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

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

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

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

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

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

book I immediately wanted to recommend to the most people: Arboreality, by Rebecca Campbell (2022). I could think of three friends, off the top of my head, who would love this, the second winner of the Ursula K. LeGuin Prize for Fiction. It takes the form of vignettes – you could call them interconnected short stories, as the same network of characters spreads through the book, some more visible at times than others – set on Vancouver Island in the late 21st and early 22nd century, after a series of plausible catastrophes including rising sea levels and waves of pandemics have rendered the internet patchy and vehicular travel all but impossible. The whole world hasn’t actually ended, but the islanders are so isolated to begin with that they, at least, have to start almost from scratch. And they do, whether that’s a dedicated group of academics and librarians saving the local university’s collections by storing boxes of books with sympathetic locals – and thereby ensuring that people have access to instructions on market gardening, electrical engineering, landscape management, etc., for the next two or three generations – or a group of youths organising into salvage gangs to strip abandoned suburban homes of useful materials like copper and glass. It’s so realistic and yet so hopeful. The central episode, originally an award-winning short story around which Campbell then built the rest of the book, features a violin-maker who cuts down the oldest Sitka spruce on the continent to build an instrument for a local prodigy. Campbell unobtrusively but tightly weaves themes of building, waiting, patience, art, and makes them resonate with the wider community’s actions as they try to survive an uncertain and rapidly changing world. I tried to describe the story out loud to my fiancé after finishing and suddenly found myself sobbing. Arboreality is absolutely superb, and also very short (117 pp. in paperback) – pick it up from the (independent!) publisher Stelliform Press for Novellas in November.

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

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

September was really busy for work, and less busy for academia, although my first peer-reviewed article, about Mary Robinson’s 1792 debut novel Vancenza, is now in the world! It’s in an open-access journal, and can be read for free here if you fancy it. I also caught up with a dear friend I hadn’t seen since we were both about fourteen. Wonderfully, it was as if hardly any time had passed.

This past weekend, to round off the month, M and I attended a wedding at Canterbury Cathedral. It was totally stunning: the bride’s train and veil took two people to move, there were sixty people in the choir alone and nearly 300 guests in total, and the cathedral itself is so beautiful. Unfortunately, just as we were leaving the reception in the deanery gardens, I tripped and fell very hard on my left side. My fall was broken by a large deadwood log and what seems to have been a pile of poison oak or nettles. The upshot is that I not only have a rash up the arm and hand that broke the fall, but have either badly bruised the intercostal muscles on my left side or possibly fractured a rib. (I’m not exhibiting the “red flag symptoms” that would permit an x-ray, so we may never know for sure.) Right now my side is continuously painful, but particularly when I breathe deeply, and I can’t bend at the waist (i.e. lean forward, backwards, or sideways) without stabbing pain. I never realised how much of my daily movement involved leaning until now… I’m taking OTC painkillers, and there’s not much else to be done except wait for it to heal, whatever it is.

I also read some books this month: fourteen, in total. Three I discussed earlier counted for RIP XX, and two more were covered in September’s #LoveYourLibrary roundup. I also went on a kick of reading five Gothic and Gothic-adjacent novels from the 1790s by Ann Radcliffe and Mary Wollstonecraft. I’m hoping to write those up, but unsure if I’ll have the energy. TL;DR: Radcliffe is hypnotically readable and surprisingly funny. The Mysteries of Udolpho is unexpectedly long but also unexpectedly good, The Romance of the Forest is shorter and maybe better, The Italian is mid-length and well-paced but its heroine has noticeably less interiority than Radcliffe’s other heroines. Meanwhile, Wollstonecraft (of whose work I read Mary: A Fiction and Maria; or the Wrongs of Woman) was better at nonfiction than at fiction.

After all that (!), here’s what I made of the rest of September’s reading.

most new-to-me sci fi premise: The Afterlife Project, by Tim Weed (2025). A two-strand postapocalyptic novel. In one storyline, Dr Nick Marchand wakes up in a pod that has harnessed quantum time (in a way I didn’t entirely grok) to deposit him ten thousand years into the future. Humanity was on its last legs when he entered the pod, literally decimated by a super-pandemic, most of the survivors of which were rendered infertile. Nick’s mission is to find out if anyone at all survived, reproduced, and founded even the tiniest of civilisations to last this long. The second strand follows the increasingly frantic efforts of the research team he left behind in 2068, led by his lover Dr Natalie Quist, to find a woman or girl who can still reproduce. Their secondary mission generally goes unspoken: to capture or coerce said woman or girl into the second pod, and send her into the deep future for repopulative purposes with Nick, who happens to have retained his fertility. Setting aside that this is a totally useless task if you only have one fertile couple—your new civilisation will fall to inbreeding within a few generations—I like Weed’s idea here, at least on paper. What would it be like to wake up in a pristine world alone? What would it be like to mourn not only the loss of world culture, but also of small personal comforts: fresh coffee, blueberry scones, hot showers? There’s a paragraph near the start where this really comes home (it’s where the blueberry scones are mentioned), and the descriptions of the deep-future wilderness that was once New Hampshire are uniformly absolutely stunning. But to pull it off for the whole novel, Weed’s characters would need to feel more complex and the narrative would need to be more interested in their subjectivities. There’s an effort in that direction, but the main characters don’t feel specific enough; Quist in particular is someone we’re told is the greatest mind of her generation, but we never see her behaving in ways that signal anything other than “generically pleasant older woman”. I found the ideas and questions that this sparked really rich, but it’d be great to see this premise built upon with stronger character work. Free e-copy from publisher Podium—thank you!

book I was most surprised to like: The Silver Book, by Olivia Laing (forthcoming 2025). Laing’s first novel, Crudo, felt too shackled to its own moment for me to like it unreservedly or to feel that it would stand the test of time. The Silver Book is a more interesting project. It’s a short novel that follows the making of both Pasolini’s 1975 film Salò and Fellini’s 1976 film Casanova through the eyes of Nicholas, a young English gay man who comes to Italy in flight from trauma and guilt, and becomes involved with Danilo Donati, who designed the sets and costumes for both films. I know nothing about movies and have never seen either of these two, although I am aware of Salò‘s reputation: it’s an adaptation of de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom that allegorises the brutality of fascism, and sounds unbelievably gross. (That link is to the detailed plot summary on Wikipedia; those of weak stomach are hereby warned.) Laing creates tension by putting Nicholas’s naive perspective (and a little bit of Dani’s more worldly one) against what we know of history, including Pasolini’s brutal unsolved murder at the age of forty-five amid rumours that he was attempting to buy back film reels stolen from his warehouse. The Silver Book is, I think, about the simultaneous hiding and revealing of queer life that some mid-century art scenes (and indeed European fascism for some élites) facilitated, and about the warping effects of power. I’m not sure that it entirely succeeds; Laing insistently skims the surface of events in a way that is obviously a deliberate choice (Nicholas must remain naive right to the end, after all), but that forecloses their ability to dig deeper into the dynamics that we glimpse between individuals and institutions. I really liked it, though. It’s extremely evocative—there are some amazing scenes in the workshop where Dani’s team builds surreal objects for Casanova, like a giant whale that you can walk around inside—the dialogue is good, and there’s some excellent food writing. I’m pleased to see Laing’s fiction developing in this way. NetGalley, publishing 6 Nov. 2025.

hardest to get a handle on, though eventually rewarding: Orchid and the Wasp, by Caoilinn Hughes (2018). Initially I expected this to be an Irish contemporary-historical version of Vanity Fair, with a very young female protagonist on the make in the echelons of the powerful. And Gael Foess—only a year older than me—is a kind of millennial Becky Sharp, although she largely avoids having sex with people to whom she isn’t attracted as a strategy for advancement, which I found refreshing. Gael’s style is more breathtakingly audacious and effort-intensive social engineering and financial grifts. In one incredible scene, she gets an interview for an MBA at the London Business School despite having no business experience by doing an amazing amount of behind-the-scenes work; in another, she uses an eight-hour transatlantic flight in first class to extract a check for $50,000 from the only other passenger in the cabin. This is all just the middle section of the book, though. It starts with her as an eleven-year-old: the early chapters dig deep into a complicated family dynamic, though the full extent of this we only discover in half-formed mental asides or exasperated, after-the-fact conversations. One plot point I’m still not sure about, although if it’s what I think it is, it’s horrifying, and horrifyingly well camouflaged. Perhaps what made it so difficult to get properly engrossed by Orchid and the Wasp was a constant uncertainty about what the book was going to be, or trying to be. At different points, it’s a bleak family drama; a hyper-modern picaresque; a satire on, if not the 1%, at least the 10%; a dissection of the complicity and greed that created the global financial crisis. (The book’s main action takes place between 2008 and 2011, including scenes at the Occupy Wall Street encampment; Gael’s father Jarleth, who looms large in her life, is a cold and unscrupulous investment banker.) Of course it’s all of those things, and they don’t necessarily have to sit uneasily with one another. There are, however, qualities of relentlessness and a kind of frenetic density in the experience of reading the text—which, though third-person, is focalised entirely through Gael, whose brain is constantly a-whir. It makes the book exhausting. I’m not at all sure that this isn’t a novel of genuine genius, but I’m also not at all sure that I’d care to read it again. Does anyone else have thoughts? Passed on by Rebecca—thank you!

most purely pleasurable and moving: Small Rain, by Garth Greenwell (2024). Greenwell is very insistent that this is not to be seen as autofiction, despite the fact that what happens in it happened to him, and the protagonist shares many details of his life (a gay poet who used to live and teach English in eastern Europe and now resides in Iowa City with a Spanish academic husband whose first name starts with L.) That’s his prerogative as an author, I suppose, and actually the rich texture of Small Rain feels more like what I still, very uncoolly, think of as “proper” fiction than like the rather etiolated quality I associate with contemporary autofiction. On one level, it’s about the protagonist experiencing a medical emergency for reasons no one can work out, even by the novel’s end, and spending a week in hospital during the autumn of 2020, when Covid was a little bit figured out but we didn’t yet have a vaccine. (Masks and PPE are a thing; he’s allowed a visitor once admitted to the ward, but has to go to the ER alone.) On another level, it’s about care, trust, and vulnerability—when you’re sick, yes, and being looked after by strangers whom you can only hope will do their jobs well, but also when you love another person and choose to spend your life with them. On other levels still, it’s about how those themes show up in contexts ranging from home ownership to sibling relationships to poem analysis. (There are two absolutely stonking readings of poems: one is the verse from which the novel takes its name, a favourite of mine, a short and enigmatic 16th-century lyric; the other is “Stranger’s Child” by George Oppen, the kind of poem that my particularly literary training often fails to get purchase on. Greenwell[‘s narrator] interprets both so well and with such sustained attention, which for me is what close reading is all about.) I just loved the experience of reading this. Greenwell’s prose is intentionally stylistic here, 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. A strong year-end list contender. Passed on by Susan—thank you!

How has your September reading treated you?

August was a much-needed quieter month after a truly manic beginning to the summer. M and I tend to take the month off from singing, which helped a lot. We spent the extra time doing things like solving crossword puzzles over morning coffee and embarking on favourite countryside walks. A lot of friends had birthdays to celebrate. It was quiet and nice. I also read a ton, seventeen books in total. Seven were for 20 Books of Summer; one more got a write-up in this month’s #LoveYourLibrary post. Here’s what I made of the rest.

most disorienting setting: Thus Was Adonis Murdered, by Sarah Caudwell (1981). An epistolary murder mystery in which the suspect and investigators are all members of the same chambers (legal firm), specialising in tax law. The narrator, Hilary Tamar, is never gendered, which Caudwell manages to sustain with remarkable naturalness. Hilary’s voice is waspishly witty, and the milieu they inhabit and describe is both casually privileged and proudly unworldly; imagine a spiritual bastard child of P.G. Wodehouse and John Mortimer’s Rumpole books. The odd thing about it, which threw me sufficiently to make me wonder whether 1981 was really like this, is the novel’s conception of sexual politics. Jo Walton describes it thus: “The other noteworthy thing is gender—not the triviality that Hilary’s gender remains unstated, but that this takes place in a universe in which women are sexual predators and beautiful young men sexual prey, for both women and older men, and this is axiomatic. This was in fact not the case in 1981, and is not now, but nobody within the novel questions it.” I guess that’s comforting. Anyway, much of this takes place in Venice, and there are some truly terrific one-liners and dialogues. I can absolutely see why people cite these as favourite comfort reads; they’re very stylised, but satisfying. Source: bought secondhand at Culzean Castle bookshop, Scotland

most gripping: Basilisk, by Matt Wixey (2025). SO glad I persevered past initial formatting problems, redownloaded this, and got to read it. The main story is the testimony of a “white hat” hacker named Alex, who, with her colleague Jay, discovers what seems to be a hidden 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”. He settles on something that, in the world of thought experiments, is known as a basilisk: a sentence that will fundamentally alter the victim’s understanding of reality. Eventually, it becomes clear that whatever Alex and Jay are playing isn’t a game: that there are people willing to kill to stop them from reaching the final level and discovering the sentence that comprises the weapon, and that those who have won the game often react so badly to the basilisk that they die, commit acts of unspeakable violence, and/or become insane.

I can’t improve on Laura’s perceptive disentangling of the ways in which Wixey riffs on the “Lovecraftian knowledge-as-horror” trope, or on her assessment of how cleverly he plays with the reader’s emotions (what does it mean that this book is so gripping? As we race towards the end, potentially meeting the same fates of death or madness as the characters, we still want to know: What is the basilisk? What are the words? And what does that say about us, eh?) The characters are fairly thinly sketched: Alex, Jay, and the mysterious Holly Soames—whose annotations to Alex’s testimony suggest that she, too, works for some shadowy government agency seeking to understand what happened after the fact—are basically player characters, people-shaped stand-ins for the reader’s own curiosity. But they work incredibly well; Basilisk wouldn’t be as effective a book if it went in deep on characterisation and background. Instead, it’s utterly absorbing (I read its 600 pages in a single day; a lot of the length is Holly’s and Alex’s own footnotes to the text, so it’s not actually that long). I also haven’t stopped thinking about it since reading it—about the specific details of what happens, and what various elements of the novel might mean or represent, and more broadly about the implications of its premise. Are there things we just aren’t meant to know? What if the cultural valorisation of endless discovery and the heroic individual who dares enlightenment (Plato’s cave is a recurring motif) is ultimately a trap made out of arrogance? A most superior philosophical techno-thriller; highest recommendation. Source: NetGalley

best sequel: The Sirens Sang of Murder, by Sarah Caudwell (1989). More fun with murder and tax lawyers! This one does an interesting bait-and-switch where you think that, to understand the motive for murder, you need to understand a fairly complicated (to me) financial trust administered in terms of great secrecy. Actually, the conditions of the trust don’t matter much at all; they’re very human murders, ultimately. (One of the lawyer-detectives, Julia, complains at the end that it’s all too old-fashioned to be plausible.) It’s interesting to see how Caudwell continued to use epistolary form in crime novels: instead of letters from Venice, this time, it’s telexes from Jersey, Monte Carlo, and the Cayman Islands. I had to Google “telex”; clearly the use of this technology is meant to indicate that the lawyers are old-fashioned even within their own era, since there were certainly fax machines by the late ’80s. But that distinction would have passed me by if I hadn’t checked. So interesting, what remains intelligible and what doesn’t. (What subtle markers are we missing in much older texts, for example?) Source: passed on by Laura—thank you!

book I was most sincerely shocked not to hate: Caracole, by Edmund White (1985). A (non-blogging) literary friend and I decided to read this together; I’d never read White, and my pal had never read this one. He finished it first and was not impressed, citing the lack of structure, the way the dense language works against narrative momentum, and the paucity of characters about whom one cares. I was therefore expecting something like Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, one of the worst reading experiences of recent memory, and was pleasantly surprised to find that Caracole is better. It’s set in an unnamed city and country—in chapter one it feels like Garcia Marquez’s Central America, but the city seems approximately Venetian; at no point does it feel like ’80s New York, as the back cover claims—and follows the sexual and social escapades of a very young man, Gabriel, plus an orbiting group of characters that include his childhood sweetheart Angelica, his uncle Mateo, his uncle’s mistress Edwige, Gabriel’s own mistress Mathilda, and Mathilda’s adult son Daniel (oh, and Daniel’s mistress Claude). There’s quite a lot of ripely described sex, so have a care if you’re reading it on the Tube, but ultimately it’s a curiously conservative novel to my mind, in the sense that Tom Jones is: it’s very interested in family relationships, and the (false, but no one in the novel knows this) significance of a family name.

White is generally lauded as a writer of beautiful sentences. I found him hypnotic, but also pretentious and baggy. The middle sections in particular go on for far too long, and get repetitive, making proclamations about characters at length instead of letting the characters reveal themselves to us. What I’m really stuck on is the final chapter, which takes place at a masque and suddenly introduces revolution/resistance as a real concern; the implication on the final page is that a crime of passion, totally unpolitical, is about to serve as the spark (or excuse) for a people’s revolt. The entire book up til now has portrayed the resistance movement as peripheral and ineffective; it has been mentioned, but not taken seriously. Did White genuinely think he was writing a political novel? The ending, where Gabriel is about to be made into a folk hero through the connivance of Angelica and her friend Maurizio, despite having done precisely nothing—does that emerge organically in any way from the book’s apparent interests in the previous 340 pages (sex, loneliness, artifice)? Is the fact that our focus hasn’t been on the revolution at all an indictment of the collaborationist/intellectual capacity to be distracted? Or is it just bad plotting? Like pretty much everything about Caracole, it’s hard to tell. I need to read more White to see if this is representative. Source: bought secondhand from World of Books

book that most grew on me: Home, by Marilynne Robinson (2008). Initially, I was prepared to judge this Gilead sequel as beautiful and unnecessary. Why would we need the same events told from a different point of view, and without the luminous first-person voice achievement of John Ames? But in fact Home is doing its own thing. Perhaps the key to this book, for me, was understanding that Robinson makes it possible to read against the grain concerning retired Presbyterian preacher Robert Boughton. We are allowed, perhaps even nudged, to find him disingenuous and manipulative. The besetting disaster of these books is Boughton’s son Jack, apparently a ne’er-do-well from birth who compounds his own disgrace by getting a local girl pregnant in his late teens, then abandoning her and the baby. Jack’s return to the family home after twenty years away occurs at the start of the book, and of course it’s what Boughton has always wanted: his beloved son is back. But Jack is still who he is, not who his father would not-so-secretly prefer him to be. He can’t summon up faith in God, or even really the desire to have faith, and he’s an alcoholic. These seem like such minor sins in 2025, but for the little world of Gilead, Iowa in 1950, they really matter. Boughton is growing old, too, and encroaching dementia makes him both more honest and more cruel to his son—although it’s pretty clear that he has always been a sort of God monster. This is delicately underlined by his genteel racism: whenever the civil rights protests are on the news, he mutters about provocation and everyone keeping to themselves. Gilead is as much about the ripples of the Civil War as it is about God; Home takes those concerns and brings them into the narrative present with equal subtlety and to equal effect. I haven’t even mentioned Glory, the youngest daughter, through whose eyes all this is focalised and who has her own hidden currents of strong and surprising feeling about her family and home. (Just wait til you find out what she thinks when her father says he’s leaving her the house.)

I’ve already read Robinson’s third Gilead novel, Lila, and loved it (though never wrote about it), maybe because it takes us out of this complacent little town for a bit and because Lila Ames is by far the most sympathetic of these recurring characters. I’m still not sure whether the most recent one, Jack, is worthwhile or just a rehash. Home, however, has made me more willing to concede the possibility that Robinson is attempting to use this series to do something meaningful with perspective and sympathy and the long view. Source: passed on by Laura—thank you!

book that had no right to be as good as it was: The Fifth House of the Heart, by Ben Tripp (2015). Ridiculously readable but also very capably written, this is that most maligned of things, a vampire novel. Its take on vampires—what they are, how they function—is fresh and interesting: they’re just another species of creature, albeit one that ends up looking like whatever its main food source is. Structurally, the book’s a heist. Our human protagonist, Asmodeus Saxon-Tang (he knows how silly his name is, please call him Sax) puts together a group of specialists to assault the hoard of an ancient vampire in central Europe who has marked him for her revenge. Sax is a septuagenarian gay antiques dealer who has known of vampires since the ’60s; he occasionally works, to his immense resentment, with the Vatican, who are interested in the creatures for reasons that sort of fall apart when you consider that there’s no metaphysics involved given that they’re just organisms like any other organism, but it doesn’t matter.

Tripp’s approach to diversity is 50:50. The heist gang is composed of an African-American soldier, an Eastern European criminal, and a South Korean professional vamp-hunter, with a minor Bollywood actress also getting involved, not to mention Sax and his mixed-race niece Emily, and each one is individuated. On the other hand, the Romanian guy is a boorish misogynist, and the Korean woman is a mostly silent figure whose response to the traumatic murder of her whole family is psychopathic violence, which seems to smush a bunch of stereotypes together in an effort to transcend stereotype. (There’s also one slur used in dialogue that, although the reader is clearly expected to disapprove, I think we could have done without.) For the most part, though, it’s all focalised through Sax in third person, and he’s a great protagonist: crotchety, pragmatic, cowardly, avaricious, kind. There are some terrific set pieces: a mission to escape a labyrinthine and elaborately booby-trapped Loire Valley château is particularly tense. The prose is a cut above, too; not self-conscious or poetic or anything, but Tripp knows how to use words interestingly without getting in his own way. Well worth the punt, and I’d definitely read him again. Source: Kindle

most compelling nonfiction: The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS, by Elizabeth Pisani (2008). This is such well written and compelling stuff, even if it is sixteen years old and therefore missing analysis of recent developments like the availability of PrEP. Pisano, a UN epidemiologist, proffers a window into international development thinking at the time of the book’s publication (and perhaps now too): the idea that HIV/AIDS is a development issue, caused by generic “poverty” and “disempowerment”, was well-meaning but fatally wrong. She argues passionately that the big bucks from the philanthropic HIV industrial complex need to be spent on things that don’t look cute (like mothers and babies) or make good sound bites; instead, the greatest difference can be made in making risky behaviours around sex—mostly commercial/transactional sex—and drug injection safer. These include needle exchanges and incentives for condom use. But, as she dryly puts it, there aren’t any votes in doing nice things for junkies. I occasionally found some of her language to be unnecessarily combative, and some of it (especially in relation to trans sex workers) is of its time. Clearly, though, she’s no ideologue or bigot: she wants to save lives, and the numbers point to solutions that politics doesn’t like. Extraordinarily clear and engaging writing, too; Pisani’s first career was in international journalism and it shows. Well worth reading. Source: passed on by Rebecca—thank you!

two excellent rereads: The Return of the Native (1878) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), by Thomas Hardy. I felt really burned out on contemporary and even 20th-century stuff at the end of this month. I wanted something older, a classic, preferably familiar to me. Thomas Hardy’s novels, written at the tail end of the nineteenth century, were perfect: modern enough in style not to feel like my academic work, just familiar enough (I’ve read seven of his novels, and now reread four), but I picked two that I hadn’t read since 2009 and 2010, respectively, so there were still lots of surprises. I’ve also always felt close to his novels because they’re set in Wessex—an imagined avatar for southwestern England—and have always taken place, inside my head, in versions of locations around my grandparents’ old village in the South Downs and my aunt’s former home in Dorset.

The Return of the Native was the first one I revisited. After sixteen years, I remembered character names, the evocative heathland setting, and a handful of vividly rendered scenes. The best is when two excellently named characters, Damon Wildeve and Diggory Venn, play dice for the inheritance of Thomasin Yeobright (another great name) by the light of glowworms on Egdon Heath. Even more atmospherically, Venn is a reddleman, someone who sells the red pigment that farmers use to mark rams and thus predict which ewe might be in lamb later in the year; his product has permeated his skin, making him bright red all over. But the two main characters are Thomasin’s brother Clym, who returns from a career as a Paris jeweler, disgusted by the commercial world and intending to start a school for the children of Egdon labourers; and Eustacia Vye, the closest thing the area has to gentry, who despises her rural surrounds and is convinced she’s destined for greater things. Clym and Eustacia are drawn to each other, but she has a pre-existing history with another man—nothing substantial, but serious enough to make her reputation doubted—and moreover, they don’t share enough mutual interests or values to make a successful couple in the first place. Eustacia is a fantastic creation: charismatic, darkly beautiful and mesmerising, she’s often described by other characters as a witch, but she’s also barely nineteen, with no close friends or relatives to advise her or offer a constructive channel for her strong will. In a different novel, she’d be like Austen’s Emma, learning better and growing into maturity; in a Hardy novel, she’s doomed. But so are a lot of other characters.

Tess of the D’Urbervilles is the later book and probably the more famous one, but I’m not sure it’s the better one. I don’t think anyone needs me to summarise the plot, so instead I’ll mention what I noticed this time around. One: the pacing is surprising. The book is divided into seven sections of unequal length. Tess’s defloration at the hands of Alec D’Urberville happens at the end of section one. Given how much emphasis there is on this event, both within the book and in the critical conversation about it, you might expect it to come later and form some sort of high point of the action, but no! It’s like how “Let It Go” happens twenty-seven minutes into Frozen. The novel doesn’t build up to that moment; it rests upon it. Even Tess’s confession to Angel Clare happens at the end of section four, with loads more plot still to come (though possibly not quite enough. It does drag slightly in the back half.) Two: Hardy is really into Tess. Sensuous physical descriptions of her are everywhere. Sometimes they’re sweet, but mostly they’re startling and not a little creepy. He talks about her mouth a lot. He also, especially early on, emphasises her “figure”; contextually, one surmises, Tess has large breasts for her age. At the book’s start she’s only about sixteen but is frequently taken for older. Hardy claims this happens because her state of physical development exceeds her emotional development. As far as it goes, this actually makes perfect sense to me: the adultification of teenage girls is an old phenomenon and Hardy clearly disapproves of the men who see Tess as sexual fair game. But he muddies the waters by seeming to see her that way himself at times. This was probably the thing that made me saddest about rereading this book: how visible the victimisation of a child is, within it. Three: the Durbeyfields are hilarious and poignant and interesting. John, Tess’s father, is hopeless—a sentimental, self-aggrandising alcoholic—but his swagger is winning. (Drunk the night before he’s meant to set out for market at dawn, he protests, “I? I shall be all right in an hour or two.”) Joan, her mother, is what Tess might have been with less education: resilient to the point of vulgarity, careless, once very beautiful, and—I love this touch—extremely fond of music, as is Tess herself. Tess’s sister Liza-Lu is a figure of faint hope at the end. Lots going on with the Durbeyfields; you can’t just dismiss them as hapless peasants. Source: old personal copies

How has your August reading treated you?