I believe the existence and make-up of this list says three true things: I’m reading more; I spend a bit of time on TikTok (and I’m putting more priority on fantasy which has been a long time coming); I’m blogging again.

Alex Hay: The Queen Of Fives – Out on 30th January, thus from the publisher, this is Hay’s second novel. The first, last year’s The Housekeepers, was a perfectly-paced Edwardian heist taking place over 24 hours, this second is a Victorian con taking place over five days. At the time of writing this I am a few chapters in and it’s not going to disappoint.

Lee Seong-bok: Indeterminate Inflorescence – For review, out on 14th of this month, this small book is ‘a collection of meditations on poetry, art and life, taken from the creative writing lectures of one of South Korea’s most prominent living poets’. I reckon I’ll be taking a lot of notes.

Orlando Ortega-Medina: Emerald Road – From the author for review (out 14th January), this is a follow up slash prequel to Ortega-Medina’s previous novel, The Fitful Sleep Of Immigrants, which was a slightly/semi autobiographical novel. I noted at the time that the winning character of the book was Issac, loosely based on the author’s partner and was delighted to find out that Orlando was writing a prequel about Issac. This looks at Issac’s journey as an El Salvadorian during war and the events that led to his immigration to the US.

Rebecca Yarros: Iron Flame – If you told me last year, after I was struggling through my first TikTok-famed romantasy, that I was going to adore my second one, I may not have believed you – I try my best not to go along with hype. Well, Fourth Wing may not be the most amazing novel ever written but it’s pretty darn marvellous regardless. I need the second book in my life and don’t be surprised if I’ve book three in January when it is published!

Saara El-Arifi: Faebound – I’ve been kind of circling around El-Arifi’s work ever since she debuted and in my quest to read more of one of my favourite genres, I’ve gone and got this book.

Sue Lynn Tan: Heart Of The Sun Warrior – I’ve Daughter Of The Moon Goddess soon to be put on my new non-podcast reading list once I’ve finished the first ten books. I was also very aware that it was becoming difficult to get the hardback of book two to match the first, so I went for it.

It goes without saying, really, but I’m excited about the above very much.

Never underestimate the elderly.

Archie is waiting in the restaurant of Peter Jones department store for his ninety-something-year-old great aunts to arrive. But then he’s called into a manager’s office: Great Aunt Penny has stolen a figurine from the store and has been caught; Great Aunt Josephine is with her. But Penny’s just an old lady and probably has dementia, right? The store let her off. Archie has some exciting news (these ladies are all about ‘excitements’ be they lunch or a day out) – France has invited them both to accept the Legion d’Honneur for their bravery and service in the Second World War. They’ll go, of course they will. But perhaps Penny’s stealing isn’t a one off – perhaps she’s been stealing throughout her life. Woven around the present day narrative are stories from the sisters’ days in service. Penny working in the FANY and training as a spy, Josephine in the Wrens. And we get the story of Josephine when she came back from Scotland all those years ago, that time when their friend/servant, Connie, gave birth unmarried and in disgrace.

The Excitements, Chrissie Manby’s first novel under the name of C J Wray, is one half very fun romp and one half fascinating WWII detail. Told with a few themes in tow, the novel places a spotlight on a generation of people – I’d argue it does indeed make you take more notice of factual people, not ‘just’ Wray’s two fictional heroines – who are often deemed as being of lossy intelligence, and are undermined in general.

Penny and Josephine are fantastic characters, though I’ll go to bat in saying that Penny is the more awesome for her personality and how she works through bad situations. She does also get more time on the page. Penny’s stand out feature, that can happily be discussed with only a marginal amount of spoilers dropped – because you figure the situation out in chapter one – is her tendency towards thievery. Only jewellery and expensive figurines, mind you, and there is a solid reason behind it, but, to refer back to the last sentence of the previous paragraph, she gets away with it easily because, as her loyal great-nephew points out to the manager of Peter Jones – John Lewis’ flagship store in Sloane Square that has a firm role in this book – she’s starting to get dementia. Poor Archie – he means well and loves his aunts, but even he misses a very obvious trick sometimes.

Elsewhere in Penny’s narrative, or narratives plural, given Wray’s flashbacks to various decades, we see her valiant strides through the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. A girl of her social status and general education wouldn’t have been expected to know much at the start, but Penny’s almost literal kickarse situation involves having been somewhat of an autodidact of W E Fairbairn’s fighting manual which she uses most notably on a date.

In comparison, Josephine’s life has been quieter – she gets through the Women’s Royal Naval Service duties well, and without too much comment given that she does do well, but there’s a secret that haunts her that Wray teases out to reflect Josephine’s trauma. It’s fairly easy for the reader to work out just for the sheer amount of stories we’ve heard about the whole thing by now, but given Wray’s deft work in placing it in the narrative and emphasising it at times it makes sense to do so, it never becomes a case of waiting for the author to get to the point – you’re happy to let it flow naturally.

As to the writing and structure, as mentioned, it’s well thought out. Wray makes use of both the first and third person and includes diary entries and the odd letter. The movements back and forward in time and the way different periods (now; 1940s; 1960s) are dotted about never threaten your comprehension – it’s easy to keep up with what’s happening and the presumed mystery Wray wanted to employ in choosing the non-linear storytelling works.

Of language we’d better bring in the Morse code. Penny and Josephine sometimes use it to communicate and there is hilarity to be had in Archie’s effective broken Morse. The code is brought to the fore towards the end in a very funny way that involves other war-serving nonagenarians that Penny and Josephine aren’t keen on, and a situation of a more criminal kind.

In characterisations further than our intellectually-sound, thieving, kickarse heroines, Archie is a good supportive character. (I can’t quite call him a main character because there’s both a literal difference in age and a big gap in knowledge.) He has his own character progression which involves a jolly scene when he meets a past lover (the comedy grows as the book nears its end) and you get to see inside his head on occasion. Otherwise there is Penny and Josephine’s housekeeper (they don’t use the word ‘carer’) who has a wonderful progression in her own right, and the two other nonagenarians who show up half way through add to the humour – sometimes at their expense (one is always introducing any statement with ‘as an admiral’s daughter…’) and sometimes to outwit Penny and Josephine. And one of them has their own carer who plays a supplementary role.

The Excitements is such a fun book. The sisters’ wish to always have something to look forward to (an excitement) becomes more than they bargained for in a strangely good way and their constant drive for happiness and to always be ‘toujours gai’ (always cheery) becomes a motto within the narrative. If you want some humour with your WW2 fiction – I’d say this book counts as both historical and contemporary – you want this novel.

Publisher: Orion (Hachette)
Pages: 342
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-1-398-71183-9
First Published: 30th January 2024
Date Reviewed: 8th October 2024

I’m not reading from other sources as much as I used to but, particularly with the demise of Twitter, there’s no really easy way to share other people’s written work at the moment. Threads and BlueSky aren’t really there (yet?), and I do like the idea that these posts are here to look back on rather than links shared one by one and gone in a matter of minutes on social media.

The list below is one I compiled over the course of months during that time I was blogging intermittently. Timely news has been edited out, evergreen content remains.

Author/Literary Figure Specific

How an 18th-Century Cookbook Offers Glimpses of Jane Austen’s Domestic Life
Helpful Men: Defending Philip Roth, Dismissing Virginia Woolf
40 Years Ago, Poet Lucille Clifton Lost Her House. This Year, Her Children Bought It Back
On the Friendship and Rivalry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton
‘I learned about storytelling from Final Fantasy’: novelist Raven Leilani on Luster and video games
Makeshift Refuges: Edith Wharton’s Home-Building
Virginia Woolf on Why We Read and What Great Works of Art Have in Common
The Fashion of Jane Austen’s Novels
Is Jane Austen the Antidote to Social Media Overload?
“Only Lovers Live in the Present”: On the Notebooks of Patricia Highsmith
By the time L Frank Baum introduced the world to Dorothy and the gang, he’d already made his name as a shop window dresser par excellence
Emily Brontë’s Lost Second Novel

Book Specific

Was This Book The Original Eat, Pray, Love? (Mary Wollstonecraft)
The Mary Bennet Makeover: Postfeminist Media Culture and the Rewriting of Jane Austen’s Neglected Female Character
How the Women Became Little

About Writing

You Must Change Your Writing Style: Ward Farnsworth’s Guidebooks to English Virtuosity and Ancient Philosophy
On Setting YA Aside to Write a Novel for Adults (Nina LaCour on “Growing Up” Through Fiction

Libraries & Bookstores

Why a Bookstore’s Most Quiet Moments Are (Sometimes) Its Most Important
The Norwegian library with unreadable books

Misc. Literature

Better Than Nothing? Exploring the Limitations of AI-Narrated Audiobooks from a Disabled Person’s Perspective
Rachel Hore on Olga Gray, the historical figure behind her book, A Beautiful Spy
‘Alice door’ – inside this church is an obscure piece of art carved by the famous Alice Liddell
How a Team of Calligraphers Brought Jane Austen’s Fictional Letters to Life
Lydia Conklin on Writing Residencies and the Invaluable Gift of Permission
What’s In a Name? Tracing an Obsession with the Shakespeare Authorship Question

Other Links

The Devonshire Manuscript, a sixteenth-century handwritten collection of poetry and commentary, offers a glimpse of intellectual life at the court of King Henry VIII

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.