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I was prompted to re-read this by the news of Gardam's death a couple of weeks ago (and discovering that she was a colleague's mother-in-law). A Long Way From Verona was her first novel, published in 1971 but set during the Second World War, and it is so good on just how it feels to be an awkward, unpopular teenager surrounded by people who are preoccupied with their own stuff. (It was published as a children's book, though I think that it's much more that it is a book about someone who happens to be a child. I understood the ending better now than I did as a teenager, where quite a lot of it went over my head rather.)

I didn't buy John Wiswell's debut novel, Someone You Can Build A Nest In, when it came out, despite seeing a lot of buzz about it from people whose opinions I generally respect, because I suspected it might edge a bit too close to horror for me, but I kept seeing more and more buzz and it got nominated for awards and Wiswell seems like the kind of author I want to support financially, so in the end I bought a copy.

Surprisingly enough, it turned out to be a bit too close to horror for me (I just can't do amorphous tentacled blobs and viscera), though I can see why people with a higher gore-tolerance than me loved it - despite the horror elements it's basically a very sweet, extremely queer romance, using monstrosity to stand in for a lot of things about difference and othering.

The third of Kingfisher's novels about the paladins of the now-dead Saint of Steel; as with the others, this is basically romance with fantasy adventure, though this one is m/m which makes a nice change from het. It's very enjoyable - funny, compassionate and reassuringly cosy despite some probably-slightly-more-than-mild peril.

I Overcame My Autism And All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder - Sarah Kurchak

This autism memoir has the best title ever, and I found it really interesting and relatable. I picked it up because

kaberett mentioned it, and would definitely recommend it to anyone wanting to read more about autistic experiences.

A Phoenix First Must Burn, ed. Patrice Caldwell

A collection of YA SFF (mainly fantasy) short stories by Black writers featuring Black girls as protagonists. Some really good stories here, particularly the ones by Rebecca Roanhorse (set in New Mexico in the 1880s, with a lesbian protagonist), Justina Ireland (a really funny fantasy story featuring a plus-size Black heroine who triumphs over the wizards trying to take over her country), Patrice Caldwell (a lovely vampire story) and Charlotte Nicole Davis (another f/f story, inspired by the water contamination incident in Flint, Michigan).

Menewood - Nicola Griffith

The sequel to Hild is an incredible immersive experience of a book. I decided to read it now because I was on holiday in Yorkshire where much of it is set, and Griffith's evocation of the landscape meshed with the real landscape around me to such an extent that I felt like I was walking around with the seventh century overlaid on the twenty-first. This chapter of Hild's story takes her from terrible losses to a new beginning; it's a book about grief and recovery, about living in harmony with the natural world, and about leadership and negotiation and an extraordinary woman (and the only slightly less extraordinary women around her) trying to live and prosper in a world full of violence and danger. It's brilliant, and I really hope there will be more of Hild's story soon.

I approached the final book in Suri's Burning Kingdoms trilogy with some trepidation, as I was slightly worried it would break my heart. I can report that it did not in fact break my heart. It was just as amazing and absorbing as the first two books (and I had the same experience as with both of them, that I started off reading at a steady pace and then ended up gulping down the last 250 pages in a day), with a plot that twisted and turned and never went where I would have expected it to go, ending up with a really satisfying resolution to the story.

The fourth of the Campion mysteries, and the last of the early ones that I didn't re-read last year as part of Kate Davies' yarn club. Generally entertaining enough, though the dénouement involved a plot twist that was quite breathtaking in its blatant racism (even where presented as the view of An Older Generation). Also, the title is a misnomer, as there are several deaths and inquests but no actual funerals, with or without police presence.

I enjoyed this retelling of one of my favourite ballads, and I thought the framing narratives around Tom's own narrative of his time in Elfland (before and after, from an elderly couple to whom he becomes something like a son, and the woman he marries after returning) added interesting context to the familiar story. Although I have been earwormed by the Steeleye Span version of the ballad for the whole time I was reading the book.

A gentle romance novel with a bit of mild peril (smugglers) set in a fantasy version of rural 1920s England with a hidden magical society and a nod to Sayers. I bought this ages ago because it looked like my kind of thing, and it languished in the depths of my kindle until a friend put me in touch with the author who was looking for some assistance with research on the University for a forthcoming book, and I thought I really should read it. It was good escapist comfort reading and I will definitely be reading more of Lake's books. (Ace romance reader note: there are a couple of heavy petting/sex scenes, but easily skippable without missing plot.)

The seventh in McGuire's October Daye series, urban fantasy about a half-fae PI turned general hero in San Francisco. I really like this series, and the way the characters are growing and developing, but my goodness, Toby's knack of finding half a dozen new ways to get herself almost killed every book is bad for the blood pressure.

I bought this last year in the gallery at Salt's Mill, surrounded by Hockney works. Part biography, part an ongoing conversation between Hockney and art critic Martin Gayford conducted via FaceTime and email while Hockney was painting the seasons in his Normandy farmhouse during the 2020 lockdown. Some interesting thoughts on ways of seeing the world, and lots of pretty pictures.

My mother lent me this French crime novel from 1966 (translated, obviously). I approached it with a certain amount of trepidation, but actually it had an interestingly twisty (if somewhat far-fetched) plot and a fascinating heroine, and was a compelling read which felt a bit like a cross between Mary Stewart (strange crime-related events happening to a young woman driving alone through France) and Patricia Highsmith (the more psychological thriller aspects).

A rare book by Goddard that isn't part of her Nine Worlds series, this is a sweet little space opera novella (novelette?) about an interstellar courier travelling home to fulfil a promise to a childhood friend. It's clever, funny and romantic and features bonus space squid, and I liked it a lot. (It reminded me quite strongly of Bujold in lighter moods, so if you enjoy that, you'll probably enjoy this.)

This is a gentle epistolary fantasy, full of bickering academics, with multiple queer characters, a main character with OCD and at least one other who feels very autism-coded. Oh, and it's mostly set under the sea. Obviously, I adored it.

The second of Charles's Will Darling adventures - 1920s pulp-style stories with glittering nightclubs and Bright Young Things and gangsters and guns, and an odd-couple queer romance between working-class bookseller Will Darling, veteran of Flanders, and Lord Arthur 'Kim' Secretan, an aristocratic scion with a chequered past. Like all of K.J. Charles's books that I've read, The Sugared Game combines a compelling adventure plot with a rather swoony romance (and a number of pretty explicit sex scenes, but helpfully she doesn't mix plot development with the sex scenes so they are entirely skippable if you prefer not to read explicit sex scenes. I found the ending of this one pretty downbeat, but it is the second in a trilogy, so the story isn't over yet.

I picked this up because a lot of people have been talking about Tanith Lee recently, and I've been meaning to read more of her work (I know I read some in my teens, and liked it, but I don't remember much about it). I am pretty sure I did actually read this once, sometime between 35 and 40 years ago, but I remembered almost nothing about it. I enjoyed it this time round - an interesting take on parallel-worlds fantasy, using the concept of the sacrificial king in a matrilineal society to look at the inherent problems of concentration of power in the hands of one gender. I should definitely read more of her work.

Near-future YA SF about a teenage girl living on a libertarian seastead and starting to discover the unpleasant realities underpinning her home. I enjoyed it, but the main character sometimes felt a bit too hypercompetent for a 16-year-old (but what do I know, after all, it's a long time since I was 16). I liked it a lot, but not as much as I have enjoyed some of Kritzer's other work, in particular her novella The Year Without Sunshine and earlier YA novel Catfishing on CatNet.

Last year, the knitting designer Kate Davies ran a club themed around Margery Allingham's novels - fortnightly patterns based on the Albert Campion novels, interspersed with essays about Allingham and the world she lived in. I doubt very much I'll actually knit any of the patterns, but I enjoyed the essays and reading the novels, having not read any Allingham for about 35 years.

The club started with Sweet Danger, the fifth Campion novel, so once it ended I thought I'd go back and (re)read the first four. Look to the Lady is the third in the series, a fairly lightweight romp about the attempted theft of a priceless national treasure by a shadowy gang of international criminals. As a teenager, I preferred the light-hearted whimsy of the earlier Campion books to the more serious later ones, but reading this now, I found it shallow to the point of being silly, and there's a whole subplot about "gypsies" which made somewhat uncomfortable reading. I had thought I was struggling a bit with it because my mental health isn't great, but actually, I think it may just be one of the weakest of the series.

Lois McMaster Bujold's The Flowers of Vashnoi was far more to my taste - the most recently published instalment in the Vorkosigan series, although third from last in terms of internal chronology, this novella is told from the perspective of Ekaterin Vorkosigan as she investigates strange happenings around a radioactivity decontamination project.

I bought this in the nice indie bookshop in Norwich, because I love flat places, and also because I remember Masud when she was one of our DPhil students. In fact, A Flat Place is less a landscape book and more an exploration of trauma and recovery using Masud's affinity for flat landscapes as a focus. I enjoyed it, and found it quite thought-provoking, but it also felt really awkward reading a deeply personal memoir written by someone you still feel the lingering remains of a duty of care towards. And I would still like to read a book which is just an appreciation of the wonder of a wide-open space.

I snuck in one last novelette on New Year's Eve to bring my total of books read in 2024 to a nice round 125. Of these, at most 9 were by cishet white men, with 105 by women or NB people. Most-read genres were fantasy (39) and non-fiction (37), with SF and mystery both on 17. My most-read author was Margery Allingham, thanks to Kate Davies's Summer of Mystery pattern club. (I am unlikely to knit many of the patterns, but was very glad to be prompted to return to Albert Campion, who I adored at the age of 11 or 12. At 50, I liked the older, wiser and sadder man more than the foolish young sleuth I'd preferred then.)

Full list of books: ( behind the cut )

2024 was a year where I stopped doing a lot of things I'd previously enjoyed, mostly due to fundamental brokenness (five years of burning out at work and starting the year with your father's funeral will do that, never mind covid halfway through). One of those was writing about the books I'd read, because trying to write good reviews was feeling too much like hard work, but I miss talking about the books I've read, so I'm going to try to get back in the habit of doing that, even if I only write a couple of sentences rather than full reviews.

Meanwhile, if you're interested in my thoughts on any of the 2024 books, ask in comments, or give me a random number between 1 and 125 and I'll talk about the corresponding book.

Books read in 2023:

( Read more... )

134 books.
16 by men, 108 by women, 11 by non-binary authors.
93 white, 11 PoC (some I didn't know).
30 by writers I know are some flavour of queer, 2 by trans authors
9 by writers with disabilities that I am aware of.

Most-read genre was fantasy (78). 21 SF, 2 historical, 17 romance, 2 contemporary fiction, 6 mystery, 19 non-fiction.

72 novels, 23 novellas, 8 novelettes, 2 short story collections, 9 graphic novels.

Most read author by some way Victoria Goddard (21 books). Other people I read more than one book by: Tansy Rayner Roberts (8); Alexis Hall (5); Olivia Atwater, T Kingfisher and Seanan McGuire (3 each); Blue Delliquanti, Stephanie Burgis, Eric Newby, Juliet E McKenna, Mur Lafferty and Freya Marske (2 each).