Jo Walton’s Reading List: September 2025 - Reactor

I was in Florence for most of September, with day trips to Fiesole and Lucca, and I came to Chicago at the end of the month. It was a great month—my novel is advancing, the weather was beautiful, and I took a lot of friends around a lot of museums. I also twice ran into people who recognised me, once in the street and once in a restaurant, which was really surprising and cool. I read just eight books, though some of them were quite long.

The Mirror & the Light — Hilary Mantel (2020)
Re-read, though I read this for the first time in March 2020, which is like having read it before. There are some series where embarking on a re-read is like embarking on a long voyage, where you just commit yourself to the depths of the book and sail on. The Wolf Hall books are like that, and by this third long volume it’s just a case of immersion. You can’t step back and be critical any more. You’ve always lived with Thomas Cromwell, always almost been him, and the experience of reading this volume is like being in the back of his head and shouting at him to stop, to back off, warning that there’s a cliff edge before his feet and we can see it and he can’t. The first book is the fall of Thomas More, the second is the fall of Anne Boleyn, and the third is the fall of Cromwell himself. Taken together they’re a spectacular achievement, and I love them. It really feels to me as if Mantel has made the period and the people solid and fascinating, and just as real and complex and full of politics and people as the contemporary world. I recommend the whole set, but start with Wolf Hall.

The Griffin’s Mate — Zoe Chant (2017)
Sold as romantasy, this is a fun and gentle genre romance with shapeshifters. It wasn’t doing anything very innovative, but it did a reasonable job with both the shapeshifter culture and the romance plot, and with using the two in tension with each other—using the shapeshifting culture to bring obstacles into the romance plot, and to resolve them. I enjoyed reading it, and will probably read more in the Hideaway Cove series, since I bought them as a set. I’ve had such bad luck with both cosy fantasy and romantasy that finding one I mildly like feels like a real win.

Sad Cypress — Agatha Christie (1940)
A house, an inheritance, a poisoning, the trial of an innocent girl—oh, this is classic cosy mystery all right! Christie at her most characteristic, with clues and red herrings and lots and lots of class consciousness, and not in a good way. Interesting to think that this is a book people were reading in the bomb shelters and that she was probably writing it in the first days of WWII when it seems so solidly set in the world before. Also interesting to compare to Sayers’ Strong Poison, which it is both like and unlike.

The Right Place — Sophia Money-Coutts (2024)
This is great, a ton of fun and very well written. It’s a romance novel in which a woman inherits a hotel in France and decides to change her life. I’d call this chick lit by my definition that in chick lit, it’s as much about the career as the romance, because this certainly is that. Excellent food writing, lovely Provence, good gay best friend, and very well-done terrible husband. Reminded me in a way of Trollope in how it laid out how good intentions had led a person into a terrible place, but unlike Trollope it opened the door to new possibilities and a better future. If there’s one message in genre romance it’s that you can personally, through your own actions, change your own life—the choices you have made can be revisited. It’s all in a very small way, compared to the way science fiction changes worlds, but sometimes you don’t have a giant robot or a hyperspace ship handy, so quitting your job or walking away from bad relationships can be a good plan. Also, this book is funny and well-constructed and I enjoyed it a lot.

Eifelheim — Michael Flynn (2006)
Long, odd science fiction novel about aliens landing in the Black Forest just before the Black Death. (Content warning: Black Death.) Flynn does surprisingly well with writing the mindset of the medieval priest coping with aliens, that was great. I was irritated at his deriving new scientific names from Greek and coming up with exactly the words we use like “automata.” But generally, I thought that this worked as a historical novel with aliens. It would be better without the parts in the present day, though. The modern characters inventing hyperspace travel and figuring out the aliens are shallow, and Tom’s starting point for his “cliology” is that no other village appears in the hex where Eifelheim was, and… there’s no explanation for this. There are plenty of other sites a new village could have developed if the original one is cursed or whatever, and it says this and then ignores it. If you come up with something that sounds scientific and is set up like a mystery you need to resolve it, not just find the skull of an alien. Anyway, this is a very long book, and I liked some of it. I notice it was originally a novella in 1987, perhaps it would have suited me better at that length. But I certainly enjoyed it enough to want to find out what happened.

Discourse on the Origin of Inequality — Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1755)
On the Harvard shelf, and I hadn’t read it before, though I certainly had read other people citing it. This is kind of the origin of the “noble savage” myth where people lived happily in the wilderness until corrupted by civilization. Interesting to see it, hard to imagine how it became so popular, though I suppose if your alternatives are this gentle romantic wilderness or the Hobbes kind of savagery, it makes sense.

The Evening of the Holiday — Shirley Hazzard (1965)
This is a strange book, beautifully written, and certainly set in Italy, but very much not a romance novel, though it is centrally about a romance. It’s odd. It’s simultaneously very vividly described and very dreamlike, very well observed and making no emotional sense. It frequently uses the omniscient to move between POVs in a way that was strange in 1965 and even stranger now. Everything is charged and consequent but nothing happens—why does she have an affair with him, and why does she leave him, why do they feel what they do? And this is a book all about feelings—well, and also watching a parade in an Italian city. I read this on the plane and in Chicago, and indeed it feels to me like jetlag. I’ll try more Hazzard, but I have very mixed feelings about this one.

Obstetrix — Naomi Kritzer (2026)
Absolutely riveting novella set in a very near future, about a doctor who is kidnapped to deliver babies for a cult. Invites comparison to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet but a very different story in terms of time and place. It’s not very science fictional, this could be the present moment, and most of the real-world things that have gone on and become worse are mentioned at the beginning. So for most of the reading experience this could be a present-day thriller. It certainly is thrilling; I couldn’t put it down. Kritzer is very good at tense situations and the ways people have to get on with life when things are challenging, and she’s absolutely on the top of her form here. Pre-order this, and set aside a day to read it uninterruptedly.