Books. Aren't they just so damned addictive? Every year I promise myself I'll get rid of some of my books to free up a bit of space. Every year I buy more than I give away. I'd be absolutely sorted if I didn't hate e-reading so much.
2025 has been a great year of reading for me. I got some good books for Christmas last year and spent my birthday money on even more, so I've read a good 20 to 30 new-to-me titles.
The absolute stand out pleasure has been the Ithaca trilogy by Clare North. I love Clare's science fiction novels so I was confident her writing would be good, but even so this series blew me away. It's set on the island of Ithaca, home of Odysseus, and chronicles the life of his wife Queen Penelope who has to use every ounce of her wit and guile to rule over a place missing a generation of men, subjected to piracy and political machinations of neighbouring kingdoms, and that will not accept a woman in charge.
Each one (Ithaca, The House of Odysseus and The Last Song Of Penelope) is narrated from the perspective of one of the three Goddesses involved in the fight for the golden apple that started all the trouble. Hera, Aphrodite and Athena have strong and distinct voices, and very different biases. It was a marvellous conceit through which to tell the story and I'd buy Clare North a box of chocolates for it if I could. The women of the island were well drawn characters that I desperately cared about, and I had to ration myself to only reading one then having something else on the go to eke out the story as long as I could.
Sticking to Ancient Greece, I recommend both Natalie Hayne's Stone Blind and No Friend To This House. I enjoy Haynes on the radio as well as through her novels. She's smart, funny and tells a good story.
Another big win was The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim. My lovely friend and neighbour Penny bought it for me when I got home from our week in Rapallo because von Arnim had been living there when she wrote it, and the book is set on that headland. It was a gorgeous literary extension of the holiday, with the sea and sky so blue and the buildings glowing in the sun. Penny is a skilled hand at choosing just the right book for a person or an occasion; she puts a great deal of thought into her gifts. I'm lucky to have her as a friend.
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Setting for The Enchanted April |
However, it did tip into the trend for Bloody Ridiculous Narrators To Choose. In the past two years I've had an octopus, a tree, a book, a pigeon, some water, a dog, and probably a couple others I can't remember. I don't mean when an animal narrates a story about animals, or when it's a non-human person like a cyborg or AI or super intelligent spiders (hurray for Adrian Tchaikovsky!) or ghosts of people who have died in the story. I mean stories about people 'whimsically' told by an unexpected being. I'm all for a bit of whimsy here and there, but not whole torrents of it. It's a seasoning, not a main course.
For holiday reading I thoroughly enjoyed two by Tracy Chevalier: Remarkable Creatures about my heroine Mary Anning and The Glassmakers about the Venetian island of Murano through the centuries. Daisy Jones and the Six as an audio book was an ideal choice to keep me entertained through airports and flights and trains - the voice cast is excellent. There was also Small Bomb at Dimperley from Lissa Evans, which I enjoyed but it was slightly spoilt by my sky-high expectations given how much I loved the more ascerbic Old Baggage and Crooked Heart. This was an enjoyable romcom and I wish I'd read it first, not last.
I did have two clunkers while in Italy. The first as Think Again by Jacqueline Wilson, whom I'd only previously read as a children's author. I forced myself to finish it because I was running low on holiday books and still had 3 days to go, but thought it was leaden and dull.
Casting about in desperation, I found Sally Rooney's Intermezzo on the swap shelf in the hotel. I've never read any of hers and figured it was worth a punt. Nope. It's boring, has too much sex and not enough personality. One of the main character reminded me of the really irritating drippy John Irving protagonists he went through a phase of - the type of bloke you'd like to give a slap to and tell them to buck their ideas up. I can't be arsed with navel-gazing ineffectual men.
Another I read that seemed to be everywhere was James by Percival Everitt. It's Huckleberry Finn as told by escaped slave Jim, but it's essentially one 'joke' (that black people are well spoken but put on a dumb patios in the presence of white folk) stretched far past breaking point. It would have worked for me as a short story but across 303 pages it wore mighty thin.
I've been reading quite a lot of non-fiction (for me) lately but as usual I rarely finish them. I start all enthusiastically, galumph through the early chapters but then fade out like a a toddler with a Sesame Street attention span. However, I do like to pick them up from second had shops to dip into when the subject looks interesting. The low cost helps to offset the didn't-finish-it guilt.
The memoir Crying in H-Mart by Michelle Zauner was interesting as a snapshot into a culture I don't know much about - tourism from the armchair is much cheaper than the real kind! I didn't get terribly far with Normal Woman by Philippa Gregory because it covered quite a lot of the same ground as Femina by Janina Ramirez, which I read a couple of years back.
In contrast, I positively devoured Unfortunately She Was A Nymphomaniac by Joan Smith, which defends the reputation of the Julio-Claudian women of Ancient Rome. Having reread Robert Graves last year, I am embarrassed that I took his wild and misogynistic characterisations in I, Claudius and sequel as true. Poor Livia, the slandered villain of the piece, and poor starved Julia. The Caesars were brutal to the women they disliked or discarded.
I bought Unfortunately when I went to the Women's Right's Network's book festival in November. At the same time I bought yet more histories of women and essays about women's rights, but those are the kind I can dip into for one essay at a time. Much as I once needed to read Satanic Verses to see what all the protests were about, I'm enjoying The Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht, which caused the National Library of Scotland to nearly self-combust this autumn. It was introduced at the festival by its co-editor Susan Dalgety, who has so many tales to tell and dirt to dish I wish I could be on a night out with her. She also has a downright filthy laugh. Her book certainly sparked a long and interesting conversation with Luke.
I've read a couple of books about buying less (borrowed from the library, naturally) and about being more connected to the natural world, but I kind of do that stuff anyway. The books about birds by Tim Birkhead - The Most Perfect Thing and What It's Like To Be A Bird - have been very interesting while my pitiful attention span holds, but ultimately I read because I want to be told a story.
Between this year and last I read the first three Brandon Sanderson Mistborn novels. I love a bit of fantasy and interesting world-building, so Luke thought this would be something I could get my teeth into. He was right, as he so often is, and I will happily read more Sanderson in future. After all, poor old Robin Hobb can't be responsible for every mighty fantasy tome, can she? I did read the three Wild Ships novels this year, rounding out her already remarkable world. She takes up about 6 feet of bookshelves alone.
R.F Kuang's been very busy over the last few years. After a brief foray into her satirical fiction Yellowface, I returned to her fantasy with Babel, which was fascinating to anyone with a love of just the right word and correct nuance for a situation. It has racism, colonialism, isolation, magic and conspiracies while romping through an alternate Oxford weirder even than Lyra's. Her latest, Katabasis, is on my wish list for next year.
For science fiction, I've only read a few this year and only one new one. The Ministry Of Time (which barely counts) kind of fluffed its execution while landing the ending pretty well. I revisited my old pal Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy.
Uncharacteristically, I only read 6 Georgette Heyers instead of my usual 15-20. I chose Terry Pratchett for most of my comforting re-reads instead - first all the Guards novels, then dipping my toe in a variety of them as they appealed to me including Granny Weatherwax and Tiffany Aching novels.. I think I needed the humour. And it does me good to have a gap from Heyer now and again because I know my favourites almost by heart.
Zach loaned me Batman: Year One by Frank Miller in a sincere attempt to overcome my long-held impression that Batman is basically an asshole. I like Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, Superman, the X-men (Bryan Singer movie versions, at least) and Ms Marvel, but the Caped Crusader always seemed more of a sociopath than a hero. I was impressed! Year One was a very engaging story. That was a super introduction for me, although Jim Gordon almost broke my heart. He's queued up another couple for me to carry on with. I like the lads' determination to share their cultural capital with me the way I share mine with them.
Queen B doesn't recommend books to me often but we share a few authors. We both enjoy Emily Henry's romance novels. I wasn't as taken by Funny Story, which I read in the summer, so I re-read Book Lovers and Holiday Read to get me back in the mood.
Oh! I forgot one of the big hits of the year - The Voyage Home by the sublime Pat Barker. It was the final in the trilogy started by The Silence Of The Girls (my book of the year at the time). Barker's prose is so gorgeous I always feel I'm in the room with the characters, hearing the insects chirp and smelling the blood and the dirt. I love a book that sweeps me in so utterly that I forget my surroundings.
I expect in January I'll tell myself I need to make more space and give away another 30 or 40 books again, before instantly filling the space with a new batch of exciting stuff to read.
It's still a shame I hated my Kindle so much. It felt the ideal solution to my slightly out of control book habit. My mum-in-law Marion very kindly bought me one for Christmas some years ago. But somehow it's just not the same without a cover and pages. At least the kids use it.
I'm sticking to paperbacks.
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