Literary Wives Club: The Soul of Kindness by Elizabeth Taylor (1964)
(With apologies for today’s multiple posts!)
This was my fifth time reading Elizabeth Taylor. It’s a later novel of hers: the ninth of 12. As per usual, there’s an ensemble cast, but this time I had some trouble keeping the characters straight and finding enough sympathy for all of them. There are a dozen main players if you count housekeepers and neighbours. The opening scene is Flora’s wedding to Richard. She’s the title character: beautiful and well-meaning yet sometimes thoughtless. As she grows into the roles of wife and mother, Flora believes everyone should follow her into marriage.
Although as good as gold, she had inconvenient plans for other people’s pleasure, and ideas differing from her own she was unable to imagine.
Her interfering can be comical – she doesn’t realize Patrick is homosexual, so her attempt to match-make between him and her friend Meg is futile.
If she could get Meg settled, Flora had decided, she herself would be quite happy, but her friend thought she went about it in strange ways and wondered what, if anything, Flora knew about people.
When she convinces her father-in-law, Percy, to marry his mistress, Barbara, it’s the wrong thing for them. (“I think we are very well as we are, Percy,” Ba had said.) By ignoring Meg’s little brother Kit’s crush on her and encouraging his hopeless dream of acting, Flora nearly precipitates a tragedy – and Kit’s lover decides to let her know about her misstep.
I got hints of Emma so was pleased to see that comparison made in Philip Hensher’s introduction, in which he considers The Soul of Kindness in the context of the English “novel of community.” Flora herself somewhat fades into the background as we spend time rotating through the other characters in pairs. I found Flora silly and stubborn but not deserving of others’ ire. I felt most for Richard and for her mother, Mrs Secretan, both of whom she unfairly underestimates and sidelines.
This wasn’t one of my favourite Taylors – those are Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, which I’ve read twice, and In a Summer Season – but she always writes with grace and psychological acuity. Here I loved a description of the fog – “It’s disorganising, like snow. It makes a different world” – and the fact that the book starts and ends with throwing crumbs to birds. Flora’s pet doves must be a symbol of something: the peace she tries to keep but unwittingly disturbs? In any case, the next time you find a book a slog, here’s her diplomatic strategy for talking about it:
she said that she was taking the books in tiny sips, à petites doses, as Henry James wrote when he was up to the same trick – as if it were the most precious wine. That meant that she was bogged down in it.
(Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury?)
The main question we ask about the books we read for Literary Wives is:
What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?
Marriage is not a solution to a problem. (Especially if that problem is loneliness.) Some people aren’t the marrying kind, for whatever reason. Being a spouse can be one aspect of a person’s identity, but it’s dangerous when it becomes defining – this is probably the single common moral I’d draw from all that we’ve read for the club.
See Becky’s, Kate’s and Kay’s reviews, too! (Naomi is taking a break.)
Coming up next, in March: Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell.
#MARM2025, Part II: Bluebeard’s Egg and Book of Lives (In Progress)
My hold on Margaret Atwood’s memoir, Book of Lives, arrived in late November. It’ll be my first read for Doorstoppers in December. I’d also been casually rereading her 1983 short story collection Bluebeard’s Egg and managed the first two stories; I’ll return to the rest next year. A recent Guardian interview stated that Atwood had written in “every genre … except autobiography” and quoted her as saying “I’m an old-fashioned novelist. Everything in my novels came from looking at the world around. I don’t think I have much of an inner psyche.” Is this her being coy or facetious? Because, particularly among the short stories, there are many incidents taken from her life. Indeed, in the 140 pages of Book of Lives that I’ve read so far, there are frequent mentions of how people or events made their way into her fiction and poetry. Perhaps most obviously in Cat’s Eye, a novel about childhood bullying by girlfriends.
Bluebeard’s Egg opens with two Alice Munro-esque stories, “Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother” and “Hurricane Hazel,” both of which track with facts revealed in the memoir. The former draws on her mother Margaret’s Nova Scotia upbringing as the daughter of a country doctor (to avoid confusion, Atwood was nicknamed “Peggy”). Out of a welter of random stories comes the universal paradox: that she is in some ways exactly like her mother, and in others couldn’t be more different. It closes: “I had become a visitant from outer space, a time-traveller come back from the future, bearing news of a great disaster.” The latter story features a young teenage girl in a half-hearted relationship with an older, cooler boyfriend, mostly because she thinks it’s what’s expected of her. Atwood addresses it explicitly:
Let’s call this boyfriend “Buddy,” which is how he appears in a story of mine called “Hurricane Hazel.” Buddy and I broke up on the night of this famous hurricane, which flooded the Don Valley and killed eighty-one people in Toronto. Buddy wanted to go out that night, but my father, snapping out of his inattention—this was, after all, a matter of the weather, something he always kept his eye on—said it was out of the question. Didn’t Buddy know what a hurricane was? Far too dangerous!
One can also trace The Penelopiad (see my first post for Margaret Atwood Reading Month 2025) back to Atwood’s high school experiences with the Greek classics.
Who knows when an “influence” may begin? My own 2005 book, The Penelopiad, had its origins fifty years before, when I’d been horrified by the brutal treatment dished out to Penelope’s twelve maids by Odysseus and Telemachus. After being made to clean up the blood from the suitors who’d raped them and were subsequently slaughtered by Odysseus, they were hanged in a line. “Their feet twitched, but not for very long.” A line I have always remembered.
As to Book of Lives in general, I’m finding it delightful but also dense with detail and historical context. Atwood grew up between the wilderness and the city because of her entomologist father’s seasonal fieldwork. She was called “Little Carl” due to how much she resembled her handy father, who built the cabins and houses they lived in as well as most of their furniture. With her beloved older brother, Harold, she was free to explore and later, as a camp counsellor, was known as “Peggy Nature” for her zoological expertise. She could easily have become a scientist but fell in love with crafts and the humanities, sewing her own clothes and writing an opera for Home Economics class. By the end of high school, she’d decided she was going to be a poet.
A cute pic of her from her Substack
I’m impressed by the clarity of Atwood’s memories; all I remember of my school days wouldn’t fill one chapter, let alone four. It could be argued that some of this is superfluous – a whole chapter on several summers as a counsellor at a Reform Jewish camp? But it’s her prerogative to choose the content and no doubt, always the novelist, she’s seeding important facts that will come to fruition later. As ever, her turns of phrase are amusing and her asides witty. There is a wonderful trove of photographs and artefacts for illustration. Although she effortlessly recreates her experience at any age, her perspective is salted with hindsight. I can already tell, making my way steadily through, 25 pages at a time, to return this by the deadline, that I’m going to need to read it again in the future to take it all in. Ideally, I’ll get my own copy so I can use the index to return to any scenes I want to revisit.
Bluebeard’s Egg – Little Free Library
Book of Lives – Public library
Wreck by Catherine Newman (and a Cocktail Recipe) for Thanksgiving
Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate! Though it’s just an ordinary Thursday here in the UK, I always strive to mark the occasion. Today, it’ll just be with a slice of pumpkin pie. But I’ve also been lucky this year to be invited to two Thanksgiving feasts, the first (vegetarian) last Saturday with a few North American neighbours from my book club and the next one (vegan) coming up tomorrow with university friends, one of whom is half-American. Meal #1 was splendid and kept us fed with leftovers for four days afterwards (I’m sure the second will be equally delicious and bounteous). We contributed mini squashes stuffed with leek and cauliflower macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes and onion gravy, a pumpkin pie, and nibbles and cocktails. I adapted this pumpkin pie martini for J (too acrid and too sweet for me) but the rest of us had a signature cocktail I invented. Recipe below.
Friendsgiving Berry Cobbler
(Serves 1; or multiply by the number needed!)
50 mL Bombay Bramble gin
20 mL fresh lemon juice
20 mL homemade simple syrup
5 mL Grand Marnier
5 mL cranberry sauce or lingonberry jam
Mix all ingredients with ice in a cocktail shaker, shake well, and strain through a fine sieve to serve. Garnish with fresh cranberries, frozen blackberries and a twist of orange peel. Top up with ginger ale to taste.
Last month I reviewed Wreck by Catherine Newman for Shelf Awareness. It was one of my Most Anticipated books of the second half of the year and has a sequence set on Thanksgiving, which is reason enough to reprint it here.
In Catherine Newman’s third novel, Wreck, a winsome sequel set two years on from Sandwich, a family encounters medical uncertainties and ethical quandaries.
Rocky is a fiftysomething food writer and mother of two young adults. After Rocky’s mother’s death, her 92-year-old father moved into the in-law apartment. Rocky and Nick’s son, Jamie, now works as a junior analyst for a New York City consulting firm. The engaging plot turns on two upsetting incidents. “In one single day, in two different directions, my life swerves from its path,” Rocky divulges. First, she notices a mysterious skin rash, which, along with abnormal blood work results, eventually points to an autoimmune liver condition [primary sclerosing cholangitis]; second, news comes that Miles Zapf, one of Jamie’s high school classmates, died in a collision between his car and a train. Was it suicide or an accident? A moral complication arises: Jamie’s firm advised the railroad company.
As one New England fall unfurls, leading to an emotionally climactic Thanksgiving Day, Rocky airs her fears over her prognosis, her father’s infirmity, and her children’s future. Empathy is a two-edged sword—she can’t stop imagining what Miles Zapf’s mother is going through. Newman (We All Want Impossible Things) writes autofiction that’s full of quirky one-liners and particularly resonates with anyone facing mental health and midlife challenges. There’s family drama aplenty, but also the everyday coziness of family rituals, especially those involving food. This warm hug of a novel ponders how to respond graciously when life gets messy and answers aren’t clear-cut.
(Reprinted with permission from Shelf Awareness.)
In short, it’s enjoyable and effortlessly readable, but Rocky is A Bit Much, and after you’ve read Sandwich this is really just more of the same. 
Plus, more Thanksgiving reading ideas in this post I wrote way back in 2015.
Guest Review of Greene Ferne Farm by Richard Jefferies (#NovNov25)
As busy as he is as a lecturer in animal ecology at the University of Reading (and a multi-instrumentalist in several folk/Americana bands), my husband, Dr Chris Foster, managed to find time to read and review (below) something for Novellas in November. This is a random, obscure Victorian novel (from 1880) that we picked up at a book sale in Kingsclere last month.
“The 19th-century author Richard Jefferies is better remembered as a nature writer than as a novelist, and in this slight early novella (albeit published only seven years before his death from tuberculosis at age 38) it is indeed his evocation of the landscapes, wildlife and weather of rural Wiltshire that stand out most.
“Jefferies conjures atmosphere skilfully, from an uneasy night lost on chalk downland in thick fog to the lonely, dust-filled room where an avaricious old farmer looks out at the sunset from his armchair. There’s a sense of abundant nature as a backdrop for rural life that can be taken for granted, a sense of connectivity across generations – “the cuckoo came and went; the swallows sailed for the golden sands of the south; the leaves, brown and orange and crimson, dropped and died” – but also a prescient fear expressed here by a landowning squire that modern farming methods such as ‘ploughing engines’ might “suck every atom out of the soil.” The abundance of corncrakes portrayed around Greene Ferne is just one reminder for contemporary readers of how much wildlife has been lost from farmland since Jefferies was writing.
“The plot is lacklustre in comparison to the prose: a Hardyesque blend of love triangles and scenes from rural life, with no sense that the occasionally dramatic events portrayed are helping to build any narrative momentum. The portrayals of rustic village folk, complete with thick country accents, feel clichéd and idealised, especially given the decidedly un-Hardyesque happy ending, but the quality of Jefferies’ writing for much of Greene Ferne Farm is at least an encouragement to check out his other, better-known work.” [126 pages]
#NovNov25 and #GermanLitMonth: Kästner, Kehlmann & Kracht
Our trip to Germany in September whetted my appetite to read more German-language fiction, and November also being German Literature Month (hosted this year by Caroline of Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat and Tony of Tony’s Reading List) was a perfect excuse. K names only this year, please. (Perhaps next year I’ll make it S and finally get to those Sebald and Seethaler novels I have on the shelf.) These three works – a children’s classic, a set of linked short stories about the writer’s craft, and a mother–son spending spree – have coy metafictional touches, plus there’s a connection I wasn’t expecting between the Kehlmann and Kracht. All: 
Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner (1929; 1931)
[Translated by Eileen Hall]
If only I’d realized this was set on a train to Berlin, I could have read it in the same situation! Instead, it was a random find while shelving in the children’s section of the library. Emil sets out on a slow train from Neustadt to stay with his aunt, grandmother and cousin in Berlin for a week’s holiday. His mother gives him £7 in an envelope he pins inside his coat for safekeeping. There are four adults in the carriage with him, but three get off early, leaving Emil alone with a man in a bowler hat. Much as he strives to stay awake, Emil drops off. No sooner has the train pulled into Berlin than he realizes the envelope is gone along with his fellow traveller. “There were four million people in Berlin at that moment, and not one of them cared what was happening to Emil Tischbein.” He’s sure he’ll have to chase the man in the bowler hat all by himself, but instead he enlists the help of a whole gang of boys, including Gustav who carries a motor-horn and poses as a bellhop, Professor with the glasses, and Little Tuesday who mans the phone lines. Together they get justice for Emil, deliver a wanted criminal to the police, and earn a hefty reward. This was a cute story and it was refreshing for children’s word to be taken seriously. There’s also the in-joke of the journalist who interviews Emil being Kästner. I’m sure as a kid I would have found this a thrilling adventure, but the cynical me of today deemed it unrealistic. (Public library) [153 pages]
Fame by Daniel Kehlmann (2009; 2010)
[Translated by Carol Brown Janeway]
I’ve been equally enchanted by Kehlmann’s historical fiction (Measuring the World) and contemporary metafiction (F is one of my all-time favourites) in the past. These nine linked stories feature writers and their characters, actors and their look-alikes, and are about how life translates into – or is sometimes transformed by – art. Ralf Tanner starts to feel like he doesn’t exist when his calls gets diverted to someone else’s phone and an impersonator is more convincing at playing him than he is himself. Leo Richter’s new girlfriend is curiously similar to his most famous character, Lara Gaspard, a doctor working for a medical charity. Crime writer Maria Rubinstein takes Leo’s place on a cultural exchange to Central Asia and gets stuck in a Kafka-esque situation without a visa. Leo’s fan and Ralf’s call recipient are subjects of their own stories. References to Miguel Auristos Blanco’s spiritual self-help books recur and he, too, eventually becomes a character. I liked the pointed little jokes about what writers have to put up with (“Do you know how often I’ve been asked today where I get my ideas from? Fourteen. And nine times whether I work in the morning or the afternoon,” Leo complains). Mostly, these stories struck me as clever yet had me wondering what the point was. My favourite was “Rosalie Goes Off to Die,” in which Leo’s character travels to Zurich for an assisted death but he the writer decides to interfere before she can get her last wish. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com) [206 pages – but fairly large print]
Eurotrash by Christian Kracht (2021; 2024)
[Translated by Daniel Bowles]
This was longlisted for the International Booker Prize and is the current Waterstones book of the month. The Swiss author’s seventh novel appears to be autofiction: the protagonist is named Christian Kracht and there are references to his previous works. Whether he actually went on a profligate road trip with his 80-year-old mother, who could say. I tend to think some details might be drawn from life – her physical and mental health struggles, her father’s Nazism, his father’s weird collections and sexual predilections – but brewed into a madcap maelstrom of a plot that sees the pair literally throwing away thousands of francs. Her fortune was gained through arms industry investment and she wants rid of it, so they hire private taxis and planes. If his mother has a whim to pick some edelweiss, off they go to find it. All the while she swigs vodka and swallows pills, and Christian changes her colostomy bags. I was wowed by individual lines (“This was the katabasis: the decline of the family expressed in the topography of her face”; “everything that does not rise into consciousness will return as fate”; “the glacial sun shone from above, unceasing and relentless, upon our little tableau vivant”) but was left chilly overall by the satire on the ultra-wealthy and those who seek to airbrush history. The fun connections: Like the Kehlmann, this involves arbitrary travel and happens to end in Africa. More than once, Kracht is confused for Kehlmann. (Little Free Library) [190 pages]
Spotted in my local Waterstones…
Four (Almost) One-Sitting Novellas by Blackburn, Murakami, Porter & School of Life (#NovNov25)
I never believe people who say they read 300-page novels in a sitting. How is that possible?! I’m a pretty slow reader, I like to bounce between books rather than read one exclusively, and I often have a hot drink to hand beside my book stack, so I’d need a bathroom break or two. I also have a young cat who doesn’t give me much peace. But 100 pages or thereabouts? I at least have a fighting chance of finishing a novella in one go. Although I haven’t yet achieved a one-sitting read this month, it’s always the goal: to carve out the time and be engrossed such that you just can’t put a book down. I’ll see if I can manage it before November is over.
A couple of longish car rides last weekend gave me the time to read most of three of these, and the next day I popped the other in my purse for a visit to my favourite local coffee shop. I polished them all off later in the week. I have a mini memoir in pets, a surreal Japanese story with illustrations, an innovative modern classic about bereavement, and a set of short essays about money and commodification.
My Animals and Other Family by Julia Blackburn; illus. Herman Makkink (2007)
In five short autobiographical essays, Blackburn traces her life with pets and other domestic animals. Guinea pigs taught her the facts of life when she was the pet monitor for her girls’ school – and taught her daughter the reality of death when they moved to the country and Galaxy sired a kingdom of outdoor guinea pigs. They also raised chickens, then adopted two orphaned fox cubs; this did not end well. There are intriguing hints of Blackburn’s childhood family dynamic, which she would later write about in the memoir The Three of Us: Her father was an alcoholic poet and her mother a painter. It was not a happy household and pets provided comfort as well as companionship. “I suppose tropical fish were my religion,” she remarks, remembering all the time she devoted to staring at the aquarium. Jason the spaniel was supposed to keep her safe on walks, but his presence didn’t deter a flasher (her parents’ and a policeman’s reactions to hearing the story are disturbingly blasé). My favourite piece was the first, “A Bushbaby from Harrods”: In the 1950s, the department store had a Zoo that sold exotic pets. Congo the bushbaby did his business all over her family’s flat but still was “the first great love of my life,” Blackburn insists. This was pleasant but won’t stay with me. (New purchase – remainder copy from Hay Cinema Bookshop, 2025) [86 pages]
Super-Frog Saves Tokyo by Haruki Murakami; illus. Seb Agresti and Suzanne Dean (2000, 2001; this edition 2025)
[Translated from Japanese by Jay Rubin]
This short story first appeared in English in GQ magazine in 2001 and was then included in Murakami’s collection after the quake, a response to the Kobe earthquake of 1995. “Katigiri found a giant frog waiting for him in his apartment,” it opens. The six-foot amphibian knows that an earthquake will hit Tokyo in three days’ time and wants the middle-aged banker to help him avert disaster by descending into the realm below the bank and doing battle with Worm. Legend has it that the giant worm’s anger causes natural disasters. Katigiri understandably finds it difficult to believe what’s happening, so Frog earns his trust by helping him recover a troublesome loan. Whether Frog is real or not doesn’t seem to matter; either way, imagination saves the city – and Katigiri when he has a medical crisis. I couldn’t help but think of Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs. Caliban (one of my NovNov reads last year). While this has been put together as an appealing standalone volume and was significantly more readable than any of Murakami’s recent novels that I’ve tried, I felt a bit cheated by the it-was-all-just-a-dream motif. (Public library) [86 pages] 
Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter (2015)
A reread – I reviewed this for Shiny New Books when it first came out and can’t better what I said then. “The novel is composed of three first-person voices: Dad, Boys (sometimes singular and sometimes plural) and Crow. The father and his two young sons are adrift in mourning; the boys’ mum died in an accident in their London flat. The three narratives resemble monologues in a play, with short lines often laid out on the page more like stanzas of a poem than prose paragraphs.” What impressed me most this time was the brilliant mash-up of allusions and genres. The title: Emily Dickinson. The central figure: Ted Hughes’s Crow. The setup: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” – while he’s grieving his lost love, a man is visited by a black bird that won’t leave until it’s delivered its message. (A raven cronked overhead as I was walking to get my cappuccino.) I was less dazzled by the actual writing, though, apart from a few very strong lines about the nature of loss, e.g. “Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project.” I have a feeling this would be better experienced in other media (such as audio, or the play version). I do still appreciate it as a picture of grief over time, however. Porter won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award as well as the Dylan Thomas Prize. (Secondhand – Gifted by a friend as part of a trip to Community Furniture Project, Newbury last year; I’d resold my original hardback copy – more fool me!) [114 pages]
My original rating (in 2015): 
My rating now: 
Why We Hate Cheap Things by The School of Life (2017)
I’m generally a fan of the high-brow self-help books The School of Life produces, but these six micro-essays feel like cast-offs from a larger project. The title essay explores the link between the cost of an item or experience and how much we value it – with reference to pineapples and paintings. The other essays decry the fact that money doesn’t get fairly distributed, such that craftspeople and arts graduates often struggle financially when their work and minds are exactly what we should be valuing as a society. Fair enough … but any suggestions for how to fix the situation?! I’m finding Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry, which is also on a vaguely economic theme, much more engaging and profound. There’s no author listed for this volume, but as The School of Life is Alain de Botton’s brainchild, I’m guessing he had a hand. Perhaps he’s been cancelled? This raises a couple of interesting questions, but overall you’re probably better off spending the time with something more in depth. (Little Free Library) [78 pages]
Three on a Theme of Sylvia Plath (The Slicks by Maggie Nelson for #NonfictionNovember & #NovNov25; The Bell Jar and Ariel)
A review copy of Maggie Nelson’s brand-new biographical essay on Sylvia Plath (and Taylor Swift) was the excuse I needed to finally finish a long-neglected paperback of The Bell Jar and also get a taste of Plath’s poetry through the posthumous collection Ariel, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary. These are the sorts of works it’s hard to believe ever didn’t exist; they feel so fully formed and part of the zeitgeist. It also boggles the mind how much Plath accomplished before her death by suicide at age 30. What I previously knew of her life mostly came from hearsay and was reinforced by Euphoria by Elin Cullhed. For the mixture of nonfiction, fiction and poetry represented below, I’m counting this towards Nonfiction November’s Book Pairings week.
The Slicks: On Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift by Maggie Nelson (2025)
Can young women embrace fame amidst the other cultural expectations of them? Nelson attempts to answer this question by comparing two figures who turn(ed) life into art. The link between them was strengthened by Swift titling her 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department. “Plath … serves as a metonym – as does Swift – for a woman who makes art about a broken heart,” Nelson writes. “When women make the personal public, the charge of whorishness always lurks nearby.” What women are allowed to say and do has always, it seems, attracted public commentary, and “anyone who puts their work into the world, at any level, must learn to navigate between self-protectiveness and risk, becoming harder and staying soft.”
Nelson acknowledges a major tonal difference between Plath and Swift, however. Plath longed for fame but didn’t get the chance to enjoy it; she’s the patron saint of sad-girl poetry and makes frequent reference to death, whereas Swift spotlights joy and female empowerment. It’s a shame this was out of date before it went to print; my advanced copy, at least, isn’t able to comment on Swift’s engagement and the baby rumour mill sure to follow. It would be illuminating to have an afterword in which Nelson discusses the effect of spouses’ competing fame and speculates on how motherhood might change Swift’s art.
Full confession: I’ve only ever knowingly heard one Taylor Swift song, “Anti-Hero,” on the radio in the States. (My assessment was: wordy, angsty, reasonably catchy.) Undoubtedly, I would have gotten more out of this essay were I equally familiar with the two subjects. Nonetheless, it’s fluid and well argued, and I was engaged throughout. If you’re a Swiftie as well as a literary type, you need to read this.
[66 pages]
With thanks to Vintage (Penguin) for the advanced e-copy for review.
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
Given my love of mental hospital accounts and women’s autofiction, it’s a wonder I’d not read this before my forties. It was first published under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas” because Plath thought it immature, “an autobiographical apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the past.” Esther Greenwood is the stand-in for Plath: a talented college student who, after working in New York City during the remarkable summer of 1953, plunges into mental ill health. Chapter 13 is amazing and awful at the same time as Esther attempts suicide thrice in one day, toying with a silk bathrobe cord and ocean waves before taking 50 pills and walling herself into a corner of the cellar. She bounces between various institutional settings, undergoing electroshock therapy – the first time it’s horrible, but later, under a kind female doctor, it’s more like it’s ‘supposed’ to be: a calming reset.
The 19-year-old is obsessed with the notion of purity. She has a couple of boyfriends but decides to look for someone else to take her virginity. Beforehand, the asylum doctor prescribes her a fitting for a diaphragm. A defiant claim to the right to contraception despite being unmarried is a way of resisting the bell jar – the rarefied prison – of motherhood. Still, Esther feels guilty about prioritizing her work over what seems like feminine duty: “Why was I so maternal and apart? Why couldn’t I dream of devoting myself to baby after fat puling baby? … I was my own woman.” Plath never reconciled parenthood with poetry. Whether that’s the fault of Ted Hughes, or the times they lived in, who can say. For her and for Esther, the hospital is a prison as well – but not so hermetic as the turmoil of her own mind. How ironic to read “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am” knowing that this was published just a few weeks before this literary genius ceased to be.
Apart from an unfortunate portrayal of a “negro” worker at the hospital, this was an enduringly relevant and absorbing read, a classic to sit alongside Emily Holmes Coleman’s The Shutter of Snow and Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water.
(Secondhand – it’s been in my collection so long I can’t remember where it’s from, but I’d guess a Bowie Library book sale or Wonder Book & Video / Public library – I was struggling with the small type so switched to a recent paperback and found it more readable)
Ariel by Sylvia Plath (1965)
Impossible not to read this looking for clues of her death to come:
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
(from “Lady Lazarus”)
Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.
(from “Years”)
The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment
(from “Edge”)
I feel incapable of saying anything fresh about this collection, which takes no prisoners. The images and vocabulary are razor-sharp. First and last lines or stanzas are particularly memorable. (“Morning Song” starts “Love set you going like a fat gold watch”; “Lady Lazarus” ends “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.”) Words and phrases repeat and gather power as they go. “The Applicant” mocks the obligations of a wife: “A living doll … / It can sew, it can cook. It can talk, talk, talk. … // … My boy, it’s your last resort. / Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.” I don’t know a lot about Plath’s family life, only that her father was a Polish immigrant and died after a long illness when she was eight, but there must have been some daddy issues there – after all, “Daddy” includes the barbs “Daddy, I have had to kill you” and “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two— / The vampire who said he was you / And drank my blood for a year, / Seven years, if you want to know.” It ends, “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” Several later poems in a row, including “Stings,” incorporate bee-related imagery, and Plath’s father was an international bee expert. I can see myself reading this again and again in future, and finding her other collections, too – all but one of them posthumous. (Secondhand – RSPCA charity shop, Newbury)
#MARM2025 and #NovNov25: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood (2005)
It’s my eighth time participating in the annual Margaret Atwood Reading Month (#MARM) hosted by indomitable Canadian blogger Marcie of Buried in Print. In previous years, I’ve read Surfacing and The Edible Woman, The Robber Bride and Moral Disorder, Wilderness Tips, The Door, Bodily Harm and Stone Mattress, and Life Before Man and Interlunar; and reread The Blind Assassin. Novembers are my excuse to catch up on the soon-to-be-86-year-old’s extensive back catalogue. While awaiting a library hold of her memoir, Book of Lives, I’ve also been rereading the 1983 short story collection Bluebeard’s Egg.
Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year is The Penelopiad, Atwood’s contribution to Canongate’s The Myths series, from which I’ve also read the books by Karen Armstrong, A.S. Byatt, Ali Smith and Jeanette Winterson. I remember Armstrong’s basic point being that a myth is not a falsehood, as in common parlance, but a story that is always true even if not literally factual. Think of it as ‘these things happen’ rather than this happened. Greek mythology is every bit as brutal as the Hebrew Bible, and I find it instructive to interpret biblical stories the same way: Focus on timelessness and universality rather than on historicity.
I do the scheduling for my book club, so I cheekily set The Penelopiad as our November book so that it would count towards two blog challenges. Although it’s a feminist retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey, we concluded that it’s not essential to have prior knowledge of the Greek myths. Much of the narrative is from Penelope’s perspective, including from the afterlife. Cliché has it that she waited patiently for 20 years for her husband Odysseus to return from war, chastely warding off all her would-be suitors. But she admits to readers that both she and Odysseus are inveterate liars.
When Odysseus returned, he murdered the suitors and then Penelope’s maids – some of whom had consensual relations with the men; others of whom were raped. The focus is not on the slaughtered suitors, or on Odysseus’s triumphant return and revenge, but on the dozen maids – viz. the chapter title “Odysseus and Telemachus Snuff the Maids.” The murdered maids form a first-person plural voice (a literal Greek chorus) and speak in poetry and song, also commenting on their own plight through an anthropology lecture and a videotaped trial. They appeal to The Furies for posthumous justice, knowing they won’t get it from men (see the Virago anthology Furies). This sarcastic passage spotlights women’s suffering:
Never mind. Point being that you don’t have to get too worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don’t have to think of us as real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol. We’re no more real than money.
The cover of The Canons edition hints at the maids’ final transformation into legend.
As well as The Odyssey, Atwood drew on external sources. She considers the theory that Penelope was the leader of a goddess cult. Women are certainly the most interesting characters here. Penelope’s jealousy of her cousin Helen (of Troy) and her rocky relationship with her teenage son Telemachus are additional threads. Eurycleia, Odysseus’s nurse, is a minor character, and there is mention of Penelope’s mother, a Naiad. Odysseus himself comes across not as the brave hero but as brash, selfish and somewhat absurd.
Like Atwood’s other work, then, The Penelopiad is subversive and playful. We wondered whether it set the trend for Greek myth retellings – given that those by Pat Barker, Natalie Haynes, Madeline Miller, Jennifer Saint and more emerged 5–15 years later. It wouldn’t be a surprise: she has always been wise and ahead of her time, a puckish prophetess. This fierce, funny novella isn’t among my favourites of the 30 Atwood titles I’ve now read, but it was an offbeat selection that made for a good book club discussion – and it wouldn’t be the worst introduction to her feminist viewpoint.
(Public library)
[198 pages]
Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (#NovNov25 Buddy Read)
Seascraper is set in what appears to be the early 1960s yet could easily be a century earlier because of the protagonist’s low-tech career. Thomas Flett lives with his mother in fictional Longferry in northwest England and carries on his grandfather’s tradition of fishing with a horse and cart. Each day he trawls the seabed for shrimp – sometimes twice a day when the tide allows – and sells his catch to local restaurants. At around 20 years old, Thomas still lives with his mother, who is disabled by obesity and chronic pain. He’s the sole breadwinner in the household and there’s an unusual dynamic between them in that his mother isn’t all that many years older, having fallen pregnant by a teacher while she was still in school.
Their life is just a mindless trudge of work with cosy patterns of behaviour in between … He wants to wake up every morning with a better purpose.
It’s a humdrum, hardscrabble existence, and Thomas longs for a bigger and more creative life, which he hopes he might achieve through his folk music hobby – or a chance encounter with an American filmmaker. Edgar Acheson is working on a big-screen adaptation of a novel; to save money, it will be filmed here in Merseyside rather than in coastal Maine where it’s set. One day he turns up at the house asking Thomas to be his guide to the sands. Thomas reluctantly agrees to take Edgar out one evening, even though it will mean missing out on an open mic night. They nearly get lost in the fog and the cart starts to sink into quicksand. What follows is mysterious, almost like a hallucination sequence. When Thomas makes it back home safely, he writes an autobiographical song, “Seascraper” (you can listen to a recording on Wood’s website).
After this one pivotal and surprising day, Thomas’s fortunes might just change. This atmospheric novella contrasts subsistence living with creative fulfillment. There is the bitterness of crushed dreams but also a glimmer of hope. Its The Old Man and the Sea-type setup emphasizes questions of solitude, obsession and masculinity. Thomas wishes he had a father in his life; Edgar, even in so short a time frame, acts as a sort of father figure for him. And Edgar is a father himself – he shows Thomas a photo of his daughter. We are invited to ponder what makes a good father and what the absence of one means at different stages in life. Mental and physical health are also crucial considerations for the characters.
That Wood packs all of this into a compact circadian narrative is impressive. My admiration never crossed into warmth, however. I’ve read four of Wood’s five novels and still love his debut, The Bellwether Revivals, most, followed by his second, The Ecliptic. I’ve also read The Young Accomplice, which I didn’t care for as much, so I’m only missing out on A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better now. Wood’s plot and character work is always at a high standard, but his books are so different from each other that I have no clear sense of him as a novelist. Still, I’m pleased that the Booker longlisting has introduced him to many new readers.
Also reviewed by:
Annabel (AnnaBookBel)
Anne (My Head Is Full of Books)
Brona (This Reading Life)
Cathy (746 Books)
Davida (The Chocolate Lady’s Book Review Blog)
Eric (Lonesome Reader)
Jane (Just Reading a Book)
Helen (She Reads Novels)
Kate (Books Are My Favourite and Best)
Kay (What? Me Read?)
Nancy (The Literate Quilter)
Rachel (Yarra Book Club)
Susan (A life in books)
Check out this written interview with Wood (and this video one with Eric of Lonesome Reader) as well as a Q&A on the Booker Prize website in which Wood talks about the unusual situation in which he wrote the book.
(Public library)
[163 pages]
R.I.P. Reads, Part II: Feito, King, Link, Paver & Taylor
Soon it’ll be all novellas, all the time around here. But first I have a few more October reads to review.
A belated Happy Halloween! As a kid in the U.S. suburbs, I loved Halloween. It was such fun planning costumes – pumpkin, cowgirl and picnic table are a few memorable ones that I remember thanks to photographs – and my hoard of candy would last me for months. But these days, I tend to be pretty grumpy about the holiday. It never used to be a thing in the UK, but it has been creeping in year on year. I don’t mind a creatively carved jack o’ lantern, tasteful decoration or clever homemade costume. What does get my goat is plastic tat, gratuitous gore and the dozens of sodden sweets and wrappers littering the streets after last night’s rain and wind.
Anyway, we enjoyed the stormy evening because we spent it at friends’ having delicious autumnal lasagne and parkin, playing instruments and board games and eavesdropping on the trick-or-treaters. I had to laugh when J said “Take a couple” and one little girl replied, “That’s okay, I don’t really like sweeties.” These friends were keeping some ancient traditions alive: carving a turnip, wearing one’s clothes inside out and walking between two fires to ward off fairies. They also put potatoes in the treats bowl, which definitely confused the kids. (One did take a spud!)
I really leaned into the Readers Imbibing Peril reading this year. I had a somewhat lacklustre first batch, but these five were great!
Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito (2025)
This was among my Most Anticipated titles of the year – for the bonkers blurb but also because of how much I’d enjoyed Feito’s debut, Mrs. March. Both novels go deep with mentally disturbed protagonists. The first channeled Patricia Highsmith with its stylish psychological suspense; here we have a full-on blend of slasher horror and sadistic humour, wrapped up in a Victorian pastiche. Winifred Notty (naughty girl indeed) is the new governess at Ensor House on the Yorkshire moors. She couldn’t care less about her charges, Andrew and Drusilla. No, she’s here to exact revenge on the master of the house, Mr. Pounds. But not before she’s dispatched many a random servant and baby. “Bodies pile up in the attic.” Her brutal fantasies are so realistic that at times it’s difficult to separate them from what she actually carries out. Miss Notty is also a highly sexual being whose fixations could certainly be interpreted in Freudian ways. Feito spins a traumatic backstory for her antiheroine but doesn’t make it any excuse for her gleeful reign of terror. It’s delicious fun, especially for a Victorianist, but don’t attempt if you’re squeamish. (Read via NetGalley)
Misery by Stephen King (1987)
All these years I’d had two 1989–1990 films conflated: Misery and My Left Foot. I’ve not seen either but as an impressionable young’un I made a mental mash-up of the posters’ stills into a film featuring Daniel Day-Lewis as a paralyzed writer and Kathy Bates as a madwoman wielding an axe. (Turns out the left foot is relevant!)
Paul Sheldon wakes in a fog of pain, his legs shattered from a one-car accident on a snowy Colorado backroad. He’s famous for his historical potboilers about Misery Chastain but, like Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, has killed off his most beloved character. Except now he’s in the home of Annie Wilkes, his rescuer and biggest fan, and she demands he resurrect Misery. Annie is a former nurse who left the profession after numerous suspicious deaths on her watch. She keeps Paul dependent on her – and on Novril, a fictional opiate. In a case of ‘Scheherazade complex’, he’ll be her prisoner until he’s completed a sequel that’s to her satisfaction. Compared to Pet Sematary, the only other King novel I’ve read, this was slow to draw me in because of the repetitive scenes in a claustrophobic setting, and I wearied of the excerpts from Paul’s manuscript. But eventually I was riveted, desperate to know how Paul was going to get out of this predicament and what the final showdown could be. Extremes of pain and obsession make this an intense study of the psychology of a wretched pair. (Public library)
Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link (2008)
This is a reissue edition geared towards young adults. All but one of the 10 stories were originally published in literary magazines or anthologies. The stories are long, some approaching novella length, and took me quite a while to read. I got through the first three and will save the rest for next year. In “The Wrong Grave,” a teen decides to dig up his dead girlfriend’s casket to reclaim the poems he rashly buried with her last year – as did Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which Link makes a point of mentioning. A terrific blend of spookiness and comedy ensues.
“The Wizards of Perfil” and the title story are 50-some and 60-some pages, respectively, which allows a lot of space for intriguing weirdness and side plots. In the former, Onion’s cousin Halsa is purchased to be a servant to a wizard. The cousins both have the gift of foresight but can’t get the wizards to take them seriously when they beg that something to be done to prevent human disasters. It’s a brilliant allegory of the danger of waiting for an external force – God, the government, whatever – to solve everything versus getting on with it yourself. In the title story, a group of teens are obsessed with a mysterious Doctor Who-esque television show called The Library, which colours all their interactions. The main character Jeremy’s father is an eccentric sci-fi novelist named Gordon Strangle Mars who has written his son into his latest plot in a disturbing way. Jeremy recently inherited a gas station and phone box in Las Vegas and occasionally calls the phone box to air his grievances and solicit supernatural aid. My only other experience of Link was a standalone story I was once sent for review, “The Summer People,” which I didn’t get on with, so I was surprised to encounter such top-notch fantasy/horror tales. (Little Free Library)
Rainforest by Michelle Paver (2025)
I’d read all three of Paver’s previous horror novels for adults (Thin Air, Dark Matter and Wakenhyrst) and found them easy, atmospheric reading but not nearly as scary as billed. This is her best yet. Set in 1973 on an expedition to Mexico, it has as its unreliable narrator Dr. Simon Corbett, an English entomologist. Adding to the findings of the archaeological dig he’s accompanying, he’ll be hunting for mantids (praying mantises, stick insects and the like) by fogging sacred trees with pesticides. He also experiments with taking a hallucinogenic plant extract used by the Indigenous shamans, hoping to be reunited with his lost love, Penelope.
We know that Corbett’s employment is tenuous and that he’s seeing a therapist. Paver authentically reproduces the casual racism and sexism of the time and seeds little hints that this protagonist may not be telling the whole truth about his relationship with Penelope. The long sequence where he’s lost in the jungle is fantastic. Corbett seems fated to repeat ancient masochistic rites, as if in penance for what he’s done wrong. My husband is an entomologist, so I was interested to read about period collecting practices. The novelty of the setting is a bonus to this high-quality psychological thriller and ghost story. (Public library)
Bone Broth by Alex Taylor (2025)
Ash is a trans man who starts working at a hole-in-the-wall ramen restaurant underneath a London railway arch. All he wants is to “pay for hormones, pay rent, [and] make enough to take a cutie on a date.” Bug’s Bones is run by an irascible elderly proprietor but staffed by a young multicultural bunch: Sock, Blue, Honey and Creamy. They quickly show Ash the ropes and within a month he’s turning out perfect bowls. He’s creeped out by the restaurant’s trademark bone broth, though, with its reminders of creatures turning into food. At the end of a drunken staff party, they find Bug lying dead and have to figure out what to do about it.
This storyline is in purple, whereas the alternating sequences of flashbacks are in a fleshy pinkish-red. As the two finally meet and meld, we see Ash trying to imitate the masculinity he sees on display while he waits for the surface to match what’s inside. I didn’t love the drawing style – though the full-page tableaux are a lot better than the high-school-sketchbook small panes – so that was an issue for me throughout, but this was an interesting, ghoulish take on the transmasc experience. Taylor won a First Graphic Novel Award.
With thanks to SelfMadeHero for the free copy for review.
And one DNF: Saltwash by Andrew Michael Hurley. (I was warned!) It had no menace or momentum at all…
Any stand-out creepy reading for you this year?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 