Jo Walton’s Reading List: October 2025 - Reactor

October started in Chicago, then I took the train to Stratford, Ontario where I saw some excellent plays at the Festival, and then came home, again by train. I saw Goblin:Oedipus, very interesting production, but not quite as good as their Macbeth, an excellent Dangerous Liaisons, and a very good adaptation of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility—and seeing both of those together and directed by the same person made me think a lot about how close together in time those stories are, even if they seem like different universes. The English Channel and the French Revolution lie between them, and a totally different worldview in terms of human nature. Fascinating. I’ve been at home since, reading, doing the copyedit of Everybody’s Perfect, and working on the new novel. I read eleven books, and they’re kind of a mix.

Perspective(s) — Laurent Binet (2023), translated by Sam Taylor
This is absolutely brilliant. It’s an epistolary novel, set in sixteenth-century Florence. It’s very funny and very clever and even in the few places where I caught it in errors of historical context I forgave it. Wonderful characters, and just delightful. Featuring Cellini lying about jumping off the Palazzo Vecchio and landing on a haystack! Such a beautiful, clever book. I haven’t read any other Binet and I must.

The Art of Travel — Alain de Botton (2002)
This is a book of philosophy, I suppose (at any rate, de Botton is a philosopher), but in this book he takes two places in each chapter—one that he visits himself and writes about the experience, and one that is a historical instance of a trip someone made and wrote about—and compares them. Sometimes there’s more than one. None of them are obvious, all of it is very well written, and it’s a really excellent reading experience. Highly recommended. Not like anything else. If you’re a fan of his, what should I read next?

Death in the Spires — K.J. Charles (2024)
Murder mystery set in Oxford in 1905. It was all right. That sounds so grudging. I really wanted to like it more.

Sonnets from the Portuguese — Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1850)
I went to a book fair in Chicago and I picked up this very beautiful little hardback with silhouette illustrations, and then I made the mistake of sitting down to look at it and reading the whole lot in one go. I subsequently wrote a whole pile of Petrarchan sonnets, some of them about being stuck with my brain on sonnets and some of them about EBB. These are great, truly, excellent sonnets… very specific and concrete sonnets about her particular and specific love for Robert Browning, and consequently they work very well. But sensible people read them one at a time over a reasonable period, and not all of them in an hour. (My EBB sonnets are on my Patreon if you want to see them.)

Corvus — Marko Kloos (2025)
Second volume in the Frontlines: Evolution series, don’t start here, start with Scorpio. This is military SF, and if you don’t like milSF you won’t like it, but I do when it’s good, and this is very good. Kloos is better than anyone at writing battle sequences that are genuinely interesting and exciting—normally I am so bored by action sequences, but not here. Great fun, just preordered the sequel. I’ll keep gulping these down as fast as they get written.

Princess Puck — Una Lucy Silberrad (1902)
Another wonderful book from Silberrad, and I think this is my favourite of what I’ve read of hers so far. So excited to see more of her work becoming available! This is a Victorian novel and so of course it has a crusty old man, a beautiful house, a village, a vicar, some cousins, ancestral complexities, and inheritances, and it does them all very well. But it also has a heroine called Bill, nobody calls her Wilhelmina (and since my cousin whose name was Wilhelmina went by Wella, I suspect nobody ever called anyone Wilhelmina), whose main characteristics are honesty and a liking for doing physical work well. Bill is terrific, the plot is fun, and I enjoyed every minute of this book. It’s free on Project Gutenberg, and there is more Silberrad coming soon.

The Adventure of the Demonic Ox — Lois McMaster Bujold (2025)
Another Penric & Desdemona novella, and like the last few it was fun, but felt like just more of the same. I will no doubt keep on reading and mildly enjoying these.

Worlds Out of Words — Barry Torch (2026)
This is an as yet unpublished PhD thesis written by a friend. It’s about the humanists in Rome around the papal court in the fifteenth century, including the one who became a pope, and the one who was arrested in a plot to assassinate a (different) pope, and the prefaces and other things they wrote advancing their agendas and trying to get jobs. I enjoyed reading it, and will try to remember to remind you when it gets to be a proper book.

Black Swan, White Raven — edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (1997)
Another collection of retold fairy tales, many of them very good but with one absolute standout, a science fiction version of Tam Lin by Bruce Glassco. Sadly, he does not seem to have written anything longer than other short stories, but I’ll be looking out for them; this one was perfect and I keep thinking about it.

Nonesuch — Francis Spufford (2026)
ARC sent to me by the author, who is a friend of friends. This is a horror novel set in London in WWII, and it does a lot of very difficult things very well. Spufford has done his research, and holds the challenging balance between fascists and metaphysical monsters. It’s really well written, even better than Spufford’s earlier work. However, I found the end very disturbing—not just the “to be continued,” which came as a big surprise, but the events of the very end, which are impossible to discuss without spoilers but which seemed to undermine a lot of what I’d loved about the earlier part of the novel. Again, I’ll try to remember to remind you when it comes out.

Why Read the Classics? — Italo Calvino (1991), translated by Martin McLaughlin
A collection of essays by Calvino; first, a fascinating essay on why people should read classics, then a bunch of essays about books written at different times, then two essays on imaginary books. It was funny reading it, because I kept saying “Of course he loves that!” Of course he loves Orlando Furioso, why, he clearly got the idea of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler from the experience of reading it! Of course he loves Don Quixote! Of course. Terrific collection, interesting and fun.