I read much, much less this year than I have done in recent years; only 43 books, compared to 70-odd for the last couple of years. Maybe it's the pandemic; I know lots of people have commented that they've been struggling to focus on reading, and that's definitely affected what I read (much more fluff and lots of romance). I do wonder, though, if it's at least partly due to being back on antidepressants. I went through a long period a few years ago where I hardly read at all, and rediscovered reading once I came off ADs. And it's noticeable that the real drop-off was in the latter part of the year, after I'd gone back on them in July. I read 36 books up to the end of July, and only seven after than, and have only finished two books since the middle of September. (I'm currently reading Ursula Le Guin's No Time to Spare and the Silk and Steel anthology in very small chunks, and am nowhere near finished with either.)

The ADs have done me a lot of good, but I do miss reading.

Of the 43 books I read, only 6 were by men (and one other was co-authored by a man and a woman). Only 5 were by people of colour (I meant to do better, and have been deliberately buying books by POC, but a lot of that buying happened after the slowdown in reading so I haven't got to them yet). 11 (as far as I can tell) are by LGBTQ+ authors.

( Full list )

I've been finding it hard to read ever since the start of lockdown, and for the last couple of months it's been almost impossible to make my mind focus enough to take in the words on the page. Even much-anticipated new books by favourite authors felt like a slog, and I ended up DNFing two books in a row: one steampunky novel about lesbian space pirates, which should have been right up my street but which I just couldn't manage to get into (it was also self-published and felt like it could have done with tighter editing, which may have been part of the problem) and one chicklit novel about swimmers which I thought was going to be fluffy and feelgood but which turned out to be full of interpersonal conflict and domestic abuse). When girlyswot mentioned Olivia Dade's new romance novel, Spoiler Alert, on Twitter, I thought it sounded like fun and might just be the thing to get me out of what was starting to feel like a serious slump. And while it took me quite a long time to get through the first two-thirds of the book, this week, suddenly I found myself picking up speed again. It no longer felt as though it was an effort to push each word through the fog surrounding my brain. I didn't have to read each sentence two or three times before it made sense. I could just...read. I don't know what changed. Maybe it was not having to go into the office twice a week and being able to set aside some reading time in my lunch breaks, to keep up momentum (normally when I'm in the office I read on the bus, but I've been driving part way and then walking instead, and at lunchtimes I would rather go out for a walk rather than stay at my desk to read a book). Or maybe it's the lifting of a layer of anxiety I didn't even realise was there, as it gradually became clearer and clearer that however long counting the votes might take, Biden was going to win the US election, and Trump's key supporters were going to drop him and start looking for their 2024 candidate rather than doubling down behind his attempts to take the election by force.

Anyway, Spoiler Alert. Spoiler Alert is a contemporary m/f romance based around the fandom for a fictional TV fantasy show that has run to many seasons, leaving behind the unfinished series of books it's based on. (Any resemblance to any actual TV shows is, I'm sure, entirely coincidental.) Marcus is the star of the show, but he also works through his frustrations with the showrunners' interpretation of his character by writing fix-it fic under an assumed name. April is a fan and fellow fic writer who is done with hiding her fannish identity from her coworkers. When she posts a picture of herself cosplaying Marcus's character's love interest on Twitter and goes viral, Marcus sees the picture and asks her on a date, not realising that they have already been online friends for years.

This is a funny, charming, delightful book, and is particularly entertaining for anyone with experience of fandom and fanfic communities. (I also loved the brief mentions of some of the terrible films Marcus starred in earlier in his career.) I thought Marcus was probably a bit too nice and normal-seeming to actually be a TV star, and definitely more sensitive and emotionally literate than any 40-year-old cishet white man I've ever met, but I guess that's the delightful thing about romance (or maybe I'm just jaded and cynical), and April is a wonderful and very realistic character. The novel handles both the fatphobia April experiences and Marcus's dyslexia sensitively but without ever suggesting that these aren't real challenges, and while some of the inevitable miscommunications along the path to their happy ending were so obvious I occasionally wanted to scream at the characters, Dade does manage to make them seem realistically in-character. I liked this a lot (though be warned that this novel does have quite a lot of pretty explicit sex scenes, which aren't always that easy to skim if sex scenes aren't your thing as Dade mixes in conversations which are important for plot and character development).

Tea and Sympathetic Magic is a Regency-romance-with-magic-and-more-liberal-social-values novella by Tansy Rayner Roberts. It's set in the Teacup Isles, where the main pursuits of fashionable society are garden parties, house parties and magically-enhanced croquet, all pursued as part of the quest for every eligible young woman to secure a good marriage. Mnemosyne Seabourne, however, would prefer to be at home with a good book, and, whatever her mamma might want, has no interest in marrying her cousin the Duke of Storm. When the Duke disappears from his own house party one night, she and Mr Thornbury, the spellcracker whose job is to find and dismantle the charms deployed by the female guests to win the Duke's affections, find themselves leading a mission to rescue him from a forced elopement.

Tea and Sympathetic Magic is charming, funny, and just the kind of cosy fluff that you might well want to read given the state of the world right now. I particularly liked that (with the exception of the villain of the piece) everyone is nice and even the various rivals for the Duke's hand are happy to work together when needed rather than sniping at each other. The ebook is currently only available to Roberts' Patreon subscribers, but is due to be released for general sale later this year.

I thought I was going to gulp down Tamsyn Muir's Harrow the Ninth (the second in the trilogy that began with Gideon the Ninth) but in fact I found that it wasn't a book I wanted to rush, or even could have if I'd chosen. It's an intricate, elegantly-crafted puzzle box of a book, with multiple strands of narrative, and it certainly felt worth taking the time to appreciate it properly.

Harrow the Ninth has two main narrative strands; one following on from Gideon the Ninth, and the other revisiting the events of the first book, but from a different perspective, and, it gradually emerges, with certain significant changes. As the two narratives unfold in parallel, the underlying plot starts to emerge for the reader, although not necessarily for the characters who don't have the advantage of seeing both. It's a complex book, with some dark moments, but also some very funny ones (plus a whole sequence where, for Reasons, a character experiences a number of AUs of their own life), and Muir writes beautiful, compelling prose.

I know that Gideon the Ninth was extremely Marmitey, and I expect that Harrow the Ninth will be as well; like Gideon, it's full of references to high and low culture and internet memes (many of which completely passed me by, to be honest), and one of the narrative strands is in second person which I know really irritates some people, though I don't mind it in general and think it can be used in really clever ways (which I'd say it is here). I loved it, and can't wait for the third book to be published.

I've been meaning to read more of T Kingfisher's work for a while, and I couldn't resist buying her new novel, A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking, for the title alone. A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking is set in a world where magical talents are reasonably common and very specialised; wizards generally have a single thing they can control, whether that be lightning, water, resurrecting dead horses or (like Mona, the narrator of the novel) bringing baked goods to life. All Mona wants to do is to continue to work in her aunt's bakery, honing her skills and tending to the carnivorous sourdough starter she keeps in the cellar, but when she finds a dead body in the bakery one morning she finds herself caught up in a plot to overthrow the ruling Duchess and take over the city where she lives.

This was a fun read, which reminded me a bit of Pratchett's Tiffany Aching books in the way it mixes humour and seriousness with a young, magically gifted protagonist. I did struggle a bit with the fact that the city is threatened by an enemy called the Carex, Carex being a well-known brand of antibacterial soap in the UK, and I wasn't entirely sure that some of the baking detail was quite right (but maybe magic makes dough handle differently), but overall I liked it a lot.

The weekend before last, my entire Twitter feed appeared to be reading Alexis Hall's new novel, Boyfriend Material, and exclaiming over how funny and delightful and escapist it was, and given how much life right now demands delightful, funny, escapist fiction I downloaded a copy, even though I don't normally read contemporary romance with no fantasy elements*. And it is indeed delightful, funny, and escapist, even if the contemporary (pre-pandemic) London setting felt more unreal than any of the SF and fantasy I've been reading lately**.

The main character, Luc, is the son of two 80s rock stars, and in today's celebrity culture, that makes him fair game for paparazzi and gossip columnists. When an out-of-context photo threatens his job as a charity fundraiser, he needs to clean up his act by being seen out and about with a nice, respectable boyfriend. Enter Oliver, the only other gay man Luc's Straight Best Friend knows, who needs a date for his parents' anniversary party. The only trouble is, Luc and Oliver have nothing in common, and really don't like each other very much, so they agree to pretend to be going out together instead - only somehow, real feelings start to intrude on their fake relationship.

Oliver and Luc are likeably flawed main characters (and despite being two decades older than them, and female, I could see a lot of myself in them both), and there's a fantastic supporting cast of friends, co-workers and family (I particularly loved Luc's well-meaning but terminally dim upper-class colleague). Luc's narration is fabulously sarcastic and there are some brilliant comic set-pieces which had me laughing out loud in places. I spent more time reading this weekend than I have mostly been managing to do lately, because it was such a perfect comfort read.

*I think that at some point fairly soon I'm going to have to stop saying "I don't usually read romance", whatever the context, because it's becoming increasingly clear that at this point in (a) my life and (b) world history, romance is very much what I read.

**I realise that the last contemporary novel I read was False Value, back right at the start of lockdown, when it still felt like there was a normal that things might go back to. Four months in, it's just weird to read about people going to pubs and clubs and parties, and working in offices and organising events, and remembering everything that we used to take for granted.

Wild Dress: Clothing and the Natural World is a collection of short essays by Kate Fletcher (Professor of Sustainability, Design and Fashion at the University of the Arts, London) reflecting on the way the clothes we wear reflect and influence our relationship with nature. The essays are all very short (no more than four to five pages at most), and the book ends with an appendix of colour plates of the landscapes (all in the north-west of England) that inspired the book. I loved the way Fletcher evokes the natural world around her, and the reflections on clothing and how it can separate or integrate us into our environment, were fascinating and thought-provoking. It's a very short book, but a rewarding one.

I had seen a number of people recommending Reni Eddo-Lodge's Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race as a good introduction to issues of structural racism and why "I don't see colour" isn't the panacea many of us white woolly-liberal Guardian-reading types were brought up to believe it was; I bought a paperback copy about eighteen months ago, which sat in the TBR pile waiting for the "right time" to read a potentially "difficult" book. After last month's Black Lives Matter protests, I realised that there probably wasn't going to be a "right time" and I just needed to pick a time when I had a little bit of brain space to process it.

Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race begins with a chapter (the longest in the book) setting out the history of racism in Britain. Building on that, Eddo-Lodge then looks at structural racism, white privilege, racist fears of black domination, and the intersections of race with feminism and class, and uses this to explain why, in the words of the title and a 2014 blog post that provided the original seed for the book, she no longer wants to spend her time patiently explaining racism to white people who cannot or will not see the way it's baked in to all the structures of society. It's not a scholarly book, although Eddo-Lodge's argument is always grounded in facts, statistics and official reports; instead, it's a personal account of how racism has shaped the world that she exists in as a young black British woman, and I found that its impact was as much in allowing me to see inside her experience and showing how the effects of structural racism lie not in single incidents but in a wider pattern of things, each of which, on its own, could be explained away as the result of other factors (and I know that, as someone who finds it really difficult not to believe the best of everyone, I have been guilty of doing that explaining away in the past) as it was in providing new information about racism in Britain. As a feminist, I thought the chapter on feminism and why non-intersectional "white feminism" actively works against people of colour was particularly interesting (and also applicable to other intersections of oppression which are ignored by feminisms which only focus on women's oppression as women); generally, I'd recommend this book to any white person who wants to become a better anti-racist, or indeed any white person who thinks they don't need to.

I tried reading Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog about thirteen years ago and bounced off it very hard (mostly due to Americanisms and geographical inaccuracies in Willis's depiction of Oxford), but I always had a sneaking suspicion that I'd done it a disservice and, having picked up a secondhand copy last year, thought I'd give it another try.

In fact, I barely noticed the geographical inaccuracies that had bothered me so much this time round. Maybe years of watching Lewis and Endeavour have inured me to the kind of liberties fiction takes to the geography of Oxford. To Say Nothing of the Dog is a comic time-travel romp which also pays homage not only to Three Men In A Boat (as is fairly obvious from the title), but to Golden Age detective fiction in general and Lord Peter Wimsey adn Harriet Vane in particular. It was entertaining and charming, and I particularly loved how well it evoked the lower Thames valley in glorious June weather.

I did think that it felt quite old-fashioned (it was published in 1998, which doesn't really feel like it's that long ago though I suppose it is really); mostly in the lack of diversity of the characters, although Willis's 2057 Oxford also felt oddly dated, with all the senior posts held by men and characters addressing each other formally rather than using first names (and I couldn't understand why no-one seemed to have a doctorate). Also, for a historian, the narrator appears to know startlingly little about history (to be honest, he knows startling little for a member of the general public). But it was a fun, light read when I really didn't want anything too demanding or difficult, and I'm glad I finally read it.

Jeremy Hardy Speaks Volumes is a collection of excerpts from Hardy's comedy - mainly from the radio version of his stand-up, Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation, but also some pieces from newspaper columns, early stand-up sets and his contributions to The News Quiz and I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue - interspersed with reminiscences from fellow comedians and friends. I find reading funny things difficult, as being able to see all the text on the page means my brain has already seen the punchline before I actually "read" it, so it's not laugh-out-loud funny in the same way as listening to Hardy was, but it's a lovely reminder of a much-missed favourite comedian, both his humour and his passionate political beliefs. (In other circumstances, I think it might have been a book I would have dipped in and out of rather than reading from cover to cover, but in fact a book made up of snippets and fragments was the perfect thing for my unfocused lockdown brain.)