Melissa Harrison's Rain: Four Walks in English Weather is another of the "random walking books I picked up while browsing in the travel section of Blackwells" (a category that accounts for a fairly substantial proportion of my TBR pile). It's exactly what it says on the tin; four short essays describing four rainy walks taken across the course of a single year, one each quarter. Each essay blends description of the walks themselves and the varied landscapes and rain Harrison walks through, which range from the flatness of Wicken Fen to the tors of Dartmoor, and from steady winter rain through spring showers to a summmer thunderstorm, with meteorological detail about the causes of the different types of rain storms and showers which are such a feature of the English weather, notes on natural history, quotes from other writings about weather, and snippets of memoir. It ends with a glossary of regional terms for rain and another of meteoroglogical definitions for different types of rain (I now know the precise difference between light, heavy, very heavy and extreme rain, although alas there's no waty to work that out without standing still holding a rain gauge for an hour). It's a lovely little book, which evokes each different setting and type of storm perfectly, and I'd particularly recommend it to anyone who is longing to get out into a different bit of countryside, or any countryside at all, after weeks of lockdown.

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I then took a look at legionseagle's copy of Tolkien's The Notion Club Papers, which reached me (via lilliburlero) just before the lockdown at a point where reading about Tolkien's ideas of Oxford in the late 80s seemed less of an entertaining prospect than it had done when I'd asked to borrow it. It's a curious fragment which seems to blend a future version of the Inklings with bits of what would become Middle-Earth's mythology and an Anglo-Saxon timeslip story thrown in for good measure (and to demonstrate the continuity between Middle-Earth and Old English). Tolkien's Oxford of 1987 appears to have remained a curiously male affair, and I'm a bit concerned about the mentions of the academic who was a leader of the Queer Metre movement and the undergraduate who is much attached to him, which sounds like very much the kind of thing we should be discouraging. Also, the occurence during the narrative of a catastrophic event (in this case the Great Storm of 1987, only a few months earlier than the actual Great Storm of 1987) which means that all summer exams have to be moved to winter was, frankly, a bit too on the nose right now.

Tasha Suri's Empire of Sand is a fantasy set in a world inspired by Mughal India. Mehr, the heroine, is the sheltered daughter of a provincial governor, but her mother was Amrithi, from a marginalised and persecuted race who live in the province's vast desert and claim descent from the daiva, elemental beings themselves said to be descended from the gods. When Mehr's Amrithi power of manipulating the forces of the desert's storms comes to the attention of the Emperor's mystics, she has to leave her home and is taken to the temple of the Maha, the chief mystic, where her powers will be used to support the Maha's manipulation of the Empire's sleeping gods to ensure his will is done.

On the face of it, the plot of Empire of Sand is a fairly common one; the story of the princess cast out from her home and forced into a life of servitude. It's differentiated from other stories of the same type both by its non-European setting, and by Mehr herself; from the start, she is acutely aware of her own privilege, and she wins through not by being good and kind and patient, but by being skilled at manipulating other people to her own advantage, something which is not normally seen as a positive trait in a heroine. I found it an engaging read with really interesting worldbuilding, and a really rather sweet romance subplot, although in places it was a lot darker than I'd expected it to be and I'm not sure it was actually quite what I wanted to read at this precise point in time.

I'm currently reading Ben Aaronovitch's new Rivers of London novel, False Value, but I'm finding it rather slow going as my brain isn't really managing to focus on fiction at the moment, so I took a brief break to see whether, having bought a new (and much larger) phone recently, I'd be able to read the latest of the graphic novels, which I hadn't bought when it was released as my iPad had died and I didn't rate my chances of reading it on either a nine-year-old kindle or an iPhone 5S.

It turned out to be perfectly readable on my new phone; the kindle editions have a feature which enables you to scroll through frame by frame, rather than trying to see a whole page on the screen, which makes it easier. Action at a Distance is a flashback to a case of Nightingale's from the late 1950s; it was fun, if fairly slight, and interesting to see some of Nightingale's past.

Favours Exchanged is the fifth of the companion series to the Comfortable Courtesan novels, Clorinda Cathcart's Circle. It follows on from Two Weddings and Several Revelations in telling the stories of Clorinda and her friends some twenty years after the end of the main series, as a threat to blackmail Clorinda provides a way to turn the tables and maximise felicity for a number of people.

I picked this off the TBR pile at 2am one night last week when I was struggling to sleep and needed something soothing; as always, it was a perfect comfort read, even if I've found it hard enough to concentrate in the current circumstances* that it's taken me a long time to finish it.

*I am coming to the conclusion that "the current circumstances" is the present tense of "Recent Events"

Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth is a book that almost everyone seems to have been raving about, to the point where I did wonder if it would live up to the hype. I'd seen it described as 'lesbian necromancers in space', which I take some issue with; there are lesbian swordswomen as well as lesbian necromancers, and most of the novel takes place on a planet, rather than in space, but it's a good tagline, and if lesbian necromancers in space is the kind of thing you'd like you'll probably like this.

The novel is the first in a planned trilogy, and centres on Gideon Nav, an orphan and foundling who has been raised in the service of the Ninth House of the galactic empire, and Harrowhark, heir of the Ninth and Gideon's lifelong rival. After Gideon fails in the latest of many attempts to escape the Gormenghast-like Ninth House, Harrow offers her freedom and a commission in the empire's military Cohort if she will accompany Harrow to the First House, where the Emperor has summoned the heirs of all the houses, along with their cavaliers, to undertake a series of tests designed to determine whether they are worthy of joining the Emperor's elite cadre of immortal necromancers.

Part gothic horror, part murder mystery, Gideon the Ninth isn't quite like anything else I've ever read. For me, it absolutely lived up to the hype. The characters are vividly drawn and deeply human, and the plot is twisty and complicated with plenty of tension. The novel is told in tight third person from Gideon's perspective, and I suspect that some readers would be put off by the Tumblresque style of the narrative, but for me it worked perfectly to convey Gideon's personality and yet never obscured the different personalities of the secondary characters. Muir has invented a detailed, complex system of necromancy with numerous different branches as the background to her trilogy; there are also glimpses of a wider political background which I hope will be explored further in the other books. I enjoyed this a great deal; I was quite sad to finish it. and have already pre-ordered the sequel.

alithea recommended Nimona to me a few weeks ago, and seeing that it was by Noelle Stevenson, who is the showrunner for the delightful She-Ra and the Princessses of Power, I ordered a copy straight away.

Nimona began life as a webcomic before being published as a graphic novel. Set in a fantasy world which combines dragons, jousts and sword fights with TV news, video calls and takeaway pizza, its central character, Nimona, is a shapeshifter who becomes sidekick to supervillian Ballister Blackheart. It's snarky, funny and surprisingly touching in places, with a background m/m romance, and I thought it was great fun. My only issue is that the text is very small and I could only read it by taking my glasses off and holding the book closer to my face than I normally would.

Emily Tesh's novella Silver in the Wood is an utterly delightful m/m romance between a Green Man and a young folklorist who comes to investigate his wood, featuring dryads, malignant revenant spirits and a Middle Aged Woman Who Takes No Shit. It's short (only 112 pages, and I read it in a couple of hours), but beautifully written, with a wonderfully evoked forest setting and mythological background; it's also very gentle and full of kindness and entirely charming, and I adored it.

There is a sequel due out in June, which I have pre-ordered and am very much looking forward to.

Alice Payne Rides is the second of two novellas by Kate Heartfield featuring Alice Payne, mixed-race eighteenth century English gentlewoman whose secret identity is the notorious highwaywoman the Holy Ghost, her lover, the inventor Jane Hodgson, and time-traveller Prudence Zuniga, born in the twenty-second century, once a soldier in a war spanning centuries of human history and now a deserter hiding out in Hampshire in 1789 but still trying (with the help of Alice, Jane and their neighbour Wray Auden) to covertly nudge history in the right direction. When a mission goes wrong and Arthur of Brittany ends up in 1789 rather than dead at the hands of King John's men, Prudence finds that their activities have drawn the attention of her former superiors, who want to bring her back into the fold.

Like the first novella, Alice Payne Arrives, this is pacy, clever and engaging, and if "lesbian highwaywoman time-travel shenanigans" sounds like the kind of thing that appeals to you, then you should definitely read it.

I've been meaning to try some of Mary Stewart's novels for ages, as she's someone multiple people whose opinions I respect speak highly of, and the girlmeetstrouble readalong spurred me to pick up the copy of Madam, Will You Talk? which I acquired from a phone box full of secondhand books in Buckland last summer (although I did temporarily forget it was that one and had got as far as downloading a kindle copy before spotting it on the TBR bookcase and returning the kindle copy for a refund) and give it a go.

Madam, Will You Talk? is categorised as 'romantic suspense'; basically, it felt like John Buchan from the point of view of the heroine, rather than the hero. (This is not to say anything against Buchan - his heroines are terrific - but I can't think of any of his novels that actually show things from their perspective.) The heroine of Madam, Will You Talk? is Charity Selbourne, who finds herself caught up in the final act of a complicated, murderous plot when she befriends a young boy who is staying at the same Avignon hotel where she and a friend are holidaying. Stewart's characterisation of Charity manages to balance all the qualities needed in the heroine of a suspense novel - a strong moral compass, a determination to do the right thing regardless of potential personal cost, and a resourcefulness and skillset that might not be expected of a young woman in the 1950s - with a very realistic sense of fear of the dangerous game she finds herself playing. ('I am not the stuff of which heroines are made', Charity thinks at one point, shortly before going off and behaving in a very heroine-like way.)

I loved this. It's very much a page-turner; the plot hurtles along at breakneck speed, and in places I found it almost too suspenseful. The romance is the kind that I'd probably dislike in a straight romance novel but somehow rather enjoy when it's crossed with another genre, and the descriptions of the Provençal settings are absolutely wonderful; of the places mentioned in the novel, I've only been to Avignon (our day trip when we stayed there was to Orange, rather than Nîmes and the Pont du Gard); Stewart's descriptions evoked it perfectly, as well as helping me to visualise the other settings of the novel, and the sun-soaked Mediterranean feel of the novel was the perfect antidote to this greyest of English winters. I will definitely be adding Stewart to the list of enjoyable but not entirely fluffy comfort reads.

There was a lot of buzz on knitting Twitter when Esther Rutter's This Golden Fleece: A Journey Through Britain's Knitted History was published in the autumn. I thought the book, chronicling a year spent researching various aspects of the history of knitting in Britain and knitting projects to match, sounded interesting enough for me to put it on my wish list for Christmas, and to get round to reading it a lot quicker than often happens for books on my TBR pile.

I found myself rather underwhelmed. First and foremost, just as my measure of a good walking boot is whether or not it reminds me why I love walking, I expected a book about knitting to remind me of the pleasure of using yarn and needles to create something, and this didn't; Rutter doesn't actually devote much space to talking about her own knitting, and when she does it's all about the technicalities (needle types and sizes, stitch patterns, techniques) and not about the actual experience of knitting.

I also felt that the historical aspects of the book were often rather shallow; while I enjoyed Rutter's descriptions of her visits to archives and museums, and her conversations with people who are still using traditional machinery and techniques, a lot of the historical content felt like paraphrased secondary material, and much of it covered areas that have already been extensively written about by knitters such as Susan Crawford and Kate Davies. Rutter's approach to the history of textile production also feels extremely uncritical; where Crawford and particularly Davies look critically at the working conditions of the people, particularly women, employed in the textile industries of Britain, and the economic factors that drove the rise of mass-production and decline in hand-made clothing, these are much less a feature of Rutter's narrative. I would also really have liked her to have looked at the ways knitting traditions are being adapted and carried forward into the 21st century; despite mentions of Ravelry and yarn festivals, I didn't get any sense of knitting as the vibrant, living craft I know it to be, rather than a historical curiosity.

Rutter's decision to structure the book as a series of journeys, one per month, each with a linked project, also doesn't do the book any favours; the result is a rather saggy narrative, where similar themes recur again and again across different chapters without being clearly linked; so there are many similiarities between the ganseys of the East Coast, in February's chapter, and the guernseys, jerseys and knit-frocks of the Channel Islands and Cornwall, in August; socks first appear in the form of Highland stockings in April, then are returned to in July with both machine-knitted stockings (which links to frame knitting in the Borders, in May) and the nålbinded Coppergate sock from Viking York and then again in October with Welsh funeral stockings. With some exceptions (particularly the chapter on Shetland and Rutter's visit to Shetland Wool Week), there isn't enough differentiation between the knitting traditions of most of the places Rutter visits to really make the structure work (and in some chapters the geographical link is almost non-existent; March's chapter, 'Revolutionary Knitting', combines a visit to Edinburgh Yarn Festival with a trip to London, Madame Defarge and Virginia Woolf, and the distinctly non-traditional project of a pussyhat).

Although the book is illustrated, the choice of illustrations seems rather random (and the illustrations aren't captioned or referenced in the text, so you have to flip to the list of illustrations at the front to check what you're looking at). In particular, Rutter specifically mentions a sampler scarf she was inspired by when visting the Shetland Museum, but although there are pictures of other items in the museum there are no pictures of the scarf, and the chapter on Monmouth caps only includes a close-up plate of Rutter's own replica; I had to google to find out what a Monmouth cap actually looked like.

This Golden Fleece has its moments of interest; I particularly liked the chapter on Shetland, I think because Shetland does have such a distinctive knitwear tradition, and Rutter's visit, for Shetland Wool Week, also taps in to modern knitting culture in a way most of her other trips don't. Overall, though, I found it a real curate's egg of a book, and despite all of the marketing being aimed at knitters I suspect it might work better for non-knitters, or perhaps people who used to knit; as a serious knitter myself, and someone who is steeped in the knitting world, I couldn't help thinking that so much of what Rutter writes about has been done already, and done better, by other knitters.