Set several years after Swordspoint, Ellen Kushner's The Privilege of the Sword is both a sequel to the earlier novel and a complete, self-contained story in its own right. There are several strands to it, but the main one is the story of fifteen-year-old Katherine Talbert, summoned from her quiet country home to join her uncle, the Mad Duke Tremontaine (Alec from Swordspoint) in the city, where, instead of pretty dresses and balls, she finds herself given men's clothes and expected to learn swordplay. Interwoven with Katherine's first-person narrative are other stories, among the story of Artemisia, a young woman Katherine meets on her first night in the city who is following a much more conventional path, and the Mad Duke's interactions with people from all levels of society and the complex politics of the city. Together they combine into an entertaining comedy of manners which takes a critical look at the position of women in Kushner's fantasy society. I found the plot a little hard to get a handle on - it never quite seemed to be the shape I was expecting it to be, something I also found with Swordspoint - and the ending seemed a bit abrupt, but I loved the characters and their interactions and it was witty and thoughtful and also delightfully full of queer characters and interactions and generally great fun. (It's not, however, an entirely fluffy book, although the atmosphere of decay and corruption hanging over Riverside has lessened a lot since Swordspoint.)

Stephanie Burgis is an author I've been meaning to try for ages (I know I have had at least one of her YA novels on my kindle for a long time) but never quite got round to. On Thursday night, though, she was offering copies of her adult novella, Snowspelled, free on Twitter to anyone who wanted some escapist distraction, and having just finished a book and feeling in need of escapist distraction but too twitchy and anxious about the election on top of everything else to hunt through my kindle for something suitable I thought that it sounded like the perfect thing.

Snowspelled is a Regencyesque romance set in the country of Angland, where magic is the preserve of gentlemen, leaving the serious business of politics to women. Cassandra Harwood, however, has chosen to defy convention, refusing to follow her mother into politics and instead becoming the first woman magician in Angland. Following an accident which has left her unable to use her magic, she is not looking forward to attending a week-long house-party in the heart of the elven dales, full of gentleman magicians, lady politicians and, worst of all, her ex-fiancé. When she encounters an elf-lord while assisting in the search for a missing party of guests, Cassandra finds that she will have to discover who is responsible for causing the heavy snowfall that has cut the party off, or risk a breach of the treaty between humans and elves which brought an end to centuries of bitter and bloody warfare - and the only person who can help is her ex-fiancé.

This is a deliciously frothy romance-cum-mystery, full of entertainingly snarky dialogue (I particularly loved the interactions between Cassandra and her brother) and with an interesting exploration of the constraints of a very different set of gender roles to the ones applying in our world. Although the main romance is m/f, there is a background f/f romance and a suggestion that this isn't completely unheard of in this world; there are also a number of characters of colour and it's strongly implied that race is not an issue in this world. I found it utterly charming and exactly the kind of entertaining escapism I needed this weekend. There's a second novella in the series, as well as a prequel novella about the romance between Cassandra's brother and sister-in-law, and I have already bought both.

Jean-Christophe Rufin is someone I'd never heard of before picking up a colleague's copy of The Santiago Pilgrimage, though I feel I should have done; he's a doctor and novelist, a former French ambassador to Senegal, one of the founders of MSF, and a member of the Académie Française. The Santiago Pilgrimage is the account of his walk along the Camino Norte, the coastal route from Hendaye on the French/Spanish border to Santiago de Compostela. I was a little concerned that the book's focus might be on the religious aspects of the pilgrimage rather than the walk itself, but it's clear from the start that Rufin's journey was prompted less by religious fervour than by a desire for physical challenge, and the decision to walk the Camino rather than heading east through the Pyrenees was a last-minute one.

Rufin's book is much more about the psychological impact of his walk than the external landscapes he moved through; it's short on description and detail of the route, though there are the obligatory amusing anecdotes about the fellow pilgrims he encounters along the way (and I did find his accounts of encounters with women slightly uncomfortable - often unneccessarily sexualised, or generalising about "women" from one woman, and ending with his deciding, instead of being annoyed that when his wife joins him she's brought a heavy make-up bag to carry, to be thankful that she has the means to be beautiful with her). Mostly, though, his focus is on the way his own mental state changed across the course of his 800km walk. I found this absolutely fascinating; in fact, I'd say that of all the books about walking I've read, this one comes closest to expressing the way I, too, feel about long-distance walking. None of my walks have been anything like as long as the Camino, but I absolutely recognise the gradual falling away of all other concerns Rufin describes, the way narrowing life down to the simple need to keep putting one foot in front can be a transcendent experience in and of itself, and the horrible anticlimax of reaching your destination only to find that the walk itself was what mattered, not the place you have arrived in. So many walking books, even the ones which are ostensibly about walking and mental health, seem to focus on the scenery, or the blisters, and despite some things in the book I wasn't wild about, overall I really enjoyed seeing my experience of walking reflected here.

Two Weddings & Several Revelations is the fourth of L.A. Hall's companion series to the Comfortable Courtesan novels, Clorinda Cathcart's Circle. Following on from the concluding stories in Incalculable Diffusion, and also picking up the story from A Man of Independent Mind, this volume is set some twenty years after the conclusion of Clorinda's memoirs and focuses mainly on the younger generation, now come to adulthood and finding their places in the world.

As always, this was an utter delight; it's always a pleasure to spend time in the company of Hall's characters. I particularly liked the way this instalment picks up and expands the queer themes that have always been a part of the series. Perfect comfort reading for a gloomy November, or any time, really.

I've been meaning to try one of K.J. Charles's books for years, as so many of my friends love her, and when I read that Proper English was f/f, rather than m/m as I think most of her books are, I thought I'd give it a try. (Not that I have anything against m/m, but I particularly like f/f.)

Proper English is a historical lesbian country-house murder mystery, and it's every bit as delightful as that sounds. When Pat Merton and her brother Bill are invited to a shooting party with their old friend Jimmy Yoxall, she's expecting a peaceful few weeks of healthy outdoor pursuits and not having to make pleasant small-talk with other women, but on arrival she finds that the party is much larger than she'd expected and includes Jimmy's new fiancée, Fenella Carruth. Despite intially dismissing Fen as a featherhead, Pat finds herself becoming closer to the other woman, but this is not a happy country-house party and when one of the guests is found murdered there's no shortage of suspects.

I thought this was frothy and charming and perfect comfort reading. It felt a bit like a grown-up version of Robin Stevens's Wells and Wong mysteries (with a definite emphasis on the grown-up as there are some definitely explicit sex scenes), and I'm definitely going to read more K.J. Charles. (I gather this is a prequel to her Think of England, in which Pat and Fen are minor characters, and have already bought that.)

As Amal El-Mohtar pointed out in the Guardian earlier this year, there are a lot of books about time-travelling lesbians (or at least women who love women*) around this year. Ankaret Wells's new novel, Anna Chronistic and the Scarab of Destiny, is one of the ones I was most looking forward to.

In a world where there are two great Powers of time travel, the Timeguard (a kind of time-travelling police force with a mission to fix errors in the continuum) and the People of the Horizon (who exist in a temporal protectorate in the very early days of ancient Egypt). Anna Chronistic, daughter of the inventor of time-travel and owner of a steampunky time-machine hard-wired around her spinal cord, prefers to operate independently of both powers, enjoying the way her time-travelling abilities allow her to mingle with courtesans and painters in Second Empire Paris while occasionally travelling to Bronze Age Anatolia for liaisons with Helen of Troy. However, when the carved ruby Scarab of Destiny, key to the People of the Horizon's mysteries, goes missing, throwing the time continuum into disarray, Anna is forced to team up with Time Agent Polly Shapiro to find the ruby and restore it to its rightful place.

This is a delightful romp of a book, with a slightly bittersweet undertone which prevents it from being pure fluff. I thought the narrative style was rather reminiscent of Terry Pratchett, partly because of the liberal use of footnotes to convey asides and explanations (slightly awkward to read on my ancient Kindle, but well worth it - the Kindle app on my phone, and possibly the newer touch-screen Kindles, handled them much better) but also because of the way the narrative was peppered with allusions and in-jokes between Anna and her twenty-first century readership. It's extremely entertaining, and made all the more so because Wells is a friend of mine and I spotted several mutual friends (and, indeed, myself) making cameo appearances. (I was particularly delighted to be reading a section with several of these cameo appearances earlier in the week when I was reading at 4am due to a bout of insomnia. "A good book to read when suffering from insomnia" might sound like a rather backhanded compliment, but in this case I sincerely mean that it was so charming and fun to read that it managed to make me forget both the worries that had woken me up at twenty past one and had kept me awake since then and the misery of being awake at 4am and knowing the alarm would go off in less than two hours.)

All in all, I absolutely loved this, and really hope that there will be sequels someday.

*Anna is bi, rather than being a lesbian, though appears to be predominantly attracted to women. Obviously, the bi rep is another reason to love the book.

I always love finding recommendations for new books in the books I'm reading, and I was intrigued enough by the mentions of Naomi Mitchison's Travel Light in Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's This is How You Lose the Time War to seek out a copy. I wasn't completely unfamiliar with Mitchison's work; I remembered reading Memoirs of a Spacewoman in my teens, and I think from the description in the introduction to my copy of Travel Light that I also read The Conquered at least, but I hadn't thought of her in a long time.

Travel Light is an absolute delight. It's the story of Halla, daughter of a king in a land which owes a great deal to Norse mythology. When her stepmother decrees that the child should be got rid of, Halla is saved by her nurse, who turns herself into a bear and steals away with the child. Halla is brought up first by bears and then, when the bears go into hibernation, by dragons, before leaving her Norse home to travel to Micklegard (aka Constantinople). It's a short book, but the writing is beautiful, with a wonderful sly humour, and although it uses the structure of a traditional fairy-tale or quest narrative it's constantly subverting the conventions of the genre in a way that I was utterly charmed by.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Gods of Jade and Shadow is a fantasy set in Mexico in the 1920s and based on Mayan mythology. It begins in a small town in the Yucatán, where Casiopea Tun lives a Cinderella-like existence, treated as a servant in the house of her wealthy grandfather and bullied by her cousin Martín. All of this changes when she opens the trunk at the foot of her grandfather's bed and revives the Mayan god of death, Hun-Kamé, who demands that Casiopea helps him to find the three missing parts of his body which will restore him to his full powers and enable him to defeat his brother, Vucub-Kamé, who has stolen the throne of the underworld, Xibalba, after beheading Hun-Kamé and giving his bones to Casiopea's grandfather to guard. Casiopea and Hun-Kamé's journey takes them across the length and breadth of Mexico, from the Yucatán to Baja California, encountering demons, gods and necromancers in their quest before the brothers finally confront one another.

It was fascinating to read a fantasy based in a mythological tradition I wasn't familiar with at all, and Casiopea is a likeable and sympathetic heroine, but overall I didn't enjoy Gods of Jade and Shadow as much as I'd hoped I would. Mostly I think that was down to the writing style; I can see why Moreno-Garcia decided to opt for a narrative voice reminiscent of fairytales, to underline the mythic subject-matter of the novel, but I found it quite distancing, flattening emotions and the descriptions of the landscapes Casiopea and Hun-Kamé travel through and the places they visit, so that instead of the richly textured, vivid read I felt the book should have been it seemed muted, one-dimensional and ultimately rather forgettable.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free eARC for review.

In 1997 Roger Deakin, environmentalist, film-maker and keen swimmer, embarked on a journey through Britain, swimming in rivers, lakes, outdoor pools and the sea. The book he wrote about it, Waterlog, has become a classic of the nature-writing genre. I first heard of it when I read Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places, which is in part a memorial to Macfarlane's friendship with Deakin, last year, and picked up a copy a few months ago.

Waterlog's subtitle, 'A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain', suggests a linear progress through the country, but in fact Deakin follows a meandering course, concentrating mainly on the West Country and East Anglia, close to his Suffolk home. He makes one visit to Wales, spends some time in the Yorkshire Dales and swims off the west coast of Scotland before returning south again with only a brief stop in Northumbria. Huge areas of the UK are left unexplored, including (sadly for me, at least) pretty much all of the lakes and waterways I'm most familiar with (bar a brief dip in the Windrush near Burford). Nevertheless, it's a fascinating book. As well as describing his swimming experiences, Deakin writes thoughtfully about the history, natural history and cultural importance of the bodies of water he swims through, and his beautiful descriptive prose left me longing to visit the places he describes (although not to swim, except in the few outdoor pools and lidos he swims in; I love swimming, but as a short-sighted person of a nervous disposition, and one who once nearly drowned in Walden Pond, I'm happy to be a pool-based swimmer and to experience nature by walking, or maybe occasional paddling, instead).

However, for me, Waterlog does suffer somewhat from being an example of what Kathleen Jamie, in her London Review of Books review of The Wild Places, dubbed 'the Lone Enraptured Male'. Yes, occasionally Deakin talks to locals: the last eel-fisher in Ely, an artist working in the Medway estuary, a farmer and cider-maker in the Somerset Levels, but with the exception of a woman referred to only as Judith whose family own an old mill in the Avon near Evesham and swim there all summer, all of these are male. Sometimes he quotes other writers who have visited the same waters, but just about all of them are male too, and most of the time the only voice we hear is his. And his voice is a voice which, quite unconsciously, sees the world as being about men and doesn't really consider women at all (the most egregious example of this comes towards the end, when he mentions a prep school which once required boys and girls to swim naked together up to the age of 12, and describes the acute embarrassment of the older boys struggling to hide their arousal while the by-then-pubescent girls changed, without ever seeming to pause to consider that it was probably pretty embarrassing for the girls as well) and which takes a distinctly male attitude towards the sensual experience of outdoor swimming, with the water he's swimming in subtly characterised as female in a way that made me cringe a bit (the most obvious and explicit example comes when he is swimming his way across Norfolk and enters the River Wissey "feeling like a philanderer of rivers, with the water of the Little Ouse still in my hair", which was an actual full-body wince). I did still enjoy the book, but this stopped me loving it as I might have done.

I don't think I've re-read The Handmaid's Tale since I was at university; I recall trying to re-read it then because I was writing an essay on it and finding bits of it so upsetting I struggled to get through it, and while I've occasionally looked up references I haven't tried to re-read it since. (I also haven't watched the TV series, because I definitely didn't think I could handle that.) However, I do want to read The Testaments, and given how long it has been I thought I should probably refresh my memory of The Handmaid's Tale first, so I screwed my courage to the sticking point and picked my copy (second-hand when I bought it, well-read and still bearing the stains of a 25-year-old banana-in-bag incident) off the shelf for a re-read.

I was surprised at just how much I'd forgotten; some scenes I still remembered vividly, but others I had no recollection of at all (I only remembered the narrator's attempted flight with her husband and child from the 1990 film, and not from the book, and I'd forgotten most of her best friend Moira's story and a lot of the domestic details of life in Gilead which show the universality of oppression). If anything, it hits harder now than it did then; partly because the world (or at least the Western world) has got so much grimmer and less optimistic in recent years, partly because in addition to this I'm now so much more aware of the real-world antecedents of Gilead (as Atwood says, there is nothing in the novel that hadn't already happened, somewhere in the world, when she wrote the novel, but I didn't know much about those at 18 or 20 and read it as pure fiction), and partly simply because I was a rather emotionally immature 18- or 20-year-old and didn't have the same capacity to empathise with other people - not just the narrator, but so many of the other characters who we only see through her eyes - that I do at 45. I found it a really tough read, but it is also still an amazing book; Atwood is an incredible writer, and I think this may be her masterpiece. It's a vivid, compelling and utterly chilling portrayal of a dystopian future. Despite being over 30 years old now, it still feels very contemporary, with the exception of the concern about falling birthrates which is definitely of its time. I'm a bit sorry I left it this long to revisit it, although I certainly need to read at least a couple of much lighter, fluffier books before I venture on to try The Testaments.