My Year In Books: 2025

 The Night After Christmas - Kes Gray
*Night Side Of The River - Jeanette Winterson
The Blue-Footed Booby - Rob Biddulph
Hotel World - Ali Smith
The Penguin Lessons - Tom Michell
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Pageboy - Elliot Page 
The Dead - James Joyce

Winter Stack.

February —
The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald 

A happy revisit to one of my old favourites, prompted by R4's re-imagining by Roy Williams; also brilliantly conceived. 

I was curious as to how much still stemmed from the original & how much had been adapted to suit the Harlem renaissance. 
Returning to it some twenty years later, I was struck by Jay's blind faith & naïve optimism; 'you can't repeat the past'.
Aye, agreed. 

January —
Pageboy | Elliot Page

Insightful.
Vulnerable.
Compelling. 

I was glad to have encountered Page's book; to better educate myself as a trans ally & to pass it along to someone else seeking to do similar. 

'At this point in my life, it didn’t really feel like a choice, there was no other option. I had to choose to engage as my authentic self, or die not trying.' [199]

'There was a spark, a seed, something getting stirred up. My body leaned in, knowing not to stop there, sensing it before my mind did. This flesh vessel, always vastly smarter than me, if only I’d managed to listen.' [237]

Page, Elliot. Pageboy. Doubleday | imprint of Transworld Publishers | Penguin Random House: London, 2023.

My Year In Books: 2024

Shadow Reader - Imtiaz Dharker

*Hotel World - Ali Smith

The Marble Collector - Cecelia Ahern

Postman Pat And The Pet Show - John Cunliffe    

Kindness Is Magic - Duba Kolanovic    

The Magic Crayon - Amy Sparkes & Ali Pye        

Cave Baby - Julia Donaldson & Emily Gravett

You Must Bring A Hat - Simon Phillip & Kate Hindley        

Mouse's Wood - Alice Melvin        

Too Much Stuff - Emily Gravett        

LOVE - Corinne Averiss & Kristi Beautyman        

A Day That's Ours - Blake Nuto & Vyara Boyadjieva                 

Sunny Side Up - Clare Helen Welsh & Ana Sanfelippo        

The Who's Whonicorn of Unicorns - Kes Gray & Garry Parsons

From Crimea With Love - Jason Salkey 

.  .  .  .  . 
 

On the Sharpe Series:  

If I was to recommend a reading order to others, I would say to start with either Eagle or perhaps Rifles, read in publication order up to the end of the India Trilogy in 1999, & then stop. One can make a case for the later-published books if one just wants to know more about the battles, but from the perspective of making sense of Sharpe, they should be put on the same level as Lois Lane’s ‘imaginary stories’ from 1960s Superman comics. Discount them from your reading order altogether.

— https://www.sealionpress.co.uk/post/prequel-problems-sharpe-s-reading-order

My Year In Books: 2022

*The Relentless Elimination of Hurry - John Mark Comer

The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes

The House With Chicken Legs - Sophie Anderson

Open Water - Caleb Azuma Nelson

Two Across - Jeffrey Bartsch

The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep - H.G. Parry

The Bread Pet: A Sourdough Story - Kate DePalma

The Bad Beekeeper's Club - Bill Turnbull

Flush - Virginia Woolf

Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore - Robin Sloan

Was She Pretty? - Leanne Shapton

The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
The Art of Sourdough Scoring - Brittany Wood

Howards End Is On The Landing - Susan Hill

Dear Fahrenheit 451 - Annie Spence

Virginia Woolf At Home - Hilary Macaskill

Novel Houses: Twenty Famous Fictional Dwellings - Christina Hardyment

Hedwig And The Angry Inch - John Cameron Mitchell & Stephen Trask 

The Dictionary of Lost Words - Pip Williams

There's a Dinosaur in my Bathtub - Catalina Echeverri

Becoming - Michelle Obama

 January read — 

Becoming | Michelle Obama

A friend came 'round - back when we still sat on doorsteps & stoops, out in the open air, until it was too cold to remain outside any longer.
She brought with her a bag of books she'd read through her book club and was now clearing out a few. Luckily for me, this was one of them. 
  What an excellent, excellent read; authentic and honest, interesting and engaging. 
  I was certainly interested enough to want to read Michelle's story but I hadn't twigged, daft really, just how engaging it would be.
  From funny insights such as Barack's messy ways to the sheer drive, determination and warmth which has come to define this couple. Their journey shared as well as Michelle's own journey of becoming - from childhood to adulthood.

My Year In Books: 2021

The Enormous Turnip - Katie Daynes & Georgien Overwater 
Giraffe on a Bicycle - Julia Woolf
*Becoming - Michelle Obama
Paddington & the Christmas Surprise - Michael Bond
Austenland - Shannon Hale
Sourdough - Robin Sloan 
The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart - David Greig
Hugless Douglas - David Melling
Busy People: Astronaut - Lucy M. George & AndoTwin
King of the Mountain: Fireman Sam - Adam Long
Little Miss Magic; Mr. Tickle in a Tangle - Roger Hargreaves
One Hundred Steps: The Story of Captain Tom Moore
- illus. Adam Larkum
Our House - Louise Candlish
The Golden Thread - Kassia St Clare
The Wild Places - Robert MacFarlane 
The Patchwork Quilt - Valerie Flournoy & Jerry Pinkney
You’re Called What? - Kes Gray & Nikki Dyson
Oi, Puppies - Kes Gray & Jim Field
Knowing God - J.I. Packer
How to raise a loaf & fall in love with sourdough - Roly Allen

Spring reading,

05/05  I'd been wanting to read Red Dust Road ahead of its NTS tour later this year. And what a joy it was: a voyage of discovery; of parentage & self & identity.

Kicking the story off with the drama of re-meeting her birth father; tracing that moment back in the quest to re-discover her roots and whom, what kind of people, her birth parents are; the plot weaving in & out of childhood memories, 

*  Incidents of race and difference from growing up & becoming; the love and regard for her adoptive ('true') parents & the aunts from Nairn;  the disappointments of ideals held when reality hits, of opportunities just missed; the camaraderie & care of her friends & new friendships forged helping her find a way across Nigeria; that joyful rendezvous with Sidney, her brother, opening up a new world of possibility and re-connection to her wider Nigerian family. 

*  Reflections on memory (that well-known, well-used family refrain of "remember that time when...?" to relive a moment from childhood); of her parents' relationship - "my parents reinforce each other with memory" as well as their fragility & mortality. 
*  Hitting the nail square on the head with regards to Aberdeen - "depressingly dull or majestic & magical" ... "either the colour of sparkling silver or the drab colour of porridge or fog, depending on your way of seeing it." (132).

Favourite extracts: 

Part of me came from Africa, part of me was foreign to myself, strange to myself since I have never been to the dark continent and could only really have it burning away, hot and dusty, in my mind. It is not so much that being black in a white country means that people don’t except you as, say Scottish; it is that being black in a white country makes you a stranger to yourself. It is not the foreigner without; it is the foreigner within that is interesting. Every time somebody in your own country asks you where you are from; every time you indignantly reply, ‘I’m from here,’ you are subconsciously caught up in asking that question again and again of yourself, particularly when you are a child. (38)

I pictured of the plots of my land in the African landscape of my imagination. It was flat land, not like the Highlands of Scotland. The earth was dark and rich. There was a red dust road. I couldn’t really get much further than that. (42)

... And no matter how much she loved me, no matter how much my dad loved me, there is still a windy place right at the core of my heart. The windy place is like Wuthering Heights, out on open the moors, rugged and wild and free and lonely. The wind rages and batters at the trees. I struggle against the windy place. I sometimes even forget it. But there it is. I am partly defeated by it. You think adoption is a story which has an end. At the point about it is that it has no end. It keeps changing its ending. It infuriates me that this windy place exists at all. It shouldn’t.  ...  I am lucky. I am blessed. And yet still, sometimes, in my dark hours, there is this feeling that I am alone. And I can’t shake it. There’s this ghostly something. I’m only alone in the way that everybody is alone. And yet it seems that the bundle of a child that is wrapped up in the ghostly shawl of adoption does have another layer of aloneness wrapped up in there. (45-46)

Why do we even want to know; surely we know ourselves by now? Why should we have any curiosity, never mind the blazing burning curiosity, the all-consuming insatiable appetite for self-knowledge that some of us feel? If we think of ourselves as puzzles, and our birth parents are part of that puzzle, do we think that finding our parents will answer the puzzle? Surely we are not so naive? The jigsaw can never, ever be completed there will always be missing pieces, or the pieces will be too large and clumsy to fit into the delicate puzzle … You are made already, though you don’t properly know it, you are made up from a mixture of myth and gene. You are part fable, part porridge. (47)

I take off my shoes so the red earth can touch my bare soles. It’s as if my footprints were already on the road before I even got there. I walk into them, my waiting footprints. The earth is so copper warm and beautiful and the green of the long elephant grasses so lushly green they make me want to weep. I feel such a strong sense of affinity with the colours and the landscape, a strong sense of recognition. There is a feeling of liberation, and exhilaration, that at last, at last, last I’m here.... The road welcomes me; it is benevolent, warm, friendly, accepting and for now it feels enough, the red, red of it, the vivid green against it, the long and winding red-dust road. (213-214)

The empty ghost, the wraithlike figure that has stalked me for years seems to be taking off her pale polka-dot dress, slowly, in the sports stadium changing rooms, and hanging it onto a peg. She opens a locker, with her own key, found after years of fumbling, and disappears into its depths. (276)

Kay, Jackie. Red Dust Road.
Picador: London, 2010.

. . . . . 

28/04  I cannot remember how I first heard of Fishbowl. It may have been a mention in the Guardian Books pages perhaps when it first came out in 2015. Either way, its premise caught my attention & amused me so I jotted its name down as a future read. Looking for a remedy book, something to ease me back into reading after MN&JS had taken its toll, I found Fishbowl was in stock at the library. Perfect! 

Chapter Two: "Ian doesn't take his plunge from the balcony until chapter 54" raised a smile. - Okay, Bradley Somer, we're with you; you master of intrigue, you. 

What a read. Witty, philosophical, heart-warming.

It takes a goldfish less than four seconds to fall the distance between the twenty-seventh floor and the sidewalk below. A flash. The time it takes to read a sentence or two. For Ian, it's a lifetime of wonder. 

 ...  I loved how the novel was both four seconds long and yet simultaneously months, years old. The clever weaving-in & out of characters and story-line; pausing each one to return to Ian's apparently imminent demise: the high drama of Connor/Katie/Faye especially  and the background to, and resolution of, Claire's story. 

Lives intersecting, crisscrossing rooms, corridors and streets close by the apartment; "a glimpse into the box" ... Ian's fall serving as a "vital thread that ties humanity together."  

That twist in the tale come the ending. 

Brilliant.

. . . . . 

a brilliant bonkers journey of binaries

Emma Rice's debut play came to town. A chapter a night ahead of watching the performance. Characters I loved, was rooting for, cheering on from the sidelines. 

Great humour, warmth & escapades and a love letter to Shakespeare of sorts. 

Glad to know of the nuances which time on stage could not allow for (the chapter on America omitted entirely); the cleverness in tying up the ending. (Ah Perry!)

. . . . . 

25/02  I wanted to like this book. After all, a big chunky read; a epic of sorts. A book that had already been dramatised for tv. A book that promised a collision of worlds, of magic and society,  with an ironic Austen-esque eye cast over its proceedings. 

At times, the plot development caught me up & kept me page-turning; at times, the pace felt to lag & I stalled somewhat but still, would persevere & keep going. 

Then two things occurred: 

- I found myself so irritated by the character of the man with the thistle-down hair that (with a cheating glance to a plot outline), I discovered he wasn't due to die for at least another hundred pages. Ugh, time for a break.

- I swapped over to Wise Children & found it an absolute riot. When I'd finished that brilliant bonkers journey of binaries, MN&JS was still sat waiting on my nightstand. I found myself putting off picking it up again. A couple of weeks passed and so, as much I dislike not finishing a read, that book was putting me off reading altogether. High time to quit & find another, more engaging read. A world I wanted to enter & enjoy.  

.... I wanted to agree & join the crowd of admirers, Gaiman at the front leading the fanfare but. Life's too short to read 'bad' books. Not one for me. Off to the charity shop it went to become someone else's cup of tea instead.