For a change, here are three books I've read recently that I liked a lot. They are all satisfying, well-crafted reads, and I'm going to keep them all, but I don't have vast amounts to say about them other than 'they're good'. Mary Stewart, Thornyhold Mary Stewart writes about magic so convincingly that there must … Continue reading Three good books
The Mere Wife, by Maria Dahvana Headley I didn’t finish this. I got to the bit where the character in the Hrothgar role got killed, and the character in the Beowulf role is in a car with the character in the Wealtheow role, considering kissing her. I did not want to read on because the … Continue reading My gifts to the Oxfam bookshop
John Wright is a naturalist and former cabinet maker, whose hobbies have turned into jobs and, in many cases, also books. A Natural History of the Hedgerow is a separate venture from his River Cottage Handbooks, and is both lavish (colour photographs throughout!) and lacking, possibly due to a desire on the publisher's part to … Continue reading A Natural History of the Hedgerow, and ditches, dykes and dry stone walls
In 1959, Peter Haring Judd became a history teacher in a secondary school in Maidaguri, the capital of Bornu province in northern Nigeria. He had completed his US military service and was looking for something to do with his life that the Peace Corps, to be founded two years later, would offer younger generations of … Continue reading Peter Haring Judd, Figures in a Spare Landscape
Odd title, that. Who lies sleeping, exactly? It's the latest Peter Grant / Rivers of London novel, and I gobbled it up over three evenings. But though I enjoyed it, and it had (at the beginning) the potential to be one of the really rock-solid, hard-hitting novels in the series, like Broken Homes, for instance, … Continue reading Ben Aaronovitch, Lies Sleeping
Once again, Kathleen Jamie's prose is a deep immersive pleasure, the kind of writing that stays with you for days. She's a poet and knows how to compress emotion and meaning into letters and pauses. I loved her Sightlines and Findings, both collections of essays and short pieces. This, earlier, book is, I think, even better. … Continue reading Kathleen Jamie, Among Muslims
This novel had been recommended to me by a Twitter friend a year ago, in terms that made me think that it must be a sf classic, a great sf novel by a British woman that I had unaccountably missed. He too may have got the dates wrong, because this is a 2017 novel by … Continue reading Emma Geen, The Many Selves of Katherine North
