All the near-recent posts about The New York Times’s Best Books of the 21st Century – I’ve linked to it but it’s behind a paywall – got me thinking about ‘best of’ lists in general and where they could apply to my own reading. Usually, or at least until recent years, any ‘best ofs’ I created were from my year round ups, the best five or so books I’d read in any given year. But people have been talking about what was missed – that it was full of literary fiction, that it neglected African literature, and a variety of my own research on lists have led me to realise I rarely use what I’ve read in this manner and that, on occasion, I probably should.

A ‘genre’ I don’t remark upon often, and admittedly don’t really read all that much of, is translated fiction, and this is rather silly because I tend to love reading it. But the proof is in the numbers and I’ve gone through all the data I have of my reading which extends from about half-way through 2009 (I wasn’t keeping track of dates back then) to last month, September 2024, and the answer is that I’ve read 41 books in translation out of a few hundred books in total. When my slow reading speed is considered it’s not absolutely terrible, but I did think I had read more non-English works.

I owe much of my reading in translation to my former reviewer relationships with Peirene Press and Pushkin Press which both fell by the wayside when contacts moved on. I have read some absolutely stellar books thanks to them and in Pushkin’s case I went on, much later, to invite two of their authors onto my podcast (Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, episode 33; Nicolai Houm episode 81).

I’ve gone through the list of 41 and narrowed it down to those books I rate really highly and of which the passage of time has not blurred my knowledge. I’ve left out age-old classics – Tolstoy and Thomas More will be around for years to come. I love the idea that I’m bringing old favourites back to a front page, even if it’s just my own.

Here we go. The two years given are for the publication in the original language and then English translation.

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen: One Night, Markovitch (Hebrew, 2012/2015, translated by Sondra Silverston)
A man with an unremarkable face and his friend with the amazing moustache decide to join men heading to Germany to save Jewish women from the Nazis and bring them home to Israel. Full of humour, this is no less a book with a lot to say. It was even better than I’d hoped. Looking back on it now, it is no less relevant today than it was when it was first published – in various parts of the story one of the main characters goes to work in the morning and Gundar-Goshen will throw in a phrase of two about him using a gun on some Palestinians, a deliberately casual reference with an unapologetically shocking result.

Bernhard Schlink: The Reader (German, 1995/2015, translated by Carol Brown Janeway)
At fifteen, Michael has an affair with an older woman and years later sees her once more, this time in a war trial. Fantastic. I remember this being very literary and one of those books that can seem mundane at first before becoming shocking, but at the same time gives so much more.

Éric Chacour: What I Know About You (French, 2023/2024, translated by Pablo Strauss)
Writing to Dr Tarek, our second-person narrator tells us Tarek’s history and over time we learn who our narrator is and why he is so into Tarek’s story. (I should note the plot is of an Egyptian man born in the 1960s who becomes a doctor like his father, later gets married, and then one day falls for his male assistant.) Stunning – the plot is well done and everything about the structure and writing is superb. It’s been a few weeks since I finished it and I still think the writing is the defining aspect for me, though the look at various social issues was incredibly interesting.

Irène Némirovsky: Suite Française (French, 2004/2004, translated by Sandra Smith)
As the Germans invade and conquer France, thousands of refugees move to areas that are still free and later adapt to life as the German soldiers move to live amongst them. An excellent book. I would like to read it again; I meant to around the time the film came out, but hearing that the film only focused on one of the plot threads and may have created a conclusion for it (Nemirovsky was killed in the Holocaust and didn’t finish the book, though we have some of her notes) I set the whole idea aside. I do still have another of Nemirovsky’s books to read, in terms of unread books on my shelf, and need to go back to her work in general.

Marie-Sabine Roger: Soft In The Head (French, 2008/2016, translated by Frank Wynne)
A man who speaks of his lack of education and poor childhood meets an old woman in the park and they strike up a friendship over pigeons, books, and learning. Utterly fantastic, there are so many different themes to this book and they’re all handled excellently; and it’s a book wherein I heard the character in my head rather than my usual ‘voice’ – so well written and translated. I remember it being a very fun book.

Nicolai Houm: The Gradual Disappearance Of Jane Ashland (Norwegian, 2016/2018, translated by Anna Paterson)
A woman wakes up in a tent in a Norwegian National Park, knowing how she got there; scenes from the past couple of months show how she came to be in such a place. This is a novel about grief rather than a thriller – though it has an element of that – and a very good one at that. I re-read this only a couple of years ago so it remains fresh – there is a lot of things that you, as a reader, can think about here, and the ending is left somewhat open.

Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen: The Rabbit Back Literature Society (Finnish, 2006/2014, translated by Lola Rogers)
Ella becomes the long-awaited 10th member of a society that involves the country’s greatest writers – but are they the greatest writers, really? A very good look at ideas and writing in general. Weird ideas, suitable ideas – there’s lots up for interpretation.

Seishi Yokomizo: The Honjin Murders (Japanese, 1946/2019, Louise Heal Kawai)
A couple on their wedding night are murdered in the annex building of the family estate; a three-fingered man was seen around the place the night before and his hand prints are on the wall, but why did it happen? An excellent 1940s novella that is a lot more about the ‘why’ than the ‘who’. This is the first in a series focused on fictional detective Kosuke Kindaichi.

Véronique Olmi: Beside The Sea (French, 2001/2010, Adriana Hunter)
A mother takes her sons to the seaside for a holiday that may end badly. Brilliant, and provides a lot to think about. When I say it may end badly, I mean it, however in terms of Olmi’s look at mental illness and showing why people do what they do, it’s stunning.

What would be on your list?

Episode 108: Mark Stay (The Witches Of Woodville)

Charlie and Mark Stay (The Witches Of Woodville) discuss writing humour into wartime, using period-correct language as well as slang, why community is important and how much we’ve lost over the decades, and the metric ton of projects he has on the go.

If you’re unable to use the media player above, this page has various other options for listening as well as the transcript.

A couple of years ago I made what was, if I recall correctly, an in the moment, flip of a switch decision to stop including ratings in my reviews. (As a lover of information I feel I should act accordingly – the last review to include a rating was Natasha Miller’s Relentless which I posted in 2022.)

I say flip of a switch decision – at the time it was. It was a kind of ‘am I doing this darn thing of going with my new thought that I don’t want to rate any more, or not?’

But in the bigger context of my blog as a whole, I’d been thinking about ratings for a long time. In March 2014, I wrote about my 3/5 rating. Three months later that June, I wrote about ratings more broadly. And I returned again in 2018, where I spoke about my conflicting thoughts. My usage of the same graphic as those posts for this post is very intentional!

So in all, my dropping ratings has been a long time coming. I do remember wondering about it a lot over the four years it was in my mind (if we assume my feeling conflicted begun in 2018).

Do I feel better for it? I have to say I do. Whilst I may be a sucker for categorisation and data and statistics (outside of a maths lesson), my original thoughts that it would make me feel more free did turn out to be correct. One of the benefits is that it has made me be clearer in my writing. This is not to say I wasn’t clear but when you’ve a numbered system to fall back on, you can think on occasion – for example when a review is proving tricky to write – that if all else fails, the numbers will do the explaining.

That worked in my head when I was greener, before I understood just how differently each person views numbers to another, but it doesn’t work any more. I think the first time I pondered on the idea was when I saw that a lot of people used an out-of-ten rating system – I never saw the point in that… but then I started using half numbers within my out-of-five system. I did, however, continue to not quite understand the out-of-ten system; it always seemed like too many numbers and, somehow, more complicated than using half numbers.

And this actually leads me to my next point – perhaps I should have realised a lot earlier than I did how differently people did see rating numbers. Having been blogging for so long, and just having read around the subject of books for so long, I’ve learned a lot about how numbers are viewed in context. To me a 3/5 or, bringing in others’ systems, a 5 or 6/10 means a pretty average book, one that’s not bad, per se, but could have been better. For others, though this is rare, that rating means the book’s not at all good. And then there are the people who would say a 7/10 is a very good book, which is something I can’t quite get my head around. Some of these people will never give 10/10 – by their own confession – because either absolute perfection is impossible or, for a subset of this ‘some’, once they give a 10/10 that means any further ratings would be incredibly hard to assign.

I don’t think I’ve ever properly explained my own ratings. Originally that would’ve been due to a lack of self-awareness, in that surely everyone felt the same way. But later it was in fact due to a bit of embarrassment, and that’s because my rating system came from The Daily Mail and as I was getting older and moving away from the certain isolation you have when still a child and living with parents, I was starting to realise that my values did not align with the newspaper I had, prior, happily read from cover to cover (I had no experience of any other papers).

While The Mail’s rating system isn’t exactly political, and it’s something I can still agree with, certainly discussing the source felt problematic. I now have stronger critical thinking skills and an understanding that choices made in childhood are limited by what you are taught and what is available to you, which is usually less than what is available to you in adulthood.

So the ratings were as follows: 1 – poor. 2 – adequate. 3 – worth reading/watching. 4 – good. 5 – very good (which, for lack of a 6 rating, I viewed as being synonymous with ‘perfect’). I added my own half points to get around the pesky problems when, for example, a book was just that bit more than ‘worth reading’.

And these ratings could still serve me if I wanted them to, indeed I do keep a rating in my personal tracking which allows for an ‘objective’ rating (I still believe in reviewing and rating as objectively as one can) and, if my personal opinion in full subjective terms is different, a second, personal, rating. (I often opt for two. For example, I can’t deny that the Christmas I read Outlander was massively fun and memorable due to that reading and that I now like to read a book of the series a year at about the same time but, objectively, there are issues with it.)

I mentioned above that no longer including ratings in my reviews has been freeing and that it made me a better, clearer, writer. I think it also helps my real thoughts to stand out. Reducing your opinion to a number, no matter that you have text to back it up, means some of the meaning of your words are lost. It means there’s also a big chance a reader of your review could say ‘too long; didn’t read’ and skip to the rating, and while I can’t argue about how people prioritise their time, you do lose nuances when you’ve got numbers. Do numbers mean you’ve an additional review, a sort of second review? Yes. Do they mean your well-laid-out thoughts could be lost in a sea of numbers? Yes. I was also just starting to feel unhappy including ratings, which I needed to listen to.

I don’t think this change will be reversed – this is partly why it took so long for me to start leaving ratings out – I’m one for systems and frameworks on my blog. Likewise I’m not going to go back to older reviews and remove ratings – I stand with those who see deleting older work as deleting the progression you’ve made in your chosen subject and those reviews are testament to who I was when they were written, and a diary of sorts. (My review of Pride And Prejudice leaves much to be desired, no matter how much I loved the book!)

I do think, had I done it much earlier, I might have failed – there’s a daunting shadow that hangs over you when you picture your text having to do more heavy lifting and you feel your writing isn’t yet there. But I think it was the right time and added to my recent restructuring of the format of my reviews I can say I’m very happy.

I started reading Fourth Wing several days ago and… it’s been a surprise. I had cottoned on that the whole Empyrean series was about dragons but was expecting a ‘regular’ romantasy and… it’s dark. It’s very dark. Darker, in many ways, than The Hunger Games, with its violence or threats of such on every other page compared to Collins’ novels which have some time away from it.

The first chapter of Rebecca Yarros’ book left me considering opting for another book. I think it’s excellent, if a bit too much in some respects (excessive swearing and mentions of casual sex numerous and lusty enough to put an erotic romance to shame) but nevertheless… these constant ellipses are a written metaphor for the constant shock on my face.

It is absolutely… horrible. I don’t think it’s meant to shock, exactly – though it certainly does – it’s more that’s it’s just absolutely unapologetically dog eat dog. I wonder if it had to be so specifically horrible, so specifically cruel to not only teenagers (‘only’!) but to teenagers from very poor and unprivileged backgrounds, some who clearly have no other choice but to sign up to train as riders of notably cruel dragons, which involves them first having to walk across a tiny parapet way up in the sky above a valley in the wind and rain.

I should probably be more descriptive.

The beginning of the book in question sees a young woman called Violet having to enlist as a cadet for the ‘Rider Quadrant’ of her educational facility, Basgiath (it’s like the worse Hogwarts ever in terms of danger). She has spent her life applying herself to studies that will enable her to be a Scribe at the Worst Hogwarts Ever, but her mother decides 6 months before the Scribe training would begin that, as she herself is a commander of the Riders who fight the Bad Guys with whom the country has been at war for time immeasurable, her daughter must also be a Rider. Her oldest daughter is a Rider, and it seems (we don’t yet know enough) that her late son was one, too. In making this decision, the mother dismisses her late husband’s library-littered education of his youngest daughter.

If this doesn’t make the mother sound bad enough – throwing her daughter into a vastly different training with 6 months to prepare when everyone else has had years to prepare – the training involves a sign up day that involves walking across a parapet in the wind and rain where the prospective trainee may well fall off to their death. If they make it to the other side they still aren’t safe because aside from the small individual squads they are placed in, any trainee can kill them at any time – it’s in the metaphorical rule book. Again, these trainees have been studying for years, so parent of the year here is callously setting her daughter up to be killed because she can’t handle her daughter not being a Rider like she is. Or at least that’s the reason given at this point.

This post is not actually about Mother Dearest, although I’d certainly say she’s complicit in what happens next.

No, this post is about the parapet. Having left her mother’s office having failed to convince her mother to let her become a Scribe (her Rider sister tried to stop it happening, too, and failed), Violet goes to join the line of candidates moving up the stairs to the start of the parapet they have to cross. Violet’s sister, Mira (so many characters are called Mira recently!) has given her some leather gear that can hide the small daggers that Violet is thankfully skilled at using, as well as a pair of boots with rubber soles to stop her slipping on the parapet. These shoes become an element in themselves – Violet notices how many candidates have the same slippery-soled boots as she would have continued wearing if her sister hadn’t stepped in. And when Violet finds herself talking to the girl in front of her, she makes the girl switch one of her boots with hers so that now both of them stand a chance, even if Violet has numerically reduced her chances by fifty percent. (‘Violet is a good person’, says Yarros, via subtext.)

The person ahead of the girl – who is called Rhiannon – is a boy, Dylan, whose parents Violet spotted crying their eyes out and having to tear themselves away from his side. Dylan’s from an obviously lower socioeconomic background and his rucksack is overweight (Mira repacked Violet’s for her and chucked a lot of stuff away). Joy of joys, the rucksacks must be carried across the parapet too.

So we now have two potential friends for Violet, or allies, as Mira warns – never make friends – in Rhiannon and Dylan. Well, not Dylan, as it turns out. He takes to the parapet, starts walking across, and in the wind and rain and with his cheaper slippery boots… he slips. But then he grabs hold of the parapet with his hands, dangling off the edge – he’s saved! Rhiannon tells him to pull himself up. He can’t. He falls. He’s dead.

It’s much worse in the book itself.

It’s fair to say that Yarros set Dylan up to look like a main character to make the impact of his short appearance in our reading lives more impactful. You get to know a remarkable amount about Dylan and his family and you feel for him as he steps onto the parapet. And you look forward to the later chapters where Violet and Rhiannon and Dylan will hopefully all be flying in the wars and… yeah, that’s not going to happen.

It is horrible. Yet it can’t be said that it isn’t well done. Yarros did, after all, make you feel for Dylan as much as you would a favourite main character – his character development within a small number of pages is very good. And the setting and high stakes increase it. Within these small number of pages, she sets the tone for the entire Empyrean series.

And ultimately, for all that I’ve ranted here, the reason I felt the need to write about the chapter is because while it is awfully horrible, it is also very successful. You instantly feel a lot for Violet and Rhiannon, even if Violet is somewhat the stereotypical average underdog main character. You also know, now, if you didn’t already (and why would you? it’s called a romantasy for goodness’ sake) that you’re in for a difficult if breathtaking read. You find out straight away that Yarros favours immersive, film-like, scenes, with detailing that makes it all too easy to picture.

Dylan was unprepared, like Violet and, shoe-wise, at least, like Rhiannon. Rhiannon makes it across as does, inevitably, our shrinking Violet.

And Yarros has you completely snared because you want to look away but can’t. And the new trainees will be dealing with death around every corner, and dragons that are not like those in other stories – these dragons bond to humans because they must, and they are not fond of humans. (In a later chapter, a petrified new student makes a bolt for it and gets turned into ashes.)

Fourth Wing is not going to be what I thought it was – I thoughts Wings referred to a building, and I thought it was going to be lower fantasy. But Yarros has indeed snared me. I will read this fantasy cough horror with a completely new readiness…

Have you read this book?

This is a very quick post to say that from January, my podcast will be called Author’s Afterword. It’ll be the same content as always, just with a far better name.

I’ve never felt all that happy with the name ‘The Worm Hole Podcast’ – it completely fits as an entity of this blog but whereas this blog has been successful enough being called The Worm Hole, and blogs can get away with being more vaguely named, podcasts cannot.

When I say I never felt happy, it was that I knew that, away from the blog, the name made no sense, and indeed most other podcasts with ‘wormhole’ in the title, albeit without the space, are about astronomy, pun not intended. There are also just so many of them, mine rarely shows up in search.

It took a lot of thinking to arrive at the new name; many months and many names left out of the running upon finding out they were already in use or that there were podcasts with very similar names. I’m happy it took a while though – Author’s Afterword is, hands down, my favourite of the lot.

I’m excited about the change. I feel happy saying the name.

The first episode with the new title will be episode 113 with Edward Carey on Monday 13th January.

I’m really, really, happy with the number of books I read this month. Due in no small amount to the quality of the books but also the choice I spoke about last week helped a ton. The last three books on this list were from the list, and while I may have been planning to read Paul’s book anyway, it all still helped. Knowing me, I’ll still have a reading slump sometime in the not-too-distant future (I’m on the high now, clearly!) but I expect that if I can keep going with it or, at least, when I keep doing it, it’ll lessen that problem.

All books are works of fiction.

C J Wray: The Excitements – Two nonagenarians are invited to Paris to receive the Legion d’Honneur award and, with one of them a jewel thief with a reason, the other with secrets, and a loyal great-nephew in tow, many ‘excitements’ may occur. Fabulously funny and full of heart; this book contains a lot of world war history, too, in an interesting, well-planned, structure.

Chloe C Peñaranda: The Stars Are Dying – Astraea can only remember the last five years and those have been spent at Hektor’s mansion, hiding from everyone under his command and staying faithful while he sleeps with any woman he wants. When she decides to slip away from the manor to visit her friend who is going to a (we might call it) Hunger Games-esque trial, Astraea starts a cascade of events that begin with her meeting an incredibly handsome man who may be a vampire who has the ability to converse in her head. This is the first in a dark romantasy series and has some basis in the Greek mythology. The only thing I’d bring up here is the pacing – it won’t work for everyone. Some will find it too slow but, certainly, others will adore it.

Éric Chacour: What I Know About You – Writing to Dr Tarek, our second-person narrator tells us Tarek’s history and over time we learn who our narrator is and why he is so into Tarek’s story. (I should note the plot is of an Egyptian man born in the 1960s who becomes a doctor like his father, later gets married, and then one day falls for his male assistant.) Stunning – the plot is well done and everything about the structure and writing is superb. This is the English translation; the author is from Quebec and the original title is Ce que je sais de toi.

Gill Paul: Scandalous Women – A somewhat fictionalised story of Jacqueline Susann and Jackie Collins, this tale looks at the literary journey of both women as well as the life of a editing-hopeful purely fictional character, Nancy. This is an excellently written story, where reality and fiction has been balanced beautifully (you’ll be surprised what is fact!) The research is evident and the look at the literary industry, particularly for women, in the decades (1970s mostly) is awesome – certainly it was my favourite aspect of the book, though learning about two women you could then look up on YouTube was thrilling.

Kaliane Bradley: The Ministry Of Time – A secret government ministry in near-future London has managed to develop time travel and is experimenting with the safety aspects by pulling historical people who were due to die in their own time forward. We follow our unnamed narrator, a guardian-type figure for one of the historical figures which, in her case, is Commander Graham Gore of an ultimately failed Arctic exploratory mission (Gore is, I believe, the sole real character in the book). The two must learn to live with each other, Gore must learn to live in the 21st century, and our narrator must work with the mysterious ministry she’s a part of and yet kept distant from. This is a stunning, stunning, book, often hilarious, and has a great use of narrative.

Kristy Woodson Harvey: A Happier Life – When Keaton’s relationship and career are upended she decides to take on the job of getting her family’s heritage home ready for sale. But travelling from New York to Beaufort in North Carolina becomes a journey she didn’t expect – she likes the house, she loves the town’s people, and the man living next door is very attractive. As she goes about preparing the house she starts to uncover the semi-mystery of her grandparents’ death and starts to feel she might want to stay in Beaufort. As well as this we have a narrative from 1976, the last months of Rebecca Saint James’ life. A nice feel-good story, for all of its mystery and ending – it was difficult to read in parts but overall good. Certainly, as I did Woodson Harvey’s The Wedding Veil, I enjoyed reading about the present day characters more than the past.

So, yes, I’ve really enjoyed this month. I’d say my absolute favourite was Bradley’s book because it’s just so unique even within its time travel genre (the nearest I’ve read is Kerstein Gier’s Ruby Red trilogy). It also totally lived up to the entirely self-created hype I had for it just based on the cover.

What did you read this month?