Jo Walton’s Reading List: November 2025 - Reactor

November was a month I spent entirely at home in Montreal, reading, working on my novel, and doing the page proofs for Everybody’s Perfect, the totally finished novel coming out in June next year. I read nineteen books, and some of them were great. Then in early December I got a migraine before I finished writing this post and forgot to finish it, which is why it’s so late. Sorry!

Nicked — M.T. Anderson (2024)
The story of a monk going from Bari to Myra to steal the corpse of St Nicholas with a group of assorted people with their own motivations for making the trip. I wanted to like this more than I actually did. It was fine, but reading it always felt like a bit of a slog. It never surprised me, or really drew me in; it hit all the beats you’d expect from the premise.

Windfall — Jennifer E. Smith (2017)
YA romance about a boy who wins the lottery and the girl who bought him the ticket. Smith is a very good writer, and so I enjoyed it. In many ways this was the opposite of Nicked, where the premise was great and the execution didn’t work for me—this had a premise I disliked but it was well enough written to pull me through anyway.

Sunward — William Alexander (2025)
Bath book. Now this is a very, very good book. It’s SF, set in a settled solar system without Earth, and it’s about families and robots and what it means to be a person. It’s as if Will imprinted on John Varley’s Eight Worlds stories and decided to reimagine the setting with modern sensibilities. It’s also a brilliant example of how you can write better about human nature when you have something to contrast it with. I raced through this short book and thoroughly enjoyed it. Highly recommended.

The Sea Wolf’s Mate — Zoe Chant (2019)
Second in this series of shape-shifter romance novels, very definitely genre romance, with fairly well-done worldbuilding of the shape-shifters. On reading this second one, I really don’t like the magical “this is your mate” recognition thing, it takes all the fun out of it. But I did like the seal-kid rescue part.

Amongst Our Weapons — Ben Aaronovitch (2022)
That’s more like it: a novel in the main sequence that feels like it has some plot progression. Though there was a thing where a previous character was mentioned/reintroduced in such a way that it made it clear to me that she’d be appearing in the book, which was a bit clunky, but I was so glad to be seeing her again I didn’t mind. I think I may give up on the novellas, they feel like trivial side quests and I don’t really enjoy them, but the full-length books are still fun. Lots of good things in this episode. But don’t start here, this is book 9, for goodness’ sake—start with book 1.

Mad Tuscans and Their Families — Elizabeth W. Mellyn (2014)
Really excellent non-fiction book about the treatment of the mentally ill and mentally handicapped in Renaissance Tuscany, largely drawn from legal records, and absolutely fascinating. Sometimes people are claiming someone is mad to get out of contracts. Sometimes someone is raving and attacking people in the streets. The solutions are patched together and sometimes work and sometimes don’t, and sometimes we don’t know what happened, only what all the participants in the trial said—and sometimes we don’t have the outcome either. A really great read, and thought-provoking too. Very readable as well as thoughtful and kind. Recommended if you’re at all interested.

Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief — Maurice Leblanc (1907), translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
Absolutely delightful series of stories about a French thief who’s impossibly good at his job, and how he gets away with things. Not quite heist stories, but part of what carved out the genre space for heist stories to exist later. These are ridiculously fun, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading them. I was suitably surprised by the surprise appearance of Sherlock Holmes—apparently this was unauthorised fanfic and Leblanc got into trouble for it. It’s interesting to see Holmes as he was seen in 1907. But the real joy here is Lupin on the train, Lupin on the boat, Lupin in prison… tons of fun.

In Italy for Love — Leonie Mack (2024)
Romance novel set in Italy, and a surprisingly good one. A young Australian woman who has come to Italy for love and had a terrible time and is ready to leave goes to a different part of Italy to wait for things she needs to wait for, and finds actual love there. Well written, very good Italy, surprisingly plausible romance. It’s so great when one of these turns out to be actually good. Must read more Mack.

Thieves’ Dozen —Donald Westlake (2004)
Re-read. Collection of short stories about Dortmunder, and therefore also heist stories—I enjoyed the Lupin so much I felt like reading something else in the same general space. These are light and fun, and some of them are much better than others. I don’t know who I’d recommend these to—if you’ve read Dortmunder already you probably know about them, and if you haven’t they’re not where to start. (What’s the Worst That Could Happen? is where to start.) Fun to revisit.

Teacup Magic: The First Collection — Tansy Rayner Roberts (2021)
Oh, these were such fun. Finally, romantasy that I like! Beautifully silly worldbuilding, taken seriously. There’s a romance, there are mystery plots, the whole thing is fluffy but interesting and fun. I don’t know why I like this and have found other books in the genre that are very similar boring—maybe it’s that Tansy Rayner Roberts is a very good writer with the right kind of light hand? Or that she knows what worldbuilding is so she gives just enough to hold together? I don’t think it was just that I was in the mood for it, because I was in the mood for the others when I tried them. Anyway, these are Heyer-with-magic in the same vein as Sorcery & Cecelia and I commend them to your attention. There are more, and I’ll be reading them.

Spring Magic — D.E. Stevenson (1942)
No actual magic, sadly. A girl who has never asserted herself goes for a holiday in Scotland in 1941 and everything turns out for the best. Good Scotland, good Blitz, good portrayal of children, as always in Stevenson. Surprisingly good portrayals of different kinds of marriages. Not top tier Stevenson, but engaging. And I am endlessly fascinated by the fiction set in WWII and written while it was going on, as opposed to written historically. There are a whole lot of things that have become part of our canon of Blitz, evacuation, etc, which had not yet solidified, and also we know the shape of the war and what happened, and a German landing in northern Scotland in 1942 didn’t happen, so nobody writing now would have a regiment there to prevent one.

The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Vol 1 (1845)
Re-read. How I love these letters, how I love RB and EBB, how they love each other and work hard on understanding that. You probably know the plot—her father was very possessive, she was an invalid, and spoiler: They run away to Italy at the end of volume 2, which I haven’t read since 1988, because there wasn’t an ebook of volume 2 the last time I read volume 1. But now there is! If you like the letters in A.S. Byatt’s Possession you will like this book, in which two Victorian poets go from strangers to friends to being in love. I was in the middle of this (it’s very long) when I read the sonnets last month and got them in full context. He was sending her all his work and she was critiquing it, but she didn’t show him those sonnets, which most people think are her best work, until they were in Italy. From the sonnets and the letters I could tell you which days she wrote them, but she didn’t show anyone. Reading these letters I keep thinking of the thing in Possession where Roland considers how letters are written with a recipient in mind but just that recipient, not posterity. These letters were not written for us, but for each other, but now they’re not here and the letters remain, we may as well enjoy them. I love them so much and I want them to be happy even though I know things about love they do not know. On to volume 2!

Strange Bedpersons (1994), The Cinderella Deal (1996) — Jennifer Crusie
Both re-reads and bath books. Crusie has written about how these books both have the same plot, and they do, and that makes it fascinating to read them as a pair and see how different they are… how the same writer can take the same plot and make it something completely different. Cinderella Deal was the version she wanted to write, Strange Bedpersons is the version her editor insisted on. They both have good, different things going on. They both have the plot of a cold man inviting a warm woman to pretend to be his fiancée for a weekend, which turns into something real. Both the women grow, even if they don’t grow up. Comparing them, the detail, the beats and the rhythms, is a very good exercise in how books work. They’re also a lot of fun. Crusie is too compelling to read as a bath book, a chapter at a time. Lots of times the water got cold as I read just a bit more.

Heart of the Matter — Emily Giffin (2010)
Re-read. Very odd book, with its sympathies in an odd place. There are two women and one man, a doctor. The women are his wife and the mother of one of his patients. And Giffin isn’t good at knowing when she’s made a character seem selfish and unsympathetic to me. Mainly she does it by writing about people with so much privilege I just roll my eyes at their problems, and that is very much the case here.

Elfin Music: An Anthology of English Fairy Poetry — Arthur Edward Waite (2005)
Actually Victorian, not originally published in 2005, a collection of poems on “elfin” themes. Some of them are great, some of them are the kind of awful Tolkien talks about in “On Fairy-Stories.” Really interesting to read them all together, especially as Waite includes centuries’ worth of poetry in English, without the work that has come after and become our genre. Some of them are seminal, some very much are not. Free online, and an illuminating if not exactly fun read.

I Think I’m in Love With an Alien — Ann Aguirre (2025)
This was great. A chat group for people who are into alien abduction and aliens and Roswell nonsense where it turns out that… I mean you can guess, right? But Aguirre does it very well, and this was a delight.

Making History — K.J. Parker (2025)
A new novella from Parker, what a treat! While his novels are usually military history in made up worlds, his shorter work is often metaphysically interesting. This concerns an attempt to make up some fake history to justify a war that backfires spectacularly. Like most Parker, it’s a fast, absorbing read.

The Eights — Joanna Miller (2025)
Much-lauded first novel about women at Oxford in the immediate aftermath of the Great War which was just a notch shallower than I wanted it to be. The women had mysterious pasts, which all turned out to be very unsatisfying—revelation is a hard problem. When the author keeps something back from the reader there should be a reason for it, and when it is revealed it shouldn’t be the obvious guess. This was good enough to keep me reading but there was never quite enough to get my teeth into.