What to Read during a Heat Wave
The short answer is whatever you want. A longer answer: you could get stuck into heat-themed and summer-set books; escape by reading about a holiday destination, whether you can get there or not; will yourself cool by reading about icy places; and/or sink into a stack of lighter reading material.
I’ll be employing some or all of these strategies as the mercury climbs. I keep thinking I’ll just give up on work one of these days – my new study has a big window that traps the midday sun, but it remains bearable as long as I use blackout curtains and a desk fan – and read on a couch all afternoon. That hasn’t happened yet, but on Tuesday peak temperatures (of 36 °C) are expected here in the UK, so I may well carry out my threat.
Here’s what I’m reading now in each of those categories, along with some earlier reads I can recommend (with excerpts from my reviews and a link to the full text):
Embrace the Heat
My current reads:
Contemporary
Golden Boys by Phil Stamper: Four gay high school students in small-town Ohio look forward to a summer of separate travels for jobs and internships and hope their friendships will stay the course. With alternating first-person passages and conversation threads, this YA novel is proving to be a sweet, fun page turner and the perfect follow-up to the Heartstopper series (my summer crush from last year).
Classic
Summer by Edith Wharton: An adopted young woman (and half-hearted librarian) named Charity Royall gets a shot at romance when a stranger arrives in her New England town. I’m only 30 pages in so far, but this promises to be a great read – but please not as tragic as Ethan Frome? (Apparently, Wharton called it a favourite among her works, and referred to it as “the Hot Ethan,” which I’m going to guess she meant thermally.)
My top recommendations:
Contemporary
Heatstroke by Hazel Barkworth: From the first word (“Languid”) on, this drips with hot summer atmosphere, with connotations of discomfort and sweaty sexuality. Rachel is a teacher of adolescents as well as the mother of a 15-year-old, Mia. When Lily, a pupil who also happens to be one of Mia’s best friends, goes missing, Rachel is put in a tough spot…
A Crime in the Neighbourhood by Suzanne Berne: Marsha remembers the summer of 1972, when her father left her mother for Aunt Ada and news came of a young boy’s sexual assault and murder in the woods behind a mall. “If you hadn’t known what had happened in our neighborhood, the street would have looked like any other suburban street in America.”
Heat by Bill Buford: You know what they say: if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen (eat some cold salads instead!). Buford traces TV chef Mario Batali’s culinary pedigree through Italy and London, and later spends stretches of several months in Italy as an apprentice to a pasta-maker and a Tuscan butcher. Exactly what I want from food writing.
Heat Wave by Penelope Lively: Pauline, a freelance copyeditor in her fifties, has escaped from London to spend a hot summer at World’s End, the Midlands holiday cottage complex she shares with her daughter and her family. The increasing atmospheric threats (drought or storms; combine harvesters coming ever nearer) match the tensions in the household.
Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell: Another spot-on tale of family and romantic relationships. The language is unfailingly elegant. It opens with the heat as the most notable character: “It inhabits the house like a guest who has outstayed his welcome: it lies along corridors, it circles around curtains, it lolls heavily on sofas and chairs.”
- This is set during the UK heatwave of 1976, which lives on in collective memory and legend in this country even though its temperature record has been topped (but not the length of the streak). I’ve since tried two other novels set during the summer of ’76 but neither took (maybe you’ll get on better with them?): Water Shall Refuse Them by Lucie McKnight Hardy and In the Place of Fallen Leaves by Tim Pears.
Or try the American summer of 1975 instead, with Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau, a juicy coming-of-age novel set in Baltimore.
Classic
A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr: Tom Birkin, a First World War veteran whose wife has left him, arrives in Oxgodby to uncover the local church’s wall painting of the Judgment Day. “There was so much time that marvelous summer.” There is something achingly gorgeous about this Hardyesque tragicomic romance, as evanescent as ideal summer days.
The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley: Twelve-year-old Leo Colston is invited to spend the several July weeks leading up to his birthday at his school friend Marcus Maudsley’s home, Brandham Hall. The heat becomes a character in its own right, gloweringly presiding over the emotional tension caused by secrets, spells and betrayals.
In a Summer Season by Elizabeth Taylor: The title is not only literal, when much of the action takes place, but a metaphor for the fleeting nature of happiness (as well as life itself). Kate remembers pleasant days spent with her best friend and their young children: “It was a long summer’s afternoon and it stood for all the others now. … Their friendship was as light and warming as the summer’s air.”
Escape on Holiday
I try to read on location whenever possible, but if it’s a staycation for you this year, you can still transport yourself somewhere exciting or tropical through fiction.
My current read:
Mustique Island by Sarah McCoy: “A sun-splashed romp with a rich divorcée and her two wayward daughters in 1970s Mustique, the world’s most exclusive private island [in the Caribbean], where Princess Margaret and Mick Jagger were regulars and scandals stayed hidden from the press.”
My top recommendations:
Siracusa by Delia Ephron: A snappy literary thriller about two American couples who holiday together on the Sicilian island of Siracusa. Shifting between the perspectives of the four main characters, it looks back to ask what went disastrously wrong on that trip. A delicious story ripe for a cinematic adaptation.
Nothing but Blue Sky by Kathleen MacMahon: Set in Aiguaclara, a hidden gem on Spain’s Costa Brava where David and Mary Rose holidayed every summer for 20 years. Most of the book remembers their life together and their previous vacations here. Grief, memory, fate: some of my favourite themes, elegantly treated.
A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson: Set on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960, this zeroes in on several authors, including a young poet from Canada named Leonard Cohen. We see all of the real-life characters from the perspective of a starry-eyed 17-year-old narrator. You can feel the Mediterranean heat soaking up through your sandals.
The Vacationers by Emma Straub: Perfect summer reading; perfect vacation reading. Straub writes great dysfunctional family novels featuring characters so flawed and real you can’t help but love and laugh at them. Here, Franny and Jim Post borrow a friend’s home in Mallorca for two weeks, hoping sun and relaxation will temper the memory of Jim’s affair.
Read Yourself Cool
Will reading about snow and ice actually make you feel any cooler? It can’t hurt.
My current reads:
I had a vague Antarctica reading theme going for a while, but have yet to get back into two set-aside reads, Empire Antarctica by Gavin Francis and Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor (or pick up Snow Widows by Katherine MacInnes and South Pole Station by Ashley Shelby). Maybe next week!
My top recommendations:
Among the Summer Snows by Christopher Nicholson: After the death from cancer of his wife Kitty, a botanical illustrator, Nicholson set off for Scotland’s Cairngorms and Ben Nevis in search of patches of snow that persist into summer. “Summer snow is a miracle, a piece of out-of-season magic: to see it is one thing, to make physical contact with it is another.”
The Still Point by Amy Sackville: A sweltering summer versus an encasing of ice; an ordinary day versus decades of futile waiting. Sackville explores these contradictions only to deflate them, collapsing time such that a polar explorer’s wife and her great-great-niece can inhabit the same literal and emotional space despite being separated by more than a century.
Keep it Light
I’m more likely to read genre fiction (crime, especially) during the summer, it seems. I recently read The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey for book club, for instance – but it was so permeated in Plantagenet history that it wasn’t your standard detective drama at all.
I also like to pick up lighter reads that edge towards women’s fiction. I’ve been starting my days with passages from these two, though it might make more sense to read them later in the day as a reward for getting through parts of weightier books.
My current reads:
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy by Helen Fielding: I’d never read this second sequel from 2013, so we’re doing it for our August book club – after some darker reads, people requested something light! Bridget is now a single mother in her early 50s, but some things never change, like constant yo-yo dieting and obsessive chronicling of the stats of her life.
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus: This year’s It book. I’m nearly halfway through and enjoying it, if not as rapturously as so many. Katherine Heiny meets John Irving is the vibe I’m getting. Elizabeth Zott is a scientist through and through, applying a chemist’s mindset to her every venture, including cooking, rowing and single motherhood in the 1950s.
My top recommendations:
Sunburn by Laura Lippman: While on a beach vacation in 1995, a woman walks away from her husband and daughter and into a new life as an unattached waitress. I liked that I recognized many Maryland/Delaware settings. Quick and enjoyable. (I’ve never been hotter than during the July week we spent in Milan in 2019. This is one of the books I read on that trip.)
Modern Lovers by Emma Straub: Short chapters flip between all the major characters’ perspectives, showing that she completely gets each one of them. The novel is about reassessing as one approaches adulthood or midlife, about reviving old dreams and shoring up flagging relationships. Nippy and funny and smart and sexy. So many lines ring true. (Yes, a second entry from Straub: she writes such accessible and addictive literary fiction.)
The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney: The four dysfunctional Plumb siblings must readjust their expectations when the truth comes out. This also affects their trust fund, “the nest.” A nest is, of course, also a home, so for as much as this seems to be about money, it is really more about family and how we reclaim our notion of home after a major upheaval.
This article on the Penguin website has a few more ideas, including To Kill a Mockingbird (you think we’ve got it bad? Try a summer in the American South!), Atonement, and poetry. I took up one of Alice Vincent’s recommendations right away: since I’m reading My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland, it made sense to get a copy of McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding out from the public library. Already on the first page you’re steeped in a sweltering Georgia summer (like McCullers, my dad is from Columbus):
It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. … The sidewalks of the town were grey in the early morning and at night, but the noon sun put a glaze on them, so that the cement burned and glittered like glass. The sidewalks finally became too hot for Frankie’s feet. … The world seemed to die each afternoon and nothing moved any longer. At last the summer was like a green sick dream, or like a silent crazy jungle under glass.
What are your current reading strategies?
Have you ever spent all day reading, just because you could?
Book Serendipity, March to April 2022
This is a bimonthly feature of mine. I call it Book Serendipity when two or more books that I read at the same time or in quick succession have something in common – the more bizarre, the better. Because I usually 20–30 books on the go at once, I suppose I’m more prone to such incidents. The following are in roughly chronological order.
(I always like hearing about your bookish coincidences, too! Laura had what she thought must be the ultimate Book Serendipity when she reviewed two novels with the same setup: Groundskeeping by Lee Cole and Last Resort by Andrew Lipstein.)
- The same sans serif font is on Sea State by Tabitha Lasley and Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor – both released by 4th Estate. I never would have noticed had they not ended up next to each other in my stack one day. (Then a font-alike showed up in my TBR pile, this time from different publishers, later on: What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad and When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo.)
- Kraftwerk is mentioned in The Facebook of the Dead by Valerie Laws and How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu.
- The fact that bacteria sometimes form biofilms is mentioned in Hybrid Humans by Harry Parker and Slime by Susanne Wedlich.
- The idea that when someone dies, it’s like a library burning is repeated in The Reactor by Nick Blackburn and In the River of Songs by Susan Jackson.
- Espresso martinis are consumed in If Not for You by Georgina Lucas and Wahala by Nikki May.
- Prosthetic limbs turn up in Groundskeeping by Lee Cole, The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki, and Hybrid Humans by Harry Parker.
- A character incurs a bad cut to the palm of the hand in After You’d Gone by Maggie O’Farrell and The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki – I read the two scenes on the same day.
- Catfish is on the menu in Groundskeeping by Lee Cole and in one story of Antipodes by Holly Goddard Jones.
Reading two novels with “Paradise” in the title (and as the last word) at the same time: Paradise by Toni Morrison and To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara.
- Reading two books by a Davidson at once: Damnation Spring by Ash and Tracks by Robyn.
- There’s a character named Elwin in The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade and one called Elvin in The Two Lives of Sara by Catherine Adel West.
- Tea is served with lemon in The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald and The Two Lives of Sara by Catherine Adel West.
- There’s a Florence (or Flo) in Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin, These Days by Lucy Caldwell and Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell. (Not to mention a Flora in The Sentence by Louise Erdrich.)
There’s a hoarder character in Olga Dies Dreaming by Xóchitl González and The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki.
- Reading at the same time two memoirs by New Yorker writers releasing within two weeks of each other (in the UK at least) and blurbed by Jia Tolentino: Home/Land by Rebecca Mead and Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz.
- Three children play in a graveyard in Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier and Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith.
- Shalimar perfume is worn in These Days by Lucy Caldwell and The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade.
- A relative is described as “very cold” and it’s wondered what made her that way in Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso and one of the testimonies in Regrets of the Dying by Georgina Scull.
Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild is mentioned in The Sentence by Louise Erdrich, which I was reading at around the same time. (As is The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald, which I’d recently finished.)
- From one poetry collection with references to Islam (Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire) to another (Auguries of a Minor God by Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe).
- Two children’s books featuring a building that is revealed to be a theatre: Moominsummer Madness by Tove Jansson and The Unadoptables by Hana Tooke.
- Reading two “braid” books at once: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and French Braid by Anne Tyler.
- Protests and teargas in The Sentence by Louise Erdrich and The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki.
- Jellyfish poems in Honorifics by Cynthia Miller and Love Poems in Quarantine by Sarah Ruhl.
- George Floyd’s murder is a major element in The Sentence by Louise Erdrich and Love Poems in Quarantine by Sarah Ruhl.
What’s the weirdest reading coincidence you’ve had lately?
Recent Literary Awards & Online Events: Folio Prize and Claire Fuller
Literary prize season is in full swing! The Women’s Prize longlist, revealed on the 10th, contained its usual mixture of the predictable and the unexpected. I correctly predicted six of the nominees, and happened to have already read seven of them, including Claire Fuller’s Unsettled Ground (more on this below). I’m currently reading another from the longlist, Luster by Raven Leilani, and I have four on order from the library. There are only four that I don’t plan to read, so I’ll be in a fairly good place to predict the shortlist (due out on April 28th). Laura and Rachel wrote detailed reaction posts on which there has been much chat.
Rathbones Folio Prize
This year I read almost the entire Rathbones Folio Prize shortlist because I was lucky enough to be sent the whole list to feature on my blog. The winner, which the Rathbones CEO said would stand as the “best work of literature for the year” out of 80 nominees, was announced on Wednesday in a very nicely put together half-hour online ceremony hosted by Razia Iqbal from the British Library. The Folio scheme also supports writers at all stages of their careers via a mentorship scheme.
It was fun to listen in as the three judges discussed their experience. “Now nonfiction to me seems like rock ‘n’ roll,” Roger Robinson said, “far more innovative than fiction and poetry.” (Though Sinéad Gleeson and Jon McGregor then stood up for the poetry and fiction, respectively.) But I think that was my first clue that the night was going to go as I’d hoped. McGregor spoke of the delight of getting “to read above the categories, looking for freshness, for excitement.” Gleeson said that in the end they had to choose “the book that moved us, that enthralled us.”
All eight authors had recorded short interview clips about their experience of lockdown and how they experiment with genre and form, and seven (all but Doireann Ní Ghríofa) were on screen for the live announcement. The winner of the £30,000 prize, author of an “exceptional, important” book and teller of “a story that had to be told,” was Carmen Maria Machado for In the Dream House. I was delighted with this result: it was my first choice and is one of the most remarkable memoirs I’ve read. I remember reading it on my Kindle on the way to and from Hungerford for a bookshop event in early March 2020 – my last live event and last train ride in over a year and counting, which only made the reading experience more memorable.
I like what McGregor had to say about the book in the media release: “In the Dream House has changed me – expanded me – as a reader and a person, and I’m not sure how much more we can ask of the books that we choose to celebrate.”
There are now only two previous Folio winners that I haven’t read, the memoir The Return by Hisham Matar and the novel Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, so I’d like to get those two out from the library soon and complete the set.
Other literary prizes
The following day, the Dylan Thomas Prize shortlist was announced. Still in the running are two novels I’ve read and enjoyed, Pew by Catherine Lacey and My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell, and one I’m currently reading (Luster). Of the rest, I’m particularly keen on Kingdomtide by Rye Curtis, and I would also like to read Alligator and Other Stories by Dima Alzayat. I’d love to see Russell win the whole thing. The announcement will be on May 13th. I hope to participate in a shortlist blog tour leading up to it.
I also tuned into the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards ceremony (on YouTube), which was unfortunately marred by sound issues. This year’s three awards went to women: Dervla Murphy (Edward Stanford Outstanding Contribution to Travel Writing), Anita King (Bradt Travel Guides New Travel Writer of the Year; you can read her personal piece on Syria here), and Taran N. Khan for Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul (Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year in association with the Authors’ Club).
Other prize races currently in progress that are worth keeping an eye on:
- The Jhalak Prize for writers of colour in Britain (I’ve read four from the longlist and would be interested in several others if I could get hold of them)
- The Republic of Consciousness Prize for work from small presses (I’ve read two; Doireann Ní Ghríofa gets another chance – fingers crossed for her)
- The Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction (next up for me: The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams, to review for BookBrowse)
Claire Fuller
Yesterday evening, I attended the digital book launch for Claire Fuller’s Unsettled Ground (my review will be coming soon). I’ve read all four of her novels and count her among my favorite contemporary writers. I spotted Eric Anderson and Ella Berthoud among the 200+ attendees, and Claire’s agent quoted from Susan’s review – “A new novel from Fuller is always something to celebrate”! Claire read a passage from the start of the novel that introduces the characters just as Dot starts to feel unwell. Uniquely for online events I’ve attended, we got a tour of the author’s writing room, with Alan the (female) cat asleep on the daybed behind her, and her librarian husband Tim helped keep an eye on the chat.
After each novel, as a treat to self, she buys a piece of art. This time, she commissioned a ceramic plate from Sophie Wilson with lines and images from the book painted on it. Live music was provided by her son Henry Ayling, who played acoustic guitar and sang “We Roamed through the Garden,” which, along with traditional folk song “Polly Vaughn,” are quoted in the novel and were Claire’s earworms for two years. There was also a competition to win a chocolate Easter egg, given to whoever came closest to guessing the length of the new novel in words. (It was somewhere around 89,000.)
Good news – she’s over halfway through Book 5!
The Rathbones Folio Prize 2021 Shortlist
The Rathbones Folio Prize is unique in that nominations come from the Folio Academy, an international group of writers and critics, and any book written in English is eligible, so nonfiction and poetry share space with fiction on the varied shortlist of eight titles:
- handiwork by Sara Baume (Tramp Press)
- Indelicacy by Amina Cain (Daunt Books)
- As You Were by Elaine Feeney (Harvill Secker)
- Poor by Caleb Femi (Penguin)
- My Darling from the Lions by Rachel Long (Picador)
- In the Dream House: A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado (Serpent’s Tail)
- A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa (Tramp Press)
- The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey (Peepal Tree Press)
I was delighted to be sent the whole shortlist to feature. I’d already read Rachel Long’s poetry collection and Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir (reviewed here), but I’m keen to start on the rest and will read and review as many as possible before the online prize announcement on Wednesday the 24th. I’m starting with the Baume, Cain, Femi and Roffey.
For more information on the prize, these eight authors, and the longlist, see the website.
(The remainder of the text in this post comes from the official press release.)
The Rathbones Folio Prize — known as the “writers’ prize” — rewards the best work of literature of the year, regardless of form. It is the only award governed by an international academy of distinguished writers and critics, ensuring a unique quality and consistency in the nomination and judging process.
The judges (Roger Robinson, Sinéad Gleeson, and Jon McGregor) have chosen books by seven women and one man to be in contention for the £30,000 prize which looks for the best fiction, non-fiction and poetry in English from around the world. Six out of the eight titles are by British and Irish writers, with three out of Ireland alone (two of which are published by the same publisher, Tramp Press). The spirit of experimentation is also reflected in the strong showing of independent publishers and small presses (five out of eight).
Chair of judges Roger Robinson says: “It was such a joy to spend detailed and intimate time with the books nominated for the Rathbones Folio Prize and travel deep into their worlds. The judges chose the eight books on the shortlist because they are pushing at the edges of their forms in interesting ways, without sacrificing narrative or execution. The conversations between the judges may have been as edifying as the books themselves. From a judges’ vantage point, the future of book publishing looks incredibly healthy – and reading a book is still one of the most revolutionary things that one can do.”
The 2021 shortlist ranges from Amina Cain’s Indelicacy – a feminist fable about class and desire – and the exploration of the estates of South London through poetry and photography in Caleb Femi’s Poor, to a formally innovative, genre-bending memoir about domestic abuse in Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, and a feminist revision of Caribbean mermaid myths, in Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch.
In the darkly comic novel As You Were, poet Elaine Feeney tackles the intimate histories, institutional failures, and the darkly present past of modern Ireland, while Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat finds the eighteenth-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill haunting the life of a contemporary young mother, prompting her to turn detective. Doireann Ní Ghríofa is published by Dublin’s Tramp Press, also publishers of Sara Baume’s handiwork – which charts the author’s daily process of making and writing, and explores what it is to create and to live as an artist – while poet Rachel Long’s acclaimed debut collection My Darling from the Lions skewers sexual politics, religious awakenings and family quirks with wit, warmth and precision.
My thanks to the publishers and FMcM Associates for the free copies for review.
August Releases: Fiction Advocate, Kingsolver Poetry, Sarah Moss & More
My five new releases for August include two critical responses to contemporary classics; two poetry books, one a debut collection from Carcanet Press and the other by an author better known for fiction; and a circadian novel by one of my favorite authors.
I start with two of the latest releases from Fiction Advocate’s “Afterwords” series. The tagline is “Essential Readings of the New Canon,” and the idea is that “acclaimed writers investigate the contemporary classics.” (I reviewed the monographs on Blood Meridian, Fun Home, and The Year of Magical Thinking in this post.)
Dear Knausgaard: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle by Kim Adrian
Karl Ove Knausgaard turned his pretty ordinary life into thousands of pages of autofiction that many readers have found addictive. Adrian valiantly grapples with his six-volume exploration of identity, examining the treatment of time and the dichotomies of intellect versus emotions, self versus other, and life versus fiction. She marvels at the ego that could sustain such a project, and at the seemingly rude decision to use all real names (whereas in her own family memoir she assigned aliases to most major figures). At many points she finds the character of “Karl Ove” insufferable, especially when he’s a teenager in Book 4, and the books’ prose dull. Knausgaard’s focus on male novelists and his stereotypical treatment of feminine qualities, here and in his other work, frequently madden her.
So why is My Struggle compelling nonetheless? It occupies her mind and her conversations for years. Is it something about the way that Knausgaard extracts meaning from seemingly inconsequential details? About how he stretches and compresses time in a Proustian manner to create a personal highlights reel? She frames her ambivalent musings as a series of letters written as if to Knausgaard himself (or “KOK,” as she affectionately dubs him) between February and September 2019. Cleverly, she mimics his style in both the critical enquiry and the glimpses into her own life, including all its minutiae – the weather, daily encounters, what she sees out the window and what she thinks about it all. It’s bold, playful and funny, and, all told, I enjoyed it more than Knausgaard’s own writing.
(I myself have only read Book 1, A Death in the Family, and wasn’t planning on continuing with My Struggle, but I think I will make an exception for Book 3 because of my recent fascination with childhood memoirs. I had better luck with Knausgaard’s Seasons Quartet, of which I’ve read all but Spring. I’ve reviewed Summer and Winter.)
My rating: 
My thanks to Fiction Advocate for the free e-copy for review.
The Wanting Was a Wilderness: Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and the Art of Memoir by Alden Jones
Hiking is boring, yet Cheryl Strayed turned it into a beloved memoir. Jones explores how Wild works: how Strayed the author creates “Cheryl,” likeable despite her drug use and promiscuity; how the fixation on the boots and the backpack that carry her through her quest reflect the obsession over the loss of her mother; how the flashbacks break up the narrative and keep you guessing about whether she’ll reach her literal and emotional destinations.
Jones also considers the precedents of wilderness literature and the 1990s memoir boom that paved the way for Wild. I most enjoyed this middle section, which, like Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir, surveys some of the key publications from a burgeoning genre. Another key point of reference is Vivian Gornick, who draws a distinction between “the situation” (the particulars or context) and “the story” (the message) – sometimes the map or message comes first, and sometimes you only discover it as you go along.
I was a bit less interested in Jones’s reminiscences of her own three-month wilderness experience during college, when, with Outward Bound, she went to North Carolina and Mexico and hiked part of the Appalachian Trail and a volcano. This was the trip on which she faced up to her sexuality and had a short-lived relationship with a fellow camper, Melissa. But working out that she was bisexual and marrying a woman were both, as presented here, false endings. The real ending was her decision to leave her marriage – even though they had three children; even though the relationship was often fine. She attributes her courage to go, believing something better was possible, to Strayed’s work. And that’s the point of this series: rereading a contemporary classic until it becomes part of your own story.
My rating: 
My thanks to Fiction Advocate for the free e-copy for review.
Two poetry releases:
Growlery by Katherine Horrex
As in Red Gloves by Rebecca Watts, released by Carcanet in June, I noted the juxtaposition of natural and industrial scenes. Horrex’s “Four Muses” include a power plant and a steelworks, and she writes about pottery workers and the Manchester area, but she also explores Goat Fell on foot. Two of my favorite poems were nature-based: “Omen,” about corpse flowers, and “Wood Frog.” Alliteration, metaphors and smells are particularly effective in the former. Though I quailed at the sight of an entry called “Brexit,” it’s a subtle offering that depicts mistrust and closed minds – “People personable as tents zipped shut”. By contrast, “House of Other Tongues” revels in the variety of languages and foods in an international student dorm. A few poems circle around fertility and pregnancy. The linking themes aren’t very strong across the book, but there are a few gems.
My rating: 
My thanks to Carcanet Press for the free e-copy for review.
How to Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) by Barbara Kingsolver
Kingsolver may not be well known for her poetry, but this is actually her second collection of verse after the bilingual Another America/Otra America (1992). The opening segment, “How to Fly,” is full of folk wisdom from nature and the body’s intuitive knowledge. “Pellegrinaggio” is a set of travel poems about accompanying her Italian mother-in-law back to her homeland. “This Is How They Come Back to Us” is composed of elegies for the family’s dead; four shorter remaining sections are inspired by knitting, literature, daily life, and concern for the environment. As with The Undying by Michel Faber, the book’s themes are stronger than its poetic techniques, but Kingsolver builds striking natural imagery and entrancing rhythms.
Two favorite passages to whet your appetite:
How to drink water when there is wine— / Once I knew all these brick-shaped things, / took them for the currency of survival. / Now I have lived long and I know better.
Tiptoe past the dogs of the apocalypse / asleep in the shade of your future. / Pay at the window. You’ll be surprised: you / can pass off hope like a bad check. You still / have time, that’s the thing. To make it good.
(To be reviewed in full, in conjunction with other recent/upcoming poetry releases, including Dearly by Margaret Atwood, for Shiny New Books.)
My rating:
I read an advanced e-copy via Edelweiss. (I’m unsure of the line breaks above because of the formatting.)
And finally, a much-anticipated release – bonus points for it having “Summer” in the title!
Summerwater by Sarah Moss
This is nearly as compact as Moss’s previous novella, Ghost Wall, yet contains a riot of voices. Set on one long day at a Scottish holiday park, it moves between the minds of 12 vacationers disappointed by the constant rain – “not that you come to Scotland expecting sun but this is a really a bit much, day after day of it, torrential” – and fed up with the loud music and partying that’s come from the Eastern Europeans’ chalet several nights this week. In the wake of Brexit, the casual xenophobia espoused by several characters is not surprising, but still sobering, and paves the way for a climactic finale that was not what I expected after some heavy foreshadowing involving a teenage girl going off to the pub through the woods.
The day starts at 5 a.m. with Justine going for a run, despite a recent heart health scare, and spends time with retirees, an engaged couple spending most of their time in bed, a 16-year-old kayaker, a woman with dementia, and more. We see different aspects of family dynamics as we revisit a previous character’s child, spouse or sibling. I had to laugh at Milly picturing Don Draper during sex with Josh, and at Claire getting an hour to herself without the kids and having no idea what to do with it beyond clean up and make a cup of tea. Moss gets each stream-of-consciousness internal monologue just right, from a frantic mum to a sarcastic teen.
Yet I had to wonder what it all added up to; this feels like a creative writing student exercise, with the ending not worth waiting for. Cosmic/nature interludes are pretentious à la Reservoir 13. It’s not the first time this year that I’ve been disappointed by the latest from a favorite author (see also Hamnet). But my previous advice stands: If you haven’t read Sarah Moss, do so immediately.
My rating:
My thanks to Picador for the free copy for review.
What August releases can you recommend?
Rebecca Stott, Duke Special & More at Greenbelt 2018
After five years away, we finally made it back to Greenbelt, a progressive Christian summer arts festival held on the grounds of Boughton House, on the Bank Holiday. The festival is a mixture of talks, music, performances and more, and given how much we’d paid and how far we’d traveled just for the one day, we tried to pack in as much as possible.
We started the day with “Beyond Forgiveness,” a presentation by Jo Berry and Pat Magee. Berry’s father, a Tory MP, was killed when the IRA bombed the Conservative Party conference in Brighton in 1984. Magee spent 14 years in prison for his role in the bombing. When he got out of jail, he met Berry at her request and they talked and listened to each other for several hours. For the first time, Magee said, he could see her father as a real person and realized that the IRA had been just as guilty of dehumanizing and misrepresenting people as the English were. Berry, too, felt that “I’d met my enemy and seen his humanity.” The two have now shared a stage more than 200 times, speaking about the value of empathy in healing broken relationships while also addressing imbalances of power that lead to violence.
To my surprise, cookery displays and musical comedy seemed to be the order of the day. A model kitchen is a new addition to the festival, giving celebrity chefs hour-long sessions to demonstrate a particular dish. Jack Monroe, promoting her new book Cooking on a Bootstrap, cooked a sausage lasagna. She made us all laugh with her idea of “the inverse sausage fallacy” – the cheaper a sausage is, the better it tastes because of all the salt, sugar and spices added to cheaper bits of meat. She started writing recipes when she was a single mother on the dole, and so she encouraged audience members to donate nice things you would like to eat, as well as everyday hygiene products, to food banks. For a “What Vegans Eat” session, Brett Cobley (aka EpiVegan) made a pea and asparagus risotto and answered questions about protein sources, egg replacements, plant milks and harder-to-find ingredients.
Uproarious musical comedy came in the form of Harry & Chris, who made up impromptu raps about New Year’s Day, the Teletubbies and phobias, and Flo & Joan, who sang about divorce statistics, unnecessary inventions for women, and sex robots (the show was fairly crude and came with an 18+ warning). The overall musical highlight of the day was Duke Special, a Greenbelt favorite we’ve seen play quite a number of times now. His pop combines his smooth Belfast tenor with music hall and Big Band stylings, and his songs are often drawn from poetry and 1920s–40s songbooks. His latest project, Hallow, is a beautiful set of Michael Longley poems set to music. He played “Another Wren” and “Emily Dickinson” from that album, various covers (including two bizarre ditties by Ivor Cutler), and crowd favorites “Last Night I Nearly Died,” “Freewheel” and “Our Love Goes Deeper than This.” We also sampled performances by Martyn Joseph, Wallis Bird and CC Smugglers.
Duke Special was a good bridge between music and literature. From the literature program I also saw Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg speak on “Things My Dog Has Taught Me about Being a Better Human,” the title of his recent book. (His dog Mitzpah had a special dispensation to join him on stage; no animals are allowed on site otherwise!) The rabbi spoke about lessons in listening, attention, trust and seizing the moment. Mitzi and his previous dog Safi have also given him a connection with the rest of creation. Although he lives in the London suburbs and has an inner-city synagogue, they have accompanied him on long walks in Scotland and Germany. Wittenberg was a warm and witty speaker and I very much liked the sound of his book. It could make a good follow-up to The Power of Dog.
My other festival highlight was Rebecca Stott, in conversation with Radio 4 presenter Malcolm Doney. I read her Costa Prize-winning memoir In the Days of Rain: A daughter. A father. A cult in April and it’s been one of my stand-out reads of the year so far. The book conveys a huge amount of information about the Exclusive Brethren and Stott’s family history but never loses sight of what is most important: what it was like to be in a cult and have your life defined by its rules and its paranoia about the outside world. Stott remembers 6 a.m. Sunday communion services and her constant terror of being left behind in the Rapture.
Rebecca Stott reading from In the Days of Rain.
Unfortunately, the talk didn’t add much to my experience of reading her book. The interviewer, catering to those who haven’t read the book yet, led her through her whole story bit by bit, and because I’d read it fairly recently it was all familiar. However, Stott spoke wonderfully and was full of wry compassion for her younger self. I was most interested to hear about the book’s aftermath: she’s received 300 letters from ex-Brethren that her daughter is transcribing to send to a Brethren Church archive in Manchester. When asked during a Q&A where she sees cult tendencies today, she mentioned Trump supporters!
Whereas I read In the Days of Rain from the library, I happen to own two Stott books I haven’t read yet, so I cheekily brought along my paperback of Ghostwalk for signing. She was intrigued to see the older cover design and told me she thinks the prose style in her debut novel is much richer than in Rain, and she hopes I’ll like it. I thanked her for the talk, told her how much I’d enjoyed her memoir, and recommended her two books vaguely about cults: Educated by Tara Westover, which she already knew well, having done some events with Westover, and The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon, which was new to her (my blog tour review is coming up on Monday). I caught myself using the word “brilliant” three times in speaking about Stott’s work and these other books – nuance and vocabulary alike clearly go out the window when nervously speaking to admired authors!
Some readers of this blog would have been delighted by the event I rushed to straight after Stott’s talk: Jon McGregor giving readings from Reservoir 13, with Sigur Rós-esque backing and interlude music from Haiku Salut. I heard about the police reconstruction with actors from Manchester, and collecting bilberries on the heath in August. Unfortunately, I found it just as dull read aloud as I did when I tried the book last year, and I left early.
During bits of down time I pulled out a Katherine Mansfield story collection I found in a charity shop last week and read “Bank Holiday” and “The Garden Party.” The former is a very short piece whose carnival atmosphere rises to a note of indeterminate striving:
“And up, up the hill come the people, with ticklers and golliwogs, and roses and feathers. Up, up they thrust into the light and heat, shouting, laughing, squealing, as though they were being pushed by something, far below, and by the sun, far ahead of them – drawn up into the full, bright, dazzling radiance to…what?”
It was my first time reading the famous “The Garden Party,” which likewise moves from a blithe holiday mood into something weightier. The Sheridans are making preparations for a lavish garden party dripping with flowers and food. Daughter Laura is dismayed when news comes that a man from the cottages has been thrown from his horse and killed, and thinks they should cancel the event. Everyone tells her not to be silly; of course it will go on as planned. The story ends when, after visiting his widow to hand over leftover party food, she unwittingly sees the man’s body and experiences an epiphany about the simultaneous beauty and terror of life. “Don’t cry,” her brother says. “Was it awful?” “No,” she replies. “It was simply marvellous.” Mansfield is especially good at first and last paragraphs. I’ll read more by her someday.
How did you all spend your Bank Holiday? / How do you plan to spend Labor Day?
Did any reading get done?
Final Thoughts on the Booker Longlist
On Wednesday the 13th the Man Booker Prize shortlist will be announced. I’d already reviewed six of the nominees and abandoned one; in the time since the longlist announcement I’ve only managed to read another one and a bit. That leaves four I didn’t get a chance to experience. Here’s a run-through of the 13 nominees, with my brief thoughts on each.
4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster (US) (Faber & Faber): I can’t see myself reading this one any time soon; I’ll choose a shorter work to be my first taste of Auster’s writing. I’ve heard mostly good reports, though.
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry (Ireland) (Faber & Faber): Read in March 2017. This is my overall favorite from the longlist so far. (See my BookBrowse review.) However, it’s already been recognized with the Costa Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, so if it doesn’t make the Booker shortlist I certainly won’t be crushed. 
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund (US) (Weidenfeld & Nicolson): Read in March 2017. A slow-building coming-of-age story with a child’s untimely death at its climax. Fridlund’s melancholy picture of outsiders whose skewed thinking leads them to transgress moral boundaries recalls Lauren Groff and Marilynne Robinson. (Reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement; )
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (Pakistan-UK) (Hamish Hamilton): I don’t have much interest in reading this one at this point; I didn’t get far in the one book I tried by Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist) earlier this year. I’ve encountered mixed reviews.
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack (Ireland) (Canongate): If you’ve heard anything about this, it’s probably that the entire book is composed of one sentence. Now here’s an embarrassing admission: I didn’t make it past the first page.
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor (UK) (4th Estate): I read the first 15% last month and set it aside. I knew what to expect – lovely descriptions of the natural world and the daily life of a small community – but I guess hadn’t fully heeded the warning that nothing much happens. I won’t rule out trying this one again in the future, but for now it couldn’t hold my interest.
Elmet by Fiona Mozley (UK) (JM Originals): Read in August 2017. Simply terrific. (See my full blog review.) Overall, this dark horse selection is in second place for me. I’d love to see it make it through to the shortlist. 
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy (India) (Hamish Hamilton): I was never a huge fan of The God of Small Things, so this is another I’m not too keen to try.
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (US) (Bloomsbury Publishing): Read in April 2017. An entertaining and original treatment of life’s transience. I enjoyed the different registers Saunders uses for his characters, but was less convinced about snippets from historical texts. So audacious it deserves a shortlist spot; I wouldn’t mind it winning.
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (UK-Pakistan) (Bloomsbury Circus): This is the one book from the longlist that I most wish I’d gotten a chance to read. It’s been widely reviewed in the press as well as in the blogging world (A life in books, Elle Thinks, and Heavenali), generally very enthusiastically.
Autumn by Ali Smith (UK) (Hamish Hamilton): Read in November 2016. (See my blog review.) While some of Smith’s strengths benefit from immediacy – a nearly stream-of-consciousness style (no speech marks) and jokey dialogue – I’d prefer a more crafted narrative. In places this was repetitive, with the seasonal theme neither here nor there. 
Swing Time by Zadie Smith (UK) (Hamish Hamilton): Read in October 2016 for a BookBrowse review. The Africa material wasn’t very convincing, and the Aimee subplot and the way Tracey turns out struck me as equally clichéd. The claustrophobic narration makes this feel insular. A disappointment compared to White Teeth and On Beauty.
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (US) (Fleet): Read in July 2017. (See my blog review.) I’m surprised such a case has been made for the uniqueness of this novel based on a simple tweak of the historical record. I felt little attachment to Cora and had to force myself to keep plodding through her story. Every critic on earth seems to love it, though.
If I had to take a guess at which six books will make it through Wednesday and why, I’d say:
- 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster – A chunkster by a well-respected literary lion.
- Exit West by Mohsin Hamid – A timely refugee theme and a touch of magic realism.
- Solar Bones by Mike McCormack – Irish stream-of-consciousness. Channel James Joyce and you’ll impress all the literary types.
- Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders – Effusive in tone and cutting-edge in form.
- Autumn by Ali Smith – Captures the post-Brexit moment.
- The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead – Though it’s won every prize going, the judges probably think they’d be churlish to pass it by.
By contrast, if I were asked for the six I would prefer to be on the shortlist, and why, it’d be:
- Days Without End by Sebastian Barry – Pretty much unforgettable.
- History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund – A haunting novel that deserves more attention.
- Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor – Though it’s not my personal favorite, I support McGregor.
- Elmet by Fiona Mozley – A nearly flawless debut. Give the gal a chance.
- Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders – Show-offy, but such fun to read.
- Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie – Timely and well crafted, by all accounts.
That would be three men and three women, if not the best mix of countries. I’d be happy with that list.
What have you managed to read from the Booker longlist? How do your predictions match up against mine?
The Booker Dark Horse: Elmet by Fiona Mozley
The dark horse in this year’s Man Booker Prize race is Elmet, a brilliant, twisted fable about the clash of the land-owning and serf classes in contemporary England. I’d love to see this win the Booker, or make the shortlist at the very least. You’d hardly believe it’s a debut novel, or that it’s by a 29-year-old PhD candidate in medieval history. The epigraph from Ted Hughes defines “Elmet” as an ancient Celtic kingdom encompassing what is now West Yorkshire. The word still appears in a few Yorkshire place names today. Metaphorically, Hughes notes, the region was a “‘badlands’, a sanctuary for refugees from the law.” That’s an apt setting for Mozley’s central characters: a family living on the edge of poverty and respectability – off-grid and not quite legal.
Daniel and Cathy Oliver – 14 and 15, respectively – live with their father, John Smythe, in a simple house he built with his own hands in a copse. They mostly eat whatever they can hunt. Daddy is a renowned pugilist not above beating people up when they owe his friends money. Feisty Cathy is bullied by boys at school; when teachers don’t believe her, she has no choice but to hit back. There’s a strong us-against-the-world ethos to the novel, but underneath that defensiveness there’s a sense of unease: Daniel, the narrator, isn’t a fighter like his father and sister. He’s a sensitive soul who’s happiest cooking and playing with his dogs.
Like the reader, Daniel watches in grim fascination as Mr. Price, a powerful local landlord, starts issuing threats. Price warns Daddy that his family is trespassing. If they don’t leave he’ll make life difficult for them. A group of tenants, many of them just out of prison and barely getting by, bands together to take revenge on Price, planning to withhold rent and farm labor until conditions improve. No longer will they accept £20 payments for 10-hour work days. At first it seems their fight for rights might be successful, but Price and his goons retrench. Things come to a head when Price promises to sign their plot of land over to Daniel – if Daddy agrees to call off the strike and fight one last climactic match in the woods.
The final 70 pages of Elmet blew me away: a crescendo of fateful violence that reaches Shakespearean proportions. This knocks all those Hogarth remakes (which generally, with the exception of Hag-Seed, adhere too slavishly to the plots and so fail to channel the spirit) into a cocked hat. Though oddly similar to two other novels on the Booker longlist that unearth disturbing doings in a superficially pastoral England – Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor and Autumn by Ali Smith – Elmet achieves the better balance between lush nature writing and Hardyesque pessimism. Mozley’s countryside is no idyll but a fallen edgeland:
And if the hare was made of myths then so too was the land at which she scratched. Now pocked with clutches of trees, once the whole county had been woodland and the ghosts of the ancient forest could be marked when the wind blew. The soil was alive with ruptured stories that cascaded and rotted then found form once more and pushed up through the undergrowth and back into our lives.
The characters usually speak in Yorkshire dialect, but where many authors would render the definite article as “t’,” Mozley simply elides it. For instance, here’s John shaking his head over the injustice of land ownership:
It’s idea a person can write summat on a bit of paper about a piece of land that lives and breathes, and changes and quakes and floods and dries, and that that person can use it as he will, or not at all, and that he can keep others off it, all because of a piece of paper. That’s part which means nowt to me.
The author is not entirely consistent with the transcription of dialect, though, and sometimes her use of spoken language is off: too ornate to be believable in certain characters’ mouths, like Cathy or a man who comes to the door to deliver bad news late on. These are such minor lapses of authorial control that I barely think them worth mentioning, but take it as proof that Mozley will only get better in the years to come. This is a gorgeous, timeless tale of the determination to overcome helplessness by facing down those who might harm the body but cannot destroy the spirit.
My rating:
Elmet was published in the UK by JM Originals on August 10th. With thanks to Yassine Belkacemi and Katherine Burdon at John Murray Press for the free review copy.
Making Plans (and Book Lists) for America
On Tuesday we leave for two weeks in America. It’s nearly a year and a half since our last trip – much too long – so we’ll be cramming in lots of visits with friends and family and doing a fair bit of driving around the Mid-Atlantic states. I’m giving myself the whole time off, which means I’ve been working flat out for the past two weeks to get everything done (including my U.K. and U.S. taxes). I’m nearly there: at the 11-day countdown I still had 12 books I wanted to finish and 12 reviews to write; now I’m down to five books, only one of which might be considered essential, and all the reviews are ready to submit/schedule. What with the holiday weekend underway, it should all be manageable.
I’m a compulsive list maker in general, but especially when it comes to preparing for a trip. I’ve kept adding to lists entitled “Pack for America,” “Do in America,” “Buy in America,” and “Bring back from America.” But the more fun lists to make are book-related ones: what paper books should I take to read on the plane? Which of the 315 books on my Kindle ought I to prioritize over the next two weeks? Which exclusively American books should I borrow from the public library? What secondhand books will I try to find? And which of the books in the dozens of boxes in the closet of my old bedroom will I fit in my suitcase for the trip back?
I liked the sound of Laila’s habit of taking an Anne Tyler novel on every flight. That’s just the kind of cozy reading I want, especially as I head back to Maryland – not far at all from Tyler’s home turf of Baltimore. I browsed the blurbs on a few of her paperbacks I have lying around and chose Back When We Were Grownups to be my fifth Tyler and one of my airplane reads.
I’m also tempted by Min Kym’s Gone, a memoir by a violin virtuoso about having her Stradivarius stolen. I picked up a proof copy in a 3-for-£1 charity sale a couple of weeks ago. And then I can’t resist the aptness of Jonathan Miles’s Dear American Airlines (even though we’re actually flying on Virgin). I’ll start one or more of these before we go, just to make sure they ‘take’.
I almost certainly won’t need three print books for the trip, particularly if I take advantage of the in-flight entertainment. We only ever seem to watch films while we’re in America or en route there, so between the two legs I’ll at least try to get to La La Land and The Light between Oceans; I’m also considering Nocturnal Animals, Silence, and the live-action Beauty and the Beast – anyone seen these?
However, I’ll also keep my Kindle to hand, as I find it easier to pick up and put down on multi-part journeys like ours to the airport (train ride + coach ride). Some of the books on my Kindle priority list are: The Day that Went Missing by Richard Beard, Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman, The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, Mrs. Fletcher by Tom Perrotta (out in August), The Power by Naomi Alderman, Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor, The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy, See What I have Done by Sarah Schmidt, You Should Have Left by Daniel Kehlmann … and the list continues, but I’ll stop there.
My book shopping list is an ongoing one, as the many cross-outs and additions on this sheet show. Finding specific books at my beloved Wonder Book can be a challenge, so I usually just keep in mind the names of authors I’d like to read more by. This time that might include Arnold Bennett, Geoff Dyer, Elizabeth Hay, Bernd Heinrich, W. Somerset Maugham, Haruki Murakami and Kathleen Norris. In addition to the couple of secondhand bookstores we always hit, I hope to visit a few new-to-me ones on stays with friends in Virginia.
As for those poor books sat in boxes in the closet, I have plans to unearth novels by Anita Brookner, Mohsin Hamid, Kent Haruf, Penelope Lively, Howard Norman and Philip Roth – for reading while I’m there and/or bringing back with me. I’m also contemplating borrowing my dad’s omnibus edition of the John Updike “Rabbit” novels. From my nonfiction hoard, I fancy an Alexandra Fuller memoir, D.H. Lawrence’s travel books and more of May Sarton’s journals. If only it weren’t for luggage weight limits!
On Monday I’ll publish my intercontinental Library Checkout, on Tuesday I have a few June releases to recommend, and then I’m scheduling a handful of posts for while I’m away – a couple reviews I happen to have ready, plus some other lightweight stuff. Alas, I read no doorstoppers in May, but I have a list (of course) of potential ones for June, so will attempt to resurrect that monthly column.
Though I may be slow to respond to comments and read your blogs while I’m away, I will do my best and hope to catch up soon after I’m back.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 
Random Blog Searches and Spam Comments
I should have another batch of summer books read and reviewed by Friday. To fill in until then, I’ve resuscitated a recurring post template that I haven’t used in over three years, looking at the random searches that have led people to my blog. (Previously surveyed in May 2016, October 2016 and June 2017.)
I keep a record of the most interesting or bizarre blog searches that show up on my dashboard. Some recent favorites are below. I may not have the dirt on a new Donna Tartt release, but some of those who came with an inquiring mind will have found answers to their questions on my site.
(Spelling and punctuation are unedited throughout!)
2018
June 23: heart surgery vs brain surgery, elderberry cordial nancy Mitford
September 8: eve schaub rag rug
October 9: i hate elena ferrante
December 20: shaun bythell partner
December 27: philip carey leg
February 8: julia buckley journalist friend with a witchdoctor
March 30: was mel love with sharon animators
April 17: parker fiske – eleanor roosevelt’s cousin
May 31: is donna tartt writing another novel after the goldfinch
September 10: reservoir 13 who did it
October 22: sample inscription in cookbook for a bride
2019
March 19: the heart’s invisible furies spoilers, culling books
2020
January 19: vikram paralkar night theatre stinks, is megan phelps roper a jehovahs witness
March 30: miochel faber interview, did shaun bythell marry jess ica fox, why did mary give thatcher a gift in the novel unsheltered
April 17: bitter orange symbolism, books under 50 pages, cystic fibrosis stevenson helen, nuts in may louis macneice
April 28: essays on comparing the novels empire falls by richard russo and cat’s eye by margaret wood
July 6: christianne ritter aurhor what became of her and her husband
Lots of curiosity about Shaun Bythell’s romantic history – my review of The Diary of a Bookseller continues to be one of my most-viewed posts. I think my favorite search, though, is “i hate elena ferrante” (hate is too strong a word, but I do remain indifferent to her charms).
I regularly check my spam folder because, every once in a while, a regular commenter’s message goes astray there and I’d hate to miss anything genuine.
In the last month I’ve noticed hundreds of spam comments on my blog, all containing identical Spanish-language text (“Muchas gracias. ?Como puedo iniciar sesion?”) and usually appearing on one of four particular posts.
Any ideas about how I can get the Spanish spam to go away?