I know, I know.
October books
- The Monkey’s Mask — Dorothy Porter. I’m still not sure how I feel about this classic verse novel of murder and sex and the Sydney arts scene, except that (a) poets writing about horrible poets amuses me a great deal, (b) it gave me a lot to think about re how little a book can get away with saying, and (c) I ended up drafting an outline of a project partly in verse as a result. It might not have been a better outline, but it was certainly a faster one.
- Death on the Agenda — Patricia Moyes (1962). Shared some interesting tropes with other mysteries I’ve read about this time, especially re beautiful tragic women. I loved the setting of a murder around an international police conference, and also scenes where people unexpectedly end up at too-fancy parties.
- Murder Against the Grain — Emma Lathen (1967). In my experience, Cold War novels written in the ’60s tend to be either far closer to WW2 or far more human and lighthearted than one might expect. This is the latter. Trained otters! Forged grain lading bills! Spies and embassy staff and bank managers and limousine drivers capering around New York.
- After the Funeral — Agatha Christie (1953). A very small-feeling book, but the feeling behind the crime lingered.
- Green Grow the Dollars — Emma Lathen (1982). I described this to someone as Michael Crichton with tomatoes, and for a mystery set mostly at a horticultural conference and turning on industrial espionage, I loved that. Also, a fabulous background character who is changed by their fame exactly as much as suits their purposes, and who thoroughly enjoys the fact.
- Going for the Gold — Emma Lathen (1981). Banking systems vs the Winter Olympic Village. I just love novels about logistics and systems?
- Summer Spirit — Elizabeth Holleville. Dreamy, and a reminder (especially read in the same month as The Monkey’s Mask) that graphic novels can feel closer to verse novels than either are to novels or verse.
- Saint Death’s Daughter — CSE Cooney (out April 2022 and available for preorder). What I wrote about it: “A luminous, chiming, bone-belled, ludicrous, austere, flamboyant, rhyming, reckless, affectionate novel, that — for all its mortality and cruelty — is less about decay than it is about love in its most expansive, gilded, world-shaping forms. A giddy libation to a sly and shifting pantheon, a glittering ossuary-mosaic of incautious hope and over-generous loves, of gambling and falling and flying.”
November Books
- Lick — Kylie Scott. Caveat: these are very steamy rockstar romance novels (my first foray into reading that subgenre). I’m caught between actually preferring no sex in novels and enjoying the situations and vibrant characters (and Kylie) enormously. Also a gratifyingly uncomfortable stranger-at-the-party sequence. Something I love about Kylie’s novels is the range of vivid personalities, and how many of her protagonists come out swinging, and generally give as good as they get.
- Play — Kylie Scott
- Lead — Kylie Scott
- Corpse at the Carnival — George Bellairs (1958). Perhaps a little heavy on the poetry, but it does make the Isle of Man sound wonderful, and definitely creates a pocket-sized physical world, an enclosed landscape with its own personalities and zones.
- The Art of Broken Things — Joanne Anderton (out in 2022). This is what I wrote about it: “
- The Art of Broken Things embodies a cycle, deteriorating but never entirely decaying, of hope and death. It is peopled by delicate, opportunistic constructs of equal parts life and tragedy shot through, held together and torn apart by grief and gold. Anderton wires together little lives out of the appeal and the dangers of life-grubbied enchantment, fabricated from the humanity of letting go too soon and also holding on too tightly (which might sometimes be just tightly enough).”
- Deep — Kylie Scott
- A Girl Like Her — Talia Hibbert. Again, Talia Hibbert’s novels are FAR steamier than is my preference. But she writes a range of characters who are variously atypical (or perceived to be atypical), and something about that presentation of a character as they are, operating within the world, and integrating that into the story and what good relationships and friends mean, and people figuring that out, feels more… human, perhaps, than some books that subscribe too lightly to perceived defaults?
- Untouchable — Talia Hibbert
- That Kind of Guy — Talia Hibbert
- Damaged Goods — Talia Hibbert
- [secret — bird book]
December Book
- Writer Chaps Season 1: Headstrong Girl: how to live a writer’s life — Kim Wilkins. Advice drawn from a wealth of experience in writing and teaching. Kim has been someone I admired from afar, the person who scolded me into finally going back to study, my advisor, and now my friend, and so this was like being reminded very firmly of all the good advice she has given me.
- Writer Chaps Season 1: Capturing Ghosts on the Page: writing horror & dark fiction — Kaaron Warren. Kaaron is a very nice person and an absolutely terrifying writer, as well as someone who can present an entire lecture on where she gets her ideas and have it be very thrilling. This chapbook contains very resonant and generous advice.
- [secret — map book[
- From Baby Brain to Writer Brain: writing through a world of parenting distraction — Tansy Rayner Roberts. Exactly what it says there, and also really fascinating to lean over Tansy’s shoulder while she worked on books I know (and for the later editions of which I did covers!). Something I particularly appreciated was the appendix with her diary of getting back up to speed in order to meet some deadlines — the particularity of that process (when so many books give blanket, general advice) was fascinating.
October Other
- Nil. One day I should consider adding things I watch at home to these lists, but if I haven’t managed that in the last two years…
November Other
- No Time to Die. This contains a lot of homages but there was a bit that gave me an incredibly vivid flashback to lying on a bed in college, chin propped up on one hand, watching a friend sitting at their computer playing GoldenEye.
- Last Night in Soho. I’m still thinking about the use of mirrors, the timeslip elements, the good faces, the sense of the smallness of a good creepy UK story. I’d watched Ghost Stories shortly before this, and they belonged to the same tradition.
- Red Notice
December Other
Kathleen Jennings 