I was home all month, which was the normal kind of cold snowy January we have in Montreal. I was working on the essay collection (done!) and the novel, but I didn’t go out, and anyone would be forgiven for thinking I spent the whole month doing nothing but sitting by the window reading my book and watching it snow, because I read twenty-eight books this month. Some of them were great.
Aesop’s Fables, Aesop (500 BCE)
This was the next thing in the Harvard Shelf of Books, and while it’s technically a re-read it’s a long, long time since I read it before. Short, mostly familiar, fables, surprisingly fun to read through.
The Two of Swords, Volumes 1, 2, and 3, K.J. Parker (2017)
Three books, one entry. A K.J. Parker series. A war. I actually believed at one point that the world would be completely depopulated and there would be nobody left, but fortunately there were some more countries we hadn’t heard about before. There’s an empire, which has split into two empires, and they’re at war, and there are two brothers and one is commanding the army of each empire, and there’s a secret society and—yes, this is K.J. Parker doing his special thing, fantasy of logistics with scheming. I love it unconditionally. I’ve even reconciled myself to the way love works in his universe. I really liked the point of view switches in the first volume and was sad when he stopped doing that later. I was thinking people talk about David Mitchell switching POV but Parker is doing this really interesting thing here, but in fact never mind, the difference is that Mitchell is doing it purposefully. But I did enjoy that a lot in the first volume. Reviews sometimes say that this is the kind of book people who like this kind of book will like, and yes. If you want to read Parker, here is some.
Isabella d’Este and Francesco Gonzaga, Sarah Cockram (2013)
This is an academic history that wants to argue that Isabella and her husband were a team, not opposed to each other, and everything before has written about them in opposition. I don’t think they were quite as much of a team as Cockram makes out, but she’s pushing against a lot of weight of expectation. Excellent quotations from letters, I wish there were an affordable English translation of their letters. Not a book for if you don’t already know who they are, or if you haven’t already read other things about them, but I really enjoyed it, especially when she shows how they were actually double-teaming people.
A Surprise for Christmas and Other Seasonal Mysteries, edited by Martin Edwards (2020)
It was still the season when I started it! Another anthology of cosy mystery short stories from Edwards and the British Library Crime classics, perhaps a little weaker than the other Christmas-themed ones, or maybe I’m just getting tired of them. There were some real gems, but only a few.
Evicted From Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome, Michael Herzfeld (2009)
This is a sociological study about gentrification and about the working-class people who live, or lived, very close to the centre of modern Rome and the way their communities worked and how they are being destroyed. Parts of it were fascinating and other parts dragged. While it had some great moments, I felt I never really got into it as much as I wanted to.
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1920)
I really like Fitzgerald’s short stories, so every so often I try one of his novels. He’s a very good writer but I never enjoy his longer work. It’s as if he has nothing to write about, and he does it very well but it’s all empty. Here the focus is Amory, an American boy of a certain class, and he is spoilt rotten and goes to college and has various overanalysed love affairs and briefly goes to WWI and comes back and discovers he doesn’t have as much money as he had been led to believe. None of it does him any good, he’s as spoilt and entitled at the end as at the beginning. It’s a beautifully written whine about how unfair it is that people can’t lead the empty lives of rich people without actual money.
At short lengths I don’t have time to get so fed up with his people. I did spent a little while thinking about Amory and UBI because even when he has nothing he has so much more than the people all around him that he barely sees. There’s one point where he and friends from Princeton eat and drink at the beach with no intention of paying, and the text thinks this is fun and I was worried about how the establishments they are defrauding are going to cope with this deficit. If society gave him enough to actually live on he’d waste it on one bottle of champagne.
Golden Lads: Sir Francis Bacon, Anthony Bacon, and Their Friends, Daphne du Maurier (1975)
Disappointing biography of mostly Anthony Bacon that does that terrible thing where it has invented dialogue. When she was quoting from letters it was solid, but everywhere else it was on very thin ice. Very much not recommended, though I like du Maurier’s novels and am very interested in Francis Bacon.
Under the Rainbow, Susan Scarlett (Noel Streatfeild) (1942)
Re-read. Now this one was great. A lot of Streatfeild’s strengths in this one. Great well-observed children, an excellent antagonist (surprisingly sympathetic), and a heroine with a plausible secret. There’s also fun with amateur dramatics, and a beautifully oblivious parson hero. I liked the discussion of coping with grief, which must have been very useful to people in 1942. Also a perfectly nice romance. This would be a good one to start with.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021)
This book is amazing; it’s the book I wanted after I read Mann’s 1491. It collects modern anthropological information about the Neolithic and early civilizations, and writes about them in a lively and examining way. It’s full of weird ways of living and different societies and—as I said about Graeber’s Debt—you couldn’t ask for a better book to give you worldbuilding ideas. It’s speculative non-fiction, and if Graeber and Wengrow are bending over backwards to find feminism and co-operation in early cities, well, it’s a valuable kind of corrective. I like their ideas about the three elements that make up a state, and it doesn’t matter if they’re right or not, they’re useful and different ways of thinking about it. Also worth noting that I read this because so many people in Spain and France at signings and events asked me whether I had, so I felt I should. They were so correct. It was also a joy to read, beautifully written and full of thinky thoughts. Move it to the top of your pile.
The Italian Holiday, Victoria Springfield (2021)
Romance novel set in Italy. This starts with a young woman taking a phone call from her beloved grandma who has won a competition with a prize trip to Italy at a time when she can’t go, so she gets her granddaughter to go instead. Then she mixes up her suitcase with the case of an Italian chef returning home, and both of them find love while being in Italy. Not amazing, but pretty good, and I really enjoyed the subsidiary romance of the widow and widower, and indeed all the old ladies on the trip were great, a truly excellent supporting cast. The heroine did skip out on going to Pompeii to further the plot, but otherwise lots of fun.
A Traveller in Time, Alison Uttley (1939)
Children’s book about a girl visiting a farm where her family have lived for generations and having episodes of visiting the same farm and family in the Elizabethan period. One odd thing of reading this book now is that it was written in 1939 but set in about 1910, in the time of the narrator’s supposed childhood, so the technological difference between the two time periods feels much less to me than it would have to a contemporary reader. Not a great book or one worth going to a lot of trouble to read, very standard time travel children’s book with very romanticised Mary, Queen of Scots.
“Shopoholic on Honeymoon,” Sophie Kinsella (short story, 2014) and Shopoholic and Sister (2004)
I got stalled on this series because Shopoholic Ties the Knot didn’t download properly and Amazon’s solution, when it still wouldn’t download when they tried, was that I should delete everything off my Kindle and start again. They understand nothing about how people read. Nothing. However, since I’d already bought the rest of the series, I eventually decided to skip that one, and indeed, I could understand what was happening and imagine the shape of the missing volume. Sister is an interesting look at the way blood relationships both do and do not mean anything. Kinsella is always funny and readable and generally much more thoughtful than you’d expect. Becky is an awful person and I don’t like anything she likes but I can still find her sympathetic. Fun.
Like Family: Growing Up in Other People’s Houses, Paula McLain (2004)
A memoir by an author whose novels about Hemingway’s wives I have enjoyed. I found this absolutely compelling in a train wreck way and couldn’t put it down. There are a lot of people whose fathers are in and out of prison and whose mothers go off one day with a boyfriend and whose grandparents and aunts can’t cope so they end up in the welfare system, but I don’t see a lot of books written by people who have had that experience. McLain writes here with deep self-examination and honesty about things people don’t write about much. This is a very good own voices book, though grueling—all those different foster families! All that hope!
Foxglove Summer, Ben Aaronovitch (2014)
Don’t start here, start at the beginning of the series, but I thought this one was great. We finally got a little bit away from London and the Folly and saw some more of the country and the arcane stuff going on underneath it, and it wasn’t anywhere near horror. I can’t quite believe, that with this level of frequency of weird magical stuff they’ve been managing with just Nightingale all these years, but never mind, he does say it’s getting worse. Well-written, surprisingly interesting urban fantasy that I’m still enjoying and will continue to read.
The Rehearsals, Annette Christie (2021)
A Groundhog Day romance novel, in which a couple who have been together for years and are about to get married have to relive the day of their terrible rehearsal dinner, with both of them trapped in it. It made me realize how much more science-fictional Groundhog Day is than this book, how Bill Murray actually tries to test the boundaries. A neat thing to be doing in a romance but very much not a genre book. It’s interesting that it is mostly the man who has to learn to stand up to his family here.
The Rise of Athens, Anthony Everitt (2016)
A clear readable history of classical Athens with short chapter sections. I wouldn’t say there was really anything I didn’t know in this book, but it’s an interesting story and very well told. (Everitt’s biography of Cicero is one of my favourite biographies.) If you’ve always wanted to know more, or anything, about ancient Greece, grab this.
Virtual Unrealities: The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester, Alfred Bester (1997)
A collection of Bester’s short stories, containing some of his very best work and a few things I didn’t have in the two paper Bester collections I already owned, none of which were particularly good. But gosh his good work is good—really, I think he wrote some of the most powerful, memorable early SF stories.
Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont, Elizabeth Taylor (1971)
An incredibly well-written novel about an old woman moving into a hotel because being old and alone sucks, and developing an odd kind of friendship with a young man. It’s merciless and powerful. This is of the highest literary quality, and full of revelatory observation and acutely seen character and situation, but in a way that’s agonising. I’d be interested in recommendations for what Taylor I should read next, because she’s such a good writer and I don’t quite know how I’d overlooked her until now. But I’ll definitely brace myself.
Arkad’s World, James Cambias (2019)
Re-read. I don’t understand why some books get a lot of attention and others seem to be published inside a paper bag and nobody talks about them. This book is great. It has aliens, lots and lots of different and well-thought-through fun kinds of aliens, and linguistics, and a complex satisfying quest across a very alien planet. This is a fun SF romp that also has ideas. It’s not the greatest book in the world, it’s not something I feel everyone ought to read, but it’s a lot of fun and I’m surprised more people haven’t enjoyed it. There are lots of books less good than this that people are always recommending to each other. If you like Niven’s Known Space, or Cherryh’s Chanur, or Leckie’s Imperial Radch, you’ll enjoy Arkad’s World.
One More Croissant For the Road, Felicity Cloake (2019)
Gosh I loved this book. Cloake is a food writer who cycled around France eating delicious things, sometimes alone and sometimes with friends, sometimes camping and sometimes staying in cheap hotels, and occasionally taking a train between places. There are lots of descriptions of food, ratings of croissants consumed, descriptions of the French towns and countryside, quirky museums of food, triumphs and disasters. This is just delightful. With a travel book like this, you’re spending a lot of time with the narrator, and it’s important to like them, and Felicity, with her love for food and quirky food museums and her way of seeing the funny side of things, is an excellent companion.
Stuck On You, Portia MacIntosh (2020)
Romance novel. I enjoyed this, despite correctly guessing the big reveal instantly. Funny, fast moving, relatively plausible, with very good family and Christmas content.
One Italian Summer, Rebecca Serle (2022)
Now you’re thinking this is another romance novel set in Italy, right, but no! This is women’s fiction, and it’s about a woman whose mother dies, then she goes to Italy and there connects with not the ghost of her mother but her mother as she was thirty years earlier on her own trip to Italy. This book could have been so great, but it doesn’t work for two reasons. First is that while Italy is a different country from the US, anyone with half a brain would in fact notice they were in 1992 instead of 2022 even if they had decided to do without their phone.
Secondly, and more profoundly, it doesn’t work because the daughter doesn’t have anything to give to her younger mother and it needs to go both ways to work emotionally in a story like this. It’s nearly very good, but it needs that to balance. And they need to deal with the fact that the mother has always known when she’ll die and how her daughter will feel, and there should be something from the old mother at the end when she’s back in the present acknowledging this. It was so close to being good that I wanted to fix it all the time. Third, and trivially, while Italy has great food and beaches, that is not why people go there, really, or at least if all the characters do is swim and eat and go to bars then I judge them as shallow.
Conclave 1559: Ippolito d’Este and the Papal Election of 1559, Mary Hollingsworth (2013)
Excellent popular history about exactly what it says on the tin, with lots of valuable detail. Hollingsworth is great. This is two generations after the papal election I most care about—indeed Ippolito is the grandson of the victor of the 1492 papal election—but an excellent book. I’ve been to Ippolito’s house in Tivoli with its wonderful fountains and bizarre wall paintings. This is approachable by anyone who has even a mild interest in Renaissance Italy, and recommended.
Stet: An Editor’s Life, Diana Athill (2000)
A memoir of being an editor at a small literary publishing house in London, and some of the authors Athill knew and edited, written when she was very old. Funny and interesting and full of details. Quite honest about her life, and not afraid to tackle difficult questions. I really enjoyed reading this. Thank you whoever it was who recommended that I read more Athill, she’s great.
The Bird King, G. Willow Wilson (2019)
Excellent fantasy novel about the end of Islamic Spain, feminism, and self-determinism, with djinn, magic maps, and a magic island. The characters are great, the background is unusual and very well done, the magic is really interesting. The problem is that it’s grim, the characters have to go through a lot and I suppose my complaint is not about the book but about history—1492 in Spain was horrible. Many people writing about it in a fantasy context (Kay, Bujold) give way to the urge to soften it and make it more bearable, Wilson does not. This is in the same universe as her much more cheerful Alif the Unseen. I really like the djinn and was happy to recognise them.
Lord Geoffrey’s Fancy, Alfred Duggan (1962) Re-read, bath book. Historical novel about Outremer and Greece a generation after the Fourth Crusade, from the POV of a slightly naive English knight who goes to Greece and makes his life there for a while. The politics and culture of the 1280s are very much seen through his eyes, and also the eyes of Duggan (1903-1964), an upper-class Englishman.
I loved Duggan when I was a teenager, his historical novels always had some women in them, and that is the case here, though it’s not where his focus or the sympathy is. You can also always trust him on his historical details. The interesting thing about this book is that it’s set in such an utterly neglected part of history, and that it’s telling the story of a “perfect knight” as observed by a slightly clueless other knight, and none of them are aware of the “tides of history” that they are part of. This has never been one of my favourites, and so I haven’t re-read it in ages. Warnings for period attitudes of the period in which Duggan lived, as well as the period in which he was writing.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published two collections of Tor.com pieces, three poetry collections, a short story collection and fifteen novels, including the Hugo- and Nebula-winning Among Others. Her novel Lent was published by Tor in May 2019, and her most recent novel, Or What You Will, was released in July 2020. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here irregularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal. She plans to live to be 99 and write a book every year.
