Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson
As mentioned in my previous blog, I was dragged kicking and screaming out of my Stormlight Archive reading streak by some ARCs and a book club book, but I knew that Dalinar Kholin would want me to keep my oaths and so I did the right thing and took a break from the series. And given it’s the last book in the series (at least for now), it’s probably for the best that I didn’t rush myself through it. I’m very glad I savoured this book as much as I did because by the time I got to the end I felt positively hollowed out and I truly don’t know how I’m going to last until the Era 2 starts. So much of what happens in this book is bittersweet in particular Dalinar’s time in the Spiritual Realm and confrontation with Odium, and Kaladin and Szeth’s journey (in both a literal and therapeutic sense) through Shinovar. However as much as various elements made me cry, it all felt right and so I’m not in a position to complain. Sanderson has an incredible gift for making every major twist feel earned and satisfying to the reader so even the most devastating moments don’t sting as much as they could. Adolin’s arc in Azir was gorgeously done and I’m so excited to see the ramifications of his choices playing out in future books and the exploration of Jasnah’s limitations and fallibility felt like such an interesting route to take at this stage in the series. I appreciate I’m being annoyingly vague in all of this but know that I am trying to protect you from spoilers. All in all, I’m coming out of this series feeling exhausted, emotionally wrung-out but also so grateful for the journey I’ve been on with these characters and excited for whatever comes next. Journey before destination, always.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Sometimes a story reaches through the mists of time to grab you by the throat. The Yellow Wallpaper was written over a century ago but it’s so pertinent to modern life it feels as if it could have been written last week. This novella tells the story of a woman diagnosed with “temporary nervous depression” and “hysterical tendencies” by her physician husband after she gives birth to their first child. She is whisked away to the countryside to recuperate and confined to the old nursery of their rental house. The room is airy, with lots of light, perfect for an invalid….except for the profoundly and offensively hideous yellow wallpaper. As our narrator is encouraged not to strain her overexcited little brain by accepting visitors or writing, she is left to stare at the wallpaper for hours on end until finally she sees something moving within it. What ensues is a breathless, gothic tale of domestic and marital oppression, lightyears ahead of its time.
Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Not many people know that years before Bram Stoker ever picked up a pen to craft Dracula, there was already already a queer lady vampire causing havoc in Europe. Enchanting beautiful young women and forming deep emotional relationships with then as she drains them of their blood, Carmilla is a radical and revolutionary figure in Victorian literature. Seductive and beguiling she observes Laura, the object of her desire, for years before insinuating herself into her life and subtly tempting her towards…vampirism? A lesbian sexual awakening? Maybe both? Where Dracula’s attentions always have a hint of the supernatural glossing over the erotic undertones (and indeed is being fought be his victims every step of the way), Carmilla is eerily human in the way that she woos Laura and as Laura herself says ‘her soul acquiesced in it’. Still looking for a better vampire love story than Twilight? Definitely give Carmilla a go.
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Gregor Samsa’s day starts off by realising he has transformed into a giant insect overnight and it’s all down hill from there. Finding himself suddenly an object of shame and disgust to those who should love him most, Kafka uses this extreme metaphor to explore the casual cruelty that mankind can show towards our most vulnerable. Painfully congnizant of how uncomfortable he makes his family, wracked with guilt over no longer being able to work to provide for them and perpetually having his good intentions misunderstood, Gregor is a man isolated who gradually finds himself becoming less and less human in his isolation. A twisted and poignant fairy tale for the modern age.
Eve Bites Back: An Alternative History of English Literature by Anna Beer
Eve Bites Back is an effort to recenter female authors in the canon of English literature, shedding new light on contemporaries of Shakespeare, Chaucer and Dickens. I would consider myself someone who goes out of their way to learn about female authors from history and while some figures in this book were familiar too me (hello Jane Austen), I was surprised at the number I had simply never heard of. This book was therefore a treasure trove of previously unheard voices and stories, from Julian of Norwich to Mary Elizabeth Braddon. What’s more, Beer also examines public perceptions of female authorship through time and how each of her subjects either sought to counteract them through delicacy and performed modesty and how others chose to spit in their faces. An absolutely fascinating read and perfect for the lady author in your life.
Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett
Thank you to NetGalley and Little Brown Book Group for this ARC. Trilogies can be tricky ones to nail. When I first reviewed Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries I was enchanted by the charming conceit and swept away by the story, but when the time came to read Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands I was disappointed, finding it lacked the direction and didn’t live up to the promise of it’s predecessor. However, I was willing to hope that Fawcett was saving the big guns for the climactic series finale and so I eagerly cracked open Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales. It is with a heavy heart I say that I was disappointed again as I really, really wanted the magic to be recaptured. Unfortunately once again the plot felt meandering and sluggish, the conflict felt confused and the resolutions didn’t feel earned. It’s still a lovely concept for a book but I think it would have been best left as a standalone novel as I don’t feel as if Fawcett had a coherent vision for where she’d take a series.
Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for this ARC. Anne Tyler has an incredible talent for writing about the most normal and mundane parts of the human experience and spinning them into tales that have the emotional heft of an epic. Three Days in June centres around Gail Baines as she prepares for her only child’s wedding but things have not been going her way. She’s lost her job, been shut out the of pre-wedding spa day and now her ex-husband is on her doorstep, with no suit and a strange cat, expecting to stay at her place. All of this seems to fade into the background however when her daughter finds out that her husband-to-be has been unfaithful. Unsure of how to respond to this revelation, worried for her daughter’s future and also struggling to confront the old wounds from her marriage that this has uncovered, Gail is forced to think carefully about what it means to live well and start over. A stunningly gorgeous little gem of a book.
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
At the ripe old age of thirty, I have finally finished my first Charles Dickens book. Great Expectations is an epic coming of age journey for young Pip, a plucky orphan trying to make his way in the cruel and callous world of Victorian England. After suddenly being told he is the heir to a significant fortune (the titular great expectation), our hero is plucked from his humble life and catapulted into the big city where he must grapple with the usual struggles of a young man finding his place in the world – who is he? What does he stand for? Who are his real friends? What does it mean to truly love someone? As much as I grew fond of Pip over the course of the many, many pages of this novel, the real stars are the supporting cast. From the bitter and haunted Miss Havisham to the ever practical Mr. Wemmick to the beautiful but heartless Estella to the lovely lovely Joe Gargery, Great Expectations is chock a block with iconic and entertaining characters who it is impossible not to be utterly enthralled by. Dickens has constructed a whole and vivid world within these pages and it was a pleasure to pass my time there.
A Room With A View by E.M. Forster
A Room With A View is a lushly romantic novel, with both a capital and lower-case ‘R’. Set in the early 1900s, our heroine Lucy Honeychurch, is setting out on a grand tour of Europe with her meddling spinster cousin Charlotte acting as chaperone. Finding herself amongst a motley crew of tourists at the Pensione Bertolini, Lucy finds her conventional sense of propriety fading away as she discovers true passion for the first time amidst the Florentine foothills. Frightened by the intensity of her own emotions, Lucy flees back to the safety of her middle class life in England and resigns herself to marrying the profoundly boring Cecil Vyse. However, what happens on tour doesn’t always stay on tour and when an old friend from Florence moves into her neighbourhood, Lucy must decide whether she has the courage to live her life to the fullest. An absolutely gorgeous, total pleasure of a read that also has some real biting social satire thrown in with it.
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson is a master of the slow build of dread and the fact that she can accomplish such a creeping sense of unease in such a short story is amazing. The story opens on the morning of a small town’s annual lottery. The children are messing around, the adults are gathering, the old ballot box is being set up – but what’s the prize? I shan’t engage in spoilers, but trust me, this isn’t a lottery that you want to win. A chilling commentary on casual cruelty and the things that we’ll justify in the name of tradition, The Lottery feels timely no matter when you read it.
When you hear the word ‘Frankenstein’, images of gothic castles, wild thunderstorms and half-crazed cries of ‘It’s alive!’ probably spring to mind. Widely considered to be the first science-fiction novel and also categorised as a classic of the horror genre, Frankenstein is also a deeply tragic tale of hubris, isolation and profoundly screwed up parent/child relationships. The real horror is less the creation of life from death, but the lack of responsibility and care shown by Frankenstein to his creature, which ultimately transforms him into the desperate ‘monster’ that we’re familiar with from popular culture. This is a novel that thinks deeply about the way that the world can be cruel to those who are different and the unthinkable consequences that can arise from that cruelty. Stunningly beautiful and always relevant, it is truly galling to think that Mary Shelley supposedly knocked out a first draft of this in one night as part of a parlour game.
The Will of the Many by James Islington
‘Ancient Rome-inspired fantasy’ is a phrase engineered in a lab to make my ears prick up. In the Republic of Catenan, the weakest must cede their ‘will’ to the rich and powerful, enabling them to accomplish feats of incredible strength and magic. This system has allowed the Catenans to conquer much of the known world, harvesting the will of more and more subjects and growing more unstoppable with each new country that they dominate. Living on the edges of society, a young orphan named Vis is fighting to live a life where he’ll never have to cede his will to anyone. The lost son of a royal family eradicated by the Catenans, he would rather die than become a part of their system but time is running out before a confrontation is inevitable. So when Ulciscor Telimus, a powerful senator, plucks him from an orphanage and offers him the opportunity attend the Academy, a school for educating Catenan’s elite and the one place where no one will ask him to cede will, it’s an offer he can’t refuse. As he infiltrates the school, Vis is caught between the wishes of Ulciscor, who wants a very personal vengeance against the school’s prinicpal, rebel groups who want to bring the republic down and something even more sick and sinister that seems to lurk at the very heart of the Republic. Fast-paced, intricately plotted and with great world-building, this is a fantastic and engrossing fantasy read and I can’t wait for the next book in the series to come out.
This is the first book by Claire Keegan that I’ve read and it certainly won’t be the last. Each short story in this collection is expertly and sparely crafted, every single sentence packs a punch and adds a tense sense of urgency to each of the stories she has written. My personal favourites were Antarctica; an uneasy and twisted tale of desire for connection with twist ending that hits like a punch to the gut, Men and Women; a daughter watches the way her father moves through the world, informing her nascent understanding of gender relations, Ride If You Dare; a boozy first date that with just one push could turn into something spectacular or devastating, and Sisters; a taut story of repression, self-denial and finally a wild catharsis that had me celebrating as I read it. If you’re looking for beautiful and impactful literary fiction that can transport you with just a few lines, this is a great collection and a wonderful introduction to Keegan’s work.
You’ve heard of Emily and Charlotte Brontë, but have you heard of their sister Anne? If you haven’t, you’re not alone. The youngest daughter of the Brontë family, Anne died aged just twenty-nine and her works are much less well-known than her sisters’. However that doesn’t make them any less of a brilliant read. I fell in love with Agnes Grey, a quietly radical novel about the abuses and privations suffered by governesses in the nineteenth century. Supposedly drawing heavily from her personal experience, Brontë has painted a moving portrait of a strong and resilient young woman who refuses compromise her principles or give up up in a world that seems determined to break her down. And of course, because I’m a sap, the love story was also gorgeous. If you’re a Jane Austen fan who’s already read Persuasion a hundred times, maybe try cracking open this hidden gem.
The Orange and Other Poems by Wendy Cope
I don’t normally read whole books of poetry but I’ll make an exception for the work of Wendy Cope. Her poem, The Orange, has gotten me through some tough times and so I was moved to pick up the full collection it belongs to when I was wandering through a gorgeous poetry bookshop in Hay-On-Wye. Cope manages to write in a way that is conversational and witty while also tapping into powerful feelings of love, loss and nostalgia. My favourites were After the Lunch, Names and Song but every single poem in this collection gave me tremendous pleasure to read. After chomping through the book in one sitting, I felt as if I’d just had a brilliant chat with a wise friend. If you’re not already a Wendy Cope fan, today is a great day to start.
Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Sometimes what I just get a craving for a beautifully written, darkly funny book about awful rich people with messy family dynamics but no actual problems. It’s like crack to me and once the urge takes hold of me there is little I can do but surrender. Long Island Compromise is the epitome of this very specific genre and reading it satisfied me on a spiritual level. It centres around the Fletchers, an extremely wealthy, Jewish-American family who on the outside seem like the pinnacle of the American Dream. However, each member of the family is in some way haunted by patriarch Carl Fletcher’s kidnapping almost forty years ago. Although Carl was returned a week later, the ripples of this event are still very much being felt in the lives of his children. Screenwriter Beamer can only write variations of kidnapping stories and seeks to numb his psychological pain with a cocktail of pharmaceuticals and masochistic sex, neurotic David lives in a prison of his own anxieties and compulsively buys insurance and Jenny, the baby of the family, is so busy trying to figure out the best way to stick it to her mother that she seems to have forgotten to actually live her life. You can really tell Brodesser-Akner began her career as a profile writer because the way she brings each character to life is so vivid it’s hard to believe they’re not real. All of this chaos reaches a fever pitch when the Fletchers find out that the wealth they have long taken for granted may be about to disappear and the reader is treated to a dense yet charming tornado of intergenerational trauma. If you like Succession and the The White Lotus, you will love this book.
Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins
Longtime readers of this blog may recall that when I reviewed The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes way back in 2020, I beseeched Suzanne Collins to ‘just give us the 50th Quarter Quell prequel we’ve been asking for’. Now, five years later, my prayers have been answered. Collins has taken us back to the world of Panem for a new Hunger Games story, which has all of the usual dystopian drama of children forced to fight to the death for the entertainment of the cruel Capitol and this time is focused on Haymitch Abernathy. Readers of the original series will remember Haymitch as the hard-drinking, bitter victor from District 12, who mentored Katniss and Peeta as they navigated their own Hunger Games. We knew some details of what he experienced in his games, which featured twice the usual number of tributes, but the details were always a bit fuzzy as the Capitol didn’t show too many reruns of these games for some reason. Now we know why. A gripping and poignant commentary on the power of propaganda and the way that totalitarian regimes will go to insane lengths to control narrative and manipulate reality, this novel turns upside down everything we thought we knew about the rebellion against the Capitol. It also serves as a timely reminder that resistance is a long road and while you may not live to see the benefits, every act of rebellion is a spark that will help build a bigger flame.
Kindled Spirits 