Well, June seemed to go by quickly! I finished all of the necessary reading for next September, wrote up the first full draft of my final thesis chapter, and went to America for my brother’s wedding, where the groom’s side of the family won handily at the bride v. groom wiffle ball competition (despite being largely composed of English relatives who did not understand the rules, which were never explained in any case). The day itself was beautiful, as were the bride and groom and the assorted company. Key takeaway for our own wedding: get a great live band for the reception.

I also read a lot of books – more than expected, given my total state of panic about term prep – fifteen in total. Five of them, from the library, qualified for 20 Books of Summer! Here’s what I made of the rest.

Teaching Reread # 1: The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925). Some books read well. Some books teach well. Some are neither; a very few are both. I have never particularly liked The Great Gatsby. I think this is because I fundamentally don’t buy the idea of the tragedy at its core; I find Jay Gatsby a sad and even pitiful figure, but not a tragic one, and if you don’t buy that, the book is so bleak as to be almost utterly without redemption. But I think it’s going to teach really well. It’s chock full of symbols and allegory, and the thematic ideas are often echoed neatly in the prose style. There are some great lines, famous for a reason (“careless people”, “her voice was full of money”, “you always look so cool”). We’ll see how the Year 12s and I get on with it.

best end to a comfort series: Brother Cadfael’s Penance, by Ellis Peters (1994). And Elle wept, for she had no more Brother Cadfael books to read. Well – no, I can always reread them. But this is the last one that I’ll ever read for the first time. It’s quite a bit longer than the others, and it does have a murder, but it’s much more about historical politics (if you don’t know much about the Anarchy, might be an idea to brush up before trying this final volume). It’s also about children, and legacy, and loyalty, and what it means to owe a duty to various different places at once; and Cadfael’s actions have consequences, although this was never going to be a series that turned away from valuing mercy above all else in its final installment.

Teaching Reread # 2: The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1901-1902). I first read this not too long ago (in November 2025), but it was really good to go back to it with pen in hand and analytical brain on. There are sometimes weird things that you notice when you reread something in a different way to the way you read it at first. Here’s one about The Hound of the Baskervilles: this plot doesn’t work at all without empire. If Canada and South America didn’t exist in a “foreign exotic landscape into which a person from the mother country can disappear and from which they can potentially re-emerge a few years later” context, there would be no novel. It keeps cropping up, like the great silent enabler! Also, hunting metaphors are everywhere. Yes, Watson and Holmes are on the trail of a killer, but the “hound” that stars in the family legend hunts down a miscreant (who is himself “hunting” a human woman); and Stapleton, the neighbour who studies moths and butterflies, is described in ways that make him a hunter, too; and Selden the convict is hunted across the moor by the police. Hunting is both a good thing, a function of order and systems, and a bad thing, a function of cruelty and predation. So cool!

new favourite prose stylist: The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler (1939). Man. Chandler is terrific. I had never read him before but he hits the perfect combination of “stylistic enough to be interesting” and “plain enough to be clear”. The plot of this one has to do with a psychopathic young woman and takes in – amongst other things – black-market porn production, interracial sex, and some quite nastily homophobic stuff that, if the lines are read between, offers a fascinating portrait of semi-closeted gay life in pre-WWII L.A. It’s also definitely sexist – I could have done without the casual slapping of women and the equally casual reflection that slapping women is good for them – but sometimes something from 1939 is sexist in a way that feels important to continue challenging, and sometimes it’s sexist in a way that’s so cartoonish as to be obviously irrelevant. The Big Sleep is definitely the latter. And Chandler can write like a demented angel. “I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.” – How’s that for an unbeatable end to an opening paragraph?!

Teaching Reread # 3: The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. LeGuin (1972). I knew I’d read this before, but had somehow forgotten that I’d actually read it twice, once in 2019 and once in 2025. It was reasonably fresh in memory; the last time I reread it, I’d written, “The allegory between the human (‘yumen’) colonisation of the planet Athshe, and the American war in Vietnam, are indeed very plain, including massacres and rapes of native Athsheans, and napalm bombings of their villages. But I also think The Word for World… has been too harshly criticised in some quarters for being obvious; it’s still an extremely interesting novel, which poses a question I’ve rarely if ever seen addressed in fiction before: what a people might stand to lose by resistance to colonialism.” Again, I think this will probably teach well, assuming the kids don’t find it too schematic. I’m delighted to be offering them science fiction by a woman, though.

Teaching Reread # 4: Henry V, by William Shakespeare (1599). God, this play just rules. (No pun intended, unless you like that sort of thing, in which case, sure.) It’s easily one of my favourite Shakespeare plays. Every word in every speech, pretty much, has two or three separate meanings. The rhetoric is beyond convincing. It might be the most effective piece of political propaganda ever written. It’s stirring and beautiful, and also quite funny in places: the scene where Princess Catherine of France tries to learn English and mispronounces words with increasingly vulgar and obscene meanings (not a scene I’m teaching, luckily), and the one where King Henry pretends to be a common soldier and ends up getting challenged to a fight, which he then has to work out how to evade while still satisfying the demands of honour. Apparently the kids consistently really like this one, too, which is great news.

Teaching New Read # 1: Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by Salman Rushdie (1990). This is a lovely children’s book that Rushdie wrote for his son, a bit like a cross between The Phantom Tollbooth and the Arabian Nights. Haroun Khalifa’s father Rashid is a champion storyteller, but he loses his mojo when family tragedy strikes (Haroun’s mum runs off with the neighbour!) and they must journey to the moon Kahani (meaning “story” in Hindustani) in the company of an irascible water genie named Iff and a wise mechanical hoopoe named Butt in order to restore Rashid’s connection to the Ocean of the Streams of Story. It’s very funny, it’s metafictional and clever, and it’s a great introduction to lots of concepts: the power of storytelling, censorship, social commentary, vivid characterisation, symbolism, allusion, and much else. I’m currently writing a Scheme of Work (unit plan) for it.

Lifetime Achievement Award for longest book (that took me the longest time to read): Ice, by Jacek Dukaj (2007; transl. Ursula Phillips 2024). This book is 1200 pages long and took me over a month, but it was translated by someone I know! It is basically speculative steampunk alternate history, in which the Tunguska comet in 1908 crash-landed in Siberia and heralded the arrival of giant, slow-moving, maybe-sentient alien ice glaciers known as gleissen which also appear to delay the development of human history, such that WWI and the Russian Revolution (amongst other things) simply never happen. Like a lot of Eastern European and Russian fiction, this is intensely interested in philosophical, religious and scientific debates, and stages these debates at length in the dialogue of various characters, an authorial choice about which your mileage will almost certainly vary. I tended to get bored in these parts, but once people start studying Ice – which they very much should – they will almost certainly be among the richest seams for consideration. I tended to prefer the more overtly speculative/science fictional aspects, such as the presence of something called unlicht, which is literally the opposite of light and can be created artificially by lighting a blackwicke (a person in unlicht casts glintzen, which are the opposite of shadows: silhouettes made of light). It’s very cool and very dense and I’m not sure who on earth I would recommend it to. Ursula’s afterword about her translation choices is extremely good, and should be read as a foreword, should you choose to commit to this leviathan.

Teaching New Read #2: An Inspector Calls, by J.B. Priestley (1945). I’m no longer the only person in Britain never to have read or seen this play! I can see why it’s taught. My current working soundbite is: it’s a secular Christmas Carol that lacks a miracle. I like the ambiguity of who or what Goole is, and the characterisation is one-note but very solid: it’s about the audience learning more about what these characters are truly like, not a revelation of layers or complexity so much as a revelation of extent. Sybil in particular never changes at all, but I bet a great actress could make an absolute spectacle of her. It doesn’t seem to be produced much anymore, which is a shame.

most surprisingly good combo of read and time: Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object, by Laurie Colwin (1972). You wouldn’t think that a novel about a young woman being tragically widowed in a stupid, avoidable accident would be a great choice to read on the plane on the way back from a wedding, but actually it worked brilliantly. Like all Colwin, this is an exploration of human personality and complexity that both eschews the easy, obvious answers and acknowledges how much we want and need them. I love her deep understanding of compatibility and motive, and the way that even with a style that explicitly engages with those things, there’s always so much that goes unspoken. On the way back from a truly joyful celebration of two people who love each other, it felt perfect to sit with a book that views relationships with a simultaneous gravity and total lack of self-seriousness. This isn’t better than Family Happiness, but it’s still an A+++++ novel, ten times better than the vast majority of contemporary imitators. I’m a fully paid-up Colwin completist.

I also read through and annotated the anthology of non-fiction prose excerpts that’s used in Year 8, and the pieces from the Year 10 poetry and nonfiction anthologies that we’ll be dealing with in the first term. The Year 8 antho has a nicely diverse selection of viewpoints, including two-to three-page pieces by James Baldwin (“Letter to My Nephew”), Jeanette Winterson (from Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?), Stephen Fry (“Letter to My Teenage Self”), George Orwell (from Down and Out in Paris and London), Monisha Rajesh (from Around the World in 80 Trains), Stan Grant (“The Australian Dream”), Chief Joseph’s surrender and Lincoln’s Hall speeches, and more. I prefer some to others, naturally. The Year 10 anthos are part of the IGCSE syllabus; they sit the exams at the end of Year 11. There’s a lot to know, but simultaneously, what they have to do is fairly straightforward: apart from some simple reading comprehension questions, the exam constitutes an essay on language and structure in a randomly selected one of their anthology texts, plus a comparison essay between that same randomly selected one and an unseen passage from a different text.

How was your June? How is 20 Books of Summer going, if you’re doing that, or your general summer reading, if you’re not? Have you read any of these?

May saw some great changes. I went from shouting fruitlessly into the void of the employment market to receiving three invitations to interview within ten days, and then – in short order – three job offers! I accepted the one that’s most aligned with where I’d like my career to go; although I’ve returned a signed contract and received more HR paperwork, I’m not sure if I can announce the appointment because the institution hasn’t yet publicly done so. Pretty sure I can say that it’s at a well-regarded secondary school in south London, though, and that my role there will be a one-year contract as a teacher of English. I’m SO pleased, and excited, and can’t wait until September. There will be much to do over the summer, both in terms of getting ahead on my PhD thesis’s final chapter and in terms of lesson planning… Meanwhile, of course, books were read! Eighteen of them, this month. I wrote separately about two new releases from NetGalley, and this month’s #LoveYourLibrary post is here. Here’s what I made of the rest.

most surprising developments from popcorn series: Daja’s Book (1998) and Briar’s Book, by Tamora Pierce (1999). When I read the first two installments of Pierce’s Circle of Magic series – Sandry’s Book (1997) and Tris’s Book (1998) – I complained that their characterisation felt thin. Despite their titles, which suggest a single point of view character that rotates with each book, they’re actually all written from the perspectives of all four protagonists, and in the first two, this results in bittiness and wheel-spinning. The third and fourth, although they’re still multi-POV, feel like where Pierce finds her feet with the series. The threats that the children and their community face become simultaneously more personal and more realistic: catastrophic wildfires, and a plague epidemic that actually kills characters we’ve come to know (albeit none of the major ones). I kept expecting an overarching plot to show up, though – something that tied the climaxes of all four books together and revealed that they were all part of a bigger picture – and that never happens. Apparently the second quartet of books featuring these characters is better; I might try it the next time I need a big backlog of comfort reading, but I think I’m always going to prefer Pierce’s Tortall-set novels.

best nonfiction popcorn (that still missed a trick): Blood, Sweat and Pixels, by Jason Schreier (2017). An account of the making of ten iconic video games, from Uncharted 4 to Stardew Valley to Shovel Knight. I don’t play video games myself – like, at all; no one ever taught me how and I don’t really have the skill set to teach myself – but I do find them, and the conditions of their production, totally fascinating. Schreier is good, in a journalistic way, at drawing his readers along through the story of each game’s development. He’s less good at analysing the industry, or making inferences from his anecdotes. Every game seems to wind up being “crunched”, for instance, where developers work 60- to 80-hour weeks (sometimes more; 100-hour weeks have been recorded) in order to ship the product on time. There are numerous superficial reasons for this. Bugs arise, for one thing, and because teams work at different speeds and have different dependencies, sometimes crunching becomes unavoidable. But Schreier fails to really articulate the serious effects that a widespread culture of crunch can have on an industry, and especially on a creative, artistic one. It’s not just the disincentives for women, or people with caring responsibilities, or anyone even mildly disabled, or the devastating consequences on the mental and physical health even of able-bodied single men; it’s what kind of art ends up being produced under these homogeneous circumstances, and what kind of art might be possible if these systems functioned differently. Blood, Sweat and Pixels is definitely diverting, but because it sticks mainly to surface-level reporting, it’s not much more than that.

most readable academic writing: Seduced By Story, by Peter Brooks (2022). Brooks is an eminent narratologist, probably most famous for Reading for the Plot: Intention and Design in Narrative (1984). In Seduced By Story – subtitled “The Uses and Abuses of Narrative” – he challenges the primacy of his own field. Why is everything framed as “a story” now, from the corporate history of a cutesy smoothie company to the calculated appeal of a political candidate? What do we miss out on when we shove other ways of conveying information into the margins? I like this idea a lot, and Brooks is a blessedly lucid writer, so the book isn’t a chore at all. But there isn’t a strong articulation of the alternatives to narrative: he mentions “rhetoric” or logical argument a few times, but it might have helped to provide a longer list. And it’s perfectly possible to say that logical argument itself constitutes a form of narrative; it’s organised, it proceeds from one step to the next, it builds on what came before. How is that fundamentally different from a plot?

most “hell yeah, this is my jam!” reading experience: There Is No Antimemetics Division, by qntm (2020). This reminded me hugely of Matt Wixey’s Basilisk, for being propulsive, scary, and Lovecraftian in the sense that it’s very much about fundamental epistemological uncertainty and how genuinely terrifying that is. In Richard Dawkins’s formulation, a meme is a unit of cultural transmission, something that lends itself to replication: a memorable idea, or song, or behaviour, or value, or tradition. An antimeme, logically, is the opposite: something that lends itself to being forgotten. They exist in the real world; automatically generated passwords, for example, are antimemetic by design. qntm (the pen name of British author Sam Hughes) composed most of these stories as contributions to the SCP wiki, an online fandom about the work of the Secure Containment Protocol Foundation (fictional, but like the best urban legends, you think… maybe??) Some SCP entities are antimemetic; they aren’t all totally evil (one, which attaches itself to our heroine like a parasite, eats short-term memories, so she tosses it things like the plots of TV shows and what she ate for breakfast this morning, like feeding a pet). The early chapters here are a little episodic, as befits their origins, but they come together into an overarching narrative about an antimemetic existential threat to humanity that has to be fought by agents who often literally cannot remember that the fight exists, let alone anything about their strategies or previous actions. Despite the seeming impossibility of writing a coherent narrative under these constraints, it works fantastically well. Fans of The X-Files, the Backrooms, or Helen Macdonald and Sin Blaché’s Prophet, will also really like this, but it isn’t just a pastiche; it has heart and intellect all its own, and delivers a convincing, emotional ending.

best comfort reading for a week of major deliverables: More Brother Cadfael mysteries! I have now polished off first reads of the whole series bar the last book, which I am saving up. An Excellent Mystery (1985) has a great twist that you’ll see coming, but you won’t care. It’s also the first Cadfael book (unless I’ve missed one somehow) to acknowledge that homosexual desire existed in the cloister, even if it isn’t painted as a good thing (though I would argue that the novel doesn’t display homophobia, so much as an extremely clear sense of how damaging hidden longings can be in tight-knit communities of people who often lack emotional maturity around sexual matters). A Rare Benedictine (1987) is a three-story collection that shows us how Cadfael entered the cloister in the first place after a career as a Crusader, plus two adventures from before the series starts; they’re pretty good. The Potter’s Field (1989) deals, amongst other things, with the romantic relationships of traveling entertainers, specifically women, who often aren’t tied down to making marital commitments and that’s just fine by everyone else, pretty much. It’s also really smart and thoughtful about the consequences of following a calling without giving any thought at all to how it might affect other people: being genuinely saintly, in these novels, is not ever incompatible with the potential to genuinely cause harm, an approach that I find fascinating and, frankly, healthy.

best novel-length magnification of reactions to a single event: A Death in the Family, by James Agee (1957). Agee’s only novel was published posthumously, and won the Pulitzer Prize. (He’s also famous for writing the text to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a collaboration with photographer Walker Evans that documented the lives of poor farmers during the Depression/Dust Bowl.) This would probably be marketed as autofiction if it were published now. It covers two nights and a day of Agee’s childhood, during which his father was summoned to attend the family patriarch (allegedly dying, but not really, as it turned out), and on the way home, had a traffic accident in which his car came off the road. He was killed instantly. The novel moves between characters: Rufus, aged about six, the Agee stand-in; his mother, Mary, a devout Catholic; his father, Jay, a boy from a backwoods family who has made good (but is an atheist, a point of marital contention); his great-aunt, Hannah, who provides emotional stability for both him and his mother; and Jay’s alcoholic brother Ralph, whose phone call is the summons that sets off the action that ends in death. Agee is a beautiful writer on the sentence level, concerned very much with states of mind, the quick and secret patterns of thought that are so imperfectly guessed by external observers of our actions. There’s stuff in here about class and money, addiction, shame, faith, truth in marriage, naivety and experience, pain, loss, integrity. It ends quite abruptly – Agee technically never finished it, though it makes sense as it stands – but its tight temporal focus combined with its point-of-view shifts make it feel both expansive and hypnotic.

best reread: Penance, by Eliza Clark (2023). I first read this back in March 2024, and had no hesitation at all in putting it on my books-of-the-year list, writing: “Here it is, then: the best book I’ve read so far this year. The story of a teenage girl’s gruesome murder by three of her schoolmates, on the night of the Brexit vote, in a decaying North Yorkshire seaside town, it uses the generic devices of true-crime writing and the metatextual frame of a slightly sketchy true-crime writer, Alec Z. Carelli, whose comeback book this is supposed to be. (No review I’ve read has yet commented on the anagrammatic relationship of ‘Alec Z. Carelli’ to ‘Eliza Clark’) […] Brilliant, dark, disturbing, sad, and recursively interrogative about the consequences of telling a story like itself, Penance is an easy entry on my books of the year list.” It’s still brilliant. It still made me feel vaguely unclean after reading it, which I mean in the best possible way; this is a book with impact. My only note would be that I didn’t feel I got anything different, or more, out of it this time around, which is what I usually hope to find on a reread. Apart, perhaps, from raising some questions in my own mind about authorial choices that then get raised in the pastiche Guardian interview with Carelli at the end of the book (such a heavy focus on the mindsets of the perpetrators, even an attempt to ventriloquise them, may lead to greater human sympathy and understanding, but it may also just serve to obscure the humanity of the victim). Penance still does what it does incredibly well, though, and is absolutely worth rereading for that alone.

most illuminating reread, followed by book I’d most expected to dislike and actually didn’t: The Searcher (2020) and The Hunter (2024), by Tana French. I reread The Searcher (first read in August 2020) for two reasons. 1: The third in this series, The Keeper, came out in March, and I read it against my own better judgment because NetGalley offered it to me, and what do you know, I liked it a lot. 2: Dorian read The Keeper too, and in comments, we got into the question of why I’d cooled so much on the first volume that I never got around to reading the second. I couldn’t figure out why. So off I went to read The Searcher again, and try The Hunter (which Laura T., incidentally, disliked so much she DNFd it).

What I have realised, I think, is that French basically isn’t writing crime novels anymore. This new direction, with an ex-cop protagonist who gets increasingly involved in situations that he tells himself aren’t his business, but which are now shading into areas like “maybe allowing a neighbour to murder someone in front of you” and “allowing evidence to burn”? It’s not in the same galaxy as the Dublin-set police procedurals she made her name with. The books, however, are still being marketed as crime – in fairness, there’s at least one suspicious death in each – and I strongly suspect that’s one of the issues here. My memory of reading The Searcher the first time is of impatience: I kept waiting for someone to turn up dead, and then for the procedure to start, and on both counts, the novel did not do what I expected it to do. Knowing, on a second read, that things of that nature do occur, but that the novel’s focus is elsewhere, helped me a lot. The same held true for The Hunter. Both can be gripping – they’re still wonderfully written, characterisation is complex, and French’s sentences are crazily readable while remaining intellectually nutritious – but only when I stop waiting for them to be crime novels.

Relatedly, though, there’s a potential problem here, which is that although protagonist Cal left the Chicago PD and moved to Ireland in order to get away from the ethical quicksand that was fast affecting every element of his life on the job, he spends these three novels running into very similarly murky waters – and, frankly, making choices about how to handle them that are not as sympathetic as his extremely sympathetic framing and characterisation wants us to recognise. He’s basically the good guy: trying to raise his unofficial foster kid, trying to get along with his neighbours, trying to keep his relationship going with a good woman. But somewhere in there, he ends up doing stuff – or allowing stuff to happen – that makes him straight-up criminally liable, and French never really encourages us to think too hard about that. We get that he’s becoming part of the community of Ardnakelty; part of the same “say nothing” wall of silence that has existed for centuries to protect a colonised and oppressed populace, and we get that this isn’t a straightforwardly great development, that it represents compromise. But Cal never stops being framed as a good guy. He can’t; French needs us to like him, in part because his relationship with his foster child, Trey, relies heavily on him being a good guy. The whole thing comes perilously close to apologia, not for cops (indeed, officers of the law receive short shrift) but for vigilanteism and frontier justice. It’s therefore probably a good thing that French will be ending this series as a trilogy.

Have you had a good reading month? Read any of these?

I feel like I really checked out of the book blogging community in April. I fell behind on reading posts, commenting, and replying, and I didn’t even begin to make an effort to participate in the #1961Club (everyone’s posts look great). In fairness, I’ve barely been around. After the week of non-stop back-to-back singing that makes Easter every choral musician’s least favourite time of year (it’s nothing like Christmas, the music isn’t jolly and the services are always two hours long at least and everything is just relentless), I went to stay with my parents and brother in Virginia for a week. We kept it super quiet, didn’t see anyone outside of immediate family or travel longer than an hour by car for day trips, and I didn’t so much as dry a dish for seven days. We hiked a local mountain, visited a local vineyard for a tasting and sunny outdoor picnic, bummed around the pedestrianised downtown area in Charlottesville visiting bookshops (yes, I bought some things), and finally went to Alley Light, one of the fancier restaurants, which is located down an innocuous-looking side alley but produces luxurious small plates, entrées and cocktails and feels like something from the 1920s (candles, dark panelling, low-volume speakeasy-type jazz). We also just sat outside enjoying the sunshine, walked our big field (my parents have finally cleared all the downed trees from a major storm three years ago and mowed the margins), had cookouts and back-patio wine and cheese, and watched silly movies. It was beautiful, restorative, a pocket of saved time that I’ll treasure in memory for the rest of my life, probably.

After a week back in the UK, working on my thesis and some more job applications, M and I went to Alsace for a wine holiday to celebrate his 30th! We had booked with this company but weren’t exactly “on a tour”: they arranged our accommodation and two days of vineyard visits and tastings with local guides, but we had plenty of time to ourselves. Even the tastings only had two or three other people on them. We traveled by train all the way: two very easy changes and a total of seven and a half hours’ travel time. We stayed in Colmar, at a gorgeous sixteenth-century hotel called Le Maréchal. The architecture is stunning – lots of very well-preserved late-medieval to Renaissance-era Germanic-looking timbered buildings. White storks were nesting all over the place; they’re encouraged by municipalities and villages, which have purpose-built stork nests on the top of all tall buildings (usually the church and mairie, or town hall). The area also supports a thriving raptor population. We saw four fledgling kestrels practicing short flights from a church spire, as well as many birds hunting in the vines, and – best sighting of all – a gigantic buzzard perched on a fence post not fifteen feet away. Hospitality in Alsace lived up to its legendary reputation: the service was always both impeccable and warm, and our favourite winemaker, whom we ended up visiting twice, gave us at least twice as much wine as we had expected on the second go round. They’re big on dry whites in Alsace, so we drank a lot of Riesling, which can taste wildly different depending on which side of the hill the grapes have come from (the region has thirteen separate geological zones!), plus Gewurztraminer, Pinot Gris, and a few Pinot Noirs and crémants. We brought back four bottles – a major advantage of traveling by train – one of which is a Sylvaner, a variety that has virtually no export market. Both of us practiced our French and were delighted to find that the Alsatians (though most of them are easily trilingual) were happy to let us.

This month I also read 15 books. My #LoveYourLibrary post for the month is here, and my thoughts on the two books I read while in France are here. Here’s what I thought of the rest. These assessments are pretty short, because, well, that’s how it goes.

most instantaneous favourite: The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer (1968; transl. Shaun Whiteside 1990). The sole survivor of an apparently apocalyptic event must come to terms with what being a person means without other humans, or any prospect of personal legacy. I absolutely adored this: the translation is limpid and compelling, the main character – a widow with two “almost-adult” daughters about whom she rarely speaks or thinks – unsentimental but still sympathetic. Her relationships with the animals that also survived the catastrophe become the novel’s emotional centre, making its ending all the more shocking. This is very far from being a gory or violent novel, but it’s very unsettling, in the best possible way. It’ll absolutely make my year-end best-of list.

most coherent despite being fragmentary: The White Book, by Han Kang (2016; transl. Deborah Smith, 2017). Most readers seem to find that the short length and fractured nature of this book detract from its impact. They probably do, but it does have an impact, and although you could read it as autofiction or art book, there’s a reading of it as straight fiction that worked well enough for me. The narrator is her mother’s second daughter; the first died at a few hours old. The phantom existence/non-existence of this sister is an emotional wound to which the narrator keeps returning through vignette-like descriptions of things that are white, the Korean colour of mourning: rice cakes, snow in various forms, breast milk, a dog. Oddly, this worked well for me as a pendant to We Do Not Part (2021, transl. 2025).

most worthwhile excursion into an author’s work after loving their most famous book: Shadow and Act, by Ralph Ellison (1964). Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952) made a huge impression on me last year, but it’s the only fiction he ever completed; his second novel, Juneteenth, was a compositional disaster, and was only recently published in unfinished form. Shadow and Act is an essay collection. Ellison’s chops are as obvious as ever – he writes with fantastic assurance and clarity – but I found some of these essays unsatisfying, particularly the ones about literature and race. I don’t disagree with his points, but his writing on jazz, by contrast, feels fresher and less involuted.

best popcorn reads: The Pilgrim of Hate, by Ellis Peters (1984), Sandry’s Book, by Tamora Pierce (1997), and Tris’s Book, by Tamora Pierce (1998). Peters is a favourite comfort writer for me, and this installment of Brother Cadfael’s medieval mystery-solving adventures is a particularly good one, featuring a great rug-pull about the relationship dynamic between two men. The Pierces are the first two in her Circle of Magic quartet, which I avoided as a kid because it wasn’t set in the same magical kingdom as her other books. On the basis of these two, I think I was right: they’re enjoyable and diverting, and they’re doing something a little different from her other books in that they show a group of gifted children becoming a team instead of focusing on individual heroics, but that group focus makes characterisation much thinner.

longest skim: Legacy of Ashes, by Tim Weiner (2007). This entire 800-page book, 45% of which is footnotes, could be summarised in one sentence: the CIA has never, ever done its job properly. (This may or may not be true: Weiner has An Angle and isn’t shy about it. Some of his evidence is quite compelling, but for balance, it’d be interesting to read at least one other book on this topic.)

best opening paragraph: Adrift on the Nile, by Naguib Mahfouz (1966). A short novel, dealing with existential malaise in Nasser’s Egypt as focalised through a group of bohemian pals who meet nightly on a houseboat. It opens in a civil servant’s dusty office and perfectly evokes a sense of hazy boredom and despair. There are slightly too many characters to keep easy track of, but in terms of both plot and themes, this would make an excellent comparison text for The Great Gatsby. Things end very badly indeed.

best return to poetry: The Carrying, by Ada Limón (2018). Limón was named the US Poet Laureate two years running, which is not the usual way of proceeding. I’ve been reading her poems since before then, often through the Instagram account @poetryisnotaluxury. I don’t read a lot of poetry these days, but she almost always hits for me; I dogeared about 70% of the pages here, one way or another. Think I want this as a wedding reading.

best salve for homesickness: Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver (2000). Kingsolver has always been a political and an ecological writer. In Prodigal Summer, she weaves three stories: that of Deanna, a Forest Service ranger; Lusa, recently widowed, who feels rejected by her husband’s family for being an outsider (she’s part Palestinian, part Polish Jew, and – perhaps worst of all – city-bred); and Garrett, a crusty older man whose loneliness and vulnerability is slowly revealed beneath his patina of irritability. All are connected, and all are tied to the land, whether that be Zebulon Mountain itself, with its coyotes, bears, snakes and songbirds, or the farmland in the valley below it. It’s set in the Appalachians in the corner between Virginia and Kentucky, so felt very familiar and comforting, and Kingsolver at her best – which this is – creates masterful webs of theme and character. Surprising, charming, profound, beautiful.

best follow-up to that salve: A Virtuous Woman, by Kaye Gibbons (1989). Also surprising, charming, profound and beautiful. Gibbons is practically unfindable in the UK so I always keep an eye out for her work in secondhand bookshops in the US, and was glad to find this on my most recent Virginia trip. Two strands, each following one half of a married couple: Ruby Stokes, who dies of lung cancer in her forties, and her husband “Blinking” Jack, twenty years her senior. A quiet but deep and convincing story about a human relationship that is by turns sweet and sad, but never predictable, bland or clichéd.

book I most wanted to give other people while reading: Family Happiness, by Laurie Colwin (1982). About a WASPy wife and mother who both loves her husband and family, and finds herself embarking almost unwittingly on an affair that feeds a part of her soul. The dominant word in this book is “trained”: Colwin uses it again and again to refer to the ways in which Polly has been made to understand – mostly by her parents – that she has to be perfect in order to be loved. For that emphasis, it qualifies as deeply feminist, but it’s very far from being a strident or overtly political book: it’s just one woman realising how deeply her upbringing has affected her, and how changes that might look small from the outside can feel big to the one making them. A truly wonderful novel, and I think the best Colwin I’ve read so far.

Have you read any of these, and if so, what did you think?