a deeply eccentric Catholic priest.

Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird by Henry Lien (2025): Subtitled “The Art of Eastern Storytelling”; an investigation of Western and Asian story structures, including four-act, nested, and circular stories.

Stay True, by Hua Hsu (2022): Marketed and received as a grief memoir about the murder of Hsu’s friend Ken in a completely random and senseless carjacking incident, but really a story of a young man’s decision process about the kind of person he’s going to be.

The Trip to Echo Spring, by Olivia Laing (2013): Re-read. Subtitled “On Writers and Drinking”; Laing chooses six big dogs of postwar American literature who were also alcoholics and explores the relationship between their lives, their works, and their boozing.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire (1968, trans. 1970): Educational theory. Very much of its time but also very influential, and I basically agree with it.

The Years, by Annie Ernaux (2008, trans. 2018): A portrait of a Frenchwoman’s life between 1940 and 2006 that’s both individual—through photos and highlighted elements of family life—and something deeper and broader, national, semi-mythological.

Hotel Splendide, by Ludwig Bemelmans (1941): A collection of vignettes about working in the banquet department of the Ritz-Carlton in New York during the 1920s. Very funny, and incredibly perceptive.

More Was Lost, by Eleanor Perényi (1946): Amazing memoir by an American woman who married a Hungarian baron just before WWII started. Endlessly fascinating, and sad.

Cries For a Lost Homeland, by Guli Francis-Dehqani (2021): Read for a Lent book group; short chapters consider each of what’s commonly known as Jesus’s seven last words from the cross (they’re more like sentences). I liked it a lot: smart but not abstruse, with strong, emotionally resonant connections.

Laboring Mothers: Reproducing Women and Work in the 18th Century, by Ellen Malenas Ledoux (2023): An examination of the compromises working women in this era had to make to balance their children with their jobs. Read for my first academic book review, which is open access: read it here!

Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson (2014): Re-read. A general memoir of Stevenson’s founding of, and work with, the Equal Justice Initiative, interwoven with a more detailed account of one particular case: that of a Black man condemned to death in 1988 for the murder of a white woman he was adamant he didn’t commit.

The History of Mary Prince, by Mary Prince (1830): The first book by a Black woman published in Britain. An account of her life, and her experiences of being enslaved in Barbados and Antigua, until she came to Britain, where she was legally free but could never return to her husband in the Caribbean.

How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2018): Subtitled “What History Reveals About Our Future”. I didn’t write about this at all. I think I couldn’t. Smart, harrowing, and so close to the bone that it was practically the marrow inside.

How to Say Babylon, by Safiya Sinclair (2023): A true story about a girl digging her way out from under her father’s religious oppression with a spoon (h/t to Jo Walton for that phrase), where the religion in question is Rastafari and the spoon is poetry.

Essays, by George Orwell (1931-1949): I loved these and became slightly obsessed with them. I think I read the one on Charles Dickens three times. What a model of clear expression and perceptive reading.

Marsha, by Tourmaline (2024): Subtitled “The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson”. The first full-length biography of Johnson, an icon of Black queer and trans life and a whirlwind street queen who has become most famous for throwing the first brick on the night of the Stonewall Riots. (Actually—and even better—it was probably a shot glass.)

The Wisdom of Whores, by Elizabeth Pisani (2008): Subtitled “Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS”, this offers a window into international development thinking at the time of the book’s publication (and perhaps now too): Pisani argues that treating HIV/AIDS as a development issue, caused by generic “poverty” and “disempowerment”, was well-meaning but fatally wrong.

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Written By Himself (1789): An autobiography written as a free man, living in London, but Equiano’s childhood and youth were spent in slavery. His life was amazing, encompassing combat during the Seven Years’ War, sailing, clerking, private trade, self-manumission, hairdressing, Arctic exploration, evangelical conversion, and abolition advocacy.

Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave, by Mariana Enríquez (2025): Subtitled “My Cemetery Journeys”; a combined memoir, travelogue, and whistlestop history lesson through twenty-six graveyards around the world over the course of two decades.

(I’m not counting these, but I’ve actually started this November with two more nonfiction choices: The Motion of Light in Water, by Samuel R. Delany (subtitled “Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village”; incredible, monumental, unforgettable) and I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara (true crime about the Golden State Killer; unflinching but never sensationalising). More on both of those later in the month.)

The overwhelming majority of these books are memoirs: eleven of them fall into that category without question, while a further four contain memoir as a major element. Of the rest, one is a straight-up biography, one is wide-ranging essays on politics and literature (with—I realise now—some memoir too!), one is political history, one is a monograph incorporating history and literary criticism, one is educational theory, and two are literary criticism with, in one case, an element of group biography. That seems a fair representation of my tastes and interests.

Some cold stats:

  • 11 of these books were written by women, nine by men, and one by a non-binary person (Olivia Laing now uses they/them pronouns, not exclusively but I think preferentially).
  • Two of these books are by authors who, as far as I know, identify as LGBTQIA+.
  • Nine of these books, as far as I know, are by authors of colour. This is quite a lot more than I expected given the generally dismal publication stats for nonfiction authors of colour!
  • 11 of these books were borrowed from a library in print or e-form. Of the rest, two were provided by NetGalley (Enríquez, Lien), three were gifts (Hsu, Pisani, Tourmaline), one was provided by the publisher (the Ledoux monograph), two were bought new (Perényi, Francis-Dehqani), and two were old personal copies that I re-read (Stevenson, Laing).
  • 15 of these books were first published in the twenty-first century. Of those, eleven were published in the last decade (well, ten, plus the English translation of The Years). Of the rest, two are from the 2010s before 2015, three were first published in the 2000s, one is from the late 1960s, three are more or less from the 1940s, one is nineteenth-century and one is eighteenth-century.

Any favourites?: Orwell’s Essays is among my best-of-year titles. More Was Lost and Hotel Splendide are fragments of a vanished world, wonderfully conveyed. Priestdaddy was a delight, hilarious but also fierce.

Any disappointments?: Somebody Is Walking On Your Grave was disjointed and tended towards dullness. Mayhem never quite convinced me. But other than that, not really!

Any surprises?: I was surprised by how much Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy felt like it was playing safe, read in the light of the changes that have occurred in the decade since its original publication. Equiano’s memoir is consistently fascinating, even if he’s not a natural storyteller. The Wisdom of Whores was both wildly entertaining and seriously informative.

Do you read much, or any, nonfiction? Are you participating in this year’s Nonfiction November?

Posted on by Elle 24