Hay-on-Wye Trip and Book Haul
We got back yesterday evening from our tenth trip to Hay-on-Wye, Wales. Our town-centre Airbnb flat was a little shabby and poky, but I can’t deny it was convenient to be able to drop in for lunch or a cup of tea in between bookshops and other activities. It was definitely looking greener in Wales than in our part of England, though a sign about dog-walking indicated that they’d had the heat waves here, too.
We didn’t begrudge the multiple spells of drizzle over the weekend, even when they coincided with walks to Cusop and The Warren. We’ve been coming to Hay since 2004 and can remember when it was struggle to find a decent evening meal. Good coffee? Forget it. Now one is spoilt for choice for eateries, though we kept costs down a bit by bringing packet curries to cover two nights’ dinners.
The Globe, an arts venue with café and restaurant, was like our home away from home. We went there on the first evening for a burgers and board games night in partnership with Herefordshire Board Gamers. We played a couple quick hands of card game Timeline (Music and Cinema, then British History) before our food came, then invited another couple to join us for Ticket to Ride Europe, where you have to construct several simultaneous train journeys. The HBG rep acted as a coach, reminding us of the rules – we have a copy but haven’t played it for many years – and advising players about their next move if they asked for help. What a great initiative! He was going to be at the Castle on Saturday afternoon, too.
We returned to The Globe on Friday for an hour of its open mic night, which featured a mix of folk and blues acts of various abilities; and again on Saturday morning. We didn’t realize when we booked our stay that we would be in the town for Hay Music Festival. We browsed the programme and plumped for a concert by a wind quintet (flute, oboe, bassoon, French horn and clarinet, with piano accompaniment on some numbers) of young musicians from Sinfonia Cymru. Their repertoire ranged from the familiar (Mozart and sea shanties) to the obscure (Samuel Barber’s “Summer Music” and a Ludwig Thuille piece). I also appreciated the spotlight on two female composers, Mel Bonis and Louise Farrenc. It was a phenomenal performance, and how civilized that the ticket price included coffee and cake from the café.
Hay Distillery and Shepherds ice cream parlour got two visits apiece. I was particularly delighted with my “Campfire Mule” concoction of Dr Beaky’s gin (which has a fascinating smoky flavour), maple syrup and ginger beer; and my scoop of gooseberry and elderflower sheep’s milk ice cream. Appropriately, my main reading for the weekend was Maggie Armstrong’s linked short story collection Old Romantics, which has cocktails on the cover.
Often, if we haven’t visited in a while, we’ll see that a few bookshops and other independent businesses have closed. So what a pleasant surprise to find that four new shops have opened since our last visit: Christie & Doyle – a classic crime extension to Murder & Mayhem, Hay Comics, Bookshop 451 for science fiction and fantasy, and A Shop Called Alice, which appears to be exclusively Alice in Wonderland- and Lewis Carroll-related books and memorabilia. (And a favourite coffee spot, The Bean Box, that we thought had closed has reopened; perhaps we just missed their seasonal hours last spring.) All in all, there are about 20 places in the town to shop for books, and we browsed most of them.
Here’s my haul of 16 books from 8 shops, which included a few by favourite authors, some that I’ve wanted to get hold of for ages, and others that I’d seen mentioned by fellow bloggers. I was especially pleased to locate The Victorian Chaise-Longue, one of my bibliotherapy prescriptions from way back in 2018, in Addymans’ outdoor Book Passage for £1. A couple of purchases that I’ll try to read right away are Gloria Naylor’s novel-in-stories, The Women of Brewster Place, at Booths (for Short Story September); and a remainder copy of Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling at Hay Cinema Bookshop (for R.I.P.). A slightly pricier haul for me this time, with a few remainder copies plus rarer secondhand finds, but the total of £46.42 still works out to an average of less than £3/book. Mr F’s different foci – nature writing, collectible Observer books, bird field guides and New Zealand-set novels in advance of his trip there in November–December – meant he supported several additional shops.
The Naylor was the only specific book that was on the paper wish list I brought with me (which also including Butler generally), while the Hustvedt and Wescott titles were on my Goodreads “priority to find” shelf. Weirdly, as I browsed I kept coming across copies of Michèle Roberts’ During Mother’s Absence and books by Janette Turner Hospital, an Australian author I hadn’t knowingly encountered before.
We often ask ourselves what Richard Booth, the Book Town founder and self-proclaimed “King of Hay,” would think about the town’s gentrification. He was not a fan of the Festival, for instance, and his stack-’em-high-sell-’em-cheap philosophy (“He once said he would much rather sell a million books for one pound than one book for a million pounds”) – which softened over the years as mentors helped him identify and price antiquarian material appropriately – seems rather at odds with the bougie boutiques and hipster cafes. But it’s by attracting a wider and younger clientele that Hay has retained its independent spirit. So I hope rather than turning in his grave he would be grateful to those who have kept the place alive.
I read nearly the first third of the recent biography of Booth, The Bookseller of Hay, while there. James Hanning makes a good case for Booth being that biographical cliché, the bundle of contradictions: privileged but happy to be one of the common men; passionate about his ventures but sometimes sloppy and misguided; with great capacity for compassion but also thoughtlessness. I didn’t know that in 1964 he was responsible for the death of a passenger due to reckless and probably drunk driving. Hanning believes this haunted him for the rest of his life. It’s intriguing to see the different people he interacted with, e.g. Margaret Drabble visited the town with a boyfriend and was dismissive: “Did he ever read books? The books themselves were just the product. I don’t think Richard was interested in literature.” Hanning depicts Booth as an eccentric who would today be considered on the spectrum. I’ll finish reading this to try to keep the Hay spirit alive a bit longer, and might follow it up with a reread of Sixpence House, Paul Collins’s memoir of living and working in Hay.
Though we were sad to leave – mostly because we know we’re facing a long, busy term and the inevitable slide into winter – we know we’ll be back, sooner rather than later.
An Inventory of My Bookmark Collection
In March, I worked on rearranging my home library. Last month, I followed up by taking stock of all my bookmarks. I’ve written about subsets of my bookmark collection before: ones I found in books, and ones from bookshops that have since closed. When I wrote the latter post, I estimated that I had 120–150 bookmarks. I always use a bookmark and take simple joy in finding the one that seems most appropriate to a book’s setting or subject matter when possible. Now I know, having categorized and counted them all, that my collection has grown to 228. This exercise was really for my own record and amusement, but perhaps you’ll recognize some familiar objects – or at least the hoarding impulse. Here’s a look at them all:
And here they are by category:
Bookseller-specific bookmarks. I’ve been to all of these establishments / used the online ones. Note the strong representation for Hay-on-Wye and Wigtown! (35)
Gifted. From left to right they are roughly from my mother, my aunt, my sister, my in-laws, and friends. Special mention must be made of certain ones: the puffin cross-stitch bookmark my mother made for me, and the daffodil she bought me from Sandham Memorial Chapel; the two blue-patterned ones my aunt wove on her loom (the bottom one is probably my single favourite bookmark in the whole collection and is so precious to me I once ran back to collect it from an out-of-service bus where I’d nodded off on the top deck); and a set of four paisley paper bookmarks given to me by one of my flatmates from my Master’s year at Leeds. A clever gift to bring over from India as they’re flat and extremely lightweight! (35)
Literary prizes – I generally get these from the library. It’s fun to look back at previous years’ shortlists. (25)
More bookshop and festival bookmarks, this time ones I’ve not frequented myself, which probably means I found the bookmark in a book or at a library. I’ve added five more, at bottom right, to my sad stack of bookmarks from defunct bookshops. I looked up what they’ve all become since.
- Bookends, Hay-on-Wye (two branches) is now the Oil & Oak gift shop (Castle Street) and The Pavement Palace hotel (The Pavement)
- Daunt Books, Fulham Road is now Sloane Street Auctions
- George’s is now the Bristol and Bath Rum Distillery
- Travel Books in Washington, DC is now a Mattress Warehouse
- Shoemakers, a Christian bookstore we used to have in Newbury, is now an antique shop, or vacant; I haven’t been down this alleyway in a while.
I was pleased to find that Alabaster Bookshop in New York City is still going, and the Dubray chain in Ireland is not only still around but has expanded. (22)
Other places I’ve been, events I’ve attended, or organizations I’m associated with (21)
Library-specific bookmarks, all from libraries I’ve visited and/or services I’ve used (16)
Found in secondhand or library books (15)
I collect leather bookmarks from places I’ve been. The four at bottom right I actually found abandoned in library books – although I have been to Buckfast and Westminster Abbeys! Cathy sent me the one from Seamus Heaney HomePlace and my mother bought me the one from Highclere Castle. (14)
Book-specific bookmarks that came with the book or that I picked up at Waterstones or at an event with the author. I’ve read all but the four at top right (at far right is one I found that originally came from The Persephone Book of Short Stories). (13)
Special ones: came with albums by The Bookshop Band and Anne-Marie Sanderson; I acquired for the in-your-face message (I found “Bonjour, Je veux mon livre” in the Little Free Library; it reads “Hello, I want my book” on the reverse side); are actually other objects – Target gift card, Paris botanical garden ticket, Hay Distillery business card – but I have always used as bookmarks; magnets and metal bookmarks. I’ve gotten rid of other wood/bamboo and metal bookmarks in the past as being so thick as to leave an imprint in the text block or slice page tops. (12)
Publisher-specific bookmarks; all are ones I’ve read from (10)
Do you have Opinions on bookmarks, too? Do you collect them? Where do you tend to get them from, and which are your favourites?
2025 Releases Read So Far, Including a Review of Aerth by Deborah Tomkins
I’ve gotten to 22 books with a 2025 publication date so far, most of them for paid reviews for Foreword Reviews or Shelf Awareness. I give review excerpts, links where available, and ratings below to pique your interest. (I’ll follow up on Friday with a list of my 25 Most Anticipated titles for the first half of the year!) First, though, it’s time to introduce you to the joint winner of the inaugural Weatherglass Novella Prize, as chosen by Ali Smith – I reviewed the other winner, Astraea by Kate Kruimink, as part of Novellas in November.
Aerth by Deborah Tomkins
At Weatherglass Books’ “The Future of the Novella” event in September (my write-up is here), I was intrigued to learn about this sci-fi novella in flash set on alternative Earths. The draft title was “First, Do No Harm,” referring to one of the five mantras for life on Aerth, a peaceful matriarchal planet that has been devastated by a pandemic. Magnus, the Everyman protagonist, is his parents’ only surviving offspring after their first nine children died of the virus. We meet Magnus in what seems an idyllic childhood of seasonal celebrations and his mother’s homemade cakes. But the weight of his parents’ expectations is too much, and after his relationship with Tilly disintegrates, he decides to fulfil a long-held ambition of becoming an astronaut and travelling to Urth. Here he starts off famous – a sought-after talking head in the media with the ear of the prime minister – but public opinion eventually turns against him.
Urth could be modelled on contemporary London: polluted, capitalist and celebrity-obsessed. But it would be oversimplifying to call Aerth a pre-industrial foil; although at first its lifestyle seems more wholesome, later revelations force us to question why it developed in this way. The planets are twins with potentially parallel environmental and societal trajectories and some exact counterparts; the hints about this “mirrorverse” are eerie. It all could have added up to an unsubtle allegory in which Aerth represents what we should aspire to and Urth symbolizes what we must resist, but Tomkins makes it more nuanced than that. Magnus’s homesickness when he fears he’s trapped on Urth is a heart-rending element, and the diverse styles and formats (such as lists, documents, and second-person sections) keep things interesting. The themes of parenting and loneliness are particularly potent.
Tomkins first wrote this for the Bath Prize in 2018 and was longlisted. She initially sent the book out to science fiction publishers but was told that it wasn’t ‘sci-fi enough’. I can see how it could fall into the gap between literary fiction and genre fiction: though it’s set on other planets and involves space travel, its speculative nature is understated; it feels more realist. A memorable interrogation of longing and belonging, this novella ponders the value of individuals and their choices in the midst of inexorable planetary trajectories.
(Wowee, Aerth made it onto Eric of Lonesome Reader’s Top Ten list for 2024!)
With thanks to Weatherglass Books for the free copy for review. Aerth will be released on 25 January.
My top recommendations so far for 2025:
(in alphabetical order) All: 
Save Me, Stranger by Erika Krouse (Flatiron Books, January 21): These 12 first-person narratives are voiced by people in crisis, for whom encounters with strangers tender the possibility of transformation. In the title story, the narrator is taken hostage in a convenience store hold-up. Krouse frequently focuses on young women presented with dilemmas. In “The Pole of Cold,” Vera meets Theo, the son of the American weather researchers who died in the same Siberian plane crash that killed her reindeer herder father. Travel is a recurring element, with stories set in Thailand and Japan as well as various U.S. states. The book exhibits tremendous range, imagining a myriad places, minds, and situations. Krouse often eschews tidy endings, leaving characters on the brink and allowing readers to draw inferences about what they will decide. Fans of Danielle Evans and Lauren Groff have a treat in store.
Immemorial by Lauren Markham (Transit Books, February 4): This outstanding book-length essay compares language, memorials, and rituals as strategies for coping with climate anxiety and grief. The dichotomies of the physical versus the abstract and the permanent versus the ephemeral are explored; the past, present, and future dance through the text. With language not changing at the pace of the climate, Markham turns to the “Bureau of Linguistical Reality” for help coining a new term for anticipatory ecological grief. The title is one candidate, “premation” another. Forthright, wistful, and determined, the book treats grief as a positive, as “fuel” or a “portal.” Hope is not theoretical in this setup, but solidified in action. In Markham’s case, becoming a parent embodied her trust in the future. Immemorial is an elegant meditation on memory and impermanence in an age of climate crisis.
Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future that Never Was) by Colette Shade (out today from Dey Street Books!): Shade’s debut collection contains 10 perceptive essays that contrast the promise and political pitfalls of “the Y2K Era” (1997–2008). The author was an adolescent at the turn of the millennium and recalls the thrill of early Internet use and celebrity culture. Consumerism was a fundamental doctrine but the financial crash prompted a loss of faith in progress. It’s a feast of millennial nostalgia but also a hard-hitting work of cultural criticism.
Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random House, February 25; Transworld, 27 February): Sittenfeld’s second collection features characters negotiating principles and privilege in midlife. The 12 stories spotlight everyday marital and parenting challenges. Dual timelines offer opportunities for hindsight on the events of decades ago. College and boarding school experiences, in particular, remain pivotal. The arbitrary nature of wealth and celebrity is a central theme. Warm, witty, and insightful.
Other 2025 releases:
(in publication date order)
How Isn’t It Going? Conversations after October 7 by Delphine Horvilleur [trans. from the French by Lisa Appignanesi] (out today from Europa Editions!): There is by turns a stream of consciousness or folktale quality to the narrative as Horvilleur enacts 11 dialogues – some real and others imagined – with her late grandparents, her children, or even abstractions. She draws on history, scripture and her own life, wrestling with thoughts that come during insomniac early mornings. It’s a lament for the Jewish condition, and a warning of the continuing and insidious nature of antisemitism. But it’s not all mourning; there is sometimes a wry sense of humour that feels very Jewish. 
Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels by Caroline Eden (Out in UK since May 2024; U.S. release: Bloomsbury, January 14): Eden cooks and writes in the basement kitchen of her Edinburgh apartment. When wanderlust strikes, she revisits favorite places via their cuisine. Her sumptuous fourth book journeys across Central Asia and Eastern Europe, harvesting memories and recipes. (Plus my Shelf Awareness interview)
North of Ordinary by John Rolfe Gardiner (Bellevue Literary Press, January 14): I read 5 of 10 stories about young men facing life transitions and enjoyed the title one set at a thinly veiled Liberty University but found the rest dated in outlook; all have too-sudden endings.
If Nothing by Matthew Nienow (Alice James Books, January 14): Straightforward poems about giving up addiction and seeking mental health help in order to be a good father. 
The Cannibal Owl by Aaron Gwyn (Belle Point Press, January 28): An orphaned boy is taken in by the Comanche in 1820s Texas in a brutal novella for fans of Cormac McCarthy.
Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love by Lida Maxwell (Stanford University Press, January 28): Maxwell’s enthusiastic academic study reappraises scientist Rachel Carson’s motivations in light of ecological crisis and queer studies.
The Queen of Fives by Alex Hay (Graydon House, January 21; Headline, 30 January): Quinn Le Blanc, the latest in a dynasty of London con artists, resolves to pose as a debutante and marry a duke for his fortune – all in just five days in 1898. Like The Housekeepers, it’s a playful romp featuring strong female characters.
Bookstore Romance: Love Speaks Volumes by Judith Rosen (Brandeis University Press, February 1): A bibliophile’s time capsule and an enduring record of love and literary obsessions, this is a swoon-worthy coffee table book about couples who formalized their relationships in bookstores.
Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks (Viking, February 4): This elegant bereavement memoir chronicles the sudden death of Brooks’s husband (journalist Tony Horwitz) in 2019 and her grief retreat to Flinders Island, Australia.
Reading the Waves by Lidia Yuknavitch (Riverhead, February 4): Yuknavitch’s bold memoir-in-essays focuses on pivotal scenes and repeated themes from her life as she reckons with trauma and commemorates key relationships. (A little too much repeated content from The Chronology of Water for me.)
The Book of Flaco: The World’s Most Famous Bird by David Gessner (Blair, February 11): Gessner’s engaging nature book tells the story of the escaped Central Park Zoo Eurasian eagle-owl. It’s a touching tribute and a subtle challenge to reconsider human effects on wildlife.
We Would Never by Tova Mirvis (Avid Reader Press, February 11): Mirvis’s fourth novel, inspired by real-life headlines, tells the taut story of an acrimonious divorce case gone horribly wrong. It explores the before and after of a murder, as the victim’s soon-to-be-ex-wife comes under suspicion and her family huddles around to protect her.
The Café with No Name by Robert Seethaler [trans. from the German by Katy Derbyshire] (Europa Editions, 25 February): Set in 1960s and 1970s Vienna, where World War II still reverberates, this tender novel about a restaurateur’s interactions with acquaintances and customers meditates on the passage of time and bonds that last.
Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create by Elissa Altman (David R. Godine, March 4): Full of stories drawn from Altman’s life and other authors’ experience, this is an inspirational guide to defusing shame through self-disclosure and claiming the time and focus to write. 
When the World Explodes: Essays by Amy Lee Scott (Mad Creek Books, March 6): Eleven inquisitive pieces set personal crises alongside natural disasters and gun violence. Scott was adopted as a baby from Korea; motherhood and adoption are potent themes across the book.
Beasts by Ingvild Bjerkeland [trans. from the Norwegian by Rosie Hedger] (Levine Querido, April 1): In this chilling young adult novella, a teenager tries to keep his little sister safe and reunite with their father in a hazardous postapocalyptic world.
Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum by Daniel Tammet (Out in UK since July 2024; U.S. release: The Experiment, April 1): A biographical mosaic of neurodivergence built of stories of individuals whose struggles and achievements defy the clichés surrounding autism. (Notable inclusions: actor Dan Aykroyd, novelist Naoise Dolan.)
Will you look out for one or more of these?
Any other 2025 reads you can recommend?
A Bookshop of One’s Own by Jane Cholmeley (Blog Tour)
Silver Moon, one of the Charing Cross Road bookshops, was a London institution from 1984 until its closure in 2001. “Feminism and business are strange bedfellows,” Jane Cholmeley soon realised, and this book is her record of the challenges of combining the two. On the spectrum of personal to political, this is much more manifesto than memoir. She dispenses with her own story (vicar’s tomboy daughter, boarding school, observing racism on a year abroad in Virginia, secretarial and publishing jobs, meeting her partner) via a 10-page “Who Am I?” opening chapter. However, snippets of autobiography do enter into the book later on; in one of my favourite short chapters, “Coming Out,” Cholmeley recalls finally telling her mother that she was a lesbian after she and Sue had been together nearly a decade.
The mid-1980s context plays a major role: Thatcherite policies (Section 28 outlawing the “promotion of homosexuality”), negotiations with the Greater London Council, and trying to share the landscape with other feminist bookshops like Sisterwrite and Virago. Although there were some low-key rivalries and mean-spirited vandalism, a spirit of camaraderie generally prevailed. Cholmeley estimates that about 30% of the shop’s customers were men, but the focus here was always on women. The events programme featured talks by an amazing who’s-who of women authors, Cholmeley was part of the initial roundtable discussions in 1992 that launched the Orange Prize for Fiction (now the Women’s Prize), and the café was designated a members’ club so that it could legally be a women-only space.
I’ve always loved reading about what goes on behind the scenes in bookshops (The Diary of a Bookseller, Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop, The Sentence, The Education of Harriet Hatfield, The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap, and so on), and Cholmeley ably conveys the buzzing girl-power atmosphere of hers. There is a fun sense of humour, too: “Dyke and Doughnut” was a potential shop name, and a letter to one potential business partner read, “you already eat lentils, and ride a bicycle, so your standard of living hasn’t got much further to fall, we happen to like you an awful lot, and think we could all work together in relative harmony”.
However, the book does not have a narrative per se; the “A Day in the Life of… (1996)” chapter comes closest to what those hoping for a bookseller memoir might be expecting, in that it actually recreates scenes and dialogue. The rest is a thematic chronicle, complete with lists, sales figures, profitability charts, and excerpted documents, and I often got lost in the detail. The fact that this gives the comprehensive history of one establishment makes it a nostalgic yearbook that will appeal most to readers who have a head for business, were dedicated Silver Moon customers, and/or hold a particular personal or academic interest in the politics of the time and the development of the feminist and LGBT movements.
With thanks to Random Things Tours and Mudlark for the free copy for review.
Buy A Bookshop of One’s Own from Bookshop.org [affiliate link]
I was happy to be part of the blog tour for the release of this book. See below for details of where other reviews have appeared or will be appearing soon.
My Best Backlist Reads of the Year
Like many bloggers, I’m irresistibly drawn to the new books released each year. However, I consistently find that many of my more memorable reads were published earlier – most of these happen to have been published between one and a few years ago, with the ‘oldest’ being from 2004. These dozen selections – alphabetical within genre but in no particular rank order – together with my Best of 2023 post (coming up tomorrow), make up about the top 10% of my year’s reading.
Fiction
Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt: The heart-wrenching story of a woman who adopts her granddaughter because of her daughter’s drug addiction. The prose is stunning as Boyt traces the history of this complicated, makeshift family. The title has a wry double meaning, but also connotations of anticipatory grief. There can be love even where there is estrangement, or eternal separation. That is one of the enduring messages of this gem of a short novel.
Homesick by Jennifer Croft: Each vignette – some just a paragraph long – is perfectly chosen to reveal a family dynamic and a moment in American history. What Croft does so brilliantly is to chart the accretion of ordinary and landmark events that form a life. In the end it didn’t matter whether this was presented as memoir or autofiction, so true was it to the experience of 1990s girlhood, as well as to sisterhood and coming of age.
Search by Michelle Huneven: When middle-aged restaurant critic Dana Potowski is invited to be on the search committee to appoint the next minister for her California Unitarian church, she reluctantly agrees but soon wonders whether the experience could be interesting fodder for a new book… The setup might seem niche but will resonate with anyone who’s had a brush with bureaucracy. Pure pleasure; lit fic full of gossip and good food.
Under the Rainbow by Celia Laskey: Researchers identified Big Burr, Kansas as the most homophobic town in America. An Acceptance Across America task force descends on the rural backwater for a two-year program promoting education and friendship. Each chapter in the linked short story collection is a first-person, present-tense confession from a local or a queer visitor, whose stories interlock. Laskey inhabits all 11 with equal skill and compassion.
The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry: This utterly immersive novel examines Thomas Hardy’s relationship with his first wife, Emma Gifford. It opens on the morning of her death. The couple had long been estranged, but Hardy was instantly struck with grief – and remorse, his guilt compounded by what he found in her journals. A universal tale of waning romance, loss, and regret. Beautifully understated; perfectly convincing for the period but also timeless.
Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout: As Covid hits, William whisks Lucy from her NYC apartment to a house at the Maine coast. She’s an Everywoman recounting the fear and confusion of the early pandemic. Isolation has benefits: the first ‘room of her own’ she’s ever had, and time to ponder her childhood trauma and what went wrong in her marriage. Astute on American politics and writers’ inspirations; an effortless voice and emotional intelligence.
Nonfiction
Bibliomaniac by Robin Ince: Ince was meant to undertake a stadium tour in Autumn 2021, but a Covid resurgence put paid to that. Not one for sitting around at home, he formulated Plan B: 100+ events, most of them in independent bookshops, over the course of two months, criss-crossing Britain and hitting many of my favourites. He’s not just a speaker at them but, invariably, a customer. I sensed a kindred spirit in so many lines. Witty and open-minded.
A Line in the World by Dorthe Nors: Nors lives in rural Jutland along the west coast of Denmark – little visited and largely unknown to foreigners. This can be both good and bad. Tourists feel they’re discovering somewhere new, but the residents are insular. Local legends and traditions, bird migration, reliance on the sea, wanderlust, maritime history, a visit to church frescoes, and more. Gorgeous writing and atmosphere, despite the bleakness.
Here and Now by Henri Nouwen: This collection of micro-essays under themed headings like “Living in the Present” and “Suffering” is a perfect introduction to the Dutch Catholic priest’s theology. I marked out many reassuring or thought-provoking passages. I was taken by his ideas that the life of compassion is one of “downward mobility” and that inner freedom comes when you don’t judge anyone. Peaceful and readable; a good bedside devotional.
Poetry
Ephemeron by Fiona Benson: Exquisite poems about the ephemeral, whether that be insect lives, boarding school days, primal emotions or moments from her children’s early years. The book is in four discrete corresponding sections but themes and language bleed from one into another and the whole is shot through with astonishing corporeality and eroticism. The form varies but the alliteration, slant rhymes and unexpected metaphors make each poem glisten.
Leave Me a Little Want by Beverly Burch: Burch’s fourth collection juxtaposes the cosmic and the mundane, marvelling at the behind-the-scenes magic that goes into one human being born but also making poetry of an impatient wait in a long post office queue. Beset by environmental anxiety and the scale of bad news during the pandemic, she pauses in appreciation of the small and gradual.
Making the Beds for the Dead by Gillian Clarke: Full of colour and nature imagery, profuse with alliteration and slant rhymes, relishing its specialist terminology, and taking on the serious subject matter of manmade disasters. Several sequences are devoted to gardening and geology; some pieces are ekphrastic, or dedicated to particular poets. The title sequence tackles the 2001foot and mouth disease outbreak. “The Fall” is on 9/11. Very affecting stuff.
My overall favourites were: in novels, Search and The Chosen (one contemporary and one historical) and in poetry, Ephemeron.
What were your best backlist reads this year?
Review Catch-Up: Monica, Bibliomaniac, Family Meal, Fudge & More
I’m catching up with reviews of the many October releases I read, including these four sent by publishers…
- a genre-bending, Technicolor graphic novel in the form of short comics
- a book-addict’s memoir of an ambitious Covid-times tour of Britain’s bookshops
- an understated novel about queer men of colour coping with death and mental illness
- and a quirky contemporary poetry collection I read in one sitting.
Followed by a bonus list of October books I reviewed for Shelf Awareness, similarly varied in genre: autofiction, flash fiction, horror-tinged historical fiction, graphic memoirs and more.
Monica by Daniel Clowes
Daniel Clowes is a respected American graphic novelist best known for Ghost World, which was adapted into a 2001 film starring Scarlett Johansson. I’m not sure what I was expecting of Monica. Perhaps something closer to a quiet life story like Alison by Lizzy Stewart? In any case, not this jumble of 1970s nostalgia and supernatural horror. The book is in nine loosely connected stories that make the head spin with their genre and tonal shifts; one thing that stays constant is Clowes’s drawing style, which combines vibrant, campy colour with exaggerated faces and blunt haircuts.
At first it seems there will be a straightforward linear narrative: the prologue, “Foxhole,” has two soldiers dreaming of what life will be like Vietnam, with the one looking forward to a simple life with his fiancée Penny. “Pretty Penny” shatters those illusions as we see that Penny has fully embraced sexual liberation while he’s been away. She rejects her mother and, in a countercultural decision, keeps the baby when she gets pregnant. Young Monica has a sequence of stepfather figures before Penny dumps her with her parents and goes AWOL.
To an extent, the rest of the book is about Monica’s search for her parents. We see her as a young college student communicating with her dead grandfather via a radio, as a successful entrepreneur selling candles, and as an older woman caretaking for a California Airbnb. But in between there are bizarre sci-fi/folk horror interludes – “The Glow Infernal” and “The Incident” – about unconnected characters, and Monica’s involvement with a cult inevitably turns strange. I couldn’t get past the distasteful story lines or grotesque style. Mostly, I wasn’t convinced that Clowes liked or cared about any of his own characters, so why should I? (This might be Tom Cox’s dream book, but not mine.) I suppose I might try a classic work by Clowes one day, but only if I can be assured that it has more plot and heart.
With thanks to Jonathan Cape (Penguin) for the free copy for review.
Bibliomaniac: An Obsessive’s Tour of the Bookshops of Britain by Robin Ince
Do you know anyone who can buy just one book? Do you know anyone who leaves a bookshop only with what they walked in to buy?
I understand that Robin Ince is a radio personality and comedian who, though holding no formal qualifications, often delivers presentations about science. He was meant to undertake a stadium tour with Professor Brian Cox in the autumn of 2021, but a Covid resurgence put paid to that. Not one for sitting around at home – he comes across as driven, antsy; positively allergic to boredom – he formulated Plan B: 100+ events, most of them in independent bookshops (the oddest venue was a Chinese restaurant; he was speaking to the Plymouth Humanists), over the course of two months, criss-crossing Britain and hitting many favourite places such as Hay-on-Wye, Hungerford (my local indie) and Wigtown. The topic of his previous book was curiosity, which gave him free rein to feature anything that interested him, so no two talks were the same and he incorporated lots of ad hoc book recommendations.
Ince is not just a speaker at the bookshops but, invariably, a customer – as well as at just about every charity shop in a town. Even when he knows he’ll be carrying his purchases home in his luggage on the train, he can’t resist a browse. And while his shopping basket would look wildly different to mine (his go-to sections are science and philosophy, the occult, 1960s pop and alternative culture; alongside a wide but utterly unpredictable range of classic and contemporary fiction and antiquarian finds), I sensed a kindred spirit in so many lines:
“A bookshop with a proximity to an interesting graveyard is a fine combination.”
“I like charity bookshops, because I can delude myself into believing that I am committing an altruistic act by purchasing too many books. I am not satisfying my consumer lust – I am digging a well in Uganda.”
“This is one of the wonders of books: the delight of being a species that can chronicle and preserve. I pick up a book from a shelf, and someone who is no more than ash or bone can still change me.”
He’s also refreshingly open-minded, determined not to become a white male dinosaur: he once spent a wonderful year reading only women authors, and gratefully accepts the gift of a Black queer feminist work – at which he knows a younger version of himself would have scoffed. I took lots of notes on shops I hadn’t heard of, but also appreciated the witty asides on British ways and on the rigours and coincidences of the tour. If you liked White Spines, this will be right up your street, though to me this was universal where the Royle was too niche. And it didn’t matter a jot that I was previously unfamiliar with Ince as a public figure.
Bibliomaniac came out in paperback on 5 October. My thanks to Atlantic Books for the free copy for review.
Family Meal by Bryan Washington
After the verve of his linked short stories (Lot, which won the Dylan Thomas Prize) and the offbeat tenderness of his debut novel, Memorial, I couldn’t wait for Bryan Washington’s next book. While it’s set in the multicultural Houston of his first book and similarly peopled by young queer men of colour, Family Meal shares the more melancholy edge of Memorial with its focus on bereavement and the habits and relationships that help the characters to cope.
Cam has moved back to Houston from Los Angeles after the untimely death of his boyfriend Kai, who had a budding career as a translator and spent part of each year in Japan. Cam works in a failing gay bar, crashes with his boss and has mostly stopped eating. Although he still loves cooking Asian food for others, he rarely tastes it himself; his overpowering appetite now is for pills and sex, leading him to arrange as many as four hook-ups per day. Kai still appears and communicates to him. “Easier to spend time dwelling on death than it is to live, says Kai.” Is it to escape this spectre, or the memory of what happened to Kai, that Cam descends into his addictions? Meanwhile, his estranged friend TJ, with whom Cam grew up at TJ’s Korean American family’s bakery after the death of Cam’s parents, has his own history of loss and unhealthy relationships. But a connection with the bakery’s new nonbinary employee, Noel, seems like it might be different.
If you’ve read Washington before, you’ll know what to expect: no speech marks, obscenity-strewn dialogue, sexually explicit scenes that seem to be there for the sake of it (because sex is part of life, rather than because they particularly advance the plot). An issue I had here, like with Memorial, is that having multiple first-person narrators doesn’t add anything; Kai and TJ sound so much like Cam, who narrates roughly the first half, that it’s hard to tell their affectless accounts apart. Such interchangeable voices two books running suggests to me that Washington hasn’t yet managed to fully imagine himself outside of his own personality.
The novel has much to convey about found family, food as nurture, and how we try to fill the emptiness in our lives with things that aren’t good for us. However, it often delivers these messages through what wise secondary characters say, which struck me as unsubtle.
“You don’t have to do this alone, says TJ.”
(Kai:) “My mother would say, Cooking is care. The act is the care.”
“Love can be a lot of things though, says Noel. Right? It’s pleasure but it’s also washing the dishes and sorting medication and folding the laundry. It’s picking out what to eat for dinner three nights in a row, even if you don’t want to. And it’s knowing when to speak up, and when to stay quiet, and when, I think, to move on. But also when to fight for it.”
“Sometimes the best we can do is live for each other, she [Kai’s sister] says. It’s enough. Even if it seems like it isn’t.”
There’s no doubting how heartfelt this story is. It brought tears to my eyes at the beginning and end, but in between did not captivate me as much as I hoped. While intermittently poignant on the subject of bereavement, it is so mired in the characters’ unhealthy coping mechanisms that it becomes painful to read.
In my mind Washington and Brandon Taylor are in the same basket, though that may be reductive or unimaginative of me (young, gay Black authors from the American South who have published three books and tend to return to the same themes and settings). Before this year I would have said Taylor had the edge, but The Late Americans was so disappointingly similar to his previous work that Washington has taken the lead. I just hope that with his next work he challenges himself instead of coasting along in the groove he’s created thus far.
I wish I could get a copy of this into the hands of Sufjan Stevens…
With thanks to Atlantic Books for the free copy for review.
Fudge by Andrew Weatherhead
I read this over a chilled-out coffee at the Globe bar in Hay-on-Wye (how perfect, then, to come across the lines “I know the secret of life / Is to read good books”). Weatherhead mostly charts the rhythms of everyday existence in pandemic-era New York City, especially through a haiku sequence (“The blind cat asleep / On my lap—and coffee / Just out of reach” – a situation familiar to any cat owner). His style is matter-of-fact and casually funny, juxtaposing random observations about hipster-ish experiences. From “Things the Photoshop Instructor Said and Did”: “Someone gasped when he increased the contrast / I feel like everyone here is named Taylor.”
The central piece, “Poem While on Hold with NBA League Pass Customer Support Nov. 17, 2018,” descends into the absurd, but his four hours lost on the phone are reclaimed through his musings on a sport he once played (“I had begun to find meaning in art and music / I was always too cerebral a player anyways … That feeling—of perfect grace and equanimity— / must be what we’re all searching for in this life”) and on life in general. This is poetry that doesn’t feel like poetry, if that makes sense. I have a hunch that it might appeal to readers of David Foster Wallace.
Published by Publishing Genius. With thanks to publicist Lori Hettler for the e-copy for review.
Reviewed for Shelf Awareness:
(Links to full text)
The Flowers of Provence by Jamie Beck (Gift books feature): A gorgeous book of photographs, perfect for gardeners, romantics, and armchair travelers. Her still lifes are as detailed and colorful as medieval paintings.
Edith Holler by Edward Carey (forthcoming): A dark fairy tale about a precocious girl confined to her family’s theatre in Norwich, England yet driven to reveal the truth behind her city’s child disappearances. Reminiscent of Dahl, Dickens, and Shakespeare at their goriest.
I Must Be Dreaming by Roz Chast: A laugh-out-loud-funny tour through her dream journal as well as a brief introduction to dream theory. Delightfully captures the randomness of dream topics and dialogues.
Tremor by Teju Cole: A kaleidoscopic work of autofiction that journeys between the US and Nigeria as it questions the ownership and meaning of Black art. The sophisticated structure is a highlight of this elegant study of art criticism, suffering, and subjectivity.
Our Strangers by Lydia Davis (Review and Q&A): In her ninth collection of mostly flash-length stories (a whopping 143 of them), an overarching theme is the mystery of human communication and connection. A real cornucopia of genres, structures, and voices. [Only available via Bookshop.org and independent bookstores.]
Lotería by Esteban Rodríguez: Lotería is a traditional Mexican game of chance. Each Spanish-language card is allotted a one-page poem in a creative, poignant recounting of his Mexican American family history.
Glass Half Empty by Rachael Smith: The British comics artist third graphic memoir is a refreshingly candid account of her recovery from alcoholism after her father’s death. In some panes, her adult self appears alongside her younger self, offering advice.
The Dead Peasant’s Handbook by Brian Turner: The final installment – after The Wild Delight of Wild Things and The Goodbye World Poem – in an intimate, autobiographical trilogy. Love is presented as the key to surviving bereavement and wartime trauma.
Happy Birthday & Bookshop Day
Happy Bookshop Day from Hay-on-Wye (and its newest bookshop, Gay on Wye)!
Today is my 40th birthday and I have been spending the weekend book shopping, reading, eating and drinking. What more could I ask for?
Before we left for Wales, I had my book club over for birthday cakes and bubbles. My husband made me a chocolate Guinness cake (vegan so everyone could share it) and pumpkin chai cupcakes; both recipes were from Hummingbird Bakery cookbooks.
I’ll report back on Monday with my book haul and trip highlights.
For now, here are some sweet lines from a children’s book I read this morning, about cats named Tom and Mot who discover that friendship and imagination are the greatest gifts, and that present has a double meaning: the now that must be appreciated.
“And then it was time for a hot drink and the cake. The cake tasted like the BEST birthday cake in the world. … ‘Today was the best present in the world,’ said Tom. ‘The perfect present!’”
A May Sarton Birthday Celebration
These days I consider May Sarton one of my favourite authors, but I’ve only been reading her for about nine years, since I picked up Journal of a Solitude on a whim. (Ten years prior, when I was a senior in college working in a used bookstore on evenings and weekends, a customer came up and asked me if we had anything by May Sarton. I had never heard of her so said no, only later discovering that we shelved her in with Classic literature. Huh. I can only apologize to that long-ago customer for my ignorance and negligence.)
A general-interest article I wrote on May Sarton’s life and work appears in the May/June 2023 issue of Bookmarks magazine, for which I am an associate editor. I submitted this feature back in August 2019, so it’s taken quite some time for it to see the light of day, but I’m pleased that the publication happened to coincide with the anniversary of her birth. In fact, today, May 3rd, would have been her 111th birthday. For the article, I covered a selection of Sarton’s fiction and nonfiction, and gave a brief discussion of her poetry (which the magazine doesn’t otherwise cover).
The two below, a journal and a novel, are works I’ve read more recently. Both were secondhand purchases, I think from Awesomebooks.com.
Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year (1993)
Sarton is one of those reasonably rare authors who published autobiography, fiction AND poetry. I know I’m not alone in thinking that the journals and memoirs are where she really shines. (She herself was proudest of her poetry, and resented the fact that publishers only seemed to be interested in novels because they were what sold.) I came to her through her journals, which she started writing in her sixties, and I love them for how frankly they come to terms with ageing and the ill health and loss it inevitably involves. They are also such good, gentle companions in that they celebrate seasonality and small joys: her beautiful New England homes, her gardening hobby, her pets, and her writing routines and correspondence.
Encore was the only journal I had left unread; soon it will be time to start rereading my top few. When Sarton wrote this in 1991–2, she was recovering from a spell of illness and assumed it would be her final journal. (In fact, At Eighty-Two would appear two years later.) Although she still struggles with pain and low energy, the overall tone is of gratitude and rediscovery of wonder. Whereas a few of the later journals can get a bit miserable because she’s so anxious about her health and the state of the world, here there is more looking back at life’s highlights. Perhaps because Margot Peters was in the process of researching her biography (which would not appear until after her death), she was nudged into the past more often. I especially appreciated a late entry where she lists “peak experiences,” ranging from her teen years to age 80. What a positive way of thinking about one’s life!
For many months I kept this as a bedside book and read just an entry or two a night. When I started reading it more quickly and straight through, I did note some repetition, which Sarton worried would result from her dictating into a recording device. But I don’t think this detracts significantly. In this volume, events of note include a trip to London and commemorative publications plus a conference all to mark her 80th birthday. She’s just as pleased with tiny signs of her success, though, such as a fan letter saying The House by the Sea inspired the reader to put up a bird feeder. 
The Education of Harriet Hatfield (1988)
This is my eighth Sarton novel. In general, I’ve had less success with her fiction as it can be formulaic: characters exist to play stereotypical roles and/or serve as mouthpieces for the author’s opinions. That’s certainly true of Harriet Hatfield, who, like the protagonist of Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, is fairly similar to Sarton. After the death of her long-time partner, Vicky, who ran a small publishing house, sixty-year-old Harriet decides to open a women’s bookstore in a Boston suburb. She has no business acumen, just enthusiasm (and money, via the inheritance from Vicky). College girls, housewives, nuns and older feminists all become regulars, but Hatfield House also attracts unwanted attention in this dodgy neighbourhood, especially after a newspaper outs Harriet: graffiti, petty theft and worse. The police are little help, but Harriet’s brothers and a local gay couple promise to look out for her.
The central struggle for Harriet is whether she will remain a private lesbian – as one customer says to her, “you are old and respectable and no one would ever guess”; that is, she can pass as straight – or become part of a more audible, visible movement toward equal rights. It’s cringe-worthy how unsubtly Sarton has Harriet recognize (the “Education” the title speaks of) her privilege and accept her parity with other minorities through friendships with a Black mother, a battered wife who gets an abortion, and a man whose partner is dying of AIDS. Harriet’s brother, too, comes out to her as gay, and I was uneasy with the portrayal of him and the AIDS patient as promiscuous to the point of bringing any suffering on themselves.
Still, when I consider that Sarton was in her late seventies at the time she was writing this, and that public knowledge of AIDS would have been poor at best, I think this was admirably edgy. Harriet’s dilemma reflects Sarton’s own identity crisis, as expressed in Encore: “I do not wish to be labeled as a lesbian and do not wish to be labeled as a woman writer but consider myself a universal writer who is writing for human beings.” Nowadays, though, what Harriet deems discretion comes across as cowardice and priggishness.
While there are elements of Harriet Hatfield that have not aged well, if you focus on the Bythell-esque bookshop stuff (“I find that the people I love best are those who come in to browse, the silent shy ones, who are hungry for books rather than for conversation”) rather than the consciousness-raising or the mystery subplot, you might enjoy it as much as I did. Kudos for the first and last lines, anyway: “How rarely is it possible for anyone to begin a new life at sixty!” and “It’s the real world and I am fully alive in it.” 
Women’s Prize Longlist Reviews (Erdrich, Mendelson, Ozeki) & Predictions
Tomorrow the Women’s Prize shortlist will be revealed. I’ve become much more invested in this prize over the past few years and will be following the 2022 race especially closely – look out for a related announcement soon. In recent years the nominees have tended to cluster thematically, which can feel redundant. This longlist has a notably high ghost quotient. Two novels I review below feature unquiet spirits, an appearance by the author, and the magical powers of books. The third is a straightforward contemporary dysfunctional family story.
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
My second from Erdrich (I gave Love Medicine, her first novel, 5 stars in 2020). I will be revisiting this in June because it is our first pick for my tenure in the Literary Wives online book club. For that post I’ll focus on the relationship between Tookie and Pollux, which I won’t mention in this more general response. I was worried that a take on very recent events – this is set in Minneapolis between 2019 and 2020 and covers the first six months of the pandemic plus local protests following George Floyd’s murder – would seem either rushed or dated. I’m still unsure how I feel about encountering Covid-19 in fiction (vs. I’ve read 20 or more nonfiction records now), but I think this novel functions as a sturdy time capsule.
Tookie, the narrator, has a tough exterior but a tender heart. When she spent 10 years in prison for a misunderstanding-cum-body snatching, books helped her survive, starting with the dictionary. Once she got out, she translated her love of words into work as a bookseller at Birchbark Books, Louise Erdrich’s Minnesota independent bookshop (Louise herself is an occasional character). Bibliophiles are sure to enjoy the mentions of the books she presses into customers’ hands; there’s also a fun appendix of recommendations on particular topics.
However, the central mystery about Flora, a dead customer who haunts the store until Tookie figures out why she died and how to exorcise her, struck me as silly. I only appreciated this storyline to the extent that it explores authenticity (Flora may have fabricated her Native heritage) and the inescapability of history. I preferred real life: Tookie getting locked down with her stepdaughter and baby grandson and filling book orders from a closed shop.
Erdrich weaves in Indigenous customs naturally and the banter between the characters, including young shop employees, makes this hip and lighthearted, even as it deals with serious subjects. I smiled at the bookish lingo, like Tookie’s division of her reading into a Lazy Stack and a Hard Stack (“books I would avoid reading until some wellspring of mental energy was uncapped” – my occasional and set-aside titles could comprise the latter) and the “cowbirds,” self-published titles secreted on the shelves that aren’t found until inventory day. There’s also an excellent passage on novellas that I’ll be bringing out in November.
Like a vintage armchair, this is a little overstuffed, but so comfortable you’ll want to stay a while. (See also Laura’s review.) (Public library)
The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson
~SPOILERS IN THIS ONE~
Artists, dysfunctional families, and limited settings (here, one crumbling London house and its environs; and about two days across one weekend) are irresistible elements for me, and I don’t mind a work being peopled with mostly unlikable characters. That’s just as well, because the narrative orbits Ray Hanrahan, a monstrous narcissist who insists that his family put his painting career above all else. His wife, Lucia, is a sculptor who has always sacrificed her own art to ensure Ray’s success. But now Lucia, having survived breast cancer, has the chance to focus on herself. She’s tolerated his extramarital dalliances all along; why not see where her crush on MP Priya Menon leads? What with fresh love and the offer of her own exhibition in Venice, maybe she truly can start over in her fifties.
Ray and Lucia’s three grown children, Leah, Patrick and Jess, are all home for Ray’s new exhibition. They’re mere sketches: Leah is Ray’s staunchest supporter and is infatuated with the no-show caterer; Patrick’s mental health is shaky, interfering with his job prospects; Jess, a teacher in Edinburgh, is pregnant but not sure she’s committed to her boyfriend long term. I wanted more depth from all the characters, but especially the offspring. I also expected a climactic late scene on Hampstead Heath to come to more.
Still, the build-up to the exhibit (followed by a laughably pitiful reveal) and Lucia’s inner life form an adequately strong foundation for Mendelson’s sardonic prose. The dialogue, full of interruptions, is true to life. This is her fifth novel and called to mind Jami Attenberg’s and Claire Fuller’s work. (Liz found shades of Iris Murdoch. Susan loved it, too.) I wouldn’t say I’m compelled to seek out more by Mendelson, but this was a solid read. (Public library)
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
A Tale for the Time Being is one of my favourite novels of the century (and one of my most popular Goodreads reviews ever), My Year of Meats was a terrific backlist read a couple of summers ago, and I’m eager to catch up on All Over Creation. So I’d built up this fourth Ozeki novel in my head, thinking a library setting and magic realist elements presaged something deliciously Murakami-esque.
What I actually found, having limped through it off and on for seven months, was something of a disappointment. A frank depiction of the mental health struggles of the Oh family? Great. A paean to how books and libraries can save us by showing us a way out of our own heads? A-OK. The problem is with the twee way that The Book narrates Benny’s story and engages him in a conversation about fate versus choice.
When Kenji Oh, a jazz musician, is run over by a chicken truck, Annabelle finds herself a single mother to Benny, a troubled teen who starts to hear everyday objects speaking to him. His voices and Annabelle’s hoarding habit jeopardize the viability of their household: Benny spends time on a psychiatric hospital ward for minors and Annabelle is threatened with eviction. For Benny, the library and the acquaintances he makes there – a fellow pedi-psych patient named Alice who calls herself The Aleph, an Eastern European philosopher who goes by The Bottleman (= Slavoj Žižek?), even the Ozeki figure tapping away on her laptop – may be his salvation; for Annabelle, it could be the book Tidy Magic (modelled on Marie Kondo’s work), written by a Buddhist nun. But until then, their stories get very dark indeed.
Concern for the principal pair and their relationship kept me reading even though this is too long and I wearied of Ozeki’s habit of literalizing metaphors (books speaking to people; being crushed by one’s belongings; crows playing a protective role). I’m still sympathetic to Ozeki’s aims, even if she doesn’t quite pull it all off here. If I pit the rather similar The Sentence and The Book of Form and Emptiness against each other, Erdrich comes out ahead. 
With thanks to Canongate for the proof copy for review.
I’ve gotten to six books from the longlist so far and have a few more on order at the library. The others I’ve read, with ratings and links to my reviews, are:
Build Your House around My Body by Violet Kupersmith
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason
I’m also partway through The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton, which is enjoyable enough but, alas, suffers in comparison to Daisy Jones and the Six, whose format (a composite oral history of a fictional 1960s/70s musical act) it repeats. The addition of the race issue doesn’t feel sufficient to call it original.
I’ve also DNFed a few from the longlist, two of them multiple times, so I have my fingers crossed that they don’t advance!
- The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller
- The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
- Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
My attitude to the rest of the longlist is…
- The Bread the Devil Knead by Lisa Allen-Agostini – No plans to read.
- Salt Lick by Lulu Allison – I might read this from the library. I’m leery of dystopias, but I’m there for a chorus of cows.
- Careless by Kirsty Capes – No plans to read.
- Remote Sympathy by Catherine Chidgey – I would happily read it if it’s shortlisted, but at over 500 pages I fear it’ll be too dense.
- Flamingo by Rachel Elliott – Maybe. Sounds like pretty standard Sarah Winman-type stuff, but it could go down well with a book club.
- This One Sky Day by Leone Ross – No plans to read.
- Creatures of Passage by Morowa Yejidé – I was actually pretty keen to read this one, so I have it on reserve at the library. Egyptian mythology makes a change from the overdone Greeks, and the Washington, D.C. setting is a big draw. Laura’s review has tempered my expectations, but I might still give it a go.
My ideal shortlist (a wish list based on my reading and what I still want to read):
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
Build Your House around My Body by Violet Kupersmith
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason
The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton
Creatures of Passage by Morowa Yejidé
vs.
My predicted shortlist:
Remote Sympathy by Catherine Chidgey
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason
The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson
This One Sky Day by Leone Ross
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
An overall winner? Gosh, it’s too early to tell. But maybe The Sentence, Sorrow and Bliss or The Island of Missing Trees.
See also Laura’s shortlist predictions.
What have you read from the longlist so far?
Which of these books are calling to you?
Sad Souvenirs: Defunct Bookshops’ Bookmarks
I’m a dedicated bookmark user and probably have at least 120–150 that I rotate through, matching marker to book subject matter or reading location whenever possible. A sorry subset of my collection commemorates bookshops (secondhand and/or new stock) that no longer exist. I was a customer at a couple of these, but only know of the others through bookmarks that I found at random, e.g. in secondhand purchases from other stores. Through Google Earth, I tracked down what you’ll find where these shops used to be.
Shops I visited:
Déjà Vu Books (Bowie, Maryland)
This was my local secondhand bookshop when I was a teenager. I would wheedle occasional visits out of my mother until my friends and I got our driving licenses and could go by ourselves. My friend Rachael and I would stop there after karate on a Saturday morning.
What I remember purchasing there: A near-complete set of Dickens’s works, blue/green cloth hardbacks, early 20th century, for $30; an Agatha Christie omnibus I gave to my mother.
What it is now: Chi Bella Natural Hair Boutique
Water Lane Book Shop (Salisbury, England)
My husband is a Hampshire lad. Salisbury was a relatively nearby town we would explore when I went to visit him while we were dating or engaged. An average daytrip would include touring the cathedral, having tea at the Polly Tearooms, and – in a waterside location just along from the cathedral square – having a nose through the well-stocked shelves of this compact shop.
What I remember purchasing there: Lots of my secondhand David Lodge paperbacks.
What it is now: A private residence (it had just sold as of Streetview in June 2018)
Others I only learned about through their orphan bookmarks:
Barnwood Books (Hagerstown, Maryland)
The bookmark looks old enough that I had to ask myself whether the shop might have been supplanted by Wonder Book & Video, a small chain I first discovered as a young teen. It has branches in Frederick (where I went to college; I worked there part-time in my senior year) and Hagerstown, and most recently opened in Gaithersburg. At the least, Wonder Book probably absorbed their stock when they closed.
What it is now: An empty storefront between a gastropub and a home fashions store (as of October 2019)
The Book Mark (Toronto, Canada)
I found this bookmark inside a secondhand book I bought from the Frederick Wonder Book & Video. I assumed the shop was still extant, but I checked in with Marcie (Buried in Print) and she sent me an article explaining that it was priced out of the neighbourhood and closed in 2012. It had been the oldest independent bookstore in Toronto. (This article gives more information.)
What it is now: Nails on Bloor, a nails and waxing parlour
Paperback Exchange (Hereford, England)
I can’t recall where I found this bookmark, but I wish a shop with this policy still existed! From the reverse: “The Paperback Exchange system: up to HALF the purchase price of books bought from us, against further purchases; up to a QUARTER on good quality paperbacks bought elsewhere.”
What it is now: On the June 2018 Streetview, it’s either the closed-down charity shop or the school uniform shop.
A nice postscript:
Royal Oak Bookshop (Front Royal, Virginia)
The bookmark I found in a used book looked so old I wasn’t sure if the shop would still exist. I was going to include it in the post as one of the defunct ones. But just to be sure, I decided to try hunting it down through the website…
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
